Misadventures of an Oxymoron: Unfortunately True Tales

By Heather Compton

(Mis)adventures of an (Oxy)moron tackles in-law idiocy, motherhood mishaps, devastating tragedy, and how to survive when you accidentally join a fitness cult. Brutally honest and hilariously blunt, Heather Compton dishes on the ridiculous, heartfelt, and often mortifying moments of being human. 

Heather Compt

• Language: English
• Publisher: KHB Media LLC
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985540710

Heather Compton

Heather Compton is a wife, mother, farmer, and co-founder of Kindhearted Badass. She lives on seven secluded acres in rural Missouri, where the only thing she successfully farms is joy. You can find her online at www.kindheartedbadass.com.

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Copyright © 2022 KHB Media LLC

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, please contact the publisher at the address below.

ISBN (paperback): 979-8-9855407-0-3

ISBN (ebook): 979-8-9855407-2-7

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Heather Compton’s down-to-earth hilarity pulls no punches. Everything is fair game, and she manages to be simultaneously heartfelt and ludicrous, which is some sort of freakish superpower. When reading her book, you can’t help but wonder what the hell is going to happen next, as well as hope that someday you’ll meet in real life and become the very best of friends.

-Amanda Turner, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be Awkward

For Chris,

who always says yes to my dreams.

Chapter 1

Ninja Invaders

This is where I keep the baking pans. The regular baking sheets are over there, my father-in-law said, gesturing to a cabinet across the kitchen. These cookie sheets are only for cookies. Never cook anything on them but cookies, he said, placing extra emphasis on never.

My husband, Chris, and I had just moved into his dad’s house and I was being given the grand tour, complete with the rules of engagement. Chris was at work, so I was flying solo on this mission. He and his brother Steven (who also lived at home with their dad) knew the rules intrinsically, having grown up with said cookie sheets, so the museum-quality tour wasn’t necessary for them.

This door leads to the front yard. Always lock it when you come in. I’d been to his house countless times and knew where all the doors led, but I respectfully followed him around while he gave me the full rundown. This closet has the board games in it, extra paper towels, and toilet paper, he said, closing the accordion door. This door goes to the garage, he stated as he flipped the light on and led me through. Once inside, he reached for a door I’d never noticed before. Was this where he kept his top-secret ninja murder weapons? Or blow up sex dolls? If so, why were they on the tour? Were the sex dolls a family secret and now that I was family, I was being initiated, like a member of a cult?

The door led into another closet and I’m sad to report there were no machetes or katanas, and not a single ninja star in sight. The human-sized sex toys were disappointingly missing, but there were containers full of microscopic drawers that each housed a different kind of screw, bolt or nut. We were inside a mini Home Depot. If I had a home repair emergency, we were set. If we were suddenly ambushed by angry ninjas in the middle of the night, we were poorly equipped; a situation I made a mental note to remedy.

Back inside, we continued the tour of the dining room, which was the epicenter of his modest, middle-class home. Long and narrow, it was originally a one-car garage that the previous owners had enclosed to gain some extra living space. Comptons live for family meals and this room housed lavish breakfasts, ridiculous lunches, and massive dinners, sometimes all in the same day. Danny’s home was the Compton family hub, and the dining room was ground zero. It was home to a long and too-wide table that sat eight comfortably, as long as you didn’t need to get up for any reason. If you did have to excuse yourself to the bathroom, everyone scooted their chairs in as far as they could so you could hold your breath and suck in your gut as you squeezed by. At that point, you might as well give up on eating, because the circus act you were going to have to perform to make it back to your seat wasn’t worth it, especially since the next meal was most likely already being prepared.

Here’s the dog food. I give Nova one of these cups of food in the morning and one in the evening, and about two-thirds of one for Daisy, he said grabbing a plastic tumbler off the top of a gigantic vintage-looking microwave. I had yet to see anyone use this microwave, since there was a perfectly functional modern one mounted above the stove in the kitchen, but I imagined the amount of radiation put out by that thing was enough to cause birth defects with every reheated cup of coffee.

Nova was Steven’s dog, an oversized caricature of a German Shepherd. She was either dropped on her head as a puppy, or spent too much time eating next to that relic of a kitchen appliance. She looked large and in charge, and if you didn’t know she was mildly mentally handicapped, she would scare the urine directly from your bladder with her throaty Bavarian bark. Those of us who knew her though, knew she was terrified of everything. Faced with an intruding ninja she would surely tuck tail and hide behind the couch trembling, much the same as she did during a thunderstorm.

Daisy was the Border Collie puppy Chris and I got to be a companion to his Siberian Husky, Kiara. Daisy ended up being a stone-cold killer in an adorably compact package, and would attack Kiara violently over minor infractions, like breathing or licking herself. Because Chris’s dad loved animals, and Chris knew he was generally a sucker when asked for help, we sent Daisy to live with him. Danny Compton loved dogs almost as much as he loved family meals.

The water’s over here. I only have to fill it every few days, but with all the dogs here now, we’ll probably have to do it more often. The automatic waterer was set up under the large window that looked out over the front yard. Just to the right of the window was a safe the size of a public bathroom stall. Having never seen inside it, I hoped that’s where he was keeping the ninja stars. I didn’t ask, thinking it was probably rude to imply he wasn’t prepared to defend his family against a shinobi invasion, but he was a Boy Scout leader for many years, so I had faith he had the proper preparations in place.

We brought two dogs with us during our move, Kiara the Husky and my wrinkled and smelly bulldog, Gus. If you can do simple math, you’ve probably realized by now we had four dogs in a three bedroom ranch house, with a typical suburban-sized backyard. We were also bringing a thirteen-year-old tabby cat I’d had since high school, and a three-year-old human boy. We were the invaders, not the ninjas.

Chris and I had been living in the house I bought during my first marriage, and although he gave it a good try, he didn’t want to build our family on top of the tarnished memories that resided there. He also wasn’t a fan of the area. Being the camo-wearing, gun-shooting, fishing pole–toting man that he was, the affluent suburb I lived in wasn’t his jam. Knowing it would be difficult to sell the house while it was inhabited by two dogs, an elderly tabby cat, and a messy human boy, we were temporarily moving in with Chris’s dad until the house sold, with plans to reevaluate after closing. Temporary turned into two-plus years, and Danny, and his rules of engagement, became everyday fixtures in my life.

Danny had a big laugh and a heart to match. He was a caretaker to his core, and although we upset the balance of his life and home, I truly believe he enjoyed having us there. Chris and I still didn’t have our shit together, and Danny thrived on helping us along. His boys were everything to him, and he had them both under one roof now. He adopted me as his own immediately, which meant I was held to the same standards Chris and Steven were. And that meant following the rules. When I talk about him having rules, I don’t want you to misunderstand. As a thirty-year-old adult woman with a child, he didn’t give me a curfew or anything. The rules were the particulars of how Danny liked his house to run, and although we paid rent to live there, it was his house, so we tried our best to respect his reign.

Rule number one: always lock the doors. He was emphatic about the exterior doors being locked, particularly the ones he couldn’t see from his spot on the reclining sofa. The dining room had three doors, and they better be locked when he happened upon one of them. I still don’t know where his obsession with locked doors came from, maybe he had a house that was burglarized at some point in his life and suffered from PTSD. Whatever it was, it must have been serious, because if Chris, Steven, or I ever found a door unlocked, we quietly fixed it, covering for the poor soul who made the egregious error.

Rule 1a. Don’t you dare use the cookie-designated, double-insulated sheet pans when you cook pizza rolls. This isn’t rule two, it’s up there in importance with rule one, but since we can’t have two number ones, cookie pans are 1a. This was an infraction of the highest order, and I knew that. I was so aware of the severity of this mistake that I wouldn’t cook anything on a sheet pan, for any reason, because I was certain I would choose the wrong one and be booted out. Kicked to the curb with my cat and flatulent bulldog. He really loved my human boy though, so he would have kept him during the eviction. Which would have been fine, Danny was a much better mother than I was anyway.

The list of rules went on and included things such as how to throw away your trash when we had a family meal and used our fanciest disposable dinnerware. If you didn’t know that there was a certain way to throw away your paper plates and red Solo cups, let me enlighten you. Everyone who drank anything was to stack their empty cups, one inside the other, and no one was to throw any of them into the trash can until the stack was complete. The space inside the garbage can was limited and precious, and you would be remiss to waste any of the available air in the thirteen-gallon trash tomb. More important than the cup stacking was the plate stacking. Under no circumstances should you ever leave the table with a single plate, piled with your breakfast scraps. Everyone gathered their plates into a teetering tower by pouring their leftover food onto the top plate, and sliding their gravy-smeared paper carcass to the bottom, all while trying to keep the tower from tumbling. When the plate pillar was tall enough that you worried for the cleanliness of the floor or your freshly washed shirt, you used both hands to smash from the top and bottom and walked the perilous journey up the two stairs to the garbage can. Once there, you didn’t simply place the structurally suspect column into the trash can, you had to flip it upside down, so that no food was visible when you gazed upon your discarded culinary cargo. If you were the monster who put the plates in the can right side up, God help you. I hope you said your morning prayers, because it was possible you would meet your maker that day.

You want to be polite and wipe the table after dinner? Don’t do it. At least not at a Compton gathering. There’s a very specific pattern your rag must follow to get the table Compton-clean, and none of the rest of us are capable of doing it as well as they can. It’s just a fact, move on. Go do something your simple mind can handle, like load the dishwasher. Just don’t unload it when it’s done running, because it needs to be propped open for at least an hour, so the dishes can dry properly before they’re put away. And make sure you thoroughly rinse each dish and utensil, because Danny Compton didn’t use the dishwasher to wash the dishes, it was mostly just to sanitize them. He firmly believed they should sparkle before you put them in.

The dishwasher can only do so much! he would holler, if he found a rogue knife with peanut butter still smeared on its edges.

Living with my father-in-law did have a lot of perks. Although his rules were intense, he wasn’t a Nazi soldier, demanding everyone stay in line, or death be to all. Even if one of Chris’s favorite things to yell at him was Nein! Nein! Nein! when he would go off on a tangent about a minor misstep someone made. Our son was generally immune from the scoldings, seeing as how he was darling and only three, and I never got a serious verbal beat down, probably because I’m a girl, and Danny had a special place in his heart for the fairer sex. Chris and Steven though, they better not let their tires creep off the driveway and onto his perfectly manicured grass …

Food was a primary perk of living under Danny Compton’s roof. The man could cook, and