Kathy Gets a Vibrator

Last night, we were all in the kitchen. Lindsay was cooking, Sara was not offering to help, Mom was listening to Bill O’Reilly rant about unpatriotic shrimp (or something. We’re not sure. We’ve gotten pretty good at tuning most of it out), and Dad was telling Lindsay all about the Mongolians, whether she wanted to hear about them or not. Pretty typical week night. Some family friends called, who had just returned from a big trip around the world. Mom and Dad decided that the best idea was to answer on speakerphone (even though we have 2 separate phones so they could each talk on their own headpiece) and have a loud conversation in the kitchen, competing with the TV and kitchen fan for noisiest thing in the room.

Sara: Why in the actual fuck do they have to talk right there? They have a whole house to talk in and they picked the one room that’s already noisy.

Lindsay: Because they’re Mom and Dad. They're getting old and people get weirder as they get older. I don’t know why you continue to expect them to be normal.

Dad: What?

Lindsay: Sara thinks you guys are talking too loudly.

Sara: And you don’t?

Dad: I own everything. I can talk as loud as I want wherever I want.

Sara: Doesn’t make you any less of a butthole.

Later, the subject of cleaning came up. With so many of us in the house, it can get messy very quickly. We all help out in some way or another, but occasionally someone tries to use it as leverage in an argument…and by someone we mean Dad, and by occasionally we mean constantly.

Dad: Who do you think is the one that keeps the house clean?

Lindsay: Certainly not Mom, as much as she’d like to believe otherwise.

Dad: ME! Although your mother does clean. She just does it in spurts. She’ll go a week without doing anything and then clean everything in a day.

Sara: Me too! That’s why I never clean as I go. I like to do it all at once.

Lindsay: Yeah, me too. I'm like someone with Parkinson's running. Once I start I can't stop.

Obviously, after that politically correct comment, we decided it was a good idea to start writing things down.

Sara: Mom’s not going to like this next blog post. She’ll probably yell at us for being terrible daughters and tell everyone how awful we are, as usual.

Lindsay: Mom gets mad at everything. It’s like she has dementia. She just yells at shit for no reason.

Sara: Dude, could you imagine how much it would suck if she actually got dementia?

Lindsay: Wow, way to be a Debbie Downer.

Sara: No, I don’t mean in the actually sad way. I mean for us. Do you have any idea how much louder she would be all the time?

Lindsay: She'd be like Dad asking us the same things over and over again, only angry. 

We’re not entirely sure why degenerative neurological disorders kept coming up, but we’ve agreed that it’s definitely not a good sign. But the most disturbing part of the night, by far, happened at the dinner table.

Mom: So I got a vibrator today.

<Horrified silence>

Dad: <while walking away> Oh my god Kathy…

Sara: That is the worst thing I’ve heard all day.

Lindsay: I heard this already.

Mom: Don’t you want to see it?

Sara: This can’t be happening right now.

Mom: Oh calm down. It’s a special vibrator for my hand; it helps break up the scar tissue. My physical therapist told me I could go to The Love Package* and buy one or just use theirs, so I took theirs.

Jesse: Oh thank God…

Sara: We were eating, WHY would you do that while we’re eating?! That was one of the worst moments of my life.

<Mom laughs all the way back to the computer>
*She meant Lovers, the store formerly known as Lover's Package. Another shining example of Mom's ability to remember names of things. 


For the record, we would love to see our mother go into an adult store and tell the cashier the vibrator she just bought is for her hand.