Cricky and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Cricky hasn’t written in awhile, it’s true. But can you blame her, really? After the time she’s been having lately? Hurricanes and national financial meltdowns are one thing, but this? This is enough to make anyone cry.
It all started with the dream last week.
Cricky awoke screaming after having a nightmare that the world had stopped producing sour candy. (As a fellow sour-addict, I totally feel her pain. I would have woken up screaming too.) Luckily, her screaming woke up Joe, who quickly discovered that she could not be calmed with his assurances. He sighed, threw on some clothes and run to the store to prove to his wife that yes, sour candies still existed. (Now that’s a good man!)
Slightly reassured by his determination, Cricky reduced her screaming to sobbing and started to go through the motions of getting ready for work. Then her cell phone rang. It was Joe, and his news was not good.
“The gas station is out of sour candies. I’m tired. I want to go back to bed. I’m coming home, and we’ll just get you some at the regular store later.”
As you can imagine, Cricky didn’t exactly take kindy to this message. I’m not sure of exactly what she said, but I think it went something like this – “Oh, darling Joe, sweet and wonderful husband of mine, I must insist, ever-so-nicely, that you please continue the search for the candy, if you would please be so kind as to do so?”
Joe mumbled something under his breath, then agreed to stop at one more store. Cricky decided she’d better start attempting to wake up Kelly. Kelly, like most girls her age, was not keen on the idea of getting out of bed. Fine. Ten more minutes. Fine.
Her dream still had Cricky in a bad mood, and Joe’s lack of success at bringing home the sour candy was not helping. Her phone rang again. “Babe? This is really weird, but the grocery store doesn’t have any sour candy either. No Brite Crawlers, no Sour Skittles, no Sour Patch Kids, no lemon drops, nothing! I can’t even find an empty spot on the shelf where they should be. I’m coming home,” Joe said.
“STAY RIGHT THERE!” Cricky screamed, as she frantically ran to her closet and started throwing on some clothes. “Kelly and I are going to meet you there in 10 minutes – DON’T MOVE!”
“But the store is at least 15 minutes away, and Kelly is probably still sleeping. Why don’t I ju-”
“This is an EMERGENCY. Don’t doubt for a second that my Shiny New Car can get us there. STAY PUT!”
Cricky, now dressed, ran into Kelly’s room, picked the girl up, and carried her out to the driveway, where the Shiny New Car was gleaming in the early morning sunshine. She threw Kelly in the backseat, where she promptly leaned against the glass and started snoring.
Cricky jumped in, threw the car into drive, and raced off to the store.
Nine minutes later, Joe’s jaw dropped. Cricky had made it all right, in record time. He could see her running in from the parking lot, pushing a shopping cart full of…their child? Yes, putting Kelly in the bottom part of the basket seemed like the best way to get to the store quickly, but really, she was getting much too old to be pushed, and the weight of the cart was slowing Cricky down considerably. She spotted Joe, yelled at him to get over there, then passed off Kelly to him as she raced into the candy aisle.
No shit. Joe wasn’t kidding. There was not a single piece of sour candy to be seen. Not even the teeniest, tiniest little SweetTart (and those things don’t even really qualify as sour anyway).
Cricky ran out of the store and nearly crashed head-on into Joe, who had grown tired of pushing the cart and was struggling to wake up his daughter. “There’s no time, just push her back to the car. We’ve got to get to the Super Fancy Candy Store on the other side of town. They’ll clear this whole mess up, for sure!”
So the family packed up into Cricky’s Shiny New Car, after a brief argument over which car would be taken, and headed out across town. Of course, by this point, they got stuck in horrific rush-hour traffic. Kelly, now wide awake, was wondering why she was in the car, in her pajamas, and hey, wasn’t she supposed to be in school today?
“Cricky had a bad dream, so we’re driving across town to the Super Fancy Candy Store to try to find some sour worms,” Joe explained.
Kelly looked at them both incredulously and shook her head. Sure, they always comforted her when she had a bad dream, but she never got rewarded with candy, and she sure as heck never got to miss school for it! Grown-ups really didn’t make any sense.
When they arrived at the Super Fancy Candy Store, they found it to be closed. Abandoned. The sign on the door informed them that, due to unforseen circumstances, the store would be closed until further notice. The sign also said that they should visit the Not-as-Cool, But Still Kinda Great Candy Store in the next town over.
Joe looked at Cricky, then quickly changed his mind about suggesting they go home. They loaded back in the car, and headed out of town.
Now here’s where things start to get strange. (Okay, stranger.)
They arrive at the Not-as-Cool, But Still Kinda Great Candy Store, and are excited to see that it’s open. Cricky tells Joe and Kelly to stay in the car, and then runs inside and up to the counter.
“I’d like 1 pound of Sour Patch Kids, please!” she tells the cashier.
The cashier freezes, then looks sideways at the manager, who slightly shakes his head. Then he turns back to Cricky. “Um, Sour Patch Kids? I’ve never heard of them. Is there anything else I can get for you today?”
“Okay, then I’ll take a pound of Brach’s Lemon Drops.”
Again, the cashier pauses. “Lemon drops? From Brach’s? I don’t think Brach’s makes lemon drops. In fact, I highly doubt that a thing called “lemon drops” even exists. Maybe you’d like some Starlight Mints? Or Maple Nut Goodies?”
“No,” Cricky says through clenched teeth, “I’d like something sour today. What do you have that’s sour?”
“Sour? Sour candy? Ma’am, I’m afraid you’re confused. Candy is sweet. That’s the whole point of it. If you’d like something sour, you could eat an orange, or a pickle, or a -”
The cashier is interrupted by Cricky’s scream as she runs to the door, signals to Joe, and storms back to the counter. She tells Joe what’s going on, and Joe demands a manager.
The manager, looking quite nervous, approaches the two slowly. “Y-y-yes, may I help you this morning?” he asks.
“Yeah, you can give us some answers! Why is this punk kid telling my wife that candy doesn’t come in sour? OF COURSE CANDY COMES IN SOUR! I demand to know what’s going on around here! I’ve been up since before the buttcrack of dawn, and have driven to I don’t even know how many stores in search of sour candy, just to quiet my wife’s fears that sour candy doesn’t exist anymore, only to have your employee tell her that sour candy never existed in the first place? WHAT IS GOING ON?”
“Sir, okay. Quiet your voice, and I’ll try to explain.” The manager looks around, then summons them both to come back to his office. They take a quick peek out the window at Kelly, who is happily playing a DS in the back seat, and then follow the manager back to his office.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he tells them. “It’s true. Sour candies do exist.”
“No kidding! Not impressed. Keep talking,” Cricky says.
“It’s just that, well, the sugar industry has launched an attack on the citric acid industry, and it’s not looking good.”
“There’s a citric acid industry? Really?” Joe asks. The manager nods solemnly.
“Oh yes, and the sugar industry has become tired of them. Not only are they trying to prevent them from producing more sour candy, they’re trying to convince the world that sour candy never existed in the first place!”
“What can we do about it?” Cricky asks.
“There’s not much that can be done about it, unless…”
“Unless WHAT?”
“Well, unless…how serious are you about wanting the sour candy back? How dedicated could you be to the cause? How far are you willing to go, to bring justice back to this world?”
Joe and Cricky looked at each other, then back at the manager. “We’re willing to do whatever it takes.”
The manager looks in their eyes, sees that they’re serious, and says, “Okay. Take your daughter to school, then meet me at this address. And don’t tell ANYONE.”
At this point, the story gets fuzzy. I know that they dropped Kelly off at school, with instructions for Marci to pick her up and care for her until further notice. And then no one heard from them. Because of the top-secrecy of their mission, it is unknown what may have happened in the past week. If you ask Cricky, she closes her eyes for a moment, sighs, and then says, “But it was all worth it in the end. We did what we had to do.”
So that’s why we have’t heard from Cricky in awhile. After presumably neutralizing the aggressive sugar industry, she curled up on the couch with her lifetime supply of sour candy, a thank-you gift, I’m sure, from the once-again thriving citric acid industry. Will she back to blog? Signs point to yes, but, for now, let’s let her have a bit of time to recover. It’s not exactly easy to fight for the good of the world.
The End.
Truth
This is actually part of a comment I left for Metalia, but I realized that I was speaking more honestly than I ever have on the subject, and I wanted to save it here. You know, for posterity. Nope. Not for posterity at all. Just for me.
I’m not a mom, but I have been filling in for them for over 7 years, and while I really, truly love my job, I’ve recently become very frightened of having my own children. It’s not the 9-10 hours of daytime activities that scare me, it’s the part where 5:00 ticks on by and no one is coming home to release me, the part where I don’t get to unwind after work. I cannot fathom watching a child all day long, then not getting to escape at the end of it. I can’t imagine going from getting paid a lot of money for a relatively short work week to working nonstop, every single day, for nothing. Even though I know that it’s different when it’s your own kid, I worry that I will resent the fact that I don’t get to escape. And then I start to feel prematurely guilty that I had so much energy to take care of so many other kids, and I feel like if I *don’t* stay home full-time to watch my own child, they’ll be getting cheated. I’m afraid I’ll count the hours of quality time with them and realize that I spent more hours a week with someone else’s child than I ever spent with my own. That future is years away, but I’m already struggling with it.
I can’t explain myself
Even though I’m exhausted, and even though I made myself stop studying almost an hour ago, and even though I’m completely bored with the internet, and even though I am, in fact, lying in bed RIGHT NOW, I can’t make myself turn off the computer and go to sleep. What the hell, Em? What the HELL?
Thank you, broken water main
School was cancelled tonight, which lowered my stress level immediately. I took advantage of it by emailing my best friend first thing this morning to see if she wanted to hang out tonight. I recently realized that, since she moved within walking distance, we haven’t really spent much time alone together. We’ll hang out at home instead of going out to eat, and either J or her boyfriend is nearly always there. So I’ve been missing her. Missing us. You know what I mean.
I also realized that I haven a tendancy to shut people out when things are too much for me to deal with, and I know that I’ve shut her and everyone else out before during many a September. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about stuff lately, and it all points to the fact that I need love and support in order to stay strong and be able to give abundant amounts of love and support to someone else.
So, to get back to the point, I reached out to her while I had that crack in my stress, intending to fill her in on everything. I didn’t tell her everything, but we did hang out by ourselves for three hours. We were plenty wrinkly when we were done (we rotated between the hot tub and the pool that whole time), but it was well worth it. It felt like the old us again. I’m grateful that the four of us can all get along, but it hadn’t ever hit me how much I missed it just being us.
And I can’t tell you how much better I feel about life in general, just after those few hours. I’m definitely going to make it a point to hang out alone with her as much as I can. And I do plan on filling her in on everything. And if that goes well? Maybe I’ll start filling select other people in too. Even the idea of letting it all out feels so liberating. In the past, I have dealt with things all alone. That’s not good for me. I know that now.
Like pieces to a puzzle
“It’s Silly September, you know that, right?” J asked me last week.
“Silly September?”
“Yeah. You named it that last year because crazy stuff always happens in September.”
“I don’t remember that! Crazy like what?”
“I don’t know, but it does, and you named it Silly September.”
“I don’t remember…”
—-
My mother, talking about the last time my brother saw my grandmother -
“I think he hasn’t seen her since the time when she was visiting and J met her.”
“Well, she was here in December 5-6 years ago, the first time J met her. Then she came to town right after we got married too, so he saw her then.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“She did! Right after we got back from Las Vegas, she came. Remember? J and I had to live here for two weeks, and Grandmom was visiting, and we had all the animals with us, and my brother still lived here, and the kids you watched came over during the day? It was a madhouse! Frankly, I don’t know how you didn’t just shove us all out the door!”
“I retreated. I blocked it all from my memory. That’s what I do when things are too much for me to handle. I don’t remember. It’s why, when you ask me about certain things, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
—-
With mom again:
“I wish I had realized how big the anxiety problem was. I wish I had gotten you help. I guess I just thought it was normal, because I had it too. Except I didn’t completely freeze up the way you do. I hid in my closet.”
—-
I hide in the laundry room. I didn’t tell her that. I wish I had. It was the first time that I realized that my mother shared some of my same anxiety & coping mechanisms. Then I remembered what she said about blocking out things that she couldn’t deal with. And then I thought about J talking about Silly September. And I thought about the events of last week, and everything clicked into place. I block out the month of September. Every single year, probably. I block it from my memory completely. Thank god I journal, because I at least have a partial record of past events.
I don’t mean to be evasive, I just need a place to vent…while still keeping my secrets locked inside. Someday I will tell someone. Nothing TERRIBLE, just…overwhelming, emotionally draining, etc. Stuff I wish I could open up and talk to my best friend or my mom about, but something always holds me back. Probably that whole fear of judgment thing.
I can’t type more because I bit a huge painful section away from my right thumbnail and it hurts to use the spacebar. I never realized that I space with my right thumb exclusively. Something else I never realized? There’s a term for one of the things I do when freaking out. That’s actually kind of really cool, to be able to put a name with it.
‘Cause waking up is hard to do
I slept until after 1:00 today. Seriously.
Was it because:
A) I was up way, way late, unable to sleep?
B) the dog was up barking in the middle of the night?
C) I’ve been feeling kind of weird these past couple days?
D) I still haven’t fully recovered from vacation?
E) school is kicking my ass?
F) I was having never-ending dreams about John Krasinski this morning?
G) all of the above, but mostly E
H) all of the above, but mostly E (but REALLY mostly F)
Mmmm….John Krasinski….
Oh, Design Spectracolors, how I love thee
I’m about to cry.
The colored pencils I’ve been hoarding since elementary school? The ones I loved so much I never even dared to sharpen them? The ones I recently started using in my Anatomy Coloring Book, after finally convincing myself that it was okay to use them because I can just buy more when they’re gone? The ones I’ve sharpened once or twice in the past week?
DISCONTINUED. OVER TEN YEARS AGO.
