I finally removed my last-of-the-summer toenail polish today. It’s almost winter and technically only four of the toes had polish left on them. It was brownish/purple polish so it pretty much just looked like I had four bruised toenails. Well, five because one actually is bruised from the errant placement of a kettlebell.

Logically, I should have pulled out the cotton balls last week before I walked around barefoot in front of some friends. I’m sure they would have appreciated it. They probably would have liked it if I had waxed my eyebrows too. I did shower, though. So I have that going for me. And they for them.

I waited until today to remove the polish because yesterday we went to the movies at this ridiculously redesigned theater where the seats recline. Like REALLY recline.

AMC ain’t lyin’

A friend responded to this picture by saying she thinks we’re on our way to living Wall-E times, to which I say bring on the Big Gulps.

These recliners have nothing to do with my toes. You’re welcome.

The drive to the movies was perilous, though you probably couldn’t see that from the way my husband was speeding down the freeway. He’ll tell you that he was driving under the speed limit and I will tell you not far enough under. It was foggy, rainy, icy, and part of the interstate was shut down due to an accident.

You know how your mother always wraps her fingers around the handle in the car where you’re supposed to hang your dry cleaning, even though no one gets their clothes dry cleaned any more? Here, please soak my shirt in chemicals so I can breathe it in and wear it against my skin. Mmm.

Anyway, your mother. You know how she holds onto that handle and tells you how to drive and says things like, “Please don’t kill us!” – or, is that just my mother? Well, it was also me yesterday before we got to the recliners which have nothing to do with my toes.

So, this morning before mass I was thinking about those roads and our three block drive to church. (That sound you just heard was the collective gasp of everyone who lives in NYC.) I thought about the chance that we could be in an accident and if I went to the hospital, my treatment would suffer because of the state of my toenails.

Don’t act like if you were an ER doctor and someone came in with pretty toenails that you wouldn’t treat them before the person with four, no five, bruised toenails. Because you totally would. If you say otherwise, you’re lying to yourself and should probably go to therapy.

I didn’t want my healthcare in the hands of a student who would probably give up on medicine and go work as a seamstress after treating me, because fabric swatches don’t have feet. I wanted to be seen by a good doctor. Like the time when my daughter was in the NICU and my husband told the nurse practitioner that he wanted a real nurse, not one who was just practicing.

Because I’m a catastrophist I removed the toenail polish and made it safely to church. Which, sadly, also means I didn’t get any morphine or anything. But, at least my toes look pretty.

Well, nine of them anyway.

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Last week, my husband dropped off some homegrown tomatoes at my mom’s house and she asked him to look at her dog’s belly, where she had felt something…odd. When he came home he said, “There’s something wrong with your mom’s dog. He has some weird growth on his stomach. I looked at it and it’s the strangest thing. It feels like a pencil.”

My mom, who is more attached to her dog than she is to her crossword puzzles – and that’s really saying something – called me the next day in tears. “Did you hear about Cappy? He has this hard growth and I don’t know what it is. I’m taking him to the vet tomorrow.”

Because it’s easy for me and my Zoloft to say, I reassured her. “Mom, don’t worry about it until you talk to the vet. It could just be a cyst. Blue had a whole bunch of them and they were nothing.” This didn’t do anything to alleviate her fears.

That evening I went to her house for dinner and offered to take a look at this thing. I was prepared to be grossed out because my sister had looked too, and she mentioned that it had an open sore.

But, it turned out that all the people who had already touched this thing were the ones who were grossed out, because that growth that felt like a pencil and had an opening – the growth that my mom, sister and husband had examined and touched? It was the dog’s penis.

And I will never let them live it down.

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Here’s what I could tell you; that it’s sometimes exhausting to raise a special needs child. It’s also the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done and if you mess with my son, I will go all Mama Bear Advocate on you until you stop. I will also say bad things about you on Facebook.

I could tell you that my cousin is very sick. That she was pretty much fine and then was suddenly diagnosed with THREE DIFFERENT types of cancer and is in critical care. Get your papsmears, ladies. Make a note and schedule it as soon as you possibly can.

I could mention that I can never, ever get the laundry done all in one day like my husband can and that he constantly rubs it in my face. Or, I could talk about how I don’t understand why The Voice is on EVERY night.

Maybe I’ll mention how hard it is to be vegan with Twix bars in the house, that I could buy a new pair of shoes just about every day or that I wish I were a piano virtuoso.

I could say that I think guilt is an incomparable emotional experience and if you don’t have any, then you’re not someone I want as a friend. If you don’t feel guilty about something, then you don’t care enough. Or, I could say that my dog is the best snuggler in the world. For real.

Or I could just show you a picture of my 78 year old mother beating my daughter at arm wrestling.

I’m 41 years old and my mom still scares me.

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My 13 year old daughter is wicked smart. I know that sounds conceited, because it is.

I never have to tell her to study or do her homework, she just does it. She reads so much (12 books so far this month) that I sometimes have to tell her to stop. She makes the parent/student relationship very, very easy.

As I’ve always said, if her brother hadn’t been born, I would think I was the best parent on the face of the earth. Thank goodness he came along to set me straight. And, oh boy, did he ever. I found out that my daughter isn’t intelligent from anything I’ve done, just as I can’t be held responsible for my son’s wrong answers.

I make mistakes just like any other mother, but this latest misstep of mine was quite a doozy. *head desk*

I told the super-smart, natural-braniac daughter of mine that she could get a hamster if she got straight A’s for the entire school year. We’re halfway through…

I have never wished so hard for a “B”.

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