4. Decide you need new shoes to go with your new shirt, even though your old lady feet can’t handle cheap shoes anymore. Pick up shoe inserts to cushion the plastic. This is self-care. You are caring for your body like the Bible said to.
5. Head back toward kitchenware for trash can, and put two big frames in your basket en route because you just remembered you wanted to attempt a feature wall in your living room like you saw on Pinterest. Also grab those storage bins because you were going to get organized this year.
6. Get trash can and also placemats, because organized people have nice table settings.
7. Head to toiletries to get cotton balls. Smell all the shampoo in the organic, natural section, and put a twelve-dollar lotion in your cart. Discover experimental face cream made of spun elfin dreams. Costs thirty-nine dollars, but your crow’s-feet are making you look like Robert De Niro and this hurts your feelings.
8. Decide you need all the stuff to organize your desk. Better pens will make you smarter and more efficient.
9. Proceed to checkout, where you pay the one hundred dollars (plus) cover charge Target insists on inflicting every.single.time.
10. Grab a Starbucks or Icee for having some self-control (because you didn’t buy the themed Christmas dishes), and head to the car.
11. Realize you forgot the cotton balls. Obviously.
HOW TO ORGANIZE A BOOK CLUB
1. Select a book.
2. Purchase said book with real dollars.
3. Place book on bedside table for the next three to four weeks.
4. Look at book each night with good intentions. If intentions could read a book, you would have read 1,248 books this year. Feel proud of your intentions. They mean so well.
5. Start book in bed and immediately fall asleep. Your intentions are genuine but they are very tired.
6. Carry book around in your purse in case you can spontaneously read somewhere, sometime, somehow. (You can’t, you won’t, but now your purse is denting your shoulder between the heavy book and all the other mysterious and sometimes unidentified crap you cart around. What is even in your purse? Why does it all have a thin layer of filth on it? Why is your purse a Grime Generator?)
7. Ten minutes before the guests arrive, flip through the chapters to learn the main characters’ names. Try to determine if it was set in modern-day Florida or 1922 Paris. Make a quick call: Is it fiction? Read the last page. Have a sense of conclusion in case someone died or came back to life or married the best friend.
8. Serve enough wine in hopes no one will realize you didn’t open the book.
9. Discover that three out of twelve girls read the whole book. Admit that “Book Club” is an excuse for women to leave their homes with impunity (“For literature! Hello!”) and basically drink wine and eat snacks and talk about boobs and trash television.
Programming Note: Do not disclose step 9 to husband. Maintain position that Book Club is about nourishing your minds with well-constructed prose. What actually happens in Book Club stays in Book Club.
HOW TO GET IN BIBLE STUDY TIME
1. Send your darling children to school, grab a great cup of coffee, your Bible, notebook, and pen, and settle in at the kitchen table.
2. Bow your head in prayer to open your heart to the Word of the Lord. Get really serious and slightly emotional, because Jesus loves you and also God plus the Holy Spirit.
3. Open your eyes to find your hubby buck naked strutting across the dining room on his day off, because this was obviously the right moment for sexy time. I believe it’s deep in Song of Songs: “He shall strut himself like a mighty steed across thy gaze . . .”
4. Apologize to God. (Don’t worry about Jesus; He was never married. He wouldn’t understand.)
HOW TO LOSE BABY WEIGHT: DIY/NO-GYM METHOD
1. Tell yourself you can do it. Look how great you were at gaining the weight! Positive affirmation is important here.
2. Load baby into stroller and set off for epic one-mile walk or jog.
3. Walk or jog for what feels like eight miles. Discover it is two-thirds of one.
4. Lift five-gallon tub of laundry soap as “weights.” Do five sit-ups. See? Who needs a gym? You are so motivated and thrifty. You are a Proverbs 31 woman.
5. Feel your muscles cramping and spazzing. Self-medicate with a bowl of potato salad and a side of Doritos, because you can double down on your carbs if you want to. They are in the food pyramid.
6. Decide you’re okay with being chubby. Feel philosophical about this. Society doesn’t get to tell you how to look. You’ll intentionally keep these pounds on because you are NOT GOVERNED BY THE MAN.
7. Pour glass of wine.
8. Brag about exercise to husband. Oversell the distance/ weight/duration/reps.
9. Vow to never do any of it again.
HOW TO RUIN YOUR TODDLER’S LIFE
1. Pour him one-eighth of an inch less milk than his brother in a see-through cup.
Programming Note: If this doesn’t work, accidentally break his cookie in half as you lift it off the cookie sheet. Because broken cookies don’t taste the same! If these fail, give him the wrong kind of cheese or socks with weird seams. This should effectively destroy his happiness.
HOW TO RUIN YOUR TEENAGER’S LIFE
1. Breathe.
2. Don’t buy her a car even though she really wants one but forgot to save any of her money like you told her to four years ago. (You could stop effectively at this step, but continue through the manual if teen resentment wears off.)
3. Say no to Senior Skip Day, even when he has proof, and even when that proof is a screenshot of an iPhone note typed up and shared by someone named hottiexoxo with instructions to spread the word “on the low.” Your teen cannot understand your problem with hottiexoxo. You are the “most paranoid mom ever.”
4. Keep breathing. This assaults the teen psyche more than you might imagine.
5. Give advice on a problem teen is having. Realize you know nothing, understand nothing, have nothing to offer, have no experience, no clue, and no chill. You’re just an old lady who makes dinner.
6. Smile anyway and toast the hubs for making it this far, and dream about all the places you’ll go when the nest is empty.
HOW TO GET YOUR HUSBAND TO FIX THAT THING HE’S BEEN SAYING FOR THREE MONTHS THAT HE’D FIX
1. Tell him it’s fine if he doesn’t know how to fix it.
2. Watch him fix it.
Programming Note: If this tried-and-true method fails, start getting estimates from professionals. As a last resort, start the project yourself. Even just pick up a hammer and walk in the general direction of the broken thing. This should effectively catapult your husband off the couch and into disgruntled service: “I said I would do it!”
HOW TO HELP YOUR MIDDLE SCHOOLER WITH MATH HOMEWORK
1. Have your child go to the kitchen table and set out her homework.
2. Slip up to the bathroom. Look in the mirror and say, “I got this. Eighth-grade geometry is not my bully.”