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| 11/2006 - Rough Ride at the OK Corral |
By: By Susan Brooke Day - November 2006
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Here I am crawling all over the playroom floor. It would be nice if I was a baby having fun with blocks, but no such luck. I am crawling all over the floor because I’m just sick of it. Sick of this mess, sick of how I’m the only one to REALLY do anything around here. Sick, sick, sick! In clumsy bundles, I toss an endless road of Thomas the Train track into the blue, banged-up jumbo plastic tub. I set aright the toppled children’s table and chair and, one-by-one, pick up magenta, cornflower blue and what seems like a thousand other colors and cram them into the 96-count Crayola box. At the sofa, my hand finds an impressive array of chewy granola bar wrappers and sticky crumbs wedged between the cushions as I climb over and around the couch like I’m on an obstacle course.
I stand to look around, hands on my hips, and sigh. The boys are asleep, but my middle schooler is still studying at her desk. Today, we’ve done school, soccer practice, homework, dinner, reading, showers. We squeezed in a little bit of play time, but hardly enough.
The clock ticks past 10 p.m., and tomorrow, like for most parents of school-age kids, my day begins at 6 a.m. If I’d like a moment to myself, or dare I even suggest a leisurely shower, I have to get up even earlier. In our playroom, I’m finishing what my 4-, 8- and 10-year-old boys started in a lackluster attempt to tidy up after a rousing game of “Davey Crockett Meets the Alamo.” They had a bang-up time with swords, cap guns and every other item deemed dangerous enough for their warrior selves — anything resembling rough, tough and daring. Their energy is amazing to me, but exhausting at the end of the day, and gosh darn it, they hardly lifted a finger to help me out around here! So I’m not surprised, hoisting the toy chest lid, to find more evidence of this lousy-at-best clean-up job. It’s just stuffed with various bits of plastic you-name-its and over-sized puzzle pieces lost forever from rightful boxes. There are bath towels here, dirty socks, empty Gogurt wrappers, half-drank Gatorade bottles, caseless DVDs and solo pieces of this and that stuffed quickly away to get the clean-up-the-playroom chore over and done with. I’m ticked.
But then a quick image: The mega-stash of trappings I “stored” beneath my childhood bed for years. I could pull a sock out of that volcano of mostly balled-up clothes and other things would erupt from it along with dustbunnies. Over the years that volcano evolved: My enormous Barbie cachet gave way to 45 records,16 Magazines and toe shoes; before long, trendy clothes sans hangers mingled with diaries and empty jumbo bags of peanut M&Ms. I remember pushing hard at that pile beneath my bed to get my room cleaned fast and then tugging the bedskirt down so that a person — Mother — could stand at my bedroom door and not see my mess. Just hoping for a fast out ... and maybe a little praise. Eventually, I developed pride in my room and loved rearranging my furniture and dusting my nightstand and dresser with polish. That got me praise. And the volcano disappeared.
Now motherhood with four active children finds me barking orders like, “Pick up!,” “Make your beds!,” “Clean your rooms!” and so on. It’s no wonder that, left to their own devices, kids will get a job done their way and call it clean ... just like I did.
If I’m a bit of an authoritarian, well, I had to have learned that somewhere. And I know first-hand that this kind of parenting can yield sneakiness in kids.
OK, then. Maybe a little less barking and a little more noticing of the things my kids do right. They are after all, like we all are once, just kids. |
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