Thursday, August 11, 2011

There was that One Time...

It's significantly easier for me to write about difficult experiences long after they actually occurr.  It's not that I don't want to share such experiences, but I live with the illusion that my perspective softens over time, and I can share things with a little more humor and insight.

It's probably just a survival mechanism.

Perhaps there's a little part of me that thinks if I share old stories, it looks like everything is better now and I've learned something or gotten better at child-rearing. I hate to admit it, but crazy stuff still happens around here.  You just won't hear about it until something else even crazier happens and what's happening today no longer seems so bad.

Not long ago, during a family car trip, Jason and I were discussing how we could trust our third child to babysit our fourth without worrying, yet we couldn't trust Jordan, who is older, to babysit without the fire department showing up.  Since we weren't actually talking to any of the kids, they heard every word we said, and Jordan was livid.

He angrily responded to our lack of trust by shouting, "I have NEVER done anything that caused the fire department to show up at the house!  A few cop cars, maybe."

The car was silent.

Then Jordan spoke a little more quietly, "Oh yeah, there was that one time..."

I long for those days when it was just "that one time."