Tall Orders

I just had had enough today.

"I want to take my tricycle to school!" Julian started in on me, fifteen minutes after we should have been out of the house.

"No, you might lose it." (This is my standard answer #83 re: removing items from the apartment that I or my husband will get stuck lugging home.)

Julian then brought me a nylon shopping bag we use to save on plastic at the grocery. "Here, Mommy, please put some candy."

At least he asked nicely, right?

"No, I don't have any candy."

"Yes you do. It's in the kitchen. In the candy box."

Aha. He seems to have noticed the plastic tub I bought at Bed Bath, loaded with birthday party flotsam I didn't want them ingesting, then shoved in the back of one of our cupboards in the kitchen.

"Oh, that. No, there's no more candy in that."

He looked up at me suspiciously. I'm such an atrociously bad liar, I don't know why I bother.

Next thing, just after I've put a blue and green striped shirt on him: "NOOO, I want to wear this," and he yanked a sweater out of his drawer, his favorite with little red snowflakes on it. I put the sweater on over the shirt.

"NOOOO!! I just want the sweater! Nooo!!" He was going full tilt by that point.

I took off the sweater, tossed off the shirt, and replaced the sweater on his bare, ivory little torso. There you go.

"NOOO! I don't want it like THAT!!!! I have to do pee pee!!"

Is he freaking kidding me? At that point, I was kneeling in the hallway in between his bedroom and the bathroom, trying to simultaneously get Ian to brush his teeth ("I'm too tiiiiired.") while I argued about fashion with Julian. I was losing on both fronts. I suddenly was outside my own body and looking down, seeing this image of Master and Slave, and I was not on the right end of the equation. So I blew up. And I'm not proud to tell you. I keep having this hope that I'll be able to wake up one day and be the kind of mother who could have reared the Ingalls kids out on the Prairie, calmly birthing all of them in the loft of our lean-to frontier house and then the next day be out in the field helping Charles and all the while having time to make homemade biscuits and pat my moppets on the head with love and adoration. But it ain't me. No matter how many times I wake up, it ain't me.

"Here, do pee pee," I pushed Julian down onto the plastic Ikea potty and told him to produce some urine or else! He was bawling. Jesus Christ.

I brushed Ian's teeth, probably a little too excitedly, rinsed him, shuttled him into the hallway for his coat. Then he looked up at me mid-fury, his eyes a little pleading and his voice very gentle, and he said:

"But Mom, I didn't do anything wrong."

No, you didn't, I reassured him with a pat on the head (another Prairie attempt). Ian is the best soldier in this little ragtag army, as my husband always says. Loyal and calm. The thumbsucking helps a lot. I wonder if that was Caroline Ingalls' trick?