Here Comes the Fun

Those of you who follow my every move on twitter or facebook (all of you, right?) know that I tried a different parenting tactic today. I tried being as crazy as fuck, just like my kids, to see how that would go.

I called her “ Sam Kinison Mom.” You laugh at the fart joke you just made? She loses her MIND laughing at the fart joke you just made. She one ups your fart joke! You scream at her that your toast isn’t ready yet? She sings, “It’s toasting / and that’s how it goes / you just have to wait / wait for your to-o-o-oast” to the tune of Crazy Train. You want to hear Crazy Train 8 times in a row? It is So Not a Problem.

As you see, Sam Kinison Mom is not so different from me in real life. It just seems that lately I have been too wrapped up in being a different kind of mom. The kind who not only sweats the small stuff but goes immediately to shower off the sweat and then applies anti-perspirant right away so that there’s no more sweating and then DAMMIT I’M SWEATING AGAIN and back to the shower and guess what.

Things I need to care about my children doing:

– running into traffic
– falling off high structures
– eating their own excrement or the excrement of others
– killing / maiming each other

That’s it. Now that’s a list specific to my children. Those are the life-threatening things they might do in a given day. Your list might look different. But everything else, all the things I would have sworn up and down were not on the above list but kept behaving as though they were? (Uh, like convoluted sentence structure?) Not caring. Laughing it off. Water off this duck’s back.

After half a day of this I have noticed I have more energy. We had a usual morning; a walk uptown to the library and a quick trip in and out to get new movies (we have lots of books at home [I feel the need to say this as loud as I can every time we go in the library, to defend myself against the totally not-even-listening people around me who I am sure think of me as some illiterate buffoon who only takes her kids to the library for the free movies but if we stay any longer than 5 minutes, Fresco’s trigger finger gets real itchy]) and then a stop at the park where there were blessedly few others.

I made dumb jokes and Trombone laughed and periodically I would have to run – no, really, RUN – after Fresco who was determined to get into the petting farm and pet him some of those damn goats but I did this real exaggerated running, like I was Prefontaine in flip flops, attracting the attention of all the grandmas and nannies and you know, I’m reading this as I type it and I’m thinking, how and when did I forget that this is who I am anyway? When did I start taking the job so seriously that I couldn’t crack a dumb joke at my kid and run after my other kid in an exaggerated way? How is it worth mentioning at all? I really don’t know. Things just build; lack of sleep leads to stress and stress leads to cranky and kids have moods and at some point in the past, I don’t know, week? I started fighting it instead of going with it. Fighting what? All of it. Everything.

Which is easy to see right now when the balance is such that I feel good.

And it could also be that the sun came out today.

Or hormones.

(Or that I just remembered that I am on a PC now, not a Mac so I have a forward delete key again. Bwa ha ha ha ha!)

But I think it’s mostly that I had forgotten how good laughing feels. And that it’s contagious. And that I am the one who makes my day. I am my own boss. Why would I act like a bitter civil servant when I don’t even have any paper to shovel or idiot higher-up to obey? Shit, guys. Life is good.