Please God, don't let me be like Mary

Caucasian Mary with absolutely ripped Caucasian baby Jesus throwing a gang sign. 

As a teenager, the end of Christmas always brought about relief from one of my greatest fears: immaculate conception. 

In all Christian faith traditions, Mary, the mother of Jesus, gets a lot of play leading up to Christmas. An angel comes to her and tells her she is going to have God’s son. She wonders how that could be since she’s a virgin. The angel assures her God will take care of it. Her fiancé’s pissed because he thinks she cheated, but then the angel comes in a dream and tells him the whole deal with Mary, so Joseph becomes cool with it. Then some months and an uncomfortable road trip later, boom: baby Jesus. 

I grew up evangelical (and still mostly consider myself as such, if I could divorce all of the conservative political grossness that is attached to it from the legit tenets of my faith), so Mary isn’t quite the big deal she is to, say, Catholics. Like we believed Mary eventually did the deed with Joseph and don’t pray to her or anything. But she - and her virginal conception - are still highly revered and discussed. You hear the cutesy “baby in a manger” stories as a kid, and when you get a little older, you learn that there was almost a 100% likelihood that Mary was a teenager when all of this happened. 

Which brings me to my great teenage fear of immaculate conception. To understand this fear, you must understand the role premarital sex played in my evangelical upbringing. Basically, it was the worst thing you could ever do. Like three steps worse than listening to secular music, and only a small step below murdering someone and dancing in the rivers of blood that flowed from their body. I know people who got married right out of high school just so they could finally knock boots without going to hell. 

Forget that the first time a guy touched my boob was in the swimming pool of the church camp where the evils of fornication were so fervently preached to us. Forget that half of everyone in my youth group still did it anyway but just felt rampant guilt. But remember that one girl from that group did get pregnant at 17, and over 20 years later was denied a leadership position in the same church because of her teenage transgression. And remember what I wish I could forget: the infamous hand job talk my mother gave me at 16 when I’d been dating a guy for a while. I think she was worried I would have sex with him, so she wanted to ensure I knew the alternatives. 

As it turns out, I wasn’t having sex in high school. Not even a hand job! But I lived in a world where the only thing attached to sex was shame. (For what it’s worth, this wasn’t even really coming from my parents. They were pretty cool [obviously - hand job talk], but from church and my friends and leaders there.) I also was an over-achiever and had big plans for college and beyond, so getting pregnant seemed a fate worse than death. And then when you hear over and over and over how pregnancy happened to a teenage virgin, it starts to mess with your head. 

I did not think myself super holy or anything. But I knew a lot of girls who drank alcohol underage and had sex with their boyfriends, so I figured if Jesus was planning his second coming through a virgin birth again, he wouldn’t take up residence in their sinful uteruses. Mine would make for an OK candidate. Does the Bible say Jesus will be coming out of lady bits for his second coming? No. It’s more of a descend-from-the-sky kind of thing, but there are a lot of metaphors and literary devices in the Bible, so it’s hard to be sure. What if “sky” really means vagina?

I anxiously awaited my period around Christmastime. (Though biologically, I should really have been paying attention to it more around March.) No angel ever visited me in my yellow bedroom to advise me the Messiah would be implanting in my uterine wall soon, but that did little to ease my concerns. When Christmas was over, however, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Maybe because I just got a break from hearing about Mary so much. Maybe because I realized I wasn’t an ideal vessel for the Christ child because I sometimes cussed and went to second-base with boys to whom I wasn’t married. 

Now, at 39 and married, my greatest fear is not immaculate conception but the good, regular, old-fashioned kind of conception. The pregnancy part wouldn’t even be so bad were it not for the child you have to raise (and lose a year of sleep with) afterward. I wonder if newborn baby Jesus woke Mary up every two hours. I bet she had some less-than-holy thoughts during those times. Been there, girl; been there. 

A 90s/Y2K fashion primer for the uninitiated

It seems that all the fashion rage now for Midwestern teenage girls and young female adults is what I wore when I was a Midwestern teenage girl and young adult. I guess the fact that my clothes went out of style and have already come back either makes me old or is indicative of the fact people my age are designing all the juniors clothes and Gen Z is falling for it like a girl who had too much jungle juice at a frat party. 

Young ladies, I’m going to do help you out here and give you a heads-up on some of the hazards of your current fashion choices (I know, because I’ve lived through them), and how to make your vintage fashion aspirations even more authentic. 

Take caution: 

High-waisted jeans: I see you’re wearing high-waisted jeans again. That’s cute, and I get you wanna’ define your tiny waists that have not yet been ravaged by a human being forming inside of your pelvis and then coming screaming out of it. But here’s something you and I both know: those high-waisted jeans aren’t comfortable. Maybe you haven’t reached the phase of life yet where you bloat every night after eating anything with a tomato or grease. But girls, I know you still bloat. It’s God’s special, menstrual gift to you. And you know what doesn’t feel good when you bloat? A brass snap digging into your belly button. And I hope you never get gassy, because Lord knows there’s no room for that with a zipper digging into your puffed-up pooch. I’m not saying the ultra low-rise pants that followed the high-waisted jeans of the 90s were better, ($5 those’ll be back by 2026) but at least there was room to take a deep breath, even if your butt crack was showing. 

Flair-/ wide-leg jeans: Now girls, if you haven’t gotten distracted doing some moronic TikTok challenge by now, this is the most important thing I’m going to tell you today: DO NOT RIDE A BICYCLE WHILE WEARING FLAIR- OR WIDE-LEG PANTS. Trust me on this one. The bottoms will get caught in the bike chain. Just ask the members of my college football team who were coming out of weight-training in Pershing Hall at the exact moment I wiped out there. Yes, it provided a little damsel-in-distress moment where a bunch of them came over and asked if I was OK. But also I was the klutzy idiot who wrecked her bike in front of the college football team, and it was all because of those damn flair-leg pants.

Torn all-over jeans: Are you hip or did you have a lawn-mowing accident? In about two months, it’ll be too cold for those, anyway. 

*Obviously, the safest and best jean choices here are mid-rise, bootcut jeans which have always been comfy and looked good on everyone.*

Crop tops: Apparently, these are now allowed in schools. In the real 90s, a girl showing a shoulder or a midriff within the sacred halls of a public high school was far too distracting for boys to learn science, so they nipped that shit in the bud. You either got an ugly T-shirt from the office to wear or got sent home. And as I often heard in places like church camp, we couldn’t be causing our brothers to stumble. (To this day I won’t wear spaghetti straps because what if I make a man have lustful thoughts? He obviously has no self control or mind of his own, and me parading my clavicles around like a floozie just puts him in a bad spot.) The only time I ever saw a boy get in trouble for a dress code violation in high school was a kid wearing a Butthole Surfers shirt. (That was a one-hit wonder band, in the 90s, kids, when the word “butthole” was prohibited on apparel in school.) So I can’t give you too much advice on crop tops because they were coveted but mostly banned in my youth, but I can warn you that they’re cold. I see your little cropped sweaters, and trust me, they will do you no favors in a Midwestern February. 

Middle hair parts: This just makes your face look fat. Stop.

Authenticating your 90s/Y2K look

So, young ladies, you’re close but not quite there on your 90s aspirations. I’m going to give you some tips to really help you be authentic and be the envy of all your conformist friends: 

1. Glittery butterfly hair clips - twist sections of your dumb, middle-parted hair into these and clip that crap all over your head. 

2. Doc Martens - I made a deal with my mom my sophomore year of high school that I would pay for one of these shoes if she would pay for the other. They last FOREVER and look bad with everything. 

3. Tweeze the bejeezus out of your eyebrows - you’re going for a “I finished chemo a month ago” look. 

4. Lip-liner - It needs to be four shades darker than your lips. Then don’t wear any lipstick.

5. Perfume - You should smell like CK1 or vanilla. There are no other choices. 

6. Ditch your phone - I know you think I just said “stop breathing,” but hear me out: for the most part, we didn’t have cell phones in the 90s, and it was glorious. Our parents didn’t know where we were. We saw our friends in person. There was no cyber-bullying. There was no place to share how stupid we were with the entire universe for all of time and future employers. No unwanted dick pics just popping up to ruin your day. If you want to be totally committed to your 90s/Y2K look, you won’t have a cell phone. You can get almost the same thrill by figuring out how to type “boobies” upside down on a calculator and showing it to your friend. 

Church people can suck

A Bible verse - a good one, too - really pissed me off last week. It’s probably at this point that I should warn you that this isn’t going to be funny, as I attempt for most of my posts to be. It’s going to be long, emotional, messy, and I hope cathartic and redemptive, because I have needed catharsis and redemption from this for almost a decade. It’s about how people, even - OK, especially - church people can suck really hard, but God doesn’t. (Also note that this is my point of view of how events played out. I’m sure there are other parts of the story I’ll never know.)

It started two Sundays ago, when the pastor in the church I currently attend preached on Acts 2:42. It’s the part about the brand new church that formed after Jesus’ resurrection and ascent into heaven: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” I could feel the rage building inside me as the pastor talked. It wasn’t because of him or anything he said. It was because of a former preacher who used that verse to betray me and a whole group of people who had worked so hard to bring Christ’s love to a diverse community of people who had become like my family. 

I started attending Rivercity Community Church not long after graduating from college around 2005. It sat just off the West 39th Street Corridor in Kansas City, Mo., near the hipster hub of Westport and eclectic Midtown area. It was a scrappy little church that had recently inherited a 100-plus-year-old building from a congregation of elderly people that was literally dying out. Their church for more than a century (see photos below) had been Roanoke Christian Church, and they gave the building to Rivercity. Just gave it to us. Rivercity was meeting in a nearby coffee shop and growing, and those elderly parishioners gave us the beautiful gift of a building to better serve our community. Local news stories chronicled the generosity. 

I went to Rivercity initially because I had an aunt who was a member and spoke highly of it. I joined her and immediately felt welcome. The church was a beautiful mixture: young, single, people like me; young families; older families and singles; empty nesters; addicts; recovering addicts; artists; and even a few folks who called themselves “Roanoke Remnants,” the older ones from Roanoke who stuck around after their church dissolved and they’d given us the building. (My favorite was Betty.) We had regular, free Wednesday night meals open to everyone, including the homeless. We hosted AA meetings and drug recovery groups. We reached several students from the Kansas City Art Institute, a place where few Christians feared to trod. We helped addicts get sober and employed, single moms get the cars they needed and brought the hope of Jesus to a group of “hopeless” people it seemed no one had cared about reaching before. I was young and so energized to be part of something so meaningful. We weren’t huge - on the biggest Sundays we’d have about 100 people in attendance - but it was enough. 

I also found my people at Rivercity. My husband. My lifelong friends. Nearly all of the people with whom I have the most meaningful relationships today came through that church. 

But nothing can be that blissful forever, I guess. About five years after I started attending, the young, single people married and had families, and they started leaving, looking for better children’s programs. The older families decided to attend churches closer to their suburban homes. There were disagreements about the roles of two different pastors. And while the work we were doing was amazing, it also could be mentally and physically draining. We soon got to the point where the remaining members of Rivercity were having difficulty financially supporting the church. The building had many maintenance issues we couldn’t afford to address. We were concerned about paying for the pastor’s health insurance. By this point I was on the church’s leadership team, and as one of the people who oversaw the budget, I was stressed. I gave as much of my meager income as I could to help keep Rivercity afloat, but it became apparent that was unsustainable. 

Through it all, as I felt like my world was crashing down around me, our pastor would tell me, “The good news is, Jesus is still risen.” I thought it was so trite and that he didn’t get the depth of our problems. It turned out I was the one who didn’t get it. More on that later. 

But then, the cavalry arrived. Our deus ex machina. Or so it seemed. Gary (name changed to protect his privacy) was a pastor who had worked with some of our pastors previously and occasionally filled in as pastor at Rivercity. He’d recently left a lead pastor role at a large church in the suburbs. I’d heard there might have been something scandalous about his departure, but I chalked it up as rumor and flung myself at the light at the end of the tunnel he provided. He came to us and basically promised to rescue Rivercity. He said he had many wealthy, suburban supporters who had the money we needed to fix the building, pay the pastor and fund outreach. 

The catch was that we had to turn it all over to him. He would lead the new church, and he would rename it REACH. I don’t even remember what the acronym stood for now. Before I had been part of a 4-member leadership team. Now I was one of 12 people. I remember our first meeting. Gary took out his iPad and took notes on it. I’d never seen an iPad before, as it had just been invented. He showed us all the things it could do. I found it odd to see a pastor bragging about his shiny, new tech in the first meeting about transforming a church. He talked about how he wanted the focus of this new church be small groups, but he called them 2:42s, as in Acts 2:42. He was convinced the church should be decentralized house churches, and we shouldn’t worry about the building so much. 

For as much as he didn’t want us to be concerned over the church building, he soon asked for REACH to take over ownership of it, since they would be funding the repairs. It had previously been agreed upon by everyone at Rivercity that the building could never be sold. Even as our financial difficulties became insurmountable, we knew we could not sell the building because it had so generously been gifted to us. So as one of the three remaining members of Rivercity’s leadership team, my signature was required on the deed that gave the building to Gary and REACH. I signed it. 

Initially, I was so glad I had done so. Gary and REACH started making the repairs the building needed - HVAC, roofing, new doors. But then things started to get strange. Gary built out the church hall in the basement - where I’d attended Wednesday night dinners, the wedding receptions of my friends and set up for AA meetings - into a classroom and office space for a sort-of seminary he created and from which he profited. Then he started building apartments on the top floor for his son and his son’s friends. He said it would make a nice revenue stream. Then he said he was getting several complaints from his wealthy suburban supporters (who had deigned to come into the city on Sundays for his little project) that the church needed a parking lot. Never mind that it was built in a residential neighborhood before cars were invented, so there was no place for such a thing. We’d never had an issue parking on the streets before.  

Gary’s distaste for Rivercity and the needy people it had previously served seemed to grow. He wanted to reach college students, not addicts. He wanted to continue to bring in people from the suburbs, not from Midtown. When his “2:42s” did not meet these expectations, he informed us that he was going to sell the building and move the church into one of the wealthiest suburbs in the metro area. 

I was appalled, devastated and shocked. Did he not understand the building couldn’t be sold? It was a gift. To profit from it would be like taking blood money. And Rivercity was meant to reach the people of the city: the diversity of backgrounds, socioeconomic status, beliefs and ethnicities that only an urban area can provide. When I signed that deed over, I had no intention of being part of a ministry that served white soccer families with five other churches in a two-mile radius they could choose from. 

But Gary sold the building anyway. He essentially sold all that was left of Rivercity with it. It remains one of the greatest betrayals I have ever experienced. I realize that makes me pretty privileged, but it hurt so much that even nine years later my eyes filled up with angry tears in a different church when a different pastor who has probably never met Gary preached a sermon about Gary’s favorite verse. 

As they were preparing for the sale, Gary and some of his REACH cronies piled “a bunch of junk” into a room, and said people could take whatever they wanted. What wasn’t taken would be thrown out. I sifted through and saw some albums I’d never seen before. They looked old. I pulled them out and found they were scrapbooks of Rivercity’s century-old predecessor, Roanoke Christian Church. They contained 100-year-old photos of Sunday School classes, notes on how many people accepted Jesus at that year’s revival, weddings and funerals and so much more. I snatched them out of the “junk” pile. The generations of Roanoke Christian Church members who had served this corner of Kansas City and entrusted people like me with their ministry’s future did not deserve for their memories to be discarded like the broken chairs they sat alongside. The albums have been lovingly kept in my closet ever since.

I did not follow Gary and REACH to the suburbs. Few people from Rivercity did. We had been hurt too much. Gary’s church there failed in a few years, which I admit to having some schadenfreude about. I was put off of church entirely for a while. After pouring my heart, soul and income into Rivercity, I wondered how God could let me down so tremendously. I fully understood how so many people are put off of Christianity by the actions of people who claim to be Christians. 

My husband and I had our first child not long afterward. While I was burnt out on it, I wanted my children to grow up in church, so we church shopped. One had a smoke machine, and the worship band played Goo Goo Dolls songs. Another was promising for a while, but then the pastor ranted one day about how he might be arrested for refusing to officiate gay weddings and he hoped the congregation would stand behind him. We pretended the baby needed both of us to change his diaper and slipped out the back. 

We eventually found ourselves at a large, suburban church. I liked it because it seemed to be everything Rivercity wanted to be if it had had money: ministries for addicts and artists, a focus on helping the poor and vulnerable. But I think what really drew me to it was the anonymity I could enjoy there. The large numbers of people meant I could go unnoticed. Like a scorned lover, I was too hurt to allow myself to be in a true relationship with a church or the people in it. My heart had hardened. I still longed for the feeling of church and to hear God’s word, but I wanted only to be a consumer. I had nothing left in me to contribute. And so I have remained the past nine years, letting only a couple people at the new church into my life and joining nothing. 

With my resentment newly stirred by the Acts 2:42 sermon on Sunday, it simmered all week. On Friday, I had lunch scheduled with a woman I’ve worked with by phone and email a few times since I started a new job a couple months ago. We had decided to finally meet in person. She was a good deal younger than me and excited about getting married in a couple of months. I asked her where she was getting married. She started describing the church she attended and loved and where it was located. I stopped her. It was THE church. Roanoke, Rivercity, REACH, right there at 40th and Wyoming. Part of it will always feel like MY church. 

I almost wept at the connection. The church Gary sold the building to is still there, and from her account, it is thriving. They’ve taken out the apartments he built on the upper floor and remodeled it into a children’s ministry space to accommodate all the families who attend. She made it sound like the new church, City Life, is carrying on Rivercity’s mission, (And maybe Roanoke’s, too), given that its very name shares members’ intent to reach the people of the city. I told her about the century-old scrapbooks I had, and how I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but I knew I wanted to keep them safe. Through her, they’re now headed back to their rightful home. 

A lot of people claim to hear God tell them explicit things. I’ve never experienced that, but I hear him through circumstances. I don’t think it was any coincidence that my week started with the scab getting torn off my unhealed wound with an Acts 2:42 sermon and that it ended with the news that the spirit of God’s work through Rivercity carries on with a new group of people in the very same building. Because a peace is dawning on me now that I never thought possible. Although I don’t know where Gary is now or if he has any idea how much he hurt me, I might finally be able to forgive him. Perhaps most importantly, the hardened “church people” shell around my heart has gotten a few cracks. Maybe some pieces will start to fall away, and I can learn to let people in. I hope to try again to serve others and learn more about God in a cocoon of support, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced before or since Rivercity. 

I doubt few people read this whole thing, but my message is this: God didn’t send his son Jesus to die so we would be burdened with pain and anger. He also didn’t create a church - like we see in Acts 2:42 - so we could blow it off because some people in it or leading it suck. He intended us to be in community. The church is made of humans, and we are a sinful, selfish bunch by nature (which circles back to why we need Jesus, but I digress). But together, we can do amazing things for our fellow humans and bring a little of God’s kingdom down to earth. Don’t let people who have done human things keep you from that. Because as my Rivercity pastor always used to remind me, “Don’t worry, Jesus is still risen.” 

Now check out some of the cool photos from the history books below. (Click on them to see bigger versions.) I've got you, Roanoke, don't worry.

Apparently the church expanded its basement but the top half went unfinished for about 20 years.

The church hall in the basement Gary decided to turn into class/office space.

Yeah, neither of those designs happened.

There's my favorite "Roanoke Remnant," Betty, the secretary! Roanoke was very progressive; it had a female pastor from 1977-1981 and, obviously, many women on its Board of Directors. 

Rich people garage sales

Having never done it anywhere else, I’m not sure how big of a thing garage sales are outside the Midwest, but here, they’re a REALLY big thing. We held an annual one at my grandparents’ house (because we didn’t have a garage) with several other families when I was growing up, and I remember how angry the 7 a.m. sale stalkers made my mom. 

“We’re still getting everything ready! I specifically asked for no early birds in the newspaper ad!” 

I equate this to showing up early to dinner at someone’s house, which I maintain is one of the rudest things you can do. They’re still trying to cook and prep and you showing up early makes them feel like they should be engaging in polite conversation with you, but really they just need to get the rolls out of the oven and put ice in everyone’s glasses and they can’t because you’re hovering, Patty!

I fell out of garage-saling for a while because it’s a very time-consuming crapshoot. And also because I refuse to go stalk someone’s houses at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday to get the good stuff. And by good stuff, I mostly mean unstained clothing that will fit my kids. These are incredibly rare finds. On the rare chance I find something actually in my children’s current size, I inevitably inspect it and discover a permanent Kool-aid stain. Or worse. So I’ve tried to go to the rich-people neighborhood garage sales the last few years, assuming they will have higher-quality items. My experience from a few weeks back caused me to reconsider. 

Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in my city were having garage sales on the same weekend. Many of them started on Friday, which I hate, because I have a regular office job and don’t feel like taking a day off work to peruse unwanted knick knacks. So I headed out around 10 a.m. on a Saturday, which I guess put me at a disadvantage. 

In the first neighborhood, I saw middle-aged women driving around between sales on a golf cart drinking wine. Yup, that’s exactly what I thought life was like there. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed children were selling lemonade and snacks at most of the sales.

 A man tried to sell me a scratched-up child’s bike for $50. 

“The front tire doesn’t hold air, but you can replace the tube or use fix-a-flat or something like that.” 

I’m going to assume that rich people don’t shop at regular-people stores like Target or Wal-Mart, so they don’t realize you could buy a brand new kid’s bike for just $20 or $30 more than what he was asking. Ain’t nobody got time to drop a Ulysses (S. Grant - who’s on the $50 bill - is that how they say it on the streets nowadays?) on a busted bike. 

It seems rich people holding garage sales either vastly overprice or vastly underprice their items. There is no middle ground. They’re either asking $20 for a puzzle or 25 cents for a 16-piece set of Fiestaware. 

I also found the clothes rich people sell at their garage sales are mostly dry clean only. (With the exception of the plethora of stay-at-home moms’ failed Cricut experiments I saw.) I haven’t dry cleaned anything in at least a decade. I don’t buy stuff that says “dry clean only.” I barely even iron. I guess the wealthy among us can pay for a nice service to have their dry cleaning picked up and dropped off at their houses. The only kind of home delivery service I can spring for is milk. And guess what? Most of that hoity-toity “dry clean only” business does just find if you wash it in a machine on the gentle cycle and hang it to dry. Which I have to do now because I bought some of their really cute, snooty dry-clean-only things. 

Rich people also have expensive, purebred dogs who either are watching you peruse their sale or have already deposited their hair on everything available for purchase. Do their well-to-do owners even try to run a lint roller over these hair-caked items? No. You should feel honored their Great Pyrenees shedded all over that outdated comforter. 

Some rich people couldn’t even be bothered with the work to actually put on a garage sale. One house had a table with designer women’s shoes and several other items around with a sign asking anyone interested to ring the doorbell to inquire about price. At least she was trusting, I guess. 

I think from now on I’ll stick to middle-class garage sales. They’re where I’ve found the best stuff, priced right. I’m still not stalking unwanted VHS tapes at 7 a.m. on a Friday. 

Little-discussed side effects of the COVID vaccine

I am extremely fortunate to already have received both doses of my COVID-19 vaccine. Thanks to my job, I was in a pretty high vaccination tier, and I got the second Pfizer dose a little over a week ago. When you can get it, you should. This pandemic needs to be over yesterday so I can hug my friends and let my kids run wild at the playground without having to clean snot off their face masks afterward. 

However, due to how intensely this vaccine activates the immune system, there are some side effects you should prepare yourself for. You’ll get a sheet with all the “duh” ones from the CDC - muscle aches, chills, etc. But I’m here to tell you what the CDC won’t. And given my complete lack of medical expertise, you absolutely should put blind faith in what I have to say. 

So beyond a little pain at the injection site, I don’t typically have any reactions to vaccines. I get my flu shot every year and am fine. That’s how I felt after my first COVID shot. I heard some rumblings that the second one could pack a punch, and well, they weren’t wrong. I’m a healthy person with a pretty darn good immune system, if I do say so myself. Maybe that’s why these things happened. It’s TOO awesome and went at the fake coronavirus protein like an army of rabid honey badgers. (Full and rather hilarious explanation from an actual doctor on how the vaccines work is here.) Everyone's body is different, and I know people who had the same/different/hardly any symptoms. 

Do I really need this arm? 

I got my second dose about 10:45 a.m. on a Friday. (If you can schedule it on a Friday - do it!) By about 7 p.m, I wanted to rip my left arm off and reattach it when it felt better. A flu shot’s got nothing on a COVID shot with arm pain. Like imagine if you peeled your skin back and bathed your muscles in acid for hours. Fortunately, ibuprofen mostly knocked that out. 

The usual

I awoke about 1:30 a.m. that night with the typical chills and muscle aches, like the CDC sheet had warned me. I didn’t have a fever. I couldn’t fall back to sleep until about 3:30 a.m., but that’s probably because of my husband’s freight train snoring. Tylenol helped. Not the snoring, just my aches and chills. 

Was I in a car accident I don’t remember? 

My husband and I take turns getting up with the kids on weekends, and Saturday morning was my turn. I should have rethought that. But I awoke without the chills and much reduced arm pain, so I thought I could handle it. My daughter is 4 and very potty trained but still needs help getting up on the toilet, and she did when she woke up. I reached down to lift her up, per usual, and then I screamed in pain, dropping her unceremoniously onto the crapper. What happened to my back? Did I get roofied, placed in a vehicle and then driven into a wall at 50 mph overnight? I made my husband get out of bed and get her off the toilet. If I had to help her wipe, I may have died. Muscle soreness continued throughout the day, and I remained on a steady diet of ibuprofen and heat pads. 

Super Hero Girls memory game flop

Also that morning, I played the memory game with my kids. The Super Hero Girls memory game, to be exact, because they don’t really make adult memory game versions with, say, characters from The Office. (Oooh, I may have to patent that.) Anyway, if you are not forced to play the memory game on a regular basis, it’s where you set out a bunch of cards face down and then have to find matches by remembering where they are. I normally slaughter my kids at this game. I’m not smart about a lot of stuff - like logical process thinking - but I have a fairly remarkable memory. People at work are frequently astounded by it, and I was an excellent test-taker because I can memorize facts with the best of ‘em. Which is why, as my 4- and 7-year-olds stacked up match after Super Hero Girls match while I got nothing, I began to question my sanity. I could NOT remember where the other Batgirl was. Or Supergirl or Wonder Woman or anything. The kids trounced me, racking up eight matches each to my two. I’ve heard about COVID brain, the fuzzy feeling that lingers for some people after they’ve had the disease. I think the vaccine gives you a taste of that. Listen up CDC! Research opportunity! Make everyone who gets the vaccine play the Super Hero Girls memory game before and after the second shot and see what results you get. This is the kind of study federal grants were created for. 

Meh

That is how I felt most of the day after the second shot. Just meh. Not particularly ill, just low-energy. A guy at work described it best on his day after the second shot: “If people attacked our building, I’d want to finish my lunch first before dealing with it.”

Armpit bulge

I was vaguely aware that I had lymph nodes prior to this experience, on both sides of my neck and probably somewhere near my armpits. By Sunday, I felt almost completely back to normal, except now I had armpit cancer. A very sore lump had appeared there. Then I remembered there might be a lymph node nearby! I did some Googling, and sure enough, it was starting to come out that some recipients of the vaccine, particularly Pfizer, were getting swollen lymph nodes in the arms where they’d gotten their vaccine. Bingo! By Tuesday, my previously feared armpit malignancy was totally gone. 

Given these side effects, would I do it over again? YES. Five hundred times if that’s what it took to have Super Bowl parties, school without masks or iPads, nursing home visits, travel and assurance that my parents are safe. And you should, too. Please get it as soon as you’re eligible. Just maybe schedule a day off afterward and don’t try to take on any kids in high-stakes memory games for 48 hours. 

A fully engulfed potato saved our lives. Probably.

One of the suckiest parts of the pandemic is that I now have to look at Pinterest. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’m not a Pinterest person. But the beloved freezer meal group I do monthly at a local grocery store has been on hiatus since last March because of COVID-19, so now I have to do all meal planning myself. This forces me to occasionally look at Pinterest to find recipes and such. 

Pinterest recipes inevitably lead you to food blogs. These involve some woman trying to look like she has a perfect life giving you a casserole recipe, but not until she first writes about how it reminds her of something her grandma made and an experience her grandma’s grandmother had at Ellis Island. Looking at them on a phone is the worst because there are a billion pop-up videos (“Watch this irrelevant 1.5-minute video of how I melt butter!”) and ads you can’t escape. I accidentally clicked on an ad for birth injury lawyers while trying to see a zucchini recipe today, and now sad baby photos won’t get out of my Facebook feed.  

It was on one of those food blogs last week that I swore I read you should bake a potato in the microwave with a wet paper towel around it for 20 minutes. I pretty much only bake potatoes in the oven, so I committed this to memory and went on with life for a few days until I wanted a potato. I did what I was pretty sure I remember that blog saying: wrapped a wet paper towel around it and set the microwave for 20 minutes. As it was cooking, I went into the adjacent living room to play with my kids. 

A blaring noise soon pierced the calm. It was our smoke detector. 

“What’s wrong with the smoke detector?” I asked aloud as the kids looked confused. 

Then I walked into the kitchen, staring at the detector. It turns out that was not the issue. I next saw the layer of smoke on the ceiling. Then I turned to my left and saw flames in the microwave. I screamed and turned the microwave off, yanking on the door handle. My husband came running downstairs as soon as he heard the smoke alarm. He saw the flames and jetted into the garage to grab the fire extinguisher. The children were screaming. It was chaos. I stopped him before he could use the fire extinguisher. The potato sat engulfed in flames on its ceramic plate, but that seemed to be as far as it went. So I poured a cup of water on it, and that was that. Flames out. 

The smoke was still thick enough, however, that the smoke alarm kept blaring. So we opened windows and doors in the 20-degree night to try to get it out. My children thought this was amazing. They grabbed blankets and burp cloths and stuffed animals and emulated us as we tried to waft the smoke outside. They danced around with glee at the excitement. They asked why I put out the fire before they could see it. They acted like me almost burning our house down with a potato was the best thing to happen to them since Christmas. 

As the smoke dissipated, I became curious if the entire potato was burned. Maybe just the paper towel around it and the skin were singed? Maybe I could salvage some! I tried cutting it, but the knife wouldn’t go through. My husband tried, and we found it was basically a charcoal briquet through and through. Then we discovered the microwave didn’t work anymore. I’m not really sure how. As far as I can tell, only the potato was on fire, but the microwave didn’t take kindly to it. 

My husband is an electrical engineer, and he was bound and determined to fix the microwave himself. It’s an over-the-range kind and has been in the house since we bought it 10 years ago. As he dug into it, he realized the previous homeowners had cut a hole in the top of the microwaved and jury-rigged ductwork into it to vent it. Then they secured said venting with discarded baseboard pieces. 

So really, he should be thanking me for ruining that thing. How many micro-waves went straight into our brains with that set-up? Am I a walking 5G access point now? How did it not catch on fire a long time ago? I shouldn’t be surprised. The previous homeowners seemed intent on setting this house ablaze. When we moved in, we saw they’d nailed an extension cord in the wall around the perimeter of the garage, with the nails going straight through the cord. When we redid the basement they had shoddily finished, our contractors pointed out three scorched spots in the insulation courtesy their DIY wiring. How many more code violations are just one flaming potato away from discovery in this place?

The house smelled like charred tubers for days. My face masks and hair. Our coats and cats. But it was worth it. Thanks to my brave - albeit unintended - actions, we how have a new and properly installed microwave. I’ve probably saved all us from further radiation and brain cancer and stuff. And maybe even a fire way worse than a potato. Not all heroes wear capes.