I've had a story on my mind for a while now, a story from a year ago that I had decided I'd like to write out and post exactly a year after it happened. Well, I got my dates wrong, and by the time I realized my mistake that one-year mark was past. So I guess it can be a year to the month instead. 🙂
It's kind of a crazy story, about an absurdly hard day I had with my boys, and I couldn't quite decide if I should even share it. I wrote it out and read it to my boys, and at first they were all enthusiastic about me sharing it.
But then they actually heard the story, and they heard what their old selves had done, and those vibrant smiles got a little more sober, and the laughter came a little more haltingly, and at the end when I asked again if they minded if I shared it, they both immediately shouted no.
Alec said, with big, somber eyes, "Word would spread."
Oh, dear boy . . . I am no advocate for sharing dirt on my children, no matter how naughty they can be sometimes.
I reassured the boys that I would make sure people knew that these were things they had done when they were much younger and that I was so glad they didn't do things like that anymore. I told them they had grown up a lot since then and that I would make sure people knew that.
But I also really wanted to share the story because the more I thought about it, the more I thought maybe it could be encouraging to another mother in the same shoes. Not just a "this too shall pass," not just a "been there done that," but an honest "what you're doing is really, really hard, and it doesn't always feel like you're doing it well, and it often feels like it will never end, but it will get easier, and your children will grow in both age and maturity, and there will be different challenges as that happens, but it won't always be this level of unending crazy."
(That, and there's a Lord of the Rings reference that I'm terrifically proud of and that it seemed a shame to waste.) 🙂
So I explained it to my boys, and I asked them again if they would mind if I shared, and I did get a yes this time, albeit still a somewhat reluctant one.
They are no longer three and four. They no longer do pretty much any of the things listed in the following story. And even though they are central characters in the story, in a way they have nothing to do with it. It's more a story about motherhood than it is about the individual little boys. (In fact, maybe I'll just refer to them as Boys 1, 2, and 3 to further distance them.)
And so I share this story, not to shame my boys or myself, but more to just give a nod to the moms in the trenches. An "I see you" that I don't think anyone can quite understand till they've lived it.
May your children be docile, your coffee be hot, and your heart be at peace today. (And if nothing else, hopefully this story makes the day you're having right now seem a little less crazy. And if not even that, hopefully it at least helps you feel less alone. Even the crazy days come to an end. Eventually.)
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Once upon a time, we were all a year younger. The year was 2022. The month was July. Emmett was two-and-a-half months old. Sebastian was three; Alec was four. And we had a doozy of a twenty-four hours.
I would say it all started the night before, but in reality, it kind of started when Emmett was born. And isn’t that how they all say it will be . . . a new baby will bring out all sorts of bad behaviors in your other children. Goodness, yes.
The evening before July 1st (that day of infamy) found me annoyedly scrubbing filthy little boys in the bathtub while Eric scarfed his supper alone in order to get to the chiropractor in time. The boys were filthy because not only had they gone into the chicken house for the umpteenth time (I could not keep them out, no matter what I did or how hard I tried), but this time they had been foiled at the big walk-in door by some sorcery of their dad’s and had instead wormed their way through the tiny chicken door at the back. There they were, whooping and hollering and digging in chicken poop and feathers, with dust and spiderwebs in the air and in their hair.
Off to the bathtub with them, and that scrubbing was not a nice one. By the time they got out of the tub, their daddy was already gone, and we didn’t get to eat supper with him.
You’ll never guess what Boy #2 thought he’d occupy himself with after supper. After he was all scrubbed, all squeaky clean . . . he played with poop. In the bathroom, thankfully. On the wall, not thankfully.
I went to bed a bit frustrated, obviously having no inkling of what awaited me the next day. (It was actually in my mind that since the current day had been such a hard one, maybe the next day would be easier – I couldn’t have been more wrong.)
Eric got up at 5am to go pour concrete in Springfield. Not just concrete, but a smooth-finish floor, which always takes forever and a day. I’ll just give a spoiler right here: he didn’t get home till almost 10pm, so everything you read from here on out was just me trying to wrangle an entire circus all by myself.
After weeks of the boys getting up way too early, we’d finally gotten them an okay-to-wake clock and pushed their green light little by little out to 6:30am, which still felt way too early but was better than 5:30am for sure. They’d been doing pretty good with that, staying in their room till the light was green and all, but recently they’d started coming out of their room and getting toys to play with till the light was green. I knew it was a bad idea from the get-go, but it was easier to just let it slide, and that was usually Eric’s territory anyway.
Until suddenly it wasn’t.
Eric was gone by the time the boys got up at 5:55am, and this time they wouldn’t stay in their room, and they wouldn’t play nicely. There was fighting and throwing, yelling and crying. Boy #1 had actually woken up Boy #2, which made it even worse. Boy #2 wasn’t happy to be up, Boy #1 wasn’t happy that he wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t happy that either of them were up. I kept trying to go back to bed while they played in their room, but by the time 6:30am rolled around, I had been in and out of bed several times to break up fights and make them go back in their room.
Around 6:30am I turned on a video for them and crashed back into bed. I didn’t know it then, but that extra half hour of sleep I got would be dreadfully needed later in the day.
All morning long, I literally couldn’t feed the baby or put him to sleep without multiple interruptions by crying, fighting boys. At first they kind of seemed to take turns, and there was only one boy being naughty at once, but it got worse from there.
At one point I was trying to feed Boy #3 and put him to sleep, and I had left the boys sitting in their high chairs because they wouldn’t stop coming in and being loud and fighting and waking up the baby, and by about the second time of that happening, I’d had enough, so I got smart and stuck them in their chairs to wait for me. Boy #2 wasn’t able to get out of his chair by himself, but alas, Boy #1 was, and that “helpful” older brother pushed a chair over for his little brother to use to get down. Pretty soon, I heard things flying around and falling on the floor, and I put the baby down for the third time and went out to investigate. I’d had a Thrive Market box sitting on the counter waiting to be unpacked, and there was Boy #2, standing on the counter, merrily throwing groceries around. There were meat sticks all over the floor, and boxes of Annie’s pasta, and who knows what else. Meanwhile, Boy #1 had kyped the box and taken it back to the green room because he wanted to use it for a project.
Needless to say, discipline was served all around, and tears even more all around (mine included), and back into their chairs they went (this time in front of a video), and back into the nursery to my crying baby I went.
Even with the video on, Boy #2 still howled for about half the time I was with Boy #3, but I did finally get Boy #3 put to sleep, many, many interruptions later. Thankfully he had a good hour-long nap because it wasn’t long after that that I went into the boys’ room to the remarkably strong odor of pee and a suspiciously wet register. Someone had peed down the register vent. I at first couldn’t get a confession out of anyone, so both boys went back into their high chairs while I tried to clean up the mess. Thankfully the register had been closed, so it didn’t get down too far, but it was not a very nice thing to clean up. I eventually learned who the culprit was, and his name started with S.
You’d think with all the chair-sitting and all the disciplinary consequences that somewhere in there somebody would’ve quit being naughty, but no . . .
Boy #2 emptied all the dirty clothes out of the clothes hamper in his room. The boys fought over playing the keyboard. The house was a wreck, and I was a wreck, and by 10am I still hadn’t done much of anything but mitigate disaster after disaster. There was so much screaming and crying and fighting, and I knew nothing but sleep would fix it, but it wasn’t nap time yet. I was scared to send the boys outside after the ongoing chicken house debacle (the last straw would’ve been having to give baths before naps), and they didn’t ask to go outside anyway.
In my frustration I listed out all the things that had happened in the last fifteen hours . . . poop on the wall, pee in the register, chicken house shavings in little boys’ hair, countless outbursts, groceries thrown everywhere, dirty laundry all over the floor . . . yeah. It was not going well. At least Boy #3 took a good nap during some of the chaos.
There was finally a blissful forty-five minutes right before nap time where nothing terrible happened and the boys were good.
Okay, it wasn’t actually blissful (I had an awful headache by then), but it was a bit of a reprieve.
Just enough to collect my wits and my sanity and dry my tears in preparation for the nap time battle.
You’d think that with how early they’d gotten up that nap time would’ve been a breeze. It wasn’t. It took Boy #2 forty-five minutes to go to sleep.
“One boy sleeping, two to go,” I texted Eric, hopeful.
I felt like I was finally getting the break I needed to get things done. Or even just to catch my breath. I hadn’t really had a chance to do that yet that day. I even ridiculously thought maybe everyone would sleep for two or three hours and that I’d be able to get a bit caught up on housework and not have to work on that all weekend just to catch up. Ridiculous, as I said. I did some laundry and made some coffee before heading off to put Boy #3 to bed. (May it be noted that while Boy #1 was still in bed, he was not asleep.)
Boy #2 slept for literally thirty minutes before Boy #1 woke him up. A very distraught Boy #2 came howling down the hall to where I was feeding Boy #3, so I threw the baby in his bed and rushed Boy #2 back out of the room before his crying could wake Boy #3. Both Boys 1 and 2 had to go back to bed, but of course neither of them slept. I went back to finish feeding the now-awake Boy #3, who then went back to sleep thankfully, and then I let Boy #2 get up while Boy #1 had to stay in bed a while longer as a punishment for waking his brother.
I texted Eric a picture of me by the still-full coffee pot.
“Coffee pot still full. I literally cannot get to it.”
(Why does that sound so ominously like the dwarves trapped in Moria? We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes. Drums, drums in the deep . . . We cannot get out. [Tolkien or Peter Jackson or both, I don’t have time to look.])
Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but by this point, I was so, so tired of the day. I just wanted it to be over. It felt like an endless running from one calamity to the next, with only me there to stretch around to all three boys. Poor Eric got the entire play-by-play texted to him while he was pouring concrete, but of course there wasn’t much he could do from seventy miles away. I think he might’ve called one or two times though to try to talk the boys down from their exploits, bless his heart.
Let me just say here that I’m sure there were things I could’ve done differently. I could’ve sat on the couch and read to the boys to try to keep them occupied I guess, but I still had the baby to take care of, too. And anyone who’s ever had a two-month-old knows that they’re just coming out of that “easy” newborn stage into a new stage where they don’t really sleep and they don’t really play and they’re distractable while feeding and it might be hard to lay them down once you’ve gotten them to sleep, and the list goes on. Plus, it’s not like I was doing all myriad of other things and my boys were getting into trouble while I was keeping after the house or reading a book or drinking coffee or even getting dressed. I had done none of those things by 1pm and only a couple of them by 4pm. It was literally just a day of tending to one boy after another, again and again and again, and unfortunately a lot of those needs presented themselves in pure naughtiness. And yes, before anyone comes at me, I utilized traditional discipline methods, quite fruitlessly, might I point out. Some days are just crazy, I guess.
After I let both boys get up, I sent them outside, and they were literally out there as long as it took me to get dressed, so maybe ten minutes. When I went out to check on them, the chickens were all out, and the big chicken house door was open, and Boy #2 was swinging the empty water container around. I looked inside, and the food container was full of shavings. They’d dumped the water and the food, and we were clean out of chicken feed.
But that wasn’t all. Boy #1 told me that Boy #2 had found three eggs in the chicken house and that he’d taken them and smashed them against the fence. And then while I was out there, right in broad daylight with his mother six feet away, Boy #1 took a big stick and hit a chicken with it.
I was so done. I corralled my insatiably naughty boys and took them up on the deck with me and told them they had to stay up there as their punishment, but they got right back down, so inside we went for more drastic measures. I gave them a good talking-to and more, and I tried to be a good mother, but inside I was just at my wit’s end.
“I thought maybe if I got dressed it would turn the day around,” I texted Eric, “but while I was doing that they were just being terrible again. I am trying so hard, and nothing works, and I am so tired of it.”
Apparently they went back outside after that to try again because Boy #1 came in a bit later with a hand full of slivers from the bottom of the sandbox. Boy #2 was incredibly tired, and crying. Boy #3 was crying because I had to take care of Boy #1, and Boy #1 was probably crying because he had slivers, and I just had to use the bathroom.
Boy #1 went back outside after I divested him of his slivers, but Boy #2 wouldn’t quit crying. I had to feed Boy #3, so I thought I’d just keep Boy #2 with me so he wouldn’t cry even more. But by that point Boy #2 was about hysterical, and of course the baby wouldn’t eat with all that going on. So I sent Boy #2 back outside to be with Boy #1, but as soon as he went out I heard the front doorbell chime. I put poor Boy #3 down and went out to find both boys outside the backyard gate. I brought them inside and put them in their high chairs so I could feed Boy #3 without them coming in and disturbing him.
Guess how well that worked . . . after much screaming, Boy #1 finally got down and moved a chair to let Boy #2 down, so I had to put Boy #3 down again and go put them back in their chairs. I had already tried to make Boy #2 go to bed because I knew how tired he was, but I couldn’t enforce it because my hungry baby was screaming his little heart out. So I kept trying to feed Boy #3 and get him at least taken care of, but the boys got out of their chairs again (yeah, again).
I didn’t know what to do. I knew poor hysterically tired Boy #2 had to have his nap, but I wasn’t sure how to get both him and Boy #3 taken care of at the same time, especially with a rowdy Boy #1 in the mix as well. So I put the big boys back in their beds, and I took my baby and sat on the rocking chair in the boys’ room.
“Wish me luck,” I texted Eric. “I have never in all my life had this bad of a day. This is awful.”
I’m sure I’ve had days that bad, but in relation to parenting my own children, maybe not. It really was endless and preposterous.
Thank goodness, Boy #3 was able to go to sleep in the boys’ room even amidst all of Boy #2’s screaming, so I took Boy #3 back to his own bed and could then focus on poor Boy #2, who was again crying hysterically. He wouldn’t just settle in and go to sleep, even though he needed to so badly. It made me really upset that Boy #1 had woken him up twice that day, first in the morning and then again at nap time. Thankfully Boy #1 was lying quietly in his bed at this point, not sleeping but at least not adding to the chaos anymore.
Of course Eric finally got a chance to call while I was in the boys’ room, so I couldn’t answer it. I finally ended up holding Boy #2 on the rocking chair as if he were the little baby instead of Boy #3, and that calmed him enough to lie down in his bed and try to go to sleep. He might’ve gone to sleep while I held him but then he woke up when I put him in his bed. He did stay there though, and he did eventually go to sleep around 3:30pm. Good thing too, because as soon as I was done with him, Boy #3 got back up.
I let Boy #1 come out with me and settled him on the couch looking at books while I took care of Boy #3. Then Boy #1 and I had a long talk about why Boy #2 went so crazy, namely because he was so tired and that Boy #1 must stop waking him up.
It was mid-afternoon, like I said, and I still hadn’t had a single moment to myself, and not only that, but more often than not I had had someone screaming for me or at me. By 4pm all that I had gotten done was a bit of laundry-washing and a bit of laundry-folding.
I know, I got the boys taken care of, too, but at some point there was other work and it did have to get done or else we’d have been walking around hungry and haggard and naked and very unhappy.
Boy #2, miracle of miracles, slept for an hour and a half, and things went better for a while after that. I fried up some hotdogs for supper, and we ate them out on the deck and had a bit of a nice time together.
But then it got bad again. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I went inside to feed Boy #3, and as soon as I did, the boys went through the front gate again. Like right after I specifically reminded them not to. And then after I was done feeding Boy #3, I looked out the nursery window to check on the boys, and there they were . . . you guessed it . . . in the chicken house.
Boy #1 was dumping the chicken water again, all over the floor. What a huge, disgusting mess. When I went outside Boy #1 quickly got out of the chicken house and stood in front of the door and tried to tell me that Boy #2 had opened the door and spilled the water, but I knew better because I’d seen it all happen from the window.
I despaired. Literally. I’d been so sure that after our eventful day they’d at least be good for a little bit before bedtime.
I ended up putting all three boys to bed a little before 7pm, which was early even for me. Even with all the bad sleep throughout the day, it took Boys 1 and 2 half an hour to finally settle down, and of course as soon as they went to sleep Boy #3 got back up. I went to take care of him, thinking surely the big boys were fast asleep.
When I came out from being with Boy #3, I realized the light was on in the boys’ room. I went in there to find Boy #1 fast asleep, the light blazing, and . . . Boy #2 DRAWING ON THE DRESSER WITH A CRAYON.
“Will it never end . . .” I texted Eric.
I’m happy to say it did. They finally slept. Eric finally got home. And that day was finally over.
Let’s just call that day a turning point in their life. I don’t think they’ve ever been so incessantly and unstoppably naughty since. (Although now that I say that, I did just receive a complaint from one boy that the other boy had peed on him. Help us all.)
Anyway, it makes a great story, a year later. It wasn’t so nice to live it though. So maybe next time you see a mom of littles and she’s still carrying an extra thirty pounds and she’s dressed a bit frumpy (if she’s out of pjs at all) and she looks way too haggard and tired for someone who stays home all day, give her a little grace. She might be having a day, or a week, or a month, like I just detailed.
I can say I miss my boys being littler, but I can’t say I miss the days like that one. Whew.
