Free I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression by Erma Bombeck

proportions as Sophia. While shewas built like a cut diamond, I was taking on the shape of a pyramid. But I persevered.
    “Well, Sophia,” jeered my husband, “how are you and Marcello Mastroianni making out?”
    “I had it for lunch,” I said.
    “It’s funny,” he said, “but I cannot remember Sophia walking around with a safety pin in her slacks.”
    “A sex symbol cannot be built in a day,” I retaliated.
    It wasn’t until I began to think the “before” pictures in magazines looked great, that I realized the road to beauty is not paved with spaghetti. Sophia lied to me. It was all a hoax to make the women of America look like beasts, while Sophia slithered her way through movie after movie. (Like having ugly bridesmaids so you’ll look good.)
    Taking off “spaghetti,” my friends, is like taking off no other food. You can run around the block and take off an eclair. You can do a few sit ups, and dissolve lobster dipped in butter, but spaghetti hits your hips, takes roots and begins to grow again.
    The other night as I sat nibbling on a piece of carrot, I watched Sophia in a movie with Cary Grant. I couldn’t help but wonder … maybe if I left off the Parmesan.

Put Down Your Brother
.
You Don’t know Where He’s Been
.
    My husband’s idea of a fun vacation is sitting around watching a ranger pick his teeth with a match cover.
    My idea of “roughing it” is when you have to have an extension for your electric blanket.
    My husband is one of those idiots who leaves pieces of bacon out to attract bears to the camp site.
    I once trapped a gnat in my bra and went to bed with a sick headache for a week.
    “Face it,” I said, “we are incompatible. I want to go to New York and see some theater and shop and you want to go to Murk Lake and watch mosquitoes hatch their larva.”
    He stiffened. “I am not going to New York and watch a bunch of lewdy nudies cavort around the stage.”
    “And I am not going to Murk Lake and watch men shave out of double boilers.”
    “I am not going to the city where I have to wear a necktie to bed,” he continued.
    “And I am not going to a camp ground where life is so primitive the animals come to watch us feed.”
    The point is we are incompatible on the subject of vacations.
    “You don’t understand,” I said to my husband. “I don’t ask much in this world. All I want is a few weeks where I could sleep in a bed where the alarm clock is on the opposite side.
    “I want to go to the bathroom, lock the door, and know that when I look through the keyhole I will not encounter another eye.
    “I want the phone to ring and have it be for me. I want to walk in a room and see all the drawers closed. I want to drink a cup of coffee while it is still hot.
    “Don’t you understand? I want to pick up my toothbrush and have it be dry.”

    He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Why didn’t you say so? We’ll compromise. We’ll go camping.”
    I know for a fact that a lot of families who travel together have a swell time. They play “Count the Cow” until they faint. They wave to “Out of State” license plates and sing gaily, “Getting to Know You” in two-part harmony. Our kids play a game called, “Get Mama.” Or, “The Family That Camps Together Gets Cramps Together.”
    It’s a 400-mile non-stop argument that begins when we leave the driveway and doesn’t end until Mama threatens to self-destruct.
    The players include a daddy who drives in silence, a mama who listens in silence, a daughter who keeps repeating, “Mom!” and two brothers who make Cain and Abel sound like the Everly Brothers.
    Just for the mental discipline, I kept a record of the last “Get Mama” game. The kids argued for seventy-five miles on whether or not you could run a car a hundred miles in reverse without stalling. They used up fifty miles debating how workers in the U. S. Treasury Department could defraud the detectors by putting hundred-dollar bills in their mouth and