The Jelly Bean Jar

“One forgets about parenthood — the on and on-ness of it.”  – Downton Abbey

As ever, the Dowager is given the best line.

Our darling daughter has reached a “stage in her development” where her only purpose in life is to interrupt (at best) or totally disrupt (at worst) any activity her brother is engaged in, leaving me in a constant state of vigilance to maintain a tenuous peace.  Got a check to write?  A lunchbox to pack?  Too bad.  In the two seconds it takes to uncap a ballpoint pen, Babygirl has parkoured across the livingroom and onto the couch, the better to pull out giant chunks of LittleMan’s hair while he pores over a Lego catalogue.

“Mommy!” he shrieks, before ninja-kicking her off the couch, where she narrowly misses the coffee table corner in her tumble to the floor.  “NO!” she yells, climbing back to her feet and running to me.  Then (wait for it): “Paci!  I need it!”

Have you noticed how everything these days is a stage in development?  Gone is the time when you could write your kids off as, say, insane little monkeys and call it a day.  Now it’s all just stage this, and phase that and developmentally-appropriate yada yada.

(“You girls, your generation, you think too much,” my mom will say.  “You give these kids so much power…stop analyzing everything down to the bone.  They’re babies!  Sometimes they’re naughty!  It’s healthy for them to see you get angry once in a while.  It’s good for them to know when they have really crossed the line.”  And then she sort of waves her hand at me: “I mean, look at you!  I disciplined you all the time, and you turned out alright.”)

I guess so.

But I digress.  Because as you can tell, and I’ll just go ahead and admit it: My patience is shot.  The husband has been travelling, and work has been nutso in that sort of personally-draining, politically-charged way that work can be, and, as my sister said yesterday, I’m all outta jelly beans.  I started with a full jar but over the past five days I’ve been handing them out all over the place and now, well, my jelly bean jar is empty.

So now what?  There is no time today to run out and get some more jelly beans.  There is no time today to run out and get anything (which is why my children have eaten food from a box two nights already this week, and tonight will have scrambled eggs).

In other words, I have to open the door of my dusty inner pantry and see what I can find to stand in for the jelly beans.  Maybe there’s the odd leftover Easter candy or a couple of mini Snickers pilfered from the nail salon a few weeks ago.  Maybe there’s a container of applesauce.  Just something to get me to Friday evening.

Dig deep, girlfriend.  It’s so close.

I had to work late three nights this week.  With my husband gone, it has been really disruptive for the kiddos, and when I came in around 9:30 yesterday evening my mom reported that before dinner, after poking Babygirl in the arm with a thermometer he dug out of the baby supplies, LittleMan had a wee meltdown, wrapping himself in a blanket on the kitchen floor and wailing that he missed his Mommy and Daddy.

As much as there is a bit of a knife-to-the-heartness about that anecdote, with my jelly bean jar all empty, I could muster little more than a vague feeling of guilt coupled with a resigned This is how this week is, and it’s not the norm and it’s not forever.  And then I went to sleep.

LittleMan crawled into bed with me around 6am, as is his habit these days.  While I clung to the final minutes of rest, he wiggled all around and rolled this way and that and eventually poked me with a stage whisper: “Mommy, I have to show you something.  I need you to come to the kitchen now.”

Shuffling into the kitchen I turned on the light, registering with sleepy satisfaction the gurgling of the coffee maker, its warm smell of morning.  LittleMan was standing in front of the whiteboard applique on the far wall, the days of the week scrawled across it.  “Nana and I made a chart,” he explained.  “All the crossed-off days are the days Daddy has been gone.  Tomorrow I will cross of Thursday.  Then Friday.  And then he’ll come home!”

Kids have such a fluid relationship with time.  A week means nothing; what’s important is how many PE days are there?  How many nap days?  How many days with no school?  A visual diagram makes time tangible.  Of course: snaps for Nana Wisdom.  A part of me grateful, a part of me wishing I’d thought of it myself, I sat on LittleMan’s tiny desk in the corner and pulled him into a hug.

“I’m sorry I’ve had to work so much this week,” I whispered.
“It’s okay, Mommy!” he said, putting his hands on my face.  “I wasn’t sad!”

Jelly beans when you least expect them: before breakfast, before coffee, before the baby wakes up.  The best part is, you can’t really predict anything.  (Before you get too excited: that’s also the worst part.  But most of the time, it’s the best part.)  Because so often, right at the beginning of the day, they surprise you.