Sometimes I don’t know if I’ll survive the four of them.
How I ended up with all these daughters feels like a manifestation of my own mother’s “someday you’ll understand” to me.
I can’t be all too certain she wasn’t secretly mixing up some kind of tincture, as she said it,
to sprinkle on my sheets.
I understand the fact that she hoped one day I’d see exactly what I’d put her through when she was raising me,
but times FOUR, though? Four times repaid?
I’m not sure I deserved all THAT.
That seems a bit extreme.
That’s a definite “Objection, your honor” in a court of law to me.
Today my teens dialed up their teen-ness at least 10 notches, using sighs, their heels on the hardwood, and bikinis they’d purchased without my approval as their choice weaponry.
I’m left feeling dizzy from looking into the spiral of rolled eyes that me telling them they were DEFINITELY not wearing those in public earned.
I’m feeling a deep urge to ask someone to get over here and tightly swaddle me.
Today, my youngest, Paige, is extra sassy.
Being 10 though, she at least still feels bad about it soon afterwards, and apologizes, but that doesn’t take away the sting of my so recently chubby-cheeked angel baby asking things like,
“Is this some form of dementia?!”
about some action of mine she is questioning.
I’m hoping it’s because maybe she didn’t eat enough today…
Hoping it’s something that can be fixed with a suggestion as simple as some chocolate milk being made, and not because she is now beginning her descent into the den of a pre-teen,
about to sprout fur and howl at the moon at night.
I’m not ready to relinquish them all to this phase,
and suddenly go from four eyeballs to then six squinting at, and judging me.
Tonight, at the grocery store, my husband Justin paused, staring at the scratcher machine that was sporting a freshly taped-up notice that someone had just won $250,000 there with one.
He asked me what I’d most want to do with that kind of sudden windfall of money,
and right now my answer is that I would research building a time machine.
I’d use it to go back in time to when they were all cute, and toothless, and let me pick out their outfits, and actually smiled at cameras, and sometimes even at me.
It was work, but it was a different kind of work.
They loved me then.
They climbed into my lap.
They never once said the phrase, “That’s so cringe” to me;
But now, my own hair is rapidly turning grey as if even my very own stem cells have had it with me.
On Sunday we went out to brunch and sat beside a dad with a darling two year old daughter.
He kept having to pry her from underneath the table and begging her to sit right as she waited on her stack of French toast that ended up coming as tall as she was.
Justin and I both gazed at that two year old like love-struck teenagers,
chins resting on our two fists, pupils like hearts, just remembering how it used to be.
Justin called, “You’ll miss it one day,” to him as he pulled her, once again, from beneath his seat.
The man called back as he pulled her skirt back down from over her head,
“I don’t know…Your table looks calm and quiet.”
Oh, sweet unsuspecting brother.
Just you wait and see.
The quiet years are the hardest ones with all the closed doors and the wondering.
The calm is just an inner storm of many hidden things.
We urged him to not will himself forward too fast,
and to not tap the glass, or reach too quickly into their enclosure when his own “calm and quiet” is reached,
because one day that two-year-old under that table will emerge from her habitat in a questionable bikini,
and bite his groping hand, making it bleed,
then she will simply bat her eyes,
and ask him to buy her things.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
