McDonald's

In the past, oh, almost nine months, we’ve gone through the drive-thru of our nearest McDonalds…a lot.

More often than we should, actually.

Sidebar: There are three drivers in our family of four. Care to guess how many of those three drivers is willing to order/purchase food at a drive-thru?

The answer, is one. ONE of the three of us is willing/able to order food at a drive-thru.

One guess as to which ONE of us that is.

So at least one night each week, I’ll get home after working for 9+ hours that day and I’ll be greeted at the door by one of my lovely children who will inform me that ‘Dad’ is sending use to McDonald’s to pick up dinner. He seems to think that if he gives me his debit card, that’s his portion of providing dinner.

Okay, so it’s only about 10 miles away but still.

So yeah.

Now to be fair, in all the times we’ve been through this McD’s drive-thru, they’ve messed up our order one time.

That’s pretty good odds if you figure we’ve been there at least twice a month (but we’ve been SO MUCH more often…) in the past nine months.

But the one time they messed up it, we didn’t realize it until I was about a block away. I turned around and got back in line at the drive-thru. Thankfully, this McD’s, even when there’s a long-ish line is pretty quick.

So when it was my turn at the intercom, I just said, in my sweet little drive-thru ordering voice, “Hi, we just went through a few minutes ago and you shorted us two orders of fries.”

Silence.

So I waited, and waited. Finally, because the person on the other end of the intercom still hadn’t replied I said, “Uh, could we, like, get those fries?”

At that point I was instructed to just pull forward. No apology, no offer of a Flurry for my trouble. Just “Pull forward.”

The person at the window who gave us the fries we’d been shorted didn’t apologize either. What is this world coming to, I ask you.

Alyssa and I shared a look and a laugh as we pulled away. It was just so ridiculous.

Oh yes, didn’t I mention that when I’m sent to McD’s with Tom’s card to pick up dinner, the girls ALWAYS go with me. Like, literally, always. The only time they’re not with me when I’m picking up food is when I get it right after work before I go home.

Yes, I’m a little bitter that Tom gets EVEN MORE time at home ALONE. I just…well. There’s nothing to be done about that, is there?

So perhaps I should just let it go.

18

I am now the parent of an adult. She’s officially all grown up, at least in the eyes of the law.

What does that mean, really?

Does it even mean anything?

I know that Alyssa doesn’t feel like it means anything. She’s still chomping at the bit for some freedom.

Alas, in the age of Covid, freedom doesn’t come easily for any of us.

I know she feels stifled by me and her dad. I know this and yet I can’t fix it for her.

She wants to make her own decisions and learn from her mistakes.

I get that. I really, really do. Which is why I don’t go check on her at 2am if I happen to be up to see why she’s still awake on a school night. She’s a big girl now (just ask her) and can handle being a little tired the next day if that’s the natural consequence of her not going to sleep earlier.

Eighteen year old Alyssa is a delight to be honest. She’s smart, she’s loyal. She works hard and wishes she had the freedom to play hard. She’s funny and kind. She can be snarky and fiercely defends me against her sister.

She loves with her whole heart and has so many talents. She can sing, play the flute and piccolo. She runs and does well in the high jump. She acts and draws and paints.

She finds humor in most things, can have a good cry and then turn the day around. Her friends vie for her time and attention because she gives all she’s got when she’s with you.

I am so grateful to have the honor of being her mother and watching her grow up into the beautiful young woman she’s becoming.

I want to be like her when I grow up.

The YouTubes

Olivia has discovered ASMR. Google it, I’ll wait.

She enjoys watching a woman who called herself Honee Bee (Her real name is Naomi, much to Alyssa’s consternation.) and another lady who calls herself Pita (I think it’s short for Lupita but whatever.)

These two women whisper into their microphones, they tap things with their fingernails and mostly, they eat food. Sometimes the food is crunchy, sometimes slurpy. Pica is pretty funny.

I can stand these two on the television when O watches them.

Alyssa says I’m pretty tolerant of things like that.

But I cannot stand this one YouTuber that Olivia has discovered.

No.

This girl/woman (I’m 50 years old, have I mentioned? Everyone under 40 is of indiscriminate age as far as I’m concerned. Seriously, this person could be 20, she could be 36, who the hell knows?) is so, so, so annoying.

She makes weird faces, she makes stupid jokes. She’s not funny, she’s just offensive.

Olivia, who is fourteen, let’s remember, thinks the woman is hilarious. She seriously screams laughter while watching Liza (I think that’s her name, again, who knows or even cares?)

I tried to sit through a video. It’s how I came to find that Honee Bee and Pita are fine as background noise.

No.

I told Olivia she had to turn down the volume on Liza because I couldn’t stand it. For what it’s worth, Olivia likes to watch YouTube with the television volume turned up to like 65 (that’s actually not an exaggeration.) I tend to watch at 45 even when it’s something I’m enjoying so yes, 65 is way too loud for someone as obnoxious as Liza.

Olivia turned off the video and started to search for a different one.

I could tell she wasn’t having any luck finding something she wanted to watch so I offered to go to my room and let her have the living room to watch her choice of video.

She took me up on it. So I vacated the premises and we were all happy. Tom was in the family room, Alyssa was in her room. I was in my room and Olivia was in the living room. We’d all found a corner of the house and no one had to suffer through a YouTube channel that they hate.

All’s well that ends well.

That Time Olviia Said F*@&

Olivia is fourteen years old. In so many ways, she’s very much a typical fourteen year old. She loves YouTube, she listens to Melanie Martinez, watches ASMR (google it) videos and probably other less appropriate things that I am not aware of. (Ahem, yes, I should be more aware of what she’s watching/reading/learning online. Noted.)

When Alyssa was fourteen, she was into Pentatonix, a very wholesome a capella group that is truly just lovely.

Olivia’s interests are not quite so wholesome.

Anyway.

One day I was in the basement looking for tomatoes.

Olivia came down to look for me.

I wasn’t in my usual place, which is in front of the washer and dryer.

Instead, I was between two shelving units that hold all our preserved food.

I heard O come down the stairs. I watched her walk right by me. She didn’t see me there and kept going toward the basement laundry room. She took maybe three steps into the laundry room and stopped, noting that I was not in the room. At that point, she muttered, “Fuck.”

I was maybe ten feet from her in my space between the shelves. I called out to her, “What did you just say?”

She spun around, her hands flying up to cover her mouth.

She walked quickly to where I was standing and hugged me.

I laughed.

I mean, what’s a single muttered “fuck” between mother and daughter?

I did suggest that maybe that’s not the best word for her to walking around muttering but you know what? I get it.

Sometimes muttering the worst word you can think of is the best form of stress-relief.

So…yeah. That happened.

A Little Late but Happy, Merry Everything

Now that my tooth is fixed (almost, I still have to go to the stupid dentist and have them 'finish up' what the ondodontist started) I can think about anything and everything else.

Christmas was good. It was lovely, actually. The only difference this year from the past few years is that we didn’t all gather at my mom’s for the afternoon.

Well, we did, as in, the girls and I went over to her hours for a couple of hours. My youngest brother was there with his dog.

The dog was depressed because Olivia hates him. He doesn’t understand that he’s a huge slobbery beast and she can’t stand the sight of him.

He’s fine, he’s just a big dog (she hates all dogs, not just the big ones but the big ones scare her the most.) and she doesn’t just hate dogs, she hates all animals, unless it’s a fish that can’t get out of its bowl, then she’s fine with it. But don’t introduce her to flippy fish that jump out of their bowls because if you do, fish will be move from the ‘okay, fine, whatever’ list to the ‘nope, no way, no how’ list. But animals with fur/hair that can walk up to her and touch her? No, thank you but no.

So Axe was sad because each time he went near her, she squealed and climbed on top of a chair. After her initial squeal, he’d slink away to lay beside my brother, his very favorite person and peer sadly over at Olivia, who would be scowling at him and asking her Gram why that dog wouldn’t just leave her alone.

The rest of us were glad to be together, even for a little while.

My other brother, the one between me and the youngest in age, was at home with his nuclear family. He and his wife aren’t so much the social distancing types and so my mom asked them kindly to not come over and share germs with her and her geriatric husband.

Tom stayed home because he’s even more germaphobic than ever and even though the girls and I would bring home anything he might have been exposed to had he gone to my mom’s himself, he chose to absent himself.

And it was fine.

We had fun, both at home and at Gram’s.

It was low-key and the older I get the more I like low-key things.

Then I Took Down the Christmas Tree

The Saturday after Christmas (so December 26) I woke up in the middle of the night with jaw pain.

I’ve had fairly regular pain since August (September? Hell, I don’t know.) which is when I got four fillings in three corners of my stupid mouth. Remember that trip to the sketchy farm with the one-footed chicken? My jaw hurt then and it was about a week after my fillings.

So. I didn’t think much of it. I just took a couple of aspirin (ibuprofen, whatever, Jan) and went about my business.

But this time, the pain didn’t actually go away. It stuck around and got worse.

I muddled through the weekend and made my way to work on Monday and Tuesday. The pain wasn’t constant but it was definitely building. It was all along my lower left jaw and making its way toward my ear.

On Tuesday night around midnight, I got up and found some stronger pain meds, which helped me sleep. I decided I’d call the dentist the next day to see if they could fit me in and figure out what was going on.

At 6:30 the next morning I took another dose of the strong pain meds and went to work.

By the time I got to work, I was sick to my stomach. My jaw didn’t hurt as much, though. So…lose/win?

I went outside at 8:04 to call the dentist. I thought maybe being outside in the cold January air would help my nausea.

The dentist office was able to get me in at 8:30 that day. Yay?

The appointment took maybe seven minutes and cost $94 for the dentist to tell me I needed a root canal in my lower back molar. I’ve never had a root canal before so that was a daunting prospect.

Because this tooth is the farthest one back, the dentist gave me referrals to two endodontists. You know what means, right? It’s going to cost more! Yay specialists.

The dentist also gave me a prescription for antibiotics and strong pain meds (read: narcotics.) I went to Walmart to get these prescriptions filled. Check your local listings but the Walmart pharmacy in my area doesn’t open until 9:00am. I was at least 10 minutes early since my dentist appointment took less than twenty seconds and cost almost a hundred dollars.

Alas, the air inside Walmart isn’t as refreshing as the frigid January air in northeastern Indiana. So… I wanted around Walmart for five minutes and then had to make my leisurely way back to the restrooms because, hello narcotics on an empty stomach.

I’d been guzzling water all morning because I knew this was going to happen. Thank you eleventy million weeks of morning sickness.

I made it to the restroom and wouldn’t you know it? The only stall open was the middle one.

You know what’s grosser than throwing up in a Walmart bathroom? Throwing up in the middle stall of a Walmart bathroom while the ladies in the stalls on BOTH sides of you are taking massive dumps. There I was, yacking up all the water I’d drunk that morning and on both sides of me, BOTH, were the sounds of women shitting.

It was horrible as it sounds.

I cleaned myself up (physically, emotionally, I’m not sure I’ll ever feel clean again) and went to find the pharmacy open for business.

I didn’t get back to work until almost 10 that morning. I walked in and my boss, bless her, took one look at me and told me to go home. She also told me to take the next day, New Year’s Eve, off; which gave me a four and a half day weekend. Too bad I felt so bad, we could have partied hard.

Hahahaha. That’s funny.

I should have called the endodontist that day when I got home. Alas, instead I slept off and on in the heated recliner and wasted an entire day mourning my life choices.

I did call the next day, which was a Thursday for those not paying attention.

I called the place that had an office that has a twenty-nine minute drive from my office. They also have office that is a fifty-five minute drive from my office. This is pertinent information that will come into play later. The second endodontist has an office that is halfway between the two offices of the first endodontist, which is about a 35 minute drive from work.

The office that is closest to work only does the procedure I needed on Thursdays. They had an opening for a week later, on January 7, at 12:40. Did I want that appointment?

What do you think?

I took the appointment and prepared to suffer for seven more days. Oh, woe is me, I’m such a freaking martyr.

I figured out that taking a full pain pill every six hours was torture. But if I took half a pill every five hours, I got just enough pain relief to be semi-productive. By semi-productive I mean I was able to get laundry done, wash dishes as needed and cook food so that my family didn’t starve. But the vacuuming did not get done, the kitchen did not get swept, and I think Olivia might have been extra stinky because baths were not a priority unless they were my baths as I attempted to wash away my misery.

I managed to get through Monday and Tuesday at work but Wednesday brought the narcotic fog and residual pain in my stupid tooth.

I decided to go home early. As I was leaving work, my phone rang. It was the endodontist’s office. See, the closer office is actually in the same office as O’s orthodontist, who has offices in both Kendallville and Angola. We see him in the Angola office but have been to the Kendallville office once for Alyssa. So I knew where I was going to get my root canal. Except wait. No. There was a problem with the compressor at Dr. D’s office and so, if I wanted the root canal done the next day, I’d need to drive to the farther office, down on the south side of Fort Wayne. It could be at the same time, though. Yay.

Obviously, I acquiesced. What else was I going to do? Reschedule and suffer another week or more with the pain of the tooth and the awfulness that goes along with narcotics? No. I just couldn’t stare down another weekend of misery. So I accepted the appointment and went home

When I got home I went straight to bed where I slept soundly enough to dream for an hour and a half. As I wavered between sleep and waking, I felt someone leaning against the bed, as if they were leaning over me. I assumed it was Tom or Olivia and ignored them, pretending to be more asleep than I actually was. When I finally rolled over, no one was there.

Huh. Neither Tom nor Olivia will admit to coming up to see how I was doing. Alyssa said she locked my bedroom door to keep Liv out.

Double huh.

Finally, it was Thursday, January 7. I made it through the morning at work with not nausea because I didn’t take anything for pain that morning. I’m a slow learner, but I do learn. And guess what? I got to the appointment, got two extra shots of anesthetic (apparently, I’m a tough nut to numb) and then it was done. I was super numb but hey, that meant I wasn’t in pain.

When I got home that afternoon, I felt so much better I took down the Christmas tree.