It was Bean’s idea, but really? I blame John Mellencamp.
Lately, we’ve been discussing maturity — or rather, my complete lack of it. Bean feels, and rightly so, that I need to be more objective, more mature, take the high ground, follow through on things. I need to grow up. Yes, she is 14 and I am 41. But you know what else? She’s absolutely right. I do over-analyze things and situations to death. I do have the tendency to bring up every bad thing that someone ever did when they do the next bad thing. She is far more grounded than I am.
Anyway, we decided to paint the house shutters today. Been ten years and they really were starting to look tie-dyed, the blue fading off and exposing white primer above their natural black shade of plastic.
So, this time, I let Bean pick. She liked pink. I liked light lilac or sage green.
We went with pink.
Eleven cans of spray paint, $50, and eight hours later, we’re expecting Ken to pull up out front in the Barbie Dream Car.
There’s no other way to put this: the color is HIDEOUS.
Words cannot even begin to do justice to the horror of bright pink. It melds with the darkness where the shutters fold in and out, creating some bizarre, shockingly harsh optical illusion of hot pinkness with dark lines that appear to move and sway — right before the migraine sets in. We tried looking at them from a little further away – walking out to the street. It didn’t work. So we got in the car and went around the block. Turning left towards our street on the adjacent street, we steeled ourselves.
“It’s not going to look that ba—,” I started, stopping as the first shutter came into view. We collapsed into laughter as I almost drove off the road.
“Please, please…let’s just put them in the shed and re-paint them next weekend,” Bean begged.
“No. We spent all day painting them. The spaces underneath them are dingy and dirty and need paint. I’d rather have a Barbie Dream House than Michael Myers’ Bungalow.”
“Please. I’m going to want to throw up every time I walk to the door.”
“No.”
I put the rest of them back up, hoping that once they were all in place, they would somehow blend. Instead, all of them together seem as though they’re conspiring to blind passers-by.
As I finished with the last (by myself, since Bean wanted no part of this horror show), she began singing a song. It went like this:
“Trailer trash next door
I wonder how much I can sell my house for?
This is horrifying
I wish that I was dying
Soon I will be flyyyying….
Awwwwaaaaaaay.”
“Maybe we could paint the words Pepto Bismal on the side of the house and get some sort of product placement money? People who drive by will automatically remember to take it,” I said.
Ignoring me, she kept singing.
We drove around the block a few more times, trying to approach the house from different angles, hoping for a miracle. But each time it just got a little more frightening. Brighter. More obscene. Eventually it looked like something that Elle Woods would consider too girly and over the top. I gave up.
“It’s not so bad, Bean. And it was the color you wanted…” I said, hopefully.
“Well, you shouldn’t try so much to make me happy. You should’ve gone with the color you wanted,” she responded.
“But then you would’ve always thought pink would have looked better and you’d have been upset,” I replied.
“I would have just whined and complained. You have to learn to get over that. And you didn’t have to put them back up!” she said.
Walking into the house with one final shudder at our pink shutters, I turned to her.
“You know,” I said slowly, “I only put them back up because I was being mature. We made a mistake and we have to live with it until we can find the time and money to fix it. You should be proud of me. “
“I really hate you, sometimes, Mom.”
