My Theory of Relativity
I hear silence. Thank God. I love that sound.
It’s bed time. And at bed time, several things happen in this household, all within the space of about .8 seconds after the clock strikes 9 o’ clock. They are:
A Total Loss of Patience
A Complete Dispensing of Criminal Justice
and
An Absolutely Immovable and Pharisaical Legalism.
This is Bed Time we’re talking about and I want one thing and one thing only: Quiet. I’ve covered it before, it’s covered in the book, and it’s late and I don’t feel like covering it again.
I had to um…visit…the boys in their room four times in the last half hour. Super Nanny would have looked at the camera and raised an eyebrow, let’s put it that way.
Parents, you know how you throttle up your threats to DefCon 1 and how it can backfire? But how you absolutely CAN NOT (oh my God in heaven, you CAN NOT) let them know this? I mean the times you stomp into the room, but you actually start the stomp from downstairs or down the hall? But it’s not the controlled yet frustrated, tired, sighing, here-we-go-again walk. That’s the sitcom version. It’s this real version:
Stomp (as) Stomp (God) Stomp (is) Stomp (my) Stomp (witness) Stomp (this) Stomp (is) Stomp (going) Stomp (to be) Stomp (the) Stomp-Stomp-STOMP (most enjoyable homicide ever recorde–GET YOUR BUTTS BACK IN BED!
And then they scuttle, scurry, scrape, claw, break it up, and dive under the covers while throwing each other under the bus. Accusations fly. THEY. FLY. If this were the Brady Bunch, Alice would just whistle that way she does and a darling little batch of children would quiet down and hush their little heads. “Aw, they’re just tired. We’re all tired.” Isn’t this charming?
Yeah, no. I fired off a sentencing so disproportionate it even made me say to myself inside my head, “Self? What in the hell did you just say?”
Crime: unimportant. Who started it: Irrelevant. Who hit who: like. I. care. You have your own versions in your own homes every night at bedtime so don’t even try pretending. You know the drill.
“You’re both grounded. All weekend. You go nowhere, nobody comes over to play.”
I leveled it like I was head of a jury, reading the verdict, and the trial had lasted months. Heavy, sobering sentencing read with enough seriousness to let them Just Think About What You’ve Done.
And then I left the room. Left them there, their eyes the only thing I could see in their bunk beds. The green ones brimming with tears at the loss of the weekend. The brown ones with palms pressed to them so I couldn’t see the tears I knew were leaking out even still.
Yeah. Don’t mess with the bull (*does that ‘horns’ thing like that teacher in The Breakfast Club).
Then I stepped into the master bedroom where Cute Redhead was comforting a very sick little girl with a high fever (thanks, Beginning of School Year), to make sure they had all they needed before coming back downstairs to finish writing the story I was working on.
Was working on, because it’s not this one.
The television was on.
And on the television was a documentary about the real horrors of real lives being really derailed (that’s being kind) by crystal meth. I was stopped dead in my tracks for only about four minutes while a support group, faces digitized out to conceal their identities, talked of the money spent (“started as $60 a month, one year later it was $1,000 a week”), the families destroyed (all of them), the marriages wiped out (all of them) the diseases contracted (the worst of them) (the worst), and the emotions completely unravelled and mocked by a drug’s promise to make it all go away, so potent and lethal it boggles the mind. There were no smiles and certainly no laughing. Or giggling.
…giggling.
. . .
. . .
Oh…no.
I (inside my head and heart) stomped right over to myself and kicked my own butt, and grounded it for a change.
I had to um…visit…the boys in their room four times in the last half hour. I believe I mentioned that.
Because they were laughing. Okay, they weren’t actually laughing. They were giggling. Can you believe that? The defiance. The horror. The insubordination. How dare they. How dare they not have their lives chewed up, spit out, chewed up again, turned inside out and ruined by a drug they don’t even know exists yet.
Step (God…) Step (I really) Step (am) Step-Step-Step (sorry for this one…)
“Boys? You’re not grounded.”
“…we’re not?” There is nothing worse than seeing the face that cried needlessly. No, that’s sterilizing it. There is nothing worse than looking in the young eyes and knowing you made them cry needlessly. Okay, now I’m being mawkish.
But it was giggling and not crystal meth.
“No. You’re not grounded. I screwed that one up. I love you. Now go to sleep, you nut jobs. We’re going to try and have some fun this weekend.”
And then I came back downstairs and wrote this story.
And I hear giggling. Thank God. I love that sound.
Heartfelt, tearfuly beautiful. And it’s not a cliché. God, You’re good.
Todd—I see your sharing icons up there but what about Facebook?….I want to put this on my FB …..help.