Me versus the Laundry

Four days ago I stood before the laundry chute in the basement. I felt a brief moment of reluctance before I released the eyehook and watched the hatch swing open, rendering its load onto the floor in a great heap. It reminds me of those office supply commercials where the files keep shooting out of a closet until the unsuspecting intern is buried. Except that I fully expect to be buried now. It’s amazing how quickly the wet towels, dirty socks, stained shirts and muddy pants of two children accumulate.

When I fold our laundry (a project that takes about three days and two nights) I usually encounter four of Ryan’s white tee-shirts, four pairs of his boxers, several pairs of my workout socks and tee-shirts, occasionally a pair of Ryan’s or my jeans. And the rest of Mount Everest that stands in the center of our bed is little kids clothes and bath towels. Bath towels that were dumped in the chute after having been pulled into a full tub of water, used to wipe up spills in the kitchen and syrup tracked down the hall, bath towels that were left in a heap in the bedroom, bath towels that were inadvertently urinated on. A couple of years ago Ryan and I talked about getting rid of all of our old raggedy towels and getting one new matching set. Where would we be if we had done that?

After separating the clothes from the towels (a job that takes a full day after dozens of interruptions to help break up fights, find missing toy parts and doll clothes, feed hungry kids and answer the phone) I wash about two to three loads of each: towels and kid clothes. Kids go through clothes faster than I go through coffee after a sleepless night.

This morning as I walked down the hall to the kitchen, creeping quietly in the dark of predawn trying not to wake any of my sleeping family members, I opened the laundry chute to toss my pajama pants in. A full chute greeted my pants right at the top, spitting them back onto the floor like a basket ball bouncing off the backboard. Well that’s what four days does to our laundry chute.

I joke with my girlfriends that laundry washing and folding could be its own full time job. I wouldn’t even expect a full time maid to be able to keep up with it. Not with all the other things there are to do in a big house. Luckily I like to clean. Cleaning and organizing has been a favorite pastime since I was a little girl and discovered the satisfaction of bringing deeper and deeper organization to my own long and narrow walk-in closet. I soon converted it into a sitting room with a singular light bulb hanging from a clothes hook and a bean bag chair on which I sat to write my earliest short stories.

But like it or not, it’s one of those things I tend not to have time for these days. My birthdaughter’s family watched Twila and Jada the other day while I went to the dentist and I was comforted and pleased to see a healthy clutter around their house. They are going through major remodels and everything is in flux. Sandy managed to make a beautiful lunch for us in the midst of crowded counters and five circling children ranging in age from two to twelve. As we talked I thought back to the first time I came to their house, just after Nicole had gone home with them and how meticulously neat it was. Not a dust speck could be found. Children have a tendency to take their toll on living spaces. And frankly, as a mother with any sort of life, something’s gotta give.

If I want to keep writing novels and doing a half-way decent job maintaining a blog, the laundry chute’s going to be full and the counters may hold a little more clutter than they used to before children were piling things onto them. Of course, I have been known to wipe down counters and vacuum floors as a means to crushing through a writer’s block, which is a technique I did not learn from Dan Brown but, really, who has time for inversion therapy? My inversion therapy is rolling around on the carpet with my daughters.

Twila and I were doing the Jillian Michaels Shred yesterday morning. When Twila got tired she crawled under me as I was doing walking pushups and something about the angle of my face (and probably the strain thereon) cracked her up, which of course, enticed the two year old to come check out the show. Soon we were all on the floor laughing as Jillian Michaels pushed us to work harder.

The life of a mom will always encompass the search for balance. I have been delighted in these recent months to see that it is not going to be an unattainable goal forever. Balance actually can be achieved, which is something I flat out didn’t believe a year ago. Now that Jada is two, talking, sleeping, playing with her older sister, there is time during the day for things other than holding, feeding, entertaining and comforting. When she gets to the other side of potty training—when she starts preschool for goodness sake, I’m not even going to recognize my life. What will I do with my time? How many books I’ll publish; how frequent the blog posts will be then when there are uninterrupted hours to write.

We don’t find a perfect balance every day. And of course, just when the routine gets settled, someone pops another tooth through or spikes a fever or pees on the floor, or dumps icy water over her sister’s head in the bath, and I’m pulled away from whatever I'm doing, shaking my head and sighing. But more and more each day I see them collaborating; I see them maturing and figuring out that it is more fun to play than to fight, and I see myself growing more patient and calm each day and subsequently, more fun. We do more things together yet there is more time to myself too in some magical paradox of time. Maybe it’s just that the time we spend is so much more quality when everyone is happy that they demand less of it, feeling satisfied by what they get.

And I can’t help feel—even as I am delighted for my friends getting pregnant with their second and third children—happy that our family is passed babyhood. It is wonderful, delightful, mysterious and magical to fall in love with a tiny person who only just popped into existence. But it is also wonderful to be less in demand.

Seeing Sandy with her three kids, now twelve, eleven and nine, I see what the next phase of motherhood looks like. It is astounding to have the preview of that stage in watching my birthdaughter grow into a young woman. She is tall and poised and mature, thinking about mature things and experiencing mature relationships; busy with her own life. In the blink of an eye my daughters, now small looking up to their grown-up brithsister, will be there.

So with that perspective, I creep into the quiet kitchen to make my tea and bring it to the office where, ignoring the laundry and the toys on the floor, I write in the dark, uninterrupted hours of morning. Because it’s for me. It makes me happy and it makes me a better mom to do what I love. And before I know it my little girls will have their own lives and their own families and aside from having my husband’s undivided attention back, I will also hopefully have an established writing career. The laundry can wait.

Aiming Higher

The grocery store seems to be a place of particular difficulty for me and my daughters. We shop at a small co-op south of the city, and that might be part of the problem. It’s a small store and the girls are very comfortable there. So comfortable that they feel safe wandering away from my cart, exploring the isles, helping themselves to samples and clearing shelves into their mini cart when they see a package that looks appealing.

But it’s getting out of the store that is the hardest. Something about leaving the co-op leaves me angry and snappy each and every time. I don’t know if this will sound as aggravating on paper, but Thursday when we drove down just before lunch to grab those few essentials that can’t be substituted at our local Super Target, the girls were in classic form (I wish I could say it was rare).

As I waited in the checkout line, they each ran off and came back with armloads of treats and vegetable scrub brushes and random supplements that seemed necessary because of their “cute” small containers. As a mom, I’m used to being begged constantly for stuff and I’m really good at saying no. But having to repeat it over and over as calmly as possible, with a smiling clerk asking for my card, then my ID, then my signature, and with a long line of impatient shoppers having to move out of the way over and over for my daughters each bringing their “needed items” to my feet and then having to move out of the way for me while I chased my daughters’ wiggly bodies back out into the isles, all the while trying to bag my groceries as quickly as possible so I could get out of the narrow check out (this is not like a Cub or Rainbow where the isles are equipped to handle long lines and big piles of groceries; its more like, well like a tiny co-op) was more than I could handle with grace.

Finally the unaccepted items are back on the shelves and I am madly bagging groceries and loading them into our tiny cart. The girls have circled back and are filling their hands with brochures from the table near the door. Patrons are tripping over them as they come in and the table is a mess of mixed up literature. Suddenly I am sweating and have to rip my coat off. I make threats at my kids and pick up my last bag a little too quickly. One handle rips and the bag falls on the ground.

The mixture of anger and embarrassment is a lethal cocktail when it starts pumping through your bloodstream and no one is more at risk from this altered state of mind than your young kids who may or may not have triggered the anger in the first place.

I spit and hiss something incoherent at them but this fails to rein them in. They want their mini smoothy drinks that they convinced me to buy. Not wanting to argue, I uncap and hand them over. Finally, my broken bag is re-bagged and I am heading for the door. I am reminded not unkindly that the mini carts can’t go outside. Instead of getting a bigger cart, I decide I can carry the four moderately heavy bags.

Jada is putting the smoothy on the floor, right in the isle where customers walk to leave with their carts and groceries, so that she can climb onto the motorized wheelchair for patrons who cannot walk the isles. They should make a two-seater for moms with small kids. I tell Twila to come with me and Jada to get down and pick up her smoothy. Of course, none of this happens. Twila wants to “help” me get her down. I tell Twila to let me handle it. Of course, this doesn’t happen. Jada is now crying and Twila is about to stumble backwards into Jada’s smoothy. I set the bags down and grab their arms a little harder than I need to. Everyone is watching, and I’m angry and embarrassed.

I’m angry because I feel like I can’t get my kids to listen to me lately. It seems they don’t take me seriously until I lose it and scream at them, which makes me feel awful because I want to be a calmer mom than that. And I’m embarrassed because everyone is watching me lose it with my kids, looking at me like I’m “that mom” and I know that in this moment, I am that mom who we look at and pity but also despise as she screams at her kid in the toy isle. We despise her because we know her kids are her own creation. She’s made them this way and now she’s punishing them for being what she created. We pity her because we’ve all been there at one time or another.

Right now, I am that mom and I can’t pull out of it because adrenaline is coursing through me. I’m hot and tired and I just want to get out of the store. I tell Jada not that quietly that if she doesn’t pick up her smoothy I am throwing it away. Because she is in the master testing age, she doesn’t even consider picking it up. Instead, she stands back, keeping her eye on the smoothy and me, alternatingly.

She’s not the only one watching. The whole store, it seems, has stopped what they are doing to see if I will make good on my threat. So of course, I have to. I swiftly march over and pick up the smoothy and without hesitating, drop it in the trash.

“NOOOOOO!” Twila screams as if her beloved puppy has been ripped from her arms.

Jada comes unglued and hits the floor.

With super human strength, I somehow scoop up four bags of groceries and a writhing toddler. “Come on, Twila!” I bark and drag us out of the store.

It wasn’t the worst time we’ve had at the co-op, but it certainly wasn’t the best.

The girls sniffed in the backseat, dejectedly. As I drove, my rage ebbing as I started to see the ways I could have handled the situation better. Hindsight is so much clearer.

Twila shared sips of her smoothy in the backseat. Jada thanked her each time. Their sweetness to each other always amplifies the voice of guilt in my ear.

When I had calmed down, I explained to the girls why the grocery store ends up feeling stressful for me: having them run off, having to look for them, fix messes, say no over and over…

As I explained, my voice got higher pitched and intense and I realized I was still a little angry so I lapsed into silence again.

Last week Ryan was home between Christmas and New Years. The best thing about this is that he gets to see how hard it is to be home with the girls day after day. The worst thing is that we have a lot of fun when he’s home and when he goes back to work not only are there tons of mundane house work to catch up on, the absence of his warmth and fun is sobering to all three of us. I find myself doing a kind of tap dance to show the girls that we can have fun, just the three of us, but then end up resenting the tap dance I have to do for my daughters to get excited about me.

It’s become a running joke that whenever we all play some kind of imaginative game, Twila’s the princess, Ryan’s the prince, king, night, Jack, from Jack and Annie…Jada’s usually a baby, a little sibling or an animal, and I am always and invariably, a witch. Even if the story doesn’t easily include e a witch, we work one in for me, so I have a role to play. And though I’ve been told by a friend who has two boys and always has to be a dinosaur stuck in the mud, to count my blessings, after a while, it’s hard not to take offense.

Thursday was a hard day. Tuesday Ryan went back to work and everything was chaos and consolation. Wednesday Twila and I were gone all day seeing Hairspray at Chanhassen Dinner Theater, which was AMAZING and fun but took absolutely all day and I came down with a migraine on the way home at 4:30 so Thursday was the first day that real life had to come back together. Piles of laundry had to be folded, lists of things had to get done, Twila’s Kindergarten application had to be finished, bills had to be paid, checks had to be deposited, groceries had to be scavenged and collected. It wasn’t the most chaotic day we’ve had, but it certainly wasn’t the calmest.

Last night as I made dinner and attempted to check in with my email, while simultaneously fetching healthy snacks for the girls who just can’t wait until Ryan gets home to eat, I rounded the corner too fast and drilled my rib cage on the corner of one of our tall, heavy chairs. It just about dropped me. The wind was knocked out of me. I thought for a minute I might have cracked a rib. But far from noticing, the girls kept shouting at me to get things for them, kept shouting at each other. I felt so hurt—overly hurt—by their insensitivity. I know their just kids and they probably didn’t see it happen. But it hurt my feelings anyway to be treated like some robot whose primary function is to serve them.

I stormed into the kitchen where crumbs were being swept onto the floor that I had just cleaned and I barked that I was hurt. Of course this was news to them.

I left the half-made dinner and went and sat on the couch.

A few minutes later, Twila left her snack and came and stood by me and I hugged her.

“I didn’t know you got hurt, mom,” she said.

“I know.”

Then she wrapped her arms around my head and patted the back of my head in that maternal way she does. “That must have hurt your feelings that we were shouting at you to get us water when you were hurt.”

It’s not a new phenomenon for Twila to parrot our parenting back to us. But when it’s a positive gem of parenting wisdom instead of helicoptering over Jada or threatening to put us on timeout, it makes my heart just about burst with joy.

Just then Jada came slowly marching out of the kitchen, her half-eaten bowl of corn raised up high, her characteristic mischievous grin, lighting up her face, “Happy chew you, chew you!” She sang to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday to You.’

Twila and I smiled as Jada marched forward singing to us. She finished as she arrived and Twila and I blew out our imaginary candles.

And it’s that moment that I will hold with me today as I start another day, hoping for more peace and patience and less aggravation. I quietly sit in the quiet peace of predawn, before anyone else is awake, readying myself for another day. And when I look back on yesterday, but also on this era in our lives, I’ll remember that moment instead of the frustration and tension and stress that permeates some days. And I hope that’s what my daughters will choose to remember too.

Handling the Holidays

I woke up from an attempt to put my two year old down for a nap in a panicked haze. I was the only one sleeping. I could hear Twila rattling around in some distant corner of the house. Jada sat playing quietly in the corner of her room where her blocks had been discarded.

“Hi mommy!” Jada greeted me brightly as if she was scrambling eggs, waiting for me to roll out of bed and start the day.

I tried to shake the fog out of my head that’s been so prevalent these past three weeks. Something about the coming holiday, the unpredictable weather, my heaving hormones, and my crazy kids has made this an epically sleepy month. It’s not just a tiredness of the body; it’s a tiredness of the mind that no amount of deep sleep, vigorous exercise or caffeine seems able to chase away.

I lifted Jada into my arms and stumbled into the hallway to find out what kind of trouble Twila had busied herself with. The first thing I noticed was a fresh roll of bright red, candy-cane wrapping paper opened and sliced into any number of varying sizes on the guestroom floor, the scissors used to cut the paper, laying wide open amongst them. I walked a little further.

I bowl of tortilla chips sat on the table (the telltale snack of a child with an unavailable mom). Just as I walked up to see how stale the chips were, Twila came prancing out of the bathroom, a dozen clips in her hair, smelling like she’d rubbed a sea breeze candle all over her body. Turns out that’s exactly what she’d done.

“Hey, mom, how was your nap? Hey guess what?” She went on without pausing.

“Twila what’s with the mess in the guest room?” I interrupted, grumbling because I was overwhelmed with how quickly the house can get messy when I’m not paying attention.

“I’ll clean it up. But guess what, mom?”

But before she could finish, I noticed that the kitchen door was open.

“Guess what mom; a present came for me and Jada!”

“You opened the door?” It was the first coherent sentence I’d been able to form. Since Twila was two and a half and I started napping without her because I was exhausted from pregnancy, the one insistence I’d drilled into her each and every time I’d gone to lay down was of course: DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR—FOR ANYONE!

“It was just the mail man,” Twila seemed exasperated in her mature five year old way, with my missing the grand point that a present had arrived as if from nowhere—on our doorstep.

“Twila we never open the door when mom’s not around,” I said a little more grumpily than was necessary because I wasn’t fully awake from my nap and I was sick of being tired and was thoroughly incapable of meeting Twila at the level of energy she was skating on. She shrunk a little, and turned back to fancying herself in the bathroom.

I stalked around the house for a minute, trying to get my bearings. I walked into the living room where our tree stands tall and slightly imposingly in the corner. Underneath, the girls and I placed a couple of presents we’d wrapped for Ryan and his family the day before. Then I spotted it. There nestled with the blue Noel wrapping, was a big box in bright red candy-cane wrapping. It looked like it had been wrapped in four layers of paper and the tape almost completely covered the surface area. The wrapping was lumpy and wrinkled.

I knelt down by the package and just looked at it for a while. Jada climbed down and ran after Honey.

“Hey T,” I whispered because I knew she wasn’t far away and because I didn’t want to alert Jada who wants to be in the middle of whatever Twila is doing.

Twila came over.

“Did you wrap this present?”

She nodded.

“You are getting amazing at wrapping presents,” I said. And she leaned into my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Come on mom, I want to show you something—it’ll make you happy. You think it’s nothing special, right? Pretend you can’t see and you have to hold my hand.” Twila in her five year old maturity speaks in endless streams of thought and monologue that seem to require a response at regular intervals but rarely leave gaps long enough in which to respond.

She brought me to the guest room and showed me that all the wrapping had been cleaned up, the scissors put away. Jada came around the corner holding the cat in both arms. Honey’s head poked out as if it might drag against the wall and her haunches hung low. And I realized things are changing.

Things are changing fast. One challenging stage is replaced with another and we find ourselves missing the last one.

The end of this year has reached a gallop as Christmas draws near. In November a good friend gave me the idea to make advent activities for the kids. And since I’ve been looking for ways to deemphasize gift-giving and focus on preparing our hearts and minds for the holiday, this seemed like a great idea. Today there are only three loops left on the advent chain that holds an activity for each day. I can hardly believe we’ve done so many already.

When I tell people what we’re doing this year, they first say how cool that idea is and then they ask what kind of things we’ve been doing. I tell them it varies. One day the girls got to open a present that was a deck of cards, each with a science experiment we could try. One day we baked pumpkin bread loaves for the whole family. One day we made “I Care About You Bags” for the homeless and drove around passing them out. Last week we went down town to see Santa Clause and have breakfast, one day we read the Christmas story and drew the scene we imagined.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas is three days away in Minnesota. Whether it’s the complete lack of snow, or the massive influx of long and untreatable viruses we Minnesotans have been enduring, it just doesn’t feel like a time for peace and celebration. But these activities have helped.

Each day for the last month, the girls and I have had at least one moment in the day when we’ve sat together, talked about the holidays, gotten excited or reflected on the trials of different life situations.

Through some new friends of ours, we’ve taken up a collection of clothes and shoes and toys for seventeen young boys and girls living in Rwanda. This work has given Twila and me time to talk about how children live in other parts of the world, why it is so important to think about them and help support them.

The other day as Twila flitted around the house doing her five year old thing that is almost entirely independent these days, playing, leading Jada, inventing new ideas and games, she came up to me with a small jar she’d found in the cupboard. It had a few coins rattling loudly in it. “Mom, do you have any coins you can give me? I’m collecting money to give to people who don’t have any.” I could have fallen on the floor I ran so quickly to shake out my purse.

And that, I think is what I really want to teach my daughters this time of year. Yes it’s fun to bake cookies and open presents on Christmas morning. Yes, we love to celebrate with our families and cook grand meals and open bottles of wine. But Jesus’ life on earth was only partly about celebrating with friends and family. It was also, and probably more so, about service.

If Christmas is meant to commemorate the life of a person who did radical social works and gave everything he had to the people, it only seems right that our celebration honoring his life would do the same.

And just to see that Twila is getting it, just beginning to get it, but getting it, makes me feel like all the tedium of motherhood can actually be outweighed by the impact we ultimately have. People say that mothering is the most important job, but in reality, it doesn’t always feel that way. Hours of rocking fussy babies in the night, trying to be patient while redressing kids to get out the door and changing diapers that get dirty five minutes after we should have left, helping gather the materials for crafts and then moments later having to “help” clean them up again, negotiating transitions and doing our best to protect their bodies from the cold and sugar and busyness of this time of year. The truth is, sometimes it feels meaningless.

But in moments when you see your child take initiative, whether it’s to wrap a present or start a fund-raising project, a mother can see that her influence and lessons are taking root. And it’s enough to give a weary mother hope in this season of advent.

Blue Piss and Other Joys and Challenges

Walking through the aisles of Target the other day, I was working on being more light-hearted. It has occurred to me lately that I take myself, specifically, and “things” in general, far too seriously.

I have friends who are wound too tightly like me and mother as if the fate of the world lies in their children’s ability to listen to their mothers; and I have friends who model much more easy-going, unflappable mothering. I am grateful to have both because if I didn’t have my uptight, manic mother friends, I would feel like an isolated sociopathic freak; but if I didn’t have calmer, cooler-headed mother friends, I wouldn’t have anyone to emulate.

I was thinking of these mellow moms as I tried a new tack for shopping with two kids.

As any mother knows, (and any one who’s been in Target and witnessed a mother shopping with more than one kid) shopping with kids is HARD. I don’t care if you’re at Target, Macys, the Grocery Store or even Home Depot, your children will always find things they want to buy. And their constant, insistent expression of these desires will make you want to pull your hair out and will always make you forget at least one item on your list. Usually the one item you actually came to the store for.

Suddenly my daughters both think they need their own miniature paint rollers, colorful duct tape, light bulbs. If it’s packaged, they want it. I sweat and grit my teeth, make hushed threats and bribes as both girls run in opposite directions. Mothers with one child stroll calmly around the aisles singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ softly to their happy toddlers who want nothing more to sit belted in their seats, staring at their mommy’s face, and give me pitying looks, thinking my child will never be like that.

It was one such afternoon as we worked our way through Target buying glamorous things like giant packs of toilet paper, paper towels and Kleenex when Jada discovered that she can quiet easily wiggle out of the belt on the seat in the cart. Afraid she would pull an Evel Knievel and dive onto the tile floor, I let her get out and run next to (away from) the cart.

Soon Twila was laughing and running around too.

But instead of getting tense and angry, I smiled, laughed at their joy and energy. Who cares? I thought. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, Target is deserted. The girls are having fun. But Jada, being Jada, felt my calm and decided to test its endurance. She grinned, turning to the lowest shelves of Kleenex and began sweeping them on to the floor with one arm

“Awwww—Boo-Hiss!” I shouted, using my humor instead of my anger.

Twila thought this was fantastic and started shouting: “Blue-Piss! Blue-Piss! Blue-Piss!”

Jada, delighting in Twila’s humor started shouting what she thought we must be saying, “Boo—Bies, Boo-Bies!”

I wiped tears away from my eyes as I tried to gather them back up into the cart through my laughter. I loaded the Kleenex that was on the floor into my cart and ran for the exit, my girls shouting their innocent obscenities the whole way.

Two days later, I was glad we had stocked up Kleenex.

Twila and Jada both began coughing and sniffing. Assuming it was nothing more than a cold, I turned on the humidifiers, doubled the vitamin C and D intake, kept them warm and settled in to wait it out. We read lots of books, experimented with new crafts, played with blocks and their train set. And we waited. We waited, and waited and waited for the incessant, painful coughing to stop, for their noses to stop running.

After missing three days of school, I brought Twila to the doctor. Jada’s cough seemed to be improving so I let her skip an ear check. When the walk-in doctor looked in Twila’s ears he almost leapt back.

“That is a serious ear infection.” He said. Checking the other ear confirmed that she had a double ear infection.

We were prescribed Amoxicillin and went on our merry way.

But that evening, as Ryan got home from work and we got ready to start the weekend, Twila spiked one of the highest fevers she’s ever had. Her cheeks were beet red and her feet and hands were actually cold. We called the nurse line and were assured that a high fever often accompanies Amoxicillin. We started a rotation of Mortin and Tylenol and tried to get through the night.

Twila coughed and coughed, hardly sleeping. Eventually morning came. When Twila got out of bed on Saturday, her fever was already one hundred and four point eight. I climbed into a lukewarm bath and asked Ryan to grate some ginger. It’s an old natural remedy, maybe a wives tale but ginger is supposed to draw out a fever. It, and the bath, brought her temperature down to one hundred and two point three.

All day we did what we could to keep her comfortable and keep her fever down. She agreed to sip cool water but refused any and all food. Sunday brought more of the same. We coaxed a few bites of crackers in, a few chilled, canned mandarin oranges.

That night, Twila’s fever reached one hundred and five and Jada, still being treated for the pink eye they had contracted the week before, began coughing again. But this time it was the deep, painful, barking cough that Twila has. Sunday night they both coughed all night.

When Monday morning came, Ryan asked if I could handle things on my own. Since over the weekend our two fussy and hot babies had kept us both hopping all day and night long, I wasn’t sure. But they both had fevers right off and my plan was to drag them in to be seen again (two nurse line calls had gotten me no more information than I had had in the blearily hours of a sleepless night). Deciding I could handle two listless babies in a car, I told him to go.

Our regular doctor quickly confirmed that Jada had a double ear infection as well, though not nearly as advanced as Twila’s. She also shook her head in alarm at the fact that Twila’s fever had persisted through three days of Amoxicillin. After rechecking Twila’s ears she said that the drug had not even touched the infection. She instructed me to discontinue its use and prescribed a stronger antibiotic.

Back at Target, both my girls huddled in the cart, eyes wet and glassy, hacking up a lung and radiating heat.

All day Monday Twila lay nestled in our bed, coming in and out of consciousness as I fed her bites of fruit and crackers and sips of water. Jada stayed in my arms, or sat on the floor bawling until I could pick her up again. As the motrin worked its magic on Twila she wanted food but was still very sensitive and wined when Jada touched her, called me back each time I stepped out of the room (usually when I had just reached the other end of the house) and both girls needed everything right now. At two o’ clock, I was done running back and forth, trying to keep the girls apart but happy, fed and comforted. I called Ryan asking him to come home.

Today brings more of the same. Over the last four days, they have kept each other awake. No one had taken a decent nap. As one of them would doze off, the other would scream for something or cry out in frustration or pain from a cough and wake the other up. But today, after a visit through The Culver’s drive through lane, Twila fell asleep in the car. After she was loaded into my bed, I walked Jada around her room, laying her down occasionally and patting her back until she too was asleep. Now, almost two hours later as they both sleep, I enjoy the first quiet and peace I’ve had day or night in almost three weeks. It doesn’t even matter that I haven’t showered today; the silence refreshes me more than hot water could.

I try to enjoy it. I try to enjoy the silence, the lack of wining and fighting and calling out demands. I try to enjoy that I can sit in one place for more than thirty seconds without being summoned to come help in the bathroom, take back a toy on someone’s behalf, make a snack, clean-up a spill. But I can’t help but wonder and worry as I sit here: is this a foretaste of what is to come this winter? Last winter was very difficult for us. Each week seemed to bring a new virus. But these last three weeks have been the first stretch of time I’ve known as a mother that ushered in layers of viruses. Pink eye, bronchitis, ear infections, possible pneumonia now, my doctor warned yesterday. All these infections and sicknesses are piling on to my children all at once.

It doesn’t seem fair. Aren’t I doing everything I can to keep them well? We eat well, we take vitamins, they get lots of sleep, we wash our hands. As their doctor told me yesterday, “you’re doing all you can except keep them in a bubble.”

I know she was joking but as I look down the long dark hall of what this winter may bring, I consider for the first time in two years quitting the gym and homeschooling.

As they sleep, I am afforded for the first time some perspective. I actually miss their energy in this silence. Not their sick, unhappy, miserable energy but their joyful, buoyant, healthy humor and fun. I miss their antics in the aisles at Target and their ability to make each other laugh. I miss listening to them playing games and running around the house.

As I sit in silence I send up prayers spoken and unspoken that ‘energy and antics’ and not the worry and wining of these past four days will be our norm this winter.