Promise You Won’t Get Mad

You want a glimpse into my life? You wanna see what I’m dealing with here on a day-to-day basis? Wanna know what it’s like to be me with these wonderful children and amazing husband? Well, I’ll tell you.

A few weeks ago, Kali and Jack were sitting on the floor right where the family room meets the kitchen when suddenly…

“Jack has a spider in his mouth!”

I rushed from the family room and Donny came from the kitchen. Even though he’d been cooking Donny wasted no time in putting his finger in Jack’s mouth and getting the spider out. I scooped Jack up and raced to the bathroom to clean out his mouth.

“Oh my God, Donny! It could have bitten him.”

“It was dead,” Kali said.

After a few moments I turned to Kali. “How did you know it was in there?”

“Well, we’d been playing and I saw the dead spider on the floor. Then I turned my head and when I turned back the spider was gone and I could see Jack had something in his mouth.”

Silence.

“Kali?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you just pick up the dead spider when you saw it?”

“Ewww. ‘Cause spiders are gross.”

People, no matter how beautiful and smart your children are they are still children. And sometimes children don’t make no damn sense.

Fast forward to last night…

Donny and I are headed upstairs for the night. He’s carrying my laptop, I have a glass of juice, and my sister offers to carry Jack upstairs. We’re by the foyer entrance, near the trash can, when Kali says, “Ugh, a spider!”

She runs to the next room, grabs one of my running shoes, and comes back to kill the spider. It sticks to the bottom of my shoe and she leaves them both there on the kitchen floor.

“Now throw it away!”

“Ewww, no.”

“Kali! Just get a piece of tissue and throw it in the garbage.”

She shakes her head.

My sister sighs, hands me Jack, gets a piece of tissue and uses it to scrape the spider into the trash bag. We all, including Jack, look at Kali like, “Was that so hard?”

She simply shrugs and says, “I have arachnophobia.”

“Girl, you ain’t got no damn arachnophobia. You gonna have getmyassbeatophobia.”

***

You have to know how to work, “Promise you won’t get mad.” There’s an art to it. The key is that if you preface your bad news with it enough times, the person will have no choice but to promise just to get you to talk. And it doesn’t matter if they mean it or not. Because if they don’t, and they do get mad, you can then flip the script and get mad at them for breaking their promise! See? Win/Win.

Last night, Donny and I were on the loveseat when I suddenly remembered something from earlier in the evening.

“You’re gonna be pissed.”

“What did you do?”

“Promise you won’t get mad.”

“Nina, what did you do?”

“Promise you won’t get mad.”

“What did you do?”

“Promise first… ’cause you’re already looking kind of mad.”

He takes a deep breath and swallows.

“Fine. I promise I won’t get mad.”

“Ok, so you know how Richard and I are always talking about Jacklyning our lives?”

He looks confused, but I press on…

“In every Jacklyn Smith Lifetime movie, she’s always like, ‘La la la, life is so great!’ right before she finds out she has cancer, her teenage daughter is pregnant, and her husband faked his own death to evade the Feds.”

Donny just looks at me and in his eyes I can see the regret of not marrying that blonde he dated after high school.

“Anyway, you never wanna say how great things are because that’s a sure-fire way to Jacklyn your life and something bad will happen. So, remember how earlier my Mom went to Starbucks and asked if we wanted anything and we were all, “Shhyeah, free Starbucks, duh!?” Well, she came back just as I was upstairs thinking what a great day today had been and even though I didn’t say it, I thought it, which is really the same thing. She gave me my caramel macchiato, I took two sips and sat it on the table by the bed… and it fell off the table.”

“It fell off the table?”

“Yeah.”

“All on it’s own?”

“Pretty much. I Jacklyned it!”

“Did you clean it up?”

“See, that’s the thing….”

“Nina!”

“I grabbed the closest thing I could find…”

“Fuck.”

“… some baby wipes…”

“Fucking baby wipes.”

“… and I started to clean it up, but then something happened and I got distracted and I think I kinda left the baby wipes there.”

“Fuck.”

“You said you wouldn’t get mad!”

“I’m not mad,” he says looking really mad.

“You’re sure saying fuck a lot… like someone who’s mad.”

“You’re cleaning that carpet.”

“I know. OK.”

“Cause you were supposed to clean the carpet in here the other day and I did it.”

“I was?”

“Yes. You kept saying that we needed a carpet cleaner and that you wanted to clean the carpets. So, I bought a carpet cleaner and I ended up cleaning the carpet.”

“See, I only remember saying part of that. I remember saying that we need a carpet cleaner, but I don’t remember the rest.”

Three words: White. Boy. Crazy.