A couple of weeks ago my dad invited us to come to a house he was clearing out after an estate sale.
When we arrived, he opened the door to a large house, still relatively full of antique furniture and artwork. He told us to take anything we wanted.
Roaming through and collecting items felt like Christmas as a kid.
I found an outdoor bench for the garden, flower pots, and a few paintings, and felt content with those, but then I entered the kitchen, and as if illuminated by a beam of light shining straight down from Heaven sat the ultimate item I knew I was meant to get:
A gallon ziplock bag full to the brim with brand new silverware that nearly took a dolly to lift.
”You’re taking THAT?” my husband Justin had asked, standing over an antique desk, seeing me hauling it in.
“Taking a dead person’s silverware just feels weird. What if it’s haunted?”
But, haunted schmaunted.
How would he know that I saw that bag as helping myself solve an age-old problem mothers deal with: Owning your silverware for a max of six wash cycles, and then never seeing it again.
Who knows?
Maybe Bloody Mary was a mom herself, and would appear in the reflection of the spoons to help me out if they were about to be put somewhere they shouldn’t be.
For months I think we’ve had three spoons in our drawer – litter mates to ones lost in the cold underbelly of the girls’ bedrooms, or left at schools, or in the crack of my car’s third row with the mysterious pound of peanut shells it came from the dealership with.
I had taken to grabbing extras at Chipotle, doing as my friend Lisa suggested and
“surrendering to the life I have.”
“So we are the kind of people that only eat with plastic now. It is what it is.”
The silverware is not like the cups.
I know where the cups are.
They’re on a one month pilgrimage back to the sink from the Jenga tower that is a teen girl’s room. I’ll see the cups again.
I like to think they’re just off “finding themselves.”
It’s the no-word-on-their-whereabouts from the runaway forks that really hurts my heart.
I brought that bag of silverware home like it was the main prize that day.
I had my daughter, Chloe, hold it in the back seat of the truck.
She said it crushed her legs.
I told her sometimes pain was the sacrifice, and she would understand if she had kids of her own some day.
When we got home, I washed it all and put it away in the drawer,
and I am here to report that for the first time,
maybe even in the actual history of parenting,
a mother has her silverware drawer possibly TOO full.
(I know. I know. I’ll take questions at the end)
The next day my daughter, Tessa,
(who had not been with us when we got it)
opened the drawer and looked confused, then turned and asked,
“Wait…Did we get more silverware?”
“Yeah,” Justin answered, before I even could.
“Mama brought home dead person silverware.”
He glanced at me here, hoping I would feel some form of shame from his look.
“Some old lady died with one of those spoons in her mouth,” he called.
(No she didn’t)
“You just have to guess which one it is.”
Tessa went silent, took out a trusty Chipotle spoon, and just re-closed the drawer.
But joke’s on Justin trying to dissuade the girls from diving into my new bag of treasure by scaring them.
I almost WELCOME it being haunted.
If they never use it, they’ll never lose it.
I think I may have found the plan that works.
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.
