Ironically, the birth of my first child has taught me the true joy of silence and an uninterrupted block of free time. I know that my own mother understands this statement well. It's funny how once you have children, all the wacky things your parents used to say and do suddenly begin to make sense. There is a reason after all that you should not run with scissors, but this logic is lost on the excited child traveling at mach 6 from her bedroom to the kitchen wielding a pointy pair of paper choppers. When you're six and en route to create the most beautiful snowflakes on the planet, speed is of the essence. After all, every child thinks they are far too sure-footed to end up splayed on the floor with a pair of scissors stuck in their arm, until they unexpectedly find out they aren't.
We all test limits to see if our parents are right or wrong. Here are a few things mine were right about over the years. There is in fact a very good reason why you should not go down a slide while twirling a baton. Most problems that you have as a teen actually will get better before you get married, especially if you wait fifteen years or so to settle down. Be careful what you say even when you're angry. Once a nasty little something has left your lips, no matter how hard you try to suck it back in or apologize for your words, you can never take it back. By doing just a little bit every day, you can accomplish almost anything even laundry. Don't sweat the small stuff. Life is too short. Do not attempt to operate a blender without placing your hand on the lid. Unless you are intentionally planning on repainting your entire kitchen in modern margarita. Same goes for lifting beaters out of the mixing bowl before they come to a complete stop. Unless you have always dreamed of owning a house with a chocolate polka dot kitchen ceiling. Never stop reading and learning, even if you have a toddler and you haven't read anything longer than a recipe card in three whole years. If you're the mom and you don't like a certain food, you have the power to veto it, forever banishing it from the pantry, never to be prepared by your hands again. Ever. Unless it was requested for someone's birthday dinner and then you really have no choice.
Sweatpants should not be worn outside the house unless you are on your way to the gym or participating in a sporting event. While I think this rule was so we didn't look like ragamuffins, I've found that after having a child it has a different kind of importance. Getting into the stretchy-waist pants habit, even when you're lounging around the house, is dangerous territory. Your favorite pair of jeans is usually on strict patrol, asking any extra pastries to quickly and quietly leave the premises. However, stretchy pants are all too willing to host all night parties with plenty of doughnuts, cakes, and cookies on the guest list. If you don't want to be forced to fashion yourself a new dress out of your camping tent, stick to the jeans. They are much more discriminating about who they allow you to hang out with.
Finally, if a friend walks out of your life, don't waste time sniffling and trying to stop them. True friends will always find you again. Everyone else can move out of the way to make room for improvements. Surround yourself with beautiful things. It leads to a life well lived and it makes your house your home. Take time to be still and enjoy nature. Even if a toddler is kicking you in the arm while you are trying to be still. If you stay up late to hoot with the owls, it is very hard to wake up early the next morning to soar with the eagles. Unless you are a mother, then you just drag yourself around all day until the kid finally passes out, collapse face first over the dryer, and wake up hours later with permanent imprints of the dryer dial on the entire left side of your face. As payback for all the lack of sleep that they caused, children should eventually be required to do a long list of household chores, especially the ones you hate.
When I was a wee tot, I had a few jobs assigned exclusively to me. Taking out the trash, feeding the outdoor animals, drying the dishes, and setting the table were among my daily chores. I didn't mind the trash part because I got to actually set it on fire and what kid wouldn't be all over that? Feeding and playing with the animals was a job that I also didn't particularly mind, except when it was freezing cold outside. After a hard day at school, I had to change into my snowsuit, wade through waist deep snow, dig out the water and food bowls, break the ice out of the water bowl and refill it, toss some dry kibble into the food bowl, give everybody a few pats and make my way back across the tundra until I reached the house. It was a bit of a race against time, since if your hands were exposed to the elements for too long, they became frozen useless blobs. Completing the chore became impossible until you went back in the house, thawed your digits out, and tried a second time.
Somewhere between homework, after school specials, and when my dad got home at 6:00, it was my assigned duty to set the table. Setting the table came with its own special set of hazards. For one my mom was cooking and scurrying around the kitchen from the sink to the stove to the fridge as moms often do. It was paramount that you not get underfoot. A mom-kid collision could lead to major trauma like splashes with hot, boiling liquids or minor inconveniences like beet juice splatters that ruined your favorite white shirt. While we are on the topic of white shirts, why does any person on Earth think that it is a good idea to dress children in anything white? Better yet, why do they even bother to make white garments for children as everyone knows that within 13.6 seconds of being placed on their little stinky bodies, they will be ruined. Oh, wait a minute, I see. The manufacturers are quite smart, it's the purchasing people that are the problem. Never mind.
Aside from molten liquids and shirt staining substances, there lurked an even greater danger in our house. My mom would be hustling around the hearth with a strange little growth protruding from the side of her head. This blocked her peripheral vision and made her very distractible. If you weren't careful you could be accidentally mowed down by your own mom at any second. Oh wait, that thing was actually a telephone. For some reason, my mom's mother insisted on calling her almost everyday at supper time. What started out as mindless mother daughter banter soon morphed into a full blown hostage crisis, with my mom trying to finish the meal under duress, and extricate herself from the never ending phone call before my dad got home from work. All the while my grandmother would be warning her that if a hot meal wasn't ready and waiting for my dad when he got home, he might divorce her. That and serving sandwiches for dinner were grounds for a trial separation according to my grandmother. Oddly enough, my father did not agree.
This was way back before everyone had cordless phones which ratcheted up the danger factor considerably. To compensate for the fact that the phone was fixed to a stationary point on the wall, the solution was to install a really really long spiral phone cord so that your full mobility would not be hampered. You could still access every corner of your house even though the apparatus next to your ear was actually fastened to a wall forty feet away. If you dared to stretch the spiral cord taut, you could even snag an extra five feet in order to reach something in the middle if the garage, but it was not without extreme peril. Many an unsuspecting child running down the hall at top speed was clotheslined by the phone cord and launched across the room. Those that avoided near strangulation by the cord risked being waffled in the side of the head with a flying receiver during an unexpected telephone recoil. It was not unheard of to see the phone flying through the air after mom had stretched it just a teeny, tiny bit too far, lost her grip and sent the phone sailing across the room to its original location. Heaven help any child in the collision zone. Soapy, dishpan hands were usually a contributing factor to this kind of accident.
This hidden household danger should have really received more attention by special interest groups working to prevent home accidents. Amazingly in all the time I spent playing with matches, I never set the house on fire. I did actually burn a small hole in my bedroom floor with a magnifying glass but who knew that little parlor trick actually worked?? Luckily, I was able to hide it under the carpet so my parents never knew that one sunny summer day, I nearly torched my own bedroom. This is why you should never teach your children wilderness survival skills, right dad? I mean trying to create a bow drill and successfully start a fire may occupy your child for hours on end, but encouraging playing with fire, without specifying that it is a strictly outdoor adventure, may be something you eventually regret.
Setting the table without being swept of your feet by a stray phone cord simply added to the adventure. Among my few responsibilities, I hated drying dishes. Why spend time wiping water around on something in order to put slightly damp dishes into the cupboard. If you just left them lying around the air will work a little magic for you. It always seemed pointless, but I never minded setting the table. It was a job I made fun. I banged the forks. I clinked the spoons. I clanged the knives against the glasses. I tapped my fingers on the plates. I hummed, I sang, I danced, I leaped. I was having a great time. Unfortunately, my mom didn't enjoy my amazing one woman symphony quite as much as I did. I never understood how such beautiful music could so rapidly rankle her and ruffle her normally calm demeanor.
That is until one day when I found myself on a solo parenting mission, trying to make one brief, important phone call. All was quiet on the home front, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity. The baby was having a snack and the dog was napping on the couch. Why is it that the moment a mother touches a telephone, complete chaos breaks out in a formerly peaceful and serene environment? As soon as the person I was calling answered the phone, the dog started barking and howling to go outside. In her frantic trot to the back door, she inadvertently stepped on the tv remote. It's hard to keep your composure when you're on the phone with your doctor's office and Big Bird suddenly starts screaming in the background about sunny days and the important qualities of the letter G. While you fumble with the remote, searching frantically for the power button, the mute button, or the volume control, you can no longer make out what the receptionist is saying because your toddler is shrieking her favorite song, beating her spoon on the edge of her bowl, and has just hit you in the side of the head with a giant glop of steaming hot oatmeal. As you blindly make your way to the sink you realize that the pot of soup you had simmering on the range top has now boiled over. A waterfall of boiling stew is now cascading down the front of your stove and inching towards the living room rug. Of course your peripheral vision was impaired due to the oatmeal in your eye and now you are hopping around the kitchen with two sockfulls of burning hot soup. Between your efforts to steer clear of the flaming pools of steamy soup and saying ooh, ahh, ooh, ahhh, you realize that your attempt at accomplishing anything by telephone is a complete and total wash. You tell the receptionist that you will call back later, hang up and proceed to scrub your sullied kitchen, meanwhile the dog's protests and the child's shouts continue to increase to ear splitting decibels.
It is at this moment that I realized how my mom must have felt as she tried to make dinner before my dad happily strolled through the door (to avoid divorce of course), wrap up an exhausting conversation with my grandmother (often revolving around terrible tragedies that had befallen other poor people that neither my mother or my grandmother even knew), and make sure that her children did not accidentally set each other, the dog, or the house on fire in the process. No wonder she was unable to appreciate my musical genius at that particular moment. As I lay here on the floor pondering all of this, I know I should be using this moment of silence to do something productive. I should probably take advantage of a few minutes of quiet to make some important phone calls, but I'm not willing to waste such a golden, sanity saving moment of serenity. I am keenly aware that phone usage could easily lead to a hostage crisis, on hold with some crabby old receptionist. Despite having raised three children of her own, she has somehow completely forgotten what it is like to find yourself locked in your own pantry, vision obstructed by oozing oatmeal, soup-saturated socks in hand, trying to communicate with someone by telephone. Besides, we all know what happens as soon as your call is finally answered by the person you have been waiting to talk to for twenty minutes while listening to really cheesy, annoying music. The baby wakes up hungry and crying with a diaper that is now six times its original size, threatening to reach max capacity at any second. The dog starts whining to go outside despite having just been let back in less than a minute earlier. Finally, the freshly rested husband strolls into the kitchen and nonchalantly asks if there happens to be anything tasty to eat or drink. Forget it, I am going to continue to lay here praying that the phone does not ring for at least a few more precious, peaceful minutes.
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