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Blogging for Books: Why My Life Should Be a Sitcom
by Mindy Roberts

Is it bad that I have been told repeatedly that my life should be a sitcom even before I was a mommy? It is? Well, with the addition of three children, we could definitely hang on for a few seasons. Here’s my treatment for the cast and suggestions for three episodes, based on actual events in my life.

The Cast
Mindy (Mom): thirty-six years old, raised in Chicago as a latch-key kid by a single mom fixing to blossom into a feminist scholar and professor. Works at a private foundation, shoveling money out the door and trying to do it legally. Married unwisely or by accident of immaturity for less than two years at the age of 21. Married again, much more wisely, at 24 and tried unsuccessfully to have a family for the next five years. Fertility treatment brought two boys, and then a drunken night of irresponsibility brought a little girl. All three were born within three years, nine months.

Gil (Dad): forty-six years old, native of Colorado Springs, raised in a largely idyllic environment surrounded by mountains and conservative Christianity. Nice guy, high-tech career put on hold by the tech bust, stayed home with children for three years. Just went back to work in same industry.

Logan: Six years old (if asked, he will give his age to the nearest eighth of a year), a friendly, smart little boy with a fondness for order and control. Has fashion sense. Knows everything there is to know about mammals, and does a mean Richard Attenborough. Great vocabulary. Poor emotional control. Eats nothing but waffles, cereal, and sushi. Will either be a biologist or have a spot on Queer Eye or Fashion Emergency.

Dylan: four years old, a survivor of catastrophic viral heart damage as a newborn, now an indestructible imp with more energy and spare time than anyone of the rest of us. Fanatic about trains, uncanny sense of comedic timing, both verbal and physical. May actually be a leprechaun. May have future in politics or comedy. Or both.

Daphne: two-and-three-quarters old, willowy and verbal enough to be mistaken for Dylan’s twin. Obsessed with princesses and fairies and her mommy. Red hair. Climbs like a monkey. Can argue using logic, which pisses off the rest of the household. She’s cute enough so that we never remember why we’re mad.

The Set
Small ranch home in the Silicon Valley. 1400 square feet of living space with a mortgage of half a million dollars housing two grownups, three children, and a large dog. Parents are divorcing, slowly. Both seeking psychiatric care. Neither overcoming inertia with respect to divorce proceedings. Instead are preparing for holidays and painting interior of house in hopes of benefiting greatly from color therapy.

Other Characters
Maternal grandparents: a doctor and a professor, both with long careers in academia, both published authors, both scary smart, both politically and religiously liberal. Both really fun to drink with. Live close by, when not commuting to their jobs, three thousand and two thousands miles away, respectively. Still waiting for them to grow up and settle down.

Paternal grandparents: an architect and a homemaker with design and calligraphy sidelines. Residents of Colorado Springs by way of Topeka. Love golf, play tennis, are active in church, community, family, and in general. Extremely nice people. Politically and religiously conservative. Make damn fine pepper steaks.

Three Sample Episodes:

Episode One: Mommy Scrum
Every morning starts with an intense game of logistics and strategy, with each of the players launching into full competition mode before the sleepies are even out of their eyes. This morning, after suffering bruises and scratches while teetering on the edge of our king-sized bed, buried under a wriggling scrum, I cried, “This is a very big bed! HOW can there not be enough room for everyone??” Logan looked me in the eye, smiled, and replied, “Oh the bed’s big enough; there’s just not enough of you.”

Rules of Engagement
Mommy’s Object: successfully negotiate the 10 feet between the bed and the shower, get dressed, and in general groom sufficiently for a chance meeting with a mucky-muck during the day. Leave house with purse AND keys AND matching shoes.

Bonus points for: leaving the kids waving joyously from the kitchen window.

Penalty for: having to pry one or more weeping children off legs, or barely clearing front door being slammed and locked by an irritated spouse.

Children’s Object: wake up and tumble into Mommy’s bed before she wriggles out of her jammies and gets in the shower. *This is absolutely imperative.* If she is either in her robe or already dressed, use every available method of persuasion to convince her to put them back on and return to bed immediately for snuggling. The secondary object is to secure the best possible parcel of Mommy Real Estate and defend that parcel against all invaders. Rugby rules, of course, apply.

Bonus points for: securing an inside position, under an arm, with full duvet coverage.
Penalty for: getting caught scratching or head-butting and being tossed out of the bed.

Husband’s Object: get the heck out of bed before the Mommy Land Grab begins. Escape to the kitchen, make coffee, and chew through the Sports page and maybe the front section before answering Mommy’s tortured cries for help (muffled by small bodies, so it is acceptable to pretend you weren’t really sure you heard anything). Once Mommy is given safe passage into the shower and the children are herded into the kitchen, return to bathroom and pepper her with miscellaneous inquiries and tidbits. Remind her of any upcoming appointments and obligations, and solicit opinions on pending issues. The most advantageous window for eliciting a “Hon, why don’t you just do whatever you think is best!” is the one in which she is rinsing shampoo from her eyes or shaving her legs, or both. Beat a hasty retreat.

Bonus points for: achieving total decision-making authority on all matters.

Penalty for: pissing Mommy off sufficiently to keep her from coming home until after everone’s in bed.

Episode Two: A Tragicomedy in Three Acts
A mini-novella or a short play about a ficticious woman who works for a ficticious company and has a difficult week.

Act One
Scene One: The opening scene finds our Heroine arriving exactly on time to her weekly staff meeting, one minute too late to witness the intervention staged by fellow managers to keep the boss from calling to see if she was showing up, just as he does every.single.week. [laugh track]

Scene Two: Later in the day, we find her sitting with lawyer and spouse, exploring the many different ways to calculate six percentage points of a given amount. She patiently draws diagrams and explains that you can multiply a number by .06, or you can divide it in half and subtract .03 of the original amount and get the same result! Close-up of two sets of fingers scratching heads, cut to eye roll, and fade.

Intermission: Audience goes for jujubes and bio breaks while tax code meeting takes place.

Act Two
Scene One: First act opens on a somber note as our heroine sobs into her hoodie sleeve at her therapist’s. [cue wistful music] Therapist asks her to fill out a feedback form on the way out. [laugh track]

Scene Two: The next morning. Heroine dresses with extra care, shaving her legs and donning a skirt in last minute sell-out move. Attends performance review and is stunned by insulting presentation of merit “increase.” Close-up of crestfallen expression and hint of tears welling up, then cut to silky shins as she stands and stumbles out of boss’s office. Fade. Open to medium shot of heroine’s office door, muffled sounds of crying in the background. Cut to shot of staff hovering outside door, looking worried. After a time, heroine emerges from the office to go home, where she spends rest of afternoon on phone to bank, attempting to re-mortgage house. Neighbor’s dog barks in background.

Act Three
Scene One: Heroine arrives at work, ready to start clearing tasks neglected the previous day. We hear a chime as the following message pops into her email inbox:

“Since the library has moved to headquarters, they no longer need the newspapers delivered to [heroine’s building]. We have decided to re-evaluate our need for these newspapers.”

After a brief apopleptic fit, heroine fires off scathing series of snarky emails to entire building asking if anyone else feels the need to be less informed now that the population of the building has gone down by two librarians.

Scene Two: The dentist office, lunch time. “So, what are we keeping you from today?” “Nothing. The tax return. Been working on it for seven months. It’s due tomorrow.” [awkward pause] “So, how’s that temporary crown been treating you?” [laugh track]

Scene Three: Late afternoon. Our heroine fields call after call, first from the finance department, asking for an ETA of the tax return schedule, and then from counsel to confirm that the tax return schedule will be not ready by tomorrow, and then from finance again asking for different answer about the tax return schedule. As phone rings one last time, our heroine picks up, poised to give reassurances about tax return schedule, only to hear boss’ voice, asking for business reason for several items on latest expense report. Which, incidentally, cost less than annual newspaper susbcriptions, but more than her annual pay increase. [laugh track] [cymbals] Fade to black.

Curtain.

Episode Three: In Case They Don’t Find Our Bodies until Spring...
We made a break for it at noon today. The roads out of Tahoe were impassible on our first attempt at 8 a.m. (Gil and Logan tried to go skiing, but could go no more than 100 feet down our road), but by 11, enough others had tamped down a trail for us to decide to pack up, shut down the house, and try to escape before the heavy snows came again in the afternoon. We figured that if we could clear Truckee, get onto 80, and make it over Donner Pass, we’d be home for dinner. By the way, if anyone from the Placer County snow removal service is reading this, I would sooner attempt to put eyeliner on an angry rhino in a phone booth than willingly pay taxes that might in future go in whole or in portion to your department. Really.

That was three and a half hours ago. It took about 40 minutes to travel the 6 miles from the house to Tahoe City, and the remainder has been spent on the 14-mile stretch of 89 that connects to Truckee, where we can catch 80 to the Bay Area. During that time we have:

• Passed out sandwiches and collected the partially chewed leavings
• Passed out juice cups
• Drawn lots of pictures on the doodle board
• Passed out the few jelly beans remaining in the glove compartment
• Pulled over so Logan could pee (loved drawing pictures in the snow btw)
• Took dozens of photos of the cottony trees and blowing snow

[Ahhhh, shit, I just noticed that everyone’s headlights are coming on....dark is coming soon.]
• Pulled over so Dylan could pee ( I had to hold him over the snow so he wouldn’t (a) sink into a drift, or (b) pee all over my shoes
• Passed out mini-marshmallows
• Got out so Logan could pee again. We didn’t actually have to pull over—we were no longer moving forward—we just started letting the car idle whenever we needed to take a walk. This time, Gil got out with Logan. Unfortunately, he’d barely set his feet on the icy road when they suddenly flew out from under him and he landed on his tailbone.
• Passed out more mini-marshmallows
• Begged them to please share
• Typed up a list of thank-you notes to send to family

Logan: “But Mommy, the presents were from Santa!”
Me: “Not all of them—Santa only brought you the water buffalo.”
Logan: “Moo-oom, it wasn’t a water buffalo. It was an African buffalo.”

• Called Gil’s folks to chat
• Called Gil’s brother to chat
• Got out so Dylan could poop (false alarm, but judging from the tears it bode ill for anything but diarrhea)
• Passed out goldfish in baggies and broke the news that we were officially out of juice
• Got out again for Dylan, and this time it was diarrhea, and almost all over my shoes. I was soooooo glad Gil had picked up wipes this morning.
  Short pause, long enough to buckle up again and find the bag of goldfish, and......out again. What did this kid eat??

And we still can’t see the lights of Truckee. There are now four inches of snow on the hood, and we can’t even make out the outline of the mountains less than 100 yards away. I just feel bad for the car behind us—they’ve moved up just far enough to have a good view of the scene of Dylan’s private little moment. Pretty soon, I’m going to have to get out, and I don’t think anyone’s going to offer to cradle me in their arms to keep me from dipping my bum in the snow drifts!

4:46 PST. Time elapsed: Four hours, forty-five minutes. Truckee? Nope, can’t see a thing. The moon’s up, though.

6:30 PST. We pulled off the road at 5:00 to celebrate our arrival in Truckee with milkshakes at the Dairy Queen. The kids sat happily transfixed with an entire strawberry milkshake each. After 30 minutes of waiting in line for the john and seeing the men’s line dwindle to nothing, I asked my fellow line-mates if there was any special reason why we were not now using the men’s room. Unbelievably, there were some who were appalled by the suggestion. The lady in front of me and I looked at each other and said, “Right.” We formed a second line, declared the johns unisex, and forced the men to take a place with the rest of us. Honestly.

6:40 PST. Whiteout conditions. The highway is plowed to the width of a two lane road, and the drifts are deep on either side. Dylan started crying to go peepee again, so we begged him to go in his pull-up just this once, but then he escalated it to poopy alert. Gil pulled over as far as he could, and I hopped out, cursing, into a knee-deep snowdrift to make a cradle for Dylan again. Poor guy. Poor me.

As soon as I started buckling him back into his seat, Daphne went bananas. I thought she just wanted to get down, and as I was soothing her, I noticed her Dairy Queen cup...pointing straight down. She was sitting in an 8-oz. puddle of melted strawberry milkshake. Then I noticed Logan’s own discarded milkshake cup, leaking all over the children’s coats. I think that was the loudest I’ve ever cursed in front of my children. I just could not believe it. There was sticky strawberry mess all over the car seat, her clothing, the only remaining diaper, freshly placed on her bottom, the children’s brand-new snow gear...everything, including, now, me. I pried her out of her seat, Gil pulled off the soggy clothing, and we both tried to mop up with napkins. I then coldheartedly confiscated Dylan’s blanket and shoved it underneath her now naked legs to buffer the disaster area. Good Christ.

After a few minutes, Gil whispered, “At least you have some good blog material.” So I did! I pulled out the computer to write this down.....and now the computer’s battery is dying…

[Later]

The rest of the trip was so, so sad. It’s the kind of thing I would love to read about while sitting in my empty nest, in my Frette-clad Dux bed, while letting my pedicure dry and eating Haagen-Dazs straight out of the container.

Daphne was so upset at her naked legs and feet that she wailed for the next forty minutes. She had this little routine where she would scream until I looked at her, and then drop it to a wail once I made eye contact. I tested it out...look away...scream...look at her...wail...look away...yup, high-pitched...look at her...comparatively pleasant wail. At some point I got over involved in mediating a doodle board dispute, and when I looked up again, she was asleep.

I’ll make the rest of it short:

• They each wanted to sit in my lap for the rest of the trip
• Logan periodically declared from the darkness of the back seat, “I can’t take it anymore.”
• They were each suffering from thirst so severe it threatened to rob them of their sensibilities, but which inexplicably enabled them nonetheless to produce copious amounts of bodily discharge
• We stopped for McDonald’s where they drank about a gallon of Sprite apiece
• Gil and I totted up the peepee and urgent poopy stops at the side of a snow-swept road for a total of at least eight
• When we finally had an opportunity to go in a real bathroom at McD’s, Dylan was overly distressed at being forced to go in the ladies’ room
• We arrived home at 12:01 a.m., almost twelve hours to the minute after setting out with all hopes of beating the weather.

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