Not a Museum…

My motherhood has been graced with the lives of five unique individuals who excite my spirit and exude a charisma that sets me on fire.  This is code for, my kids drive me crazy and sometimes I turn into “Maniac Mom”.  This “Maniac” is aptly titled and happens typically when every child has turned on my solemn time of momentary fairy tale to rise up and amass chaos.  My husband has said I sound like a Pro-Wrestler from the Ninety’s who also became a spokesperson for a semi-pepperoni, spicy, beefy edible plastic stick…Can you Dig it?  

Many times over the course of my mothering, I have learned so much about my children’s creativity and active lifestyles.  Before we owned a house, our apartment would be trails of toys left in every room like installations of art, to be awed over until everything landed back in the toy box.  When, my oldest was two, I was so enthralled the first time he sat on my lap and drew the tiniest of pictures on every page of a notebook.  I cut out each and every page and stapled it into a tiny booklet to put away in a keepsake box.  If we fast forward time, I’m lucky if my, fifth child, almost 1 year old, has any keepsake box to put things into, I keep things for her, but I’ve become no good at keeping track of them.  By the way, Cecilia, Mommy loves you, even if I don’t fawn over the same things as I did your older siblings.

When my oldest entered school at five years old, it was actually a bit difficult to decide what to keep and what to discard.  Do I show how his name writing changed over the course of the year?  Do I compare the natural progression of his "people" drawing skills…look now they have fingernails!  Before I knew it, I had a whole basket of artwork.  My second oldest was a different type of creative and in Kindergarten, his art was chosen for an exhibit in our State Capitol…I wanted to cherish this forever, but he wanted to hang it in his room.  I recently stole it back because it almost didn’t make it out of there in one piece!  I have plans to curate my upstairs hallway into a museum of artwork and photos because most of the walls in my house are blank…but first, we have to stop collecting laundry outside of the hamper and leaving toys for me to step on in the middle of the night.  Damn you, Legos!

I read a blog post recently that was talking about “vacuum lines” in a carpet and how this mom was at first, jealous of the vacuum lines because they looked so neat, but she realized that Vacuum lines are lonely.  It means your kids are growing up.  Vacuum lines can’t exist for more than 5 minutes with a brood like mine.  They are too busy destroying anything that would make my house momentarily seem like a museum.   I’ve been to museums often when I was in college, less often now unless “children’s” appears in the name and there is a disclaimer that “everything can be touched”.  On the flip, I have also been to “museums” of parents that seem to have everything together or at least a lot of cabinets to hide all things deemed messy.  I do not have enough cabinets, closet space or money to make this a reality.  Maybe if I didn’t have so many beautiful individuals teaching me about life, I would have enough time and money to organize reality.  But that’s the point.  

My life is real, not a museum.  Things happen that I can’t tangibly hang on a wall or put away under glass.  I have fingerprints, dirt, and Cheerios.  I have giggles and smiles and Saturday morning, Star Wars costumes being ripped from old sheets.  I have a baby that lets me know she’s full, by blowing raspberries and spraying baby food all over the walls…really, every time. Neither my molding nor my walls are always clean; nor does art tastefully hang from them, unless it’s the crayon scribbles from my two-year-old.  Also the markers apparently, I just found this same two-year-old in just a diaper and a shirt with marker lines up and down his legs. Maniac Mom will occasionally arise to power when some crayons not put away, and become the medium to which every room is decorated.  The best invention for this type of antic is essentially sandpaper, thank you, magical, bald headed man in white pants!