Not Ready for Granny Panties--The 11 Commandments for Avoiding Granny Panties

By Mary Fran Bontempo and Pat Achilles

It happens to the best of us. On a day like any other, you look in the mirror and find a cranky, worn-out, middle-aged woman staring back at you. A woman who is firmly strapped into a giant pair of GRANNY PANTIES.

Yes, aging is inevitable, but looking, and acting, like your grandma is not. So join Mary Fran Bontempo and learn a new set of Commandments that will enable you to avoid the Granny Panties and love life in the middle years. You'll laugh, learn a few things and with any luck, bid a permanent goodbye to GRANNY PANTIES and the old hag in the mirror!

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456609139

Book preview

again.

The Players

Me: The occasionally hysterical woman behind this rant against Granny Panties. I’m mad as Hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!

Dave: My frequently bewildered but always indulgent husband, who likely supports me for his own survival, but I’ll take what I can get.

Kids: David, Laura and Megan, my children, occasionally maligned, but much loved. Thanks, kids.

My Mom: Same as above.

Chrysa: My partner in crime, blogging and adventure who regularly talks me down off the ledge (or up onto a ledge, depending on our mood).

Women of the Chorus: Maxine, my cousins, my sister--Karen, Dianna, Kakie, Dorothy Gale, Glinda the Good Witch, Miss Gulch— a.k.a.Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, Oprah, Pat, Carmen, Chris—my b.f.f., my grade school girlfriends, Donna—my best friend from college, my hero, Kathy H., and others. Without these ladies, be they real or fictional, life, and this book, would be impossible (or at least a lot less FUN).

The First Commandment:

Thou Shalt Fuhgeddaboudit

Tony Soprano was no dope.

A thug, morally reprehensible, perhaps, but not a stooge. For Tony was capable of dispensing priceless advice in a word—Fuhgeddaboudit.

(Okay, so it’s really Forget About It, but if Tony says it’s Fuhgeddaboudit, I’m not going to correct him.)

Truth be told, that one word (or three, but who’s counting?) speaks volumes. Of course, when Tony said it, he was usually advising some guy to forget something he’d witnessed, for the guy’s own health and well-being. Fuhgeddaboudit or something pretty bad is probably going to happen, at least in Tony’s world.

But Tony was on to something, something we women would do well to remember—or forget, that is.

We spend countless hours of our lives trying to remember stuff. Where we have to go, what we have to do, who we have to get where. We remember who said what to whom, when it was said (especially if we’re talking to our spouses and the statement in question was made twenty years ago) and the vocal inflection with which it was said. (How many times have you said, What’s THAT supposed to mean? to a seemingly innocuous statement made by a spouse who immediately regrets opening his mouth?)

We keep mental lists which expand exponentially on a daily basis. And invariably, we forget something—or someone. Ever leave a kid at the orthodontist because you forgot to pick him up after dropping off his sister at her piano lesson, stopping at the bank and fetching the dry cleaning? Come on; you know you did.

Try as we might, we just can’t remember it all. Which is the point. We’re never going to remember everything; it’s useless to even try. (Except for the kid, of course. But he’d find his way home eventually.) Trying mightily and forgetting anyway just sets us up for failure, and really, haven’t you had enough of that?

As we get older, Mother Nature tries to drive home the point that attempts to remember everything are futile by stripping our minds like a field for planting—a field on which nothing is growing, that is. In the last week, how often have you walked into the next room with purpose and direction only to forget why you went in there in the first place? Was it once? Twice? Ten times? Or have you forgotten that,