Bombeck - At Wits End

Everyone Loves Erma Bombeck

Bombeck knows what shes doing. We roar for more.

Time

Ms. Bombecks musings on family life are informed with hard-won wisdom and with love.

The New York Times Book Review

As prolific as she is funny. If a visitor from another planet wanted to learn what it was like to rear a family in suburban America in the last two decades, he couldnt do better than to read Bombeck.

Chicago Tribune

She is funny just about all of the time, particularly on the mundane details of domesticity.

San Francisco Chronicle

Americas irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire.

The Boston Globe

Also by Erma Bombeck:

JUST WAIT TILL YOU HAVE CHILDREN OF YOUR OWN! * (with Bil Keane)

I LOST EVERYTHING IN THE POST-NATAL DEPRESSION *

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER OVER THE SEPTIC TANK *

IF LIFE IS A BOWL OF CHERRIESWHAT AM I DOING IN THE PITS? *

AUNT ERMAS COPE BOOK: How to Get From Monday to Friday in 12 Days *

MOTHERHOOD: The Second Oldest Profession

FAMILY: The Ties That Bind and Gag! *

I WANT TO GROW UP, I WANT TO GROW HAIR, I WANT TO GO TO BOISE

* Published by Ballantine Books

A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1965, 1966, 1967 by Newsday, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

F AWCETT is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-77824-6

This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

v3.1

This isnt a book.

Its a group therapy session.

It is based on six predictable depression cycles
that beset a woman during a twelve-month span.

These chapters will not tell you how to overcome
these depression cycles.

They will not tell you how to cope with them.

They will have hit home if they, in some small
way, help you to laugh your way
through while hanging on to your
sweet sanity.

It hits on a dull, overcast Monday morning. I awake realizing there is no party in sight for the weekend, Im out of bread, and Ive got a dry skin problem. So I say it aloud to myself, Whats a nice girl like me doing in a dump like this?

The draperies are dirty (and will disintegrate if laundered), the arms of the sofa are coming through. There is Christmas tinsel growing out of the carpet. And some clown has written in the dust on the coffee table, YANKEE GO HOME.

Its those rotten kids. Its their fault I wake up feeling so depressed. If only theyd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?

I think she hears us. Her eyelids fluttered.

Wait till she turns over, then everybody cough.

Why dont we just punch her and ask her what we want to know.

Get him out of here.

Shes pulling the covers over her ears. Start coughing.

I dont know how long it will be before one of them discovers that by taking my pulse they will be able to figure out by its rapid beat if I am faking or not, but it will come. When they were smaller, it was worse. Theyd stick their wet fingers into the opening of my face and whisper, You awake yet? Or good old Daddy would simply heave a flannel-wrapped bundle at me and say, Heres Mommys little boy. (Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddys little boy becomes Mommys little boy, the kid is so wet hes treading water!) Their imagination is straight from the pages of Edgar Allan Poe. Once they put a hamster on my chest and when I bolted upright (my throat muscles paralyzed with fright) they asked, Do you have any alcohol for the chemistry set?

I suppose thats better than having them kick the wall until Daddy becomes conscious, then ask, Do you want the cardboards that the laundry puts in your shirts? Any wrath beats waking Daddy. There has to be something wrong with a man who keeps resetting his alarm clock in the morning and each time it blasts off smacks it silent and yells, No one tells me what to do, Buddy.

Personally I couldnt care less what little games my husband plays with his alarm clock, but when I am awakened at 5:30, 6:00, 6:15, and 6:30 every morning, I soon react to bells like a punchy fighter. Thats what I get for marrying a nocturnal animal. In the daylight, hes nothing. He has to have help with his shoelaces. In all the years weve been married he only got up once of his own accord before 9:30. And then his mattress was on fire. He cant seem to cope with daytime noises like flies with noisy chest colds, the crash of marshmallows as they hit the hot chocolate, the earsplitting noises milk makes when you pour it over the cereal.

The truth of it is, hes just not geared to function in an eight-to-five society. Once he even fell out of his filing cabinet. Around eleven at night a transformation takes place. He stretches and yawns, then his eyes pop open and he kicks me in the foot and says, What kind of a day did you have?

You mean were still on the same one? I yawn.

Youre not going to bed already, are you?

Yes.

Would it bother you if I played the guitar?

Yes.

Well, then maybe Ill read a little before I go to sleep.

Why not? I have the only eyelids in the neighborhood with a tan.

No doubt about it, if I could arise in a graceful manner, I could cope.

Its starting to snow. Thanks a lot up there.

Before moving to the suburbs, I always thought an Act of God was a flash of lightning at Mt. Sinai or forty days and forty nights of rain. Out here, they call a snowfall an Act of God and they close the schools.

The first time it happened I experienced a warm, maternal glow, a feeling of confidence that I lived in a community which would put its children above inclement weather. The second time, that same week, I experienced a not-so-warm glow, but began to wonder if perhaps the kids could wear tennis rackets on their feet and a tow rope around their waists to guide them. On the third day school was canceled within a two-week period, I was organizing a dog-sled pool.

We racked up fifteen Acts of God that year and it became apparent to the women in our neighborhood that somebody up there was out to get us.