Of Playrooms and Padlocks

Ok, I’ll admit it…my children have more toys than probably all of the royal houses of Europe combined.  My daughter has more stuffed toys than any 10 toy stores put together.  I am an over-indulgent, push-over, type mom when it comes to all things child related…toys especially.  I don’t spend money on clothes (my husband does that), I don’t spend money on shoes (all shoes are torture devices that you are forced to wear outside), I don’t spend money on my kitchen or furniture, I spend money on toys, games, and movies.  Or in other words I spend money feeding childhood needs and wants…both ours and our children’s!

When I was a child, one of the most vivid memories I have is the week I spent without toys…as my mother put a padlock on my toy box.  Yes, she did and it was life-altering!  I begged and pleaded to have my toys back, but to no avail, my mother stood firm.  I was the 7^th of 7 children, so that really isn’t surprising.  I remember laying on my locked toy box crying and clutching my blanket.  I knew my happiness was locked in that box calling to me, but no matter what I couldn’t get to it.  All I could do is lay on top and mourn.  This is something I have spent many years being angry at my mother about, and swearing up and down that I would never do to my children!

*Enter heart-wrenching tears, gut wrenching realizations, and the echos of my mother’s laughter as I crawled into my bed that evening.*

Since having an extra room in our home I have made for my children a playroom for their toys.  It is actually really awesome and I have ignored my craft room in favor of this project for them.  I have made a zoo for all the big stuffed toys.  I have hung a lot of the smaller ones from the ceiling to make it look cooler.  I put a tv and gamecube in there so my baby-girl can play her Mario DDR or SmartCycle.  I have toy organizers and bins and trunks for their toys.  This is just upstairs too, downstairs they have their “Harry Potter Closet” also filled with the toys and decorated with Pokemon sprites.  As you can tell, I worked my butt off and put my children first…because I love them!

So what does my daughter do…throw everything on the floor and jump on them.  All the stuffed toys are pulled from the zoo, all the toys are dumped from the bins, and you can’t even get in the door!  Then she leaves it to go watch tv!  This is unacceptable to me, I can understand doing it once or even twice, but 3 times when she has been told not to!  I have explained to her that this is not playing with the toys when you just throw them on the floor and step on them.  I have also told her that I wouldn’t care if she just cleaned them up.  The 3^rd time it happened I told her to clean it up, because if I did then I would be locking the door.  I gave this child all afternoon to do this…nothing!  So finally I went in there and started cleaning up…and by this point I was really angry!  At that point all she could do was watch, as I told her that if it was in that room then it was staying in that room.  Suddenly the blood drained from her face, as she realized that she had brought all her “friends” from her bed in there…thus started the screaming.

“And it came to pass that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the land of Jordan!”

As I finished and closed and locked the door, she pounded and cried.  When she went to bed that night she was pitiful with her cries of loneliness.  This is when the agonizing reality hit me…Damn it!  I just put a padlock on my kids’ toy box!  I did the same thing that my mother had done to me…I did what I swore I would never do!  My mother chuckled at me when I told her that I put a padlock on Casey’s toy box.  I hung my head as I went off to sob silently into my pillow at the horribleness of what I had done.  For days I was depressed and felt guilt…all encompassing guilt!  I know what everyone is thinking…this is a reasonable response to a given situation…and you are so right, but I still felt guilt.  I managed to make it through the week and resist her cries for her friends, and we all seem to be doing much better this week.

 So here’s to being a mom and having to do the really hard things.  Here’s to pad locks and playrooms.  And here’s to becoming our mothers…may we not cry too hard when we do something “terrible” again!

My Mother

I have spent some time over the past few days thinking about mothers, and in particular about my own mother in approaching this Mother’s Day.  I have been putting together a card for her that I saw on Pinterest a few weeks ago, and this card involves cutting and gluing…2 things that I hate above all others.  Why I hate cutting and gluing is a blog for another day…but I was sitting there working really hard on this card for my mother, all the while the demon that lives inside me was screaming.  He hates cute and pretty, and this is nothing but cute and pretty.  My demon is also a blog for a different day, and by the way he hates Pinterest!  Anyway I was sitting working ever so fervently on this project for my mother, doing things I hate, with an entity writhing inside me…finally the thought struck me, why are you doing this?!  So I have been thinking about why I did that…what is it inside us that makes us do things we wouldn’t do for anyone else, but we will willingly do for our mothers?

I can’t answer that question for anyone else, but over the course of the last few days I have come to understand the answer for me.  I have thought a lot about my mother, what she has taught me and how I came to feel the way I feel about her.  I think we all love our mothers…even if they do things that hurt us, and some people have horrible mothers…but even then I think we all have a need inside us to love them.  They gave birth to us in most cases, they raised us by sacrificing their own needs and wants, and they continue to love us despite our often stupid behavior.  My mother once told me that I was the light of her life, and that has stuck with me to this day.  It was a family home evening we were doing and we all had to write down on a strip of paper what we loved about our other family members…and to this day I can still see her handwriting on the strip that says “she is the light of my life!”  It is the only one I remember, but the rest were written by my brothers that were there, and all they ever wrote was that I made a great ball to throw around.  Anyway, that was my mother, and she was always that way…I don’t think any of us could ever doubt her love for us, as she gave her love freely and openly.

 My mother taught me what love is by loving me, no matter what I did that was monumentally stupid.  My mother, who was a custodian at a church building, taught me that the only way to listen to Neil Diamond was at full blast in the cultural hall while you were cleaning.  My mother taught me respect by showing me what respect was.  She taught me to learn by learning with me.  She taught me to enjoy the little things in life by making everything fun.  We used to stop and get an ice cream cone on the way home and we would race to see who could eat theirs first…I still lose to this very day!  I remember being a child and being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up…the only thing I could every think to answer was “mom”.  The only nightmare I remember having as a child was that someone took my mom from me…I woke up screaming.  When I went to school I was more concerned about what mom would do without me there than what I was facing in school.

 Understand that I am the last of 7 children that my parents had, and my mother gave birth to me at home on her bed early on a Sunday morning.  My father did the catching and cutting, but my mother went through that for the 7^th time far from a hospital.  I watched my mother growing up making everything work as best she could, whether it was money or one of my siblings doing something that caused her heart to break, she made it work and got up every day to face the world again.  I have seen the great times, and I have seen the really bad times…and someday I will have to see her leave this life.  I can very easily say that she has been my best friend, and really the only lady I can talk to about anything.

 I have gone through some horrible times in my life, but the one thing that has always been constant in my life is the love my mother has always shown me.  My mother loves rainbows, she still comes to get me when she sees any, and what she doesn’t realize is that she was my rainbow when all I saw was gray.  No matter how difficult the depression became, all I would need was to hear her loving voice and I could see the color in the world again.  When she would visit, I swear she brought a rainbow with her to brighten my life!  Even to this day my mother is a rainbow in my life, she surrounds herself with them, and she is teaching my children to see the rainbows as well. 

 So why did I cut and glue so fervently for my mother…because my mother is my rainbow!  Here’s to you Mom!  Thank you for being my rainbow, thank you for loving me, and thank you for everything you taught me about being a mother.  I pray I have made you proud.  Because Mom, you light up my life!  Happy Mother’s Day!  I love you.