This blog post was inspired by Sarah Silverman’s comedy special We Are Miracles in which she says – amidst a bunch of other awesome, off-the-wall things – something about the fact that if Africa were a land full of stray labradoodles, our desire to care for and/or help its inhabitants would be way higher.
And she’s probably right. Weird-looking, curly haired dogs, big fluffy, pushed-in-face cats, iguanas, gerbils (though this one, I just don’t understand) – we love our pets, often more than we love humans, it seems. My aunt tells me this in every email she sends – people suck/animals are so much better.
Her “I’ve been burned one too many times” bias aside, I believe there are lots of people who feel this way. The question is why? Why would we care about animals more than we care about our own species? Is it because we see animals as helpless creatures, driven to build a life in a contaminated world of chaos, concrete, and poison? I know that’s being overly-dramatic, but it’s the truth. The poor raccoons have nowhere to go, and then we get pissed off when they set up camp in our attics. Is it because we think humans should just know better, and that if we suffer, it’s our own damn fault? Well, we should, and it is.
My daughter thinks our house is haunted – for real. My husband and my two sons think she’s delusional. I think that weird stuff does go on around here sometimes. I’m hoping there are logical reasons to explain it all. I don’t deal well with the scary supernatural, or with guys coming after me in my sleep who have knives for fingers.
Let me explain what’s been happening, and you can decide for yourself. Am I living in the Amityville Horror house, or do my daughter and I just have REALLY active imaginations?
You see, my stove seems to have a mind of it’s own. It appears that it can turn itself on. It’s happened on numerous occasions. Either that, or I’ve turned it on myself without even realizing it. This may or may not be related, but I also forget where I’m going when I’m in my car sometimes. That’s weird thing number one.
Then there was the time that my daughter’s phone randomly recorded a conversation that she was having with her girlfriend about the Illuminati, playing it back to her just-as-randomly about an hour later. I guess you don’t talk about the Illuminati and get away with it. They are everywhere and always listening, even in my rec room. No doubt, it’s a place where mad stuff goes down, like we’ve been known to watch four episodes of Say Yes To The Dress in a row. I know, insane.
A few times, my daughter has heard unexplained hissing noises. OK, so we have three cats, but she says that it wasn’t any of them. She’s sure – absolutely sure. Not that she was really looking. She’s usually glued to her computer watching some comedy special on Netflix.
Then there’s the fact that the light outside our house doesn’t work very well. It’s always flickering on and off. When you peak out the window at it – scanning for phantom-like figures – it goes from a dull glow, to a slightly stronger dull glow, like it senses your presence and it’s trying to say hello in an evil, demon-like way. Now, it could be that its electrical connection just isn’t working quite right. Nah.
Also once, my daughter looked outside to see a bunch of men trying to fix it. They were up on ladders and everything. When she went downstairs a few minutes later – probably like ten minutes later, and this is the real “holy shit there are ghosts afoot clincher” – the men were GONE. Poof! They had just disappeared. My daughter thinks this is crazy. How could they have collected all their stuff and left in such a short amount of time? I think it’s just proof that city workers are really good at going on coffee break. When donuts or cigarettes are involved, those men with the neon yellow or orange vests can disassemble a ladder and pack their toolboxes faster than Donald Trump can say something stupid on Twitter.
Furthermore, the thermostat in the basement glows a firey “I’m going to kill you” red whenever anybody goes down there, not that it’s motion sensitive or anything.
OK, so the tree on our front lawn died. The city chopped it down this past summer. Maybe it was the possible native burial ground upon which our house was built – the spirits coming alive in protest – OR it was the Emerald Ash Borer beetle that was “confirmed in Ottawa back in 2008 and whose impact has clearly been seen spreading from the St. Laurent area since then”. Take your pick.
If none of the above seems reason enough that our house could be haunted, how about this? A shadowy figure keeps trying to have sex with my daughter in her dreams. It’s happened over and over and over again, so what that she’s twenty-two and quite possibly in the throws of a sexual awakening? Scarily, she can’t see his face, but his body looks – surprise, surprise – a lot like Ryan Gosling. If you assume that in the ghost world, people are – on average – about as attractive as they are in real life, then what are the chances? Wouldn’t most ghosts look more like Seth Rogen? She should consider herself lucky, I think.
There was that one time when two of the cats stood at the top of the stairs and looked down like the devil himself was coming up, their tails bushy, their ears all back. Devil or no devil, ghost or no ghost, that’s exactly why I have feline protection. Obviously, the specter didn’t come past them because I’m still here – alive, not bleeding from my eyeballs. My whiskered strategy seems to be working. You ask me why I want my cats sleeping with me every single night, by my side, under the blankets? That’s why.
So what to do about all this stuff? Well, to answer this question myself – there’s probably NOTHING I can do about it. We are just going to have to ride this torturous life out forever. It’ll probably affect generations. My great-great-great grandchildren will suffer – sadly.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Paranormal Activity, or that one with Kevin Bacon, you’d know that moving from one house to another won’t work. Being haunted is like having the flu. It doesn’t leave because you drag yourself to another location, like the doctor’s office. That just makes it worse – because you’ve gone outside and it’s cold. Most of the time, it’s better to stay put, close to the toilet, to prevent an embarrassing “stinking up the bathroom in public” scene.
Nope, the ghosts go with the people. Like car insurance. That’s just the way it is. All I can say is, thank goodness at least one of them is a sexy bad boy. Creepy and partly incestuous or not, my daughter and I will share that one. I seriously hope he likes a woman with a sense of humour.
One more question: do handcuffs work on apparitions? Please say yes.
No matter how smart you are, there is always something new to learn. Sometimes, it’s something trivial – like snails have teeth (I didn’t know that until today) – and sometimes, it’s something that could save your life, or simply keep you from eating something really gross.
Take my oldest son’s BFF, he knows a LOT of facts about a LOT of crazy things. For instance, he knows why beer makes a person fat – like the biochemical details, not just that it does. He knows that rats multiply so quickly that within eighteen months, two rats can turn into over a million furry little buggers. He also knows (for a fact) that Superman would kick the crap out of Batman should the two of them ever meet and decide to fight. I think every young adult male has a theory (or twenty) like this.
We’ve all heard stories of mothers doing crazy things to protect their children, and while I’ve never had to lift a car off of anybody – knock on wood – I will say that I have that same boundless and (at times) catty drive to protect my young, though they aren’t so young anymore.
This is typically how it works…
Someone says my kids aren’t perfect, I say who is?
Someone says they don’t always use the best language, I say they learned it from their fucking father.
Someone says they shouldn’t be climbing the neighbour’s fence to take a short cut to the bus, I say, Jesus Christ, again? I’ll talk to them.
All kidding aside, it doesn’t matter their age, a mother is a mother forever, and my claws WILL come out if someone criticizes, questions, or otherwise bad-mouths any one of them. I count this as a good thing. It’s my job. If I don’t stick up for them – right or wrong – who’s going to?
I think it just goes to show that we have bonded, that the body-altering nature of their time inside my womb, and the subsequent excruciating pain of their individual evacuations – my daughter’s being by far the most bloody and brutal – and the many, many, MANY long nights of taking care of them, and all the stress, and all the dishes and laundry that I’ve done to clean up after them, has really left its mark on me.
I’ve always thought of myself as the mellow one in the family. I’ve never, in a fit of anger, broken up pieces of wood in the basement with my bare hands, and I only backed into my grandfather’s car once when I was seventeen-years-old. I chalk that one up to being young and impetuous. Occasionally, I yell, but I consider that more like “talking loud”, and I only do it because most people around here don’t listen to a word I say.
In my opinion, every family needs a floater – a person who is flexible and who can stay fairly stable (mentally) with the ebbs and flows of life.
Yes, in my situation, that person is me. My husband’s job is one of very high stress. He works long hours, and what he does calls for a great amount of responsibility. It’s been that way for twenty-five years. Don’t ask him to deal with young adult angst. When he gets home, he literally melts into the chair in the living room, his computer on his lap, a stack of papers by his side. His brain goes into “cruise” mode, his eyes close, and his head bobs back and forth from time to time.
I’m the one who has to be ready – sort of like a firefighter, I always say. Things are usually calm, and I can watch “House Hunters” and take my cats for walks on their leashes – fun and (what my husband calls) leisurely and almost counterproductive stuff like that – but every once in a while, the shit hits the fan, and I need to spring into action, like when somebody forgets their dance shoes and it’s minutes before the show, or worse, when someone rips their pants in front of the whole cafeteria, or worse worse, when someone gets cheated on by their girlfriend, or worse worse worse, when somebody crashes the car, or gets really drunk, or fails a major test, etc. etc.
