Every now and then, I reach this mysterious place where parenting feels really easy. The boys are behaving perfectly (as if that’s the measure of easy parenting), and everyone is loving each other well and, most importantly, no one is complaining about what I just put on the table for dinner before they’ve even tasted it. We are all a happy family. I like them. They like me.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, watch out. They wake up different people the next day, and I find I’ve told myself a whole parcel of lies like this one:
I have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent.
Fortunately, this one gets knocked off-kilter quite regularly by my oldest, who is a practiced diplomat who never lets an answer stay an answer until he’s rolled it all over on the ground and wrestled it to near death.
After nine years of parenting this kid, I know better than to believe this lie. I don’t have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent. I have really easy kids because they were born easy. I have a few of those in the mix, and they’re delightful. They’re also easily forgotten, because they don’t require as much work. I could leave the 6-year-old home all day alone, and the only thing I’ve have to worry about is the state of the refrigerator when I get back (this kid once ate three pounds of red grapes when I raced upstairs to take a record-breaking shower). The others, well. They’ll argue with a sock, if it told them them to put it on.
There are a lot of other lies we tell ourselves, too. Like:
It’s going to get easier.
This is your lifeline when you’re the parents of twins. You spend the first year telling yourself it’s going to get easier, because they’ll be able to feed themselves, and then you spend the next year saying it’ll get easier when they’re 3, because they’ll understand things like “Don’t take the cover off that baby-proofed light socket. It will kill you,” and then you spend the whole third year dying, because you have not known fear until you see 3-year-old twins with their guilty faces on standing outside a bathroom door they just closed, saying they did “Nuffing.”
Crap. It’s not ever going to get easier. I’m just going to tell myself that, and then maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised (but probably not).
The other day I found myself thinking of another lie while I was scrubbing the dish that had somebody’s sour ranch dressing caked on it.
Eventually they’ll do the chores to my standards.
Eventually they’ll do the chores, that much is true. But it will probably not be up to my standards. I know, because I remember myself as a child. My mom had a rotating dish schedule, and after my shift, the sink was always splattered with water, and my mom told me over and over and over again that part of the dishwasher’s job was wiping up all the excess water, but yeah, yeah, I just wanted to get on to the part where I got to sit on the couch and read a book. They didn’t have streamed audio books back then. If they had, it would have been a different story, Mom.
And then, the other night, when I’d finished a dinner of sautéed pork chops with mushrooms and garlic sliced infinitesimally small so no one would complain about the unknown grossness caking their otherwise perfect meat, somebody, before he’d even tasted it, said he didn’t like what we were having and he wasn’t going to eat, and I discovered another big, fat lie.
One day they’ll stop complaining.
It’s a lie, too. I know, because the other day, when something was taking too long on my computer I started complaining about how you’d think we’d have faster computers in this century and how it was taking SO MUCH TIME and how I didn’t have all this extra time at my disposal and how I wished I could jut hire someone to do this part and blah blah blah blah blah.
The only way my kids will stop complaining is if I magically somehow stop complaining, which is probably not going to happen anytime soon, because have you seen the mess kids can make in two seconds of inattention? Complaining is my feel-better.
On Christmas morning this year, I found myself agreeing with the lie flipping through my head when my kids emptied their stockings and asked to eat a peanut butter cup.
It’s just a little sugar. Just this once.
“Just a little sugar” is like saying, “It’s just a few broken pieces of furniture and a few more holes in the wall and a few whiny kids at the end of this day. Giving kids sugar is like rubbing yourself with raw meat and walking out into the African bush. You’re going to die.
And, of course, we decided to have our first Family Fun Day on the first day of the new year, because our word for this year is “play,” and we wanted to end the boys’ Christmas vacation on a good note, on a day when we would all be able to enjoy each other and play, and twenty minutes into that day I found another lie sneaking in, like maybe I wasn’t paying attention:
One day it’ll take us less than 30 minutes to pack up and get in the car.
It seems like it’s taken longer the older the boys get, mostly because now they have wills of their own. There is always another shoe to be found. There is always a drink someone forgot. There is always something they need to “pack up real quick” because they want to take a billion art supplies to the zoo.
Another lie that happens to me often, when I’m posting a picture of my boys and I’m disappointed that only 157 people liked it is:
Everybody thinks our kids are as adorable as we think they are.
Nope. People think kids are cute, generally, but no one thinks they’re as cute as we do (except twins—other people think they’re cuter than they really are.). I’m speaking generally, of course. That’s not the case for my boys. Everyone in the world thinks they’re cute.
Some lies knock us right off our parenting pedestal, like this one:
Not giving in to bad behavior makes bad behavior magically disappear.
I remember the first time this illusion was shattered, when my oldest threw a major fit because he wanted the green plate instead of the blue one. But the blue plate was the only one clean. And thus began the oft repeated phrase in our home, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.” I didn’t give in. Of course not. That meant the tantrums would go away.
Not what happened. In fact, I suspect he tried harder. And I stuck to my boundary harder. And we danced again the next time. And the next time and the next time. Now he’s 9. We don’t fight about the green plate instead of the blue plate anymore. We fight about things like how he needs five more minutes of technology time to finish this one thing, even though his time’s up.
Not giving in never solved anything in my house.
Every now and then, when a kid is talking about how they want to run away and how they wish they had different parents, I find myself thinking:
One day they’ll understand.
One day they’ll understand the boundaries we set, and one day they’ll understand why we said no, their friend can’t come over today because we want to spend some time together as a family, and one day they’ll understand why we limit that technology time and require creative time every day. But even if they don’t, that doesn’t change the fact that:
One day they will know just how much they were loved.
I’ve gone over and over this one, examined it inside and out, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this one is not a lie. They may not understand the love of it all right now, but one day they will. I’m certain of it.
Now, excuse me while I go fish out of the toilet a stuffed animal that wanted to “take a mud bath” in the present someone forgot to flush. It’s going to get easier.
