A Road Less Travelled

I have always had a great deal of respect for my mother. I have had a great deal of respect for mothers in general. It is something I was raised with; this idea that mothers are just that cool. But it is only recently that I have come to understand why mothers command such respect. Since we the S. Ben-Ezras have declared our house to be operating in a state of emergency I have shouldered more of the day-to-day running of the household as Crystal is busy with other stuff. I have come to appreciate exactly how difficult it is. First, from the moment you wake up anywhere from four to seven people could want something from you. They all want something from you and they all want it at the same time. One wants you to find his pants and another wants you to get him out of his bed and take him downstairs. They all have questions for you and they all want breakfast. Sometimes the other adults will add their requests or you will need to hold the baby while the other adults deal with another child. By an hour after you get up you feel as though you have answered a million questions and fed an army. Second, you will never be allowed to have both hands at any given time. You will either be holding the baby or the toddler or you will be doing four things at once each requiring a hand. Each task then takes twice as long because they are only allotted half a hand each. If you are holding a child at the moment the task will take three times as long because you have been taught it is a bad thing to spill coffee/tea/water/soup/eggs/dish water on the child and it is doubly bad to catch them on fire. Some jobs necessitate two hands and so they are accomplished as quickly as possible while someone screams in the background. It is most distracting. Third, the children will not understand or hear you when it is most important that they do. When you are holding the baby and the toddler is straying too close to the children on the swings said children will not understand what you mean when you, panicstricken, yell, “STOP!!!!!!!” They just won’t get it. They will instead assume you are telling them to stop something you hadn’t noticed they were doing that they probably shouldn’t have been. You know you can’t get there in time to stop the toddler from being struck down by the swings and you only have one hand to start with because you are holding the baby so you make a split second decision to stand on the porch yelling. When you call the child who didn’t stop swinging up on the porch to take him to task you find out he was really trying to obey, but he didn’t understand what you wanted him to stop. Next, the child who will fight you about anything because his will has not yet been tamed will do it when you are least able to impose your will on him. For instance, when you are trying to take him away from the aforementioned swings after the baby woke up and is no longer in the sling, but just being held in your arms. So you have a baby who doesn’t like how you’re holding him and a toddler who is refusing to obey. Under normal circumstances you would have picked him up and taken him to a disciplinarian, but you only have one arm. Under abnormal circumstances you would oick him up anyway, but you are afraid that if you bend down to pick him up the baby’s head will flop in a way nature never intended it to and if you stop to adjust your grip on the baby the toddler will get away from you. So you are pulling him by his hand always remembering what people say about how easy it is to dislocate a child’s arm, but still wanting to insist that he obey you. I know now that this is the sort of morning my mother had all the time. I have no idea how she did it and still stayed as close to sanity as she did. Now, I’m not going to say she was completely sane, because anyone who would choose this life has to be insane. I mean, look at me. But even though most mothers are insane I have a great deal of respect for them. Homes equipped with homemakers very rarely fall down for no good reason and children equipped with mothers are very rarely maimed in swing accidents. There’s a lot to be said for that.