The Impossible Dream

It's THAT week. My Man of La Mancha Week. Waverly turns four on Friday, and in addition to throwing a Fancy Nancy party for twenty-something preschool girls and their mommies (those are fancy words for chaos), I'm planning an ambush makeover of her bedroom (in the hopes that she WILL START SLEEPING THERE.) So beginning today, I switch gears into what the dearest of my minions know as BECKY'S BIRTHDAY MODE. I become that irrepressible Don Quixote, dreaming the impossible dream. I will, while madly decorating, frosting, painting, and baking, morph into the Creature That Has Yet To Be Named, a wild amalgamate of Godzilla, Medusa, and Martha Stewart.

Why, you should ask, would I attempt this quest? (You should ask.) Am I trying to make up for my own wildly dysfunctional (that's a fancy word for crazy) childhood with dream parties and fantasy bedrooms? Am I desperately competing with the Other Moms? (YES. Here is the cake I'm making. Match that, bitches!)


OR, am I utterly, irreparably, manically neurotic? (Final answer.)

DING! DING! DING! DING!

(You win nothing.)

I have come to the conclusion that my cake-decorating, room-restyling, streamer-hanging neurosis comes from my utter frustration with my limited capacity to impose control over events or other people. Namely, Joe Wilson, Glenn Beck, and the stymied, hateful debacle over Health Care in America. (A fancy term for a basic human right.) A Rightable Wrong. A Reachable Star.

(Okay, so I promised myself at the inception of this blog that it would be a politic-free zone. However, in that this like all creations is endowed with the image and likeness of its Maker , I must and will hazard to interject my personal political beliefs here. )

(More on my recent crisis of Existentialism and The Reason I Started This Blog in the next post. I know you can't wait. NEITHER CAN I!)

So my thinking is that the so-called Compassionate Conservatives (an oxymoron and a misnomer), the so-called Christian Right, are more attached to their pre-tax income than the plight of 46 million Americans without health insurance, the millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them, the 12 million Americans in the previous three years who were denied coverage because they had a pre-existing illness or condition.

"Not my problem," they say. "Why should I have to pay for it?"

LET THEM EAT CAKE!

And so, by God, at MY little girl's Fancy Nancy Party, we will. LOTS of it. In this room (which I will finish by Friday):


And we will be fancy and use LOTS of hand sanitizer (that's a fancy word for soap) in the case that any of the little fancies carries a case of H1N1, pneumonia, MRSA, or meningitis that could land any of us a bankruptcy-inducing hospital bill or, if we're uninsured, a dead child.

"And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star"

I'm getting out my paintbrush RIGHT NOW.