There are many things you don’t ever think about before you become a parent—things no one will find it necessary to mention to you, either (even though there are many things they will mention to you unnecessarily).
I read so many books before I became a parent, but I was still ill-prepared for all the things I would have to give up.
You give up so much. You give up things like:
Long phone calls.
Every time I start to dial the number of a doctor or someone I need to talk to (because I hardly ever call the people I actually want to talk to), it doesn’t take my children long to realize what’s happening. In fact, I usually have to tell the hold music to hold on—because one of my twins has taken out the rake from his daddy’s shed and is running toward the other twin with said rake raised above his head and a guttural yell straight from the pages of Lord of the Flies tripping along ahead of him. It’s always my luck that the hold music stops and a person actually answers the phone when I’m in mid-yell—“Cut it out, or you’ll have to come sit with me for the duration of this call!” I don’t apologize. Instead, I usually pretend they didn’t hear anything.
They probably didn’t. Their “How can I help you?” didn’t sound worried at all. It was my imagination.
Real dates.
If you have as many kids as I have, a date can seem like a luxury. Husband and I haven’t had a real date in four months—and by real date, I mean a date that actually gets you out of the house. It’s not because there are no babysitters willing to sit on a Friday night and watch my kids sleep but because we’d have no money left, after paying a sitter (or two), to actually have a date. I suppose we could ride around in the car looking at Christmas lights (for a three-week span during the year) or walk through a park (the temperate climate of South Texas is limited to the same three-week span; who wants to sweat on a date or freeze half to death?) or recline the van seats and take a long, uninterrupted nap.
But I’d like, for once, to have a restaurant-cooked dinner where kids weren’t hanging around outside the door, peering through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor, whispering that they’d like to have some French fries once in a while, too. A dinner out would be nice now and then.
Extended conversations.
We try really hard to teach our children not to interrupt, unless there’s an emergency. The problem is that kids have a very hard time defining “emergency.” They will interrupt us to tell us the computer froze while they were playing Minecraft (this was unauthorized play, an observation that will come with a whole half hour of argument). They’ll interrupt us to ask why rain tastes like dirt mixed with sky mixed with musty fart (they’re the kids of a poet; what do you expect?). They’ll interrupt us to tell us all about the cut they just got on their finger—the middle one, of course—that you’d need a microscope to see but for which they need a Band-Aid—maybe two. Seriously, they do. They’re bleeding! All this while unintentionally flipping us off.
Husband and I have gotten really good at leaving sentences unfinished and assuming the other knows what we were going to say. We have been married thirteen years, after all.
I won’t go into all the trouble this can cause. Arguments are good for marriages.
Trips to the store together.
The last time we all went to the store together, two kids fought over who was going to push the cart and nearly tore off my toe in the process, another kid slipped three packages of chocolate chips into the basket when we weren’t looking, another kid flattened himself on the bottom of the cart so he could fly and ended up smashing his finger (which I told him would likely happen), and another kid disappeared for half an hour while all the frozen fruit and vegetables defrosted because of a very hastily-organized search party. We almost left without the last kid, who was charged with watching the defrost process so he could report about it later, keeping the secret about the chocolate chips, and not moving the cart. (I dare you to guess which one of those instructions was mine.)
Never again.
Confidence.
Kids will say anything—and everything—to other people. They will tell another person how old you are (and be way off), how much you weigh (and also be way off), and how hard you cried while watching Pete’s Dragon last Friday. They’ll tell all your secrets, especially to their favorite teacher.
Good luck keeping a healthy sense of confidence with a kid who hugs you, hugs you again, and then asks you if you’re having another baby because your belly sure is poking out.
The most basic form of self-care.
I’m an introvert living with six wild, loud, rambunctious boys, which means I need a daily moment—or a hundred of them—to care for myself. Reading is my favorite way to do this.
Not that I have the opportunity to do it often. When I try to put my feet up for any amount of time, someone decides it’s time to open up the game closet and take out all the games that have no less than ten thousand pieces; someone else decides it’s the perfect opportunity to steal into my room, where all the devices are stashed in hiding places (we’re running out of unknown places, apparently), and spend some extra minutes doing the forbidden: playing with tech; and still another takes a pair of scissors to his shoelaces, his shirt, his underwear (he wants us to believe he blew out that hole with a massive fart), and, regrettably, his hair.
A nice and tidy home.
It doesn’t matter how many times you remind them where hampers are, where shoe baskets are, where their school things go, kids will walk out of their clothes, kick off their shoes, and drop their school things in the hall and forget all about the after-school procedures they’ve done for the last four years (ironically, the oldest is the most consistently forgetful).
And by the time you’ve solved this problem, they’ve decided it’s time to examine all the pencils in the pencil holder—and by examine, they mean dump them out—because anything’s better than mental math.
Scissors, glue, permanent markers, paints.
Do you know what can happen if you leave a child unattended with any of the fun art supplies listed above? You will end up with a four-year-old who looks like he has mange, another four-year-old who’s no longer hungry because his snack was Elmer’s glue, a four-year-old (previously mentioned—yes, the same one) with permanent whiskers on his face, and another four-year-old (also previously mentioned) with an acrylic mural on his shirt (he didn’t like the one that was already there.).
It’s easier to get rid of them. The supplies, I mean.
Stylish clothes.
My closet has not been updated since 2006, which coincides with the year I became a mother. I am constantly buying clothes—but not for me. No, I buy clothes for the kids who walk on their kneecaps and blow out their jeans within a month of receiving them. I buy clothes for the kids who use the toes of their tennis shoes as makeshift brakes—even when they’re running. I buy clothes for the kids who think “shirt” is synonymous with “napkin.”
The only thing even remotely consistent about my children (besides their complaining about what’s for dinner before we’ve sat down to eat it) is that they will require our entire clothes budget for themselves.
I’m down to my last pair of jeans. Not because they’ve worn out (I hardly ever wear them, to tell the truth), but because, well, things are expanding. If you know what I mean.
Sleeping in.
The beginning of parenthood had me fooled. When Husband and I only had one kid, he slept so late we could wake at a decent hour and still get things done. As the years passed and the kid-count increased, that rise-and-shine time became earlier and earlier and earlier. Now, on a school day, my kids sleep until 6:30 a.m. On weekends they sleep until 5:30 a.m., if we’re lucky. We’re usually not.
Sleeping in is overrated anyway.
We may give up a lot to have kids, but on our best days, we’ll agree that it’s worth it. On the worst days, we’ll still agree it’s worth it—hard but worth it. Because what we get in return—sweet kisses that miss their mark but hit the bull’s-eye, hugs that hold on, a voice that whispers in your ear how much they love you—is what dreams are made of.
At least until you get on the phone with your health insurance and realize it’s going to be a long afternoon in more ways than one.
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.)
