Having four “big kids” is a bit crazy sometimes. My mind knows that these are some of the best years of our lives. My sanity, however, needs a little encouragement to hang in there some days.
When I read the lists (like this one and this one) of things I miss about the earlier years of motherhood I hold these cuckoo days close to my heart.
Like the days that we have left behind us, this is a precious and unique season of life. Here are ten things that I can’t wait to be over, and that I will pine away after when four teenagers are awake late into the night, eating all our food without asking, and then sleeping all day as I do who-knows-what with myself.
10. The activities that never end. Baseball, ballet, piano, birthday parties, sleepovers, playdates, on and on the list goes. My calendar orbits around these four people like the earth orbits the sun. Except I don’t really keep my calendar updated, so I can’t keep it all straight. Sometimes I realize minutes before we are supposed to be somewhere that we are supposed to be somewhere!!! It would be so helpful to have a driver, or a personal assistant for each child. But alas, they are stuck with me, the woman who schedules nothing, plans very little, and keeps track of the day with great difficulty.
9. Irrational anger over minuscule problems. Occasionally there is screaming in our house because “Someone touched my hair!!!!” Other days, there is a full-blown fight over who will spit in the sink first while brushing teeth. I have seen children lose their minds and writhe on the floor because an apple was served at lunch. There are three bathrooms in our home, but when nature calls, often only one is considered worthy of using, resulting in World War III. I know the hormones of the teen years will be hard to deal with, but I think the hormones of elementary school are my training ground.
8. The constant food consumption. This morning I toasted ten english muffins for what a hobbit would call “second breakfast”. I have to refuse to be a walking, talking menu, because I get this question at least a dozen times a day, “What can I eat?” Let he who has eyes to see look for his own snack! Cutting, slicing, boiling, roasting, toasting, pouring; these are the tasks that fill my day. Any time one of my children fixes their own breakfast, lunch or snack, I feel like have won a major award. But someday, I know I will use fresh baked goods to lure them into my presence. So, I embrace these years of “Mama’s Café” as preparation for the day that giant men saunter in and hug me over chocolate chip cookies, and a grown Lady sits beside me and enjoys a cup of tea and homemade scones.
7. Chores. I consider it part of my role as a mom to train my children to work diligently. I also consider it part of my job to teach them to do things like wash dishes, sweep floors, prepare food, and generally care for a house. In theory, I am working my way out of some jobs around here. In practice, I am the evil task master who ruins all their fun and forces them into hard labor. Someday they will embrace responsibility as a part of life, but that day may not come while they still live under my roof. This is disheartening, but I know it’s best for them to learn that a life worth living takes hard work.
6. Sibling fights. Here’s my goal in life: for my children to love one another more than themselves. Here’s their goal in life: to be the most important, best, biggest, strongest, funniest, or most special person in the house. We’re working on it, and we’ve made some major headway, but they still hash out their human nature on each other quite often. I’m hoping that by the time they are big enough to really do physical damage to each other, they will also have enough self-control to tame their anger. But even then, I will ask for the same thing for Christmas every year: Children who don’t fight.
5. Shoes, everywhere. At any given moment in our house you can find flip flops by the front door, boots under the dining room table, cleats in the middle of the garage floor, tennis shoes in the hallway, sandals by the sofa, and one lonely, forgotten shoe in the shoe basket under the coat rack. I console myself with the thought that this will probably be a blessing that will last well through the high school years. All four of them seem to entirely lack the gene that remember to put shoes away, so I can treasure this problem until they move out. I get warm, fuzzy butterflies just thinking about it.
4. A total reliance on me for everything important to them. My children expect me to know where every item of clothing is and every toy has been placed. I am asked to perform services constantly; make a cup of juice, remove baseball belts from pants, sew holes in stuffed animals, find a safe place for precious articles, hold snotty tissues, and build forts with “windows”. Someday I will be of little use to them, unless they need money. This knowledge is saddening, and makes even holding those snotty tissues seem like an honor.
3. Hypocritical reasoning and logic, completely flaunted in my face. One day a child hates broccoli, the next he is cataloguing its health benefits for his sister, encouraging her that it’s “not so bad”. I have seen belligerent children flip an internal switch and decide to obey without question. The kid who hated the sand and salty water at the beach last summer now waxes eloquent about how much he loved that day. They expect me to overlook these fickle displays, but it’s really difficult, because I am a rational human who thinks clearly.
2. Noisy dinners (and lunches, breakfasts, snack times….) Everyone talking at once. Arguing over who will pray for dinner. Someone singing the names of all the presidents. Someone else screaming, “STOP SINGING!!” Mr. Fantastic smiling at me from the other end of the table, as he is interrupted for the 100th time, and me saying, “Bedtime is only two hours away.” Yep, these are the best years! But then, they all go across the street and the house is totally quiet. And I know, it will be like this every day when they grow up and leave. My heart hurts with the thought and I wish someone would yell out the alphabet in falsetto, with the sound of breaking glass coming from the kitchen.
1. The mountain of laundry. I have a high-capacity washer, and still I do approximately fifteen to twenty loads of laundry in a week. It’s crazy. And with all the activities, the general food preparation my family requires, and the shoes that I am constantly asking someone to put away, the laundry gets pushed aside quite a bit. This often results in digging through seven loads for a baseball uniform, a ballet leotard, or a pair of underwear. I suppose I will miss their cute little clothes someday, but I won’t miss this frantic digging. I may miss using the folding of all that laundry as an excuse to watch an entire season of Downton Abbey, but I won’t miss carrying the piles to their respective homes. At least, I don’t think I will, but motherhood is such an emotional roller coaster, you never know….
THAT WAS AMAZING! CARRIE!!! Its like youre living my life but only IN ANOTHER STATE!!! I havent been able to stop laughing. I thought that i was the only person who hasnt yet found a solution to the singing debacle!