Hellish. That's the only word to describe my day. The kids had half a day of school, so they walked in the door at 12:30 p.m., and I was ready with my Plan. Rebecca was going to do a little lawn mowing to earn some Points (at our house, you have to have a certain number of Points to do fun things like sleepovers, etc.); Suzanne was going to help here and there with yardwork; the two of them were going to help me move stuff out of the workroom to take to the church for the Boy Scout yard sale tomorrow; I had a healthy snack recipe ready for Rebecca to make, with all the ingredients on the kitchen counter--I was ready.
Rebecca hated the recipe; she wanted to make smores, and guess what I forgot to buy at the grocery store: graham crackers. Not only did I not get an A for effort, I got an evil look. She stomped outside and after five minutes announced she was done mowing the lawn. When I checked and saw weeds knee high and told her to mow some more, she kicked the lawnmower and stormed inside. Suzanne was suffering a severe Mommy Deficit and I could hardly make a step without her wrapped around my leg. They fought like two scorpions in a bottle and when they weren't fighting or clinging or giving me evil looks they were whining--I swear Suzanne could easily make the Olympic Whining Team, no coaching required. Hell, she could be the coach.
Somehow we got all the castoffs to the yard sale dropoff point and then went by my friend Ann's house. Ann's daughter likes to play with Suzanne but today for whatever reason she was Rebecca's acolyte, her adoring slave; whatever Rebecca said, she did, and Suzanne was chopped liver, which of course made Suzanne more miserable. Late in the day, they decided to put caterpillars in jars, which was fine....but then a jar got misplaced and I thought Suzanne was going to have a stroke: a little red face, tears streaming over the freckles, and every nerve in my body ready to shred into little bitty pieces. When David got home I went for the Xanax.
And then tonight, just before bed, Suzanne is curled up on my lap, and I say, "Sweetie, I'm sorry Mommy was so grumpy today," and she looks at me in genuine surprise and says, "You weren't grumpy, Mommy," and I feel my heart crack. Either grumpy is S.O.P. around here, or she has a sweet and forgiving nature, or maybe it's a little bit of both. I am left to ponder.
And as I do (it's late now), I have this overwhelming desire to pick up the phone and talk to my mommy--to say, "Were there ever afternoons you just wanted to kill us?" and to hear her say, "Oh, yeah, honey," and to compare notes on who was worse, her kids or mine. It's little things like that you miss when people die. I know she would have enjoyed it; she'd have chuckled at her granddaughters' misbehavior, and advised me to slack off a little, not to be so uptight about everything, because they're only little once. (Even though she never followed her own advice; she was plenty uptight.) But I missed her. So I went to the closet and got out the lotion I smoothed on her face as she lay dying, which I saved for times like these, because the sense of smell is one of the most primitive memories; the brain remembers scents long after other details are gone. I smoothed the lotion on my own face, and the sweet fragrance brought her to me for just a nanosecond.
So now the kids are upstairs sleeping, and tomorrow we start over. There are days when being a parent makes coal mining look easy, but the good thing is that you do get to keep trying to get it right.