Only Sixteen Hundred Fifty-Six More Days

Eighth grader is taxing the limits of my Motherosity, let me tell you. Taxing it like a gainfully employed middle class American. Like cigarettes in New York City. If this kid pushes down any harder on my buttons today, I might burst into a live reenactment of Willy Wonka's elevator.

Motherosity is the word I use to describe the otherwise indescribable package of skills and characteristics required to raise decent children without dosing them daily with Benadryl. Patience, understanding, love, discipline, ability to multi-task...these are terms for amateur gardeners. Motherosity is a special brand of fierceness married to tenderness having an illicit affair with omniscience in regard to your child's whereabouts, doings and needs: Some days, all are content with their lot and life carries on. Other days, it's a hot mess.

Guess which day today is.

Today, for starters, is Monday. Monday is the day that comes after the weekend is over - hence, "weekend", signifying the end of the previous week - and thus most people regard as the time to get back to business. For eighth grader, this translates to Go To School and Then Come Home and Do Your Homework and Clean Your Room. How many Mondays have I said this now? Monday is a day when Sixth Grader has multiple activities to be shuttled off to attend, thereby rendering Eighth Grader alone for a brief period of time during which she could easily demonstrate to me how marvelously mature and ready she is for the TV she wants in her room and the laptop she wants for Christmas. How? Come Home and Do Your Homework and Clean Your Room. That's twice just this evening alone that I have spelled it out, and I bet you got it the first time.

Imagine for a moment that you are Eighth Grader. You have been in middle school for approximately fifty-one Mondays now, and with few exceptions the instructions on Mondays have sounded exactly the same. And the instructions are what again?

Go to school. Come home. Do your homework. Clean your room.

Imagine further that on Friday night, you went to a nine-thirty movie with your friends and then slept over one of those friend's houses. Imagine that on Saturday, you had several of your friends over your own house and, although you were instructed that said friends must go home at ten, you did not communicate this to said friends UNTIL ten, thereby postponing their ride-getting ability by an additional half hour. Step out on the imagining branch one more length and dress up in your Halloween costume, go trick-or-treating with your pack o' friends sans parents and then unexpectedly bring your entire pack-o'-friends home with you, on Sunday night as your mother is putting dinner on the table, and liberally spread them and their candy and their discarded costumes around the kitchen and family room, triggering the "must feed children" mechanism of the Motherosity so that the family's dinner for four is made to now feed nine, five of whom again don't seem to have any immediate plans to go home. (I will not bore you with the tedium that is Why Trick-or -Treating in November. I'm just grateful that it's over.)

Remember. You are in Eighth Grade. When I was in eighth grade, there was no way I would have been able to pack that much friend time into one weekend. Weekends belonged to my seventy hour a week working father, and most of them were dead silent except for his window rattling snoring on the living room couch. But this is not that childhood. Motherosity inflation has occurred such that the "I want your friends to hang out here so I can get to know them" mechanism has been activated and occasionally belched smoke from overuse. Fine. So, fun weekend. And now it's Monday. And what do we do on Monday?

Apparently, we go to the coffee shop with our friends after school and have the audacity to text our mother asking if she can bring us money. When our mother doesn't reply and we still have no money, apparently we then bring all of our friends home with us and assume they can "hang out". When my Groom, who was delegated shuttle-arounder of Sixth Grader today, firmly nixes this "hanging out," we place an angry call to our mother at work and proceed to have a screaming match with my Groom for my helpless enjoyment. We rile things up so severely that we induce Sixth Grader to tearfully join in, because the only thing that Sixth Grader ever wants is for everyone to be happy and get along perfectly. We finally acknowledge that our mother is on the phone with us and undoubtedly we hear her say "everyone must leave right now, go and clean your room.". Undoubtedly we hear this.

When our mother arrives home roughly an hour later, where are we? Are we cleaning our room? No. We are HANGING AROUND on the front steps outside WITH OUR FRIENDS because they are WAITING FOR THEIR RIDES. Which it seems they are calling for at this present moment. For the first time.

I wish I could say that bestowing the gift of "You're grounded" gave me some sense of satisfaction, some payoff for being the adult here. But really, without the Benadryl option, grounding is just a major pain in the ass. More monitoring, days of being looked at with scowling incredulity that she is really and truly grounded, and at the end of it, the blank response of an unremorseful teenager who does not get that someday her kids are going to put her through these same headaches and then, finally, she will get it and appreciate my Motherosity.

I consoled myself by counting up roughly how many more days until I move this child out of my house and into a college dorm. Preferably one that is close enough for her to come home on weekends for a home-cooked meal, but that requires her, on Mondays, to be back at school and off my watch.