In this house, I’m the Mama…

So here’s my Monday…I’m at work, minding my own beeswax really, when my husband calls. This is not an unusual occurrence, but the tone of voice is decidedly unusual…

Me: “Hi, how are you?”

Him: “Not good. I just got plowed by some guy in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”

It’s important to note here, before I actually print my response, that the vision in my head is of him inside our minivan, getting backed into by some yahoo that wasn’t paying attention.

Me: “OK. Are you OK?”

Him: “NO, I’M NOT OK. I just got plowed by some guy in the Wal-Mart parking lot.”

Clearly he’s hysterical at this point - most likely stressed out that this idiot just wasn’t paying attention.

Me: “OK. But are YOU ok?”

Him: (Much louder this time) “NO, I’M NOT OK. I JUST GOT PLOWED BY SOME GUY IN THE WAL-MART PARKING LOT!!!!!”

I’m still in my blissful little IT world, hammering away at the keyboard while I’m talking to him, non-plussed because, as I mentioned previously, my mental picture of what has happened here is so, so different from his.

Me: “That’s what you said. Is there damage? Are you OK?”

Him: (Finally, some clarification, although the words are a little garbled because they’re coming over a cell phone and you know what happens when you yell into a cell phone) “NO, I’M NOT OK. I JUST GOT HIT, IN THE BODY, IN THE CROSSWALK, IN THE WAL-MART PARKING LOT!!!!!

This takes just a split-second to register before I scream back, “WHY AREN’T YOU ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL???”

I now have this terrible mental picture of my poor husband lying on the ground in the crosswalk at Wal-Mart, battered and broken because this guy totally ran him over. My hubby, meanwhile, is telling me in his best “I’m really fine” voice what has happened…

Evidently, he was exiting our local Wal-Mart store and happened to be in the middle of the crosswalk when dude in his blue tin can raced out of one of the aisles, right through the middle of the crosswalk, right into my husband. My hubby heard him coming at the last second, went up onto the hood and tried to propel his body off the side of the car, thinking the whole time that it was just important to not actually go UNDER the car! He landed, hard, on the ground and tin-can man kept right on driving! Can you even believe this? So my bruised husband, now amped up on 80,000,000 gallons of adrenaline gets up off of the ground and, along with the cart collection guy and some other folks, screams at tin-can man to STOP! Tin-can man finally pulls over and gets out of the car. Using his best “I can speak English” impression, he repeats over and over again, “I no see him, I no see him.” Clearly!

By this time, the best employees Wal-Mart has to offer have assembled in front of the store, along with a small crowd of rubber-neckers and are all frantically searching for the magic bullet that will undo this travesty that has occurred in front of their precious store. One goes inside to call the local Police Department, while everyone else tries to figure out if both parties are ok.

“Do you need an ambulance, sir?” they ask. Of course (remember the 80,000,000 gallons of adrenaline, now punctuated by “I really want to beat you senseless for not stopping” anger), my husband says “No. Let me just sit down for a minute.”

At this point, the Wal-Mart worker is inside on the phone with the Mayberry Police Department. Wal-Mart worker tells them all about the accident in the parking lot, but fails to make it clear that this particular accident involved a pedestrian. Mayberry doesn’t ask any additional questions and just gives the standard answer… “Unless there is over $1,000 damage, we don’t come out. Just have them exchange information.” Brilliant Wal-Mart worker doesn’t question this statement, just comes back out the front door and advises everyone that the police aren’t coming and they should just exchange information. I wonder if this illustrious employee even thought to estimate the damage (”Sir, could you give me an estimate on your knee injury? Do you think is let’s than a K?”) Is this completely insane? So Tin-Can man gives my husband (crazy at the time, remember the adrenaline) his name and phone number and Wal-Mark folks tell him to be on his way. Is ANYONE using their brain at this point?

Cut to the phone conversation between myself and hubby. He recounts this fantastic information to me, at which point I blow a gasket because he has been hit by a car, the police have not come to make a report, Tin-Can man is gone, and no one has called an ambulance for my crazy, but likely very injured husband. I’m not just frustrated, I’m TICKED. So I begin to scream a string of garbled information into the cell phone, probably overwhelming my husband completely. He calmly tells me, “I’m OK, sweetie. Let’s not worry about it.” What? We need a police report! We need Tin-Can man’s insurance info, we need you to be on your way to the hospital, RIGHT NOW!

After much screaming back and forth, hubby finally agrees to call the police back. I wait, completely impatient, until he calls me back. He spoke to the Mayberry Sergeant about why they would not come and ticket Tin-Can man for running him down in the crosswalk. Sergeant is shocked and says, yes, of course they send and officer out when a pedestrian is involved. Why did no one make that clear? They happen to have an officer in the neighborhood. He’ll be right there. Just sit tight. Officer Friendly shows a couple of minutes later and tries to run the plate number provided by the oh-so-helpful Wal-Mart employees. Bogus plate, not registered. How about the phone number Tin-Can man left? Just rings and rings, but no answer. Well sir, you’re probably completely screwed, sorry to tell you. Tin-Can man is probably illegal, probably has no insurance, and will never pay you a dime. He’ll just bail out of the country and leave you with the bills for your knee injury. Not much we can do. We’ll try to hunt him down, but with a last name that common, the odds are against it. Outstanding.

Hubby calls with this latest tidbit of fantastic news and I convince him to meet me at Urgent Care immediately. I grab everything I can think of to grab and head out the door at the speed of light, trying to slow myself down while thinking that it won’t do him any good for me to get into an accident on the way. At Urgent Care, they x-ray but don’t do much of anything else. They’re geared for life-threatening, so since he’s bruised but not dying, they’re not that worried. X-rays show no breaks, that’s great news! So go home and ice it and follow up with your family doc tomorrow.

Meanwhile, back in Mayberry, the officers have found Tin-Can man and, hallelujah, he’s not only legal, but he actually has insurance. I have no idea what the hold up was with the license plate number, but my immediate thought is that someone from Wal-Mart wrote it down, so…. That’s the best news we’ve had in several hours now. Unfortunately the fine Mayberry PD has decided not to ticket Tin-Can man. What?!? Are you kidding?!? Why not?!? Well, sir, because he wasn’t breaking any laws…

WHAT?!? Is everyone in the Twilight Zone right now? What do you mean he wasn’t breaking any laws? Turns out when they reviewed the security tape, Tin-Can man wasn’t going any faster than anyone else. Excuse me? He may not have been going any faster, but he sure as heck was going in the wrong direction! No one else in the Wal-Mart parking lot managed to hit my husband with their car! Isn’t there a law against that? Remember this for future reference folks… If you hit someone on private property, as long as you weren’t speeding, you weren’t breaking any laws. I just can’t believe it. So no ticket for Tin-Can man because he didn’t really mean to…

OK, we’ll deal with that. Let’s move on to filing the claim. Even better. Evil insurance company won’t pay squat until they’ve “determined liability”. Again… WHAT? My poor husband got run over IN THE CROSSWALK by the insured. And the whole thing is on the security camera! How much more information do you need to “determine liability”? Well, we need to take pictures of the injuries and meet with you. He’ll need to sign some paperwork… My left foot!!!!!

I’ve had all of the craziness I can take for one day. Seems like someone, somewhere, must be thinking, because it’s clear that no one in this whole situation has a single, reasonable thought in his or her pea brain. It’s a miracle we don’t sue everyone for everything if this is really the way these things happen. So the lesson for today is…

Don’t get hit by a car in the Wal-Mart parking lot, particularly if you are a pedestrian, because everyone will fail to think clearly, act rationally, or help you in any way, shape or form. Then they’ll blame you for being in the crosswalk so their insured could hit you. Unreal! More to come as this ridiculous story unravels…

Do you ever think that the world is conspiring against Stepmothers? Maybe it’s not just Stepmoms, but all families that aren’t “traditional”. I think we’re conspired against on a daily basis.My latest conspiracy theory has to do with our local recreation center. Typically the Rec Center has all kinds of classes for the shorter members of the family that don’t cost an arm and a leg and still make you feel, as a bio-parent or step-parent either one, that you’re doing the right thing for your kids. Our local rec center issues a catalog every now and then and we just got the latest one in the mail. I perused the pages, looking for the classes that the kiddos would like the most and got excited about the opportunities. I read all about dance, martial arts, swimming lessons, gymnastics, soccer, basketball. Oh, the things they will be able to do. Visions of Tiger Woods, Mary Lou Retton, and Jason Lee float in my head. Maybe they’ll be famous and finance my retirement…I got completely excited about these opportunities before I read the catalog in its entirety or really looked at the schedules. The girls would love dance, I thought. Maybe tap, or hip hop, or ballet. The youngest would love ballet. I picture her in a little pink tutu, with toe shoes, performing Swan Lake… it could happen. What? Ballet is only offered on Mondays from 11-11:45. She’s in school at that time. Why would they even offer something for her age group at that time? OK, how about tap? Only offered on Saturdays from 1-1:30. She’s with us two Saturdays per month, but bio-mom would never take her the other two Saturdays. How about a combo class? Mondays from 4-4:45pm. I could do that if she was with us on that day, but she’s not, she’s with bio-mom and I’ve already explained how that works. Perhaps gymnastics would work better. Monday nights (not with us) or Saturdays - I explained that above. OK, I give.

I found the following on The Wicked Stepmom’s blog and thought it was a good creed for all stepmothers out there.  Some pieces of it are obviously more delicate than others, but all in all, it’s a pretty good foundation.  If adhered to with love and respect on both sides, perhaps it could solve many of the problems we stepfamilies face.

Stepmother’s Bill of Rights  

Sometimes life is confusing. I find myself struggling with how to explain our particular family dynamics to people who don’t know us. It’s uncomfortable sometimes. We’ve made “choices with consequences” in the past and we just don’t have the idyllic Ken and Barbie existence (got the dream house, but not the dream car or the RV) that others around us do. And inevitably we get the “Ohhhhhhhhh” response (usually with a slow head nod), like the recipient of the aforementioned explanation is wasting tons of CPU cycles just trying to fit all of the pieces in place. It seems so much easier to just make it a funny thing. “Yep, we just have too many last names in our family to count.” Even better, “We’re the Brady Bunch on acid.” I like that one the best. That seems to take the edge off of the difficult conversation and make whoever happens to need this information laugh. Kind of like, “Well, if you’re okay with that, then so am I.”

I do wonder, though, why people need so blessed much information. And why when you provide it do they always manage to change it somehow and cause more difficulties than there might otherwise be. Case in point, filling out the information page on the church website. Should be easy enough, right? It WAS easy enough. Separate records for each person in the family, ability to enter different last names without the whole system freaking out and spitting up random electrical parts, etc. I entered all of our information carefully, one record at a time, until all six of us currently living under the same roof were in. Good enough… until Sunday morning when we went to check in and everything was different! Someone attempting to be helpful, no doubt, merged our old record in with our new record. Suffice it to say that the old record couldn’t handle the different last names, so everyone was now the same and it caused great consternation when nametags were printed. Under no circumstances should we, the owners of the records, have enough power in the system to change our own records back to the way they were entered in the first place. So we have to wait for the single, solitary “administrator” to utilize her power and fix the glitch. Until then, we’ll just try to explain why some of us answer to what the nametag says and some of us don’t. Funny how the decision to keep different last names to avoid confusion in Kindergarten causes confusion in every other arena on the planet. Sigh.

I am grateful, though, that to the younger members of our family this existence is fairly “normal”. It’s kind of funny, actually, to watch our oldest daughter explain it to people. She’s one of those kids gifted with language and determined to use it, so she has no inhibitions about sharing all kinds of squirrely information with whomever happens to be listening. So the dental hygienist, the school crossing guard, the high school kid behind the counter at Papa Murphy’s all get a glimpse of how things work. “This is my stepbrother, my half-sister, and my brother and my sister.” Sometimes it’s fun to watch from somewhere unobtrusive and wait for the eyes to roll back in the head. Sometimes the head even spins around. Generally, folks are polite enough not to drill the child for further information, and they just spend the rest of the time looking slightly puzzled, like their subconscious is really working it out in there somewhere.

For the kids who’ve been part of the “Brady Bunch on acid” for seven years now, all of our mismatched pieces fit into a nice, hand-stitched quilt that keeps us all warm and cozy most nights. For the grownups, we’re still settling into the roles we have. Sometimes it feels too bad that we’re not Ken and Barbie and we have to explain things more than “normal” people. So, for the nights when the stitching feels a little sloppy, and the drafts come in right along with the questions, we go to counseling and learn to deal with it.