by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
The other day we were driving in our van, and the boys wanted us to turn on the radio, which they tried to communicate by asking twelve times, in quick succession, “May we please listen to the radio?” We didn’t even have time to answer before the next one would ask in the exact same way, not even varying the words or tone. It was somewhat alarming.
In a house with so many, I’m regularly astonished by things like this.
The problem with turning on the radio when we’re in the car is that as soon as the music begins blaring into the backseat (Husband and I adjust the direction of the radio so we can talk in the front—cars are the best places to talk, because all the kids are strapped in with nowhere to go. Although sometimes that can also work against you.) the nine-year-old suddenly remembers that he has five billion words to say. He will accomplish this spectacle of word-vomiting, or attempt to accomplish it, by yelling his thoughts and random observations over the din of the music. Which then makes his brothers yell, “Be quiet! I’m trying to listen to music!” in some nice and not-so-nice ways so that Husband and I then have to address issues of honor and respect with a diatribe on how brothers are forever friends, after which everyone in the car says, “What?” because the music is still on and nobody heard a word.
Husband will turn off the radio and say, “Speak in an honoring way to each other.” And then he’ll turn it back on, eliminating the possibility of counter arguments.
One of the most interesting things about my children is this contrast between what they don’t hear and what they do.
The other day we were, again, driving in the van with the radio blasting, and we’d just told (or shouted to) our nine-year-old to stop hitting his brother, and he said, “What?” three times. We turned off the radio and told him, for the fourth time, to stop hitting his brother, and then we turned the radio back on. The volume of the music was exactly the same as it had been. Husband, in a normal speaking voice, mentioned his name—to me, not to him—and he heard everything that was said after the mention of his name. He even repeated it back to us, word for word.
Tell me how this can be possible.
My sons can’t hear me say that they must have all the LEGO pieces cleaned up by the time the timer goes off or the LEGOs will be in the sad, secret space of exiled toys. They can’t hear me calling their name when they’re playing outside and now it’s time to come back in and take a bath, because they’re having so much fun that the fun blocks out the sound of my voice. They can’t hear me announce that it’s cleanup time; they’ll just act like they don’t know what cleanup time is and go right on playing with the cars and building a new track and making a bigger and more out-of-control mess.
They can’t hear me say it’s now no longer time to play with Pokémon cards and will go ballistic when those Pokémon cards get confiscated. They can’t hear me call their name a thousand times to get their attention because I have something important to tell them or I need to relay some instructions. They can’t hear me when I ask them did they hear me.
They can’t hear me when I tell them to stop pummeling each other for the red LEGO piece, when there are five hundred other red LEGO pieces just like this one. They don’t hear me when I say I’ve had just about enough. They don’t hear me when they’re playing at the table and I tell them it would be wise to stop because they’re going to spill something, and then they do. And it’s usually milk. All over the wall, themselves, and the floor.
They can’t hear me when I instruct them to set the table or do their after-dinner chores or toss their clothes in the laundry basket or remember to put their shoes where they belong or any of the other billions of nagging instructions I have to give them every other minute of every day.
Basically, they won’t really hear anything I have to say if it (a) contains more than three words and (b) doesn’t contain the preamble of repeating their name at least three times and (c) doesn’t interest them in the least. (For those who are quick, you already know: the only thing they hear is their name. Everything after is disqualified, unless it’s something they’re not supposed to hear.)
We work hard on our communication in my home. Communication is the foundation for healthy relationships. My boys have a hearing problem, which we’ve tried to point out. But they don’t hear us.
The things they do hear, however, are a study in irony.
They hear the crackle of a chip bag that Husband opened in the pantry, where I’m supposed to meet him in thirty seconds. They hear us whisper something about the chocolate we’re going to get later, a confession that begs a reply like, “Aren’t you supposed to be eating better?” They hear us talking in soft murmurs about how worried we are about their uncle, and then we’ll have to explain why (kids can’t leave anything resting in mystery).
They’ll hear our feet going down the stairs to retrieve the treats we stashed in the topmost corner of the laundry room, where they’d never be able to find them (because they’re really, really bad at looking).
So I know that their inability to hear us when it’s important is not a case of whether they can actually hear or not. They just, like every other kid, have selective hearing. They hear what they want. They filter out the rest.
Sometimes I wish I could do the same. Then I would live in a world that had no whining, no complaining, and no ignorance.
When you’re a parent, however, this “editing” can be incredibly annoying. I can’t even mention in a phone call to my mom from the privacy of my room how proud I am of one of them without the kid saying, “Are you talking about me?” He’s not even home right now.
But when I tell them it’s time for bed so they can get enough sleep for the Family Fun Day tomorrow that we most definitely don’t want to make a Family Fight Day?
No one hears a word.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
We’ve just gotten into the swing of the school schedule, and here comes Labor Day.
I love a holiday just as much as the next person, but when it comes so close to re-introducing my children to the concept of getting up when I tell them it’s time, dressing in both pants and shirts (I’ll pretend I don’t notice the lack of underwear), and grabbing everything they need for school (someone always forgets something), Labor Day can become a bit of annoyance.
On school days, my children must be dragged out of bed at 6 a.m., hurried down to breakfast, and ushered out the door. But on Labor Day, they were knocking on my door, begging for breakfast at 5 a.m.
Get your own breakfast.
That’s what I wanted to say. But the last time I told them that, the kitchen was dusted with a fine film of raw oats, I almost fell into a milk puddle the size of Rhode Island, and a bowl of sludge—presumably oats and milk, though I can’t be completely certain—waited by the sink, and my sons were all passed out from extreme hunger.
In other words, things didn’t go so well. And I still had to fix breakfast.
So on Labor Day, I dragged myself out of bed at a ridiculous hour for a holiday, slid down the stairs, and fumbled around in the kitchen for a light switch. Once I found it, my oldest son jumped out from behind a door leading into a dark room, and I had to visit the bathroom.
How many times do I have to tell him it’s not funny to scare me like that?
He laughed himself into the garage while I delayed their breakfast by fifteen purposeful minutes spent examining my fingernails. Every time someone asked me why breakfast wasn’t yet ready, I told them to go ask their brother. He’d already forgotten what he’d done.
I love spending time with my kids, but it always feels like Labor Day comes too close to the first week of school to really enjoy the break. Who wants to start the back-to-school boot camp only to restart it two weeks later?
Last year my twins were kindergarteners. They started school on a Tuesday. The next week was Labor Day. It took me months to convince them that they had to go to school on Mondays. Yes, every Monday. Except Labor Day. And Thanksgiving week. And—oh, forget it.
This whole summer I haven’t been able to get any work done, and I was looking forward to getting started again—but a holiday delayed my productivity. And here’s what happened during this holiday that is no longer summer but is also not quite the school year (at least not the regular one).
1. They interrupted me 12.5 billion times. My door, which I close when I am working, was a revolving door. They would talk to me, but I have noise-canceling headphones, so they just thought I was ignoring them. Wonderful for their self-esteem, I’m sure.
I still feel guilty.
2. They were wildly wild. It seems like Labor Day always announces itself with either pouring-down rain or obscene temperatures here in South Texas; sending them outside is usually out of the question, to the detriment of all in this house.
3. The routine went down the drain. Tomorrow morning they won’t know what it means to “wake up, it’s time for school,” and we’ll start the fun all over again.
I guess it doesn’t hurt to practice. Practice, after all, makes…
Well, it makes us, at the very least, good at trying. That’s about all you can ask as a parent.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
I’ve decided to eat healthy again.
We’ve just had a long week and weekend of rewarding ourselves for getting through the day. It was more than that, actually. It’s incredibly counter-productive to have a birthday at the end of January, right during the time you’ve hit your stride with healthier living. You start off the new year on fantastic footing, getting your eating under control after the holidays, and then you’re bombarded with a birthday and the irresistible temptation to relax your food rules a little—take a day or maybe two days or maybe the whole week.
You can see how this quickly becomes a snowball.
I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before, but this yearly struggle could likely be alleviated by starting my new year in February. And pretending Valentine’s Day doesn’t exist.
So here we are, a week past my birthday. I’m ready. Let’s do this.
No sugar for the next thirty days. A cleanse. My favorite thing to do.
Sunday night
I’ll start tomorrow. Tonight I’ll eat an entire container of Ben & Jerry’s delectable ice cream in my favorite flavor: “The Tonight Dough.”
Monday early early morning
The day unfolds like it’s stacked against me: with (surprise and oh, joy!) my monthly visitor. But I am strong. I can do this.
Monday early morning
Workout’s finished, it’s time to get the boys up for school. I can totally do this. Totally.
We race out the door, to walk the school boys to their elementary school three blocks down the road. My four-year-old twins don’t wait to cross the street, because they think, erroneously, that they’re competent at everything. They almost get run over. Now they have to hold on to the stroller, so they’re both wailing. One is refusing to move forward, so he gets to be carried. He weighs a lot. I already did my workout for the day, and now here’s another.
I deserve a reward. I resist.
We’re home. I let the twins race for the front door. They get there before me, which means they have an opportunity to do something real quick before I push inside with the stroller carrying their baby brother. The something they do is grab the markers their second-oldest brother left out this morning and color the piece of art he was drawing for me, which he was planning to finish after he got home from school. When I walk in, the one doing the coloring, which he should know, by now, he’s not supposed to be doing, after countless lectures about coloring on other people’s art, says, “My brother left this for me to color.” The picture is ruined, and not just a little bit. I send them outside to play.
I deserve a reward. I resist.
While they’re outside and I’m wrestling laundry out of the washer and into the dryer, the baby silently climbs the stairs and starts sticking his hand in the toilet, because this is one of the funnest entertainment ploys of all time—especially when it hasn’t been flushed, which is the terribly frequent state of most toilets in my house. I discover him, along with the mess he’s made, while I’m carrying clean clothes up the stairs, so I set to work cleaning. The twins peer in from outside and see that I’m not in the kitchen or anywhere they can see, because, to reiterate, I’m upstairs trying to wash the poop water off their baby brother’s hands. The two of them decide this would make the perfect opportunity to steal inside the house, rummage through the cabinets, and pour all the homemade cleaners into a gigantic hole they and their brothers have been digging in the backyard. That’s not enough, though. While I am still preoccupied with their brother and his disaster, they break into Husband’s shed and find a gasoline can.
A quick aside: This has happened before. There were consequences. They don’t care about the consequences. They break inside anyway.
Out comes the gasoline can, which they also pour into the gigantic hole. Husband was planning to use that gasoline to mow our lawn later today, because we got a note from our homeowner’s association saying it was a little out of hand. Also, there’s a shrub that needs trimming, the letter said. It didn’t say which one of the eight in our yard they believe needs trimming, so we’re just guessing. Unfortunately, it’s not the one the twins, after dumping all the cleaners and gasoline into this hole, decided to cut with the shears.
They are herded inside and told to sit on the bench at the kitchen table. They smell like pickled gas pumps.
I need a reward. I barely resist.
Monday lunch
The only time my sons are still and quiet is when they have food in front of their faces—and barely then.
After lunch, I wrestle them into bed, for a few hours of blissful nap time when I pretend I can’t hear the twins jumping off their bed and having a good old time before they crash in various chalk crime-scene positions on their floor or bed or wherever it is they collapse in utter exhaustion.
I don’t need a reward. I can do this.
Monday afternoon
Fighting, shrieking, complaining about homework, someone says he hates me, someone else says he wishes he had different parents, especially a different mom, like I can’t hear him, someone forgets to flush the toilet after a very loud unloading session on said toilet, making the whole downstairs smell like a sewage plant, someone else eats five apples without permission (which means he’ll probably need the toilet soon).
Why are kids so hard?
I need a reward. I…resist.
Monday dinner
They’re all complaining about dinner, and I am, too.
Why can’t we have pizza? they say.
I don’t know. I really don’t know anymore. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we torturing ourselves and our children trying to eat the food that is good for us but takes twice as long to cook and four times as long to complain about and tastes like…
Oh. It tastes pretty delightful.
(So would cookies.)
I deserve a reward for cooking this amazing dinner.
No! I’ve made it all day!
Must…press…on.
Monday bedtime
After stories and brushing teeth (during which time someone lands a glob of spit and mint toothpaste in the middle of the mirror I just cleaned), we wrestle them into bed. Three times.
We have to visit the twins’ room four times, and the last time we enter, they’ve changed their clothes.
“Why did you change clothes?” I say.
“Because we accidentally peed,” one says.
I look around. The floor is clean.
“Where did you put your clothes?” I say.
“Under there,” the other says. He points under his baby brother’s crib, where, when I bend down to look under it, I see a whole wad of clothes. I gag. It smells like a horse pasture under here. I don’t think I even want to know.
I leave.
“Get back in bed,” I say to the older boys as I pass through.
And just when we think they’ve finally settled down and are actually going to sleep, one of them bursts into the room and tells us he accidentally brought all his drawing supplies up to the library and one of his brothers stepped on a drawing pencil and broke it and now he’s really, really sad.
I deserve the biggest reward.
I want to resist, but…
Monday before sleep
I’ll start the thirty days tomorrow.
It’s all good. I got this.
This is going to be easy.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
When you’re a parent of irrational children (which is every child for at least a small amount of time), there are a whole lot of hills. There are hills where you will battle over which color plate is the best color plate, even if it’s a color that doesn’t exist among the plates stacked in your cabinet. You will battle over whether or not a plate of that color, indeed, exists inside your cabinet. You will battle over why the orange plate is the plate they’re getting if they want lunch.
There are hills where kids stand with feet planted and arms crossed and say they’re not going to wear the red shirt because their teacher’s favorite color is blue, and they want to make their teacher happy today, not you. There are battles where kids insist they put their shoes where they’re supposed to go yesterday and someone else must have moved them. There are battles during which kids will pick their nose and eat the treasure right in front of your face while claiming they don’t pick their nose and eat the treasure anymore (I just saw you. Nuh-uh!).
There are massive hills and tiny hills, round hills and oval hills, rock-solid hills and mushy ones.
One thing remains the same: There are many, many hills.
These hills can get bloody and complicated, depending on the battle. But one thing I’ve learned in my parenting life is that if we’re engaging in full-armored and weaponed battle on every single hill our children summon from the rocky ground of childhood, we’re going to die on every single one of them.
So there are some hills I’m no longer willing to die on.
1. The Hill of What They Look Like
I don’t care if they wear a vertically-striped shirt with shorts that have horizontal stripes. I don’t care if the waistband of their pants is pulled all the way up to their shoulders. I don’t care if they could walk the Pacific Ocean without getting the legs of their jeans wet because they’re wearing their twelve-month-old brother’s jeans.
I don’t care if they didn’t brush their hair today, because they’re boys, and their hair’s short. Knotted, but short. I don’t care if they’re saving that smudge of jam on the side of their face for later. I don’t care if they wear one flip flop and one tennis shoe all the way to the library and back. I don’t even care if they wear two left shoes, so long as the decision was theirs and they don’t complain about it.
I don’t care if this shirt is as wrinkled as their eighty-year-old great-grandfather’s face because they like stuffing their clothes in drawers instead of hanging them up. I don’t care if they buttoned up their shirt all wrong and they flail away from me every time I try to fix it.
Whatever, kid. Have your way with that wardrobe. Come back to see me when you start caring about impressing girls.
2. The Hill of Where Or When They Tantrum
I used to be super-sensitive about this. When my first son was born, I was conscious of every place, every person, every escape route my kids could take to run far away from the meanest mom ever.
If we were in the doctor’s office, my son couldn’t tantrum on the way back to see the doctor, whom he remembered as “the man with the woman carrying a needle,” because it would disturb all the other people. If I were in the park, he couldn’t melt down by the swing sets without great and near-fatal embarrassment on the part of his mother. If we were at his school, I could feel the eyes of the teachers and all the other parents upon me, and I’d consider, at great length, what it might look like—what it might say about me, as a parent—if my kid dropped to the floor and started [panic attack] kicking the ground.
Well, I don’t care anymore. I’ve become conditioned to the tantrums, I guess.
I don’t care if my kid throws himself across the mulch of the park’s ground and shouts about how I’m the worst mother in the history of the world’s mothers because I won’t let him go one more time across the monkey bars even though it was time to leave five minutes ago and he’s already drained his buffer time. I don’t care about the stares I get from the other watching people, likely (or maybe not) condemning me for the way my kids are behaving, as if their behavior somehow reflects on how good or bad my parenting skills are.
If my kid’s acting the fool, I’ll let him act the fool (within reason, of course), because the consequences of acting the fool that will come later, when we’re away from all these people, will carry a lesson in its sit-on-the-couch-and-let’s-have-a-talk.
3. The Hill of They Just Broke Something
I used to be fond of things. Now I’m more fond of people.
So I don’t care if my kids accidentally break something that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, because those sorts of things—a lamp that is knocked over by a stuffed animal someone was really excited to find; a sconce that shattered when someone thought it would be a good idea to sword fight with brooms; a wooden chair knocked over in a game of chase conducted inside the house on a rainy day—can be replaced. What can’t be replaced is a relationship lost or damaged over something as silly as an unexpected breakage.
The really important things (pictures that mean a lot, computers, valuable books) are put away where kids can’t get them, and all the rest of our “things” are fair game. My fault for having them out.
This also goes for spilling, destroying, or losing things.
4. The Hill of My Kid Just Said Something Inappropriate or Embarrassing
Kids are really good at embarrassing their parents. They’re good at saying words the wrong way or saying things without thinking them through. In fact, some of the things they say, they don’t even have the capacity to think through.
There is a story of three-year-old me that has been told and retold in our family folklore. The story goes that when a woman my mother knew told me I was the cutest little girl she’d ever seen and, after this compliment, asked me if I wanted to go home with her, I looked at her and said, “No. You’re too fat.”
I was not a rude child. I was simply way too candid.
I would be mortified if one of my children said this today. My mom apologized profusely and later talked to me about the difference between truth and keep-it-to-yourself.
My kids have had The Talk. It apparently hasn’t sunk in yet.
Don’t ask them what color your teeth are or how old you look today or whether you look a little…chubby…in this dress. They will answer gray, four hundred twenty-three, and very much so. (This is hypothetical; I don’t wear dresses.)
I no longer care about their embarrassing displays of honesty.
Yes, Mama forgot to put peanut butter on the sandwiches yesterday so all you had in your lunches was bread; go ahead and tell your teacher. Yes, Mama’s legs are really hairy; how ‘bout you announce it to the world, and then I can actually wear shorts outside the house unashamed. Yes, Daddy dances like a chicken in pain; be sure to tell all your friends so they ask to see the chicken-in-pain in action next time they come over.
5. The Hill of I Must Keep a Perfectly Tidy House
I saved this one for last because it has been the hardest one for me to surrender. I’ve died on this hill a thousand times, sometimes daily. But no longer. I will not die on this hill.
Kids come with mess. They’re really unskilled at cleanup, no matter how many times we train them to do it well and efficiently. And of course we’ll keep trying. But if I continue to die on this hill of I Must Keep a Perfectly Tidy House, I’m either going to sacrifice my best relationship with my kids or I’m just going to become one of those mothers who walks around talking to herself (oh, wait. I already do that.). A mother who is dissatisfied with the whole of her life. I don’t want to be that mother.
So [deep breath] I don’t care if he leaves his sock right next to the dirty clothes hamper. We’ll have our cleanup time at the end of the day, and he’ll do what needs to be done. I don’t care if he takes out a sheet of art paper and then, in his concentrated state, loses count of how many pages he got out, and now the table looks like it’s made of papier-mâché because (of course) he also spilled the glue. I don’t care if he cuts up his worksheet from school into tiny little confetti pieces. He knows how to vacuum, and it’s almost time for the motivating force of Allowance Handout.
If we’re fighting every single little battle that comes our way, we’re not going to win the war. We don’t have enough stamina. We’ll burn out halfway to the end.
So these are hills I’m not willing to die on. What are yours?
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
It is not outside the realm of possibility that other homes with children can exist without as many rules as mine. But, unfortunately, it is also not outside the realm of possibility that my home would devolve into a scene from Lord of the Flies if it were not governed with rules. Left to their own devices, boys would pull dirty socks from the laundry and wear them every day, never take a bath, and likely accidentally die by daring.
We have rules for everything—rules I never thought I’d have to make. But that’s a subject for another day.
What I want to talk about today is how running a house with rules does one particular thing better than all the other things: It highlights the amazing strong will of the family’s non-conformer.
I have a few of these non-conformers in my house, and you’ll see them out and about with shirts that are not buttoned up correctly (Me, to my four-year-old twins: What is taking you so long to get dressed this morning? Both of them, in unison: We’re wearing button shirts and we’re buttoning them ourselves. Hey, more power to them.), shoes that likely don’t match, and, secretly (or not so secretly, if you’re the four-year-olds), no underwear.
There is one who is more…let’s call him intense…than the rest.
It’s not easy raising a non-conformer. Sometimes it’s the most annoying thing in the world.
I’ve never been the sort of parent who expects my kids to be perfectly behaved all the time. I also have never expected my kids to be exactly the same. I know kids well enough to understand that (a) they have bad days and (b) they’re all different. Maybe that makes parenting a little more challenging for me, but it also makes it more enjoyable. I get to see my kids blossom into who they are.
I have another problem as well: I’m a non-conformer. I’m the kind of person who, when someone tells me I can’t do something (I’m not speaking of crimes and such; don’t misunderstand me), my response is, “Watch me.” I want my kids to have that same attitude—not convinced by the “experts” who say they know everything about everything.
It’s just that when it comes to a nine-year-old non-conformer, things get a little tricky. Sometimes, honestly, I’d rather he just give it up and conform already. It would be easier for me.
My non-conformer walks to the beat of his own drum. He has a billion ideas in his head and a maddening urge to do them all, right now. He talks nonstop about the plans he has, the benefits of letting kids build with LEGO pieces all day every day, and Minecraft.
The most frequent word ejected from his mouth is “Why?” As a question. Sometimes as a response. All the times as a challenge to authority.
Here are some of the things we go round and round about.
Dress code
We don’t ask much. At school, we just want our sons to be comfortable—which means no shorts in the dead of winter and no sweat suits in the dead of summer, which is pretty much every month but January and February here in South Texas. Other than that we only expect tennis shoes, socks with the tennis shoes (you’d be surprised how many times they forget socks, which is why my house smells like an ancient Frito factory mixed with soured sweat when I’m not proactively diffusing essential oils), and a shirt of any kind. (We’ve had to add a couple of amendments to this, including (1) no shirts with nipple holes you cut out with scissors and (2) underwear. Please, underwear.)
The non-conformer slides around this dress code by not tying his tennis shoes. I told him the other day that he should just take the laces out and save himself some trouble. He said, “Why?” which is the standard response any time we say anything that has the word “should” in it. I’m waiting for him to trip and bust his face (not too badly, of course), so I can say, “That’s why.” In a very empathetic and understanding tone, of course.
Church is a bit of a different story. We still don’t expect much—we want them to wear jeans and a T-shirt or a nice shirt, if they so desire (they hardly ever desire). No holes in jeans, no sweat pants, no ratty clothes that make you look like a feral cat that got in a nasty fight.
The non-conformer is the kid who’s dressed in sharp black dress pants and shoes that are actually tied for once and yet dons a collared workout shirt.
It’s about all we can ask.
Homework
We want them to do it. Before tech time, before play time (as much as that pains me), before dinner time.
The non-conformer will fight, cry, argue, stomp for half an hour, then begrudgingly take five minutes to do his homework, because he’s a whiz at all things academic. Yesterday I tried to point out that if he just sat down as soon as he got home and did it, he would have so much more time for other things.
He said, “Why?”
I shook my head.
Dinner
Everyone in our house is expected to be at the dinner table promptly after we call them. The key word is “promptly.”
We will call everyone into the house, and most of my boys will be ravenously eyeing the food they just said they didn’t like before they’ve tasted it, and there is one seat empty. Guess whose.
We’ll go ahead and pray without him and dig in. He’ll amble to the table five or ten minutes later and say, in a voice full of hurt, “You’re eating without me?”
“We called you to the table,” his daddy will say. “You didn’t come.”
“I was just finishing this one thing,” he’ll say.
“And we were finishing dinner,” I’ll say. I don’t really say that. I say nothing, because there is no arguing with the non-conformer.
Even though he gets to the table five or ten minutes after we do, he’ll still beat Husband and me to the clean plate.
Bathing
The rule in our house is you must take at least four baths or showers a week.
That might seem gross to some people, but, hey, you’re not me and I’m not you. It’s a way we make parenting easier on ourselves.
The problem, however, is that when boys get old enough to take a bath or shower on their own, they no longer have the drive to do so.
My nine-year-old sort of decided he was ready for showers this year. The other day he came downstairs with some stringy, greasy hair hanging down in his eyes.
“Uh, how long has it been since you had a shower?” I said, trying to count back the days. I couldn’t remember.
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Go take one right now,” I said.
It’s not that he doesn’t want to take a shower; it’s just that there are more important things to think about and do. When I went upstairs later that same morning, he had not gotten in the shower. He was, instead, hovering around an old CD player listening to Jim Dale read him Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. When he lifted up his arms to reach for something on his desk, I nearly passed out.
And this is why we can’t have a nice-smelling house.
Bedtime
Bedtime is a challenge for any kid. The days are so much fun, and they are never done playing. For the non-conformer, bedtime is merely a suggestion.
It doesn’t matter how many times I lecture my non-conformer about how important the proper amount of rest is, he will look at me and say, “I just want to finish this book.”
And how can a mom who is an author say no to that? It’s what I hope every kid who reads my novels will say to their own parents—because it means they’re interested in the story and that they are learning to love reading.
But still. Sleep.
Sometimes he’ll come up with other things. “I’m going to clean my room real quick,” which means, in nine-year-old terms, he’s going to spread everything out that’s currently on his floor (and there are a lot of things), stack it into piles and then leave it there so it can spread out evenly across the carpet again. Ever been stabbed in the cheek by the tail of a LEGO dragon because you tripped over a scarf your son had lying in the doorway of his room? I have.
Sometimes I let him stay up and clean.
Other times I’ll find him sitting on the toilet, a book open in front of him.
“It’s time to go to bed,” I’ll say.
“I know,” he’ll say. “I’m just using the bathroom.”
For half an hour.
Going out as a family
When we’re having what we call a Family Fun Day, we tell our boys they can bring a few things with them—just not all the things.
My non-conformer, however, will walk around with a backpack that is perpetually dragging him down into a sitting position. One day we were all gathered around looking at the display of dinosaur bones at the local Witte Museum, and he had his knees bent like he was using a prehistoric toilet or something.
“Straighten up,” I said. “You’re standing weird. People are gonna think you’re…”
“My backpack’s a little heavy,” he said, after which he swung it from his back and opened it up. I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) to see at least ten books, a billion LEGO mini figures, and a package of brand new art pencils that were losing their points every time he readjusted. The inside of his backpack was a colorful display of accidental pencil marks.
“What could you possibly need all of that for?” I said.
He shrugged. “In case I get bored.”
This has been the case since he was a little boy. We’d take him to the park down the street, walking the entire way (it’s only half a mile), and he’d shove coloring books and art pads and novels into his backpack, thinking he’d sit and draw or maybe read instead of playing on the playground equipment.
He never did. He would only complain about how heavy the backpack was on the way back. I would let him carry it anyway. Natural consequences.
He never learned, though. He still carries a backpack everywhere—like to the museum today.
Later that day of the museum outing, Husband found me sitting on a bench inside the children’s area, where the kids were playing dodgeball, climbing ropes (don’t worry, they were made to be climbed), and pumping their legs on exercise bikes.
“What are you doing?” Husband said.
“My backpack was a little heavy,” I said. “Thought I’d sit down and let my back rest for a while.”
Husband tried to pick up my backpack and was nearly thrown off the bench. “What do you have in there?” he said.
I shrugged. “A few things.”
He opened it up, rifling through at least three books, some National Geographic magazines, and a couple of writer’s notebooks. His eyes were wide when he turned back to me. “What could you possibly need all of this for?” he said.
I shrugged. “You never know when you’ll have a minute to yourself,” I said. “I come prepared.”
He shook his head and eyed the nine-year-old. Then he looked back at me. He seemed to be saying something with his eyes.
I have no idea what it was, but before I could ask him, my non-conformer plopped down on the bench next to me, unzipped his backpack and took out his notebook.
“Told you I would need it,” he said, before burying his face in the blank page and writing.
You could hear Husband’s laugh in the next town.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
If you want a lesson in focus, try having a conversation with your partner while your kids are home.
At the end of every day, when Husband and I have put away our work for the evening, we try to have a quick run-down of what happened—highs and lows that we’ll share, somewhat, at the dinner table but in a kid-friendly way. Husband is usually finishing up dinner and I’m usually hovering and stealing pieces of the turkey burgers he’s making, while he tells me about all the contacts he made today and I tell him about all the words I wrote (one of these is clearly more interesting than the other). We’re interrupted an average of forty-five times in a five-minute conversation. And when we turn our attention to the kids, usually they forget what they were going to say in the first place.
The other time that we can nearly always count on (halting) conversation is when all the kids are strapped in the car and we’ve turned up the radio, full blast, so we don’t have to hear boys tattle. That doesn’t work, of course, and oftentimes, Husband and I will wish for a police car glass separating the front seat from the back. Why aren’t there cars like this made for parents yet?
In any of the instances when we think it would be a perfect time to approach a conversation, we are invariably and constantly unsuccessful.
Conversations when you’re a parent really have one defining quality about them: constant interruption.
It doesn’t matter at what point in the conversation you are. You could be almost all the way done with what you need to say, and miracle of all miracles no one has needed you for the last fifteen minutes—but now you’ve gotten to the most important part. And, of course, one of your kids will need you as soon as you start in on the finale. They will need you for the silliest of things—one will wonder how many galaxies are in the solar system, and you won’t have the slightest clue. Another will need you to ask what 4,567 multiplied by 9,327 is, as if you’re some kind of math whiz and didn’t forget how to even add numbers after you finished your required college algebra class.
Sometimes you’re interrupted because they happen to hear their name, even if they’re in the middle of singing their favorite song at the top of their lungs. They will hear their name and perk up and then proceed with an interruption to ask what you’re talking about. I remember my mother calling me Rabbit Ears, because I could always hear my name even when she was saying it a couple of rooms removed from mine, to someone other than me. Well, now I understand this phenomenon. I have been blessed with six rabbits, and one who will, without fail, interject into the conversation the question, “Are you talking about me?” The others, at least, will close their mouths and quietly listen.
Even if we whisper their names, they will hear it. We’ve done it just to test this theory. It’s quite astounding, because they can’t seem to hear their names when we’re actually talking to them. Weird.
We’ve tried to teach our boys to say “Excuse me” or “Pardon me” or to wait until a break happens in the conversation to tell us what they have to say, unless, of course, it’s an emergency. (The emergency definition gets a little lost in translation, too, but that’s a topic for another day.) On the good days, a boy will place his hand on one of our arms and wait patiently for the talker to finish—but it is extremely hard to finish a point when you have large brown eyes staring at you like they’re wondering if you’re ever going to be done talking. If that doesn’t steal your thought from the track down which it barreled, then you are more skilled at conversation than I am.
When you’re a parent, conversations with your partner will sometimes last for days—and if you’re really, really good, weeks. Sometimes you’ll even think you had the conversation and you didn’t at all. It was only wishful thinking. You will have mapped out the entire conversation in your head, and then on the day of your doctor’s appointment, your partner will say, “I didn’t know you had a doctor’s appointment,” and you will get mad at him, because he never listens to anything you have to say, when the real explanation is that the conversation never happened at all, except in your head. You were communicating with a figment of your own imagination.
Other times, you’ll forget that you already told your partner something, and you’ll delightedly repeat the same story twice, to a bored and disappointing reception.
There are so many times that I am right in the middle of saying something and one of my boys will start crying because a brother kicked his lip and made it bleed, or maybe someone just needs us to know that his poop was green today, and I can’t for the life of me remember what I was saying. Have you heard the old saying “If you forget what you were trying to say, it must not have been all that important?” It turns out that if you forget what you’re saying in the middle of saying it because your kids interrupted you, there is no guarantee that it is not important. I know, because none of my boys had signed permission slips for their field trips this year, because I forgot to tell their daddy they were due.
Husband and I have had the longest conversations with the fewest words while living with six boys. Here’s an example of one of those conversations:
Me: Hey, I wanted to talk about the supplies that we’ll need for this weekend’s birthday party.
Husband: Let’s make a list.
Kid 1 interruption: Mama, my brother took the ball from me.
Me: [mediating a fight over a superhero ball that is completely flat. Someone wants to play soccer with it, even though it’s a flattened ball. Someone else wants to wear it as a hat. Everyone had it first.]
Fast forward half an hour.
Husband: Now what was that again?
Me: I forgot what we were talking about.
Husband: Me too.
[Collective laughter.]
Me: Oh, yeah, the birthday party.
Kid 2 interruption: Mama?
Me: I’m talking to Daddy. Just wait a minute. Don’t be rude. Remember what we taught you about interrupting?
[Kid 2 places a hand on my arm and watches me intently.]
Me: I can’t think. Let me just see what he wants.
[Engaged with a kid who wants to know if he can start a business selling art. Today. Right this minute.]
Fast forward another half hour.
Husband: [with a good amount of sarcasm.] Back so soon?
Me: Where were we?
Husband: I don’t think we’d even gotten started.
Me: The birthday party. You said something about ca—
Kid 3 interruption: Excuse me, Daddy?
Husband: Mama and Daddy are talking. Please don’t interrupt.
[Kid 3 places a hand on Daddy’s arm and watches intently for a break in the conversation.]
Me: So cake and plates and cups.
Husband: I’ll make a list and pick some up at the store.
Me: That would be good.
Husband: Chocolate?
Me: Yes. And green.
Husband: Snacks?
Me: Yes. And make sure the cups are recyclable.
Husband: Got it.
Me: One more thing—
Kid 1 interruption: [crying] Mama, Daddy?
Husband: Maybe we should talk later.
Kid 1: My brother hit me.
Husband: [turning to Kid 2] What did you want?
Kid 2: I forgot. You were talking so long.
Kid 1: Can we watch a movie?
Kid 3: Did you know that a shark can smell blood from 40,000 miles away?
When Husband and I “finish” a conversation, it’s usually a day after we actually start it, when kids are entertained out on the trampoline until someone takes a leap into someone else’s knee and comes in limping to tell us all about it—with a little exaggeration thrown in for good measure.
All I know is that my focus is much more efficient now. I can keep a running commentary going in my head all day. The real challenge is remembering what I’ve actually said to Husband and what I’ve only said in my imagination.
Ah, well. Husband and I won’t even finish the argument we’ll have before a kid will interrupt us with a stink bomb and a proud declaration that they win the Rotten Smell Tournament.
As if one ever existed.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
Photo by This Is Now Photography.
