H.L. Mencken once famously defined puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Add to that the words, “and making a mess” however, and what you have instead is the definition of a parent. Or, at least you have the definition of a parent like me.
I’m not sure when it happened–maybe around the time Clementine starting walking–but at some point the “sweet sound of children at play” began to take on menacing undertones for me. For most people, I’m sure, passing a house in the summertime and hearing screaming laughter coming from the back yard only brings back reminisces about the summers of their youth–the tire swings they swung from, the swimming holes they splashed in, the dilapidated forts they painstakingly pieced together. As for myself, however, all I can hear are the warning signs that someone is having fun; in other words, that a mess is being made.
Maybe the hose is being used to create a mud puddle that will be rolled in, tromped through, and eventually relocated to every surface under six feet in my kitchen. Maybe a pair of cats are being harnessed–one to a Malibu Barbie convertible, the other to a RC Hummer–in preparations for a chariot race that will leave a swathe of misery and destruction that’ll make Sherman’s march to the sea look like a walk in the park. Or maybe every single one of my gardening tools is being carefully taken out of my gardening shed, lined up from smallest to largest, methodically inventoried by color and size, and then left to rust under the last spring snow.
I know, I know: these are all very creative, very playful schemes, and I should be happy that my kids are using their imaginations out in the yard as opposed to slowly having their brains sucked out through their eyes in front of the TV. But still, the devil parent on my other shoulder can’t help but whispering that “you never have to get out the shop vac when they sit on the couch watching Dora.”
At least with the TV, the worst of the messes usually involve nothing more toxic than congealed yogurt, ground up Cheetos, and strawberry milk–oftentimes appearing all together somewhere under the couch cushions. Add the Great Outdoors to the mix, however–add in a 50 lb. bag of peat moss, a lipping full rain barrel, and 200 feet of extension cord–and you soon have a mess worthy of FEMA. (Every time my kids are left to their own devices in the back yard
I’m a little surprised it doesn’t all end in the governor flying over in a helicopter).
And the worse part is that it is always accompanied by peals of laughter. Before I had kids, the sound of children laughing made me smile; now it just makes me alert, like someone working in a nuclear plant who has just seen their radiation badge jump from green to yellow. (As with radiation, children’s laughter has varying levels of danger. A light chuckle means a mess that can still be contained by paper towels; a deeper chortle mean that renting a steam cleaner is imminent; and one of those high-pitched screaming giggles–the kind that sound like a race horse just received a surprise visit from the proctologist–means that perhaps you should consider listing your house on the market–“as is,” of course.)
This is why it is so vitally important for your children to cultivate friendships with other yards–I mean children–in the neighborhood. Only through the filtering lens of distance can you once again appreciate the magical sound of children’s laughter–especially when it is counterpointed so nicely by the enraged bellow of some other parent discovering a hose snaking in the kitchen window, up the stairs, and under the bed–all in an attempt to create the world’s first hideaway waterbed couch.