A friend of mine always describes domestic discord this way, and it's a vividly accurate image: "I always picture like a bird's eye view of everyone's houses with the roofs off," she says. "And you're just looking down and seeing the exact same arguments happening simultaneously in these little individualized silos."
For real.
I brought some work home with me this weekend, and as I hunkered down to do it in my bright yellow sleeping bag suit, I saw my rainy Saturday unspooling in front of me with a single, overarching theme as the arc of the day's narrative.
Yes, Donald Trump just rage-quit his week of faux-decency toward Puerto Rico to return to his usual relentless, malevolent, watch-the-narcissism train-wreck on Twitter. But I had more immediate concerns: sibling rivalry.
At this age, it's a lot easier to have friends come over to break up Paige and Isaac's not-dynamic duo, so I set about texting various moms whom I was hoping would come to my rescue by depositing their spawn with ours for a few hours. Because up until that point, here's what had been going on:
For real.
I brought some work home with me this weekend, and as I hunkered down to do it in my bright yellow sleeping bag suit, I saw my rainy Saturday unspooling in front of me with a single, overarching theme as the arc of the day's narrative.
Yes, Donald Trump just rage-quit his week of faux-decency toward Puerto Rico to return to his usual relentless, malevolent, watch-the-narcissism train-wreck on Twitter. But I had more immediate concerns: sibling rivalry.
At this age, it's a lot easier to have friends come over to break up Paige and Isaac's not-dynamic duo, so I set about texting various moms whom I was hoping would come to my rescue by depositing their spawn with ours for a few hours. Because up until that point, here's what had been going on:
- Paige accused Isaac of cheating at Sorry and called him the "stupidest person on the planet."
- Isaac hit Paige with a whiffle ball bat.
- Paige yanked down Isaac's pants, held him down, and drew a flower coming out of his asscrack with a brown magic marker.
- Isaac went ape-shit, insisted on taking an immediate bath to wipe it off, and demanded that Paige be given a "timeout" for drawing on his ass with a marker.
- I pointed out that he regularly refused to take a bath for days with much grosser stuff than magic marker loitering about in that neighborhood of his body.
- All he could do was tell me, through tears of rage, how DRAWING with a MARKER on somebody's BODY was so WRONG.
- I mentioned that the whiffle ball bat beating was probably just as bad or maybe worse.
- He refused to concede the point.
Fortunately at that moment, one of Isaac's friends showed up, and Paige turned into mother hen. She set about officiously preparing Annie's mac n' cheese and cutting up apples for the boys while they climbed a gravel pile outside, shouting their names from the porch when it was ready. Then she invented some sort of game involving plastic carrots and a notepad until her own friend showed up.
At that point, she forgot all about the boys and is now hiding out in her bedroom making friendship bracelets and listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on loop so loudly it feels like like Lin Manuel Miranda's sole mission in life is to make me go deaf and insane, not necessarily in that order.
Rainy weekends with my kids feels like being bitten to death by ducks sometimes. I keep telling myself to "cherish these moments" as their little beaks peck into my flesh over and over again. To be honest, I'm not always able to make a convincing case for moment-cherishing.
S.O.S.
UPDATE: SOMEONE TOLD ME IT WASN'T ACTUALLY RAINING TODAY DO YOU SEE HOW BAD IT IS NOW!?
UPDATE: SOMEONE TOLD ME IT WASN'T ACTUALLY RAINING TODAY DO YOU SEE HOW BAD IT IS NOW!?
