Mom Days

There’s a cloth doll lying facedown on the laundry room floor, looking vaguely like a crime scene. I wonder briefly if I should draw a chalk line around the poor thing, but then think better of it. The kids wouldn’t get the joke, and Mike only notices things in his immediate range of vision.
The canning funnel isn’t in the laundry room, either. I’ve been searching for it for nearly two weeks now. You see, I haven’t been able to afford a decent canister or Tupperware set, so I save every spaghetti sauce jar, washing them out for reuse. They make excellent storage, but present a slight challenge to fill. The blue wide-mouth funnel would be perfect, but I haven’t seen it since canning season. I’ve been using a rolled up paper plate for dry goods, but that won’t work quite as well for wet, gloopy chili.

“Mommy!” my 3 year-old calls from the dining room, “I have a cut on my fingew fwom the bad, bad icicle thing outside and then I fell and it huwted weally, weally bad and can you kiss it please?” Her words come out in a tumble, her face full of the innocent consternation the young possess.

Tripping over the menagerie of toys, books and clothes, I locate a bandage and duly wrap and kiss the tiny affliction.

Now, what was I doing? Oh, yes, the chili. Its only ten minutes until I have to get to work, there’s no time to keep looking. The chili will have to find its way into the recycled jar and I’ll just rinse off the edge. Running towards the crockpot, I spy a dirty dish I somehow missed last night, holding scant remnants of yesterday’s curry. I run water in it and fling open the dishwasher, hoping there is room for just one more bowl.

Oh yes, the chili. I grab a Barilla jar from my top shelf, cursing once again the kitchen designers who must have been eight feet tall. One of these days, I remind myself, I’ll have a kitchen made for the five foot four that I really am.

The chili has been made with free-range beef, and resents the confines of the glass jar. What smelled so good cooking all night now churns my stomach as it spills over the edge of the jar and onto my hand.

“Mommy!” a tiny bandaged finger is waving at about the three-foot mark “It still huwts!”
“Oh, honey, I must not have kissed it enough. Come here.” Kid #3 advances for the proffered lips, then recoils from the chili on my fingers,
“But, you’we diwty, mommy!”

So I am. Conveniently enough, the kitchen faucet is still running, filling and overflowing yesterday’s overlooked bowl. The moving water has filled and rinsed the curry away, except in the one corner angled away from the water, where lentils still cling stubbornly to the earthenware. Sighing in frustration, I flip the bowl around, rinse my fingers, and remember to turn the water off. Kid #3 gets her finger kissed again, (“It’s all bettew now!”) and then requests something completely unintelligible.

Mike returns from dropping the kids off at school, but there’s a bit of a problem- he still has the kids. Our school called a snow day, again, and forgot to call us. This is why normal people use TVs and radios, I suppose. Now we have two choices: drag all three kids to work with us, or let Mike work at home, again, with the tinkle of children’s voices all around him. I can’t stay home today because I have customers coming in to see me, and my wonderful husband knows that without asking. He looks at the kids, who are gleefully stripping off all vestiges of the indignities of a school day.
“Guess I’m staying here.” He sighs, unwrapping his scarf.

I guess so. I finish stuffing chili through the mouth of the jar and dig through the drawer for a matching Barilla lid. There is not one. I have four empty Barilla jars and not one single lid, whereas I own three Classico lids and not one jar. I slam the drawer shut, setting off a chain of protest from Kid #3, and wrap the jar opening in Press’n’Seal.
The dishwasher is ready to run, the dishwasher gel makes fart noises as it escapes the plastic container. My kids are just old enough to be completely devastated by this and fall over themselves in laughter,
“It farted!”
I grimace, but keep my mouth shut, remembering the days when I would torment my own mother with similar crudity. The dishwasher must be propped open with the spare table leg; otherwise it fills up and stops.
“Stupid rental house,” I mutter to myself, “one of these days, I’m going to own my own house, and then-“

And then what? Would I have had the extra money to replace or repair the dishwasher? Probably not. I un-curse the wretched machine and house, and realize that I have one minute now to get to work, and I’m not even all the way dressed- work slacks but a dirty tee-shirt. I trip over someone’s backpack on my mad dash to the stairs, then keep vigilantly to the right on my way up, because we have that silly habit of putting ‘things to go upstairs’ on the left, and they never quite make it up.
Upstairs, there is a mountain of clean laundry. I have been meaning to get it ALL put away for about five months now, but there is always something better to do- work, cook, play with the kids, run errands, write stories. Every time I get almost to the bottom, another 3 loads seem to get washed simultaneously, and the pile never ends! Somewhere on the bottom is probably that one black knee sock I’ve been missing since autumn.

Frustration with the perpetual mess boils over inside of me, and I storm downstairs, haranguing the kids with promises of money if laundry is folded, threats of death if it isn’t. With choices like these, I’m sure their childhood will turn out just fine, no?

Dressed, packed, car started finally, I kiss everyone goodbye and dash out the door, almost ready to wait on a never ending succession of people who need their watch batteries changed, their rings sized, or their junk jewelry ‘appraised’. Maybe, if we have a lucky day, we’ll sell something!
I glance back at my children, waving at me through the living room window. They are standing in the scattered detritus of a life lived fully. I didn’t want to raise my children in a messy house or a mad-dash life like this. I didn’t want to have this daily struggle over money, the never-ending march of errands and chores and juggling.

But they’re happy kids, and we all chose this lifestyle. In the end, I can either say I’ve had a clean house for fifty years, or I can have a body of literary work, a gallery of jewelry designs, and three children and a husband who are happy and well-fed.

I think I’ll pick the latter. It’s a good life.

Labels: career, children, cooking, housework, kids, laundry, life, motherhood, work