The pressure is officially on. Now that I’m done with college until August, I have no excuse to be a sub-par mother or wife. Not that I ever needed an excuse. Laundry better get caught up. The house ought to be spotless. My child should be potty trained and reciting Shakespeare. And dinner should have four courses. It’s worth mentioning that potato chips do not count as a course—I know, I was shocked too!
Obviously, this super-mom thing is going to eat up a lot of my time--time that I have daydreamed about spending any way I want. This means my desire to lie motionless by the lake, bathed in the warm, soft heat of the springtime sun is completely impossible. The closest I can get right now is lying relatively motionless beside the bathtub, bathed in the water that splashes (pours) over the edge while my daughter has her “bath,” also known as the Bathroom Hurricane.
There is a similar phenomenon that occurs in the rest of our house, which we refer to as the Toddler Tornado. These tornados are tricky, because unlike real tornados, you get zero warning before it happens (aside from the loud yelling and sound of expensive toys crashing to the floor). The position you were taught to curl into during a tornado is completely useless during a Toddler Tornado—the child will just sense your fear and weakness, and we all know what toddlers do when that happens. They pounce. Just like flesh-eating predators, only scarier.
With my summer To-Do list growing every day, I figure I’ll need some assistance. I can’t do it all alone, right? Wrong. My husband has figured out how to get out of doing most household chores by being really terrible at whatever he attempts to help me do. When he washes dishes, plates mysteriously break, and baked-on food stains are treated like honored guests in our home. Instead of removing them (and subsequently seeming like he is good at washing dishes), he welcomes them with open arms.
When my husband, a former sous chef, makes dinner, it’s natural for me to expect a gourmet meal that is perfectly cooked and tasty. But one thing I’ve learned in life is that expectations of perfection in the home (or anywhere, really) are rarely met. Case in point, my five-star chef hubby can’t seem to bake a DiGiornio frozen pizza without burning it to a crisp. I have to tell myself that he just isn’t used to our oven; maybe it’s not calibrated properly. This makes the perfectly cooked frozen pizzas I make in the very same oven a real mystery.
It might seem a bit ridiculous to ask my nearly three-year-old daughter to help me with laundry. After all, she is really much better at getting clothes dirty than cleaning them. But because of this, I have learned to make her natural destructive tendencies work for me instead of against me. For example, she has a habit of opening a drawer and throwing every item inside it onto the floor. This is obviously an annoying habit. However, when laundry is involved, I can make it work for me. I just have her throw all of the clothes in the basket into the washing machine. She feels like she is destroying something, and the clothes get washed. It’s a win-win situation!
Don’t let your husband or children get away with skirting the household chores—even if all the whites in your laundry turn pink, or the carpet has more dirt on it than it did before they “vacuumed.”
Find fun ways to channel your child’s destructive habits into helpful ones, like I mentioned with the laundry. Try letting them throw stuffed animals at the ceiling fan to clean the dust off the blades (just make sure you put a sheet down first—this is an important step).
Before you go, just remember to always—wait, what?
Oh, that’s my husband calling for me in the kitchen. It seems as though he’s caught the fish sticks on fire (again) somehow...
Love, Mom
 Debra (Fulcher) Carpenter writes when she isn’t studying, or when she’s procrastinating. Mostly when she’s procrastinating. She is a young housewife, student, and mom.
Email her at interruptedmom@gmail.com or visit the website at www.motherinterrupted.com