I’ll take a knuckle sandwich on baguette, please.
Picture it. Sicily 1922. (I’m kidding and most of you likely don’t have any idea where that came from and why I’m laughing right now.) As I’m standing in the living room, holding a vacuum to suck up sawdust, (yes, sawdust, because doesn’t everyone do their woodworking in the living room), Clementine, our horse sized, elderly, Great Dane, causally walks by. It took me a minute to realize that she was also carrying a large baguette with her. No one else noticed, and she walked right by, laid down on the floor and ate it right in front of several of us. Her lack of concern says a lot about not only elderly animal privilege in our house, but what “normal” is around here. No one even wondered why she came from downstairs proudly carrying a large loaf of bread.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the land of trauma, yelling starts. Which honestly, doesn’t cause me much alarm, just turns my ears on as I lay in wait for things to escalate. I mostly have the theory that until we hit the line where we are on the urge of violence, I let it play itself out. Then I heard swearing, which is a tell tale sign. So, in trauma mom fashion, I high tail it up the steps and just let out a shriek. Which creates instant silence for all but one, whom I resorted to just grabbing and hugging her until she was speechless and hugged me back. As an anti-hugger, I was thankful that her silence came rather quickly after the embrace.
Come to find out, all this drama was over one girl “spilling the tea” about another, and then got herself labeled the household “snitch” for the afternoon. That type of offense around here is looked at as rather serious by the others. Such offenses seemingly, require retaliation in the form of lots of swearing, head bobbing, fingers pointed in faces, and threats of hair pulling and ass kickings. When did “snitching” even become a thing? It’s like a little white collar gang up in here. I feel like the word “snitch” is reserved for inmates in prisons disrespecting one another. This visual that goes with the word is not necessarily teenage girls carrying around fancy purses, full face of makeup, acrylic nails, and freshly flat ironed hair. Whatever happened to the good old days of, “Don’t be a tattle tale?”
I’m sure you can picture that there was an emotional meltdown after all this. Meltdowns often require a good run-to spot. I am guessing most of you don’t have what I call the run-to spot in your house. So, for those uneducated in such matters, the run-to is typically a pre agreed upon spot where a particular sweet pumpkin child, can go to in order to remove themselves from the conflict. They have a 15 minute cool down in the agreed upon safe space, before I come to collect them. This prevents what we lovingly refer to as running, a.k.a., making a break for it. Anyway, I was ill prepared for winter running, and the space we typically use wasn’t appropriate for today. We could not mutually agree on a run-to spot. This was mostly because she was already neck deep in crisis mode and unwilling to consider what were realistic options. Enter hubby, who innocently walked by, oblivious to what was going on, because you know, woodworking. Wrong place at the wrong time, Dude. He is now headed to the dentist with an emotional teenage girl. Sorry. Not really.
