When I was a teenager, our family moved into a monster. It had been built as a house but modified into a real estate office. It seems like we counted 11 "bedrooms," 1 1/2 baths, both in the basement. It had a parking lot instead of a driveway, and what would have been the garage was some sort of conference room. The kitchen was a veritable closet, a room barely big enough to hold a microwave, sink and a fridge, with a few cheaply made cupboards. And the realty that used it ran into some major legal trouble, and they trashed the place before abandoning it. It had sat that way for a few years, with water pipes broken in 5 (if I remember right) places. Mold grew about three feet high on all the basement walls, and in at least one room, mushrooms had sprouted out of the carpet.
Dad was excited about the possibilities. Mom... braced herself to live in a construction zone.
One of the first things that had to be done was opening the kitchen. Walls were torn down, those cheap cupboards carefully spared, because there wasn't money to do the job "right" just yet. When the room was safe, we stacked those cupboards on the floor to hold most of the dishes. Mom cut a "door" into the side of a couple of moving boxes to create more cupboards. A new sink was installed in the old countertop, hanging out over the side. A new cooktop stood on 2x4 legs.
And thus it stayed for... what was it? About 2 1/2 years? One year, a family we knew had a house fire and their insurance replaced their appliances. Their old electric range still worked, and they gave it to us, just a day or two before Thanksgiving. For the first time in ages we had an oven! It was the best Thanksgiving ever.
But this isn't a story of gratitude. Sorry. It really should be. But it isn't.
I was probably a junior, maybe a senior, in high school, certainly old enough to know better. One day, we kids were being silly and irresponsible. There was a rule about not running in the house. We all knew that rule. We were all busy breaking it. We ran in a circle, all of us (Clint may not have been there; I'm not sure if he was off at college or a senior.) The circle probably involved someone being teased, because generally someone was being teased. But we all thundered around and around that stack of cupboards, that precarious stack of old cupboards, that "make do" storage space.
Can you predict what happened? We apparently had never considered it.
One of the cupboards on top couldn't take it any more, and dove to the linoleum, with a CRASH!
We stopped. We started to clean up what we had done. We all felt awful.
It is really a bit of a miracle that only one thing had broken. We kids were all relieved that that was all of the damage our misbehaving had caused.
But Mom... Mom had heard the crash and come running. There I stood with the pieces of the broken casserole dish in my hands. "Sorry," we all stammered. "We didn't mean..."
Mom's face had gone from worry -- "Was anyone hurt?" -- to pain so quickly I couldn't believe it. "You d@#*ed kids," she said. "I can't have anything nice."
We'd never heard Mom swear before. There was stunned silence, and then...
We kids all burst out laughing.
Mom ran from the room sobbing, and we all were laughing. We didn't mean to. We already felt terrible, and this made it infinitely worse! But... Mom SWORE. Our Mom. That all enduring, all forgiving, all amazing lady. First we broke the casserole dish, and then we broke Mom.
I am really, really good at holding onto guilt, and this guilt... this is one of the worst ones in my tortured soul. I, KIM BENNION, LAUGHED WHEN MY MOTHER WAS DISTRAUGHT. She had already endured so much, and we broke something precious to her. What kind of oldest daughter am I?
This week, my daughter got hold of a skein of yarn I was saving and cut it into bits. Oh, was I mad! She didn't ask, and she knows she isn't supposed to cut up things. Well, she's been told, anyway. Especially things that aren't hers. And as I seethed at the unfairness of it all -- she has too many toys as it is, does she have to ruin my stuff? -- I took to Facebook to whine. In the big scheme of things, it was just a skein of yarn. It wasn't irreplaceable. I didn't NEED it. It was really pretty dumb to get upset.
Another day, and she has MY stuffed Mickey Mouse down off the shelf AGAIN. Not only has she been playing with him, but she has wrapped a hair elastic around him to hold a washcloth like a cape. That's not the best thing for his stuffing. And then she left him on the floor. In a heap of other things. And she'd been eating potato chips... oily, nasty chips. MAN... She has her own Mickey, even, WHY does she have to mess with my special things?
And this morning... I suppose it is my own fault for leaving my markers down where she could reach them. I always put them away so carefully, arranging them as best I can by shade, and never let the kids use them. I have other markers they are allowed to use. Though... I let her use these one day a few months ago. And she lost one. I found the lid of the missing marker after a couple of weeks, but have never found the marker. So this set became one that the kids can use, technically, but I usually keep them up, and I didn't put them away. And this morning I noticed they are spilled all over the floor. After a few minutes, when I looked back, I noticed that there was a lid off. I breathed deeply a few times, and told her that it is important to put the lids back on markers so they don't dry out. And then I noticed that there are about ten lids scattered around the room without the marker attached.
"MAN!" I complained. "I can't have ANYTHING nice!" Katie put her hands over her face. And as my full-sulking kicked into gear AGAIN, the echo of my complaint called up another voice from my memory, and my sulk ended instantly. I was whining about some dumb markers? Markers I've actually already replaced? I have exactly ZERO room to complain.
(I honestly didn't swear. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, Katie probably wouldn't have laughed, because it wouldn't have been an aberration like my own mother's explosion.)
When I posted my whining about the yarn on Facebook, a dear friend replied that she thinks there must be a reward in heaven for moms who don't exact revenge when our treasures are destroyed by the children. "Cheesecake in heaven," she suggested.
Mom, I hope your cheesecake in heaven is the biggest of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment