There are certain things no one tells you when you sign up for motherhood, and it's for a good reason, or else there wouldn’t be mothers. No one tells you that your child will puke on you, or puke on their swimming instructor. No one tell you that your child will have an explosion in their pants, long after they've outgrown diapers. No one tells you that you'll be sneezed on, coughed on, used as a tissue. No one tells you that you'll get pink-eye during finals week from your child. No one tells you that your children will inherit your less desirable genes along with the ones you've always hoped to pass on to future generations.
Oh there were so many things Jeremy and I would dream our children would inherit from us: his brown skin, his musical ability, my artistic ability. We would look at our kids for the physical features they possess that have been handed down from generation to generation. "Look, he inherited the eyebrows!" "Wow, she is JUST like you in personality." Those are the things that made us want to have offspring, to keep a little piece of us alive into the future, long after we've left this earth. We didn’t think once about the negative crap we'd hand down to them as well, like nosebleeds.
Oh Ruth is her father's child, right down to the nosebleeds. Jeremy suffers horrible and disgusting nosebleeds. It was one of those fun things I learned about AFTER I married him. I'm not sure how long after, I just remember waking up in the middle of the night to him sitting next to me, a puddle of blood on his pillow, streams of blood dripping down his hands, his face covered in blood, holding a tissue trying to contain it enough to make a run for the bathroom. I freaked out. I had never seen so much blood just randomly decide to make a public appearance through the nasal cavity. Over the years, he learned how to prevent them with a q-tip and some Vaseline before bedtime. I've begged him to see a doctor to get those troublesome capillaries cauterized, but I supposed the idea of sticking a burning stick up the nose to seal them off outweighed the inconvenience of the bloody nose. I can't tell you how many pillows I've thrown out.
So this morning, I got up early before church to get a nice soak in the tub. It was Jeremy's turn to play his cello, so he and Josh were leaving early for practice, and we were going to catch up with them when the service started. Ahhhh. A nice Mother's Day soak in the tub. I deserved it, I felt. I was not five minutes into the soak when Ruth bounded into the bathroom, covered in blood, moaned and threw her head over the sink. "I have a terrible terrible nose bleed" she whined.
I hopped out of the tub, dripped across the hallway, grabbed a wad of tissues from Josh's bedroom, dripped back over threw them over her nose, and grabbed a washcloth. I proceeded to wipe off all the blood which was on her hands, neck, chest, legs, feet, arms, and even her butt. How did the blood get on her butt, I will never know. I then cleaned up the floor, the sink, the wall behind the sink, the mirror, the toilet, the stool she was standing on, and any other surface that had been dripped upon. I began to follow the trail of blood back to her bedroom. I wiped down the floor, the rug, the bunk bed ladder, the walls, the top bunk, the bunk bed railing. I was still wet and dripping. "It looks like we killed someone in here," I commented to Ruth. Then I took stock of the crap in her bed.
Ruth is also like her father in that she must sleep with a ton of crap, er, I mean, soft squishy stuff padded around her. I managed to break Jeremy of this when we got married, though, when I'm not around, he will pile blankets around himself in the bed and make a "womb" for himself. She goes a little further with the "womb" and adds extra pillows and stuffed animals. Once I thought I had lost her, only to realize she was so buried under her fluff, I couldn’t see her. She had been tired after school, and crawled up into her "womb" and fell asleep without my knowing. But I digress. After realizing that at least one drop of blood had ended up on the vast majority of her blankets and pillows, I decided I should throw on a towel. My soak was over.
I wrapped my hair up, and threw another towel around my body, grabbed her crap and walked it down to the basement to put some stain remover stuff on it. There was too much to put into one load. While I was busy fighting stains, my towel kept falling off. Much like a Laurel and Hardy skit, I stood at the washing machine trying to hold my towel on with one hand and applying stain remover with another, fighting with huge comforters and fluffy pillows and stuffed animals. Finally, I gave up. Gravity won, and I just said "Heck with it." Dropped the towel, finished stain fighting, walked up stairs, on my way to find some clothes, though at that point, it almost didn't matter anymore.
That's another thing no one tells you when you sign up for motherhood. If you've ever had one shred of modesty at any point in your life, kiss it goodbye.
Happy Mother's Day!
“Yes,” I repeated. “I’m sure Miss E wrote those. Do you think someone would sneak into our yard and just randomly write B’s and P’s and R’s?” I tried to reason with The Boy.
