Raspberry Hulk

I met with Kallan’s teacher yesterday.

Have you ever been in the middle of something that is going spectacularly badly?  Something that you meant to go well, and that will all work out in the end, but right now, right in the middle of it, it’s just horrific?  And you know that if you could just achieve a bit of distance, or if this nightmare was happening to someone else, it would be pretty fucking hilarious?  But because it’s you in the middle of it and not someone else, all you can see in this moment is the terrible awkward raw emotion of it, and it doesn’t feel funny at all.

And then after you finally make your escape, you try to confide in your husband in the hopes of gaining sympathy and perhaps another interpretation of the events in which it’s not that bad after all.  Only to be met with said husband’s hysterical laughter and merciless teasing because it turns out that it is just as bad as you thought, and really really funny because it hasn’t happened to him.  And so then you take your pounding headache and sense of deep failure and go crabbily and weepily to bed?

It was kind of like that.

Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.  Some events take a while to turn into funny stories.

Like the time I had to break into our own car with a rock.  That wasn’t funny at the time (although Mark thought it was hilarious).  Even years later I don’t share all of the details with people when Maj excitedly relates her favorite memory of the time Mommy went crazy and shattered dangerous glass all over her carseat.

Mark was out of town on business, and I took the girls to the beach.  With two small girls to worry about, I didn’t want to carry anything extra, so I left everything in the car except for our lunch, towels, and sunscreen.  I didn’t want to worry about my keys, so I removed the car key from the ring of keys I carried and put the single car key into the tiny silly pocket on the front of the bottom boy-short portion of my bathing suit.  The rest of the keys I tossed into my purse, which I left in the car.

The beach was almost empty.  The girls had a great time playing and splashing at the water’s edge.  I had no intention of actually going into the water, because I had recently developed a weird allergy to cold, and I broke out in hives when I got cold.  But it was a hot day, the water seemed warm, and the girls begged me to play with them.  So toward the end of our visit, I finally relented.  I figured we would leave after just a few minutes in the water, and if any hives emerged, they would disappear in the warmth of the car drive home.

We had such a good time!  I whirled the girls in big circles in and out of the waist-high water, jumping as the waves hit us.  But as I entered the water, I knew instantly that it was colder than I had imagined.  As I played and spun with Maj and Kallan in the water, I could feel my skin growing bumpy and hive-covered and itchy.  Eventually, the girls grew tired and cold and hungry (lunch was long gone by now), and it was time to go.

As we left the water, I looked down to see that every bit of skin below my shoulders was covered in enormous welts.  I was bright red and hideously lumpy, and I looked like a giant raspberry.  I wrapped myself as best I could in a small towel, we gathered our stuff, and we turned to head shivering back to the car.  At which point I realized that the key was no longer in my tiny bathing suit pocket.  I searched pointlessly along the water’s edge, but knew that the key was somewhere out there in the waist-deep water, completely lost.  I had forgotten all about the key.  The girls were wet and cold and whiny by now, wondering why I was playing in the sand when it was time to go.  And I was a huge cranky bumpy itchy raspberry without a ride home.

So I walked them up to the car (my feet wouldn’t fit in my sandals – I was that swollen) without telling them that I had no key.  I stood next to the car and gazed longingly at my purse tucked behind the passenger seat, a purse that contained money, my house keys, and my cell phone.  My clothes sat there as well.  The wind was picking up, and the three of us were getting colder as the sun began to disappear behind some late afternoon clouds.  The hives that covered my body were now raised and white and hard against bright red background skin.  I could feel that hives were now also emerging on my face and neck as well.  It was astounding and scary.

There was a small grocery store far across the parking lot, and possibly a phone inside.  There were also some houses along the street adjacent to the beach, at which we probably could have asked for someone to call a tow truck.  A couple walked along the beach below, and they may have had a cell phone.  But there was no way I was, in my freakish condition, taking advantage of any of those solutions.  I was a huge purply-red Incredible Hulk of hives.

When I tell people this story, I always leave out the hives.  I tell people that the store was closed, that the couple on the beach had no phone, and that the girls started freaking out when I asked them to start walking to the houses to ask for help.  How else to reasonably explain my next decision, which was to ask Maj (who was 3 at the time) to help me find a big rock.  She obediently searched the area and handed me various pebbles and shells.  “No, sweetie, Mommy needs a really big rock,” I explained as I held my swollen crazy hands apart to explain that I needed something brick-sized.  Together we searched the parking lot until we found a large loose piece of asphalt with which I then bashed in the passenger side window of the car.

The girls were astonished. We called a taxi, in which I huddled in the back seat with the girls, pretending to play a hide and seek game under our collected wet towels to avoid the cab driver’s curious eyes.  When we got home, I took a looooooong hot bath and eventually returned to my normal size and color.  Maj came in to comment about how I looked a lot less “tomato warty” after my bath.  I then called another cab to take us back to our crippled car, which we drove back home.

Final cost: $20.00 for the two cab rides.  About $150.00 to replace the electronic car key and another $500 to replace the car’s small passenger side window (apparently I had chosen the most expensive window on the car to smash).  Plus, there was the humiliation of having to explain to Mark how this had all come to pass.  Which was, as they say . . . “priceless.”

Meeting with Kallan’s teacher was something like that.

Priceless.