Outnumbered Two to One

At some point my husband and I delude ourselves into thinking the art museum would make a great family outing. Admission is next to nothing, comparatively speaking, and we figured our children were about due for a hefty dose of culture. Why we thought our 18 month old would do anything other than screech at the top of his lungs is beyond me.

The rest of the children were cooperative enough to start, but unfortunately the museum was not conducive to quiet contemplation. The first room on our tour, was a like giant empty banquet hall. Art galore on the walls, pieces my daughters disregarded as squiggles, but the rest of the room, aside from a pair of austere benches, was completely bare. That was too much of an invitation for my kids who proceeded to run in circles like a bunch of galloping ponies, drawing the attention of the rather severe security guards who for the rest of our visit felt the need to shadow our entire family like we were going to walk off with a showpiece tucked in the back of the stroller. Or worse yet, that we might let our little hellions rip all their valuable and indecipherable art to shreds.

It was a tad stressful. My five year old drama king, was putting on quite a show, dragging himself through the museum as if each of his tiny shoes was filled with cement. He was “starving” he’d say, his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. It was really hard to do any art appreciating under those conditions. They had a very fascinating Cuban art exhibit that I wasn’t able to take in as fully as I would have liked. My kids were practically cheering on the elevator ride back down to the lobby.

I’m hoping they gleaned some sort of culture from our trip though, at the very least through osmosis.

The highlight of the day for them—visiting the Barnes and Noble after lunch.

Is the kind where I’m not the guest of honor.

Don’t get me wrong, babies are fabulous, tremendous blessings, but I don’t envy anyone those first few months. The transition from regular sleep pattern to 24 hour living is a big adjustment. I remember always measuring my day by feedings, instead of hours. Days had no beginnings or endings, just that constant looping, sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, it was all incidental.

Maybe postpartum just made me a little loopy.

In any case, I ingested plenty of party food today, for which I’ll surely be paying later. It was a friendly gathering, although I can’t say I’m a big fan of the baby shower games.

I came home with a prize though. The game - identify the most melted candy bars in the baby diapers. The resemblance to baby poop is so uncanny, I had to toss the remainder of my tetrazzini in the trash. It really turned my stomach. I know my chocolate bars though, for sure.

I’m also an expert on poop, but that talent is somewhat less handy than you’d think.

I am not convinced that a Glad Forceflex bag would be able to withstand the sharp edges of a dismantled piano, especially when it can’t even hold up against a flattened Eggo waffle box without tearing clean through. Unfortunately I’ve got an industrial sized box from our buying club, so I’ve got to keep using them till they run out. Seriously though, they’re driving me bananas. Especially since most of my garbage bags are filled from top to bottom with gross goodies I definitely don’t want spilling out across my living room. I won’t go into details about my son’s toxic diapers but use your smello-imagination.  There’s also tons of dripping grossness that needs to be contained, I’ve got a terrible habit of letting things fester in my fridge until they reanimate. These are definitely not things you want to step on barefoot.

I will never believe another commercial again.

Also, the low temperature here today is 89 degrees. That’s not a complaint, just a sad and very humid fact.

At the grocery store today, me with four in tow, I stopped in the grocery aisle to help an elderly woman compare the labels on two cartons of Lactaid. She was very sweet and apparently very lonely. She engaged me in conversation across six aisles and with my kids dancing circles around us, except for my oldest who was rolling her eyes dramatically.

She explained to me how the grocery store was her only chance at conversation, how when she got back home it would be just her and the dogs. She was volunteering quite a bit of information and I wondered if she was alone. She told me how when she married, her husband never allowed her to go outside and talk to the neighbors, how to this day she didn’t know any of them.

“This was how it was then,” she told me, “your husband told you to do something and you did it. Things are different now, women do what they want.”

It was almost girlish the way she kept giggling, her hands fluttering around her face. Every now and then she would glance at my oldest and say “She thinks I’m crazy, but it’s true.”

I didn’t mind the exchange really, she was sweet. Unfortunately I had more pressing matters to attend to. My youngest was battling his restraints, my five year old tugging awkwardly at his crotch.

Still she went on. About her grandchildren, how they were fair-skinned and blue-eyed though her son was not. How her daughter-in-law vowed that if he ever asked her for a DNA test he’d be facing divorce papers.

“Why not take the test, if you have nothing to hide?” she asked me, searching my eyes for approval. I shrugged and smiled politely, pushing my stroller, nodding, shrugging.

I felt bad for her because she was old and lonely, yet something in her seemed trapped in this naïve social awkwardness.

Eventually we parted ways, her at coffee and cereal, me shoving off to bread, but the whole weird exchange stuck with me. I’m guessing the husband is no longer around if she only has a pack of dogs to go home to. Not to mention the fact that she’s out and about, loitering in the dairy section. I almost wanted to take her home with me.

Almost, but I think my husband would kill me.

I am not by nature a happy-go-lucky kind of person. I’ve never been described as chipper, or upbeat, or cheerful, or bubbly. Think instead words like cynical, sarcastic, negative, and morose. Think dark and occasionally demented. Most of that, I admit, is somewhat subdued, being that I’m a mom and I try not to frighten my children on a regular basis. But with my tween skirting depression, I’ve felt the need to compensate a bit. So today, I turned the happy up…LOUD.

It took some effort. I led some aerobics for my girls, baked cookies, held a movie screening in the living room for “Spiderwick Chronicles”, which we really enjoyed, complete with movie candy and buttered popcorn. 

I didn’t scowl once. I didn’t scold. I smiled. A lot.  I was on, really. Telling then retelling stories where I either fell, or was chased by dogs, or had to get stitches, complete with exagerrated facial expressions and physical gestures.  

It wasn’t easy for me. I love having fun with my kids and I love making them laugh, but sadness is contagious and having to single handedly lift that cloud that’s recently settled on our home is hard, particularly when financial strains and other factors have the adult part of my brain in pretzel knots.

Secretly I’ve been wanting to curl up into the fetal position all day long. Funny thing about pretending to be happy though, when everyone’s laughing it stops being an act.

I thought we were past it, the death thing.

But today after what appeared to be a jolly time on the double Slip n’ Slide, my nine year old wrapped herself in a beach towel and proceeded to sob unconsolably. At the heart of her troubles, the inevitability and finality of death.

Needless to say, she was bringing me down.

She is by nature a happy go lucky, clowning around, no sweat kind of gal. To see her alternately morose and grieving, really broke my heart. It even had an effect on her older sister, who on a good day would find her unbearably annoying. But the sadness was toxic, warranting a hug from my surly teen, whose normal reaction to physical displays of affection is “it burns, it burns”.

My thoughtful little tween is better now, smiling and joking. But I was a little stressed this afternoon, considering even whether or not I should have her speak to a counselor. We haven’t lost any family members of late, and the way she’s struggling with the concept has me more than a little concerned. For all my hugs and comforting words it seems she didn’t snap out of it until she was absolutely ready. I can’t say I offered anything useful, to this day I’ve never lost anyone close to me, I suppose navigating that grief is something we’ll all have to learn together.

Living off a single income blows. I know we’ve got it good compared to some - a roof over our heads, sufficient food in my children’s bellies, we all have shoes. Still, making money stretch is a challenge, deciding what we really need vs. what would make our lives easier vs. stuff we want for craps and giggles. It puts a strain on us.

Today we bought our five year old a twin mattress, because he’s been sleeping in a toddler bed on a nine year old crib mattress for a couple of years. A mattress with boxspring and frame was roughly $350, from there it was on to BJs to spend another $200 on snackfoods and cleaning products, from their it was on to Super Target to pick up groceries, a baby shower gift and a birthday gift, $180. The whole time my husband’s mood was sinking from happy camper, to brooding shopper, to dejected spender, to depressed grunt. It seems like it gets harder and harder to keep our heads up, there is always some large purchase or bill we’ve got to tackle and the idea of saving becomes more and more unlikely.

I read articles on how to save, online posts with tips and ideas, but the reality is so much harder. We were hoping to expand on our 1200 sq. ft. home but after our appraisal came in low, that home equity loan is looking like a long shot.

That mattress we bought today, barely fits in the boys’ room, with the baby’s crib and all their stuff. We’ve just got to live with it really. Growing up I shared a room, actually a full sized bed, with my sister the entire time I lived at home. I turned out OK (mostly), so I tell myself it’s not a big deal. Get rid of some of the unneccessary clutter and move on.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Put that on my list of crap to do. I’ll get to it once I figure out how to eliminate sleep from my agenda.

My nine year old daughter has been brooding. She is by definition a brooder. She is the one of my children who is and I expect always will be an enigma. I suspect she is the brightest of the bunch, creative with an offbeat and sharp sense of humor her siblings so far do not possess. She’s quirky but not very good at expressing her feelings. Her older sister, my sassy teen, ok more like surly teen, often suffers from verbal diarrhea. Which is great in that I almost always know what is vexing her, she likes to broadcast it, with plenty of eye rolls for punctuation. My darling middle child does not.

So here it is 10 PM, everyone tucked in their respective beds and suddenly their is weeping coming from the girls’ room, sobs and snorts usually reserved for some kind of traumatic injury like a stubbed toe. Instead she’s crying because she’s afraid of death. I don’t have a band-aid for that one.

After extensive in the dark interviews with her, I learn that my teen had mentioned off-hand that a certain musician had died in his sleep during a casual conversation that my nine year old overhead.

People dying in their sleep can scare the crap out of anyone, but of course this tidbit set the ball rolling in her tiny little head, and she started worrying not just about not waking up but about car accidents and murderers and disease. It makes my heart hurt and my brain too. What the heck do I tell her? That I myself worry about all these things, that I pray for their safety and well being on a nightly basis, that if I really let myself dwell on all the things that could happen, I’d never get out of bed?

Nope. I hugged her and told her nothing bad would happen, that she wasn’t sick, that we would protect her, that God was watching over her, that tomorrow we’d do something fun and she would feel better. Simple words, stupidly simple. Maybe she doesn’t believe them 100%, when she came out for tissue her eyes were still wet but she was holding back the sobs and that’s something.

Tomorrow there will be distractions enough hopefully to prod her mind onto other lighter topics, milder worries. Tonight, I’m just hoping her dreams are peaceful.

I have them every so often, these self doubting parenting moments. I think from the moment my oldest daughter was delivered I knew instinctively I was scarring her for life. Those first few weeks were riddled with anxiety and crying jags. She survived though and she wears her scars pretty well I should add.

Everyone commits minor parenting faux pas. A little too much TV before bedtime, cereal and milk for dinner, occasionally allowing the Playstation to babysit, letting the baby wear his PJs all day. No big deal.

Sometimes though, I really step in it and those mistakes are harder to admit. My five year old son was eating his dinner this evening sitting crosslegged on the floor of my mom’s house. I wasn’t paying attention because I was following the baby around with a spoonful of beans and rice, which he was deftly dodging. At some point my son walks away from his plate of food, leaving it wide open for my mom’s mutt to devour. So of course, rather than own up to my role in this less than disastrous disaster, I fly off the handle and go on a shrieking rant about how he should have been paying attention. Nevermind the fact there were at least five other people in the room who could have just as easily kept an eye out, since my little boy is only five. He cried and I might have used the “F” word once.

I can’t even justify that. I acted like a butt. So I apologized and fed him food the dog hadn’t slobbered on and he was fine. We even had a good laugh about how his toes end up in my nostrils everytime he sneaks into our bed.

The point is I don’t want to have to apologize for being less than rational, for ripping a five year old a new one, for being scary. I don’t want to but I know it won’t be the last time, because last I checked I was human and sometimes that overwhelmed feeling sneaks up on me and I don’t know I’m standing on the brink of a meltdown until I’m tumbing head first into it. My kids have them, so how can I expect myself to be immune.

My little boy forgave me, so I’ll take his lead and forgive me too, at least for tonight.

After spending most of the day in my pajamas…I decided in the early afternoon to head out to the grocery store, with a brief stop over at the local Blockbuster to rent a flick for the kids. Sounds easy enough. Were I alone, it would have been a snap. I tend to be very goal oriented when it comes to my shopping - need “x”, find “x”, pay for “x”, go home.

Going shopping with one child is a whole different ball game. Going shopping with all four is like playing a ball game in outer space where the rules keep changing. It’s inevitable, I can understand that, when you have four, completely different personalities coming together for a single purpose…difficulties, complications are bound to arise.

The baby was in his stroller, strapped in but struggling wildly against his bonds. Occasionally removing his shoes to chew on them. This I tried to manage by keeping him moving at a fairly good speed, which made it a little difficult to browse movie titles, but whatever, picking out an entertaining family flick was the least of my worries.

Behind me the other children were in formation, for about half a minute, before my nine year old and my five year old took off in opposite directions, with my thirteen year old barking orders at them because she suffers from a severe mommy complex. As the oldest she feels it’s her obligation to boss the younger kids around if I fail to respond to a perceived crisis. This all usually involves her calling her sister stupid, or telling her brother to shut up, or even shaking a surly teen finger at the baby, who I keep telling her doesn’t entirely understand english yet. Everywhere we went today, we trailed disruption and noise behind us like a toxic wake. Occasionally people glared, but mostly they avoided eye contact.

Mediating these little skirmishes and trying to remember what the heck I came to the market for to begin with, requires a higher order of thinking that I rarely possess. I’m also very aware that on outings like these I look like the nutty mom who can’t keep her kids under control. No, I don’t just look like the frazzled mom, I am the frazzled mom, I am the posterchild for frazzled mom-dom.

I come home and I wonder, what the heck I ever volunteer to leave the house for. Eventually I’ll forget all that and head out again. Really if I wanted my life to be simple, I would not have had four children. Simple, for the most part, is overrated.