Starshine Roshell Posts

(I’d like to point out some unusual formatting in this week’s column. Every time you see an asterisk [*] in the text below, I want you to squeeze the muscles of your pelvic floor. I’ll explain later; just do it. Every time.)

Being the mother of a teenager brings an undeniable sense of accomplishment. By the time our kids are a decade-plus out-tha-womb, we’re masters at soothing bee-stung toes and sleepover anxieties. We can produce perfect potluck side dishes and create a Shutterfly holiday card in 20 minutes flat.

We’re competent. We’re confident. But … we’re not especially continent.*

Let me paint you a picture: I’m the cool mom who buys my kids a trampoline, relinquishes half of my backyard to the unsightly contraption, and then — excellent sport that I am — scrambles onto the bouncy spring pad with my boys to have a go on the thing.

Yes, good times. Look at us, cavorting together. Get a load of me, the fun mom, launching into the air, cackling with glee, and flopping around like a middle-aged rag doll until — excuse me?

What* just* happened?*

It seems I sprung a wee leak. And being neither a potty-oblivious infant nor a nursing-home resident, I’m confused. It’s as unexpected as if my eyes had just popped out of my head — things that have no business leaving my body without my say-so.

If you’re ever strolling past my house at night, I hope you’ll stop and admire the view through my living room’s picture window. You’ll spy fresh flowers and flickering candles. You’ll see throw pillows and artfully arranged bookshelves. You’ll notice a rainbow of gleaming produce in the fruit bowl.

And I hope you’ll delight in the sight. I hope you’ll think to yourself, “What a charming, welcoming, and tastefully appointed domicile.”

And above all, I hope you’ll do us both the favor of never — I mean not ever — coming inside.

When it comes to domestic polish, you see, I put up a good front. Flick at its fragile veneer, though — peek behind a shower curtain or peer under a sofa cushion — and you let loose a veritable geyser of chaos. It’s a chaos I confront daily and manage to ignore just as often. But the holidays bring the promise of visitors whose very merry presence forces me to face the profound mess that is my home. And on a deeper level, I suppose, my life.

They’re coming, these people: friends, neighbors, family members. I know they’re coming. And when they arrive, they’ll do the unthinkable: They’ll help themselves to the half-and-half in (gulp) the refrigerator and then visibly recoil from the chocolate fingerprints on the door handle, the milky rings on the shelves, and the sticky jars of condiments that no one ever ate and — let’s all pray — no one ever will.

What I know about soccer couldn’t fill a paragraph. It couldn’t even pad a run-on sentence. In fact, it can be summed up in two simple words: Hands off.

That’s a sad commentary considering the number of years I’ve spent watching my kids play the game. But if I don’t know what a goal kick is and couldn’t pick a sweeper from a team photo, it’s because I don’t spend my sideline time watching fútbol.

I spend it ogling hot daddy coaches.

That’s right. Plopped in my polyester folding chair, clutching my travel mug of strongly brewed, Coffeemate-saturated java juice, I hoot and yelp at random intervals so I’ll look and sound like the other parents on my sons’ teams. The “better parents,” some might call them. Where they’re actually watching our brightly clad, sweaty-headed children scramble across the field in earnest if mildly confused clumps, I’m scanning the surrounding fields for a glimpse at a species of dude that I find utterly irresistible — a brand of man candy that I’d like to slide tackle with a one-touch pass to his technical area, if you know what I mean. (Note: I have no idea what I mean. I saw those terms in an online soccer glossary and found them delightful. Don’t write to tell me I used them incorrectly. I don’t care.)

Standing at the altar, everything looks easy. The groom is impeccably groomed, flashing his best manners, and, while he may very well be thinking about the game, his eyes are on you. A decade later, though — when the caterer’s gone, the finery is shelved, and you’re deep in the bog of intimate cohabitation — spousehood can begin to chafe. And grate. And rankle.

Even if you have the best husband in the solar system — in fact, you don’t, because I do — you might be surprised to discover that he has an infantile fear of ants, an unnerving fancy for circus posters, and an inability to smell rotting trash from two lousy paces.

The truth is you never really know someone ’til you’ve shared a toothbrush-holder with him. Since the day we said “I do,” I’ve learned countless surprising things about my husband. I always knew that he’d never intentionally hurt my feelings — but I didn’t know how often he’d do it unintentionally by failing to notice a haircut or ask me, “What did the doctor say?” And I could never have guessed that the attentive boyfriend who made an embarrassing fuss over my half-birthday would become the distracted husband who asks, “It’s Mother’s Day? Again?!”

From wifely gripes like these springs Santa Barbara author Jenna McCarthy’s new book, If It Was Easy, They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon: Living With and Loving the TV-Addicted, Sex-Obsessed, Not-So-Handy Man You Married.