Everyone knows all about the Sock Trolls and Binkie and Tooth Fairies. Dust Bunnies and those two devilishly mischievous and invisible characters- Nobody and Somebody. You’ve heard tales about the Land of Lost Things. About monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Elves that make shoes by the light of the moon, trolls under bridges, and garden gnomes. Santa and his North Pole. The Easter Bunny. Blackholes and vortices. The list goes on and on of mythical, magical, unknown, and legendary beings, creatures, and places that can interact with and impact human life.
So what in the name of hell could be taking my gawdamn dishes and silverware!?!?
This is a serious dilemma here, people and my position is very strong. My plates, bowls, forks, table- and teaspoons, and drinking cups are mysteriously vanishing into thin air at random. I can’t even claim that the mythical dishwasher creature is gobbling up pieces for a snack, because I don’t freaking own a dishwasher! Everything is washed by hand in this house, by method of good ole child slave labor chore lists. I realize my tweenager is a human garbage disposal with his bottomless pit of an appetite fueling an endless growth spurt, but I’m pretty sure he’s not inhaling his eating utensils and tableware when he eats. Neither is the beast of a dog we call Mayble. Nor the diabolical cherub of a toddler, or any other family member in my personal circus, at that.
Honestly, I don’t understand for a moment, how this is happening. It’s one thing to lose pacifiers and sippy cups out of the blue. Stray toys, mates to socks or shoes, loose change, and the matching earring to your favorite pair. Not to mention how something is always going missing from my wardrobe, lost in the laundry in no man’s land. I sure don’t mind, and completely expect, the occasional disappearing paperwork or utility bill.
Hell, I even lose a dozen lighters every week, despite having a designated area in which I keep my stash of smoking and rolling utensils, but I’ve grown accustomed to that, simply as a fact of life. Lighters are one of the most commonly stolen items, after all.
But when I open the drawer to grab out some silverware to set the dinner table with, I’m surely not anticipating the scramble to wash the few forks we dirtied at lunch, all because there’s not enough clean to serve everyone, all of a sudden. Yet, that is exactly what it has come to in my house as of late. Unless, that is, you are totally okay with using the BPA-free, baby-friendly chunky plasticware, left unscathed by this unknown silverware stealing force. Yeah. I didn’t think so. One, lone, measly pea at a time is not an enjoyable way to eat.
When I noticed my supply of cereal bowls, spoons, and butter knives was dangerously dwindling down to a single meal’s setting type low the first time, I went out and bought new supplies to cover at least three more meals’ worth. Twelve new cereal bowls and eighteen new spoons and knives. Six new tumbler cups for the big kids and adults. I even bought eight new forks, just to have an even amount all around the silverware drawer. Here it is, only a bit over six months later, and, not only am I down 9 of those bowls, most of the spoons, and the majority of the forks, but I’m down a handful of plates inexplicably now, too. I’m completely dumbfounded over this. Mind-blown. The whole situation is unfathomable to me. Extreme measures have been implemented to prevent further dishes from being lost in space. Picnics have been banned and everyone, including the grown-ups, are forced to eat all of their snacks and meals within the confines of the kitchen, no matter what. No good, though. My dishes and silverware are still diminishing, a couplefew more with every passing week.
Even if the dishes are being broken and the silverware was accidentally being thrown out, there’s still no reasonable explanation for the cups. After my second pregnancy produced a second boy barely a day over a year after the first, I replaced all of our glassware with plastic, break-proof stuff. So, again, I ask you…
Where the fuq have all of my dishes and silverware gone to?
The shit doesn’t get up and walk away, saying, “Screw this crazy house, I’m outtie!” Or, maybe, it does? Maybe my kids have some magical napkin like Doc McStuffin’s stethoscope, which can bring my kitchenware to life. I bet they’re having secret powwows in the darkest corner of my basement to plot a house-wide takeover and call a mutiny on the living room sofas for supporting the fat assess of the humans who neglect their responsibilities. Wherever my dishes are, they sure aren’t in my cupboards and drawers where they belong.
I’ve thought about setting up a hidden camera in my kitchen. Wouldn’t it be great to catch the perpetrator in the act? Everything disappears so slowly, so randomly, though, that I would have to watch a lot of days worth of footage to figure it out. Probably a few weeks worth, even. If I had the amount of time to waste away that it would take to watch a replay of every moment from my kitchen’s point of view until I find a clue or the culprit, you can bet your sweet ass I am not going to spend it like that. I’ve got a list of better things to do with undiscovered free time longer than my arm, and no where on it is it listed that I’ll waste days of my life away from my family watching replays of my family from an outsiders standpoint. This mom is overworked, underpaid, disrespected, and invalued enough. Not going to relive it all for some stinking kitchenware. Hell naw! I just want to know….
Why me? Why MY dishes and shit? Where in this gawd-damn freaking universe has it all gone? Will it ever just freaking stop so I can save my sanity?
There’s got to be another way to save my silverware from the universe, save my dishes from obliteration. I can’t think of one, but I know there must be. Some sort of explanation, whether it be plausible or far-fetched matters not to me, to ease my psychotic level of paranoid mind. I’m living in fear that one morning, when I finally wake up feeling rested and refreshed after a full ten hours of uninterrupted beauty sleep, shower peacefully with all the hot water I desire, get dressed in the latest fashion without wrinkles or stains, set my fabulously died and styled hair without fighting kids to not spray themselves in the eyes with hair spray, apply department store quality makeup to my bagless, dark circle-free face, and feel amazingly beautiful in my sculpted by plastic surgery body, I’ll waltz into my kitchen and find my cupboards and drawers completely bare of all eating utensils. Looking over my shoulder constantly, wanting the answer to my dilemma to enlighten me, solving this mystery once and for all. It still hasn’t come.
So, I guess I’m stuck living this nightmare of absconding dishes and silverware for as long as it happens. Unless the culprit suddenly names itself, so I can plan a way to banish it’s presence from my home, forever. Until then, I’m only replacing lost items with disposable paper and plastic picnicware. Sorry environment, but my sanity and wallet trump a growing garbage dump, only but momentarily. I’m not going to keep shelling out fifty dollars, or so, every couple of months to replace all which is lost, gone, adios, and vamoose of this place. What I will do, though, is ask you one last time…..
What in the name of hell could be taking my gawdamn dishes and silverware!?!? Where the fuq have all of my dishes and silverware gone? Why me? Why MY dishes and shit? Where in this gawd-damn freaking universe has it all gone to? Will it ever just freaking stop so I can save my sanity? I just want my kitchenware to stay put. It’s that so much for me to ask?! Really!?!
By: Kristina Hammer, aka, The Angrivated Mom
The Angrivated Mom