My Life Beofre Dan and Jesus, a parody by Gizmola

My Life Before Dan and Jesus



I don't write a lot about my life before I found Jesus and Dan. There's nothing worthwhile to discuss. My father was a well educated Englishman and my mom was a high powered attorney. They forced me to live in a five story Victorian house with an orchard. My mom especially was obsessed with money and how money can buy things like doctors' visits, dental care and fresh food to eat. They even paid someone to cook for us so every night was a full meal. Looking back I see how wasteful it was to feed us roast beef, potatoes, fresh green beans from the outside garden, mixed green salads with homemade salad dressing, fresh yeast rolls and gallons of fresh milk from a local dairy. Below I note how my parents parented me and how I wish to change things for my family.



Oven Usage

My mother wasted a ton of money on using our oven. She and the cook made yeast rolls, homemade pretzels, two-layer cakes, homemade pizza and they did it all in the oven. We didn't even own a crockpot. I'm so grateful that I learned about crockpots so now I don't have to bankrupt our family by using $0.15 a day using the oven, which just takes up space.



Huge House

Our house was too big for my brother and my parents and myself. We each had our own room, a library, a full attic, a big kitchen with a table for eating, a dining room for formal dinners, a living room, an office for my father and three bathrooms! Because we had so much space we never had the chance to stack our common clothes in a Rubbermaid tote, hang stuffed animals from the bathroom ceiling or have the ability to stuff bunkbeds in the kitchen. I think it took away from really connecting as a family to have so much room. Everyone could have their privacy at all times and we all had our own closet. I want my children to know what it's like to live ten to a bedroom and share their two toys.



Doctor and Dentist Visits

I shudder to think how much money my parents wasted on doctors visits and dental visits. We went to the doctor at least once a year for a physical. I know now that all I have to do is weigh the children on the kitchen scale and measure them with my yard stick. I remember once breaking my wrist while sledding and my mother insisted I go to the hospital to have a cast! When Dan broke his finger trying to open a box of oatmeal I just stuck some stickers on it to bind it to the rest of his fingers while it healed. That way we didn't have to waste our money on something like doctors who are just trying to pump us full of chemicals like penicillin and pain killers. I have learned how to stitch up wounds with my sewing needle and I make my own penicillian from my crockpot bread. As for the dentist, we don't need someone to tell us how to take care of our teeth. Besides, I find it sexy when my tongue hits Dan's gums while we make love on the crusty sheets.



Food

My mom made me eat Laura's Lean Beef, pasta containing eggs, free range eggs, vegetables from our large garden outside, apples from the orchard, fresh churned ice cream (with real sugar!), butter instead of lard and she even gave me coca-cola every so often. I shudder to think of the crap I ate growing up. No lacto-fermenting the ice cream, no soaked grain french baguettes, and she let us throw away half-eaten apples. That's one reason I work so hard to make sure my family is eating proper food. When I was sick my mom would make me tomato soup which I knew had GMO in it. I know that none of our meat had the wonderful, nutritious high fat content that I get with my $1.30 tube meat. I once asked my mother how much money she spent on food each month and she just brushed me off saying, "no amount of money mattered when it came to making sure you had good food." No wonder it took so long for me to learn how to stretch my food dollar.



Laundry Detergent

My mom used Tide. I checked the price of Tide and was appalled. It would never have occured to her to purchase soap nuts and be more ecologically friendly. She just thought that Tide cleaned the clothes and smelled good. She even used a washer AND a dryer. So every morning I had fresh clothes in my dresser drawer. I strive now to keep my family on a washing schedule where we only use warm tap water in the Wonderwash (we don't want to use up too much fuel to heat the water) and we only wash after two wearings.



A friend saw how this life of material consumption was killing me and so she took me to a fundamentalist church. There I found Jesus. I read about how he had nothing and I knew that I wanted a life that was Christ like. Then I went to Bible college. My mom wasn't supportive at all about me going to Ed Smith's Super Dooper Bible College and reluctantly loaned me the money. She wanted me to go to a wasteful and sinful school like Vassar or Wellesley like she did.



It was at school that I met Dan. I saw him eating a hot pocket outside the commons one day. He bit into it and lost a tooth. I reached down and handed his tooth back to him and I just fell in love. We started a courtship and I realized how brilliant he was. I was going to finish my one-year certificate three months early but he was so dedicated to the Lord that even though his program was a three year program he was already on his seventh year. He was THAT dedicated to Jesus!!



He told me he wanted to be a pastor. Well, at first he said "patterer" but I knew what he meant. Just because he can't pronounce words, spell words or string together a coherent sentence doesn't make him stupid! He told me that he had voted for John Kerry and I almot broke up with him because at that time Christians didn't vote for John Kerry. But he told me how he only votes for candidates if he can almost spell their names. So I knew he was really striving to be like Christ.



We talked about our goals. I wanted to be a homesteading, homeschooling mom living in a toolshed and making all my meals in a crockpot. He told me that he wanted to be the pastor of the Star Trek enterprise. I had to explain that the Star Trek enterprise was only on tv and he was so upset he broke up with me for three days. But then I showed up at his dorm with a Star Trek emblem on my pajamas and band-aid Vulcan ears and we got back together.



I really loved going to his family's on the weekends. They were all really, really poor. No one had teeth and they all smelled like rotten meat. His father didn't do anything but sit in a chair and scratch. His mother was a cleaning lady at a retirement home and always smelled like lemons and urine. She's the one who taught me how to use lemons as deordorant! They ate Taco Bell and Cheez Doodles. Once a week his mother would make ham steaks and canned green beans. I finally felt like I had found my true home!



One day we went for a walk and I had Dan on his safety leash so he didn't get lost. He stopped walking and I almost fell over because the leash pulled tight. I looked back and he was crying. I asked him why he was crying and he said that he loved me more than anyone (except Captain Kirk, of course - but I can't blame him for that!) and that ever since I taught him how to tie his shoes he knew he wanted to make babies with me. I kissed him, savoring that slightly moldy taste of his teeth. Then I asked him if he wanted to get married. He said he didn't believe in Christmas. I told him marry also meant that we would live together, make babies and I would feed him and take care of him and that if he didn't marry me I would take away his David and Goliath coloring book.



It was so much fun planning a frugal wedding! My mom didn't like Dan but she wanted us to have a big wedding with a Vera Wang dress, fresh flowers, a string quartet, a bouquet of roses and real gold rings. I told her that I wanted a simple, frugal wedding. She didn't like that so she said if I wanted to throw my life away on a halfwit then she wasn't going to watch. My father, who had divorced my mother, said that if I was happy, he was happy. Later I found out that he slipped a plane ticket to London, my uncle's phone number and an envelope of cash in my honeymoon suitcase with a note that read, "For bloody hell, run!"



I bought my dress at Goodwill but it wasn't plain enough so I sewed lace doilies on for sleeves and wore flip flops. I used an old curtain as a veil and my bouquet was of spring onions and lettuce I grew in coffee cans on the windowsill. Dan wore a suit we found in the dumpster at the local funeral home. We just sewed up the cut in the back. He refused to wear socks because he said it made his toes sweaty. We used produce bag ties as rings. We didn't have a cake because we don't believe in sugar. The night before I made crockpot bread with a teaspoon of stevia ($0.24) with homemade ricotta cheese pressed on the outside as "icing." After we cut it we laid it on a cheesecloth to drain out more whey to use during our toast.



We took a nature hike on our honeymoon (in his parents' backyard behind the trailer). We ate off the land but we weren't good at it like we are now so we ended up constipated on our honeymoon. I explained to Dan that when we finally did poo (thankfully, due to me lacto-fermenting some poison ivy) he should fold his fern leaves instead of scrunching them to wipe his bottom.



We also finally had sex. I had had sex before since I wss a chain-smoking, beer guzzling goth in high school. But Dan never had. It was so cute trying to explain to him that it was more than just him fiddling with his Dan Dangle and that 30 seconds we had intercourse were the best of my life. He was so into it that he even bit my shoulder and lost another tooth. Which was like when we first met so it was so romantic.



Nine months later I realized I was pregnant with Daniel and Dan started working at Wal-Mart and attending college to be a pastor. My life is just what I wanted. I planned it this way. I'm happy. I don't wish I was back at home, attending a real college and sleeping on non-crusty sheets. I am happy eating rotten applesauce, drinking tap water all the time and forever teaching Dan to tie his shoes, tell time and how to use soap. No. I'm happy. Happy I tell you. This is the life I wanted. Really. I swear. It is.



(though I still have that plane ticket. If Dan calls my food crap one more time I may just bloody well use it.)