I wrote this in June. As you surely noticed, December immediately followed June this year. This post was one of the many items that fell to the wayside during that rare calendar event.
With the holidays upon us, it could not have resurfaced at a better time for me.
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September is the time of year when I think it is a good idea to sign the children up for all the things. I register for classes, seek festivals, set play dates, and generally fill our calendar until its seams pop.
That's one of the requisites for being a "good mom," right?
In our case, we attend music classes, soccer, dance classes and the like, not because I have grandiose ideas of my children becoming the next Chopin or Pele or Paula Abdul, but because I find it is generally best for everybody involved if this stay-at-home-mom (SAHM) does not, in fact, stay at home.
June, though. Now is the time of year when I realize that we are so busy ALWAYS GOING SOMEWHERE that we never get to just BE.
Essentially, we human beings are too busy being human doings to actually do any BEING.
Am I being clear?
June is when I become convinced that I will only be able to wrestle the kids into their car seats 3-7 more times before, so help me God, I lose my ever-loving mind.
June is when I want to SIMPLIFY. SIMPLICITY, I tell you! It is the "good moms" who keep things simple, is it not?
So last Saturday, we cleared the calendar for one plan and one plan only. We would turn on the sprinkler. The children would run in the grass. Husband and I would observe how beautifully the sunlight back-lit the water drops dancing through their laughter. We would sit. We would just BE.
And it would be beautiful.
The only detail to address was that we didn't have a sprinkler. No biggie: we live five minutes from Benny's (our local hardware-and-more store.) We would go get a sprinkler. We'd come home and plug it in. They would laugh, we would sit.
Simple. Beautiful.
Except.
Upon entering Benny's, we walked straight into the toy aisle, which is positioned directly in front of the entrance. (Well played, Benny's. Well played.)
During our frolic down aisle 1, our almost-two-year-old daughter placed roughly 27 items into our shopping cart. Since I was replacing them as quickly as she picked them, the whole thing seemed cute and innocent enough.
Until it didn't.
When we reached the beach pails, said daughter turned around to survey her bounty, and the earth dropped out from beneath us.
"NO!!!!!!!!!!!!," she screamed from the depths of her. "DAS MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE BOAT!!! DAS MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE DOLLY!!! DAS MIIIIIIIIIINE EAR-O-PLANE!!!!"
When she launched herself face-first upon the floor, I picked her up, just as Beverly Cleaver would do.
But Beverly Cleaver never taught us the proper hold for a screaming child who has perfected the art of the horizontal open-and-close jackknife body buck. While I struggled to 1) keep her from falling and 2) play it cool for the growing number of on-lookers, my just-turned-four-year-old son announced that he needed to use the potty.
Husband was running another errand.
I can handle situations like this. I am strong, and not easily jostled, or at least that's what I like to think.
But THIS DAY was supposed to be simple. THIS was FUN AND SIMPLE AND BEAUTIFUL DAY, for crying out loud. There are NO TANTRUMS on fun and simple and beautiful day, DOESN'T EVERYBODY KNOW THAT??
I abandoned our cart and diverted the childrens' attention to the automobile aisle, where there was a well-placed rack of colorful women's sundresses for only $6. (I KNOW! Can you believe it??? Only $6!) The kids--easily distracted--embraced the cave-like qualities of the clothing rack, so I seized my chance to try on the sundresses over my outfit.
My sense of personal style can be described as nothing if not "opportunistic."
The third time the store manager came to our giggling-and-shaking clothing rack to ask if he could help with anything, I recognized that he did not understand how fabulously CONTAINED my children were in there.
That was also when I realized that the terribly ripe diaper smell wafting from the rack was becoming an embarrassment, even for me, the woman trying on sun dresses in the automobile section of Benny's.
(I'll have you know that it was our diapered daughter--not our potty-trained son--who was responsible for the smell. [Hashtag thankful.])
So, being the model parent that I am, I took one child's hand in each of mine and set out to find my husband, who should have surely, so help him God, finished his previous errand and arrived at Benny's by now.
Which is when things took a turn for the worse.
In an effort to prove that young children truly do not have any impulse control whatsoever, my son released my hand, grabbed a styrofoam bat, swung the way his college-baseball-star-father taught him, and whacked a hunched elderly man in the back of the legs as we passed.
WHY. IS. SIMPLE. SO. VERY. HARD???????????
Husband (thank-you-Jesus) materialized just then to whisk the baby off for a diaper change, and I retreated to the lawn chair section to put our son--and myself--in Time Out.
Simplicity waits for us in Time Out, you know.
That's where I saw things more clearly.
I saw that, when I had been trying to distract the baby from her tantrum, I blew raspberries into her neck. Until the day I die, I want to always remember the way my nose squishes into the soft-but-firm folds of that baby's neck. I want to always remember the sweetness of her high-and-low pitched laughter tickling my ear canal.
Because that is simple. And it is oh-so-beautiful.
How relieved was I to see my husband when he appeared? How proud was I when our shy boy looked that elderly man in the eye to sincerely apologize? How high did I feel when my heart skipped that beat?
Those moments - the in betweenmoments - they're so simple. So beautiful.
The [very] elderly man emptied the contents of his pockets into my son's hand, which, once the life savers were removed, totaled six coins amounting to 19 cents.
Get a load of this. That elderly man then thanked me for "raising [my] kids the right way." I'm willing to overlook the fact that clearly he was either senile or had me confused with someone else, because--well--19 cents is 19 cents, you know?
That man told us he was especially thankful that my son made him smile that day, because his granddaughter had had to cancel their lunch date that day, and he was feeling a little lonely.
Which brings a happy tear and a sad one to my eye. Simple and beautiful ones.
The best moment of all was when another tantrum erupted in the parking lot on the way back to the car. In an effort to keep our flailing children from getting hit by traffic, husband and I released our hold on the too-many-items we had just purchased, and they spilled onto the pavement.
What caused that tantrum?
Oh, our son had grabbed my hand. And our daughter, in her daddy's arms, became irate.
"NO!!!!!!!!" she yelled. "DAS MIIIIIIIIIIINE MOMMY!!!!!!!!!"
So simple.
And oh, so beautiful.
***
Sending all of my readers so much love and appreciation today, and wishing you all a very simple, very beautiful holiday season.
In case of emergency, remember: simplicity waits for us in time out and hides in the in-between moments.
With love and light, B