Spiral Notebook Sunday: September 5, 1983

"When you get married and live in a hut,
Send me a picture of your first little nut."

~~Nikki Fisher, in the going away card from my third period German class in 9th grade, March 1983

"I'll tell you one thing--when I grow up and have kids, I'm not going to act like a mother."

~~Justine Bateman, as teenager "Mallory Keaton" on Family Ties

Before I was the mother of four children, I was the oldest of four children. Needless to say, the view from here and the view from there differ drastically. For example, there are several bitter entries in the early volumes of my journal referring to my brilliant plan to have four children so I never had to do any housework.

If you're done laughing and have dried your eyes, I would like to share the first (and most vehement) of those entries with you now. In my younger self's defense, I was fifteen when I wrote this. It was Labor Day so no school, and the soaps were preempted by U.S. Open tennis, which I wouldn't have minded watching (had a little McEnroe crush going), but Baby Brother's preference for Bugs Bunny won the day, as Baby Brother's preferences so often seemed to do.

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September 5, 1983

When I get married and live in a hut and send Nikki Fisher a picture of my first little nut, I think I'll have three more nuts. I mean four kids, of course. After all, my parents did. And look--this house runs slicker than snot on a doorknob*--with a minimal amount of parental help...Anyway, Labor Day is still not especially wonderful. We're having baked fish and baked potatoes for dinner. Which proves my point about my parents not lifting a finger more than necessary. Had I been cooking, Mom would've suggested grated potatoes and fried fish. Lovely. The only reason I'm not cooking is I have to do the dishes. I'm not going to do both.

*To my recollection, this phrase came into my vocabulary around the time I was ten or eleven, during my father's CB phase, when we heard one trucker tell another that the ice-covered roads were "slicker than snot on a doorknob." Like many phrases of varying quality, it's never entirely left my vocabulary, though perhaps it should.