Operation: Civilize Hunter

In the past week, I've discovered a side of my boy that I hadn't taken care to notice before. Hunter likes to see how things work. There were plenty of signs around the house for months that I didn't take the time to realize. The printer suddenly was broken. The TV fell on the boy. The VCR had more vegetables shoved into it than Hunter's mouth. Still, I excused him as being accident prone. Wild. Barbaric even. Beyond any peak of frustration I may have encountered before, I declared, one day, that it was time to begin Operation: Civilize Hunter. My goal was clear. The boy needed to be potty trained (that was evident), but he also needed to stop terrorizing his sister and taking my shoes and running with them while giggling deviously while I'm trying to put them on. The moment had come when his hard skull had smashed into my nose too many times.

The operation went down with a long and tedious fight. After months of teaching, instructing, and a little brainwashing, Hunter finally was saying "please" and "thank you". He was also announcing that he was "angwy" instead of hitting his sister. And slowly, the house quieted . . . just a little. It was shortly after that I stumbled upon Hunter and the remote. There he was pensively dissecting the remote control. I handled it well. My husband made funeral arrangements. A light went off in my head and I suddenly made the connection. The printer didn't just break. The paperclips we found stashed in the VCR may not have been as accidental as we had believed. His unending fetish with emptying the bagless vacume cleaner . . . It allw began to make sense. Hunter was mechanically minded. A side of me relaxed. My chest puffed out with pride like a marshmallow. Hunter was inquisitive and had to know how things around him worked. By the end of the day I found myself allowing him to dissect the staple gun with endless curiosity. So what if I had to replace it later. My boy was not an accident proned barbarian. He was a scientist.

Another Monday

by Angela Tadlock

"Momma! Momma! Danny is playing in the cat boxes again!"
I threw the covers against the wall as I leapt, in one breathless bound, from my bed to the door. My eyes adjusted to the sun light flooding my living room as my brain attempted to grasp the possibility that I just might be out of bed. I made it to my son's bedroom expecting the worse and discovered that it was much worse. I scanned the horror before me.
Handfuls of cat litter had been thrown everywhere. Cat litter covered his bed, the bookshelf, and his toys. His Geo Trak was buried under a mound of litter and beside the mound sat the three year old culprit complete with shovel in hand next to his dump truck. The sight was enough to snap my pre-coffee brain wide awake. The anger in my chest had swollen into my throat as I took in the vast mess before me. Only a couple words were able to break past the anger in my throat.

"YOU! BAD! BATH! NOW!"
I took hold of the boy and began to pull him out of the litter towards the bathroom. Emily followed behind us gleefully dancing as she began to tell Dan how gross he was. Danny had other things on his mind.
"Mommy, you angwy?"
I didn't bother answering him. While I started to strip him in the bathtub a new shriek cut through the air. My five week old newborn was now awake and was looking for mommy . . . That would be me.
I glare up at the clock as Emily shouted from my bedroom.
"Mommy! Elizabeth is crying!"
"I'm with Danny right now! I'll be there in a second!"
A moment later I heard Emily squeaking out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Elizabeth took that as cue to find another level of pitch so high that the neighbor's dog could hear her.

Boy stripped. Water on. Hands washed. Now on to the infant. While I fed the youngest, Emily walked by with the broom.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm going to clean up Danny's mess."
"No. Mommy has to do it 'cause it's dirty."
"But, Mom. I will clean it and then it won't be dirty."
She turned back toward the litter room.
"Emily! Out!"
"It's okay, Mom. I'm just going to clean it."
"I don't want to give you a bath too!" I gasp! BATH! I had left the water running. I gently, but swiftly placed Elizabeth on the couch and dashed for the bathroom. My son was now in a sea of water that was running out of the tub and onto the floor. I stepped into the pool and turned the water off. Then I pulled the plug.
"NOOOOOO! I wan' the plug!"
I decided not to reason with the toddler and, instead, I headed off to his bedroom to join Emily in cleaning the cat litter off the walls with my Danny screaming behind me.

An hour later I was able to call his room clean. I locked the cat boxes . . . again . . . and set off to pull Danny out of the empty tub. Emily had plopped herself in front of the TV for the past thirty minutes. I hate the TV on in the morning, but that morning I was willing to let it slide.
I entered the bathroom to find that Danny was no longer in the tub. I froze and the knot that clenched my stomach that morning had returned.

I went into the kitchen where I found the boy standing on a chair, naked and covered head to toe in granulated sugar. I screamed. Beyond anger a took a wrist in each of my hands and carried him back to the tub where I held him down and scrubbed him from toe to head to toe again. I pulled him from the tub and walked him to his room where I selected a pair of sweats, held him down, and stretched them over his head and legs while he screamed and kicked in protest. I walked him to the living room where I sat him before the TV in hopes to now mop up the sugar and the bath water.
Just another Monday and I haven't had my coffee yet.

Old In My Prime

I released a disgruntled sigh as I placed the phone back on the cradle; The whiny, scratchy voice of Lucille Ball echoed from the bedroom. I had just finished talking with my sister which, lately, had been enough to put me in an off mood. She was three years younger than I and had a knack for making me feel older than our mother when we finished comparing notes on our lives.
I had two children, both toddlers, and had been married for only four years. She had a live-in boyfriend, no kids, and no husband. I had four senior cats who were pushing nine. She had a quiet, one-year-old kitten.
She had started college, changed majors, was promoted to manager in the warehouse, changed majors again, and had begun planning a wedding. I had begun a writing course, was promoted to supervisor in the store, had skipped the wedding plans along with the honeymoon altogether, and had two children.
She and I hadn’t always been like this. As children, we were best friends, as teenagers, we were inseparable and now, as adults, we couldn’t stand each other. Neither of us knows how it came to this. We both know that it has. We never talk about that.
I walked into the kitchen, replaying the conversation over in my mind while re-quoting the parts that really troubled me to Tribble who was laying on the table relaxing, her eyes half shut. Ignoring the cat on the table, I walked to the cupboard and pulled down a solid, white coffee mug, then on to another cupboard where I pulled down my coffee crystals and flavored coffee mix. It was nine o’clock at night and I had some writing to do. Setting the mug next to the now sleeping cat, I walked to the fridge, pulled out the milk and removed the singing tea pot off the stove.
As I scooped out the desired amount of coffee into my mug, I thought of what Alicia had said to me. "Your dishes are so boring." She had then proceeded to tell me about her freshly bought dishes which were lined on the outer rim with little red lighthouses.
"They’re not boring. They’re classic." I said to Tribble defensively as I stirred my coffee. I took a sip and headed into the living room to the computer, first stopping to grab my evening vitamins from my regiment while mumbling about my "boring dishes."
She and her boyfriend had just returned from a weekend excursion to Niagra Falls. The twelfth one this year. It was October. Three weeks before that, she had been to Atlantic City. I sat down to my desk and stared off while pensively sipping my coffee.
It had grown cold these past few nights and the current chill in the air forced me back out of my chair. Setting my coffee onto my desk, I walked to the thermostat and turned it up to 72. Any higher and the husband would let me know about it. With my mind now preoccupied with the description of my sister’s first bar hop, I made my way to the bedroom closet and pulled down the cream, heart-crocheted afghan to throw over my legs. Desi Arnaz was now shouting in Cuban.
"I can bar hop if I wanted to." I said to my lounging, white Peach asleep on the couch as I walked back to the computer and coffee. She stretched lazily in response to my persistence and looked up at me. "I just don’t want to because it’s stupid! Who enjoys being drunk? I prefer my coffee, oatmeal, and toast to throwing up last night’s beverage in the morning."
I sat back down to the desk, my afghan now in hand. After spreading the fringed blanket over my legs, I resumed my coffee as the whistling of the radiators began. She had boasted proudly about her drinking parties and the day she had spent in New York with her old girlfriends from highschool. It had been more than nine years since I had even spoken to any of my girlfriends. And parties...?
The sudden sound of my daughter’s fussing shook me back to motherhood and forced me to abandon my thoughts. In a flash, I had set my coffee down, whipped off the blanket, and ran to her room on tip-toe.
There she slept, shifting and mumbling in her sleep. I proceeded to her bed, quieter than before so as to not wake her sleeping brother in the bed next to her. I gently began to rub her back and her body relaxed to my touch. The restlessness passed as she settled back into a calm, dreamless sleep. I released a quiet, deep sigh and tip-toed out of the room to return to my chair and to blanket, coffee, and thoughts.
I sat back down, recovered my legs, and took another sip from my coffee.
"She’s immature." I said, this time to Rolo who had leapt into my lap, her needle like claws bearing into my thighs. After positioning the cat into a more comfortable position, I continued. "She has no kids. She hasn’t grown up yet. Of course, she’s 23 and engaged. It’s about time she did settle down."
I had begun stroking the long, soft fur as her purring sedated my nerves. "She’s too old to be acting like that and the way she flirts....." My thought trailed off unfinished. Despite my feelings, some subjects were left alone. After all, she is my sister.
I drained the last of my coffee, now lukewarm, and placed the empty mug on the desk for the final time. My legs were feeling warm again and the radiators had stopped whistling. My mind, still focused on the winded monologue my sister had subjected me to earlier.
As she had poured over every rich detail of the hotel room and every event of her trip, I had sat in silence with nothing to say. She was as detailed as a nineteenth century French novel and the interest had worn off long after I had spent my own vacations living it up back when I was nineteen. Since then, I had settled down with my husband shortly preceding the arrival of our children.
"I’m not suppressing myself. I love the way I am." Rolo looked up at me unconvinced of what I had said. Her solid yellow stare bore into me.
"I am content. There’s nothing wrong with being conservative. There’s nothing wrong with being prude."
The yellow eyes continued their hard accusing, stare.
"I can bar hop if I want to. I’m not boring. I’m not as reserved as she thinks!"
The hard, yellow eyes never moved as the "I Love Lucy" theme echoed from the bedroom. The credits were rolling and my Seal, looking to nap, had curled up at my feet under the desk.
I finally broke my gaze with the uncomfortable stare of my cat and looked to the black and white of an era gone and nearly forgot.