The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After
Melanie Gideon
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 030745486X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Melanie Gideon’s hilarious memoir is a disarmingly honest take on marriage and motherhood by a woman who realized she was sleepwalking through life and decided she needed to do something about it.
The Slippery Year chronicles her struggle to rediscover meaning and pleasure in life while navigating the comical ups and downs of cohabiting with a husband, a child, and a dog: mattress wars with her snoring mate, the psychological minefield of the school carpool line, and sending her son to sleep-away camp for the first time. Gideon manages to be laugh-out-loud funny while also reflecting beautifully and movingly on her quest to appreciate what she has.
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shake things up. He’s wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.” “I’ll tell you what he’s going to do with the rest of his life. Eat, sleep, shit, drool, look at us wistfully, and catch balls. The same thing he did with the first part of his life.” I was getting nowhere. I decided to speak in a language my husband could understand: “Bodhi’s running away was his 108-day Outward Bound course. His ascent on Mount McKinley He’s looking for a new identity. He wants to reinvent
eleven. Why? Well, it could have been for any number of reasons. I was wrongly accused of eating more than my share of the Nilla Wafers. I was wrongly accused of eating an entire one-pound package of Twizzlers. I was rightly accused of eating six bowls of tapioca. “I’m going to run away,” I told my mother. “Need any help packing?” she asked. I remember the feeling of freedom as I walked down the street. It was summer. The air smelled of tar and faintly of the sea. I had a secret name for
a week, I continued to write to Tatum for a year, first suggesting, then pleading, then begging for her to write back to me. But I never got any response. I stopped making Uncle Tommy cut my hair, or maybe my mother wisely began taking me to somebody I wasn’t related to. My father was never my pediatrician. Why would my uncle be my hairdresser? Hair is just as much about life and death and transformation as height percentiles and having to deliver to somebody the very bad news that they are
that we’re all allotted a number of perfect minutes, years if we’re lucky, when everything is as it should be. When sleep comes without sleeping pills. When love is a birthright. When our houses are intact, safe from fire, mice and heartbreak. The thing I’m most afraid of is that those minutes are running out. June GUMMI BEARS AREN’T ALLOWED.” I grab a cart and wheel it into the drugstore. “Skittles?” asks Ben. I wave the list at him. “No candy of any sort. You need bug spray. Moleskin.
anybody if they’ve brushed their teeth. I feel, well, I feel a little like Alexander Supertramp, in the good days, before he poisoned himself and began starving to death. I take a long hike. I write some nice sentences. I eat flan for lunch. In the evening my husband and I go to see the Indigo Girls at an outdoor amphitheater and we both get weepy when they play “Closer to Fine,” which was the song that was on the radio the summer of 1989 when we first met. We sing along. So does everybody else.
