Oh My Empty Purposeless Soul

We’re chatting again, when my mother-in-law overhears the kids bickering then squealing in the background.

“I miss that,” she says, because she’s hundreds of miles away and the sound fills her with longing.

“I know,” I tell her, feeling guilty we haven’t been able to visit her at all since she moved almost two years ago.

There is a lull in conversation where I think we’re both tuned in to her sadness. Then she breaks the silence.

“You’re going to feel SO empty when they’re gone, aren’t you? When the little one goes to school and the house is quiet and you’re all alone?”

I’m not sure if she wants an actual answer to her question, so I just chuckle. Sigh. Wonder how many more vague non-committal sounds I can make before she’ll veer off the topic.

Maybe she wants me to sob. Who knows?

It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about it. Come fall, the youngest will hopefully be off to school with the rest of his siblings. Unlike previous years though, I won’t have a baby at home to focus all of my energies on. For the past 12 years, every time one of my kids hit their expiration date (usually between year three and four) I conveniently produced another one, so that when I was shipping one kid off to school there was always a new fresh smelling one to cradle in my arms and bury my face in.

I didn’t necessarily plan it that way, it was just the way things worked out.

Not so this year, but I’m okay with that.

While I’m sad that pudge and dimples have given way to flailing limbs and sharp bony joints, I’m a little excited by the prospect of what might come next, by the possibility of carving out a considerable chunk of day just for me.

I may go to work. I may go back to school myself. I may do both.

I could bike 20 miles a day. I could train for a marathon. I could pick up a third language. I could write a book. Or at the very least read one.

Yes, it’s a little depressing sending my babiest of babies, my last little guy, out in to the world for six hours a day. It is an ending of sorts, but also a beginning. A different chapter in our lives filled with a whole different set of challenges and joys and hey, I might be able to form a coherent thought every now and again which would be just peachy.

I’m wondering how to respond to my mother-in-law when she chimes in on her own question.

“Well, with the kids gone, you will have much more time to dedicate to your husband.”

Yeah, that’s just what I was thinking.

Dinner’s Taken Care Of

Last week my husband offered to cook dinner. It was a sweet gesture that I’m fairly certain had nothing to do with any scandalous affairs he may or may not have been harboring overwhelming guilt for.

I was suspicious grateful. Having someone else prepare our evening meal would free me up to tackle a host of other responsibilities to include loafing about and taking a considerable chunk out of the behemoth novel I’m trying to finish sometime in the next century before it’s due back at the library.

Just after five he set to chopping, dicing, and sautéing.

I sat outside, alternately watching my youngest perform Spiderman antics that required my undivided attention and attempting to read a paragraph at a time before I was busted for not providing my undivided attention. Wook at this, Mom. You’re not wooking. WOOK at me. WOOK at me now!

From inside, marvelous aromas were wafting out, slapping me in the face and making my stomach grumble.

I ventured inside to take a peek.

When my husband pulled the casserole out of the oven, it smelled wonderful, but a good majority of the liquid had evaporated, leaving the rice sans sauce and still disturbingly crunchy. I swooped about the kitchen, snatching the plastic spoon from his hand and dumping the remaining container of chicken broth in to the pan, then covering it and putting it back in the oven to hopefully simmer and soften our starches.

“Tastes good.” I took a taste from the edge of the spoon and left my well meaning husband standing dumbfounded in our kitchen.

Over the course of the next hour, I hovered, I stirred, I peeked in his pot and generally took over the cooking duties on a night I had been given a reprieve.

My husband took me aside. “You know, I offered to cook since I’m through with my classes for the semester and you just kind of took over. If you wanted to do it yourself I could’ve just sat in bed and watched the news instead.”

I was hurt. Here I was helping HIM, repairing a potential cooking disaster and rescuing our meal from the pitfalls of inexperience. I was a savior, I was…

Oh wait, I was an idiot who had the night off. What the French was I thinking?

“You’re right,” I said, relaxing my face, unclenching my fists, putting down the blunt instrument I was very close to cracking his head open with.

I wasn’t giving him enough credit. The man has some considerable problem solving skills. Half a brain, that I know of. So, if he’s making dinner then I should let him. And if it gets fragged then it’s OKAY. We’ll eat hot dogs or cereal and be no worse for the wear. It’s only dinner.

It’s easy to complain about having to do everything. My grandmother did it all the time. Woe is me, I’m so tired, life is hard! So MANY dirty dishes! Then any time she caught you in her kitchen she’d chase you out with a ladle because you were clearly doing everything wrong, even if it was just rinsing your plate off.

I don’t want to be that mom, who after her kids leave feels such a huge empty void she has to push her dog around in a stroller or maybe get one of those weird capuchin monkeys people dress like babies. Those monkeys will eat your face.

I intend to keep my face after the kids go to college.

If that means eating crunchy rice every now and then, I am good with it.

The kitchen is all yours, honey.

Blood and Chocolates

So Mother’s Day was mostly uneventful.

Chocolates were rained upon me, along with cheerful cardboard creations that turned my heart to pudding. Promises to love me forever. Appreciations for listening and loving and feeding and playing.

Sure my kids were up before seven, but strangely enough so was I, due to a damn internal clock that can’t tell the difference between Sunday and Monday. That and a full bladder are recipes for wakefulness. I did manage a thirty minute early morning walk/jog before the day turned to sweltering. We visited my mother and grandmother with only minimum disagreements before we finally headed home in the early evening.

Sadly because he was up so early, my youngest kept dozing off in the car then getting woken up at each destination, leading to several screaming tantrums that I really couldn’t blame him for. Soda on my tee-shirt makes me a little unreasonable too. He spent all day vibrating with a frenetic energy, launching himself from furniture, chattering away about Spiderman and accusing everyone who didn’t bend to his will of “being mean” to him.

Then at home, as the day was winding to a close while I made grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, I heard a sickening thump. Followed by shocked silence, followed by that siren wail that can only mean someone has seriously injured themselves.

Flying over, swooping down, and scooping my youngest into my arms I hugged him to my chest. “Are you okay? What happened?” His eyes were frantic, his hands pressed to his forehead. My daughter was describing the scenario, he’d jumped off the edge of the recliner and slipped, his head connecting loudly with ceramic tile.

“Let me see, let me see,” I said (because when I’m freaking out I tend to utter all phrases in pairs).

I pried his fingers away to see a forehead dripping blood in thick rivulets.

“Oh no, there’s blood.”

Have I ever mentioned how appreciative I am that my husband is a paramedic? I can always count on that man to maintain a level head in the face of all injury related emergencies. He is practical and efficient to my panic and nausea.

“Get me a towel,” he directs the other kids, while I hold my son’s face in my hands, fretting, tasting chocolates in the back of my throat, thinking about how clearly I can smell the blood.

He presses the towel to the boy’s head, peers in his ears and nose with a flashlight, looks in his eyes. He assesses, while I’m still uselessly staring. By now, my son’s tears have dried and he giggles at something he sees on the television.

I’m still holding his legs in my lap, stroking, watching as my husband cleans up the blood, puts ice on the bloody bump, and tells me it’s okay. It’s just a bump. He is fine.

But my heart is still pounding and I feel like a shit-heel for ever complaining about wanting time to myself. There is guilt in spades and in my superstitious, irrational, mom brain, I’m thinking this injury is karma kicking me in the head for being selfish then broadcasting it on the internet.

Eventually reason seeps in and I know injuries and small children go together hand in hand. One dented forehead is not going to slow down a three year old who is now convinced he’s Spiderman. There are bumps in his future, guaranteed.

Hopefully only when my husband is home to talk me down.

Your Momma

I am not a big fan of Mother’s Day. It’s contrived, it’s commercial, and it is never, ever the joyous breakfast in bed occasion depicted by countless TV ads. This is compounded by the fact that my appreciation of my own mother and her gift of life (9 months of bed rest, bedpans, and sponge baths of which she loves to remind me) is somewhat laden with years of resentment both justified and otherwise. So when Mother’s Day rolls around, I’m more likely to be annoyed by the obligatory visits than awash with love, appreciation, and satisfaction.

I love being a mom, don’t get me wrong. But, I don’t always love it. I don’t love it every single waking second of my life. Sometimes I am overwhelmed, sometimes I am discouraged, sometimes I want to get in the minivan and drive away from my lovely life, and my cozy home, and perhaps across the line in to another state for an undetermined period of time. I would come back. I probably wouldn’t even make it as far as Palm Beach before I was wrought with guilt, staring back at those booster seats and contemplating what a monster I am, but still, that seed is there. Luckily Florida is a very LONG state and driving out of it somewhat impractical. It lends itself to contemplation which surely lends itself to regret and a giant U turn somewhere along the Florida turnpike.

Part of it is the restlessness I’ve been feeling lately. I want to say it’s a blue funk, but it’s more like smudges of charcoal that mar the edges of my vision. It’s not conducive to writing, although it is the perfect environment for eating, moping, and brooding. I’ve been trying to break out of it, mostly by withdrawing and sighing a lot and even walk-slash-jogging in the pre-7-am hours. It’s helped somewhat. I think I’ve just been caught up in this weird cycle of neglecting myself, then feeling sorry for myself, then feeling guilty for being so selfish, and then overcompensating by neglecting myself further. It just feels like every waking hour is spent tending to someone else’s needs, then when I think I’ve gotten it all taken care of some other emergency crops up (by emergency read irrational tantrums, bickering, and complaining). And when the day is finally over and everyone is in bed and I think NOW, maybe now I can complete a thought, I find that there really are no thoughts left, just a humming which could just be the numbness in my brain that precedes deep and instant slumber, usually in my clothes and with the television on.

I don’t even know what my point is. I had one at some point, when I was loading the washer several hours ago, but since then and lunch and guinea pig wrangling and internet banking, it become somewhat muddled in the translation.

My point is, moms don’t just need a day of recognition. I don’t even think a week of pampering on a remote island would suffice. (Couldn’t hurt though, right?) We need some down time every day. Every. Single. Day.

I intend to take mine.

I’m sure they’ll understand.

Ugh. I feel guilty just writing this.

Welcome to the cycle.

—–

To all you lovely mothers out there, may you have a shiny, sparkling, happy, delicious day. May it find you equipped with large, swooping umbrellas to keep my rain off your parades.

Happy Mom’s Day

Rise and Shine, Sleepy Head

I wish I could say it was a sweet wake up call, but he rises impatient, wanting me at his side before his eyes are even open.

“MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY.”

It’s even more aggravating than that T-Rex alarm clock my six year old got last Christmas…at least that comes equipped with an off switch.

“MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY.”

This? This can’t be ignored.

Unless you’re my husband. Or the other children.

My day starts at a stumble, my vision sleep-blurred, my neck and shoulders bunched as I make my way to the boys’ room, grumbling, “I’m coming, I’m coming, stop shouting.”

“Mommy, I got pee. Mommy, I want milk. Mommy, I get down, I want milk, I want sleep in your bed, Mommy. I cold. I sit with you. I watch Max and Ruby with my milk. Mommy, I help you, I sit with you in your bed watch Max and Ruby, Mommy.”

“Yes, baby, yes, okay, I know, yes, okay, that’s fine, we will, yes, okay, alright, I heard you.”

This is my greeting, which I know someday I will ache for, someday when he’s grown and surly and aloof. My son, my youngest, my baby. I will long for the days when he curled in my lap, prodding me with elbows, feet, and knees to find his comfy spot among my soft and yielding anatomy.

It’s not the curled in my lap part that I mind.

Just that wild, shrieking, demanding greeting, that sets a hurried, panicked tone to the rest of my day.

How I love that boy.

How I wish he came with a snooze button.

A Flood Advisory and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• I woke up today to a torrential downpour and near total darkness. My weather radio, which goes off whenever there’s an important alert, had interrupted my not-so-peaceful slumber with it’s shrill storm warnings. It gave me a good five minutes to contemplate the impending disaster before the thunder and sheeting rain rolled in. Time enough to drag myself and four sleeping children in to our safe room and cover ourselves with a mattress, had I chosen to. Instead I turned the television on and started a pot of coffee. Because really, I’m no good to anyone without at least a cup.

• Earlier in the predawn hours two small boys had slipped in to my bed and made it their priority to gradually push me out of it as I slept. Feet, elbows and knees nudged, prodded, and kicked until finally I rolled off feeling like I’d endured a tire iron beating. Seriously, I think I might need a chiropractor, my spine feels dangerously misaligned.

• My kids have stinky butts, well, at least the two who’s butts I still have to wipe, although I’m pretty sure the ones who’s rears I’m no longer responsible for cleaning are just as rank. No matter how often my boys are bathed or swiped with a scented wipey, their butts always smell like a combination of cheese and overly ripe fruit. Gag inducing.

• My two year old has started playing this delightful game where he brings me an imaginary handful of steaming caca-rrhea, then pretends to eat it, then pretends to throw-up in his lap, then pretends to eat that. It brings him an endless amount of pleasure for me to participate in his rather appalling little game. I know it’s awful, but I have to admit fake retching can be rather amusing in the right company.

• We’ve been spending too much time out in the sun lately. Despite the sunblock applications and reapplications and moisturizing and re-moisturizing, my skin has started to take on a rather lizard-like appearance. The lovely bronze tone I’m sporting, is somewhat less desirable when the skin I’m wearing looks like it traveled back 30 years from the future to tell me to stop being an ass and stay indoors for a while.

• My mom likes to do this thing where she asks me every month whether I’ve gotten my period, then proceeds to spend the rest of our visit casting me knowing glances and suggesting I’m keeping secrets. It sounds like a fairly innocent little ribbing on her part but it’s really a calculated effort to take me from zero to 90 in three seconds flat. It unnerves me to no end regardless of how many times she’s done it. I’m pretty sure my reaction amuses her but I can’t help it. I suppose being my mother for thirty years gives her pretty accurate knowledge of all my nuclear-meltdown buttons. I’d like to think I’ll never resort to that kind of behavior with my own kids but I can’t make any promises.

• My tween sent me an email the other day with a message that said, “I saw this and thought of you” with a link to this image…

• How sweet is that? She knows me so well.

Have you had your serving of Random for the day? Visit The Un-Mom for more gristly fun.

The Hidden

My two year old is good at hiding.

He’s really good.

He’s expanded his range actually.

He no longer limits his talents to the childhood arena of hide-and-seek games, he has extended his reach. Pushed the envelope of his abilities, if you will.

For no reason whatsoever other than for his own perverse amusement, my darling cherubic son has taken to concealing himself very carefully in random, difficult to discover places. Luckily he hasn’t mastered the art of escape yet, which is very good news for my sanity, but in the meantime I’ve got to periodically sweep the house to uncover his whereabouts.

Last night he was under a barely ruffled comforter, ninja silent and perfectly still as people came in and out of the room around him, barely acknowledging the slight bump in the bedspread that couldn’t possibly be a rambunctious boy.

Last week, while I was hanging some clean laundry in our closet he was playing with his dad’s shoes at my feet. I walked out of the closet to grab some more shirts when I noticed he wasn’t there anymore. I called his name a couple of times, continued with my work then turned off the closet light and walked out in to the living room.

“You guys seen the two year old?” I asked the other kids.

Everyone shrugged, their eyes on the wide-screen, except for my ten-year-old who still had the last hide-and-seek fiasco freshly engraved in her mind.

“Oh no,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I offered. I’d wizened considerably since the last event and knew that the little miscreant was most likely right under my nose.

I went back to the closet and turned on the light. No tiny feet protruded anywhere, no little body was pressed in to a corner.

Hmmm?

We searched the other rooms. The kitchen, the bath, the shower, the cabinets.

Nothing.

I came back to the closet.

“Darling two year old,” I called out, “would you like to eat some chocolate? I have some for you.”

“I here, Mommy.” He trotted out happily from inside our walk-in, at which point I was completely convinced the kid had some type of inter-dimensional travel abilities since five seconds prior that closet had been empty.

But a little while later I discovered his secret…

Of course, the pint-sized villain had returned to the scene of the crime – an aluminum shoe rack – that he’d easily perched upon, keeping his feet conveniently off the floor and his tiny face buried away behind all of Mommy’s draped things.

See that smile. He knows he’s been busted, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before he finds a better more secured hideout.

Coincidentally, he’s recently started saying “I love you, Mom”, a phrase he’d been very skillfully withholding for the entirety of his speaking life.

Trouble comes in compact, exceedingly adorable packages.

At least he can be bought.

Takes Me Back – Spin Cycle

My mom does it all the time whenever there’s a lull in conversation.

“Do you remember that time we drove home from your sister’s house and you had horrible stomach cramps and you weren’t sure you would make it to a bathroom in time since we were 45 minutes away?”

“Yeah, Mom. I remember.”

“You remember when you were in labor with the tween for all those hours and you pushed so hard you popped a blood vessel in your eye?”

“Uhm, yeah, I was there. I remember.”

“Do you remember that time you got so drunk at that party that your friends had to drag you home unconscious and then you threw up in your own hair?”

“Mom! The kids don’t need to hear about that, knock it off!”

As annoying as seems to me when my mother brings up her slew of memories, I find myself falling in to the same trends with my husband.

“Aw honey, do you remember when we brought the teen home from the hospital and she was colicky and she’d cry for hours like she was singing – ‘lalalalala’?”

“Mm hmm, I remember.”

“Remember that time at Sears when the toddler puked up his entire bottle while he was sitting in his baby carrier and you were waiting in line to pay for school uniforms?”

“That’s right, the vomit leaked down in to the stroller basket and pooled in your purse.”

“Remember that dinner we had at the Mexican restaurant when I was in labor with the six year old and the manager begged us not to have the baby at our table?”

“Sure do, you were seven centimeters by the time we got to the hospital.”

All that history we share, it’s my way of reconnecting with it, of reliving it, of verifying that it happened. Talking about it brings back the details – the scents, the tastes, the tumult of emotions. I enjoy resurrecting those people we used to be for a short time.

The thing is all those individual passing days that seem like drops in a bucket when you’re living them, flow so quickly in to this long bubbling stream of past events, that I need to revisit them however briefly, however inadequately I can.

Because for every memory that I awkwardly bring up, there are twenty other events that I can’t remember at all.

And that is the nature of living, isn’t it?

So when my mother recalls that time she hit the brakes too hard in her Nova and I was pitched head first in to the windshield that cracked in to a spider-web pattern of shattered glass, I tell her, “yes, I remember,” and I try to take that trip with her again.

You know, unless it’s blatantly inappropriate.

—–

Take a stroll down memory lanes with Sprite’s Keeper and all of this week’s Spin Cycle participants…

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

They’d been playing for maybe fifteen minutes – my kids and my nieces improvising a game of indoor hide-and-seek, while outside the forecast rain pelted my sister’s house. We were flipping through an old photo album when my tween ran up behind us.

“I can’t find the baby.”

“What do you mean you can’t find him?”

It’s a small house, the doors were locked.

We canvassed.

Four adults and six other children, calling my two year old’s name, opening closet doors, checking under furniture, looking in corners, behind toy boxes, in the garage.

Then the panic crept it. My tween was crying, my six year old joining in with his own loud weeping. All our voices were rising, filled with dread.

“He has to be in the house somewhere,” my sister reasoned.

With the other children sobbing, all I could do was cry myself. The minutes were stretching and there was no toddler, no answer from him, not a peep. Where was he? Why wasn’t he answering? Couldn’t he hear us? Was something preventing him from calling out to me? My mind was reeling with all kinds of horrible scenarios. There was absolutely no logic to my terror, just that sick burning in the pit of my stomach, a painful stone lodged in my throat. Already my arms felt empty. My mother was checking the oven, wondering if somehow he’d gotten out in to the street, or worse still the jacuzzi.

Then finally after five interminable minutes…

“He’s here, calm down, he’s right here.”

A smallish two year old can fit almost anywhere. Those closets we’d searched, well, we hadn’t searched closely enough. In my niece’s bedroom, behind her colorful dresses hanging in a row, two barely visible toddler legs extended outward, clad in their tiny blue and green Crocs.

He’d clearly heard us. Perhaps the commotion had frightened him. Perhaps he’d understood too well the purpose of their game. Whether or not he had any intention of ever emerging, is beyond me.

What I do know is my kids have officially been banned from playing hide-and-seek. Ever. Or at least until they’re 30 and have kids of their own waiting to give them ulcers and gray hair and cardiac arrest.

Tonight, I’m thankful this guy is fine…decidedly evil, but fine nonetheless.

Worst Tooth Fairy Ever

The molar came out Monday night amid a flurry of excitement.

My ten year old had been squawking about it all weekend. How loose it was. How it wiggled. How difficult it was to chew with.

“Just yank it,” I told her, because I’m sensitive like that.

By Monday it finally gave way after much tugging and grunting on her part, leaving a gaping hole in its absence.

My six year old gawked enviously. “Lucky!” he grumbled. He has yet to experience the tumult of emotions that comes with losing a baby tooth, the reaction to the blood loss alone is not something I’m looking forward to.

Then yesterday, as we marched our brood in to the Super Target, my tween piped it, “The Tooth Fairy never came last night.”

Whoops.

Whether she actually believes in the Tooth Fairy is a matter of conjecture. See, just last December I clued her in on another little parenting secret – The Santa Hoax. She took it well. She’d had her suspicions and I didn’t want her going in to Middle School being the one kid that staunchly defends the fat guy’s existence. That would’ve been a little harsh.

So as we walked in to Target I improvised.

“Well, honey, since your tooth came out late in the evening, chances are the Tooth Fairy didn’t receive the memo since she was already out doing her duties. She probably has you scheduled in for tonight.”

She eyed me skeptically as my teen shook her head out of sight. My six year old, of course, accepted the theory without question.

I patted myself on the back for such a nice improvisation, then made a mental note to sit the Tween down for a nice heart to heart about the Tooth Fairy after we got home.

Apparently my mind is not the steel trap it once was. Possibly more like a rusty mouse trap some wiley rat has already snuck the cheese out of.

This morning as I was rousing the kids for school, I hear this.

“Aw, the Tooth Fairy didn’t come AGAIN?”

Dang.

“Okay, don’t worry, just close your eyes for a second.”  I quickly snatched some bills from my wallet, jammed my hand beneath her pillow and made the switch.

Not very subtle, I know.

She was quiet for a moment and I worried that she might be brooding.

Five minutes later she exited fully dressed for school and waving her cash around beneath her brother’s nose.

“I’ve got Tooth Fairy money!”

Apparently she’s not terribly disappointed about her discovery.

On a separate vein, when asked what he thought the Tooth Fairy did with her dental bounty, my six year old volunteered this nugget.

“She makes chairs out of all the teeth.”

Chairs.

That Tooth Fairy is one twisted lady.