You Pinspire Me
Two days ago as I was cleaning up the basement, I ran upstairs, puked in the bathroom, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the day half passed out on the couch, binge-watching The Paradise on Netflix as my children used my weakened body as a jungle gym. Right on the heels of that was the cold. It started with a cloudy head and followed up with a breathless chest. I have a constant tickle in my throat and an incessant urge to cough, which makes my sleep at night fitful at best. My calendar confirms that I’m also PMSing right now, which always leaves me more than kind of wiped out.
My husband’s alarm started going off at 6 this morning, alerting him to the fact that he should get up and start getting ready for his day snowboarding on the slopes of Holiday Valley. Being the lightest sleeper in the house, I heard his alarm long before his arm reached over to silence it. I managed to convince myself that I didn’t actually wake up, and I sort of drowsed for the next hour until my 2 daughter uncharacteristically started calling for me at 7. Shouting for me.
MOMMY!
MOMMY! I’M AWAKE! MOMMY, I’M HUNGRY! GET UP NOW, MOMMY!
I’d like to get one thing clear, in case you’ve never had cause to share a room with me before: I am not a morning person. I also don’t drink coffee. What I need in place of my morning coffee is at least 10 minutes of waking up by myself without anyone talking to me or asking me for anything. Usually I grab my phone, check out what’s been happening in the Twitterverse, ‘like’ a few posts on facebook, and look at what the weather’s going to be for the day. Today, however, when I heard my darling daughter start to shout an hour earlier than she usually does, I had a coughing fit. It wouldn’t go away. And of course, that made me have to pee.
The thing is, though, that our son gets up as soon as he hears any noise in the house, which means that he was already up with my husband an hour earlier. And when the 3 year old is up, he’s wound up and ready to go for the day. There is no consideration for the rules I have in place to save my sanity.
He is, shall we say, a talker. He started talking at about 16 months. By 20 months he was speaking in full sentences. I’ve been talking about “observations” and “rhetorical questions” with him this week to try to convince him that not every single thought that he has (which inevitably comes out his mouth) needs a response from me. Apparently he’s listening, because while he was out with Grandma Gina this afternoon he told her that Mommy told him that “rhetorical questions mean that Mommy doesn’t have to talk because we already know the answer.” Please. For the sake of my sanity, let him put this definition into practice!
I digress. I was coughing. I needed water. I had to pee. I got up, head groggy with a night of fitful sleep, illness lurking in the background, PMS sapping my energy, and without my precious morning quiet time I stealthily made my way to the bathroom. Not stealthily enough.
As I sat on the toilet, I was barraged with the following soliloquy:
Mommy, I was just downstairs trying to figure out how I could be warm enough in space. I thought that maybe I could wear a space suit, but I don’t have a space suit. Maybe my Winnie-the-Pooh suit would be able to keep me warm enough, because it’s sooo soft and cuddly and warm and cozy! But sometimes it itches me when I wear it, so I don’t think that I’d like to wear it into space. But it would probably keep me warm, though. But if I went into space I could land on the sun and it wouldn’t even hurt! But it might be hot on the sun. The moon isn’t hot, though. I think that the moon is a c-c-c-cold place to be! Maybe when I eat my vegetables and grow and exercise and eat and eat and eat my vegetables I’ll grow up to be an adult and when I’m an adult I’ll be able to afford to buy a space suit that will keep me warm in space. Daddy says that I have to make friends with a really really rich person who will let me go on his space ship because Canada isn’t going to have a space ship anymore when I’m an adult, but that’s ok, right? Right Mom? Right? Right Mommy? Right? Right? Mommy, I’m hungry. Can you make me breakfast now, please? Can I have bread that’s not toasted with peanut butter and honey on it and some pear?
I kid you not. This is pretty average for this kid. I probably left out about 3 minutes of his speech. I admit I was mostly zoned out, but I do remember thinking that if we were living in a cartoon world, my head would surely explode right at this very moment.
I’m sure that one day, he’ll retreat into himself as most teenage boys do when they’re at home, and be unwilling to have any sort of conversation with me that’s more than 5 words long. I know I should cherish the talking and his desire to want to share every single thought in his head with me. I love him more than I ever knew that I could ever love something. I will probably one day long for his childish voice, but some days, right here, right now, in the present, I just wish that I had a mute button. Just for 2 minutes of silence.
nb: It has been brought to my attention that this post might be considered insensitive to those who have non-verbal children. It was not at all my intent to be insensitive, but rather to express the fact that, as an imperfect human being, I just can’t handle the constant stream. I know how blessed I am. I love my son with all my heart and am so proud of his verbal skills. However, I’m not a perfect parent. I find it a real struggle to have someone narrating and questioning me from the time he gets up in the morning to the time that he goes to bed. I am an introvert; I need quiet – even just two minutes – in order to recharge myself, and when, day after day, there is no quiet to be had, I find myself drained and useless to my children.
Jenn vanOosten
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You are kind. You are smart. Thanks for sharing and being so sweet with the NB.