Puzzles

As a kid, when I pictured being a mom, I pictured it pretty much exactly the way it was tonight. My baby was sleeping sweetly, while Magoo, Laylee and I put a puzzle together and sang along to The Sound of Music at the top of our lungs. Swedish Fish were available in a secret mom-only stash and my hot husband was in the kitchen cleaning the dishes.

Laylee is all kinds of good at warbling like the reverend mother and when Magoo belts out Sixteen Going on Seventeen, my heart does a sort of burbling flip flop. He really is innocent as a rose. According to J. K. Rowling, he is also a Hufflepuff which surprises absolutely no one. Magoo puts the Fflepuff in Hufflepuff.

When I pictured being a mom, I did not picture spending hours of my life devoted to an ongoing battle with all the bodily fluids and their many orifices of dispersal.

In a single day last month, I changed three sets of pee-soaked sheets, cleaned urine out of the carpet and a mattress, and scrubbed up the fallout of a vomit explosion that blasted from the couch, ALL across my folded laundry and along about twelve feet of carpet, magically stopping just before it reached the bathroom tile.

That day was a little extreme but if I did a sit-up for every cup of bodily ick I’ve touched in the last nine years, you’d be able to wash clothes on my abs.

We were at the swimming pool on Friday and when I picked 2-year-old Wanda up off the patio, she said, “YAY! Now you can pee on mine lap!”

She also says things like, “I wanna carry you!” when she’s tired of walking, so I put two and two together and asked, “Are you peeing on me right now?” as the “water” ran down my leg.

“Ye-ah!” she chirped, “It’s the TRUTH!”

It is the truth. Motherhood is not all puzzles and badly-sung show tunes. Sometimes it’s urine. Lots and lots of urine. But luckily, it’s also about secret stashes of Swedish Fish. Here’s to hoping no one walks around in his sleep tonight, spraying the world down with his man hose and then curling up shivering in the puddle he’s created.