Dear Diary,
Once again, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the restraints placed upon me due to my age. I don't think that just because I am four it means I am incapable of making major decisions for myself, especially when I suspect those who are saying things like "YOU NEED TO EAT HEALTHY FOODS" often sneak m&m's when I'm not looking. (I can hear the distinct crinkling of wrappers and smell the chocolate-y goodness on their breaths, I swear I can.)
But really, I would like to discuss bedtime. Is there anything more restrictive, anything else designed so efficiently to strip me of my very basic rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
No. No, there is not.
Apparently, I "used" to be a good sleeper. I hear my mom and dad talk about it. "Remember when he would take a nap, every day, from 1 to 3, and then go to bed at 8 and sleep until 7 in the morning?" my mom will sometimes say in wistful tones after she has forced me to lay back down for the 23rd time.
Yeah, I remember it myself, Mother. THAT WAS WHEN YOU USED TO PUT ME IN A BED WITH BARS ON IT.
I won the no-nap battle at the tender and precocious age of 2. Admittedly, though, winning this battle of no-naps often left me tired, and I would succumb to sleep around 6:30, and sleep heavily for 13 hours or more. Mom even started to like this better than naps - called it a "hell of a trade off" and got used to doing things like taking long baths, watching Law and Order: SVU and enjoying the evening in general. Lol.
Because I was still "such a good sleeper!" Mom didn't say much when I started to stay up until 7:00. And then 7:30. She would tell Dad "It's winter. He can't go outside and play like a maniac and wear himself out." Although I object to the term "maniac," I will agree that winter does curtail my intense activities, and may contribute to a later bedtime.
But then I wanted to stay up until 8:00 or maybe even 8:30, and Mom was like, "No."
That's it. Just "no."
And thus began our battle.
I usually begin by offering her reasonable excuses of why I can't really be expected to go to bed. I patiently explain that my pillows are dangerous, or that my eyes simply won't close - because they won't. I cannot be expected to control that. I offer to do chores for her, or get up to helpfully remind her to do her own chores. I try to convince her that I have an illness, such as iritis, which needs to be tended to immediately, or that I obviously cannot be expected to sleep without a very specific Hot Wheels, which, although I have 2,987 Hot Wheels, it's a specific make and model that I actually and truly need in order to sleep.
None of that has ever worked.
But lately, I'm pretty sure bedtime has become an even graver matter, and she doesn't understand, Diary. First of all, my bedroom may be awesome during the day, but after dark, it is the most dangerous place on earth. The toys that I love so much in the clear, shining light of day become threatening, unknown hulks of danger at night. They move. And there are, without a doubt, monsters in my closet. Giants, as well. My closet has long been a din of supernatural and super-terrible activity after sundown - that is an established fact.
If the doors are closed, I can hear them. I sit up in bed and scream, "MOM, I HEAR SOMETHING WRONG IN MY CLOSET! MOOOOM! I HEAR SOMETHING WROOOOONG!"
And so she slides open the doors (I have to hand it to her - she is very, very brave), and, of course, all the bad things flee momentarily. She'll leave the closet door open, but it's a sliding door, so only half of it can be open, and even with the light on, that is sometimes worse, and so I sit up in bed and scream, "MOM! MOM! I SEE SOMETHING! I SEE SOMETHING WRONG, MOM!"
And although this isn't a trick, per se, I have learned that timing can sometimes work in my favor. Early on in the night, when I can still hear Mom roaming around the house (probably eating secret m&m's), she responds to my desperate cries...but leaves me in bed until I finally pass out, probably from fear or some secret sleep trick the monsters do. But if I accidentally fall asleep with no fuss, and wake up to a silent house...or wake up when Daddy's alarm clock goes off in the middle of the night because of "work" - and then start in about monsters, she usually just stumbles into my room, all willy-nilly and banging into walls (she could consider opening her eyes, but who am I to criticize?) and either collapses into my bed (good) or picks me up and stumbles back into her bed (even gooder).
But last week she had an "idea." I'm sure others will agree that there is nothing quite as horrible as a mom with an "idea." She foisted me off on my Mina, talking all excited about "You get to go to the movies! Mina will get you popcorn! Yay, Mina and Bubby time!" and, like an idiot, I got all excited, too - not knowing that she was going to destroy my life while I was gone.
Diary, she wrecked my room.
Admittedly, the new design leaves me a lot more floor space, where I can build gigantic structures using every available clean piece of linen and then stash a massive number of kitchen utensils in them, but I also suspect that the reason there is more floor space is because there are less toys. I can't put my finger on what, exactly, has disappeared, but many, many things have, I am certain.
She also had the nerve to organize my things into categories that may make sense to her, but not to me. For example, she put all my Hot Wheels into one container. Why would she do that? She completely stripped me of the joy I get when randomly coming across a long-lost Hot Wheels when I least expect it. She also put all my tools into another box. I ask you, why would I need 4 hammers in one spot? Doesn't it make more sense to have them stashed in various places throughout my room, so that one is always handy?
And, worst of all, she had Dad remove the closet doors...which, I can see where she was going with this and all, but then she moved my bed so that it's partly in the closet. My books are "conveniently" located on one side, and a light, and a shelf that now holds all my stuffed animals that I love-love-love during the day but morph into menacing creatures with beady eyes that prompt me to demand Mom remove them nightly. It looks cute, I'm sure, all cozy and inviting...like, "Oh, come lay on me and look at books and maybe you'll get sleepy and sleep and sleep and sleeeeeeeeeeep."
Ugh.
What would make Mom think that placing my bed in the place where the monsters come from would be a good idea?!? This is a fail, even for her.
So the battle continues. Lately, my excuse has been "My bed smells like grease." I thought it was a good one - a few weeks ago, my dad "fried" something and my mom spent the next two days in a frenzy of cleaning and laundering, muttering that the whole place smelled like a bad fry-kitchen, and even opened up all the windows and we stayed outside so the place could "air out." But apparently she's the only one who has a sensitive enough nose to detect grease, because she didn't even bother to sniff my bedding, but said "I just washed everything yesterday. It does not smell like grease."
But I think it does, Diary. It smells like grease. And what does she say? "Breathe through your mouth and close your eyes, Justin Ryan."
Heartless.
I'm stumped for now, but I won't let this defeat me. She may have won the battle, but we are still at war.
Sincerely,
Junior
Because it's my brother's birthday, I thought I would share a story about him. Plus, this is probably the only birthday "gift" he's going to get from me.
We grew up in a farmhouse, outside of Smithville. We didn't farm it, though - the land surrounding it was rented out to a cattle farmer, but we were allowed to roam freely on the nearly 400 acres, and we did. We spent our summers fishing and hunting frogs and crawdads, catching tadpoles and being generally awesome.
Justin often roamed alone, armed with his BB gun and slingshot, coming home filthy and stinking and happy. He was a scrawny little kid, all wiry strength and unable to hold still for longer than 2 minutes, and I think he fancied himself as some sort of mix between Daniel Boone and the Karate Kid.
From our kitchen door, you could see out over the yard, beyond the chicken coop (which didn't house any chickens) and past the big pond...the land was parceled into separate pastures, delineated with strands of barbed wire that we had learned early to climb over or shimmy beneath.
And in the distance, we could see Justin, slowly trudging homeward...dragging something unrecognizable behind him. He would stop at each line of barbed wire, hop the fence, then patiently reach beneath it and pull whatever it was underneath it.
"What does he have?" my mother asked, a mixture of despair and resignation in her voice.
"I don't know," one of us said. "But whatever it is, it's big."
Even as he reached the last fence, exhaustion evident as he slowly climbed it, then bent over, seized hold of whatever he had been dragging, and gave it one final, triumphant tug into our backyard, we could see he was also elated.
"GUYS!" he yelled. "COME LOOK! I THINK IT'S FROM DINOSAUR TIMES!"
"Oh my God," Mom said, but the rest of us went running. Dinosaur times? We were in the middle of a childhood, being raised by a father who took us "treasure hunting," who helped us dig in forgotten places and pronounced every rail tie, piece of broken glass, old penny we found as possible treasure. It surprised us not at all that our youngest brother had, perhaps, stumbled upon something prehistoric.
He couldn't drag his bounty in further, so we met him at the fence line...and stopped before we got to close. Whatever it was, it was massive.
"Is it alive?" we asked, before getting any closer.
"I don't think so," he answered. "It hasn't moved."
Cautiously, we moved closer. It was a turtle of some sort, but much bigger than any turtle we had ever seen. It was, in fact, massive - even to kids who had grown up watching snapping turtles. In my child's eyes, it seemed like the biggest turtle ever. In reality, I would guess that it weighed around 80 pounds...nearly as much as the boy who had dragged it home, his skinny, mud-splattered arms still shaking with exhaustion. Along the massive spine of its shell ran rows of spikes, giving it a look that really was distinctly prehistoric.
(Due to my extensive research that I just did in 5 minutes with Google, I'm pretty sure it was an alligator snapping turtle, which has recently been granted the endangered status in our state. Which makes sense, because they are probably dinosaurs.)
"MOM! MOM! JUSTIN FOUND A DINOSAUR!" I screamed...half-exalting, half-tattling. Because finding a dinosaur was cool, but getting my younger brother in trouble for finding said-dinosaur was maybe even cooler.
I honestly don't remember if Mom came to look at it or not...but I do remember her saying that she would let Dad handle it. Not in a threatening way, but more in a "I have 4 kids and one of them just dragged home a gigantic dead turtle" way.
And so we waited for Dad, cautiously poking at the gigantic dinosaur turtle with sticks, because although it was probably dead, we all knew that a snapping turtle could take your fingers clean-off, and that if it bit, it wouldn't let go until it thundered. (Duh.) Eventually Justin dragged it up to the concrete pad behind the chicken house, where we could better appreciate its strangeness and size and possible prehistoric-ness.
When Dad came home, dressed in suit and tie, briefcase in hand, he followed his youngest son to look at his dinosaur. Patiently, he explained that although it was not prehistoric, it was still pretty awesome, and as big as it was, probably very, very old. Casually, he said, "You should keep the shell. It would be neat to have," and then he went inside.
Justin agreed - the shell would be neat to have. And so with one last, loving look at the 80-pound alligator snapping turtle that he had dragged up to the house, he went inside, as well, leaving it on the concrete pad.
For a few days, the turtle was forgotten. It was summer, and there were creeks to play in and ball games to go to, and the library to visit. We were busy.
And then, one evening, there was a smell when we pulled up the driveway. A smell we all knew, because we were country kids. It was a dead smell. But it was faint, and beyond maybe one of us saying "Something stinks," that was it.
And the next day, the smell was stronger. And the day after, stronger still.
Early morning, hot summer, we all ran out the backdoor...and then backed back into the house. The smell hit us full in the face, like a meaty smack. A rotten meaty smack. It had gone from a vague death smell to a stench that induced dry-heaving. "What is that?" we cried...except for Justin. I'm pretty sure Justin knew.
"Justin," Mom said calmly, "what did you do with your dead turtle?" which is one of those questions that sounds strange to ask, unless you have a son. It was like we all suddenly remembered that Justin had dragged an 80 pound turtle carcass up from the pastures...and no one had asked what he had done with it after.
"Dad said I could keep its shell," Justin said.
"What did you do with it?"
"It's behind the chicken coop."
"Oh my God."
Putting our shirts up over our mouths and noses, we made our way to the chicken coop. Even with covering, the smell was overpowering. (Seriously, if we had neighbors, the cops would have been called to investigate the origin of the stench.) And as we got closer, we could hear a buzzing.
And there it was. Belly-up, marinading in its own glory, covered with a thousand flies and emanating a death stench that brought tears to the eyes and our breakfast up our throats. Justin's dinosaur had gone from curiosity to monstrosity, too foul and rotten to now move out of the yard.
"What are we going to do?" Justin asked.
"I don't know. Hose it off, I guess," Mom said.
And so Justin spent several days dutifully pulling his shirt over his nose and dragging the hose behind the chicken coop, where he sprayed his rotten dinosaur. I am not certain that this helped or not, or if just...you know, spread the turtle around.
And he never got to keep the shell, either. After days of serving as the bowl that held 80 pounds of soupy, rotten, frothy turtle carcass, I think the stench somehow permeated the shell. No amount of hosing could rid it of the stink.
When my sister became a mother, we all became aware one evening, sitting on our parents' deck, laughing and talking the same way our own parents did with our aunts and uncles, watching my sister's little ones tumble around and chase after each other, that we were now the adults. It was a heady feeling, a sweet one, too, to think that our children would grow up hearing our laughter in the background as they played. Justin himself became a father just a few months ago, to a beautiful baby boy, whom he named for our father. To no one's surprise, Justin is a great daddy, hands-on and involved and absolutely smitten with his tiny son, and he gave our family one more child to throw into the growing mix of kids to run around playing, while we sit on one of our decks and laugh.
My siblings and I could tell you a thousand stories...which I know makes us exactly like any other set of siblings, because that's what makes the brother-sister bonds so deep. It's not that you have common history, it's that you are each other's actual history. You share a code, a secret language, a blood-deep bond that goes beyond friendship and beyond family and is a mixture of both, and that mixture makes it both stronger than just friendship, and just family. It's the privilege of being able to say something like, "Remember the turtle" and know, at that moment, everyone is briefly assaulted by the memory of that smell, and hearing our small brother's triumphant yell of "I THINK IT'S FROM DINOSAUR TIMES!"
Being told "You're a good mom" makes me feel good...but it also makes me feel awkward, sometimes. Mostly because I worry that the reason someone is telling me this is because of the very limited view I show of motherhood through facebook statuses and carefully chosen videos and pictures. Because, like everyone else on social media, I am quick to share the funny moments, the moments when my son says something brilliant or quirky, the pictures we took of our son playing at the pumpkin patch, the videos of him singing country music.
I also have a video of him pulling down his pants and running backwards, butt-first at the camera while he yells "YOU ARE BAD-LOOKING!" Not sure why I haven't posted that one yet...just kidding. I totally know why. Because it's a video of my kid, pulling down his pants, running butt-first at the camera while screaming "YOU ARE BAD-LOOKING!" That's why.
My mom said once that it would have been so amazing to have all the information at the few touch of a keystrokes when she was a mom with young children, rather than having to call the pediatrician fifty times or rely on an old medical book of symptoms and remedies, and her well-worn copy of Doctor Spock. And she's right - if I am having an issue with Junior (and God knows, we have a ton of issues with Junior), there are millions of answers right there on my computer. And that can be really helpful - the way I potty-trained him, for example, was something I got directly off of a website, and you know what? It worked like a charm and was something I would have never thought of myself.
But one of the reasons I was so stressed about potty training him was because every child his age had long been potty trained, it seemed...and I knew this because of the internet. So it's kind of a double-edged sword, sometimes. And to me, the fact that my son was still happy in diapers at the age of three reflected on one of my failures as a mother.
Luckily, I'm confident enough in the person my son is and is in the process of becoming that, for the most part, I never got sucked into the whole "Oh my God, so-and-so's child is doing this. My child is not doing that." I call it mompetition, and it does run rampant on social media. But I am not always confident enough in myself to not be sucked into the other type of mompetition - where moms themselves compete, rather than their kids.
Junior was pretty average - he walked a little early, talked a little late. When we ran into a friend of ours, whose little girl is the same age but was highly verbal, listening to her chatter like a big kid and my son's one-word responses didn't make me worry, it made me laugh. I know children my son's age who can write their names - my son cannot. Does it worry me? Yes and no.
Yes, it worries me because maybe it's my fault that he can't write his name. When I try to help him with letters, he usually ends up screaming that he hates letters, and then I get all paranoid that I am setting him up to hate reading forever, and I back off, but maybe I shouldn't, maybe I should think of some new way to approach this, maybe I should google this shit and figure something out.
No, it doesn't worry me because I am absolutely certain that he will write his name in time. He only just turned four. There is plenty of time. He can't write his name, but he is bright and imaginative, and very much within normal cognitive ranges for his age.
And although the stuff I throw out on social media is true, and indicative of the kind of child my son is, and indicative of the kind of mom I am...it's only part of the story. It's only somewhat indicative. The internet allows us to edit, and although I think we're all aware that we're only seeing a narrow slice of someone's life - a narrow, carefully selected slice of someone's life - it still sometimes leaves me feeling inadequate, and less than truthful. Even knowing that the mom who posted a picture of their child eating carrot sticks dipped in hummus may have bribed the kid into trying it with m & m's, I am still sometimes envious as I hand my son yet another package of fruit snacks. (But they are made with real fruit juice!)
But when I started my blog, besides just having a funny, creative outlet, I also wanted to be truthful. Because I am certain that most of what I feel and do and think is pretty common to what other moms feel and do and think. Because sometimes, even after I hit the "share" button on facebook, in my head, I add another line that both completely undermines and explains what I have just posted.
So here are some unedited facebook statuses:
Early morning snuggles with my boy...because he woke up at 2 a.m. with wet pants and it was easier to change him and then take him back to my bed, because sleep.
Taking my son to the park...because we've done nothing but sit on the couch in our pajamas and watch Garfield on Netflix for four hours straight.
Ice cream sundaes for an after-dinner treat! And by "after-dinner," I mean that technically, because the dinner hour has passed, not because my son actually ate anything substantial for dinner. Because he didn't. Again.
Friday night movie and popcorn date with my son...which makes this exactly like every other Friday night, because my husband goes to work at 3 a.m. every Saturday morning, and what other option do I have?
Love rocking my boy to sleep...because it makes me feel better after I completely lost my shit when he dumped out all the utensils and gouged the linoleum with a fork, which I didn't realize he was doing exactly because I was reading on my Kindle and even though I heard him doing crap that I knew he probably shouldn't be doing, I really, really wanted to finish that chapter. And we both cried.
Awwww. Random flowers from my husband...and by "random," I mean that last night I cried on his shoulder for twenty minutes and got snot all over his shirt because lately I feel nothing like a woman and a wife and only a mom and a housekeeper, and I don't feel pretty, and did he still think I was pretty, and I burned the meatloaf and I hate meatloaf now forever and it probably scared the hell out of him and I hope to God he didn't use the credit card to buy the flowers.
I don't think any of those moments make me a bad mom or wife, anymore than I believe that the edited versions that actually make it to facebook make me a good one. It's just that when someone tells me I'm a good mom, I hope they know that these moments exist. In fact, they are abundant.
I am not, by any means, trying to be all self-righteous and say "Don't post the good shit unless you are willing to post the bad!" That's not what social media is for - I get that - and, just like everyone else, what I post on facebook is selected with care. It gives us a unique opportunity to edit our lives, and a platform to capture the good and the sweet and the funny, and to share those moments with our friends and family. And I want to know about your good, your sweet, and your funny moments, just as I want to share my own. I just want to admit to the unsaid things that often follow (with mental ellipses) after I post a status, because I have a feeling we all have explanations behind certain statuses that would probably put a whole new perspective on things, a perspective that is neither good or bad, but simply honest.
(One more example...the whole reason I wrote this blog? Because my house is completely a wreck - and I mean a complete and utter disaster, with dried macaroni noodles under the kitchen table and Play Doh crumbs all over the living room rug - and writing this seemed much more pleasurable than doing anything about that.)
Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, I asked my mother a simple question about something I had seen on that paragon of virtuous comedies - Roseanne.
"Mom...what's masturbation?" I asked. I was maybe eleven or so.
"Oh, you should ask your dad about that," she replied, quickly and without hesitation.
And I did.
I will spare you my father's pained, difficult, drawn-out, beyond awkward answer, but you do have to understand that, for my father, in his world, nothing related to sex existed when pertaining to his daughters. Nothing. That meant every movie or show that came on that had a sexual reference or joke was met with stony silence and an unmoving face from my father, my sister and myself - even when we were well into our twenties. No eye contact, ever. In fact, when my sister became pregnant with her first child, she was nervous to tell our dad about it, because then he would know that she had been doing "it" - despite the fact that she had been married for two years and chances were, he may have already suspected. But that was our family.
Why did my mom tell me to ask my dad? Because she's my mom, and I'm sure that, as I walked out of the room to find my father and ruin his entire week, she was laughing uncontrollably.
So, fast forward twenty-plus years, and I'm often the one who sends my kid to go ask his dad - less out of awkwardness and more out of sheer exhaustion from fielding his constant questions.
But the other day, I made a mistake. My husband was being a complete jackass. And by that I mean he was laying on our dining room table, in the fetal position, making these horrible squirming movements and declaring that he was a mosquito larvae. Yes, he does stuff like this often. No, I don't know why. Yes, he's lucky that most of the time it makes me laugh.
I told him to quit being a dick...just as our four year old walked in.
"I don't know what a 'dick' is," he piped up. "What is it, Mom?"
Justin and I were already laughing, and hearing that sent us off further...so, of course, like any other four year old, Junior started laughing, as well, and asking repeatedly, "What is this dick?"
Finally, I said, "It's a horrible word that no one should use. Mama shouldn't have said it."
"But what is it?"
"A bad word."
"BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?"
"Oh God. It's just a bad word."
"I'll call my Mina and she will tell me what a dick is." (Mina, by the way, is what he calls his grandma - my mother.)
And, of course, I handed him the phone. Because I am a horrible parent, and an even worse daughter...and because my mom made me go ask my dad was masturbation was, twenty some years ago.
The phone rang. I could hear her say "hello." My son breathed heavily into the phone for a minute, and I waited...and then, in gloriously clear and loud tones, he asked, "MINA, HAVE YOU EVER EVEN SEEN A DICK?"
Luckily, I only had to remind him twice the next day that we don't say that word, and I did end up telling him what it was, but it was worth it. It really, really was.
