Anne TootillTo Be or Not to Be a Mother -Part Two
October 30th 2006 15:07
There it was. A big box containing a gazillion pieces. Sure there was a picture of a swing on the front of the carton, but when I opened the box and emptied all the contents it looked more like an aisle at Home Depot.
I checked my watch. It was only 5 P.M. It would be at least 2 ½ hours until my husband got home from work. Not that he was any more handy than me but he was the man of the household and building and fixing was supposed to be their thing. Right? My job was to make lemonade and bake tollhouse cookies to keep his manhood going. Right?
But Josh was crying and I felt like crying too. That was it. I couldn’t wait another second. What if, as my mother said, this swing was the answer to my prayers? And what if I didn’t find out until I was on my fourth child (yeah right, like that would ever happen after this one) because I was married to the biggest procrastinator on the planet?
So I opened the directions and tried to make sense of what I was reading. Part A goes into hole A. But where was hole A and why didn’t anything in front of me look like it did in the picture? And where was part D? And how come part V wouldn’t fit into hole V? But if I stretched part F… at one point I tossed the directions aside and used the picture on the box as my roadmap.
Two hours later a swing was born. And in a bold, and so out of character for this constant worrier, move despite the, not so small, pile of nuts and bolts and various other significant looking parts that lay on the floor unused, I took my crying son out of his infant seat and buckled him into the swing. Here goes nothing. I wound the crank mechanism on the side (yup it was a wind-up toy) and waited for the whole thing to fall apart (metaphor for the story of my life?).
But that never happened. Despite all the “extra” pieces, the swing remained intact and more importantly a few minutes into the ride I got my miracle. Josh stopped crying.
I checked my watch. It was only 5 P.M. It would be at least 2 ½ hours until my husband got home from work. Not that he was any more handy than me but he was the man of the household and building and fixing was supposed to be their thing. Right? My job was to make lemonade and bake tollhouse cookies to keep his manhood going. Right?
But Josh was crying and I felt like crying too. That was it. I couldn’t wait another second. What if, as my mother said, this swing was the answer to my prayers? And what if I didn’t find out until I was on my fourth child (yeah right, like that would ever happen after this one) because I was married to the biggest procrastinator on the planet?
So I opened the directions and tried to make sense of what I was reading. Part A goes into hole A. But where was hole A and why didn’t anything in front of me look like it did in the picture? And where was part D? And how come part V wouldn’t fit into hole V? But if I stretched part F… at one point I tossed the directions aside and used the picture on the box as my roadmap.
Two hours later a swing was born. And in a bold, and so out of character for this constant worrier, move despite the, not so small, pile of nuts and bolts and various other significant looking parts that lay on the floor unused, I took my crying son out of his infant seat and buckled him into the swing. Here goes nothing. I wound the crank mechanism on the side (yup it was a wind-up toy) and waited for the whole thing to fall apart (metaphor for the story of my life?).
But that never happened. Despite all the “extra” pieces, the swing remained intact and more importantly a few minutes into the ride I got my miracle. Josh stopped crying.
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