Set my boys loose in a room, and it’s only a matter of time before everything in it falls apart.
It’s not that boys do this on purpose. It’s just that it inevitably happens. They’ll be standing, innocently, in the middle of a room, and a fan blade will fall off. If they get anywhere close to the boxed fan, it combusts without their even laying a hand on it. If they look at their beds, the middles will start to sag in defeat. If they think about their stuffed animals, seams begin to rip apart.
This destruction follows my boys around the house daily. I watch it happen in the kitchen, where they take out bowls and spoons and then sneak out to the backyard and try to dig to the earth’s mantle because someone (probably Husband) told them it could be done. The spoon, of course, comes back in all bent and misshapen so we won’t be able to eat with it, but no one actually touched it, they say. They were just pretending they were going to dig to the mantle. They actually used their hands.
I watch it happen when they move closer to the paintings they perfected last week, putting their grubby little hands all over them so smears of dirt join the smears of yellow and red in a perfectly shaped fingerprint for which no one in the house is actually responsible. Maybe it was a robber, they say. Coming in to steal a valuable painting. I’m sure that’s it, I say.
I watch it happen to the blinds, which will either snap upon notice or, if we’re having a really fun day, will attract Sharpie marker prints that look suspiciously like the 3-year-olds had a grand old time when Mama was putting the laundry in the dryer. They have no idea who did it. Not even the one with black lines all over his chin.
Probably the most notable thing inside the house that no one destroys is their bedrooms. Somehow, according to them, they didn’t put all those clothes on the floor, it just happened. They have no idea how it happened and now they’re wondering how it is they’re going to get it all cleaned up before technology time. I could care less, honestly, because I’d rather they were reading instead of watching a screen. They also definitely did not shove all their stuffed animals off their bed in a tumble of bears and dogs and big-eyed lions.
Other things they didn’t touch are the colored pencils fanned out on the floor, the art notebooks stacked on the dining room table, the jump rope draped across the couch, the clothes they wore to school today, the backpacks that are still in the living room instead of on their hooks, the LEGO pieces that have exploded all over the floor. And they most definitely don’t know who took their bed apart, because they specifically remember making it up this morning.
We must live with a ghost who likes pranks.
It’s not just the indoors, either. Something also destroys our yard. Not only is that where bikes and roller blades and scooters get left, even though no one touched them, it’s also where things like forks and spoons and the bowls that held their snack end up, even though they didn’t bring any of that outside.
Step into our yard, and you will find all manner of things. Jackets, hats, scarves (because you don’t need any of these for a Texas winter anymore), shoes, and, my favorite: holes. Since my oldest learned all about the earth’s core, he has made it a goal to dig all the way down. And their hole is getting there, because last time I fell in it someone had to throw a rope down to pull me back out.
They accidentally cracked the tiles we used to build a fire pit. They didn’t mean to tear holes big enough to swallow my backside in the wicker patio chairs. They thought when I said, “Don’t pull up all the rocks around the rose bed” I meant, “Please collect all the rocks around the rose bed and make sure you fling them into our brand new air conditioning unit.”
But all of this is nothing compared to the things they bring indoors with them, which causes the destruction of a mama’s sanity. There are the tree limbs that they’ll place neatly on my bed, because they want me to make them into magic wands. There are the jars of roly polies they arrange on a pantry shelf so I think I’m getting out a jar of sunflower seeds when it’s really a bug graveyard. There are the spiders they’ll bring in with them and drop, delightedly, in my lap with a quick, “Look what I found!”
The destruction boys cause is quite baffling, sometimes. They look at a brand new sock, and the sock grows a hole. They eye a bunch of bananas, and the bananas are magically gone. They find a hidden plunger and, well, you don’t want to know.
But what I’m always left with at the end of a destructive day is this: memories.
The hole in the wall over there happened when somebody accidentally slammed the door too hard, which made a picture fall, which made a boy try to catch it and, instead, drive his hand through the wall. The nick on the edge of this bookshelf happened because a boy got a little too excited about a new book he’d gotten, and, in his turning around to show his brothers, he forgot that he was dressed up as Leonardo the Ninja Turtle, and his sword crashed into wood. The paleolithic cave drawings on the back of our house happened because someone let a ghost borrow a magic marker.
Boys are careless, curious, and experimental. It’s just who they are.
Although, if you were to ask them, they would have a point of clarification: It’s not them doing the destruction. It’s someone else. We must have some kind of monster living here. Or maybe we have a ghost. I bet our house is built on a burial ground.
All I know is whichever ghost is responsible for the destruction that comes from a plunger, a used toilet, and bathroom walls is about to be sent into the beyond.
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 Collin Armstrong on Unsplash)
