"You ____ kids! I can't have anything nice!"

When I was a teenager, our family moved into a monster.  It had been built as a house but modified into a real estate office.  It seems like we counted 11 "bedrooms," 1 1/2 baths, both in the basement.  It had a parking lot instead of a driveway, and what would have been the garage was some sort of conference room.  The kitchen was a veritable closet, a room barely big enough to hold a microwave, sink and a fridge, with a few cheaply made cupboards.  And the realty that used it ran into some major legal trouble, and they trashed the place before abandoning it.  It had sat that way for a few years, with water pipes broken in 5 (if I remember right) places.  Mold grew about three feet high on all the basement walls, and in at least one room, mushrooms had sprouted out of the carpet.

Dad was excited about the possibilities.  Mom... braced herself to live in a construction zone.

One of the first things that had to be done was opening the kitchen.  Walls were torn down, those cheap cupboards carefully spared, because there wasn't money to do the job "right" just yet.  When the room was safe, we stacked those cupboards on the floor to hold most of the dishes.  Mom cut a "door" into the side of a couple of moving boxes to create more cupboards.  A new sink was installed in the old countertop, hanging out over the side.  A new cooktop stood on 2x4 legs.

And thus it stayed for... what was it?  About 2 1/2 years?  One year, a family we knew had a house fire and their insurance replaced their appliances.  Their old electric range still worked, and they gave it to us, just a day or two before Thanksgiving.  For the first time in ages we had an oven!  It was the best Thanksgiving ever.

But this isn't a story of gratitude.  Sorry.  It really should be.  But it isn't.

I was probably a junior, maybe a senior, in high school, certainly old enough to know better.  One day, we kids were being silly and irresponsible.  There was a rule about not running in the house.  We all knew that rule.  We were all busy breaking it.  We ran in a circle, all of us (Clint may not have been there; I'm not sure if he was off at college or a senior.)  The circle probably involved someone being teased, because generally someone was being teased.  But we all thundered around and around that stack of cupboards, that precarious stack of old cupboards, that "make do" storage space.

Can you predict what happened?  We apparently had never considered it.

One of the cupboards on top couldn't take it any more, and dove to the linoleum, with a CRASH!

We stopped.  We started to clean up what we had done.  We all felt awful.

It is really a bit of a miracle that only one thing had broken.  We kids were all relieved that that was all of the damage our misbehaving had caused.

But Mom...  Mom had heard the crash and come running.  There I stood with the pieces of the broken casserole dish in my hands.  "Sorry," we all stammered.  "We didn't mean..."

Mom's face had gone from worry -- "Was anyone hurt?" -- to pain so quickly I couldn't believe it.  "You d@#*ed kids," she said.  "I can't have anything nice."

We'd never heard Mom swear before.  There was stunned silence, and then...

We kids all burst out laughing.

Mom ran from the room sobbing, and we all were laughing.  We didn't mean to.  We already felt terrible, and this made it infinitely worse!  But... Mom SWORE.  Our Mom.  That all enduring, all forgiving, all amazing lady.  First we broke the casserole dish, and then we broke Mom.


I am really, really good at holding onto guilt, and this guilt... this is one of the worst ones in my tortured soul.  I, KIM BENNION, LAUGHED WHEN MY MOTHER WAS DISTRAUGHT.  She had already endured so much, and we broke something precious to her.  What kind of oldest daughter am I?


This week, my daughter got hold of a skein of yarn I was saving and cut it into bits.  Oh, was I mad!  She didn't ask, and she knows she isn't supposed to cut up things.  Well, she's been told, anyway.  Especially things that aren't hers.  And as I seethed at the unfairness of it all -- she has too many toys as it is, does she have to ruin my stuff? -- I took to Facebook to whine.  In the big scheme of things, it was just a skein of yarn.  It wasn't irreplaceable.  I didn't NEED it.  It was really pretty dumb to get upset.

Another day, and she has MY stuffed Mickey Mouse down off the shelf AGAIN.  Not only has she been playing with him, but she has wrapped a hair elastic around him to hold a washcloth like a cape.  That's not the best thing for his stuffing.  And then she left him on the floor.  In a heap of other things.  And she'd been eating potato chips... oily, nasty chips.  MAN...  She has her own Mickey, even, WHY does she have to mess with my special things?

And this morning...  I suppose it is my own fault for leaving my markers down where she could reach them.  I always put them away so carefully, arranging them as best I can by shade, and never let the kids use them.  I have other markers they are allowed to use.  Though... I let her use these one day a few months ago.  And she lost one.  I found the lid of the missing marker after a couple of weeks, but have never found the marker.  So this set became one that the kids can use, technically, but I usually keep them up, and I didn't put them away.  And this morning I noticed they are spilled all over the floor.  After a few minutes, when I looked back, I noticed that there was a lid off.  I breathed deeply a few times, and told her that it is important to put the lids back on markers so they don't dry out.  And then I noticed that there are about ten lids scattered around the room without the marker attached.

"MAN!" I complained.  "I can't have ANYTHING nice!"  Katie put her hands over her face.  And as my full-sulking kicked into gear AGAIN, the echo of my complaint called up another voice from my memory, and my sulk ended instantly.  I was whining about some dumb markers?  Markers I've actually already replaced?  I have exactly ZERO room to complain.

(I honestly didn't swear.  But, in the spirit of full disclosure, Katie probably wouldn't have laughed, because it wouldn't have been an aberration like my own mother's explosion.)

When I posted my whining about the yarn on Facebook, a dear friend replied that she thinks there must be a reward in heaven for moms who don't exact revenge when our treasures are destroyed by the children.  "Cheesecake in heaven," she suggested.


Mom, I hope your cheesecake in heaven is the biggest of all.

Yep, You're Too Old To Wear That

     A few weeks ago, as I perused my Facebook news feed, a link came up to a fashion article.  Now, I am not the fashionable sort.  I don't have much of an interest in fashion.  I don't like to shop for clothing, and rarely buy myself new clothes.  Still, I'd recently decided to stop wearing things that I didn't like, and this article promised to help me not to wear things inappropriate for my age.  I ignored it the first time or two that it popped up, and then my curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked on it.

     The first thing the author said was to get rid of "message T-shirts."  Well, it so happens that the top I threw away a couple of weeks ago was a T-shirt with a message on it.   Still, it wasn't the message that caused me to throw it away.  I threw it away because the fabric wasn't holding up well.  Since the first wash, it had sagged more and more, turning a shirt with an "okay" shape into a frumpy, saggy, disaster.  Every time I wore it, I felt like a frumpy, saggy, disaster.  Well, I don't need clothes that call me names like that.  So I threw it away.

     So, the article.  I read the whole thing.  There were some things she said with which I agreed, but I found myself shaking my head about most of it.  So what if I had jeans with rhinestones or Mickey Mouse on them?  (Where can I get some of those?)  Who cares what type of bag I carry?  And the thing about giving up "loud accessories" like nail glitter...

     This spring, a young lady invited me to a Jamberry nail wraps party on Facebook.  I told her that I was too old to wear cute things like that, and she responded that no one was too old.  During that time, I went to a school event for one of my children.  A lady sitting in front of me was wearing some fun nail wraps.  A little gray-haired lady, definitely older than I was, was wearing CUTE nail decor, and realized that I liked them on her.  It stood to reason, then, that it wouldn't be ridiculous for me to wear cute nails, at least not because of my age.  I bought wraps, including two colors of glittery ones, and guess what -- I don't care if someone thinks they aren't age appropriate.

     So it has been a few weeks since I read the article, and it turned out that it was written almost a year ago, so I was already behind the times when I saw it.  But I decided that the author was wrong.  What I'm too old to wear isn't dictated by anyone but me.

I am too old to wear things that make me feel bad about myself.
I am too old to wear things that don't make me smile.
I am too old to wear things that are uncomfortable.
I am too old to wear things that bore me.

     I recently rediscovered the joys of wearing makeup.  There was a long time that I stopped bothering with it, and maybe it was partly the "you're too old" mentality.  I knew that no matter what I did, no one was going to confuse me with a younger woman any more.  I told myself it was a waste of time to apply it, and a waste of money to buy it.  I told myself I was too old to be able to make myself look pretty.  I'm still not sure what made me buy new makeup, but then I had spent the money -- my husband's hard-earned dollars -- so I told myself I'd better use it.

     The first time I put it on, I told myself I was silly and looked ridiculous.  I told myself that, but I wasn't listening very closely because I didn't look ridiculous.  I put it on every morning for a few days.  One day, I had to take something to my son at the high school.  Before getting out of the van, I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror, and before I knew what was happening, I said, "Pretty."  I actually said it, about myself, out loud.  And I couldn't argue with myself.  I liked what I was seeing.

I am too old to waste time despising my appearance.
And I am too young to let myself waste away.

It turns out I'm too old to let anyone else tell me what to wear.