Motherhood ~ Always Good For A Laugh

It has been said that “laughter is the best medicine” and that is certainly true with the wonderful job of Motherhood.  

We both laughed our way through lots of phases of motherhood, and there again, there were lots of times when, yes, the laughter did eventually come and lasts to this day, but at the time, there was not much laughter!

My son Trevor was an active, curious, charming little boy.  He was interested in everything and was on the go a lot.  I was very used to always having to have my eye on him and it was one of these times when I was at a pool with some very good friends.  These friends were friends who I did not see very often.  They used to visit the Bahamas, where we were living at the time, a couple of times a year.  They had two older children, high school age, so they had been through this age, maybe 6 or 7, and felt that I could relax more – sit myself on the chaise and listen to their conversation.  After all, they wanted to get caught up on my life and catch me up on all the goings on in theirs!  After a lot of thought, as it was going against my intuition, I decided that this made sense.  Trevor was an excellent swimmer by this age so I was not concerned about his swimming skills.  I sat back and started to enjoy the interesting conversation when, all of a sudden, there was a huge “THUMP”.   I had my back to the wall but heard a friend shouting, “Jackie, it’s Trevor!”.  I jumped up and yes, indeed, it was Trevor, IN A GOLFCART which had just been driven into the wall!   A friend of ours had driven his golf cart down to the pool, left the golf cart, if you can imagine, WITH the keys in it and Trevor, darling, had got into the golf cart and started it up.  Off it went, right into the wall!  Fortunately, Trevor was absolutely fine and we had the golf cart fixed and all was well.  Note to self:  listen to your own intuition about mothering!

We have laughed, so often, about this story since then but, certainly, it was one of those “laugh after the fact” stories!

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Trevor is a “darling” there is no doubt!  He has made Randy and me and our three girls laugh out loud more times than you could ever count…both on purpose and just because he is Trevor…..and well…a darling.  He and our girls have been involved in some of those laugh out loud memories together, but the story I want to relay to you today did not involve him or any of Jackie’s other children.

As I was growing up my grandparents lived with us, as did my aunt and cousins from time to time when my uncle who was a naval officer, was on duty onboard ship.  And with my mother’s very large extended family, there was often some other relative staying with us as well.  All this to say, the number of adults around was often as great as that of the the children.  There was always someone to keep an eye on us.  So from my perspective as a parent that was how it was supposed to be.

My husband Randy on the other hand, grew up far from extended family as one of six children and with a father who was a surgeon and who left at the crack of dawn and usually didn’t return home until late in the evening.  That meant it was his mother on her own to keep track of six children, all very close in age.  Five of them were born within six years!  Randy has two older sisters and two younger sisters, and a brother (always referred to as the “bonus child”) who is eight years younger than Randy.  So his dear mother was no doubt happy to have at least some of her children out playing in the neighborhood so she had a minute of peace to get something done at home.  Especially when her very busy little boy (Randy) went out to play.  At the age of two she has told me she would pin a note on the back of his overalls that read “Please Do Not Feed This Child” as he would go out the door in the morning and roam the neighborhood hoping to get cookies and milk from the nice neighbor ladies.  If they fed him, his mother said, she would have a harder time locating him when lunchtime rolled around, but if they didn’t, he would come home on his own to be fed.  Remember, he was all of two years old!  He says as a young boy, maybe 8 or 9, he was allowed to take a bedroll and go out into the woods behind their home to spend the night alone….so you get the picture here…we had a very different economy about what was the ‘right’ approach to the day to day care and raising of children.  He obviously thought my approach was very over protective and I thought his was bordering on negligent.  Let’s just say we had some words about it from time to time.  This is all to give you context to my story….

During the years when our children were little, Randy taught seminars and sang every weekend from mid-December through mid-March, at a Christian camp, Forest Home, for junior and  senior high school kids.  We had a great cabin at the camp and the girls loved going up every weekend and playing in the snow and seeing their ‘mountain friends’ who were also there each weekend.  So when my youngest daughter, Amanda, who was still a baby, had been really sick with a fever for several days, I had to think twice about going up to Forest  Home.  But since I had been up for about 3 nights straight, with little, if any sleep, sitting up with Amanda and ‘becoming one’ with my rocking chair, the thought of staying home with three little ones and no back up, seemed a worse option to packing us all up for the weekend.  I reasoned that at least being somewhere with my sick baby where my older girls could play and be supervised by Randy or some of our other friends was a better idea than being home alone with all three.  So, early Friday afternoon, I finally got Amanda to sleep and go down for a nap in her crib, and I began the weekly ritual of packing up all our bags and food for the weekend.  Sara (5) and Carrie (3) were so excited that I had decided we could go that they were bouncing off the walls and singing and laughing so loudly I just knew they were going to wake up Amanda and then I knew I would get nothing done.

Since sending them outside to the backyard meant they would be loudly playing right outside Amanda’s window, that was out of the question.  But keeping them inside wasn’t working either so I made a decision against my better judgment.  As I’ve alluded to earlier, Randy had told me often how ‘over protective’ I was….I mean in the 3 years since we had lived in that house our children had never played alone on our front porch,  much less in our front yard, but I was desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures.  Sara’s school was having a paper drive and she had begged me for the past several days to let her go to the neighbors and ask for their old newspapers.  With a sick child at home, collecting papers had not been my priority, now it seemed like it might be the answer to my dilema….maybe I really had been over protective I thought.  After all, we didn’t live in a slum or tough area and we knew our immediate neighboors so what could be the harm in letting Sara and Carrie put on their roller skates and take their little red wagon and go to the houses two doors each way from ours to ask our neighbors for their old papers.  It would keep them occupied for maybe 15-20 minutes and I could finish packing before Amanda woke up.  I was having this conversation with myself because I needed to talk myself into something I was really uncomfortable with doing….being an ‘over protective mother’ and all.

I helped the girls get their roller skates on and get their wagon, then launched into giving them instructions about how to go to the neighbor’s doors to collect papers as though they were headed out alone to the jungles of Africa on a search for dangerous and wild animals.  My instructions to them took longer for me to give than it would have taken me to just walk them myself door to door all the way around the block!  Their eyes were huge and when I finished my instructions Sara said, “But mommy, I thought we were just asking people for papers.”  Off they went down the driveway and back into the bedroom I went to finish packing, and talking to myself all the while about how Randy was right and this was going to be ‘a good learning experience’ for them and build their confidence and mine.

I could not have been in the house more than 5 minutes when I heard someone knocking.  I had left the front door open and only the big wooden screen door was between me and the front porch as I wanted to hear the girls coming and intercept them when they got home before they could wake Amanda.  But this knocking that I heard didn’t sound like that of children.  Someone must be at my front door trying to sell something I thought.  As I rounded the doorway from the hallway to see a police officer standing at my front door my heart froze.  What could possibly have happened in such a short time…they had only been gone 5 minutes!!!

“Ma’am,” he said.  “Is your name Robin? Do you have two small children, little girls?”  Oh no, oh no , oh no!!!!!!  My heart was pounding and my legs felt like they had lead in them as I tried to get myself to the door.  “Yes officer I do, what’s wrong?  What has happened?  Was there a car?  Were they in the street? Have they been hurt?  WHERE ARE THEY????”  “Calm down ma’am”, he said.  “They are with my partner and they are fine.  One of your  caring and concerned neighbors called us because she said she saw some children who weren’t from this block roaming the neighborhood unattended.  You know ma’am, you really shouldn’t allow little children to go out door to door like that…it isn’t safe.”  “Oh officer, I’ve never let them do any…”  “Yes ma’am, I’m sure that’s true, but the fact is they were out going door to door and that just isn’t safe for little children to be doing.”  “Yes of course you are right officer, I have a sick baby and I….”  “Well ma’am, nevertheless, it was not a wise decision on your part to send your two small little girls, especially such darling children out to collect papers for you.”  “No, no, you don’t understand!  The papers aren’t for me, they are…”  “Ma’am, you need to keep an eye on children this age at all times.  They need to be with their mother, ma’am and not alone on the streets, picking up papers.”  Now all I could think was ‘Why does he keep calling me ‘ma’am’?  I am trying to tell him what really happened and I told him my name was Robin, can’t he stop calling me ‘ma’am’ ???  “Your children are safe now, ma’am and coming with my partner back home, where they should be.  I’m sure you are very busy and I know children can get on your nerves sometimes, and mothers need a break I’m told, but I  am going to have to ask you to keep an eye on them from now on.  We can’t have them roaming the sidewalks unattended.”  I thought my head might shoot right off my body at this point, and I was so conflicted between whether to be grateful to this public servant for coming so quickly to the “rescue” of my girls or to punch him for not letting me finish a single sentence in my own defense.  And then just when  I thought it couldn’t get any worse here came Sara and Carrie up the driveway each holding the hand of a police woman and both grinning from ear to ear, while Sara proudly announced loudly to the whole neighborhood, “Look Mommy we got picked up by the police. Mommy, you aren’t supposed to send us out to collect papers by ourselves.  It isn’t safe.  But we’re OK mommy the police came and got us and took care of us and this nice lady is bringing us back home.  We’re just fine now.”

My horror and humiliation was almost complete…with all the commotion Amanda was now awake and had somehow managed to remove all her clothes and her diaper, (a feat she never had done before and never did again) but as I retrieved her from her crib and hurried back to the door she looked as though she had been put down naked to sleep.  As I approached the front door with her on my hip to get the older girls, she pottied all over me.  “Uhhh… ma’am, would you like us to look after your children here so you could put some clothes on the little one?”  Now I was not only looking completely negligent of my older children but like a hillbilly carrying my youngest one around naked.  And all because I didn’t just stick with my ‘over protective’ instincts and not allow my children outside without me.  Randy got an ear full when he got home.  He never accused me of being over protective again as you can well imagine.

And oh yes…there is a P.S. to this story.  That fever Amanda had, she had gotten it from her sisters who had had it a few days before.  The following morning we awoke at Forest Home with three little girls with ‘spots’ all over them….they all had chicken pox!

As Jackie said earlier, I wasn’t laughing just then. But I certainly have had a good chuckle about it all since.

So no matter what challenge you are facing today with children large or small, when the dust clears try to find the humor in your situation…who knows….there just might be a good laugh ahead of you 🙂