Lachrymose intolerant

We couldn’t let the year end without checking in on America’s Worst Mother&#153 to see whether Mr. Meghan has had enough of that hot Phil the Administrative Assistant lovin’ and has returned home to the messy and chaotic love-nest that is Gurdon Manor.

We’re still waiting.

With no man in her life and no mention of the kids (Midori, Aspidistra, Oprah, and Cthulu) Meghan sends out a love letter (group hug! group hug!) to her fan(s):

For the last four hours I have been rereading many hundreds of e-mails from my most excellent Swamp readers and it has reduced me to, not to put too fine a point on things, a jellied state of weepy and nostalgic gratitude.

You, dear Readers, are the kindest, funniest, and most encouraging people. If it were possible for me to dash over to each of your houses, right now, and wring your hands, I would do it. Alas, since I can’t say it in person — not even in personal replies, though heaven knows I try — let me thank you all here and now for making the past year and a half of Swamp-writing such a joy.

After coffee, the best part of Friday mornings is getting the first reactions from readers to that week’s Swamp. You’ve made me burst out laughing at your anecdotes, you have overwhelmed me with affection and support; in short, I have walked around with the 1812 Overture playing in my heart after hearing from you.

Because they like her…they really like her!

Well, some of them at least:

I bear the Bifarellis and Caywood, Journalists no malice (though amazingly they seem to bear it towards me), but I do hope that they, along with the other anti-Swampers, realized they could click on something else to read.

Any writer will tell you that it is no fun to get rude notes. But it is also true that no amount of sneering can detract from the honor and pleasure of hearing from appreciative readers such as this man:

Thank you. I am a divorced man of 50. Reading your writings has made me remember and cherish my own children, ages 30 and 26. It helps to relive the years of their youth.

Hmmmm. A divorced man in his fifties…loves kids….likes to read The Swamp. It looks like Meghan is lining up some post-Mr. Meghan love monkeys to butter her muffin, if you know what I mean and I think you do but wish you didn’t.

Meghan also has readers who use The Swamp to rekindle their memories of Days of Child Abuse Past:

And the stories! The Fever Swamp last fall about the ghastliness of children’s birthday parties brought in dozens of aargh-me-too responses. James Rudolph wondered how I could have forgotten pinatas.

On more than one occasion, I saw fathers bashing pinatas repeatedly with a baseball bat. Once, we were at a party held at the beach. The kids were unsuccessfully trying to break the pinata with a broomstick. Finally, the birthday boy’s father took the broomstick and started beating the pinata with all his strength. The pinata held firm, but the broomstick broke, and a large piece of the stick when flying across the beach and hit a small girl in the mouth.

Aw. Good times…good times….

And, of course, with so little help at home with Mr. Meghan off doing Gawd-knows-what with Gawd-knows-who for his sexual pleasure although Meghan can’t imagine Gawd-knows-why, we see that her loyal reader(s) are providing the social safety net so beloved by upper middle-class stay-at-homes who don’t look like any of the women on Desperate Housewives but still have those needs:

In the past year-and-a-half, I’ve replaced our fried doorbell by following the advice of Don McCorvey, Space Shuttle Flight Controls specialist at Boeing, laughed at reader Ralph Campbell’s account of handling a chest freezer full of rotting food (“being an Environmental and Chemical Engineer I donned a level B chemical hazard suit with an air purifying respirator,“ he wrote), and baked innumerable almond pound cakes according to Harry Rimmer’s recipe. I’ve passed off the wisdom of Jeannine Stergios as my own (“Instant gratification does not build character!”), gotten unnatural satisfaction from Sarah Peacock’s comment, “You make me feel normal,” and have been routinely tormented by the incorrigible Dave Barnhart, who lives in, apparently, Eden (“70 degrees and sunshine today. I drove with the windows AND SUNROOF open.”).

God bless you, every one!

And so we see that Meghan’s readers are just like us. People with wacky zany lives who have kids that say the dardest most cutest things and that we all own things that break and we have husbands that leave us for another man just because he has a DVD player and extensive library of gay porn…

Oh wait…that’s not all of us.

Just some of us.