About a week ago, I went to go see what my children were doing and found them in their room. I was irritated that they had made a pretty significant mess so I told them to clean it up. I went and piddle farted around with Matt and a little later, went to check on them. The room was nearly back in order and I said, “You guys are doing great. Keep it up. Come let me know when you’re done.” Half an hour later, I grew suspicious that they were committing various crimes since they should have had the room done long ago and let me know they were finished. I went to their room and saw the door was shut. In my experience, when two children shut their bedroom door, they are doing something that is going to be annoying to a parent. I opened the door and gasped in horror. The children had learned how to make a nuclear bomb and blew it up in their room. How they managed to survive I have no idea, but nothing other than severe warfare could have caused what I walked into. Every puzzle they have ever owned had the pieces scattered everywhere. Every board game had all dice, cards, pieces, everything, scattered everywhere. All of Makayla’s beads for jewelry making were all over the place. Moon dough was everywhere. Clothes had been yanked out of the closet and drawers and scattered everywhere. Eight million legos and blocks were littering the carpet and bed. Books, markers, crayons, Barbie clothes, and hot wheels were everywhere. The hundreds of pennies, nickels, and dimes that Makayla stored in her piggy bank were strewn about. Easy bake oven stuff had been taken out of the box and thrown everywhere; zhu zhu pet and zhu zhu pet accessories were all over the place. I just looked around the room, too horrified to really say anything. I finally was able to say, “You guys? What on earth did you do?”
They both began pointing fingers and accusing one another of naughty behavior. I walked a little further into the room and saw all of Makayla’s jewelry scattered everywhere. Two days before, I had surprised her by untangling all of the necklaces, finding all the matches to earrings, organizing bracelets and rings, and making smaller boxes for small jewelry to put in her jewelry box. I had made a special compartment for “special” jewelry like things family members give her. It had taken me nearly an hour to get it all done and honestly, seeing it just thrown around hurt my feelings.
“Why did you do that to your jewelry box?” I asked Makayla.
“I dunno,” she said.
She didn’t look at me as she nonchalantly answered my question. I just looked at her, as she played her leap frog while sitting in a plastic bucket, knowing that child abuse wasn’t an option because one, I would never have sufficient self esteem in prison orange, and two, I literally have no idea how to go about abusing children anyway.
“You know,” I said to her, as I moved child paraphernalia out from under my feet in order to enter the room further, “I spent a lot of time making your jewelry box for you. It really hurts my feelings that you just dumped everything out like that and messed it all up.”
“Then you shouldn’t have made it for me,” Makayla said, not taking her eyes off her leap frog. I looked at this tiny version of a human for a while, refusing to say anything because I knew I would regret anything that came out of my mouth at that moment. After I was able to have the mind set of a real life grown up instead of a severely irritated idiot, I said, “Put the leap frog down and get out of the bucket. Now.”
She did so begrudgingly and I proceeded to discuss with her the reason as to why her statement to me was so disrespectful and rude. She stared at me with huge, tear filled blue eyes and claimed to feel “horrible about saying that!”
“Good,” I told her, “When you do or say something hurtful, you should feel horrible. BUT, I forgive you. Once I forgive you, you can feel happy again because once someone forgives you, that means what you said doesn’t make them hurt anymore. BUT, remember the way you are feeling right now so the next time you want to say something rude, you will remember how awful it feels to be rude to someone. It isn’t a good feeling.”
We discussed the proper ways to express frustration and anger and all that yadda yadda since I’m assuming not only must I teach these things from example, but I must also have conversations that do not seem to penetrate through the mile wide skull that belongs to my six year old so I can tell myself I’m a good mother before I go to bed at night.
Since Hiroshima had just occurred in my children’s room near their bedtime, I determined that we would deal with it in the morning. Disasters cannot be fixed overnight. I smooched puckered up little lips and played the piano for them and smooched puckered up little lips again, while warning them that shenanigans would not be tolerated one I turned out the light.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of childlike shrieks of laughter and lurked into the bedroom to investigate what kind of crimes the children were committing since joy like that is only derived from horrifying behavior. They were taking turns doing back flips off the bed and I nearly had a heart attack seeing my three year old son spiral dive head first to the ground upon entering the room.
“No, stop!” I screeched, springing towards Caleb to check for internal injuries, “We do not jump off the bed and we do not do flips off the bed. Remember how Aunt Amber broke her arm when she was jumping on the bed when she was little?”
“I want a broken arm so I can have a cast,” Makayla told me.
“Me too,” Caleb said, “Mommy, can you break my arm for me? How do you do that, Mommy?”
“Bubba, breaking an arm would really, really hurt. We don’t want to break an arm.” To Makayla I said, “If you had a broken arm you couldn’t go to swimming or gymnastics or soccer. Plus, breaking a bone hurts really bad.”
Both children pretended to agree with me and sped off to go tell me that they wanted ice cream for breakfast. I could tell what kind of day it was going to be. I have learned that there are times when your offspring morph into beings that I like to refer to as “these people trying to pass as my children.” Every now and then, kids just act like total assholes sometimes. And then the mother gets to ponder where the hell she’s going wrong and Google's “Sibling rivalry” and “back talking” for hours that day while reading from various "experts" online that every behavior a child exhibits is a direct result of parenting or that your child clearly has ADHD and must be medicated. I have come to the conclusion that these "experts" all say something different, live far away from my children, my children act like freaks from time to time, and as as their mother, it's up to me to decide what to do with them. Anyway, so after telling them they knew better than to ask for ice cream for breakfast, and dealing with arguing over their actual breakfast, I went into their room to estimate the actual damage. I was able to determine that the mess they had made would be too overwhelming for them to realistically clean up. And I came to the conclusion that the less crap they had, the less mess they would make. Call me mean, but realistically, a six and three year old have two or three things they really play with. Why have all sorts of crap everywhere for them to cause destruction with? So I got plastic bins, banished the children to the living room, and got to work making various piles of crap, trying to organize everything. The children ended up barging into the room, and when they asked what I was doing, I said, “I am packing all of this stuff up since you guys made such a huge mess.”
“You’re going to BURN it!” Makayla screamed.
Caleb copied, “You’ll BURN it Mommy?”
“What? Why would I burn it?” I asked, “I’m packing it away and putting it in my closet and when you two can keep your room clean, I will start giving it back a little at a time.”
“My soul is DESTROYED!” Makayla screamed, and got to work trying to pick up various items that she’s never cared about before.
“Put it down Makayla,” I said, irritated with such dramatics, “You and Caleb go in the living room.”
In her attempt to make a dramatic exit, she knocked her brother into the door which resulted in a huge bump on his forehead on the doorknob. He already has three bumps on his forehead, one from tripping over Matt’s man tools and managing to fall head first onto the concrete. Thank goodness his skull is so thick or he probably wouldn’t survive such catastrophes. After I consoled Caleb and sent him away, I got back to work. I organized as many game board pieces as I could find, and when I discovered the boxes were all torn to shreds, I packed the pieces into plastic bags and put the boards into a large tote. Ungrateful children. The puzzle pieces were so scattered, I figured there was no way I would ever get them situated and knew it would only be mean to donate over ten 100 piece puzzles that were all jumbled together to Goodwill. I threw them out. I discovered that the 20 dollar bill Amber and Adrian had sent Makayla for a job well done in Kindergarten was torn in half. I literally felt tears brim my eyeballs, seeing their kind gesture so horribly disrespected. I confronted Makayla with it.
"I tore it so that I would have two. They both say 20 so now I have 40 dollars and I can keep twenty and give twenty to Bubba," she said.
I understood her little girl logic and said, "Only two WHOLE 20 dollar bills make forty dollars. A torn dollar makes it ruined. I can tape it for you but don't EVER tear money again."
After a good hour and a half of organizing and putting stuff into plastic bins, I was nearly done except for random art supplies, doll clothes, and other small child stuff, and decided to take a break. I lurked through the house to look for something else to do. I saw the trash needed taking out and told the children, “Do NOT go into that bedroom. I shut the door and I will know if you’ve opened it.” How would I know? I put a handful of M&M’s on the desk in the event they intruded because I know for a fact my children could never resist devouring them. They looked at me with sweet, giant eyes, one set greenish blue, the other set dark brown, and promised to not even get near their bedroom door. I took the trash out and opened the back gate to get to the dumpster without managing to get electrocuted by the hot wire that Matt installed to keep his dogs from jumping on the gate, and without the dogs getting out which would result in me chasing them all over Kingdom Come. After I threw the trash out, I approached the gate and saw the wind had blown it shut. Blast! I know there is a way to open it from the outside because Matt has shown me and I fiddled with it for a while but kept electrocuting myself. My options were to either endure a fifteen minute walk around the entire neighborhood to get to my front door (which was also locked and I’m pretty sure the kids could never figure out how to unlock it) or jump the gate. I climbed up on the ledge of the seven foot tall gate, imagining Matt coming home to find me dead, with the spikes from the top of the gate through my guts and me just dangling there, impaled and whatnot. There was nothing for me to use for leverage or to climb down on the other side and I would have to just leap and pray for a safe landing. The dogs were at my feet, whining, and no matter how much I told them to shoo, they stayed, which meant I would have to not only leap the gate, but leap over them. I looked around and saw my neighbor had a tree in her backyard that I could use to help me down if I hopped her gate. Then I could knock on her back door and explain everything. She’s pretty sweet; she wouldn’t mind. So I went to her gate and the second I touched it, her giant dog started barking and growling, which sent Matt’s dogs into a barking and growling riot. I had forgotten about her ferocious dog. Frick. So I went back to my gate and climbed back up, humiliated that I was making such a scene, and looked around to see if anyone was watching. An old dude with white hair was on the roof of a house a few houses across the alley and was just looking at me. I gave him a little wave and wondered if he would be calling the police. I gave myself a quick pep talk, reminding myself that as a farm child, I had done far more dangerous stunts for FUN, put my foot on the top of one of the spikes, and jumped. While airborne, I knew I was going to fall, so I purposely fell into a roll and survived the incident with only a bruise on my lower back and a scrape on my forearm which I discovered after nearly being drowned by dog slobber since the dogs saw my awkward position in the dirt as an opportunity to show me some love. Feeling like a warrior, I went back into the house to get started on the children’s room again. I could hear them shrieking with laughter upon entering the house and went to their room and saw everything I had done had been un-done and the children were sitting in the plastic bins I had packed all of their organized things in, pretending to be in rocket ships. Everything was pretty much the way it had been before I even started. For a second, I felt guilty to ruin their fun but the sight of the mess and their deliberate disobedience replaced guilt with pure irritation.
“WHAT are you guys doing!” I exclaimed, “I told you not to come in here! You guys ruined all the cleaning I did!”
Makayla stopped her joyous shrieking and said, “Well Mommy, Bubba and I were playing hide and seek and I thought maybe he came in here and I opened the door only a tiny little bit and saw you had left candy in here for us. So I shared it with Bubba and then we made time machines.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, “But I wasn’t in here. I was in the bathtub hiding from Sister.”
“Both of you get out of those tubs right now and go straight to time out,” I said.
They both started protesting and I said, “Get your butt’s to time out, NOW!”
“NOW” came out as a scream. I have yelled at my kids before, but outright screaming I have never done and as soon as the word “NOW” left my mouth, my hands came to cover my mouth as if I was trying to hold the word in after I had already screamed it. Both children looked at me with wide eyes and I looked back at them with my hands clasped over my mouth, and they both burst into tears and ran for their designated corners, scrambling, as if I was about to thrash them with a chain whip. I stood there for a moment, feeling like the biggest piece of crap ever. I grew up in a household full of screaming (not Grandma and Grandpa's house) and you can ask Matt, I am NOT OK with screaming. It makes me so nervous when I hear others screaming I typically have to take something for anxiety. Matt and I don’t scream at each other, ever, and never have. There is a difference between yelling and screaming, not that yelling is OK either. Yelling is like, “Get in here and quit making me call you!” or “ENOUGH!” to be heard over their bickering. Screaming is a total lack of self control, a useless way to communicate frustration, and to a child, it is very scary. After I calmed down, I reminded myself that I am in fact, a human being, and forgave myself. After time out, I brought both children back into the room, and dictated to them toy by toy, piece by piece, what to pick up and where to put it. It took a horribly long time and I would have done it much quicker, but they had to know that after what they did, Mommy Dearest was NOT picking up after them again. They grumbled at first, until I threatened them with time out for having bad attitudes.
“You two will pick up this mess and you will do it cheerfully,” I said, “Put smiles on those faces. Now.”
They began complaining of starvation, which was probably accurate since lunch had been hours ago. I took them to the kitchen and gave them fruit, cantaloupe for Caleb and orange slices for Makayla. I tried to not let my frustration over their mess irritate me still, since they were already paying the consequence, and engaged them in cheerful conversation while they ate. I was tempted let them know I was still not pleased, but remaining angry wouldn’t do anyone any good. After their snack, they went back to work, a little more optimistic than they had been before, and finished their room. I put all the boxes and games in the hallway since I couldn’t figure out what to do with so many bulky items, and promised the children that they would get their things back a little at a time, when they could manage to keep what was left in their room clean. I had left them legos, blocks, Barbies, a few art things, all their books since learning shouldn’t be taken away as punishment, leap frogs and games, hotwheels, piano, and other music equipment. Every evening, I give them twenty minutes to clean their room and whatever is left out after the timer goes off gets taken away. And wouldn’t you know, that I haven’t had to remove a single thing from those children’s room since?
