Humor

A Not-So-Simple Day

By Jennifer Redmond

Humor

Does the incessant ringing, beeping, buzzing and electronic singing (bless those battery-operated toys) of life ever get on your nerves? Are you stretching to be everything to everybody? Every mom knows this breathless feeling.

Last week on one particularly memorable day I put on the brakes. Newsflash for moms: This is not always as simple as it sounds.

Craving slow motion, I turned off my computer and the land line and decided to have an old-fashioned June Cleaver-ish day at home alone. My plan was to clean the entire house, wrap two gifts and bake a cake from scratch for my husband's birthday celebration. It sounded so reasonable.

I should've let the dream die there.

The first glitch was that I nearly forgot a mid-morning interview, after which I actually had just four hours to do the above. No problem. But then I didn't have the proper ingredients for the cake. I dashed to the grocery and back and rushed into the process of being Suzy Homemaker.

I hadn't tidied the kitchen from breakfast, so the countertops were in disarray and clean dishes were still in the dishwasher, of course. No problem. I transferred everything to the sink and resolved to clean up the mess later. I was running a little behind schedule but I wasn't worried.

Happily humming, I mixed ingredients for the family's favorite chocolate cake...flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, etc. All was well. But the batter looked strangely odd. I shrugged off the feeling that something was missing and prepared the cake pan.

Then it hit me. This is a CHOCOLATE cake. I forgot the cocoa! I threw my arms up in exasperation, knocking the bowl of thick batter across the countertop.

No problem.

I considered starting over but looked at the clock. I cannot in good conscience tell you how I got that batter back into the bowl but I promise that nobody outside of my immediate family ate the finished cake and those who did lived.

Once half the batter filled the pan, this amateur baker realized that our kitchen boasts only one round cake pan and one needs two pans to make this cake. Oddly, this fact has never bothered me. I've become accustomed to using one pan and baking in stages. Yet this venture was going to take twice as long as planned, and I was running out of time.

No problem.

I scrapped the fantasy of cleaning the house and focused on wrapping those gifts. My kids' gift was already neatly wrapped in colorful paper and decorated with a homemade card courtesy of my daughter. No paper left for mine, so out came the comics (which ended up inverted anyway, highlighting instead a story about a smarmy schoolteacher's antics). How festive. So unlike Martha Stewart.

Ding! Cake #1 came out of the oven and the pan without incident and I slid in the next cake.

At this point, I was poised to be 15 minutes late picking up one son. I literally threw dishes into the dishwasher and wiped the countertops in a marathon effort to make the place look less like a school cafeteria after a food fight. Intending to warn the boy that I was running behind, I looked for the phone and it was, of course, missing.

We used to have two of these handy portable gadgets until I ran over one with the car. The remaining phone is always somewhere predictable, like under a pile of laundry or in a bucket in the garage. Yes, I could've just used my cell to call my son but by now I was angry and I WANTED THE PHONE! So I used my cell phone to call my home phone, and ran madly around the house until I located it ringing under my daughter's comforter.

I left a message for my son just in time for the second cake to come out of the oven. No time to let it cool. I dumped it onto the rack and, as expected, it broke into several steaming pieces. Perfect. But that's ok because I easily positioned the pieces on top of each other. "When it's frosted, nobody will be the wiser," I muttered. Where is Ethel when you need her?

Amazingly, I made the 35 minute drive to school, dropped my son off at work and headed home to meet the bus arriving from another school just in time to take the call from Son #2.

"Mom, where are you?"

Wondering that myself at the moment.

"Didn't you get my message? I reminded you," he said.

Apparently he had a meeting after school, the one I had just driven to and from.

I finally admitted that I did, indeed, have a problem.

Three crazy hours later, we sat down in a clean kitchen--in a dirty house-- to a birthday meal courtesy of Grandma and a funny-looking, lopsided cake with tons of frosting.

June Cleaver, eat your heart out!