Wednesday, December 10, 2008

When a simple phone call restores your sanity...


Well, we’ve just completed our weekly class with the Stepford Children of Richmond at a kids’ gym/music/art facility in the West End. And all I have to say is, thank God for friends who have twice as many children as I.

Because upon hearing—and I swear this is true—that 10 two year-old boys sat quietly in their mothers’ laps for “music time,” Patience (that’s my friend’s name; I’m not speaking in allegory) passionately informed me that THAT is just NOT normal, she doesn’t care what anybody says.

I suddenly started to feel a little better about the way things had gone over in Stepford.

This is how the class started: All the docile (and apparently mute) children were sitting in a small room off the gym in a quaint, little circle with their grown-ups singing the “hello song" while my child would neither sit down nor stop yelling, “SLIDE!” and pointing out the window at the McDonald’s playland across the parking lot.

Then the McDonald’s thing escalated into a full-blown tantrum in the lobby, replete with floor writhing, kicking and, of course, screaming. So much screaming, in fact, that another mother came out to see if I needed help (Oh, did I tell you I embarrass easily? Yeah.). It was mid-way through all this screaming (which, I swear to you is highly uncharacteristic of him—really, it is) that I realized, “Oh. My. God. I forgot to feed him breakfast.” It was official: I felt like The Worst Mother in the Room.

“Isn’t it amazing how quickly we go there as mothers?" Patience had remarked when I told her of the McDonald’s Fiasco, "But it’s just not true, you being a bad mom, it really isn’t true…”

And when I told her about how all the other children sat obediently in the circle playing instruments and singing songs while Caleb swung on a trapeze bar screaming, “WEEEEEEE!” at the top of his lungs during (naturally) the portion of class dedicated to “night-night music” or “soft, quiet, shhhh time” or some such nonsense, she said, “Yeah, because that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. He’s two.” Me: “Oh. Oh, yeah…”

The longer we talked, the less I cared about the all the disbelieving stares I got from parents or the disapproving glances doled out by the teacher throughout the class, especially when Caleb decided to go the opposite way around the obstacle course during "gym time." Oh, I tried to “redirect” him, believe me, but it’s a little tricky when you’re dealing with a human who is the same size and is displaying the same temperament as a pig on amphetamines.

By the end of our conversation, this feeling I had at the end of the class—the one where I’m one of those cartoon characters who, upon having an anvil dropped upon them, has chirping birds flying around their head (only MY birds were paper cranes made of Ritalin prescriptions)—this feeling began to fade.

Now, if only adept counseling from a fellow mom-in-the-trenches were a cure for my post-childbirth hemmorhoids (ah, isn’t birth beautiful?), which, incidentally, were the size of small planets after spending the better part of an hour trying to keep up with Speedy Gonzales with his 14-pound brother strapped to my front in a sling, but hey…

1 comment:

  1. thank the universe she's back! normal children and all...;)

    ReplyDelete