by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
I’ve never really cared much about Independence Day—not because I’m not incredibly grateful to all the people who fought for my freedom—but because here, in Texas, Independence Day falls right smack dab in the middle of a time when the air outside boils up to a thousand degrees before the sun even comes up, and we’re all just about done with summer, except we have about six more months of it.
I have a kid who has a birthday four days after Independence Day, and that was a delightful pregnancy, let me tell you. I begged my husband to let us move somewhere cooler that year. Like maybe Antarctica. But, obviously, I couldn’t travel to another continent when I was eight months pregnant, so, instead, I lounged indoors, where the air conditioner rattled to keep up, and poured my sweat all over the couch, hoping the sauna would somehow induce labor. It didn’t.
As we were nearing this day, which is about the time when I start planning for my son’s birthday party, I thought about what it would be like to have a Parents’ Independence Day. I considered what freedom would mean to parents.
Husband and I get a little taste of this every now and then, when our parents take the kids for a weekend. And here’s what I’ve noticed about what freedom from children looks like:
Getting in the car, starting it and accomplishing rubber to road within a minute, start to finish.
As it is, it when Husband and I announce to the kids that it’s time to leave, it generally takes us another half an hour (if we’re lucky) to get out the door, because someone will misplace the shoes he had on two seconds ago, someone will decide he needs to drop a load (and it’s always the one who takes twenty minutes to finish and ten more minutes to wipe—with half the toilet paper roll), someone will slip on a banana peel his brother threw down on the driveway (because it’s biodegradable!) and face plant into the hood of the car—a damage hit that will need a giant Band-Aid across his face to staunch the bleeding (which really isn’t bad. He thinks it’s worse than it is)—someone will play musical chairs with all the empty seats in the van instead of just getting in his own, and someone else will realize he forgot to put on underwear.
Going to bed whenever you want.
I didn’t appreciate this enough before I was a parent. I just went to bed and didn’t think about the fact that there could be someone waiting just outside the door, breathing underneath the crack (because I locked said door), trying to let me know that his brother stole his blanket and he doesn’t want any of the four others that are already on his bed. And no amount of ignoring him will make him go away. He’s like the worst imaginary friend, because he’s not imaginary.
Sleeping in on the weekends.
Even though, when my boys are in school, they rarely get out of bed even when I wake them up at 6:30, during the summer and on weekends, they’re sure to be up by 5:45 at the latest. I just try to pretend I don’t hear the noise of feet. But anxiety usually pulls me from bed, whether I like it or not, because I know what happens when my boys are unaccompanied for any amount of time. Someone will try to fly off the top of the van with a kite strapped to him (even though he saw his brother get mangled yesterday for the same thing) or challenge his brother to a duel with steak knives or pour himself a giant bowl of oats with milk and leave it for the flies.
A perfectly tidy house.
I don’t know if my house was ever perfectly tidy, honestly. I have a Husband, after all. And also a me. I’ve been known to put a book down somewhere and lose it in the stacks that follow me everywhere.
Eating in peace, while it’s still hot.
It never fails. I bring out some leftovers from a date night with Husband, and the kids are immediately circling me like scavengers. “Can I have a bite?” they’ll say.
“No,” I’ll say.
“Why not?” they’ll say, their faces falling into their saddest pout ever.
“Because it’s mine,” I’ll say.
“You’re mean,” they’ll say.
“That’s right. I am,” I’ll say, because I’ll do whatever it takes to eat my ziti al forno in peace. I deserve this.
Cooking for two.
I don’t even remember what this looks like. That’s probably why, when Husband and I send the kids off for a quiet weekend, we mostly eat out. Because how do you cook for two when you’re used to cooking for a small army? And, perhaps even more importantly, how do you enjoy a salad without someone complaining about it for you?
Silence.
I love silence. I love sitting in a room and hearing nothing but my own thoughts. It doesn’t happen often, because someone at my house is always talking. Usually at least four at a time. I get to the end of a day with my boys, and there are so many words stuffed up in my head that I feel like I might explode. Just the other day, I told the 9-year-old that I was on word overload and just needed a few minutes of quiet, and he said, “Well, you haven’t exploded yet” and kept right on talking about the next stop motion movie he was going to make—which is super cool, but words. So many words.
I know these freedoms seem really nice on the outside, but, truthfully, by the time a weekend without my boys ends, I’m ready to get them all back, because there’s something about silence and easy road trips and eating in peace that feels a little eerie now. I’m glad for the madness that kids bring to my life, because it’s not the freedom that matters so much as the living. And my boys show me how to live every moment of every day—by “accidentally” throwing dodge balls at my face and sneaking bites of my date-night leftovers when I get up to pour myself a drink (it’s just water, I promise) and gathering the wildflowers in the front yard, which they’ll try to put in my hair, dirty roots and all.
My boys have shown me how to play, how to dream, how to love. They have freed me in a million ways.
So my Independence Day? It happened when I had kids.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
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?
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 or he learns how to do it himself.
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.
[Tweet “Kids should learn how to wait. So the needs I can’t meet right this minute? Building character.”]
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.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It’s summertime!
My favorite part of year, because I get to have everyone at home all the hours of all the days, fighting over who gets the one red LEGO pieces out of the 14 billions that exist in our house.
I love my boys fiercely. But man are they hard on a house (and a sanity) in the summertime.
Here are 13 pictures to show how much havoc boys can wreak on summertime.
This happened about half an hour after they got out of school. The first place they went was their bedroom, to pull out all their stuffed animals so they could celebrate with them. We’ve been finding stuffed animals all over the house.
You see? This stuffed animal is doing me a favor, though. She’s guarding those writing notebooks, because everyone knows what happens when you leave a notebook with a pen stuck in it within reach of two 4-year-old twins. (No, your notebooks won’t get ruined, don’t worry. Your walls will.)
This is all the junk they brought home from school. I still haven’t had the energy to sort through it all, because every time I try to, I look at the counter to see that someone else had the sorting idea except they were much less competent than I am.
These are all the workbooks they brought home. I mean, I’m really grateful to have something to do with my boys, to make sure they don’t lose all the learning they did this year. The problem is, they seem to always forget how to put things away. So I guess I’ll just have to get used to staring at a pile like this.
Or sitting on something like this. Hey, at least they love workbooks, right?
This was a perfectly organized craft table once upon a time. We set it up, because we believe in free expression, and the boys really, really love doing crafts. But they really, really hate cleaning up crafts, and so do I. Which means this craft table might not last very long.
There’s another rogue stuffed animal, next to the cup with the crazy straw that I just picked off the floor, where the 16-month-old was headed straight for it. Disaster averted. (Ten minutes later, someone knocked over an open gallon of milk, so, honestly, I would have taken the cup over the gallon, but, hey, boys don’t do anything half-heartedly.)
Swimsuits are the staple of summertime. The problem is, they wear them so much I don’t even get to wash them. They put their swimsuits on as soon as they get up, and they don’t take them off until after we’re done at the pool, and then they do it all over again the next day. I asked this boy why his pants were crackling as he walked. He said it’s because he toots too much in them. Which is also probably true.
When they’re not wearing their swimsuits, they’re wearing regular clothes out in the rain, (1) because the only time they wear regular clothes is when it’s raining and (2) because I’m so desperate to get them outside, yes, I let them dance in the rain. It’s been raining a lot here in Texas, and I’ll do anything to save my sanity.
Toys everywhere. I should just get used to this one, but you know what? I never do. Every year I want to throw all of our toys away and just start over from scratch. But look how precious he is, standing with his wooden blocks.
You think stepping on LEGOs is bad? You should try stepping on this guy, which I did a few minutes ago. I think my foot is about to fall off. (And, yes, those are popcorn kernels smashed into the floor. We had popcorn last night and someone was too lazy to vacuum the carpet.)
The biggest problem in the summertime is attention span. This photo was taken exactly five minutes after he asked to play with the LEGOs. I guess he decided reading was more fun.
This is, hands down, my favorite part of summer. Not the LEGOs, the masterpieces. My boys are so incredibly creative, and I just love stumbling upon creations like this from the 9-year-old who wanted to be a robotics creator for half a second before he decided, nah, he’d rather design video games (he’s got a writing notebook filled with set designs already, so it’s too much work to change careers now).
While summertime presents some challenges in the way of a clean house and working from home, it also presents some great opportunities to rest and be a family and marvel in the amazing ingenuity of kids.
I guess I’ll take the latter for today. At least until they start fighting over who gets to sit on the couch for silent reading time, even though there’s room enough for five.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
What I want to tell my boys every time they fight. Which is every other second, now that school’s out.
He was lucky. He only ended up with half his face burned off.
I know. So disappointing.
One of them ended up with a dented face, but at least now I can tell the identical twins apart.
Seriously. It smells like a locker room in my house. (When do they start to care how they smell?)
Surprisingly (and sadly) the fan was hurt far more than the kid who tried this one.
Who’s in the hide-food-from-your-kids club?
Lots of injuries on this one. Think he won’t try it again? It only took 24 hours to get back in the game.
We needed to buy new toilets after this happenstance. (Explosive diarrhea has nothing on 5 pounds of grapes.)
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
It’s their first day back from the grandparents’ after a week of running wild outside in the country and swimming in a pool and watching movies for Quiet Time, and my boys have forgotten how to act.
We are incredibly blessed that my mom and stepdad took the older three boys for a week (and do every summer) and that my father-in-law took the Dennis-the-Menace-times-two twins for a few days (because that’s about all the time anyone can handle with these guys), but man. Detoxing stinks.
My parents eat a lot like us—no processed food, lots of fruits and veggies, no special “treat” with every meal. So I can’t even blame it on the food (which is my usual culprit). But when they come back from Nonny and Poppy’s house, my boys are bouncing off the walls (and that’s an understatement.). No one wants to go into the backyard when I suggest bouncing on the trampoline instead, because they all missed their toys “so, so, so much!”
No one remembers where to put their shoes (the shoe basket we’ve had by the door for YEARS). They don’t even remember how to get dressed. It’s like dressing for seven days in a row is enough effort to last the entire summer.
The first day of detox was the third son’s fifth birthday, which means tradition set a birthday treat in front of him at breakfast. I had a feeling it was a bad idea, but what are you going to do with tradition? Ten minutes later they were catapulting over the side of the couch so quickly I didn’t know whose name to call out in my scolding, because they were blurs.
They got crayons, coloring books, Hot Wheels and a bin of four million LEGOs out all at the same time, even though we have a very important rule about “only one thing out at a time.”
“I’d like to see one of you build something with LEGOs, color a picture and play with the cars all at the same time,” I said.
They looked at me like I’d lost my mind. (By that point, I already had.)
After dinner, they forgot how to put their plates and silverware away.
“We used paper plates at Nonny and Poppy’s house,” they said when I asked.
“But Nonny didn’t make you throw them away?” I said.
“Yeah,” they said, not noticing the glaring inconsistency here: They still had to carry their plates somewhere.
There is just something about not being in the house where your parents live that makes you forget all the rules. Or, worse, make up your own.
Detoxing day one was filled with rules amended by incompetent-at-logic children. Here are just a few of them.
Actual rule: Only one book down from the shelves at a time.
Amended rule by detoxing, too-creative-for-his-own-good 8-year-old: Except when I create this world called Animalia. You see, Mama? I brought all my twelve thousand stuffed animals up from the garage where I found them in a trash bag—why were they in a trash bag?—and made my room like a stuffed animal resort. They have a reading corner here. See? There’s a book for every one of them. I’ll clean it all up, don’t worry.
Yeah, right.
Actual rule: Before you get something else out to play with, clean up whatever it was you were playing with before.
Amended rule by detoxing, I’m-the-birthday-boy 5-year-old: Except I get to pick everything to play with for the day AND I don’t have to clean anything up, because I’m the birthday boy. What’s that, Mama? It’s clean up time? Well, I’m the birthday boy, so I don’t have to clean up. Nuh-uh. I don’t have to clean up even though I got to pick all the toys. I’m the birthday boy and I LOVE NOT CLEANING UP! IT SHOULD BE MY BIRTHDAY EVERY DAY FOREVER!
(Don’t ever promise a birthday boy he’s exempt from cleaning up.)
Actual rule: Stay at the table until you’re finished with your food and we say yes to your “May I be excused?” question.
Amended rule by detoxing, I-can’t-stop-moving-my-feet 6-year-old: Except that I forgot to show you this really neat picture I made at Nonny and Poppy’s house, and did you see this word search I colored instead of circling words on, and, oh, yeah, I made this really neat paper airplane out of a superhero drawing. Do you want to see it fly? And my brother just go new markers for his birthday and I have this blank sheet of white paper and I LOVE TO COLOR SO MUCH!
It was getting pretty ridiculous.
Actual rule: Don’t touch the CD player when you’re only 3.
Amended rule by detoxing, strong-willed 3-year-old twin: Except I’m an annoying 3-year-old who won’t listen to anything you have to say. Touch, touch, touch. See me touch?
“Stop, son,” I say.
Touch, touch, touch.
[Sit him on the couch while I sit beside him acknowledging that I understand he really, really, really wants to touch those buttons and that I really wish I could let him but that he could break the CD player touching them all. Let him up three minutes later.]
Touch, touch, touch.
Long, long sigh.
Actual rule: Body excrement belongs in the toilet. Please, for the love of God, don’t poop in your underwear.
Amended rule by detoxing I’m-the-other-menace 3-year-old: Oops.
I finally had to lock them all in the backyard (cruel, cruel mother) just to regain my sanity.
I am incredibly grateful for the time our boys get to spend with their grandparents, no matter how challenging it is to get them back on a schedule and remind them of the rules they’ve known since the beginning of time (at least their time). They are not only spending valuable time with another generation but they are also giving their daddy and me the opportunity to spend some beautiful time by ourselves, reconnecting and engaging in conversations where we actually get to finish our sentences and remembering how much we liked each other in the first place.
The time we spend detoxing is definitely worth that reconnection. Every single time.
P.S. Just power through that first day, Mama and Daddy. It will get better. Remember? It always does (not before you add a few gray hairs, though). Pretty soon you’ll be right back to counting down the days until you can send them away again.
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
Dear Laundry,
I know, I know. You think I haven’t noticed how you’ve been waiting seven whole days in that smelly basket, spilling over onto the floor so little boys trample you on their way to bedrooms, how you’re crumpled up in bathrooms and twisted across couches and even left in the cold car all night, how all you really want is someone to care.
I assure you, I’ve noticed. I wish I could say I’m sorry for not washing you sooner, like you wanted, but I’m not. Because I was playing, skipping through the city zoo and riding on a carousel, teaching kickball to my boys in a big field of green, making little dolls out of clothespins and yarn and fabric, and it was beautiful and invigorating and fun.
I just can’t say the same about you, Laundry.
[Tweet “I always notice you, Laundry. I just don’t like to acknowledge it.”]
Maybe I used to feel differently about you, back when Husband and I walked you to the laundromat and put you in three washers and sat holding hands while talking and writing songs and reading marriage books for the forty-five minutes it took you to wash, and then doing it again while we watched you tumble dry low for another forty-five. But you have gotten out of hand, Laundry. You have invaded where you were not wanted. You have rewarded my hours of care with next to nothing, trading scattered cotton smelling like feet for stacked cotton smelling like lavender and eucalyptus, and maybe I should be grateful for even that, but it’s just not enough anymore, because, well, someone needs to put you away, and that just seems like it’s asking a little too much. I don’t have that much to give you, Laundry.
I’m sorry you stay draped across the back of our couch for days on end (or maybe it’s weeks; I’ve lost count), only moving when little boys have run out of clean underwear and feel bothered enough about reusing their dirty drawers that they’ll come rifling in your avalanche. And then you’re not even neat stacks anymore. You’re like a laundry volcano, waiting for someone to turn a flip off the couch and scatter you everywhere, which will happen in about two more seconds. I’m sorry I’m not so great at finishing you. But I’m not really.
See, you’re just a little too needy. I have a LOT of needy people in my house, and I don’t really need more, but you, well. You must be done every single week, so many loads of you, or you start creeping into the places we don’t want you–like the baby’s bed (because twins have a fetish for clothes piles, especially when they’re smelly) and the boys’ bathroom (which has a floor I wouldn’t even wish upon my worst enemy, except maybe) and, yes, even the refrigerator (we have a few absent-minded ones in the bunch. “Where’d my soccer socks go?” “You mean the dirty ones you wore yesterday and the day before that?” “…” “Did you try the refrigerator?” “Why the refrigera–Oh. Yeah, here they are.”).
I’m just…
I’m just tired of you.
You steal so much valuable time, Laundry. You’re like a giant black hole, sucking those seconds and minutes and hours into an invisible time warp so I hardly know where my whole day has gone because of your intruding buzzer that, every half hour, screams, “Finish me.”
Finish yourself, Laundry.
[Tweet “I wish you would finish yourself, Laundry. I’d rather be playing. Make that sleeping.”]
As if all that weren’t enough, you’re never, ever actually done. That last load spills out of the dryer, and there are still the clothes we’re wearing today. Are you never satisfied? Is there never an end to your demands? Can I just be done for a second or three or fifty-million? You’re like one of my kids, and I know people say that after three it’s just “pull up another chair,” but that’s actually not true at all. It’s more like “Just pull up another adult,” because you suddenly realize that you’re way out of your league. Or maybe it’s more like “Just pull up another bottle,” because who really wants to help the parents who chose to have six kids? A bottle of Merlot, that’s who.
I need a break from you, Laundry. It’s not me, it’s you. I have more than enough people clinging to me. I have more than enough people stealing my time and space. I have more than enough people making a mess of things. I don’t need another, even if it’s just a pile of sweaty socks that smell like rotting skunks.
Besides, my little boys want to play cars, and I’m sorting you, dark and light and white and towels and blankets, eight loads a week. My little boys want to go on a nature walk, and I’m waiting for one-eighth of you to finish washing so I can put you in the dryer and start the next one-eighth of you before we leave. I just want to go to bed, and there you are, commandeering my sleeping space like an unwanted blanket.
You have some things to learn before we can move on, Laundry. Autonomy. Self-discipline. Moderation.
But I have a feeling you won’t even make an effort. So, with a great long sigh (it’s still going), I guess I’ll have to say that though I would like to say it’s finished, I know the truth of it. A mom’s relationship with laundry is never finished. So I’ll see you in our normal meeting place (all over the house) next Monday at 6 a.m. sharp. Don’t be late. As if you ever are.
Your resigned partner,
Me
