It's just that sometimes, you get full and want to take a rest from eating gingerbread. Well, taking a break wasn't part of the plan. Your job was to eat those walls. That was the plan. People look at you and say, "Well, you chose to live there. You built that house. What's your problem?" Oh, I don't know. Have you ever TRIED to eat a life-size, metaphorical gingerbread house? As jobs go, it's a sweet one, but it's sortof a Herculean task.
We had the fun idea tonight of the whole family visiting each child's room and listening to them play a song on their instrument before bedtime. Yum! Pass the gingerbread! A half hour later and envisioning myself knee-deep in nauseatingly sweet frosting, I was pounding on the gingerbread door. Let me out!! Kids were jumping on beds, dogs were barking, instruments were being tossed around precariously, and videos were being made of all the chaos.
I thought: "Quality family time blows!"
Now all the kids are tucked into their ginger-beds. As much as I wanted to vomit up a pile of icing icicles while the kids were awake, now I feel almost like I could eat a sugar windowpane or two. Life in this gingerbread house is intense. It's love and loathing, joy and despair, fatigue and elation, gratitude and fear, and it's all mixed into one giant cocktail that you hope will wash down the mouthfuls of gingerbread that have become your existence. Learning how to love and enjoy massive, relentless amounts of gingerbread is both far more wonderful and far more challenging than you ever imagined, and it takes patience, acceptance and dedication that you didn't even know you had and still aren't sure you possess.
Even when you've had enough, you keep at those walls because someday, when you've eaten up your gingerbread house, you'll move into a nice, sensible house where the walls aren't painfully delicious and exquisitely beautiful. The walls will be bare and the house will be empty.
And you'll be hungry.
8 comments:
Isn't there a country song that says, "You're gonna miss this...." and it talks about all the things you said. I know we'll miss all the chaos when their gone, but when you are knee deep in it, thinking of the "empty nester" years ahead can be a bit appealing.
I try not to get ahead of myself though. It is already going too fast. Six years and Lex is gone. Six! That is nothing. Enjoy the moment!
This is amazingly beautiful. I really think you should submit this to magazines. Although, it might turn the picture-perfect concept of parenting on its ear. (What kind of marketing is that?) Yet that is precisely why I love what you've written. You know life is not perfect but you love it anyway.
Jeff's family has a tradition of decorating (wooden) gingerbread houses every year. I'm already dreading the candy.
Beautifully put. We all will be hungry someday.... thus we must enjoy the present. Thanks for the reminder.
xoxo
Oddly enough, your post makes me want to bake ginger snaps. Keep on chewing, you can do it!!
amen!
Wonderful! I love everything you do!
I love your analogy and agree you should be published. I've used the analogy that mothering is like knitting something - with really beautiful yarn - but the kids are behind you pulling out all of your stitches. Sometimes, at night when they're asleep, perhaps, you get ahead a few stitches but it takes a lot of time to make that yarn into something beautiful. :)
Perfectly put as always Circ. A needed reminder for me after my week of sickies. What will I do when I don't have someone to take care of?
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