There’s a noise I make whenever my son gets close to something I want him to stay away from. Basically it’s ‘Ech’, but over-the-top and drawn out. Like a stern German crossed with a bouncy cheerleader who exaggerates all her syllables and smiles through every word.

I knew all those years of drill team would come in handy someday. As for the German part, I have no idea where that comes from. My love for beer served in a stein?

I ‘Ech’ when we’re at the zoo and he starts eyeing the trash can like it’s the most awesome toy he’s ever seen. I ‘Ech’ when he drops banana on the barn floor and then wants to pick it up and eat it. I ‘Ech’ when he lunges to grab what’s inside a dirty diaper before I’ve managed to wrap it up. (Ech!)

The other guaranteed time I will ‘Ech’ is whenever a snake comes into view. In a book. On a cartoon. If we see one dead on a road I will pull the car over and ‘Ech’ ‘Ech’ ‘Ech’ until I’m sure he’s gotten the point. Then I’ll reverse over the snake one more time, just to be sure it’s ready for the vultures.

Tonight, when he and Andrew were reading books before bed, my most triumphant parenting moment to date occurred.  I was in the kitchen and heard Andrew open a book that features all the animals of the zoo. Our son listened to his dad name them. ‘Lion, Zebra, Tiger, Elephant,’ and then all of a sudden, through the walls of his room I heard my son let out a huge, ‘ECH.’ And Andrew goes, ‘Yes, that’s a snake.’

That’s my boy. That is my freaking boy. You would have thought he’d just won a Heisman for how hard my heart was pounding. All the adrenaline started rushing through my veins and I was even hopping a little while I was chopping vegetables.

I was like, ‘I can really do it, I can teach him. He learns from me.’ I was still basking in the glow when I got the absolute worst idea I’ve ever had in my life. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘instead of driving thirty minutes to get him to school I could figure out how to homeschool him.’

ECH!  

Tomorrow is my son’s second birthday. This morning my best friend emailed to wish him a happy early birthday. That’s sort of like saying ‘Don’t you remember two years ago when you were feeling the first signs of the worst pain you’ve ever endured in your life? Let’s celebrate!’

But what’s weird is that I actually do feel like celebrating.

I never thought it was possible for another birthday to become more important to me than my own. I love to celebrate the day of my birth with a passion most people reserve for hobbies they can practice year-round.

But now there is this other birthday that has risen to the top. It’s the day that marks his arrival, yes. But it also marks a birth for Andrew as a father and myself as a mother. If we decide to have more children, their birthdays will be special and individual, but this will always be the day we were blown away by the power of addition. Two plus one seems like a small step, but in reality it is a huge massive leap that requires faith and growth and all kinds of things you usually only hear about on self-help shelves.  

I joke and I tease about the pain and the sacrifice, but I would never have it any other way. The pain is there so that you sit up and take notice and recognize you will never be the same again. That’s the difference May 16, 2010 made in our neck of the woods, and it’s definitely reason to eat cake.   

So today we were at McDonalds….

(Are you scrunching your nose? Wondering how I could stoop so low as to eat at McDonalds? I’ve got even worse news for you. I let my son eat at McDonalds too. Eeek! And he smiled and laughed the whole way through his hamburger! Double Eeek!)

So today we were at McDonalds…and I suffered a major blow. No instantaneous artery explosions due to fat intake. (But wouldn’t that have just made all the organic kale-lovers cheer?) No one fell out of the booths due to french fry joy, though I came close.

I looked out the window of the Double Arches and realized a box of real estate I’ve been watching for weeks was finally announced as…wait for it…or actually, don’t wait for it because it’s a huge effin’ disappointment….ladies and gentlemen we have a new O’Reilly Auto Parts opening soon!

I mean, honestly, would it kill somebody to throw me a bone and just think about putting in a store where you can’t buy a wrench?

If you live in a city, seeing a new auto parts store probably wouldn’t matter at all. But out here, we only get new buildings every once in a while. The sight of a new structure going up is something to watch, it’s something to look forward to. You drive and you drive and there’s cows and fields and more cows and fields—don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful—but you can only examine cows and sing the alphabet song so many times on one car ride. Especially when your son only knows five letters of the alphabet.   

This particular new structure is halfway between our house and Waco in a little town called China Spring. We pass through China Spring almost every week. When the building started going up I had high hopes. I was thinking—no, let’s make that praying—for a Chili’s. You think it’s pathetic to pray for a Chili’s? In my family it’s not anywhere near bottom rung of the ladder, I’ve got an Aunt who pleads to God daily for front-row parking spaces at Target. If you just generally think Chili’s is pathetic then I’ll refer you to the McDonald’s paragraph above.

And obviously this is where I screwed up. Everybody knows you can’t say your biggest dreams out loud, that’s the moment they go POP like a helium balloon that disintegrates into a hundred million miniscule pieces of plastic that fall to the ground and ruin Earth. Or at least that’s what the organic kale-lovers tell me when I ask why they say I should hand knit birthday party-favors using dye-free cotton instead of giving out helium balloons that kids might actually want to play with.

The worst part about my discovery at McDonald’s today isn’t the loss of the brownie sundae dressed up like an actual dessert. I can continue to survive without martinis in my zip code. The largest problem is that I know damn well it doesn’t matter how many auto parts stores you open out in the country, people aren’t going to fix the broken down cars parked in their front yards.  The cars are a part of the landscape you simply have to learn to accept, along with the lack of readily accessible vermouth.

Every once in a while, even the most seasoned online shopper will hit upon an item that is impossible to buy via the internet.

No. Impossible is the wrong word.

It is possible to buy anything over the internet, but to make a purchase that sings—precisely the right brand, the right fit, a purchase you have so much fun with you won’t think twice when the credit card bill rolls in…sometimes there are items for which the internet just cain’t give you that satisfaction.

One of these items has popped up in my shopping life lately. We are in desperate need of a new hammock.

A hammock, you say, but of course. (Do you occasionally talk in a Grey Poupon voice? Because that’s how I’m hearing you right now.) One of those swingy things that hangs between two trees…how hard can it be to pick out a hammock?

Actually, it’s very hard. Last year I went on a similar quest and purchased three hammocks over the internet that all had to be returned for one simple flaw—they simply weren’t comfortable.

Who would dream up an uncomfortable hammock?  I don’t know, but somebody dreamed up the pap smear. When it comes to uncomfortableness, obviously anything is possible.

Last year we found the right hammock after popping into a random highway store between here and Austin. It was the sort of store that has huge pottery urns in the front, along with wooden wheels and big whiskey buckets for sale.

I never stop in these stores unless they also advertise BEEF JERKY in a tacky sign strung across the front porch. Beef jerky from places that only sell beef jerky is never as good as what you can find in the back rooms of roadside wood/pottery/iron yard art stores. I don’t know why this is true, it just is.

There were hammocks hanging in this store and of course I beelined to that section. As soon as I dropped my body into the mesh I knew I’d found the ultimate reading spot. But I had to feel the fabric press (not pierce) my back, I had to give it a little swing to be sure it didn’t shake. These are all crucial tests of a good hammock, none of which can be performed over the internet.

That hammock fit us perfectly all summer long, but then it died a brutal death in a February windstorm. We woke up one cold winter morning to find it wrapped around tree limbs, ugly holes punched into the spaces we’d enjoyed for so many months. It was sad, but this is the life cycle of a hammock.

With another summer on the horizon (actually it’s pretty much here) it’s time to start the search fresh. But I’m not even going to mess with the internet, we’re going to keep it strictly brick and mortar this time around. Brick and mortar and peppered with beef jerky that’s so damn good you almost forget your gnawing on the ass of a cow.

Prudence Mackintosh has an essay in this month’s Texas Monthly that is (as always) excellent. It’s called Dear Jane.

If you are new to her work, it’s time to take a deep dive. I don’t think that woman has ever published a word that did not ooze truth and beauty.

Her most popular book is Thundering Sneakers, about raising her three boys. (Written way before the term ‘mommy blogger’ had even been conceived.)

But my personal favorite is a collection of essays titled Just As We Were.

This collection touches on sororities in Texas and Junior League, and other experiences in ‘her narrow slice of Texas womanhood.’ The essays are insanely accessible…even if sororities and Junior League have never been your cup of diet-iced-tea.

I read it for the first time when I was moving back to Texas after a decade spent living in other places. At the time I was consumed with concern about the transition…would I still feel boxed in by life in this state I love? And there was Prudence, in those pages, assuring me some things in life will never change.

The bullshit will endure.

The mean girls will grow into mean women….then into Old Biddies.

The cliques and climbers shall always survive.

But those essays also showed me that this is nothing to run away from. The truth and beauty she oozed in that book is that it makes no difference where you live, the difference is in how you choose to live.

Dear Prudence, you were right.