So Hi! This is me skipping into your dorm room going CLAP CLAP “It’s time to play Dress Supa!”

I need your beautiful wonderful help because my sister is getting married ON FRIDAY and I am the maid (Matron, fine) of honor and I still don’t know what I’m wearing. Here are the facts: Evening wedding, downtown Columbus reception, boys in black tuxes and girls in knee-length black dresses of our own choosing; the bride will be in a — well, I better not say, on the 1% chance her fiance sees this, but she’ll be beautiful.

I am wearing my newly dark brown hair half up, half down, in curls (putting the whole mess in the capable hands of the girls at Columbus’s Phia salon). I bought a new lipstick (something from Clinique with the word “toffee” in the name”) and waterproof mascara. But beyond that, I am clueless. I mean, I usually hang out in this:

But I need to look more like a brunette version of this:

I keep aiming for that and hitting “drag queen” instead.

So, OK. That’s the dress. Now what shoes? Keeping in mind that I don’t know how to walk in them if they don’t have “birkenstock” printed on the leather. Here’s what I have upstairs, in shoe boxes, waiting:

or

Patent leather pumps by Anne Klein, very comfortable T-strap by Sofft, or sparkly … whatever those are called? Keeping in mind that I want to look fancy and pretty and not … let’s use the word “vampy.”

Also keeping in mind that I found my first wrinkle on Monday night and only just cleared up a persistent breakout situation, so I am feeling pretty vulnerable in the ol’ looks department.

And what jewelry should I wear? I borrowed some silver hoop earrings from my cousin, and also silver-set ruby tear drop set and a diamond flower-cluster set and holy crap do you know how bad I am at making decisions? My nickname is MAYBE for a reason.

In a word: HALP. Thank you.

*skips out of dorm room to look for stash of cookie dough in mini-fridge*

But the tables have turned; now I’m in Pittsburgh, it snows all the damn time, and these people are hilariously lackadaisical about plowing, or canceling school, or giving a shit. I found myself earlier in the week creeping along snow-covered roads at 7 miles an hour with a deathgrip on the steering wheel. Dude behind me pulled a classic Snow Asshole tailgating move, and I drive even slower. I flip the news on when I get home, watch eagerly for school closings, and nothing. These people! Don’t they know there’s precipitation? Life should stand still when there’s precipitation! CLOSE DOWN THE TOWN!

So, OK, Baltimore, you can laugh at me now. I get it. But you’ve only got a few hours — all bets are off when the Steelers and the Ravens take the field. (I don’t follow football, but God help me if the Steelers don’t win today. I can’t take a town full of sad-panda football fans.)

Anyway, my point is that it took me a long time to realize that raising children and creating a home are not worthless pursuits or somehow less valuable than a life spent working one’s way up the chain of command at a newspaper. There is no line in the sand that says You are This or You are That. There is no such thing as Mommy Wars; motherhood is merely parenthood, and most humans enter that reproductive phase of life at one point. Taking a few years out of one’s work career (if that’s what I end up doing) is merely one person’s path through parenthood, not a Statement or a Track or a Cause

Too much of parenthood in this country is minimized as soccer mom work, joke fodder rather than seen through the lens of family and connection. Every one has parents; everyone comes from somewhere. Most people (I think most, statistically) will create a family of their own one way or another, or find themselves as a caregiver to someone else at some point, be it spouse, child or aging parent. It’s narrowminded and dangerous to assume that child-raising belongs to women and women belong at home; likewise it is narrowminded and dangerous to assume that raising children and staying at home are lowly, marginal or worthless activities. They are human activities.

Life is a ripple, or a wave, or a ribbon. Time bears you forward into different circumstances, doing different work that affects the larger society or culture as a whole. Arranging words on a newspaper page is one such service to your community. Teaching the children of that community about manners and love and respect and compassion is another.

To my Self of 10 years ago, I would say this: After critically thinking about so much, and fighting back over so many things, don’t overlook this. Motherhood is not the M word. Talk to me in 10 years. Get some of that stuff out of your system, take a step back, listen, think — and move the yarn forward if you want to purl.

Maybe I do look like Cormac. Or vice-versa.

Some of these I’ve never seen before. It’s crazy. I can’t believe that cute kid on the duck (chicken? rooster?) is me. Look at me! With all my original teeth. And blonde hair.

Kind of sad to think of all the awful things that will happen — I mean, not terrible. But still — broken hearts and broken jaws and hurt feelings and cruelty and everything that happens to a person. Kind of sad to think that such things will have to happen to Owen and Cormac, too.

I need some chocolate.

See? I’m serious. It’s like Land Before Time up there. Just farms and teeny die-cut machinery works and then some more farms. Holy Barnraising, how I love it.

I mean, come on. Rolling fields. Red barns. Blue sky. It’s so peaceful and beautiful, which is a good thing, because the trip takes about seven hundred hours, and it’s very dusty, and you’d better hope for some picaresque eye candy if you’re going to make it to the end.

It took about three hours of packing to get ready. Children require a lot of crap, and camping requires a lot of crap, and the combination of the two means an exponential amount of crap.

Then you load up all the crap and drive. Drive drive drive. Drive a little bit more. Then, when you’re done driving, you should drive.

Finally, you get to Meadville. This means you are not done driving. However, now there are at least things to look at.

Look! It’s made of signs! Very clever.

I have a restroom story about this Arby’s but I’m not allowed to share it.

After Meadville, you drive some more, and then there’s the Amish bit I mentioned above, and Spartansburg, and the fields and farms and all that. Just miles and miles of it. People living on like 10, 50, 100 acres at a time. I bet a lot of them are crazy old coots. Coots with shotguns.

Once you pass the crazy old coots, you turn on to the dirt road. For real, people still live and drive on dirt roads. I love it. Well, I sort of do. I mean, I love the idea of dirt roads. Very romantic. The actuality is quite dusty, though.

I didn’t get a picture of this, but one of the road signs off the dirt road says SMITH EASTMAN RD. I’m related to the person after whom that road was named. By marriage, but still. Isn’t that wild? The Eastmans are just all over the place up there and I reckon they’re all related to the person after whom that road was named. Nuts.

Anyway. All that driving and traveling and we finally get to the camp. Other than a small gate and a NO HUNTING sign, there is no indication that we are looking at 300+ acres of familial land. I think there should be a quaint handpainted sign or something.

This is the point that the camping gets underway. This is the reason for doing all that driving. Have you ever been car camping? Tent camping? You just park the truck, set up the tent, and start sitting around for a few hours trying not to get bit, burned or beset by dogs.

Oh, seriously, the dogs. I forgot to mention: we were doing the camping with my sister-in-law, her children, my father-in-law, and a grand total of 7 or 8 dogs (some we brought with, the rest came with some more relatives who dropped by to visit). Oh these fucking DOGS. Barking. Howling. Sniffing each other. Fighting. And PEEING. Boomer, the German Shorthair my sister-in-law was selling to her uncle, peed on my baby. Allow me to repeat that.

THE DOG PEED ON MY BABY.

I love my sister-in-law. I’m sure the dog has its admirable qualities. But he peed. On. My. Baby. And the baby was in his carseat, resting in the shade under the tree, and so the baby, his clothes, his diaper, and the carseat were all peed upon. And it’s camping, so it’s not like I can just whisk him away for a right proper bath or anything and toss the clothes in the wash. Argh.

ThedogpeedonmybabyARGH.

OK. I promise that’s the last time I say that. I forgive my sister-in-law of course but the dog will remain on my shit list for a while.

Anyway. It could have been worse. Right? Tell me it could have been worse.

The rest of camping was pretty fun. It was the first time for my both my children. Aside from the peeing, I don’t think Mac cared one way or the other. Owen, I believe, had a good time. There was go-karting and whittling and hiking and eating food that was cooked over a fire. There was sleeping in a tent and staying up late and peeing in the woods.

Personally, I’m not such a fan of peeing in the woods, partly because of the splash factor but mostly because — well, it’s peeing in the woods. There are no doors and there are no sinks and I tend to get quite dehydrated in my attempt to avoid doing it.

One other thing I would change — aside from the lack of proper sanitation facilities — would be the tent. We have a little two-man tent. My kids are pretty small, and so we figured we’d all just sleep in there, puppy style. We’d fit, right? I have to say that was a dire miscalculation, thinking four people could comfortably sleep in that moldy old thing. Sure we’d fit but we wouldn’t sleep. The ground was hard, my nose was running, Iain was snoring, Owen took up half the tent with his sprawling toddler legs and everybody was pressed up on me, who lay on my side in the middle trying to nurse the baby without using my hands, which were pinned to my sides by different members of my sleeping family. It was hell. I must have dozed off for a few minutes, because there was drool on my pillow (at least I think it was my drool). But in all the sleep was highly shitty. I was glad when dawn finally broke and I could clamber out of there and stretch without tripping over myself and breaking something in the dark. Like my nose.

Breakfast was instant coffee and eggs over the fire; then it was time for a last small bit of gokart riding over to Uncle Larry’s cabin, ensuring that we’d be nice and mud-covered for the drive home. I was itching to get out of there and shower, which is always the case. If I could only bathe I’d love to stay around for longer than a day, but camping has a way of making you seven times as dirty as you can tolerate. It’s mathematical fact.

So we all rode back to camp from Larry’s in the back of the truck, bouncing around with Morgan the Gordon Setter trotting after us. It was actually kind of fun, the truck rumbling and the kids laughing and the morning sun shining down happily. I almost wanted to stay longer.

But then I realized I had to pee, and the fewer times I have to do that standing up the better it is for everyone.

So that was our vacation to Amland. With two children. And no running water. And eight slobbery dogs. We loaded up the truck and reversed on out of there, back up the dirt road and past Smith Eastman Rd. and on toward the highway, just our bug-bitten, dusty, mud-covered selves.

I’d do it again, maybe, the camping. Even with the children. But next time I’m bringing a port-a-john, copious amounts of Tylenol P.M., and a secret stash of cigarettes.

Come on. You saw it coming.

God. It’s like being dumped. I thought this was supposed to taste like freedom but it’s sour, instead.

Yet.

So I’m talking to my buddy Matt this evening, and he has a pleasant new-home-owner/sierra-nevada buzz going on, and we’ve been tossing around thoughts on virtual Windows environments and Obama for President and proper gin::tonic ratios when he instructs me, quite firmly, to go get a banana.

Now, our conversations have from time to time touched on quite a wealth of diverse topics including, but by no means limited to, home repair, outdoor recreation, familial interpersonal relationships, Volkswagens, and my ass, but never have I been told in such clear tones to find and, more importantly, lay hands to, a piece of produce, domestic, imported or otherwise. However, I’m nothing if not game, so I produce the banana and also my camera, because I have a feeling that if I have been commanded to pick up a banana it could only be for the highest, purest and most worthy intentions. In that noble faith I was not mistaken.

My only challenge is to do sufficient justice to the retelling of …

THE SECRETS OF THE BANANA.

Well, just the one secret. So that would be THE SECRET, singular. The Secret of the Banana. Starring Harrison Ford! Don’t miss the next exciting episode!

Right. So. Join me on this journey, won’t you? As we uncover the age-old mystery of the Banana? I promise you the results will be so life-changing you won’t be disappointed.

First, since this is a voyage of the mind, and THEN a voyage of the banana, I want you to close your eyes. Now, open them and read the next sentence and then close them again. Picture a banana. Now — pssst! Keep reading, OK? Maybe just close your eyes like after a paragraph. Otherwise this train is just going to kind of stall at the station, or whatever the methaphor — I mean, ha, metaphor — is. Methaphor. Sounds like an antibacterial cleanser.

OK! So. Picture a banana. Imagine you are going to eat this banana. What do you do? You go to the top of the banana, right? The stemmy part. And you yank on it and rip at it and try to cause the peel of the banana to break away from the stemmy bit and also from the meat of the banana itself. Guess what? Even in your mind’s eye it’s not working! Because it’s not separating and then you have to kind of dig your thumbnail in there and the top of the banana gets all smushy and you root around in the silverwear drawer to get something a little sharper than a butter knife and a little less sharp than a butcher knife — maybe a nice piece of Chef Tony craftsmanship, like this here steak knife — and you slice the end off and THEN you unpeel the banana.

Well, my friends, this is madness. You’re thinking, “There’s got to be a better way!”

There is!

Very handy for my story, that there’s a better way and that it’s a secret to you until the next paragraph.

Here’s the secret. And I have no qualms telling you that I did not invent the secret. And Matt did not invent the secret. And the four-year-old girl from whom he heard the secret did not invent the secret, either (although, for posterity’s sake, let it be known that credit for this brilliant tale goes 50 percent to Matt for the telling and 50 percent to the four-year-old girl who shared the secret in the first place. Just because, you know, people keep count on this sort of thing).

(All right, so you had to wait an extra paragraph for the secret. I’m not sorry.)

THE SECRET IS … (Owen is doing a very enthusiastic drumroll for your benefit, please clap at the end, it builds his self-esteem) … Open the banana from the bottom.

No shit. Know why? Because, and I quote, verbatim-like, only third-hand: “That’s the way the monkeys do it.” And goddamn it, if it’s good enough for the monkeys, for Darwin’s sake, it’s good enough for me!

Also, please try this at home. Just pop off the bottom knubby part of the banana and witness the brilliant rays of light which will signify that you, out of millions or even billions of 21st century people, have figured out what the monkeys knew all along: the most efficient way to open and peel a banana.

Thank you.

If you would like a transcript of this episode of SECRETS OF THE BANANA, you could probably just print this page from your browser, and then fold it up in quarters, and slip it into an envelope, and stick it on top of the microwave in your kitchen, near the bananas.

• The phantom pee-er
• money re: our budget
• OMG blog drama
• Owen’s birth story
• moving and where to
• reasons to be jaded

I’m sure there’s more. I feel like I do that all the time: promise (or threaten) to write more about something, and then I never do. I’m a little too conscious of who’s reading to be truly honest here. For that matter, you should see what I have still in the ol’ drafts folder. Hoooo-ee.

Ugh. Gotta cut this short, I’m coughing and disrupting the other patrons.