Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (38 page)

It’s a hen party, 24-7.

So far, so good until one of my other bright ideas, which is to let the chickens out every day so they can run around free. I started doing this in the summer, and they loved it, either foraging in the grass for delicious bugs or digging to China, for all I know.

It’s a chicken thing.

I knew that they weren’t safe from foxes or raccoons, so I stood guard and watched them bask in the sun, roll in the dirt, or cluster together to form some kind of chicken molecule. Don’t ask me why they do this, either. I’m new here.

Then I noticed that they like to migrate together into the barn, and I let them because I figured they’d be safe from predators on the ground and from the sky, because they were under a roof. In time, I became a little more lax about standing guard, and they were outside all day, loving their very free-range life.

So you know where this is going.

Disaster struck.

I was in the backyard with daughter Francesca, the chickens were in the barn, and all of sudden, a hawk dive-bombed out of nowhere after them. Francesca and I started running, the hawk flew away, but we got there too late. A member of the Women’s Chorus was dead on the floor and the other chickens were terrified, squawking and calling, scattering all directions.

We managed to get all of them back into the coop, except for one that was hiding under the straw, flattened in fear, and two others we discovered with the help of Ruby The No-Longer-Medicated Corgi. She found the chickens standing completely still under a bush, pretending to be lawn ornaments.

So I consulted my chicken books and ended up buying an electrified fence, which took all morning to install, but then I couldn’t bring myself to shock my babies or turn my backyard
into a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then I realized what I really needed was overhead netting, so I got one online and spent all day trying to stretch it on top of the electrified fence, which turned out to be too flimsy to support even itself, and the whole thing collapsed into an expensive mess. So now I’m trying to figure out how to build some sort of outside cage that will keep them safe from hawks, raccoons, and my other mistakes.

Come to think about it, it’s not so different from raising kids. All parents start out as rookies, and we learn as we go, making mistakes as we let our children explore. There will be trials and errors both, but parents learn from their mistakes, too, and if we’re lucky, we’ll all survive the hawks we meet along the way.

And even chicken parenting has its perfect moments.

Daughter Francesca and I took Mother Mary into the coop the other day, and were happily surprised to find that one of the Araucana chickens had laid her first egg—small, perfect, and blue as clear sky.

I’d count that as graduation day, wouldn’t you?

History is littered with famous battles, but even the biggest pale in comparison with the battles in the Scottoline household when my mother is in for a visit. We make the Punic Wars look puny.

Two of my favorites are the Battle of the Hearing Aid and the Battle of the Thirty-Year-Old Bra.

The first shot in the Battle of the Hearing Aid is fired as soon as my mother gets off the plane. Daughter Francesca and I meet her at terminal B and ask, “How was your flight?”

“Red,” my mother answers, giving us a big hug.

“Did you get any sleep?”

“Seven thirty,” she says, with a sweet smile. Francesca and I exchange glances, and we group-hug her to the car. She insists on sitting in the back seat, where she won’t be able to see our faces, losing all visual cues of what we’re saying, which guarantees that the conversation will be a string of non sequiturs until the shouting starts.

“Ma, did you get anything to eat on the plane?” I ask, raising my voice.

Total silence.

“Ma, did they feed you on the plane?”

More silence.

“MA, ARE YOU HUNGRY? OR CAN YOU WAIT UNTIL WE GET HOME?”

“What?”

“MA! YOU WANT TO EAT OUT OR GO HOME?!”

You see the problem. I’m exhausted from her visit and we haven’t even left the car. Already my emotions are swinging from guilt to resentment, the drama pendulum. Mother Mary is a funny, smart, and talkative lady, but if she can’t hear, she’ll eventually check out of the conversation, and in time I’ll get tired of repeating and shouting, so I’ll talk as if she isn’t there.

By the way, she already has a hearing aid, which took the Boer War for her to get, but she needs a second one. I cannot understand why the second hearing aid has become such a Donnybrook. If you have the first one, what’s the big deal? You’re no longer a hearing aid virgin.

Plus, I had asked her to get another hearing aid as my Christmas present, which gives me a powerful weapon for my battle plan. I ambush her at dinner, sneak-attacking. “Ma, I can’t believe you didn’t get the second hearing aid, for Christmas.”

Her snowy head remains down, and she stabs a piece of salmon with her fork, which means either that she didn’t hear me or she’s formulating her counter-offensive. Don’t underestimate her just because she’s older. Experience molds great generals. Patton was no kid, and Mother Mary makes him look like Gandhi.

“MOM, WHY DIDN’T YOU GET THE SECOND HEADING AID?”

She looks up calmly and blinks her brown eyes, cloudy behind her bifocals. “Why are you shouting at me?”

“I DON’T KNOW. MAYBE BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE A SECOND HEARING AID? JUST A GUESS.”

“How can you start in with that while I’m eating? You’ll make me choke.” Whereupon she flushes red and begins a coughing fit that ends with her clutching her chest.

Ka-boom! My barrage of guilt infliction is blown out of the water by a fake cardiac arrest.

I never had a chance.

The Battle of the Thirty-Year-Old Bra begins when she puts on the stretchy shirt we gave her for Christmas and declares that it doesn’t fit correctly. You don’t need to be on Project Runway to see the problem. The shirt doesn’t have darts at the waist, and her breasts are in Australia.

“Ma, the shirt is fine. You need a new bra.”

“What?”

“HOW OLD IS YOUR BRA?”

“Since when is that your business?”

“YOUR BREASTS ARE TOO LOW!”

“Look who’s talking.”

She has a point. I’m not wearing a bra, but I hear they work miracles if you actually care. I’m braless unless I have a book signing. Then I haul out my underwire, which is heavy artillery for girls.

Francesca says, gently, “If your bra is older than two years, the elastic has given out. Is it older than two years?”

Are you kidding?
I think, but keep my own counsel. I haven’t bought a bra in five years and I know Mother Mary hasn’t bought one in ten. I would guess that her bra is twenty years old or maybe even thirty. In fact, I’d bet money that her bra’s in menopause and a member of AARP.

I could continue the story, but you get the idea. She admits
that her bra is thirty years old, but she won’t get a new one, which doesn’t matter as much as a hearing aid, and though I pick my battles, in the end, I lose them all.

It’s no coincidence that Mother Mary and Napoleon Bonaparte are about the same height.

For someone who has almost no estrogen, I sure do cry a lot. I don’t mean in a bad way, but in a good way. I find myself moved to tears a lot lately, and by lately, I mean the past thirty years.

I used to cry whenever daughter Francesca was onstage, anywhere, doing anything. You should have seen me at her college graduation. I was positively deranged. The people sitting around me recoiled, and in the pictures from that day, I look drunk.