Learning to Love the Madness

While my children are filled with all sorts of wisdom, like ‘I’m not eating this, it’s gross,’ ‘I’m never brushing my teeth again until we have the PINK toothpaste,’ and ‘Will you please wake up, we’re hungry and out of bouillon cubes,’ one of my favorite tidbits was from Alex several years back. We were going through my remaining box of youthful memorabilia, because it seemed very important that he knew I used to be painfully cool, in a had-my-own-darkroom-and-wore-fishnet-stockings-with-combat-boots kind of way. This mom bob wasn’t always a MOM bob, kid. It was EDGY.

At one point he sighed, fingering sexy postcards from France and letters forged with calligraphy and exotic paper, all written by people who rivaled my personal coolness, and spoke these immortal words: ‘Mom, your life used to be like an inspired French movie. Now it’s like an ABC sitcom,’

It was funny at the time, but it’s since become an explanation.

Because while it doesn’t make sense that a jar of pickles is the only thing keeping the back room door from swinging shut on its own, and the resulting conundrum of craving pickles because they’re ever in sight but then having to find a temporary prop to keep the door open in the tiny walkway so you can *have* a pickle might render frustration, it actually makes perfect sense. If you’re living a sitcom.

Or after the family’s one wild child tosses a chair across the room during dinner is spared punishment because your chickens’ screams at being chased by squirrels in the tree right outside the window requires more attention, because they are the last three chickens after another one got eaten by a possum in the rain only days before, one might be tempted to get overwhelmed. UNLESS! It’s all for comedic affect.

What about running gags? Take your pick!

• Minivan doors that bleat and grind if practiced mom-hip pressure is not applied at the *exact* moment of latching (about four seconds after pushing the ‘close’ button – can’t be too soon, and oh God not too late)
• An entire summer of rooster crows at inopportune moments, roughly half of which sounded like an infant being slaughtered
• Constantly barefoot children – no one makes it a whole week without losing at least one shoe
• The full-sized mattress that nightly houses two adults (one of whom is literally TOO TALL to fit completely) and 2-3 children under the age of ten in a rotating saga of ‘Duck Duck Bed’
• The patriarch’s search for the rare and elusive ‘Quiet Moment,’ driving him to a daily 3 a.m. alarm (I found him once at 4 a.m. at the dining room table just… staring. In the silence. Hands on the table. The struggle is real.)
• The three-year-old who drinks black coffee and will steal yours from right under your nose and guzzle it, wide-legged, like a frat party newbie with a mug of Bud Light that rivals her body weight
• Mochi and Cookie, the rats, in their rat paradise: a five foot tall cage with hand-crafted hammocks and beds

I could go on. But doesn’t every home have a stove with one broken knob, requiring a swapping out on busy dinner nights? And you can’t tell me that you don’t have two TV remotes because one of them is perpetually lost, or a ceiling that leaks mysteriously 2-3 times a year so only waterproof things go in that ‘spot.’

So we laugh. Clearly, we have cultivated a household symphony of chaos and activity, a place filled with lives not static or stifling. A place where you’re welcome to stop by for dinner, and long as you will hold the hamster while I clean its bedding, can catch an errant chicken, and don’t mind running your hands through a child’s hair even if it’s sticky with whatever they had for breakfast. (Or dinner yesterday.)