'Cuz of Cousins

My teenaged daughter has become disillusioned with the artwork in her bedroom.  It's been there for years, but, suddenly, she's tired of it.

Even though she was one of the artists.

Before that room was her bedroom, it was a playroom.  And when it was a playroom, there was a day, or two, when the players in that playroom played Michelangelo.

Only with the wall, because they were short.

When we needed it to become her bedroom, we shoved her bed up against the wall and hid most of it.  She never said a word.

But now that she is contemplating having some cousins in her bedroom, she wants the room painted.

When she mentioned it, it became the four hundred eighty-sixth thing on my list of things to do before this upcoming event involving her cousins.

I sighed.  I said I understood but didn't know. . .

Then I went to bed and thought about it.

I remembered a day in my life when I was about her age and became ashamed of my bedroom.  My older sister had convinced me that we "had to" write our names on our wallpaper so that people would know we had been there.

She thought we were celebrities.

The wallpaper was old-fashioned, anyway, but her name scribbled on my wall, and my childish nickname scribbled even more wildly right under it did nothing to improve it.

A new girl moved into the neighborhood, and I wanted to take her into my room.

But, first, I wanted my room transformed.

My parents never seemed to have extra cash, and my mother was suffering from tennis elbow that summer, but Dad purchased some fake paneling, and Mom spent hours on the ladder painting the ceiling white with that very same tennis elbow.  New Priscilla curtains were bought for my window, and also a new light fixture for the ceiling.

I felt like Cinderella when the godmother came.

So, I sighed again, and we went the next day to buy paint.

While my daughter and I pored over all the available colors, my husband grew bored and went to talk to a salesperson.  By the time I joined them, I seemed to have missed some vital conversation, the gyst of which seemed to be that we should buy a whole lot of paint we didn't need and a lot of other things, too.

"It's only a bedroom," I said.  "I don't think we need two gallons."

The paint she was recommending was about three times as expensive as what I had anticipated.  Granted, it's been a lot of years since I've bought paint.

She also thought we should buy two gallons of primer.

My frugal nature reasoned that the primer would only be needed on that one corner of the room, and we most definitely did not need two gallons for that.

We ended up with two gallons of a paint-primer mix.  And a bunch of other stuff to help us apply it to the walls.

I spent the holiday applying the first coat, somewhat ruefully covering a pink-toned off-white with a blue/green-toned off-white.  At least her sister finally believed as she saw the difference that her own bedroom really was already pink.

The permanent marker seemed to be covered with each coat, but only for a few minutes.

The backwards wobbly initial and the magenta and turquoise faces peered out at me as cheerfully as ever.

I gave in to the seeming inevitability that primer would be needed, and picked some up from the store the next day.

I drove to work thinking there must be someone I knew who would know exactly--without blunder--exactly what I should use.  I couldn't afford to invest much more into this.

Bing!  I realized I had a cousin who would know exactly what to do.  I messaged him in the morning.  I checked for a response throughout the day, but didn't receive one, so I headed to the store without much wisdom.

A different salesperson talked me into purchasing the more expensive primer by assuring me confidently, "That will cover your permanent marker!" I did, however, only pick up a quart.

When I got home, I told my cousin, "Never mind," thinking my problem was solved.

Immediately, he wrote back with the answer.  It was not the product I'd picked up.

I applied my expensive primer.  Twice.  It did not cover.

When I told my husband about the product my cousin had recommended, he said, "Oh, yeah.  She (meaning the first salesperson) showed that to us."

She had shown it to him, perhaps, but I had never heard of it.

So I found myself at the store again.  I told the saleslady that her more expensive primer that she had talked me into had not worked.  Amazingly, that didn't seem to bother her at all!  I found the product my cousin recommended, and she tried to talk me into a different form of it.  But he had described it quite thoroughly, and I had what he had described in my hand.  "That won't work as well," she said.

I went back over to the shelf and found the product--a cousin to the one in my hand--that she recommended.  I stared at them both, read the labels.  I thought about praying for inspiration, but, honestly, would God care?  Would He tell me clearly enough for me to know?

I asked myself, "Whom should I trust--my cousin who knows his stuff or this lady who steered me wrong yesterday?"

THAT helped.

So I guess the moral is that when you are trying to impress cousins, you listen to cousins you trust and don't trust cousin products not recommended by your cousin.  Then, you finish your project designed to impress your daughter's cousins on the day of your own cousins' party and go and report back to your cousin your cousins-cousin-cousin story.

Is cousin even a word? Am I spelling it right?  It looks funny to me now.