Mom shit
Fuckin Cheese Potatoes
The kitchen was our comfort
I like to sit back and watch people struggle with their kids.
That dickhead little toddler with a full diaper screaming he wants McDonald’s, the five-year-old twin brothers threatening to piss on each other. I fuckin love it.
It’s so funny because it’s not me dealing with it anymore.
And then I think, fuck, how did I deal with this?
HOW?
My memories always take me back to that kitchen. It had dark red walls that I painted when I was seven months pregnant with my fourth child.
It also had very dark wood cabinets. I realized the kitchen was too dark when I was eight months pregnant with the same child. I removed all the cabinet doors to show my colorful plates and cups, which were bright blue, yellow, and red. To brighten that dark ass room up a little.
After all, I lived in that room.
I cooked all day. Made hot chocolate. Did the laundry at the table. Read books. Drank coffee. Braided hair.
The kitchen was our comfort.
I had shoulder-length hair because that was easiest then. Every single day, I wore a variation of a Nike sweatsuit until my husband told me he was goddamn sick of seeing me in sweats all the time.
But those days in that dark kitchen. I would place my newborn in a swing next to me, but not too close to the stove. The kid would sit and smile for hours. Content. Thank Christ, he was a happy baby. My one-year-old would be nestled in my arms, ready to breastfeed. Yeah, I was breastfeeding two at the same time.
Do not recommend it.
My four-year-old wrapped his legs around my ankles and played with hundreds of matchbox cars. I stepped on them, but I didn’t yell because back then, I wanted to be perfect, and you didn’t yell at babies because you stepped on a toy.
My six-year-old zoomed back and forth across the room, pretending to be a zebra or a lion or whatever. Then my cell would ring, and I’d pick it up with my one sort of free hand because I was either making lunch or redressing a child who decided to tear their clothes off and run free.
My truck driver husband would be on the other end and say, “Please make sure to add cheese potatoes to whatever you’re making tonight. That sounds good.”
I’d roll my eyes so hard that one of them ended up in my butthole, but I said OK because it made me happy to make him happy.
I’d quickly breastfeed one, then the other, change the diapers, and pack them all up to go to the grocery store to get cheese potato shit for my husband.
And it was all on autopilot; that’s how I remember it. I think sometimes I forgot they were mine, my blood, my children. I just knew everyone needed to be taken care of. If I could check one box, I could move on to the next.
Anyway, that’s the scene I usually see when I think back. And God, it’s chaotic. But it’s so beautiful.
I was twenty-six then.
Now, I’m forty-one.
I sit here in my freedom watching a TV show that I couldn’t watch back then, or even one year ago, really.
I get this deep stab in my chest because now they’re fifteen, sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one. Twenty fuckin one. Older than I was when I had her.
When I look into their eyes now, they look the same as they did back then. Dark blue, light blue, green, brown. But they don’t look back at me like they used to. They don’t have those pleading tears.
They don’t tug on my ankles or scream to be rocked.
But I’ll tell you the worst one.
It’s when I hear a car that sounds like my son’s car. Except it’s not his car, and he’s not here. He’s not pulling into the driveway after school or after his part-time job at the daycare.
Because two of my birds have left the nest for good.
That one; it hits so goddamn hard.
All those years of no sleep and sore tits and headaches and back pain and loneliness and hating my fuckin husband because he got to leave the house and I didn’t. At least not alone.
Yeah, it was hard.
And so I ask again, how did I do it?
I just fuckin did it, man. Somehow.
And I’d do it over again right now. This minute.
Except for the cheese potato part. I’d do it all again, minus that.
Ya feel me?