Learning #30 : My Car is a Diaper Bag

(Not my car, I swear...)

I was recently asked to give a quick lift to two friends who were on their way to dinner, as I was on my way out of town.

This is normally a request that I'd be happy to honor, except that in this case, I was being asked to give a lift by two single, child-free women dressed in Versace and Jimmy Choos, the last of which is the reason that they weren't able to walk 4 blocks to dinner in the first place.

And this is normally a request that I'd be happy to honor - hello, ladies, looking lovely tonight - except for the fact that I had already been in both of their cars.

Their immaculate, German, We-are-Established-Professional-Women-Without-Children-Cars.

I used to have one of these cars.  It had seat warmers and turbo and a Bose stereo system, and my CD case was the messiest thing in it, and even that had all the discs color-coded, because everybody knows that the easiest way to find the Ani diFranco Yellow One is to have a page of yellow CD's.

And then I had a baby. And now my car is simply not my car anymore.  It's a child transportation device, and it looks it.

Here is what established professional people without children may or may not realize about having a child (I certainly didn't):

Leaving your house is like camping.  All the time.

And this is because you never quite know what you might need.  A snack pack?  Two changes of socks?  A sweatshirt?  You may think you're going to Whole Foods, but then your kid falls asleep on the way there and she missed her nap yesterday and she doesn't transfer out of the car very well, so... well, you may as well drive somewhere, and the weather's nice, and wow, it might actually be nice to go for a hike in Marin, but the list of things to accomplish that is:

hiking shoes and socks for you
sweatshirt for baby
diapers and wipes
sunblock
food for both of you
water for  both of you
snacks for her
stroller
hat

And if you don't have these things with you, now you're either parking at Whole Foods and listening to the radio with the sunroof open hoping that folks don't think you're stalking their children, or you're driving aimlessly and trying to figure out where you can go with what you have with you.

And this is why I have a bin in my car full of what might appear to be a pile of discarded litter, but what is actually intentional litter like extra socks, diapers, sunblock, and a tupperware full of trail mix.  And this makes my car a bit of a mess, but damnit - I am ready, people.  Rain?  Hike? Trip to the pool?  Yes and yes and yes. Let's go.

But what really makes my car a mess is the food.

When I was single, I remember getting into the car of a coworker with two small children and being entirely horrified by the pen marks, crumbs and other detritus.  "God," I thought, "Why do these people let their children eat and draw in the car?"

And the answer is: Because otherwise they'd never get anywhere.

I mean, seriously, it already somehow takes me 90 minutes to get out of the house with a toddler.  Maybe, just maybe, I can do it in an hour - but it's doubtful, and I might have to go without a shower.

When you're already running 30 minutes late and your child needs a snack, you have two options:

1) Feed the child at home and run 45 - 60 minutes late.
2) Give the kid a car snack and just get moving, dammit, because you're packed and ready and you need to get out of the freaking house.

Now, there are certain snacks that should just never be car snacks.  Bananas, as I found out the hard way, are one of these snacks; yogurt is another, though if you put the yogurt in a Thermos kids can use the straw, but even still - one toss and you may have yogurt all over your seats.

On the plus side, at least your child is happy.  And she's not eating something made up entirely of carbs.

At some point between now and when my sister had kids, a packaging genius came up with Capri-Sun-like pouches of baby food.  These are portable and organic and fantastic and seem like a great idea for the car... right up until your kid squeezes its contents all over her freaking carseat and self.  Now, with 8 out of 10 times with a pouch leading to a satiated, happy child and only 2 culminating in mess-all-over-the-damn-place, this is a gamble that I'm usually willing to take.  But, be forewarned, potential backseat passengers: you may find a sad, stray dried-up drop of peas, pear and mango somewhere that I haven't noticed.

So, wet snacks, by nature, do carry their own risk factors.  But even snacks that you think are safe - trail mix, raisins - will inevitably end up in the cracks of your seat, in the carseat, on the floor, and of course in the bin that holds the sunblock and socks and scarf and baby sunglasses.  On the plus side, your child may be mildly peckish one day after having tossed all other proferred car snacks aside, and - being a resourceful sort - may reach into a previously undiscovered car seat crack and extract a pumpkin seed for consumption.  Nom nom!

Which is to say that, overall, when confronting the challenge of car snacking with children, you're between a crumb and a sticky place: dry things are messy, but wet things are sticky.   Choose your demon.

My mother used to take her car to the car wash once a week, without fail.  We often accompanied her on this errand, finding the car wash and its ready supply of candy and pine-scented ornamentation endlessly fascinating.  Her car was always clean.

So, one of the things I've learned about myself as a parent is: my mother is apparently a more fastidious and time-managed person than myself, because seriously, not only do I not want to spend $25 a week to have someone vacuum up raisins, but if I have 45+ minutes to spare and I'm toting the baby, I'm heading to the gym or the supermarket.  And I am definitely not willing to give up a precious, fleeting hour of actual free time every week so that my single friends aren't embarrassed to be in my car.  No way.

I don't even know where the car wash is, people.  And I'm not ashamed.

Well, OK, I'm a little bit ashamed.  But there's a reason that SF Gate has a "Messy Mom Car" photo contest, so at least I know that I'm not alone.

I'll note here that I am actually willing to pay someone to detail my car and start over and then try to somehow keep it cleaner than it has been.  But I haven't gotten around to it, mostly because a car detail takes hours and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with a baby for hours while someone scrapes crusty yogurt goo off the carpet, and paying a sitter so that I can go get my car detailed knowing that a toddler is inevitably going to funk it up again is just annoying.

And so we are at an impasse, me and my increasingly, embarrassingly filthy car.

We did finally wash the car seat cover, so while there are no more hidden snacks for the offspring to locate, at the very least I don't feel like her ride is a biohazard.

And this is about as good as it gets these days.

My newest idea is to get the neighbor kid to wash my car, because exploiting the value of $5 to an 8-year-old sounds a lot better than all the other car wash scenarios, most especially the one that includes me doing it myself.

Learnings #28 (& #29) : Uptight Men Wrote the Dictionary

There is a scene in "Foul Play" wherein some nice old ladies are playing Scrabble.  Being a classic Chevy Chase / Goldie Hawn late '70's movie, no gag is left unturned in any scene, and it's quickly revealed that these nice old ladies are spelling dirty words, which leads to a debate between them as to whether or not "Mutherfucker" has a hyphen.  And it's fitting that these nice old ladies verbally debated this important grammatical quandary, as dictionaries at the time didn't seem to include these kinds of words.  Or ours didn't, anyway.  We looked.

"Foul Play" is my mother's favorite movie.  And, thusly, it's only fitting that this story starts with her. (She, for the record, felt that "Mutherfucker" was not hyphenated, but that it was in fact misspelled.  I concur.)

But before we get there, I'll reference the screen shot on the above, from a recent "Words with Friends" game which, like so many of Zynga's games, is a classic board game (in this case, Scrabble) made mobile (and somewhat intrusively social) with a few slight rule changes.

One of these rule changes seems to be that certain profane words are not allowed; in the case of my play, above, I will note that I assumed that the non-acceptability of the word "clit" was due to the abbreviation and not the content.

A friend told me that she was unable to play the word "slut," and I never did get letters to play the entire word (too bad, because paying all 7 letters is an extra 35 points), so whether or not "clitoris" is in fact an "acceptable" word to Zynga's dictionary is still unknown.

Another friend did spell "vulva," so perhaps actual body parts are allowed (please take note, Michigan House Republicans), but misogynistic slurs are not.    Hmm...

And this brings me back to a long-ago game of Scrabble when I was 8 or 9 years old and, incredibly, somehow beating the single most literate person I have ever met in my life.  My Mom devours crossword puzzles on a daily basis; she has a dictionary made especially for the "extraordinarily literate"; she took a 1st grade assignment to recite a poem aloud for the class as an exciting opportunity to endear herself to her classmates by memorizing and reciting the entirety of Poe's "The Raven."

And that means that my Mom is a holy terror at Scrabble, and was always assumed unbeatable.  She will spell words that you think are made up and, with only a mild air of impatience for doubting her, will then sit there beatifically as you look it up to find that, yes, beaze is a word, and it does mean "to dry in the sun," and she got the damn Z on a triple word score, too, and now she's killing you.  Again.

Except for this one day, when I was winning, by a good margin, and I was just a kid.

It was dumb luck, really.  Mom had been getting terrible letters; I'd had a streak of good ones that led to simple words and good scores.  Scrabble is the one game in which my Mom is actually competitive, too, so I can hardly blame her for taking advantage of the triple word score with C-U-N-T.

I mean, the C is worth 3 points.  And it was the best play she had going for her.

The other thing my mother had taught us about Scrabble, though, is that the word must be a "real" word, and the judge and jury of that realness was our dictionary.  So when I saw this word, a tiny one-syllable word I'd never seen before, I simply announced, "Mommy, CUNT (pronounced: koont) is not a word."

Our conversation then went something like this:

Mommy: Well, Leslie, it's pronounced "cunt," and it is a word, but it's not a very nice word so we don't say it out loud.
Leslie: What does it mean?
Mommy: Well... it's a very bad word for "vagina."
Leslie: Ew, vagina!  I think "vagina" sounds way worse than "koont."
Mommy: Well... OK, you don't have to say either of them, but definitely don't say "cunt."
Leslie (doubtful): I'm going to look it up.
Mommy: OK

And, incredibly, the word "cunt" was not actually in our dictionary.  Victory!  Or so I thought.

Mommy: Well, some words that are really words aren't actually in the dictionary.

Now, this made me suspicious.  How on earth could a word exist without being in the dictionary?  I smelled some actual foul play here, and decided to bring in an impartial judge.

Leslie: I'm going to ask Daddy.
Mommy: No, no!  Let's not ask Daddy, he's... busy.
Leslie: But the word isn't in the dictionary, and that's the rule.
Mommy: Leslie, do you really think that I'd make up a word just to try to beat you at Scrabble?

I thought about this. And the answer was: no, I really didn't.  My Mom just wasn't a cheater, at all. A pottymouth with a fluid notion of Scrabble rules, maybe; but a cheater, no way. And she had looked both surprised and, might I add, rather indignant that "cunt" wasn't in the dictionary.

And so I let the play stand. And the universe punished her with a Q with no U and all consonants the whole game and I ended up winning anyway, which may also be attributed to the fact that she was distracted due to trying to move the game along before Dad came in and saw the board.

Or, you know, just the upper right-hand corner of the board, where the triple word score is.

And so we will flash forward 30 years, when I was in a heated match of Scrabble with both of my parents and, having suffered for multiple plays by having a Q in my rack without the damn U, and being tired of playing "Qi" every time that happens, I'd waited it out.  And I finally had the U, *and I had the opportunity for a double word score.  And so, proudly, I spelled:

Q-U-E-E-F

My Dad gave me a look, and said, "Queef?  Really?"   Oh, dear.  This might be awkward.

But I then realized that the look wasn't so much a "I can't believe you spelled that" so much as it was the same look I'd given my Mom 30 years before, as he then said, "Queef is not a word."

Um...  OK, now this was going to be really awkward.  Our conversation then went something like this:

Leslie (trying not to laugh): Oh, "queef" is a word, all right.  Come on, Mom, back me up here.
Mom: Queef?  What is a queef?  That is not a word, Leslie.

I couldn't believe it.  How could the woman who uses the word "elan" in everyday conversation and talks about Daniel Day Lewis' "attractive physique" and, more to the point, has a pretty impressive grasp of naughty words in general not know this word?

Leslie: OK, I can't believe that you don't know this word, but I swear, it is a word, you guys, seriously!  Look it up.

And so we turned to the trusty dictionary again - a more recent dictionary than the one we'd had when I was a kid - and that freaking dictionary failed us.  Again.  For Cuntsakes, Merriam-Webster, get the stick out of your bunghole and put some filthy queefing words in your motherfucking dictionary, if only to spare people like me and my Mom these embarrassing Scrabble moments.

And then our conversation went something like this:

Leslie: OK, seriously though, it is a word.  Have you really never heard this word?
Dad: No, so what is a "queef" then?
Leslie (looking sideways): Well, it's a vaginal fart.

And then my Dad made that same annoyed sigh that he used to make when my sister and I were fooling around in Church.  And my Mom burst into the same uproarious laughter that she always does when something this absurd surfaces around the family table.

Dad: Leslie, that is not a real word.
Leslie: Dad, of course it's a real word!  It's a real thing, isn't it?  Are you saying that a queef doesn't exist?  Have you never encountered a queef?
Mom: (laughing, harder)
Dad: (loud sigh)
Leslie:  Look, all I'm saying is that the phenomena of a queef is very real, and so of course there's a word for it, just like there's a word for fart.

Mom, still laughing.
Dad, shaking his head.

Leslie: Seriously, you guys, if penises had farts coming out of them I guarantee you that there would be a word for it, and it would be in the freaking dictionary*, because the dictionary - like every other old text we hold sacred - was written by a bunch of entitled men!

Unfortunately, I had now strayed into the world of Leslie-goes-all-political, and that world is not welcome around the Scrabble table.

And so I insisted that I be allowed to go look it up online, but unfortunately the only dictionary I could find with the word "queef" in it was Urban Dictionary, which I felt was at least better than nothing, so I printed out the page and brought it back downstairs.

More unfortunately, neither of my parents were particularly convinced that a site called "Urban Dictionary" was an acceptable Scrabble resource, particularly when my Mom took the printout and started reading aloud.

My Dad excused himself at that point to head to the bar, as I recall, which was conveniently located a few steps away from the game table... so not out of earshot, but far enough away that he could pretend that this absurd conversation about this apparently previously unknown vaginal phenomena wasn't happening with his wife gleefully participating.

I think it was definition #3 that sealed my fate.  Once my Mom got to the point about Southern ladies tooting their TOOTS, they both decided that I was simply not allowed to play this made-up-sounding word, whether or not it was in fact a word that was used by the Urban Dictionarians to describe an allegedly refreshing self-propelled Southernmost ladyfolk breeze.

I tried to appeal to my Mom's sense of fairness by reminding her of that long-ago Scrabble game in which "cunt" hadn't been in the dictionary, but it was to no avail.  I was outvoted.

And so I played "queen" instead, which cost me 6 points because the F is worth 4 and the N is only worth one.  Boo.

And this is why I have decided to make it my mission to get this word into the dictionary, because truthfully, "Queef" is a pretty excellent Scrabble move.   Merriam-Webster has this to say about how words get added to the dictionary:

Since words are entered into the dictionary on the basis of actual usage, the best way to get a word in the dictionary is to use it and to encourage others (especially professional writers and editors) to use it. 

If you'd like to join me in my Queefing Quest, here's how:

1) Go to the Merriam-Webster Facebook page
2) Either post a link to this blog post to the Wall, or send it to them in a Message
3) Drive it home by simply asking, on the Wall or in a Message, that they add the word "Queef" to the dictionary.
4) Go ahead and use this word, and encourage others to use it.

You'll be glad you did the next time your Scrabble or Words with Friends rack has a Q-U-E-E- and there's an open F on the board.  Trust me on this one.













(*And it would probably be a really awesome word, too, like "peenphoon!"  Not that I'm in any way critiquing the word "queef," which I find charming, and rather fun to say.)