Anger Management

I'm not angry. Okay, so maybe I'm a little irritated, but who wouldn't be? I have three ADHD people trying to drive me insane and they've gotten so close that the car is in the driveway with the motor running. They seem to have spent the weekend eating, drinking and changing their clothes.

On Saturday morning, when I walked out into the kitchen, there were two empty pizza boxes, dirty dishes up the yin-yang, tomato sauce pooling greasily on the stove and counters, empty seltzer water cans, empty tuna cans, a loaf of bread with the wrapper open and a package of Swiss cheese that had spent the night going bad. But I didn't get angry.

Even when I walked into the living room and saw a line of ants marching toward the official Ants of Maine Annual Picnic on a forgotten piece of cookie that someone had left ON THE ARM OF MY CHAIR on a piece of furniture, I didn't get angry. I remembered that my daughter was very tired the night before when she finished watching a Hamtaro video, so it's no wonder that she forgot to pick up her cookie. It happens.

Dirty clothes on the bathroom floor? I'll just pick them up and put them in the hamper. I'm sure my son would do the same for me. Even if he did change into and out of half of the outfits he owns in the same day because a certain someone might be dropping in. (She didn't.) And even if he then put wet towels on top of the clean clothes - the same wet towels he'd just wiped the dog with after she rolled in something - so that the clothes had to be washed again. Hey, at least he was nice enough to wipe off the dog for me. How could I be angry at him after that?

I confess that I was mystified when I discovered that Geekdaddy had left half a bag of corn chips under the blankets at the foot of my side of the bed, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Hiding them from the dog? An attempt to "tweak" our love life and, if so, was there dip or salsa farther under the blankets? I wasn't angry, but I didn't want to know.

So I wandered into the dining room, where everyone was eating breakfast, which seemed to consist entirely of maple syrup. Okay, this is Maine, but even in Maine we usually have maple syrup ON something. Pancakes, waffles, French toast. But they might as well have been eating maple soup.

"We poured the syrup before we realized that we don't have anything to put under it," my son said.

I walked out of the dining room and back into the kitchen, where I whipped up some pancakes. Then I put them on a plate, put the plate on the dining room table and retreated back to the kitchen where I ate scrambled eggs in peace. I really didn't want to know whether they actually slid their pancakes under their syrup. I wasn't angry. How can you get angry at people who pour syrup onto their pancakes before they know whether there are pancakes? Philosophers and physicists would have no friends at all.

It is a measure of my un-ADHD-ness that I seem to notice every little thing, while they notice almost nothing, except for what they're interested in or what I don't want them to notice. Did I forget to pluck my chin hairs? My daughter will mention it in the middle of a doctor's visit, but not notice that she has her shirt on backward. My son's drawing of his cousin looks more like her than she does in person, but he doesn't know what color eyes his sister has.

Geekdaddy can tell you every computer he's had since they were room-sized and has the union bylaws memorized, but don't ask him where his pajamas are or what color they are. If they're not under his pillow, it's the ol' purple boxers (as I've mentioned before, these are the ones with "look for the union label" on the front) and the Led Zeppelin t-shirt with the holes under the arms. (Let me tell you, it'd take more than corn chips when he's wearing that. Even with the dip.)

I wouldn't trade my tribe for anything, although they irritate the bejaysus out of me at times. But when that happens, I think to myself about how much I must irritate them almost all the time. They're perfectly comfortable with chaos, disorder and dirt. Why I would want any order at all plumb evades them. So they vacuum almost cheerfully, humoring me because they love me, until the frown lines disappear from my forehead, and then they go back to reading, playing video games, art and making messes.

It's what they do. It doesn't make me angry. How could I be angry at people who give me so much to write about?

Note: The Carnival of Family Life is up at Down With The Kids. Over sixty bloggers have contributed this week and there's something for everyone. The host blogger managed to get the carnival up in spite of a nasty bug that visited her family and I love her take on Australian family life. Who knew it was so similar to the chaos that we have in the US?

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