Shenzi

The day Shenzi came to our home, I naively anticipated an easy weekend.  My daughters had given up their Saturday morning ballroom dancing class, and Audrey was getting really consistent about driving her sister Lauren to their voice lessons at Diana's, so with an occasional drive to take Lauren to her lacrosse games or sleepovers, my Saturdays didn’t feel like a nonstop blur of activivities anymore.  I was beginning to believe the weekend is actually for recharging and relaxation.

But that easy feeling came to an abrupt end when Shenzi suddenly showed up.  Actually, he didn’t just appear at my door, my daughters brought him home!  In complete defiance of my no-pet policy.  I simply couldn’t believe it when I looked up the stairs and saw Audrey sitting there with a puppy on her lap and a sly smile on her face.

“Whose dog is it?”  I seethed.  Lauren and Audrey both broke down laughing despite feeling the gravity of my threatening glare.  “Ours,” they snickered.  “No, really, whose dog is it?  You’d better return him to his rightful owner before I take him to the pound myself.”

As it turned out, the girls had picked up the pup running the streets outside the neighborhood of their voice teacher near the court house in Santa Ana.  They promised they’d put up flyers and reunite the dog with his owner in less than a week.  Fat chance, I thought.  I took initiative myself and went online to look up no-kill shelters in our area.  There’s one in Long Beach and another nearer to our home, but no one answered the line.  Lauren begged to keep Shenzi (she’d already named him after the hyena in The Lion King) until Monday.  I’ve heard of wild animals with pet names, but never a pet named after a wild animal, so in my opinion this didn’t bode well, but I decided to bite my tongue.  Actually, I was too exasperated to even speak.

Having raised four kids mostly by myself up to the point where each of them can actually fry an egg to feed themselves in the morning before school (but only 1 of them can drive herself to her errands), I was starting to feel a tiny bit less homebound and duty-bound after years of what I sometimes uncharitably thought of as nonstop drudgery.  I really couldn’t fathom taking in any pet, person, or thing that wouldn’t become self-sufficient eventually.  And even if Shenzi were super smart and could be taught to fry an egg and feed himself, well, my dismal record with pets doesn’t bode well for him, either.  Our childhood pet got run over by my dad while still a puppy.  Snowy, the homeless cat I adopted from my 3-year stint in Los Angeles, got run over by one of my neighbors while we were on vacation in Las Vegas and she was in the care of another neighbor down the street (Snowy had escaped and was finding her way home when she got hit).  For years I couldn’t get over my guilt for not taking good enough care of Fifi, our Shih Tzu, because back then we didn’t have the money to get him surgery when he needed it and treatment for his dental abscess.  I saw myself as a terrible pet owner beyond redemption.  Also a tired, uninspired mom who chased errands all day long.  Shenzi had no place in my life, period!  He needed to go.

But we had to feed him in the meantime.  He looked emaciated.  Off to PetSmart we went.  Lauren picked up a bag of AvoDerm small-breed dog food.  Awfully expensive stuff.  I eyed her additional purchases with suspicion.  It’s March.  Why does the dog need a sweater, even if on sale?  Why were we buying him clothes if he was to be returned to his owner/given up to the pound?  Lauren convincingly explained it’s unseasonably chilly at night and Shenzi would need to be walked, if he wasn’t housebroken yet.  That realization led to the subsequent purchase of a collar, a retractable leash, and a pack of doggie training pads.  I felt my head spinning by the time we arrived at the cash register.

Big brown eyes in argyle

No longer a stray

Waking up on the wrong side of the bed

Lately Lauren and I seem to be simultaneously waking up on the wrong side of bed often as our frequent arguments would suggest.  Today was one of those days where it seemingly came out of nowhere.  I was dropping off Kiet’s friend, Tyler, at our old neighborhood and heading back on Jamboree when we received a call from Lauren asking when we’d be home.  It turned out she had forgotten to take her keys with her in the morning and was locked out after carpooling home with her friend, Celine.  When we arrived home Lauren was nowhere to be seen, so I opened the back door to see her lying listlessly on our backyard swing.  Lauren mumbled discontentedly when I called out to her, and slammed the door after her as she entered the kitchen, so I figured I'd leave Her Grouchy Majesty alone.   It did cross my mind that maybe she was fishing for an apology, but I believed no apologies were due since Lauren should have known I’d likely be either running errands or picking Kiet up from wrestling practice around that time, and she'd had her own house key for a while now that she shouldn’t have forgotten.

On days when she’s picked up by me and not Celine’s mom, I'd usually get the girls after-school snacks from their favorite fast food hang-outs near home.  Sometimes we’d even drive off the way to Diamond Jamboree in order to satisfy their cravings for Lollicup milk teas or 85°C Bakery items.  This afternoon, because we had to hurry home to let Lauren in, there were no ready snacks, so she was stomping around the kitchen looking for food.  I noticed her making a show about being especially heavy-handed with our pantry doors and decided once again to ignore Her Majesty's apparent grumpiness.  After asking me to clean up a puddle on the bathroom floor, Lauren came back into the kitchen to check on her pigs in blankets cooking in the oven.  They looked almost black where they touched the aluminum foil and Lauren angrily poked at them trying to scrape off the burnt pastry shells.  I happened to be standing a few feet from her checking the day’s mail and when I turned to ask what happened, Lauren complained she had followed the baking directions on the box exactly, but the franks still burned to a crisp.  I told her in an even voice that because the food was kept in the fridge instead of the freezer, it should be cooked in less time.  That led Lauren to ask why the franks ended up in the refrigerator then, and when I explained we had no space in the freezer, she looked decidedly irritated and continued to stab the franks furiously with her fork.  When it seemed obvious she would have to start a new batch in the oven and no sympathy or help would be forthcoming from me, all of a sudden the pigs in blankets, and the piece of foil on which they sat, went flying within a few inches of my face.  Lauren didn’t throw them AT me, but she might as well have, since this was in my book as “in-your-face” as it gets.  I was livid.

“CLEAN IT UP RIGHT NOW!” I hollered, and she spit back, “OKAY, OKAY!” in a tone that implied nothing is okay and I’m going to clean it up when I want to.  After one or two half-hearted wipes to minimally appease me, Lauren turned to walk back to the fridge, in the meantime kicking and slamming a few more kitchen cabinet doors, and at that point I purposely picked up the piece of foil on which lay the mutilated pigs in blankets and hurled the whole thing overhead in her direction.  This got Lauren's attention, and when I ordered her to pick up the mess and wipe the kitchen floor, she did.

Was I being childish?  Mean-spirited?  Harsh? Maybe.  But hardly unprovoked, and in my mind, more than halfway justified.

It made me remember the last time we had a semi-major spat, several months ago.  I was driving Lauren to a birthday party/sleepover at one of her musical-theater friend's house for the first time. This was a grand and stately home that could only be reached from a forbidding road up the hill, as Lauren had later described to me, "Mom, they had an elevator in their main house and their guest house is even bigger than our real home!" Of course, that was exactly the kind of house you tended to get lost going there, as was happening to me as I silently debated against my mapquested directions, with Lauren my ill-humored front-seat passenger growing more sullen and impatient by the minute. She didn't want to be late to her fun event, she didn’t care I was having a hard time, and she'd decided to express her barely concealed displeasure through verbal stomping and the defiant teenager's other stock weapons – muttering under her breath and rolling her eyes at mom’s seeming incompetence. Finally I'd had enough and screamed back that if she thought she could find her way better than me or Mapquest, I'd stop the car in the middle of the road this minute and let her take over the wheels. Of course Lauren vehemently denied she'd ever shown any attitude and went on disputing the obvious until we somehow miraculously arrived at our scheduled destination. At that moment, I had become fully exasperated, so I stopped the car about a hundred feet from where a group of her friends was gathering by the roadside, turned to her and said glaringly, "You have no qualms about talking back to me, so let's just drive up to your friends right now and I'll throw a fit right in front of them and see who'd be embarrassed." Lauren immediately stopped arguing and spurted out a reluctant "I'm sorry, Mom!" That was when I realized the awesome power of peer pressure and how words that would normally fall on deaf ears could turn effective if they're well-timed and imbued with an unorthodox shock factor. The next morning, instead of calling me for pick-up, Lauren uncharacteristically delegated that chore to her dad.  Subsequently, she was "nice" to me for almost an entire month without incidents!

"Normal" pigs in blankets