When I look back on the past 38 plus years of marriage, I am not quite sure how my husband and I survived the years raising a house full of boys. It really doesn’t matter if it is a house full of boys or girls, or one boy or girl. Life is hard and now that my sons are in their 30’s with the trials of careers, marriage, finances, and children, I can only nod my head when they call me up. All I can say to reassure them is the “30’s” are rough. The “40’s” get a little better because you begin to prioritize better. And the “50’s” get good because you really don’t care that much anymore.
By the time you get into your 50’s the Jones’s next door don’t matter because you have lived long enough to know the grass does grow greener over the septic tank and their tank is filled with the same stuff as yours regardless of how perfect they seem. You start to realize that the bills will get paid eventually. The promotion isn’t that big of a deal anyway. Your kids are no smarter or mischievous than the next. And no matter how much you plan every now and then you will suddenly realize you’ve run out of toilet paper.
The other day one of those evening celebrity news shows was playing while I chopped onions for our dinner. And there was that television star with a head full of gray hair I had once swooned over as a teenager. Watching his smile flash across the screen, a sudden memory made me smile.
We had just moved here 30 years ago. The boys were all small. In fact, the oldest of our four had started kindergarten, and having been home his first five years with me and his brothers he seemed to be bringing our way every cold, virus, and bacteria he could encounter. Within a matter of months, we had passed around the flu, a stomach virus, a head cold, and the chicken pocks. My mother-in-law was so concerned she brought olive oil to our house to anoint it and pray away the haunting.
I will never forget packing up the boys into the minivan leaving behind an actual mound of cleaned laundry to be folded on some coming day. All I had managed to keep up was the washing and drying. There was a stack of dirty dishes, and uncooked dinner still frozen in the freezer, and floors and a bathroom needing to be disinfected. I had been living on fumes.
I was sitting in the pediatrician’s office trying not to nod off when I began flipping through one of those celebrity magazines. And there he was. Bruce Boxlietener, my favorite television star, was newly married to Melissa Gilbert, my all-time favorite Little House on the Prairie character. I wanted to be her growing up with my cane pole and tin bucket. I had even dressed like her for Halloween in the 2nd grade.
But there I sat as Jacob sneezed snot on my face as Caleb was climbing over my shoulder to get to his big brother who was making faces. Tears began to roll down my face when a lady to my right asked if I was ok. I just showed her the cover of the magazine with these glowing gorgeous perfect people. And she looked at me like I had snapped. I had. That was when I began writing my first screenplay, Will’s Fargo, and started writing my small vignettes which later became this column on life as “a prehistoric housewife.”
Thirty years later and going strong with four grown sons, a small writing and educational career, and knowledge that the perfect couple on that cover was not perfect after all, I now know what I wish I could impart to my grown children but will have to learn on their own. When life gives us lemons, know this too shall pass, and the rainy days give strength so the stalks will stand. But no matter how much you plan every now and then you will suddenly realize you’ve run out of toilet paper.
