Injuries my children have sustained as a direct result of my idiocy (alternate title: “I’m a terrible parent; don’t call CPS pls”)

Listen. All children get injured every now and then, whether due to clumsiness, overestimation of one’s ability to do shit like swing from monkey bars, or just plain bad luck. It doesn’t matter if the kid is Tarzan incarnate or the meekest little rule follower known to man — blood shall be shed. I was the most cautious child on the planet and I still managed to nearly slice my finger off in an ill-fated attempt to microwave a frozen dinner¹, so trust me on this one. 

In most cases, there’s really no one to blame for these injuries. As parents, we may bear a little bit of responsibility in some cases if our lack of diligent oversight contributed to the scrape, bruise, split chin courtesy of a glass coffee table², or broken elbow caused by driving an electric scooter over a pile of slippery leaves³, but in general, we all know this shit happens with kids and it’s nothing to feel guilty about.

Unless, of course, said injury was directly caused by you not just permitting but endorsing, encouraging, and facilitating dangerous activities. In that case, you should definitely feel bad.

For instance, I felt quite bad when I let Ryan, then 6 years old and categorically not qualified for the job at hand, participate in the demolition of our fireplace during a remodel. Was he wielding a giant sledgehammer to smash heavy ceramic tiles? Yes. Was he wearing protective gear, or even, say, shoes? No, he most certainly was not, and the scar that remains visible on his arm to this day tells the tale of what happens when chunks of ceramic go flying through the air at high velocity. 

Do I get any points for making him wear googles, at least?

Then there was the time I decided I was some kind of scientist and procured some dry ice for us to experiment with, an activity I knew was potentially dangerous and thus implemented stringent safety precautions including a “no one but Mom handles the dry ice” rule. Man, I’m smart! Or I was, until I left the open bag of dry ice on the floor and Graffin had the misfortune to slip nearby it and extend his bare hand right onto it in an attempt to break his fall. Or the day I set up a fun “foam painting” activity that utilized an incredibly slippery amalgamation of shaving cream and glue, then watched and laughed heartily as the activity devolved into my children coating themselves and the garage floor with the mixture, in essence creating a filthy pseudo ice rink in which to glide around. Why was I surprised when they inevitably fell…repeatedly…and sustained a number of colorful bruises?

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!

Believe it or not, these alarming manifestations of my abject ineptitude probably wouldn’t even rate a mention on a list of my most egregious offenses (sidenote: please don’t actually make a list of my failures). No, the top spots are all reserved for the myriad disasters that have occured in service of these nutcases’ most beloved pastime, Destroying Old Electronics. As the name suggests, this activity involves Destroying Old Electronics: ancient laptops, broken stereos, and obsolete cellphones are no match for my children’s insatiable desire to determine how many horrifying methods of destruction a poor innocent technological relic can withstand. COMPLETELY HARMLESS GOOD TIMES! Just kidding, it’s a disaster waiting to happen every time but they’ll spend literal hours destroying one $5 garage sale piece of junk and so it is my favorite of all of their hobbies. 

Recently, Ryan discovered the joys of eBay shopping and found that for just a few chores’ worth of handouts from ol’ Mom over here, he could afford an outdated but operable smartphone. This is the crown jewel of Shit to Destroy, as the fact that it still works means the kids can validate the effects of their destruction attempts as the melee ensues (this is all very scientific, clearly). The downside, of course, is that working phones contain a little something called a lithium ion battery — ever heard of it? Oh, you have? And I suppose if you were in my position, you totally would have acknowledged the existence of said battery, and perhaps even recalled all those news stories from a couple years back exposing smartphone batteries expanding and catching fire? And there’s NO CHANCE that would have just slipped your mind entirely and you would have signed off on letting small children hack away at said smartphone with the express intent of damaging it as much as possible, with little to no supervision whatsoever?

Get off your high horse. This could happen to anyone: 

He’s fine, guys. Everything’s fine. A couple very minor burns, some PTSD, perhaps an ecological disaster of some kind…no big deal. 

Why do I keep letting these things happen?! Is it because I’m a “Yes Mom,” stubbornly bound by some bizarre internal pledge to say yes to as many requests as humanly possible? Am I just an idiot who lacks foresight? Do I get swept up in the moment and develop selective blindness to danger, seeing only fun and excitement? Am I so desperate to occupy these people that I let all common sense fly out the window? 

Let’s not analyze it. See you in the ER!

(After I finish my dry ice White Claw.)

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Footnotes:

¹Lean Cuisine should be sued for making their cardboard packaging so impenetrable I had to bust out a boxcutter to make any headway. 

²Graffin

³Ryan

Yes Mom

I was on a first date with a dude last year¹ and we were doing the stereotypical “here’s a brief rundown of my life (except for the shitty parts)” song and dance, and when I mentioned something about my kids he said, “wow, it must be really hard to handle everything!”

His reaction surprised me, although I guess it probably shouldn’t have — being a single mom (or a parent at all) is a lot of work, objectively speaking. But as I told this gorgeous tattooed childless gentleman that night, my kids are the easiest and best part of my life. Is my life in general a shitshow? Do I have serious personal issues to wade through? Am I frequently on the edge of existential despair? Possibly. But don’t get it twisted: there is absolutely nothing about my kids or about being a mom that I resent or consider a burden. Not the endless lunch-making², not the fighting over video games, not the interminable baseball games played in the blistering heat at which White Claws are inexplicably not considered acceptable hydration for parents in the stands, not the laundry or the midnight bad dreams or the ceaseless avalanche of toys that cover every square inch of my house and make it nigh on impossible to sweep or mop³, nothing. My kids bring me joy, and I am the kind of sick individual that derives pleasure from things like budgeting and checking items off of a to-do list, so even all of the logistical business of mothering is really right up my alley.

If this all sounds like a bunch of holier-than-thou bragging about how amazing I am for not letting the harder aspects of motherhood drag me down, don’t fret: I’m about to let you in on the secret behind this serenity, and it should bring your opinion of me and my parenting acumen back down where it belongs (i.e. very, very low):

I just say yes to virtually everything they want. 

Like…to truly ridiculous requests, all the damn time. Eat dinner in my bed? Sure, why not. Go to the 99 Cent Store to buy hundreds of balloons for the sole purpose of trying to pop them with various implements found around the house? Absolutely. Melt a bunch of perfectly good crayons into a brick so we can smash it up? Sounds like a perfectly sane thing to do! Basically, if there’s no risk of injury (and honestly, I’m pretty flexible on that) and it doesn’t cost a ton of money, it’s gonna be a yes every time.

Now, obviously I don’t have anything to compare to since I have operated in this fashion for the duration of my mothering career, but I believe that my yes-slingin’ lifestyle has eliminated a considerable chunk of the day-to-day conflicts that arise from having to tell children “no” all the time, not to mention the innumerable hours I’ve saved by not having to personally entertain these children. Do I really want to clean up tiny bits of crushed chalk from every crack and crevice of my garage after some bizarre art/destruction activity? No, not particularly. But do you know what else I don’t want to do? Come up with shit for them to do myself, and they spent all fucking day creating that chalk nightmare and I didn’t have to do a damn thing. 

I believe wholeheartedly that this strategy is the key to me remaining (relatively) sane and am completely committed to saying yes as much as humanly possible, to the point that it has become a defining facet of my personality in my children’s eyes. Ryan once told me, apropos of absolutely nothing, “You know what the best thing is about you? You’re a Yes Mom. Because you say yes to most things…and sometimes even when you say no, you think about it and then you say yes after all!”

And therein lies the problem, of course. I have created monsters who believe that if they ask their mother to buy $40 worth of duct tape so they can make a wall out of it and then destroy said wall with sharp objects, said mother will say yes…and they are right. She will not only say yes, she will say yes again when they want to try another kind of tape, and she will in fact do this four goddamn times in a single month.

(This is sadly not a joke; in related news, for any of you with hot DIY plans in the works, Gorilla Tape is superior to T-Rex Tape and both beat regular duct tape by a mile.)

Worse, they are now old enough to understand that I only deny their requests when there’s a really good reason, which sounds like it would be a good thing but instead just means that I have to have conversations like this whenever I drop a rare “no”:

Ryan, 30 seconds before bed: “Can I sleep in the office?”

Me, simply not in the mood to alter our already protracted bedtime routine : “no, we’re not doing that tonight.”

Ryan, so very sweetly, and genuinely curious: “But Mom…what difference does it make to you where I sleep?”

He was right, it doesn’t make a difference at all. 

He slept in the office.

Wish me luck when they’re teenagers, because I am, as I believe professionals would describe it, fucked.

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Footnotes:

¹Yes, this is a thing I have to do now and it’s as horrifying as it sounds.

²Remember sending kids to school? Ah, good times. 

³Can you tell that I secretly appreciate that I have an excuse not to clean?

Doctor Show

Before I had children, I had grand plans of protecting my future spawn from the evils of television. I remember babysitting my nieces one time and being disgusted by the crude, seizure-inducing nonsense mascarading as children’s entertainment and thinking, Not for my kids! I wasn’t delusional enough to think I was going to adopt a unilateral no-TV rule (even idealistic pre-kid Maureen had the foresight to know that a little TV time was going to be vital to maintaining my own sanity), but I had every intention of limiting the viewing options to age-appropriate educational programming and enforcing some serious daily screen-time limits to ensure that my children didn’t spend their days zoned out on the couch when they should be playing outside or learning algebra or something.

How cute, right? Bless my little heart.

Three years later, I can tell you that my track record on regulating both the quality and quantity of television consumed by my child is…shaky. At best. You may remember¹ that I screwed up right from the get-go by watching true crime dramas while feeding Bubba as an infant, but I forgive myself for that one since he wasn’t really watching and I did put a stop to it once I saw him start to take a peek at the murder scenes. When he was old enough to actually watch a show himself, I did start out with Sesame Street and Super Why and other pseudo-educational options…but then the kids at daycare started telling him about Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and I felt bad having him be out of the loop, and my husband somehow convinced me that they really needed to watch WWE together for bonding purposes, and at the same time I realized that allowing him to watch TV meant I could have some glorious quiet time, and my smug anti-TV stance began to wane.

Still, though, I had some standards. I tried to avoid Cartoon Network since their shows are the most obnoxious (not to mention the incessant commercials for as-seen-on-tv crap that looks awesome but is doomed to break within moments once in the hands of an actual human child) and always encouraged other more worthy activities ahead of TV watching². I knew I wasn’t doing a great job enforcing TV limits and boundaries, but I let myself slide since at least I wasn’t letting him watch soap operas or something.

Until Baby G was born and a fatal combination of laziness, sleep deprivation, and a desire to give Bubba some alone time with Mama somehow spiraled into the creation of a nightly ritual in which my three year old son and I snuggle up in bed and watch Grey’s Anatomy.

You know, that show about sexy doctors doing surgery on maimed and gravely ill individuals. Pretty much right on par with Sesame Street, right?

I know, guys, I’m THE WORST.

It started innocently enough. I got in the habit of nursing Baby in my bed while Daddy got Bubba ready for bed, and I used those precious few moments of alone time (Baby notwithstanding…sorry, Baby) to binge-watch all the Grey’s Anatomy I had missed out on in my twenties by thinking I was too good for trashy shows³. Bubba came into the room one evening and asked if he could snuggle with me, and while I attempted to turn off the smut like a good parent would, he declared that he WANTED to watch “The Doctor Show.” Furthermore, he demanded to know what kind of injury the dear fellow on screen had sustained, and if, in fact, said injury had been sustained when the guy — and I quote — “was climbing on dangerous stuff and then he came crashing down like POW CAPOW OWWWWW!”

So now every night he asks if he can watch Doctor Show with me, and every night I say yes because I just love him too much and it’s not the same if we watch something else. And I’m not a total monster: I mute the sound and turn on the captions so I can follow the story while Bubba just watches the doctors rush around trying to save people with terrible injuries, the sights of which may or may not scar a three year old for life (TBD). He asks questions about every patient and speculates on how their injury or illness may have come to be (“did he fall like CAPOW? Did he get too much germs in his blood?”) and provides some delightful commentary on the lives of medical professionals (“why are those doctors not wearing their doctor coats at home? Are those doctors friends?”), while we eat snacks and share my blankets and just enjoy each others company. It’s a marvelous way to unwind at the end of the day and I only feel marginally guilty that this wonderful bonding experience is centered around a show that features a character named McDreamy.

And yes, I realize I could probably find a better way to nurse Baby and give Bubba some attention at the same time, but then when would I find out if Cristina and Owen are going to break up or if Bailey’s OCD will get cured or if Arizona will ever shut up about her damn amputated leg?!

OK, I’m the worst.

The 8pm scene in my bedroom. EVERY. NIGHT.

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Footnotes:

¹That post was from three years ago. If you really did remember it, congratulations on being my biggest (and presumably only) fan!

²OK, not always. Usually would be a more fair assessment. Unless I am really tired. Or need a break. Or….just stop judging me, ok?! Go watch some TV.

³So much wasted time! What else did I miss?!