Friday brought disaster #756 to the Fali household. What really burned me up, is that Friday is the day I actually get stuff accomplished around here. We often have weekend visitors, so I save the piles of dog hair and kitchen counter crumbs to be cleaned up on Friday so our guests will walk in and say things like, “Your house is always so clean!” AH, HA, HA! I feel like an evil genius when that happens.

This past Friday was no different. I had managed to move the entire dining room around, mostly because the area rug has left a mark on the floor and I want to even things out. My thought being that maybe people will think we designed the floor to have a sun-faded wring around all the edges. In addition, I managed to do some dusting, sweeping, mopping, and bathroom cleaning. Because, scrubbing other people’s poo off the toilets is just another wonderful thing about being a homemaker.

I had run the dishwasher and done four loads of laundry, when my daughter went into the basement. I heard a dreaded, “MOM!” from downstairs. The type of “MOM!” you hear when someone is about to projectile vomit, or the kind where someone other than the kid yelling has broken something very expensive. Either way, I knew it was bad.

My daughter ran upstairs and said she had stepped in a puddle. I thought, “No problem!” because, last week after a morning of diarrhea and vomiting, our dog was confined to the basement while we were out of the house. When I came home, I found she had peed on the floor down there, which was a pleasant surprise considering what I was expecting to find. So, in this case, I was thinking the dog had managed to sneak downstairs and pee. Because, well…our dog is old and the basement is chilly. I can just see her dog brain thinking, “Ugh. The heat, the humidity…I’m not going out in that sweltering grass.” And, again because, “MOM!” usually means I’ll find something resembling pea soup on the walls, dog pee was not a bad alternative. This was not a big deal.

But, I couldn’t be so lucky to have dog urine on the floor. Instead, it was covered with four loads worth of laundry water, as well as what was run through the dishwasher. The toilets had backed up too, but thankfully no one had pooped since I started the laundry. There was only #1, which had been diluted by tons and tons of water, soap and bleach. But still it was a mess. One wall to the other, the entire floor covered with two inches of water. After a three hour clean-up, my husband called the plumber. I didn’t want to call, because the last time they came out, he brought a bucket into my kitchen and said, “Look here. This is what was causing your back-up”, and showed me a BIG wad of a certain, supposedly flushable, feminine product. Oh, that’s not embarrassing. I mean, what was I supposed to say? “Well, where in the world did those come from?” I may as well have passed gas right there in front of a complete stranger.

But, knowing that I had not flushed anything of the sort since that day, and because I couldn’t bear the thought of having sewage come up into our basement, I was happy to hear they could come out the next morning.

After lots of snaking, and having a plumber pull a tree root through our basement floor, we were back in business. And, let me tell you just how nice it is to be in business, when you have a family of four who needs to do their business.

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Truly, I am not making this stuff up. My son is obscene in his honesty. He is positively audacious and blunt. He seems to always feel the need to comment on everyone’s looks and compare them to someone, or something. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as rude as I hurried him along, in order to avoid having to offer up an apology.

I actually live in constant fear of what he’ll say. He has compared people to fish, asked a rotund, MALE, friend of ours if he had a “baby in his belly”, told a cousin she has a huge chin, asked another friend why she was so big, and tells middle-aged people they’re old. Men are called women and women are called men. I have to avoid anyone overweight, as well as people with birthmarks, scars, strange hair, tattoos, bald heads, and prosthetic anything. He will gladly tell men in pink shirts that “pink is a girl color”, and boys wearing earrings are promptly told that they’re not supposed to. Taking him out in public is like getting a sharp booger. It’s unavoidable and painful, yet inevitable.

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised, when a very wrinkled, older woman was behind us at the store the other day, and he pointed and said, “She’s like Sam-I-Am!”

I tried, HARD, to play it off and said, “Yes! She looks like Gram.”

Or…what Grammy would look like in….oh, say, 100 years. But, I figured this woman would think she resembles his Grandma, and we would all go merrily on our way.

But, it was a futile attempt, because he emphatically said, “No! Sam-I-Am! Sam-I-Am! Not Gram! Sam-I-Am!”

I quickly paid, then picked him up and tickled him a little in order to get him to giggle instead of making another comment. Then, I tried to alleviate the situation as any sane person would…with humor and bad poetry. As I tickled his belly I said, “Oh, please excuse him, Ma’am. His Gram likes Green Eggs and Ham! He’s really into rhyming, because her name is Pam! You DO NOT look like Sam-I-Am!”

Thank goodness, she laughed. Another predicament handled with ease. But, as I made a break for the door, I vowed to NEVER AGAIN take him out of the house. I can not take him here, or there. I can not take him anywhere.

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This blog is meant to be light-hearted and fun to read. It is supposed to give parents something to relate to, and for you non-parents, maybe the stories give you a twinge of relief that you don’t deal with the strange behaviors and circumstances a child brings into your life. But parent or not, life isn’t always carefree and joyful. More than anything, this is a blog about life, and life can come at you like a ton of bricks. One moment it can be smiles, giggles, good times, and happiness…pure contentment with your existence. The next moment, your world can be turned upside down. I know from experience, because the mood in our house went from pleasant and happy, to somber and mournful in one small instant.

A few days ago, my son’s classmate died. John was 5 ½ years old. We hadn’t seen him since preschool let out for the summer, but he was perfectly healthy at that time. Big, strong, tough, HEALTHY. He was getting ready to start Kindergarten. All was right with the world.

A neighbor of the family said she saw John playing with his little brother on numerous occasions and that her day was brightened by the sight of him bouncing around, and the sounds of his carefree joy. He enjoyed life. He was sensitive and kind. He was an amazing big brother. He made my son laugh by making funny faces. He loved his teachers, his parents, his brother, his pets, his friends. Until he got sick a few weeks ago, life was happy, good, and normal.

I just got back from the funeral home, filled with 5 ½ years worth of adorable pictures. John with his brother and parents on the beach. John with friends and cousins. John in Halloween costumes. John at his baptism. Many of them were of John in goofy and silly pictures that are just like the ones that fill our scrapbooks…just like our pictures except they belong to a different Mom and Dad. A Mom and Dad whose pain is beyond any that I can comprehend. Two people who will have to fight really, really hard to find the strength to get through this. My heart breaks for them.

But as I type this, my two resilient kids are running around the house, filling it with their laughter and my heart is overflowing. And, I can only pray that someday John’s family will once again find happiness. I hope that their lives never, ever again get turned upside down, and that they will find peace. I hope that somehow, someway they will be able to say that all is right with the world. John would want it that way.

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This morning, I handed my son a rinsed-out bottle of laundry detergent to put in our recycling bin. As he was walking into the other room with it…because of a past experience with Poison Control, I yelled, “Don’t drink that!”

He stopped and asked, “Why?”

I said, “Because, it’s yucky. It’s gross. It’ll make you sick.”

“Yucky like poop?”

“Yes. It’s yucky like poop.”

“Yucky like a skunk?”

“Yes. It’s yucky like a skunk.”

And, although I knew he had another analogy ready to toss my way, I wasn’t expecting him to ask, “Yucky like Michigan?”

He’s getting his allowance doubled this week.

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