Not enough research…

Today while I was sweeping up Max’s partially wet eggs from the kitchen floor, I decided there is a topic of which there is not enough information and research and study concerning…  THIS.  The day in and day out of being a houseworking, care taking, mother of many.  While maintaining the kitchen I thought about the top twenty things I would rather be doing than grabbing globs of jelly with a paper towel from the table top…one being to simply go clean a different room of the house.  I’ve been trying to go thru the kids clothes to weed out the stuff that’s too small or too beat or just not a favorite.  No-one is answering the question, “Hey, hows it going?”, with “Oh fine, I recently ate a soggy cheerio off of my toddler because I was too far from a garbage can and I didn’t want to put it down somewhere I had just cleaned…”  Some days I really try to boycott this monotonous bull crap of just maintaining a life that is lived hard and heavy by just NOT doing any of it…no load of laundry, no dishwasher run, no effort to “keep up”.  I’ll just leave! Run errands! Go to a park! Pack a lunch!  And you know what happens?!  It gets worse.  And its so boring.  Catching back up on all of it.  BORED TO DEATH.  Clearly, I would rather write about the monotony of the housework than actually perform it.  I imagine that someday we will make enough money to hire someone to do all the stuff I hate doing.(HAHAHAHAHA!!!)  So here feels like a nice place to draw others into the stimulating, captivation and secret happenings of the everyday housewife.  Because lets be real, no-one wants to read your Facebook post about how you’ve spent half the day trying to find your third washbasket so you can get on with your day…did you fill it with junk and put it in the basement to hide it from humans outside the family?  Is it buried in the boys room?  Did I leave it at the storage unit the last time I used it to transport my “small business” inventory?  We all have that one friend who will listen to us vent about cracking our head on the underside of our six year olds bed while trying to fish his teddy bear collection from underneath the bed…in an effort to someday find the floor of this room and therefore vacuum it this quarter.  That friend is just being nice, because she knows she’s about to do the exact same thing to you, except her story is going to involve feces and a sudden and intersecting realization that the wipes AND the paper towels stores have recently been fully depleted.  Let’s not forget about when the kids all rush in the door after school, daily discarding shoes and backpacks at various locations ALL OVER THE WHOLE HOUSE!!!

Tonight while Chris and I were in the kitchen, he was throwing some spaghetti together while I was finally rounding a corner on getting all the laundry done and everyone’s clothes weeded through…I mentioned that I don’t know what to do with the boys underwear when I do the laundry.  (Three underwear utilizers, different ages…similar sizes…same colors) “I’m just going to make a pile of underwear and tell them all they have to find their underwear…”

Chris replied, “I know! Why don’t you put them in a brown paper bag and then put it on a shelf in the pantry closet.  That sounds like a good place…”

I did this recently to their entire collection of socks.  I was in the middle of THE GREAT SOCK MATCHING!…when something more urgent presented itself and most likely included the use of one of the only work surfaces in the entire home and therefore I took ALL the socks, the ones that had been matched and the ones left solo and threw them all into a brown grocery bag and promptly put it out of my sight.  How else was I going to get on with my life?  And there it stayed for more than a week.  Occasionally someone would whine about not being able to find any socks and I’d chime in “Brown paper bag on the shelf in the pantry closet…”  One day Chris overheard me give this answer to a troubled, sockless youth and he was like “What?”

If that right there doesn’t sum up what my life feels like at most times, I don’t know what does.  Once you keep your socks in a brown bag in the pantry long enough, it starts to feel normal.  The bag did start ripping and the first time that I had to bend over and pick an array of socks up from the pantry closet floor I got on with the long neglected chore of sorting and matching and discarding household socks.  And thankfully, the kids are always on their toes.  I can’t even say anyone would question a bag of their underwear in the pantry.  They are at least becoming slightly aware that I am the only human filter they have right now and the moment they start complaining about my filing system is the moment I announce that I don’t see a need to touch their socks at all any more.  They’ve become quite tolerant of the total upheaval that can be the rearranging of their rooms or their furniture or their roommates all with the intention to fit better and more harmoniously.  One big giant science experiment! Oh, and the boredom thing…moving everything around seems to satisfy my constant need to be experiencing something different and new without ever leaving my house.

This afternoon while I sat on my bedroom floor…finishing the sorting of the socks, Iris came in from school…the rest of her brothers decided to accompany Chris to the storage unit for some work related something or other.  She sat on the floor next to me and chatted and chatted.  She told me that she doesn’t like to have a favorite teacher because she thinks it would be mean to the other teachers.  “There are these girls who are like ‘Oh, Mrs.Reigert is our favorite teacher!” and I’m just like ‘poor Mrs.Hoffman…maybe her feelings are hurt…’  I told her that was nice of her. If I only get one girl out of all this labor of love, I’m so glad its her.

At supper tonight Flynn made it very clear how he feels about the “Lunchable” option at the cafeteria.  “I wish that the guy that invented lunchables would have invented them when he was a kid, cause then he would have eaten them and he would have known that it is not enough food for a kid.”  This is where I will confess that at Flynn’s last “Well Child” check up I asked his doctor how I would know if the boy had a tape worm…?  He looked at me a little bewildered and assured me that 10 year old boys do start to develop quite an appetite. Little does Flynn know, if this were a different era, we’d be sending him off to live with a wealthy relative who could more adequately afford his hollowed leg eating habits.

(Next day) At one point last night, it was up for debate…whether Micah had already consumed a chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing.  There was a tupperware of them on the counter for the last two days (when I actually DO bake something, we savor it…one a day…cause we won’t see this again for a while.)  Chris and I are each on the sofa in the living room, he’s completing his online spanish course and I’m reading a book about raising a confident child…Micah, our MOST confident child is asserting to Chris “I SWEAR I DIDNT HAVE ONE!”  It was one of these evenings when we gave the kids a choice, “You can have a cupcake, a juice pop or a pack of gummies…”  Its hard to keep track of who has decided on what dessert and they seem to all want to claim their dessert at different times.  Some kids want to go ride their bike while other kids want to be in the tree house while still other kids are swinging from that same tree, all choosing to enjoy their dessert at a convenient time.  Chris looks at me for some assurance…”Did he have one?”

“I honestly don’t know…”

Micah has now started to approach me from across the room…”You can smell my breath mom!” he begs.  I close my mouth tightly and begin shaking my head adamantly with my hand in the air (in an effort to halt him in his steps)  When he reaches me with his mouth open, ready to blow his non-chocolatey breath in my face he clearly hasn’t received my message and instead of stopping in his tracks, proceeds to slap my outstretched hand a confused high five.  I was taken by surprise and Chris and I both started laughing.  Micah has such an innocent nature underneath his layers and layers of mischievous, trouble making characteristics.  He is our most misunderstood child…even by his own parents.

While all the kids were at school the next day I was really trying to tackle the changing of the seasonal clothing while purging and filling the back of the van with donations.  Once when I went to the back of the van I got the brilliant idea to bring Max’s umbrella stroller into the house for him to climb in/push around/fill with stuff.  I’ve always found my toddlers to love an empty stroller.  I parked it inside the front door and went back to my chores.  He immediately took the bait.  However, it was not long until I began to hear an old familiar sound…the sound of A SUPREMELY PISSED OFF TODDLER!  Not pain, not hunger, not whining…he was just pissed.  After his third bout of severe anger at the stroller I went to try to help remedy the situation.  He had a belt buckle end in each hand and I watched him fumble the two plastic pieces together while twisting and writhing in anger.  I tried to buckle the stroller belt to appease him.  WRONG!  That just pissed him off more.  “WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?! ROLLIN UP HERE AND JUST USING HER BIG STUPID HANDS TO DO THE THING I CANT DO!” I tried to take the stroller away, to fully release him from this hell, but he insisted on coming after it and holding onto it.  I gave it my best shot.  I withdrew to the kitchen to attend to last nights’ pots and pans and it was from there that I offered these few phrases of comfort to my struggling offspring…”Oh wow, I can tell that you’re so mad.” and “Uh oh.  Sounds like someone isn’t having any fun.”  and “I’m sorry that you’re feeling so frustrated.”  I was eventually able to distract him with a snack and I got that stroller out of our day as quickly as my genius brain thought to bring it into our day.

That afternoon when I approached the school doors to pick up Owen, he came walking toward me with the biggest grin on his face…”MOM, you embarrassed me at lunch today!”

“ME? How?!”

“You put that note in my lunch that said you loved me!  My friend Atrayu (coolest name ever) had one too!”

I felt privileged to be lumped into a group with Atrayu’s mom…mom’s of first graders who embarrass them with their lunch note professions of love!

The kids usually pack their own lunches simply because the lunch packing population varies on a day to day basis and also, there are five of them…and that alone can be quite overwhelming (no, I’m not just figuring this out now…)  Some of my kids are crazy about chicken fingers and some of my kids detest them.  So 15 minutes before morning departure when someone has caught wind of the school lunch option and announced that they wish to pack lunch while I am reading a board book to a morning fusser or brushing someones hair or tying a shoe or GOD FORBID just sitting somewhere drinking a cup of coffee, I point them in the direction of the kitchen…alerting them to how little time they have to accomplish the task ahead of them and assure them that it would be in their best interest to clean up after themselves.  Owen however, had asked the evening before if I would please help him pack his lunch the next morning.  With adequate notice and the polite interaction (in other words, all my unreasonable demands were being met!) I said “SURE!”  Plus, he is my first grader and while I can be a rather hardened old broad, he does fall in the scope of my children who still require more of me than some of the others.  He hand selected his items and helped every step of the way, but at the last moment, when he wasn’t looking I was able to sneak an “I LOVE YOU OWEN! I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY! note in without his knowledge.  Every kid had gotten at least one of these from me…I’ve met my quota.

Twoish weeks later Owen and I are back at it, co-packing a lunch.  He stares off for a moment while sitting at the kitchen table, then looks at me, “Mom, did you and Atrayu’s mom text each other or something?”  Laughing at the idea that he is still so baffled at the presence of a note in both he and his friends lunches from their mothers on the same day, I explained that we did not text each other…that we are both just moms who love our little boys.

Sitting around a campfire with some friends while the ladies discuss home life affairs and probably complain about most of it, Chris interjects…”Autumn is so good at doing my laundry…when I come home from work and there is a pile of perfectly folded laundry sitting of my dresser…It feels like I have a maid service or something…I feel like a king.”  I looked at him and I just wanted to cry.  Chris is not one to fill the air with fluffy words.  If he says it, he means it and while he thanks me regularly for my hard work for our family, its usually within our four walls.  He isn’t the guy who gets on social media and offers a tribute to his lovely, beautiful, hardworking wife.  Frankly, his kingly laundry announcement around a campfire with some close friends means more than the big show any day.  Because thats our life.  Its a lot of in between.  Its a lot of cleaning up after meals.  Its a lot of mundane duty toward one another.

Not enough research, not enough charts, no funding to study the specimen that is the person keeping the home fires burning for the ones who have to go out and get stuff done in this big, wide world.  I think if the research were undertaken by some brave institution they would find, after a lifetime of serving and investing in her loved ones…she is HAPPY.  She is completely insane…mind LOST in the shuffle, but she is undeniably happy.