Bridge Views: If You Give a Mom a Cosmo

While meeting my Fort Lee girlfriends at the other morning, savoring every sip of their delicious coffee as we counted the hours until school ended, we tripped over each other’s words knowing we’d have no time until September to have another uninterrupted conversation.

Our collective non-sequitors went from “Is Fairway Market cooking your dinner tonight?” to Fort Lee's Farmers' Market, to cookbooks, to book clubs, to children’s books that we can recite in our sleep, until we finally concluded there should be a catchy picture book dedicated to moms like us who have to grab alone moments when and where we can when school’s out.

Always up for a good challenge, I present you with “If You Give a Mom a Cosmo.” So let's raise our glasses in a toast to us -- for with the last day of school goes our last coherent thought. From my girlfriends to yours, have a great summer!

IF YOU GIVE A MOM A COSMO

If you give a mom a Cosmo, she’ll want a cigarette;

Chances are when she finds a cigarette stashed away in the back of the junk drawer beneath a pile of torn recipes and sticky Chinese soy sauce packets, it will be stale and deformed;

But her day was so miserable that she’ll want to smoke it anyway;

And if she smokes it, she’ll have to go outside so her children don’t see her, and tell her mother-in-law that their mother is a drug addict since schools now brilliantly teach that alcohol and cigarettes are considered drugs;

And she won’t want her neighbors to see her smoking while drinking a Cosmo especially since she’s braless, barefoot, and uncertain when she last found time to shower;

So, she’ll probably take her Cosmo and her crooked butt and go to party alone behind an overgrown bush;

And if she drinks her Cosmo and smokes her bent cigarette behind an unruly bush, chances are nature will eventually call;

And since she’s left it to her husband to put the kids to bed so she can have a moment all to herself she won’t want to go inside and get sucked into his drama;

So, she’ll simultaneously fertilize that bush, toss the twisted nub of the cigarette into her neighbor’s yard, and continue to drink her Cosmo because she is the consummate multi-tasker;

And while behind that overgrown bush, she’ll start to think about her landscaping and decide that next summer she’s going to hire some Guatemalan day-laborers to plant her a hearty vegetable garden;

Thinking about planting a vegetable garden will make her hungry, so she’ll take her Cosmo to the car and dine on a tapas of orphaned cheerios and motherless gummies crusted like infected scabs on the floormats and car seats;

After she’s done crumb-diving in the backseat of her mini-van, she’ll find that tube of Revlon Cha Cha Cherry lipstick that she lost in 2003 wedged beneath the driver’s seat. Having survived six mid-Atlantic seasons of melting, freezing; melting, freezing; melting, freezing; melting, freezing; melting, freezing; melting freezing it now resembles the shriveled pinky toe of a very old arthritic man, providing for her the perfect metaphor for her life; 

But she’ll decide to color her lips with it anyway. And once she colors her lips, she’ll have to look in the rearview mirror to inspect herself;

Believing that her dim-lit reflection resembles Super Mario will remind her that she hasn’t waxed since Valentine’s Day;

Sneaking inside the house and reaching into the back of the linen closet she’ll find a mummified bottle of Nair that hasn’t been used since before she got pregnant with her last child, and she’ll lather it all over her body;

And while she’s waiting for the odiferous depilatory to work its magic, she’ll finish her Cosmo and turn on the shower;

As she waits for the water to warm, she’ll feel her skin burning and realize that along with her unwanted hair, the Nair is also removing 3 layers of her epidermis;

She’ll hop into the shower and use the sacred scented Lancôme body wash she bought six years ago when she had both a life and disposable income, and use it to diffuse the stench of eau de Nair that fogs the air;

After her shower she’ll wrap herself in a towel and, feeling sleepy, will decide to lie down on the bed;

Exhausted, she’ll probably drift off just as her husband comes into the bedroom;

Seeing her lying on the bed wearing just a towel, he’ll think this is his reward for giving her a break by putting the kids to bed for the first time since June 2006;

She’ll think she might as well check him off her mental list of things to do, freeing up her nights and weekends for the rest of the month;

Later, wide awake in the dark, she’ll feel like a cigarette;

And chances are, if she has a cigarette, she’ll want a Cosmo to go with it.