Black Friday

I never thought of myself as much of a grudge holder. I’m sure there are people who’d disagree, but the truth is, all I really need is a sincere and appropriate apology and I’m over it, given a little time. I certainly never thought of myself as one who could hold a grudge against a child, but it seems the lessons I am destined to learn about myself through motherhood are endless.

Not two weeks after declaring “Naked Tuesdays” as the most effective potty training technique at our house, my oldest son found a way to prove me wrong. As I put in yet another load of laundry on the day I now call “Black Friday”, I found myself floating through one of those moments in time when all is quiet…a bit too quiet, for I know that with children, it is always quietest before a storm. So off I trudged to survey just what destruction my boys were on the verge of creating.

As I wandered through the house looking for the tattered remnants of a toddler tornado, I caught a whiff of something that made my eyes squint and my brow furrow. As I turned my head to bury my nose in my shoulder, I rounded the corner to my bedroom to discover a sight that will probably, before my life is over, send me (and my child) straight into therapy.

As I examined the room, my jaw dropped and my heart pounded faster than if I’d just run a marathon. I was speechless at the sight that was before me, and when I looked to my three-year old for an explanation, he was grinning up at me, with all the nonchalance of a pig wallowing in the mire.

I looked at his legs and feet which were smeared with the substance I knew I was smelling, but the lack of blood to my brain would not allow my intellect to register with my senses until his brown eyes and cheesy smile confirmed what my emotions already knew.

“Cooper, what did you do!?”
“I pooped in the floor, hee hee, hee hee!”

If there was ever a time for a parent to call 911, this was it. It must have been my child’s guardian angel who saved his life that day, because through my shock and fury, all I wanted to do was to rub his nose in the pile he had strung across my bedroom floor. I settled for a spanking and a cold shower, however, and a 20-minute scrub session in which I touted the maxim, “You made the mess; you clean it up!”

So what is a parent to do at nine o’clock in the morning after an episode such as this? Through anger and tears, we loaded into the car and headed straight for Grandmother’s.

As we drove those 55.5 miles that day, I was boiling. I couldn’t seem to get over what my child had just done. I glared back at him in my rearview mirror. It was clear from his sweet smile and “I love you, Mommy!” that he had gotten past the incident. Why couldn’t I?

I decided to search the air waves for some form of comfort or distraction but found none, so I grabbed the closest CD and shoved it into the player. I decided if I couldn’t drive my anger away I’d at least drown it out with some tunes.

What happened next was most unexpected. As the banjo player began to pick and the fiddle player began to fiddle, I noticed a quiet hush come over the passengers in my back seat. I turned up the volume to encourage their tranquility, and as I did, the kick that was in that bluegrass began to consume my two kids. I looked back to see the boys bouncing in their seats with their legs flailing about as if they were dancing the Irish River Dance. It was so fitting and so amusing, that I almost forgot the misery of my morning.

I turned up the music even louder, and felt myself tearing up as I did. I had been so angry with my child’s behavior that morning that I had allowed myself to hold a grudge against a three-year old. I took a breath and told myself, “Ok, so he pooped in the floor. Get over it already.” And at just that moment, I did.

There are a lot of things that parents expect to encounter when we are raising our kids-fevers, sleepless nights, spilled milk. But we don’t always expect the crazy stuff, like kids trying to change their own diapers, or driving the car into the side of the house, or Black Fridays. These are the things that catch us off guard. Test our loyalty. Test our strength. Test our love. After all, I know I love my boys, but there are things that I endure for them that cause me to daily prove that love. And on those days when the anger turns to resentment and the resentment sends you running straight for your own momma, there’s just nothing left to do but shed a few tears, force yourself to laugh, and breathe.

And that’s All in a day’s work!