7 HOT GLUE AND MATHEMATICS

If you have a jar in your house filled with thousands of old buttons, you are my kind of people. And don’t ask me what I am going to do with all of those buttons until you can fully appreciate each of the buttons I have collected in this jar. Buttons from my granny’s wool coat. Buttons from vintage blouses. Buttons from shirts older than me. Heck, I buy things at Goodwill just for the buttons.

See, what you don’t know about me is that I am crafty. I may look like I prefer to spend hours in Crate & Barrel, but my love language is hot glue. I am a modern-day Picasso with a glue gun in my hand. When burlap was all the rage, I may as well have worn a “May I Help You?” vest to the local Michael’s craft store, because I was there all the time. Basically, what I am trying to tell you is that my initials are DIY. Even as I write this, I am sitting here staring at a lampshade that I think could get a little flair from some burlap, buttons, and hot glue.

I am the friend you want around when the wedding decorator is a no-show on your big day. When the silk ribbon needs draping across the two-hundred-year-old mahogany railing in the church, I can steal the twist ties off the caterer’s bread bags to make it happen. You need me to handle the flowers? I can snap twigs out of the yard and arrange them with flowers from Kroger to make your reception look like a million bucks.

Craftiness has taken me far in life. I have told you that I dipped my toe into the pageant world when I was young. And by dipped my toe, I mean I was in and out of there just long enough to win a pageant wearing a dress held up by rubber bands. The dress was too long, and I would surely trip on it and embarrass my family and hometown for years to come. So my mama did what any Southern woman would do: she bunched up the bottom of my A-line pageant gown to make handmade rosettes with RUBBER BANDS. It was magical. It made me a believer. And I won that beauty pageant. I became the enemy of contestants 3 through 16, but I didn’t care. My mama didn’t care. Maybe that is what won that pageant. If this story doesn’t belong in a Hallmark movie, I don’t know what does.

When you are a preteen and your legs are outgrowing your wardrobe, you have to be innovative. My great-grandmother’s recommendation? Let’s add some lace to the bottom—you can start a new trend. Not in 1989 you can’t. But she won. And I wore lace on the bottom of my Lee jeans to a middle-school dance. Once. I only wore the jeans once.

Thanks to my artistic prowess, I am also an interior designer. In the ’90s, we learned how to do our own interior design with stencils, and we learned how to create stamped wall borders. I have helped my mom stamp walls with brown paper bags, half a potato, and sponges cut into the shapes of ducks. We didn’t think about the fact that the ducks might show up in years to come under a coat of new paint. At just the right angle of sunlight, you can see that stamped border of ducks around my childhood bedroom thirty years later.

I have mended the sole of my broken sandal with a staple gun on the way to a job interview and fixed my blown-out flip-flop on the way to the beach… while driving… with one knee. Ponytail holder break? I can reconfigure a paper clip to get your hair off your sweaty neck in an instant. Hole in your black leggings? Give me a Sharpie.

I’ve painted crappy furniture and made it fashionably distressed. I’ve painted vases to make them look like my grandmother’s mercury glass. I have handmade more birthday gifts for my friends than I can count—journals, jewelry, headbands. I’ve wrapped them all and made the gift tag, too! I have even painted the Formica countertops in my kitchen. I will never do it again, but I am here to testify. All of this was before Pinterest was a thing. Ladies like me teach Pinterest how to hot-glue!

One of my favorite traditions around the holidays is to invite a group of ladies over for food (mostly festive dishes that involve cream cheese and bacon), and we are required to bring homemade ornaments for everyone. So if twelve are coming, you bring twelve homemade ornaments, and you leave with twelve new ornaments for your Christmas tree. We have had hand-sewn creations and ornaments made from toothpicks, felt balls, pipe cleaners, and pottery, and one even welded a Christmas tree ornament from rebar. And as the day of the party inches closer, it becomes quite a competition. Women are texting threats to each other and bragging about their own creations. You are all going down. My ornament is the best yet. You just wait. Tracey, if you show up with premade crap from Walmart, you will not be invited back next year. You will be voted off the island. Get it together. I’m telling you, this was serious crafting business. You know what I showed up with every year? Burns. Burns on my fingers from the hot-glue gun. But is it worth it? You bet your googly eyes it is.

Women in the South are either born into the crafting world or indoctrinated soon after birth with all things Hobby Lobby. We learn crafting at home and at Vacation Bible School. We then mature into bubble letters and monograms around the time of puberty—when a young girl decides she has become woman enough for her very own hot-glue gun. We get married and have children and turn our crafting skills into survival skills on a shoestring budget.

Crafting is the second commandment for Southern women, behind mastering Granny’s cornbread recipe in an iron skillet—a perfectly seasoned ironed skillet. My hot-glue gun stays plugged in, around the clock. Every good woman knows how to make a new throw pillow with an old T-shirt and some stitch-witchery. I guess when you can’t afford the newest trends at HomeGoods, you have to take matters into your own hands. The options are: I can buy a new lamp for fifty dollars, or I can bedazzle the one I’ve got and make it one of a kind, call it “boho” (also for fifty dollars). You know it’s true. I have more value in my crafting supplies than I do in my retirement account. School projects? Have no fear. Church carnival? On it. My child needs to dress like a celebrity for Spirit Week at school? Son, do you know who Liberace is?

Everything and everybody needs an update every once in a while. Can we all just pause and raise our hands in holy gratitude that we all moved beyond the ’80s bangs, Rave hairspray, and Sun In? If you have no idea what I am talking about, then may I suggest you find one of your closest friends and ask them a simple heartfelt question: “Is she making fun of me?” If your hair looks like it has hot glue IN it, then yes, I am talking about you.

Do you ever watch the Ambush Makeover on the Today show? It’s the highlight of my week. It gives me life. Those folks start off their day looking like a hobo who has never looked in the mirror, wearing a sweatshirt, not a stitch of makeup, and half-permed hair. They get snatched up and cleaned up, and then they are simply stunning. It’s like they have never seen the cover of a magazine in the checkout line at Kroger. I know you people have eyeballs. Can you not see that you may be a little washed up and need an update? How do you not know that your faded Columbia fleece is not flattering on you? What is keeping you from investing in a little touch-up here and there? Get out your Caboodles, girls! It is time. And if you can’t do it for yourself, I’ll call my friend, Carson Kressley. He will have you fixed up faster than you can say “Get a Room.”

We all need to update ourselves and our lifestyle occasionally. Look around and take an inventory to decide what needs a little fixing up. We can even apply this to the relationships in our lives. Sometimes we need to help each other do a little updating. Have someone push us out of our comfort zone. We all need to take some time to hot-glue some glitter on our weaknesses until they get mistaken for strengths. I remember a trip to Vegas with some girlfriends where we took hours in our hotel room to get ready for a concert. All of us were moms. All of us were tired, faded moms. We put on fake lashes. Flashy clothes. We did it up right. Just like we used to do on Thursday nights in college before hitting the town. It was fun to play in each other’s makeup bags and use ungodly amounts of hairspray. We couldn’t maintain that schedule during our everyday lives, but it was fun to remember and learn some trade secrets from our friends. It was fun to feel like ourselves again—even if it involved cosmetics. If you grew up in the South, then you have probably been told by your mother, “Everyone feels better with a little lipstick on.” And I agree that it’s true.

A little improvement never hurt anybody. Except when you are dating. YOU CANNOT BEDAZZLE MEN. Do not try this at home. Do not find a guy who needs a little spit shine and think you can change him, dress him up, and call him unique. Lampshades work like that, humans don’t.

There is no amount of hot glue on this earth that can fix a lack of integrity. You can’t cover his character in glitter and make it shine. You can’t crochet the holes in his dishonesty and make a scarf out of it. You can’t take his cheap self and make him act top dollar. You can’t use paper clips to hold his morals together. You can’t spray-paint a romantic desire for him to pursue you the way you ought to be pursued. You can’t papier-mâché good habits on him. You can’t just send these things into the beauty shop (or the plastic surgeon) and expect a miracle like Honey Boo Boo’s Mama June. Oh, you can try. I think every woman I know has missionary dated at least once. Don’t missionary date. You can’t change him. And you surely can’t change where he comes from. You can try. He may change for a short bit to get your attention or to get you to believe in him. But at the end of the day, those parts of him you don’t like are still there. They are just buried in colorful papier-mâché.

When a guy picks you up for a blind date in a souped-up Camaro that has the naked lady-devil decal on the back window, you should know that this man is not going to be a project. He is unchangeable. He has settled in. Now, the high school version of Heather would have been all about that sports car. But the Heather in her forties is not really into street racing anymore, ya know? When said Camaro driver also proceeds to use a buy one, get one half-off coupon at a nice restaurant and then takes you to play Goofy Golf, where he also uses a BOGO coupon for extra arcade tickets, he is probably not the level of maturity that you want to go around trying to fix. He is the blind date you just count your losses on. He is the guy you let get away. So take the gift he’s given you and RUN.

There’s the guy who called me by the wrong name during the first two hours of our date. Cut me some slack here; he looked like Bradley Cooper. He didn’t need much fixin’ on the outside, but not only was he insecure, he was as boring as a pile of hammers on the inside. Could I build a life on just looking at him? Can he just sit there and be pretty? Could I endure a life of boredom with this joker? No amount of pretty could make him interesting. No amount of refurbishing could help his personality.

If you listen closely to a girlfriend describe her new man, she will point out his flaws by how she describes him. Listen carefully. The traits she makes excuses for are the ones that scare her to death. They usually say things like “You can’t help who you love” or “We’re different. People don’t understand our love.” Slap this friend in the face. Be that friend. Because she needs to know that her rule book isn’t different. Her rule book has the same math problems of generations of women before us. While it used to be said, “Oh, she will make a good man out of him,” I am going to call the bluff of whoever said that. It’s pure propaganda. It was probably said by a woman wearing an apron in a kitchen that smelled of pound cake while her husband was still at “the office.”

I’m no mathematician here, but I have heard that healthy relationships are a multiplication problem, not addition. In a good relationship, 1 × 1 = 1. Each person must bring his or her whole self into the equation. The problem comes in when we bring our whole 1 into the relationship and the other does not. That’s where we get out the crafting supplies and try to work the magic. Unfortunately, relationships aren’t made of flair and makeovers. They aren’t simple addition. If they were, then 1 + 0 = 1, and I could be totally in control of the outcome of the relationship. Lord knows, I have tried that math problem, and it tested more like calculus. No matter what my past boyfriends or ex-husband did, I would make up for it. The less they put into the relationship, the harder I would work to make sure it looked good and acceptable on the outside.

We try to figure out what he wants, and we do everything in our power to provide it for him. Our hope is to salvage the connection. But it will not work. No matter how much we try, we can’t change him. No matter how many stamped borders she puts on his walls, his house is still condemnable.

If he’s a big fat zero, then the relationship will be a big fat zero. And there is nothing you can do about it. Put down your hot-glue gun and step away. You can pray, hope, plead, and do everything in your power to get him to see the light, but you can’t change him. And more important, you can’t make up for whatever he lacks. No matter how great you become, 10 × 0 is still 0.

Quit trying to work that math problem, girl. What you’ve got is a real problem. It may not feel like a problem when you are first dating, but as that relationship turns serious, there comes a point where you just have to face the facts.

If you think you might be in love with a zero, here are some tips for you. Ask a friend, and avoid denial. You want the relationship to work. You really do. He is cool. He is a musician. He is funny. My God, he is funny. And it’s really easy to deceive yourself. But he is still a zero in this equation. He can barely hold down a job, his emotions are all over the place, and he still lives with his parents. Listen to your friends who are honest about him. They see things you don’t because you are blinded by love.

And when you know the truth and finally see the light, be willing to walk away. You know the old saying “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours; if not, it was never meant to be”? Well, that is a terrible idea, because a lot of times the zero in the relationship comes back over and over again. And he will keep coming back. You have to learn how to lock your door and close the blinds.

Regardless of the crafting skills you possess, there is no amount of fixing up that can be done on a man you love. You can try. You can dust him off, get him prepped, and start painting on him like a fresh canvas. You can take an old boring lamp and embellish the lampshade to make it suit your taste. You’re not really changing the lamp itself. It is still there in its original form. It is still an old fire hazard with knobs missing. You haven’t changed the foundation. You’ve just put lipstick on the pig.

Burlap gets dusty. Glitter is annoying. It’s always cheaper in the long run to just buy the real thing. The one that is beautiful from the beginning. The lamp that doesn’t need anything added to it to make it work. It fits perfectly in the perfect spot in your house. So save your time and money for the real thing. It won’t disappoint. And for the love, step away from the glue gun.