The other day I was trying to put my 3-year-old in the car, and we were in a hurry, because I wanted to get to the grocery store and back before it was time for their lunch, since you definitely DO NOT want to be caught out in public when two headstrong 3-year-olds and a 9-month-old decide they’re hungry and you’re not feeding them fast enough, because, look, we’re surrounded by food and all you have to do is BUY SOMETHING FOR THEM.
That’s a fight I didn’t want to have today. So I was doing my best to buckle the 3-year-old quickly and make sure the chest piece was positioned in the exact place it should be, because I’m all about safety, while he was more concerned with waving a book he’d found in my face.
“Look, Mama,” he kept saying over and over and over again. Wave, wave, wave.
“I’m trying to buckle you,” I said.
“But look what I found,” he said, still waving it in my face. I took the book and threw it down on the floor of the van.
“Stop putting the book in my face,” I said. “I don’t like it when you shove things in my face.”
He ignored me, of course, because he’s a 3-year-old and that’s what 3-year-olds do, and he replaced a book with his finger, which I know I just saw up his nose. It took a few impressive Matrix moves that I’m still feeling today to get out of that sticky spot, and then he was buckled and we were on our merry way, my annoyance dissipating with every mile we logged, replaced by anxiety and dread, because who in their right mind takes two 3-year-olds and a 9-month-old to a grocery store? I was totally setting myself up for failure, and I knew it.
But I distracted myself by thinking about how kids probably don’t even understand the whole concept of “I don’t like having things shoved in my face,” because they don’t realize they’re shoving a book in a face. They’re just trying to get our attention. It’s how they communicate.
I know, because I watched them after we got home from the store. The two 3-year-olds were talking to each other, and one would hold a train right up into the face of the other one and say, “I want this one. Do you want this one?” Twin 1 was trying to pick a fight, but Twin 2 wasn’t taking the bait, mostly because he couldn’t see the train that was right up in his face. It was too close. So he just ignored it and said, “No,” and went right on playing.
There are so many things that kids don’t understand. Take, for instance, the “please don’t put your stinky feet on me.”
First of all, kids don’t even know what stinky smells like. They sort of know stinky when it comes to things like farts and sweaty armpits and food they don’t like, but when it comes to anything connected to their body, stinky is not a word in their vocabulary. They will come in from playing outside in the middle of a Texas summer and smell like a whole pasture full of cows and dung and the dog that was dispatched to round up all the strays who need milking, even though we don’t live anywhere near cows. They will fight to the death about taking a bath, no matter how many times we tell them that the smell they keep looking around trying to find is actually them.
Every night at dinner, the 9-year-old, without even thinking, will put his stinky feet that have been trapped inside his tennis shoes all day, on my legs. All over them, actually. He moves them up and down and side to side, because he has trouble sitting still after all that overstimulation at school. I can practically see the fumes swirling up from his black socks with the neon green toes, and those fumes get to be rubbed all over my legs. Just what I wanted.
He does it because he’s not thinking and because he loves me, but THIS IS NOT LOVE. Trust me. It’s dinnertime, and all I can smell is Fritos mixed with pinto beans and really aged cheese, even though what we’re having is salmon with salad.
Kids also don’t understand things like “Please give me some personal space,” because what is personal space to kids? They will touch me and prod me and lean into me and not think twice about it. They will stand so close to me I’ll trip over them on my way to get some requested milk. They will fall all over each other and think it’s hilarious instead of annoying. They will cling to my legs on the walk to school, and then, when they’ve disappeared from my view because there’s a baby strapped to my frontside, they will stop, and my Matrix move skills will be tested once more as I try to stop myself from falling, and I’ll be sore for another month.
“I would like to go to bed” is probably the most misunderstood phrase in our house. To our kids, this means, “I would like you to come into our room a thousand times seeking extra hugs and kisses and to especially tell us in no less than 1,000 words what you did on the playground today.” Just when we’re falling into dreamland and it’s looking like the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen, someone will knock on our door with something important to tell us, like how he thinks that tomorrow is crazy sock day and he doesn’t have any crazy socks, so can he borrow some, and it will take us five more hours to get back to sleep. “I would like to go to bed” is also code for “You can totally get out of your bed and take all the books down from the library shelves,” if you’re asking our 3-year-old twins, which is why we use a locking doorknob installed backwards on their room and lock them in it at night, because 3-year-olds roaming the house at night is scarier than that freaky doll Chucky coming for a visit with his eyes that never blink.
“Chew with your mouth closed” looks like a 3-year-old trying to figure out how in the world you’re supposed to chew food when you close your mouth, looking confusedly at all his brothers who have mastered the talent and then, after rolling the food around his mouth with his tongue, opting to swallow it whole so he chokes on a stump of unchewed broccoli. “You’re not hungry; you’re just bored,” gets me tagged as the “worst mother ever.” And “That’s not in our budget right now” results in a boy fetching my wallet, pulling out a credit card and saying, “Then use this,” reminding me that I need to teach him about responsible use of credit cards, because society’s claws are thick.
So maybe things get a little lost in translation, but the truth is I’m kind of glad. Because it’s those times I feel really annoyed that a kid is waving something in my face and I’ve already asked him to stop once that I remember how these are all places where I get to consider things from their point of view and I get to remember what it was like to be a kid and I get to take a deep, long breath and hope I’m breathing in patience and not more boiling annoyance. And then I get to be a good mother who teaches and directs and walks them toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
But, seriously, if you don’t get your stinky feet off me…
It’s not just that this bathroom smells like a swamp. It’s also that there is always mud in the sink, from boys playing out back in the pit I told them to “not get in or else,” and, of course, they thought they’d try their hand at the “or else,” because mud and boys and fun, and then coming in to wash their hands (if they bother at all). It’s also that there are soggy toilet paper rolls in the trash can, because one of the 3-year-olds decided it would be funny to put one in the sink and turn on the water and watch it “turn curly.” (At least this is what we hope he did. Nothing has been confirmed, because when you ask a 3-year-old “What happened?” you’re likely to hear all about a roly poly out in the backyard that they put into the cracks between the porch rails and how they fell on their booty but it didn’t hurt and then they ate some popcorn that you know you didn’t make today but they probably found tucked into the couch from the last movie night three weeks ago. But, all things considered, I’d rather assume it’s not potty water that soaked the toilet paper roll and the floor and mostly his white monster shirt that he refused to take off because “I LOVE THIS MONSTER AND HE NEEDS ME TO WEAR HIM AND HE’S MY FRIEND AND I DON’T CARE IF MY SHIRT IS WET.” I didn’t feel like arguing for 36 hours, so I let it be.)
It’s also that there are these gigantic spit balls leering at me from the ceiling every time I dare to think I might use this bathroom instead of making the long trip upstairs to my no-boys-allowed one.
This bathroom is the guest bathroom. I am always, ALWAYS embarrassed when someone’s over and they say, “I’ll be right back” and I see them heading for it. I always want to give a disclaimer or some kind of warning that will encompass everything that has happened in this bathroom. It doesn’t matter how many times Husband cleans it (because I have a sensitive gag reflex). It doesn’t matter how recently that cleaning happened. It doesn’t matter if none of the boys have even used it since that cleaning. They have left their marks everywhere. Most notably, now, the ceiling.
We’re not really sure which one did this little prank. We’re only sure that it’s been there for three weeks now, because Husband and I are just.too.tired to try to scrape giant spit balls off the ceiling.
I’m sure it was so much fun. I imagine one of them closing and locking themselves into this bathroom under the guise of needing to “go number two,” because they knew it would buy them some time. And it probably wasn’t even premeditated. They were probably washing their hands and looked over at the perfectly fine toilet paper roll hanging beside the toilet and then the other used-to-be-perfectly-fine-but-is-now-soggy toilet paper roll dripping in the trash can and then, innocently enough, looked up at the ceiling. Then back at the soggy roll and back at the ceiling and back again. It was such a perfectly white, untouched space. I imagine he tore off a small piece of that soggy toilet paper and tossed it up with all the force his little 5-year-old body could muster, just to see if it would stick. And it did. And then he realized it worked, and this would be a REALLY fun game, and he waved his older brothers in and they all started playing this fun game called “How Big a Spitball Can We Make Stick to the Ceiling.”
And before we even knew what was happening, we had a ceiling full of gigantic spit balls.
I remember the lure of this game when I was a kid. My brother would put bigger and bigger wads of wet paper into a straw and launch it toward the ceiling. Boys at school would do it while the teacher’s back was turned, and the boys with the biggest wads that stuck AND went unnoticed by the teacher got the most points. I never did understand its entertainment. It just made me shudder a little, walking under all that spit. Maybe that was the point.
My brother and the boys at school never got such an impressive wad of toilet paper to stick to a ceiling, which has me looking for the biggest spit ball record in the Guinness Book of World Records. I’m pretty sure my kids are close.
All this day we have bickered and grumbled because little boys didn’t get in the car when we said it was time to leave. Because little boys, in fact, unbuckled and wandered back into the house to pour their own glasses of milk because they just couldn’t wait for us to give them the water bottles we’d packed to bring out with us; to use the potty because they didn’t do it the first time we asked; to pack a bag of stuffed animals for him and every one of his brothers, because today is a Family Fun Day, and the stuffed animals are in our family, too.
And here we are, after a week filled with one speaking event and three band gigs and a house that bears the overwhelming craziness of it all so, instead of cleaning and catching up and making some dent on the week we left behind and the one we have ahead, we marked today as a Family Fun Day. We’re going to enjoy a day downtown in our city, visiting the Alamo and a park and some other city landmarks.
Except we almost don’t go because of all these not-following-directions-the-way-we-want-them-to children.
It’s only 10 a.m., and already their daddy and I feel exhausted. Family Fun Day, ruined by boys who want to do things their way, that’s what I’m thinking as we pull out of the driveway.
But halfway to downtown, I see it, how we have not been looking with the right eyes today.
If I look with frustration eyes, all I will see is frustration, everywhere. If I look with defeat eyes, all I will see is defeat, everywhere. If I look with expectation eyes, all I will see is failed expectation, everywhere.
Sometimes all it takes is a heart-turning to turn the whole day around.
And it’s an effort, watching a boy who wants to linger at a cool toy-airplane stand, even after we’ve told him to come on five times, and seeing not a disobedient child but a budding scientist interested in the way things work, wondering how that plane can actually fly, how he might make one just like it or better.
And it takes practice, when we’re sitting at that fountain, eating our lunch, and those boys throw rocks and leaves and whatever they can find into a wishing pond and we tell them they should stop so it doesn’t clog the whole thing up and, five minutes later, they forget our instructions, to see not children who deliberately refuse to comply but boys who have wishes to make and no coins to toss.
And it takes strength to walk all that way back to the car and tell little boys to get in and not fly off the handle when they run the sidewalk instead, strength to look on them with eyes that see little boys who had a great Family Fun Day and aren’t quite ready for it to end instead of boys who intentionally choose not to listen to parents.
Seeking wisdom and spiritual maturity and humility, here, means opening heart-eyes to see without assumption, without preconceived notions, without expectation.
How might our families change if we looked with these eyes?
How might the world change if we looked with these eyes?
The lights flicker off, and the two oldest scramble to parent laps because it’s dark and they are afraid. We hold them, the 7-year-old, all 54 pounds of him, on my lap, and the 4-year-old on his daddy’s.
“When will the lights come back on?” the oldest asks, his voice tight with anxiety. Candles lick light on his lined brow.
No one knows the answer to this question, and so he prays, right there in the middle of dinner, that the lights will come back on right now. And he waits. And they don’t.
It’s apparent to me, but maybe not so apparent to him, that his prayer was answered long before he voiced it, because there, in the center of our table, is a line of candles shaking warm.
The darkness has not overcome the light.
These boys fear the dark, but without the dark this night, we would not eat by candlelight, and without the dark they would not huddle so close around our table, some on laps, some leaning near, and without the dark and those candles flashing flames, we would not laugh about the shadow animals our hands make.
The darkness, tonight, has pulled us closer to one another.
We finish dinner with our daily thankfuls, and the 4-year-old says, “I’m thankful for the lights, and I hope they come back on soon.”
“Sometimes we don’t realize how thankful we are for something until it’s gone, do we?” I say, and I hug him tight because he has traded places with his big brother and wiggles now on my lap.
I think of the little years, how they are gifts sometimes hard to see for all their work, and then they’re gone faster than we can blink. We can miss this gift of moments, of every moment, until all those moments are gone, until we mark another year’s turning, until we no longer look or feel young.
The light is a gift, and sometimes it is only when we sink into dark, until only that dim glow remains, until the light shimmers soft yet eternal, that we can fully see it for its beauty.
Tonight, we say our prayers around a hushed table, that the lights will come back on soon, that God will protect the workers repairing power lines, that He will guard all who live exposed to this windy winter storm, and we send boys to bed with lights blazing once more, and we end this day with greater wisdom moving in our deep.
No matter how unexpected that darkness, or how long it stays, the light will always endure.
In this episode, Rachel talks about a spooky middle grade novel, a helpful site for content marketing information, her NaNoWriMo word count and the music of Mumford & Sons.
Husband: What is something you enjoy about being in a big family?
8-year-old: Not having a lot of attention?
Me: Wait. You enjoy that?
8-year-old: I was being sarcastic. Watching something on TV when you guys try to clean.
Me:
Husband:
8-year-old: That’s what I enjoy about being in a big family.
6-year-old: I would rearrange our whole living room.
Me: Oh yeah?
6-year-old: I would put the couch here and the loveseat here and the big chair here.
Me:
6-year-old: And then, in our kitchen, I would put the table here and—Wait. Did we win that? [pointing to the dishwasher.]
Husband: No, buddy. That came with the house. We’ve had it for nine years.
6-year-old:
Husband:
6-year-old: Huh.
5-year-old: What’s 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10?
6-year-old: I DON’t KNOW! There can’t be that many—wait. Thirty!
Me:
6-year-old:
Me:
6-year-old: I’m really good at math. That’s how I know.
5-year-old [to 6-year-old]: I’m glad I’m not sitting by you because we would fight.
6-year-old: We’re not twins.
Me [Singing]: Everything is awesome!
6-year-old: Actually, everything isn’t awesome. Death isn’t awesome.
Me:
6-year-old:
Me:
6-year-old: Death is definitely NOT awesome.
But a quick word first: Some of us think, when we have that “one, big book idea” that that’s it. We’re done. We launched out book and that’s all we’ll ever need to do.
False. If we’re interested in making writing a business, we will have to immediately pick up a pen and go at it again. And again. And again.
You know the best way to make it as a parent writer? Keep writing. Book after book after book. Because one will probably never be enough. I’m just telling the truth.
But this is good news, too. Because chances are, not only do we have more book ideas, but with each book we put together we’ll also be able to experiment with our launches until we get it exactly right for us and our audience.
Now that I got that out of the way, I wanted to share with you a nifty list for what I’ve included with my second launch, using what I learned from the first launch. This list will continue to evolve and change, but, for now, here’s what I believe is needed for an effective launch.
There are many different aspects of launching a product. There’s the initial getting-information-out, which is essentially creating a buzz about the product. The prelaunch time. The earlier this can start, the better. Months in advance would be great. I usually don’t plan well enough for that. This second launch had a landing page about six weeks before the project was scheduled to release.
Even if our projects won’t be done for a couple of months or a year, the sooner we can get a landing page up and start generating interest in it, the better our launch will end up going. What I’ve learned most from my process is that even when I’m in the rough draft writing stage, I need to be thinking about how I’ll be marketing my book. With so much out on the market, it’s harder and harder to stand apart, so it’s important to have that plan already in place.
So, in case you missed it, the first step to an effective book launch is a landing page.
Elements of a good landing page:
A section with the book cover on display, along with a great product description. I hate writing product descriptions, mostly because it’s like “selling” the book that I wrote, but this is hugely important for drawing people in. Product descriptions are some of the most important tools for selling a book.
A video that details, in a general way, what the project is and why you decided to write it. For my particular project, I decided to include little snippets of my family, because the project was one about living from family values. For fiction projects, you can document the writing process (or if it’s too late and you already have it written, you can stage it).
Good copy that tells a story about the project. My landing page included some of the story behind what drove me to write the project (which was a nonfiction book—but I’ll be trying this out with a fiction project in December), what’s included it in and, the most important part, when it will release.
A section where those interested can sign up for an email notification for when the project releases. This is important. These are the people who will be your primary customers. They’re already interested in the project—enough to sign up for a list where they’ll be emailed once the project is on the market. I chose to incentivize my email notification list with a companion guide about the project. People love having an inside look (for fiction) or some kind of practical application (for nonfiction). My fiction project, which will have a landing page sometime in December, will include a short story “prequel” that will introduce people to some of the characters.
It doesn’t end at the landing pages. Husband, who is a content marketing consultant, detailed out a three-week social media marketing campaign, where I would:
Share a book excerpt on my blog once a week
Post on Facebook and Twitter about the project three times every week.
Week one: The process and behind-the-scenes
Day one: Text
Day two: Picture
Day three: Video
Week Two: Origin story/inspiration behind the project
Day one: Text
Day two: Picture
Day three: Video
Week Three: Who the book is for and how the world will be different because of it.
Day one: Text
Day two: Text
Day three: Video or picture (in our case it was an infographic)
Three days before the book launched, we released three pre-launch videos with the following content (we will probably change this order next time):
Video 1: The story behind why I wrote the series
Video 2: What I hope people will get out of the series
Video 3: A real look inside (in the case of this particular book launch, it was how hard it was to live from our values every single day)
This might look like a lot of work. But here’s the thing: I did all this work once, for a series that will be spanning an entire year. When I do it again in December for my fiction series releasing in March, I will only have to do it once for a project that will span about five years. When we’re writing series, we can get the most out of a thing like a landing page, and when subsequent books release, we can still just point people to the landing page. It might be a lot of work for single books, but the truth is, single books probably need it even more (and also a greater lead time).
If you want to know more about the details of how to do this, visit my latest project landing page or connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, but I am actively learning and tweaking my process so that I can launch my books into the marketplace with the greatest momentum possible.
“I’m halfway to being an adult,” you said just this morning, and I nearly collapsed with the grief of it, because it feels like just yesterday, because you are my precious boy, because you were the first. And you saw, because your face changed completely, and you followed it up with, “It’s okay. I’ll take my time.”
But you won’t, my boy, because it’s what all children do: long to be adults, and I will watch the next nine years fly by just as fast as these last nine have, and then you will be grown and gone. There is an exhilaration and a sadness to this, as there is to every stage of child-raising. But especially with the child who first wrapped a tiny cry around our hearts.
Because you know what? It was not just you who were born nine years ago. It was me, too. You and I, we share a birthday—yours a coming into the world, mine a coming into a whole new world made more alive and colorful and lovely because of you.
I know it’s not easy being the first. You were, after all, our grand experiment. Your daddy and I had no idea what we were doing when you slid into the world, and sometimes we still don’t. You are heart and spirit and muscle and feet and sun and tornado, ripping away everything we thought we knew about how to do this raising-a-child thing and planting yourself right in the middle of a wilderness that would test us and beat us and tear us apart but, in the end, put us back together with all the right pieces, like a puzzle we’d forgotten we had until you let loose your wild wind and uncovered all the years. It’s you who has shown us just the right boundaries to set, and it’s you who has shown us what it means to love a child, and it’s you who has shown us more surely who we are.
That’s not to say that your brothers haven’t. It’s just that you were the first. The first one we laid in a crib and worried about all night until we couldn’t stand it anymore and went out to watch you breathing. The first one whose smile climbed down to the deepest places and said, “Adored,” so loud we could believe it. The first one who one minute made us feel so incredibly glad to be your parent and the next minute made us feel so angry we thought we’d burn right up in flames and smoke and haze.
You tested boundaries to see if they held strong. You shook the foundations of our philosophies. You let loose your whirlwind, and we were caught in chaos and fear, but mostly adoration and love. Because you were remaking us, piece by piece, limb by limb, in all the ways that mattered. So it is that we have learned how to navigate stormy waters of doubt and hope. So it is that we have learned to pry our hands loose from what happens in all the can’t-be-there places of your life. So it is that we have learned to parent in a way that feels and understands and loves in all the littlest ways.
We have made some mistakes. Of course we have. For those, we’re sorry.
But there is one, my sweet boy, that I cannot just slap a sorry on. Because I think it deserves more. So bear with me.
I spent my pregnancy with you laughing about your spirited kicks while sifting through parenting books so I might be at least just a little bit prepared maybe for what was to come. Still, we started out as authoritarians, because that’s how we were raised. It’s all we knew. When you know better, you do better, but we wouldn’t know better until four years later. So, for the meantime, we ignored emotions and hit while we told you not to hit and yelled while we told you not to yell. Do better than we do, that’s what we said in our actions. Be better than us. Choose the higher road, and you were just a boy.
How could a heart not be traumatized by inconsistencies like that?
And then I opened a Paul Eckert book on reading emotions in the eyes, and I saw your eyes on the page. They were darker than yours and smaller, with bushier eyebrows. But they were yours. Do you know what the caption said? Despair.
A little boy in a little body, crying out for help. Crying out for understanding. Crying out for someone to fight for his heart and help him back to a steady plane, because he was in danger of losing his step and his breath and who he was made to be.
I still remember that day. I don’t want to. But I need to. Because that was the day I fell to my knees and said, for the first time, “We need a better way.” That was the day that launched us into years of study, years of research, years of grasping for something that was right and true and good, and we found it. And even though we weren’t perfect at it, you no longer wore those despair eyes. Sometimes you wore angry eyes, when you had to put away a drawing pad and you weren’t quite ready to. Sometimes you wore sad eyes, when the book was supposed to be waiting on the hold shelf of the library and it wasn’t there. But mostly you wore happy ones.
We talked more. We accepted all the emotions, not just the convenient ones. We held your body when it flew out of control, whispering the only words you really need to hear: This is hard. I am here. You are safe.
And now here we are. Your ninth birthday. You are leaning closer to young man than little boy now, and I am so proud of and enthralled with and captivated by who you are. I am still just as wrecked by your eyes and your smile and your voice as I was the day you slipped into the world five days early, smelling of eucalyptus and mint, because that’s the lotion that softened my hands and touched every part of your silken face. You are my beloved one. My spirited one. My firstborn son.
You are deeply and wholly loved, just because you’re you.
You know that scene in Cinderella where she’s in the kitchen trying to get things ready for the day, and on the wall there’s this collection of bells ringing incessantly, signaling that people who are depending on her (mostly because they’re lazy) need things? Every morning, my kitchen fills with its own chorus of little bells, too, except those bells are walking around in the form of two 3-year-olds, a 5-year-old, a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old, and I can’t just simply leave the room to get away from their clanging, because they have legs and will follow me to the edge of the world without asking any questions about where I’m going.
“Mama!” the 5-year-old will say in the whiniest voice I’ve ever heard (and that’s saying a lot. I’ve really cleaned up my act.). “I can’t find my shoes.”
He’s not even out of bed yet, so I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even attempted “looking,” which I put in quotations because “looking” for a 5-year-old consists of sometimes seeing what’s right in front of his face, sometimes not. He just tripped over one of those missing shoes, and he still hasn’t found them.
His bell is followed up closely by one of the twins saying, “Mama, my brudder beat me down the stairs.” If only I could turn back time.
Followed, almost in the same breath, by his twin brother saying, “Mama, I firsty. I need milk, Mama. Mama, I need milk. I firsty, Mama” without even the slightest pause so that I can let him know that his milk is already on the table if he would just “look.”
“Where’s my blue folder?” the 8-year-old will say, even though I’m not the one in charge of his blue folder and there’s a designated place for it and I can see it sticking out from that designated place right his very minute.
“Oh! I forgot (fill in the blank),” the 6-year-old says on a regular basis. Usually that fill-in-the-blank looks something like forgetting that he’s VIP student this week and he needs to bring a poster with pictures of himself and his family on it so that all the other students will know who he is and what he wants to be when he grows up. Or forgetting that he’s supposed to have his book club book finished today, and he still has 75 pages to read. Or forgetting that there was a birthday party he was invited to this weekend, and he didn’t get to go, and how can we possibly keep track of all this? (To be fair, some of this isn’t even his fault, it’s our fault for failing at school. I haven’t signed a folder in weeks, and it’s only November.)
Get me a drink, I hungry, I can’t find my shoes, where’s my library book, please hold me just because, help me, carry me, push in my chair, where’s my folder, sign my papers, I’m cold, I’m hot, I’m hungry, I need my vitamins, bring me my blanket, where’s my backpack, can you turn on the light, I need more toilet paper, I want more, More, MORE.
With all these children and all their constant demands, sometimes I start feeling a little like Cinderella, except I’m a mama. Cinder-Mama. It’s like the fairy tale I always wanted, except it’s not.
Brush my hair, wash me off, wipe my bottom, what’s ten plus ten, I want my color book, the baby’s getting into the crayons, button my pants, tie my shoes, help me up, kiss this hurt, when’s dinner, can we go to the store because I have two dollars to spend, I need a snack, I can’t open the toothpaste, aw, man, it’s the minty toothpaste, I like the strawberry toothpaste, what are you doing? going to the bathroom? You don’t have a penis, where does your peepee come out?
There is something inherent in a mama that hears a need and that wants to meet it, desperately, right this minute. But the thing is, if I try to meet every single need in my house, I will go a little crazy.
Because one minute the 5-year-old will need someone to show him how to tie his shoes, again, and, at the same time, the 6-year-old will want help pouring the milk, because it’s a new gallon and I’m really thankful that he’s asking because the last thing I want is a whole gallon of milk dumped out onto the floor, but there’s no way in the world that I can be in two places at one time, and so one of those needs is going to have to remain unmet until I can manage it.
I tried to be in two places at once one time, and I ended up feeling resentful and angry that they would ask me to do so many things at the same time even though there was only one of me and six of them. So I had to take a step back. I had to breathe. I had to say it was okay that I couldn’t meet every single need the first time they asked. Or even the fifth time they asked. Or ever, sometimes (they did, after all, wish they could have gone to that party they missed. I was Cinder-Mama, not Fairy GodMama). It was good for them to learn how to wait. It was good for them to learn to do things for themselves. It was good for them to realize they were fully capable of doing what I could do.
So they started tying their own shoes, because they figured out they could do hard things. They started pouring their own milk, even if it was a brand new gallon, because they knew they had permission to screw up and spill, as long as they cleaned it up. They started writing their own events on a calendar and waiting to be hugged and kissed and taking responsibility for their own backpacks and shoes and school folders.
They don’t always remember, of course. There are mornings when it still sounds like there are shrieking bells wrapped around my ankles. There are days they forget “mama” is not synonymous with “servant,” but they are learning, day by day by day, that they are fully capable of handling the world on their own.
No more Cinder-Mama. Except for my indescribable beauty, of course.
It used to be so easy. It used to be that when we put something away, it stayed put away. It used to be that I could control the crawling space where my kid would scrutinize every piece of lint or dirt or dropped food, and there was nothing because HE WAS THE ONLY ONE.
Now, when I get down on my knees to do girly pushups and stand back up, there’s all kinds of crap stuck to my skin. Popcorn kernels. Tiny pieces of confetti-like paper. Mostly hair. It doesn’t matter if I just vacuumed 10 seconds ago, I will never be disappointed by the grossness that sticks to the sweat on my kneecaps. Someone in my house sheds like a German Shepherd, and it’s probably me.
And it’s not just those things that are burrowing down into the carpet that resurface when I decide to make an effort and work out (beyond chasing kids, of course), but it’s also the things my kids leave on the floor. When there was only one kid, we were able to manage this. When he took off his jacket, we could help him hang it up where it went. When he decided he didn’t want to wear socks with his tennis shoes, we could make sure those smelly socks got in the hamper. When he wanted to draw a picture of a flying elephant, he put the supplies away.
The problem is, now there are five little boys tearing off their socks and digging things out and forgetting they ever knew how to put things away. And shedding. Apparently.
The other problem is, Littlest One is crawling. That means when he finds dirty, smelly socks on the floor, they go in his mouth. When he finds important school papers spread on the floor, they go in his mouth. When he finds balls of hair they go, you guessed it, in his mouth. Which means we vacuum pretty much every day. Which is probably what we should have been doing in the first place, but who wants to clean a house where seven males live? Not me.
As you can probably imagine, vacuuming every day does not take care of this problem completely. Vacuums don’t suck up things like the insides of a stuffed animal the 3-year-olds thought it would be funny to de-fluff. It doesn’t get rid of dirty underwear no one claims. It doesn’t get rid of colored pencils.
What typically happens when you have more than one kid is that the 3-year-old will decide he wants to color, so he’ll get out the crayons and the colored pencils and his coloring book, because of course you keep all of that where he can reach it easily, because art expression is important in your house, and it’s a better alternative to butter-knife sword fighting with his imaginary friend, which has often been his preference but is definitely not allowed in your house, and then when he’s finished coloring 30 seconds later because he has the attention span of a squirrel, he goes straight for the trains even though the rule in your house is “one thing out at a time.” So then you have The Cleanup Fight, which usually just means a 3-year-old angrily swiping everything that was previously on the table onto the floor, screaming that he is “NOT GOING TO CLEAN THEM UP AND YOU’RE A MEAN BOOTY-FACE” and then collapsing into a pile of noodles right beside the tantrum mess, hopefully scraping his back on one of those colored pencils, so you can bring the point home that “that’s what happens when you.” And then he’ll say he didn’t get them out and he never colored with him, “nuh-uh,” he didn’t, and while you’re reminding him that you were just beside him while he did exactly what he’s saying he didn’t, because you’ll argue to the death with a 3-year-old, the Littlest One will pick up one of those pencils, slobber on it and then try to get it in his mouth. And because his aim isn’t all that great yet, he’ll end up with a mural all over his face.
He was super happy about his first taste of art. And by first taste of art, I mean his first literal taste of art.
I cleaned him off and turned my attention back to the 3-year-old, who was still lifeless on the floor, pretending like he was “too tired to clean up but not tired enough to lie down for his nap early.” The 9-month-old promptly zeroed in on an old diaper that had been left by Husband on the floor.
The moral of that story is: It’s not just kids that complicate things. It’s also husbands. The other moral of the story is: Clean up your 3-year-old’s messes.
Not really. Because if you do it for them, how will they ever learn to clean up for themselves? And you’re not doing the world any favors sending a kid who doesn’t know how to clean up out into real life, because he’ll never learn it if not here in your home, and if you’re too lazy to teach them something as simple as cleaning up even when they don’t feel like it, then you shouldn’t have had kids.
