It's A Glamorous Job, But Someone Has To Do It

The surest way to make sure your children will need your attention is to stop looking at them. No matter what you do to prepare them for the moment you turn your eyes away, it never fails.
"I am going to the bathroom and I would like to go ALONE," you say. You try to leave the children in the care of their father, who offers to take them to the toy section of Target, but the chance to be with you is just too good to pass up. Count on all the children jumping on the bandwagon, no matter how many or how few you have.

When you get to the bathroom, the little one will want to share a stall. He'll also want to pee first, but only after you cover the automatic-flush sensor with a strip of toilet paper so it doesn't go off on him mid-pee and scare the bejesus out of him. Then he will start to pee but have to stop to cover his ears when the hand dryers start to go off, because they sound like jet engines mounted in an echo chamber. He will stop and start three times, peeing all over the seat you need to sit on in the process. When he's done peeing, he will need help pulling up his pants and also buttoning them, because those fine motor skills are still developing. (I move that small people wear pants that close with velcro from now on. Someone make it happen.) By the time you finally get to use the toilet yourself, your eyes will be a deep shade of yellow and your bladder (whose structural integrity is probably questionable after birthing three children) will be at capacity plus one.

You'll have to pee fast, too, because the older children will have insisted on using the men's room, where there is never a line. They will have made it in and out of the bathroom in thirty seconds flat, and despite having been threatened with THEIR LIVES, could be up to anything out there by the water fountains. You will finish in record time and leave the bathroom without washing your hands, because it's easier to risk death from a staph infection than it is to peel a three-year-old off your face when he realizes the only way to dry his hands is with the jet engines. The older two will be outside the bathroom, standing where you told them to stand, but making fart noises with their armpits. Sweet relief. Sorta.

If this has never happened to you, your child is either a robot ... or imaginary. Or not your child at all, but a borrowed child actor who is highly paid to act like a robot.

Maybe you'll say something like this: "I have to hem some curtains, why don't you guys watch a movie?" Mothers of boys, here is where sex and gender roles and/or stereotypes will be tossed out the window. No, not tossed out the window--rather, crushed to death and then set on fire. They will be mere grease spots when your boys are done. Because your boy children, who actively seek out occasions to hate on Barbie and My Little Pony and Pretty, Pretty Princess toys and Easy Bake Ovens will suddenly develop a passionate interest in sewing. They will eat, sleep and breathe sewing. They will live and die for sewing. (Not that boys don't sew. It's just that MY own children typically prefer shooting each other with Nerf darts and trying to play their farts to the tune of Mario Brothers.)

"Can you teach me how to hand-sew?" they will beg, little beseeching faces turned up like sunflowers. And the oldest child, who is gifted and perhaps lacking the proper amount of common sense, will invent a design project so epic that even Tim Gunn would cry about it. "I just need some duct tape, a staple gun, some fleece and some matches," he will say, smiling as he sketches out his idea: The Ultimate Flaming Sweater of Doom, which his teddy bear will wear. The middle child will start sewing something and then cry because it's TOO HARD and he's NOT GOOD AT IT, right before he stabs himself with the needle--while the little one will find something sharp (a rotary cutter, perhaps, or your best sewing scissors) and make small pieces of fabric even smaller. Really, you should thank your children. All you wanted to do was hem some curtains, but here they are, showing you how fun sewing really is, infusing everything with a new joie de vivre.

Right?

Perhaps one night you'll have a headache, the splitting, hold-your-head-together-with-your-hands kind. You'll eat dinner, down some aspirin, then slink off to bed, stealthily leaving the children in the care of their capable and willing father.  You will get comfortable-ish and pull your head under the blankets, but the peace won't last long--the little one will climb the stairs and find you. He will seek you out like a hired hitman, and then he will jump on your head. "Mommy!" he will say, with exactly the same look on his face as you might have upon rediscovering a dear, long-lost friend. He has been looking for you his whole life! Of course, you won't be so happy to see him. You, being in pain, will yelp, which will make him cry. And cry. And cry: the kind of heartbroken, wounded keening you only hear at funerals, which will then give way to blood-curdling shrieks when you threaten to throw him out of the room.

The final blow will be delivered when he finds out you won't be turning on the TV in your room for his enjoyment. You gently remind him that his FATHER and his BROTHERS are watching Nova downstairs, but it will be too late. Rather than join the people with the television, your three-year-old will instead choose Option B: writhe around on the floor, fake choking and pretending he's about to vomit. "I really think I'm gonna throw up!" he will wail, and then he'll grab his throat and cough cough cough. "I don't know what to doooooooooooo!" he will add, with more stage coughing and writhing.

"You should go downstairs. Or go to bed," you say. "Just get. out. of. my. room."  You will bite the words off short, willing your hands to stay at your sides, your voice to remain measured and patient, but you won't be able to keep the hissing note of anger completely out of it. You will sigh. You will try to remember that he's only a child and he's probably tired. But then you will realize it's been ten minutes, he's still shrieking, and you're in danger of having to pick the left side of your head up off the floor. It will take all your strength not to punch him in the face. You DO take the high road, though, and simply say, "I'm walking away now." Which you do. The only problem with this plan is that the child is still in your room, with your big comfy bed, and you are downstairs on the much lesser futon.

Alone time is for chumps.

This "remove your eyes, need attention" rule always applies, no exceptions, regardless of whether your child is male or female. At the playground--you will look away, and your child will choose that moment to land face first in the mulch at the bottom of the slide. At the doctor's office--you will be filling out a form, and your child will scale the exam table and start ripping the sterile paper on which he's sitting. At the petting zoo--you will be putting a quarter in the food machine, and your child will trip over a chicken and land in a water bucket.

It's the hard, honest, painful truth. You can laugh or cry--but you'll never walk alone.