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.)
