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Authors: Lisa Scottoline,Francesca Serritella
Have a Nice Guilt Trip
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With all our love to Mother Mary
Contents
With Apologies to Mary Poppins
Mother Mary and The Fighting Scottolines
Photograph of The Fighting Scottolines
In Which I Officially Hit the Wall!
William Wordsworth Needs a New Password
Love and Marriage, Then Divorce
Photograph of Francesca at the National Book Festival
Photograph of Peach and a puppy
Photograph of Lisa and BFF Franca
Mother Mary and the 600 Thread Count
Photograph of Francesca with rabbit ears
They Call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Photographs of Lisa, Mother Mary, and Francesca
A Dog’s Pursuit of the Far-Fetched
Number One Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Mother Mary Talks to God and Luis
Photograph of bulldozer in Lisa’s garden
Photograph of Francesca applying makeup to Mother Mary
My Grandmother Is Not the Same
Photograph of The Flying Scottolines
Other Nonfiction by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella
Introduction
By Lisa
Nobody knows more about guilt than women.
Especially this woman.
I don’t have the time or space to list all of the things I feel guilty about, and I even feel guilty about that.
So I’ll narrow it down and name only the things that I feel guilty about since dinner:
I feel guilty that I ate second helpings of rigatoni.
I feel guilty that I used tomato sauce from a jar.
I feel guilty that I didn’t wash out the jar completely before I put it in recycling.
I feel guilty that I ran the dishwasher when it wasn’t completely full.
Also, did I mention that Daughter Francesca is home visiting, and I feel especially guilty that I served my only child such a crappy dinner?
There is no guilt like Mom Guilt.
We are always failing our children in some way, aren’t we?
At least I am.
Start with the fact that my daughter is an Only Child. I didn’t give her any siblings, and that was because I divorced her father, whom I call Thing One.
Divorce Guilt.
I even divorced her stepfather, Thing Two.
Double Divorce Guilt!
(But don’t worry, I bought her a lot of stuff to make up for it.)
Bottom line, if you’re a mom, you’ll feel guilty all the time, and this is true because you’re a daughter as well, and God only knows how many times you failed your poor mother.
Shame on you, and guilt, too.
Now, to come to my point. If you think I’m going to preach to you that guilt is a bad thing, you’re wrong.
I don’t want you to change.
Because I like you just the way you are.
Don’t lose your guilt. Embrace it, like me.
I don’t feel guilty for feeling guilty.
I’ve long ago accepted that guilt is a part of me, like cellulite.
Guilt makes me work harder, do more errands, and get to the dry cleaners before closing.
Guilt means I’m always early, everywhere.
Guilt makes me pay my bills on time.
Guilt makes me nicer to people.
Guilt helps me be a better mother.
Guilt gets me on the elliptical. Occasionally, but only on Level One.
Guilt makes the journey of life into one long guilt trip. But in a nice way.
Hence the title of this book,
Have a Nice Guilt Trip.
Herein you’ll find true and funny stories from Daughter Francesca and me about life, both together and apart, since at twenty-seven years old, she has not only moved out, but stopped nursing.
We’ll also tell a few silly and/or poignant tales about my mother, Mother Mary, who travels with a backscratcher and an attitude.
My guess is that our family will remind you of your family, except we’re less well behaved.
So read on, and join us for the trip.
And come as you are.
Homely Remedies
By Lisa
I hate it when Mother Mary is right, which is always.
We begin a zillion years ago, when I’m a little kid with a bad cold, and Mother Mary goes instantly for the Vicks VapoRub. As a child, I had more Vicks Vapo rubbed on me than most consumptives. My chest was as shiny as a stripper’s and even more fragrant.
Camphor is still my favorite perfume.
Which could be why I’m single.
Another favorite home remedy of hers was the do-it-yourself humidifier. By this I mean she placed a Pyrex baking dish full of water on every radiator in the house.
I never knew why, and neither did my friends. None of them had radiators, because they had nicer houses. They had something called forced air, which sounded vaguely scary to us. The Flying Scottolines never forced anything, especially something you needed to breathe.
And in the summer, those same people had central air, which was something else we didn’t have. Our air lacked centralization. The only central thing in our house was Mother Mary, and that was how she liked it.
But back to the do-it-yourself humidifiers, which sat like an open-air fishbowl on every radiator. As a child, I understood that this would cure something dreadful called Dry Air, which we had in spades. I didn’t really understand why Uncle Mikey had to move to Arizona for the Dry Air, when he could’ve just moved to our house, but be that as it may, I was grateful that I had an all-knowing mother, who understood that air came in forced, central, and dry, and that everything could be cured by Pyrex.
The only time this was a problem was on Sundays, when Mother Mary actually wanted to bake ziti or eggplant parm, and there were no dishes available except for the ones cooking water on the radiators. She would dispatch me to get a Pyrex dish off the radiator and wash it out, and I would do so happily, if the end result was eggplant parm.
I will still do anything for eggplant parm.
Make a note, should we meet.
But back to the story, cleaning the baking dishes was a yucky job. Often the water in the dishes would have dried up, leaving a scummy residue, and even if there was some water left, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Dog and cat hair would be floating on the surface, or ash from a passing cigarette.
According to Mother Mary, smoking was fine for air quality.
You win some, you lose some.
So fast-forward to when I become a mother myself, and baby Francesca gets sick, and of course Mother Mary advocates Vicks and Pyrex, but I reject these ideas as old-fashioned. I am Modern.
Enter antibiotics.
I had that kid so pumped up with amoxicillin she could’ve grown mold. In fact, I had her on them prophylactically, so she’d never get another ear infection, and if I could have her on them now, I would, so she’d never get pregnant.
I’m kidding.
It’s a joke, okay?
But then recently, I got the worst cold ever, and I called the doctor, who told me that antibiotics weren’t such a hot idea and what I really needed was Vicks VapoRub and a humidifier. I couldn’t believe my ears. I wanted the magic pill to make it all better but he says that it’s a virus and all that, and no.
I didn’t tell this to Mother Mary. Don’t you, either.
I suppose I could just get a Pyrex dish and put it on the radiator, but I am still Modern and I refuse. Also the doctor says I need a cool-mist humidifier, and not a warm-mist humidifier, and once again, I feel lucky to learn more about the mysteries of air, which now comes in mist.
Who knew oxygen could be so complicated?
So I go to the drugstore, buy the requisite cool-mist humidifier, and bring it home. I spend exactly one night with this thing and want to shoot myself. It’s thirty degrees outside, and in my bedroom, it’s twenty. An Arctic chill blasts from the cool-mist humidifier, and I’m up all night.
So I go back to the drugstore and buy a warm-mist humidifier. I take it home, and it frizzes my hair, but you can’t have everything. Also, it comes with a little slot for a stick that’s impregnated with Vicks VapoRub, and you know what I’m thinking.
This is the revenge of Mother Mary.
Shades of Gray
By Lisa
What’s the difference between accepting yourself and giving up?
I’m talking, of course, about going gray.
Because that’s what’s happening.
I’ve had glimmers of gray hair before, but it was concentrated on the right and left sides of my head, which gave me a nice Bride-of-Frankenstein look.
But I’ve been working so hard over the winter that I haven’t bothered to get my hair highlighted, and today I noticed that there’s a lot more gray than there used to be.
And you know what?
It doesn’t look terrible.