“But I want the cool sauce!” my five year old whined. We had just moved the container of ranch dressing closer to his two-year-old brother, so he could dip his chicken wing in it.
“Mine!” my younger son proclaimed.
“You guys need to share it,” I said.
“Then it should be in the middle!” my older son pointed out. To him, the solution favoring his brother was quite unjust.
Dripping sweat, I staggered in the door after my Sunday afternoon run, only to hear my two-year-old wailing “Mammmmmaaaaaaaa!”
“What happened?” I asked my husband, who I found standing outside the bathroom. I peered in to see my son sitting on the potty, his face red and damp. “He hasn’t been like this since he woke up, has he?”
I recalled some of my last words as I headed out the door: “Make sure you wake up [Little Bird].”
My husband winced. “Well, he didn’t want me to get him out of bed. And then he didn’t want to go on the potty. Then he refused to let me help him off the potty. Then he didn’t want me in the room at all.”
Walking into the bathroom, I sighed, leaned down and helped my son off the potty. After pulling up his pants and helping him wash his hands, I picked him up. HIs small arms wrapped around my neck while mine embraced him. My sweat dampened his shirt as his small face pressed into my shoulder. His crying slowed and finally subsided.
Guilt pierced me. So did anger.
“Can’t I be gone for just a half-hour?” I thought. “But maybe not. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
A five-year-old boy sits at a picnic table, wailing. A Junior Ranger workbook lies in front of him, open to an I Spy activity. One animal is circled, then crossed-out, then circled again. Through tears, he keeps repeating, “I can’t erase it!”
Almost 30 years earlier, a toddler girl sat on the floor, struggling to shove a block into the wrong hole in a shape sorter. Fed up with the whole thing, she chucked it across the room.
The first was my son on a camping trip a few weekends ago. The second was me as a kid. I don’t remember it happening, but my mom has told the shape sorter story over and over again. The frustrated apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Don’t worry, I’m being careful!” my five-year-old said as he tried to pick up a piece of broken glass off the kitchen floor with his bare hands.
Twitching a few times before getting the words out, I said, “No, stop, don’t pick it up! With some things it doesn’t matter how careful you are – they aren’t safe.”
I wouldn’t recommend anyone pick up broken glass with their bare hands. But his comment made me stop and think.
I never thought I’d be so happy about having a bookshelf with actual books on it. I haven’t seen this sight for more than four years.
These books have been in hiding – shoved under my nightstand, stacked up on the bottom shelf of an end table. There’s nothing wrong with these exact books. It’s the very act of placing them on a bookshelf and trusting that they’ll stay there that’s revelatory.
While books don’t jump off shelves, they do end up on the floor when a toddler pulls them down with his sticky, wet little fingers.
I never thought the image of defeated motherhood would have two wheels. But many things surprise you as a mom.
My beloved bicycle has accompanied me over thousands of miles of riding. Currently, its back wheel is decidedly non-functional. If I pumped it up to its full pressure or God forbid, rode on it, the whole thing would burst like an overinflated balloon. Even more importantly, the bike’s chain is twisted to heck. I would crash with the first push of the pedal.
My bike isn’t normally in this state. In fact, it’s like this because of a promise I made. A few weeks ago, I promised my five-year-old that we would go for his first “big kid bike ride.” While he’s biked endless loops around the playground, this would be the first time we’d go on a multi-use trail together, both of us on our individual bikes.
But something blocked my way.
Peeling the stem of a dandelion in half and rubbing it between my fingers, I say to my older son, “I used to do this when I was a little girl.” I let the stem curl up in my hand, then hand him the green spiral. “I used to pretend they were magic.”
He touches the slick interior, rolling and unrolling the piece of flower. Plucking another dandelion, he says, “It feels like Jasper, like fur.” It’s true – the dandelion fluff does feel a little like my sister-in-law’s little terrier.
As I rub another stem between my fingers, I drift back to childhood.
Holding the hand of a little girl with my fiancé holding her other hand, I thought, “Perhaps this is what having kids is like.”
That’s because the little girl was not our daughter. She was one of the three girls that were part of the summer camp where my fiancé, Chris, and I were volunteering. To be honest, those three girls were the entire summer camp. But they were more than enough. Besides being the first kids to break my heart, they gave me a peek into what my fiancé would be like as a father.
“Let’s start school in a year or two. Clearly you’re not ready and you’re not coming back until you are. You think you can do these things, but you just can’t, Nemo!” said a puppeteer holding a cartoon fish. I immediately burst into tears. Heavy weeping wracked my body as I tried to stay quiet.
“Are you okay?” my husband leaned over and asked.
“Noooo,” I whispered between tears. I absolutely was not okay. Because that cartoon fish dad was me and I was him and we were both utterly unprepared for our kids to be starting school.
I did not expect to have a parenting epiphany at Animal Kingdom in Disney World, but there we were. (Although maybe I should have, considering I had one last time we were at Disney World.)
“What did you do at preschool today?” I ask my four-year-old son.
Silence. And then, he yells, “Boobie-chang sweet barbershop!” So much for anything resembling a coherent answer. I will never have any idea what that phrase means.
On other days, I ask that exact same question and I get, “We learned about grasshoppers! Daddy told me that there are grasshoppers that don’t fly!” And we’re off to the races. It’s a barrage of information, but it’s a lucid and informative one.
It can give you whiplash.