Embracing Chaos

I have to admit I took impish glee in writing that last post about being a cancer brat. Thanks for the great feedback, and I am happy to report a huge improvement in health and attitude.

The impish glee I guess just means I am Owen’s mother.

The season that brings out the elf in most of us seems to bring out the trickster sprite in Owen. A right naughty old elf… Longtime readers know all about Owen’s holiday antics – the infamous Christmas of 2015  (Naughty – or – Nice -?).

And he’s started early this year. (“Good grief Owen!” texts brother Oskar.) A few weeks ago I found just half the paper wrapper formerly belonging to a monstrous chocolate bar lying near my bedroom trash can. (Did he eat the rest of the wrappers too??) This chocolate bar had been in line for stocking stuffing, although of course not Owen’s stocking. It’s true that I unwisely left the bar sitting on the dedicated wrapping table set up in my bedroom. My bedroom which is supposed to be locked.  But it was buried in a shoe box full of non-edibles. How does he know?

He knows. Maybe being a mostly non-verbal person, he has developed an exalted sense of smell. An exalted intuition?

Owen knows so much more than anyone thinks he does. He knows that wrapping paper and packages sitting in shoe boxes mean CHOCOLATE, or at least SWEETS. Duh Mom. I think he swung through our bedroom a couple of more times, picking out chocolate items before I realized what was afoot.

I know who I am blaming. Already by mid-December we have watched the movie Home Alone 2-3 times. (Two to three because Owen doesn’t always sit through the whole movie.) About every day he waves under our noses or thumps our arms with the video box adorned with the cherubic/devilish face of young Macaulay Culkin, eyes wide and mouth open in apparent innocence. Owen even asked his dad for it by name. That’s a big effort, but Dad isn’t always a mind-reader, he needs help. But these cues were not enough for mom either. STILL, 54 years though I am, and 24 of them Owen-educated, little did I suspect that Owen might be studying-up. Might possibly be an admirer of the young character Kevin McCallister’s methods for terrorizing two simple minded adults! (Honestly, at movie’s end didnt you feel sorry for the robbers??)

Possibly I exaggerate.  All I know is that after we had watched a couple rounds of Home Alone one night I found myself with 2 toilets and one shower covered in poop, a full bathroom sink full of laundry detergent, and one Owen snickering uncontrollably at the center of it all. (And you can keep the partridge. The pear tree has certainly been stripped of fruit.)  It’s the snickering that gets ya. Owen’s bowel problems are real — although this was pretty rich even for him.  A monstrous bar of chocolate possibly consumed with its papers can get things going. I wish I could say that I handled that evening with superior calm and an objective sense of humor. I did not.

I had Owen make amends, and I did my best to make amends to him for my poor response to trickster exploits and hilarity.  And as always (but particularly when I write about it), now that it’s over I can see the humor in the whole thing. Soap and water, and time, are wonderful curatives for nearly everything. Oh and apology. Gotta have that too.

Going forward, I am making an effort not to tax my naughty Christmas elf’s frail will-power. After shopping this week, I transferred my bulk purchase of eggs into cardboard crates before the groceries could cool on the counter, and handed that tempting Pete and Gerry’s plastic 18 egg holder over to the man with the scissors. Same for Owen’s favorite red and orange decorated bag of peppers. (When we are shopping together Owen can hardly keep his hands off some of these bags, they hold such appeal for him). Owen’s fingers were twitching as I proffered the bag, peppers safely stowed in the veggie drawer.

The plastic bag of tomatoes I was not so smart about. Sure enough, 3 minutes after he got home, there was that grape tomato bag in Owen’s possession, already filled with clothes pins and plastic shards. Owen showed me the discarded baby tomatoes in the bathroom trash basket (“Owen! this is trash! Not a basket!!”), I washed and re-packaged them, he sat a time-out for them, I hid them, and we moved on.

At least I think we moved on — hmm, wait, where are those tomatoes?….