Our house is quiet right now. For the first time in days.
Okay, maybe that is a slight exaggeration. Generally speaking if I can get all three of my kids to sleep at the same time, we have a quiet house. So if you came by at, say, 4am on any given night (last night included) you would probably think we were a very peaceful family.
During daylight/waking hours though this place is a den of chaos. At any given moment you might have one child banging on the piano while another one screams over not being given a second sippy cup of milk... while the third one marches up and down the hallway shouting "BA RUM PUM PUM! BA RUM BUTT BUTT!!!" at the top of his lungs.
Generally speaking, we've got a happy kind of noise going on over here. If you don't mind LOUD (and messy!) it's a pretty happy place to be.
Sometimes though I just lose my mind amid the sheer volume. My children seem to have only two settings:
- OFF (asleep)
- ON (screaming shrilly)
As I tried to explain to my six year old son today, there is only so much noise I can tolerate gracefully before I start shutting down.
This is a clear byproduct of having grown up essentially as an only child. My four siblings were all grown and out of the house by the time I turned eight years old - meaning that I spent close to a decade on my own with two quiet, musical, gentle people (my parents) who never raised their voices and never made noise that wasn't beautiful.
Even as an adult, on my own, I shared apartments with relatively quiet friends - low key boyfriends - and then from 1999 to 2004 I lived all alone. Five blissful years with pure, absolute silence at my fingertips whenever and wherever I wanted it. A few of those years were spent mainly with my husband but still, I *could* have had total silence at any time I chose.
Today my son asked me what time I went to bed last night.
"About 1am."
"Mom!!!! 1am!!!! That is too late!!! How will you be healthy if you don't get enough sleep?"
"I know, son. I know."
"Why do you stay up so late Mom?"
"It's the quiet, honey. I just really like sitting in a quiet house."
"What do you do when it is quiet Mom?"
"I think. I read. I write. I dream. My brain relaxes."
"Oh. That sounds good."
* * * * * * *
Summer vacation from school has been passing by, some days better than others, and mainly we've done okay because our younger son has enjoyed daily preschool and a set routine that the rest of us could work around. With a few camps and some swimming lessons thrown in for good measure, we've had a sense of predictability and normalcy which got us all the way through the months of June and July.
Thanks to his injury last Monday though, my son's school days AND our swimming lessons wrapped up very suddenly. For two weeks now we've had four or five of us at home together every moment... which is A LOT of togetherness.
During the acute period of his accident, for at least 72 hours after it happened, none of us wanted to be apart. My husband stayed home from work to help and all of the kids just wanted to be together. We really pulled close as we rose to the challenge of healing our little guy - such a valued, valuable member of our family.
After a week passed without incident though - no fever, no more swelling, everything safely hidden away in a cast so we can't actually see the gruesomeness ourselves - we slowly returned to our normal patterns. My eldest son started to pound on his little brother again... just a little, here and there. His sister started pulling his hair again. We started to give him time-outs again for breaking family rules, just like the other kids.
With every passing day the noise level in our home has risen, until today when it really hit a crescendo. My morning was a cacophony of
"MOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!! HE HIT ME!!!" and
"MOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, HE'S SITTING ON THE BABY AGAIN!" and
"MOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, I NEED YOU TO WIPE MY BUTT!!!!!!!!"
Oh, and a lot of other things related to their little rear ends. Right now it seems like their favorite release from time cooped up at home is engaging in bathroom banter:
"Brother, I see your BUTT!!!!"
"Ewwwww.... you said BUTT!!!! BUTT BUTT PEE PEE!!! Heeehehehehehheheee!"
"Mooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, brother said Pee Pee!!!"
"Don't tell her that YOU! I'll POOP on YOU!"
Etcetera.
They've even managed to get their two year old sister to sing the song she made up about "butts", which she sings in her tiny little muddy toddler voice.
Sigh. So much for Disney princesses! Our house is a magical land of bodily functions, apparently.
* * * * * * *
After about six hours of this today while I worked side by side with our housecleaner to scour this tiny, ridiculously messy home, I finally got to a tipping point. There are only so many times you can say, "Please don't use potty talk in our home, I really don't like it and I would really appreciate it if you would stop" before courtesy goes out the window.
Around 2pm my response changed from polite and firm to reactive.
"That's enough!" I announced, using my MOM voice. "The next person to talk about their bottom is going to lose dessert."
(Yes, I know, the consequence totally does not match the crime at all. Anyone got any good ideas about an appropriate consequence/natural consequence for mouthing off about bodily parts and functions? When I was a kid my dad used to wash my mouth out with soap for saying stuff like that... which I'm NOT going to do... so dessert is usually the first thing to go.)
"OOOOO KAY!!!!!" my younger son snapped at me.
"Awwww, MOOOOMMMMMMM!" whined his older brother.
"Butt Butt Butt," whispered the little brother under his breath and then giggled.
"MOM! HE JUST SAID 'BUTT'!!! HE LOSES HIS DESSERT!!!"
"Did you say that?" I stared at the little guy in frustration, who grinned back devilishly.
"I just said it quietly."
"Well, I guess that means no dessert then."
"What????????????!!!!!!!! WHAT?????!!!!!!!!?!" He burst into a storm of tears, as though he'd had NO idea that dessert was on the line.
Ignoring the crying, I reiterated my position.
"We don't speak like that in our home or anywhere else. It isn't polite to talk about bottoms, and people don't like to hear about your rear ends and what comes out of them."
"BUT I DO!!!!!!!" wept the little one. "I LOVE TALKING ABOUT BUTTS!!!!!!!!"
"He thinks its funny, Mom," added his brother.
"BUTT BUTT BUTT!" chimed in the little girl.
* * * * * * *
At this point my daughter decided to ratchet up the action by (a) hitting her brother across the face, and (b) stealing the marker he was drawing with.
Still weeping over the loss of his dessert, he chose to retaliate with force and punched her back in the arm.
She promptly burst into loud, angry screams and ran to me for consolation. I consoled her and took the marker away, as my daughter has lately shown herself to be a terrific graffiti artist - especially talented with permanent pen and paint.
When I tok her marker away, she then hit me too, hard, right on the chest.
"Ouch!" I shook my head sadly. "That hurt! Mommy is so sad that you hurt her."
My daughter laughed uproariously.
* * * * * * * *
So there we were:
A little sister hitting and stealing markers,
A little brother hitting, shouting gross four year old body jokes for HOURS, and throwing a loud and anguished tantrum,
A 35 year old mommy VERY frustrated that her children are hitting, stealing, ignoring her polite (and later, firm) requests and throwing dual tantrums,
and one six year old boy who thought the whole thing was pretty funny. But he'd still rather have been playing Angry Birds.
...and I just gave up.
At that moment, my brain was so frazzled with noise I just didn't have any good thing left to give.
"Okay," I sighed. "Guess what? We're ALL in time out."
"WHAT?" shouted the six year old boy. "WHAT DID I DO?"
"Nothing honey. You're not in trouble. We just all need a break from each other. We need to take a break. We need five minutes alone in different rooms so that we can all take a deep breath. Mommy needs a time-out too. I need to remember how to be a good and patient Mom."
"Do I have to take a nap?" he asked with a quivering lip.
"No, of course not. We're just going to take a time out. A little break."
He sighed. (The other two were still fussing.) "Okay, Mom. Okay."
* * * * * * *
Here we are then, and it's been more than five minutes. As it turned out, as soon as my daughter and younger son got into their separate rooms, they both screamed for like two minutes and then promptly fell sound asleep.
My elder son is in the bedroom my husband and I share, working on writing a letter to his best friend who moved to Australia last year. He pops his head out every few minutes to ask me how to spell a word.
I'm here sitting on the couch, since there was no bedroom for me to retreat into for my own time out. There's a computer on my lap and I've spent the last thirty minutes decompressing by venting my day onto its screen.
Slowly my headache is clearing up and I do feel as though I've reclaimed a significant portion of my inner balance. I'm ready to try again, to summon up the "good mom" inside of me and give her free reign over these feisty little ones. Maybe we'll try the park, when they wake up.
My take-home from today's chaos is that I probably should have insisted on a nap earlier in the day even when the kids said they were not tired. As my mother-in-law wisely says, tired kids get into trouble. Nap time is a better option (and typically better-received) than "Time Out!" any day.
In a pinch though, it's obviously better to take some space from each other than to continue a heated discussion with a four year old and a two year old over foul language and hitting.
I'm laughing out loud just re-reading that last sentence. How do we manage these things? How did I manage to get into a 'heated' discussion with small children over anything? At this point it seems truly funny.
Time out gets a bad rap... but for me, today, it was a lifesaver.
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