THE GOLDENCHILDREN

It’s a hostage situation.

The moment they complete their slow, messy birth out the bottom of the school bus staircase, they plant their tiny pegs in the gravel and yell MOM, their eyes narrowed to slits.

They can see the car doors open in our driveway and know what this means: that I have Plans.

They’re trailing the afterbirth of the school day: bags and papers, stuffed animals, a busted umbrella some kid gave them on the bus, and one sock someone failed to get on before a teacher’s aide stuffed them into their boots on the starting end of the journey.

It has taken them at least a full minute since the bus came to its wheezing halt to get their little meatbags extracted from the center of the bus and delivered onto the gravel of our dangerously fast road’s shoulder. Now they’re starting our daily knock-down-drag out with outrage-squinched eyeballs before Dan the bus driver has even begun his 120th failed effort this year to get their attention for his crossing signal. I’m doing chilly charades in house slippers and an ill-fitting jacket in weak support of Dan’s doomed efforts, vaguely aware that the fourth graders are laughing at me.

My kindergartners glare. I refuse to engage with the terrorism and point pointedly to Dan’s pointing signal, as if this will make them behave like normal children. They yell into the wind that they WILL NOT BE GOING ANYWHERE.

They’re standing on the opposite shoulder of the road from me. There is a line of stopped cars behind the bus and in front of it in the other lane waiting patiently for us to complete our drama, which, thank god, probably looks at least a little bit cute, in a hapless way, to the uninformed. I jump up and down, making a “hurry up” motion, hoping for some sympathy from the audiences attending.

It now appears one of the children is preparing to just shuck his bag and jacket right there and leave it in the ditch in an act of protest. (I should have begun this with “it’s the usual hostage situation.”) People tell me my children are beautiful, cute, so adorable, my my, and usually all I can say is It Is A Good Thing*, with a sincerity people mistake for easy banter.

*It has come to my attention via several (male) readers over the years that some people believe I must “exaggerate” my children’s personalities and behaviors for the sake of this publication. Let me set the record straight: the only thing I exaggerate is numbers. The rest, friends, is either accurate or UNDERSTATED. Thank you and donations of CBD and straightjackets can be arranged in the DMs.

Dan points for the children to cross, his eyes now bugging out in a mirror of my own slippered charades. He must think we are all so exceedingly dim, to be doing this every day. I point to Dan’s pointing again. The children stare at me, icily. They know my proclivities, my patently stupid desire to TAKE THEM PLACES. I do not LIKE being in the house with two six-year-olds for the four-millionth day in a row while they fight like cats and dogs and spring continues to bend us all over a chair.

FINE, I yell, my soul leaking out my helpless face, WE CAN STAY HERE FOR A BIT.

Both gargoyles immediately look up at Dan, see his crossing instruction, smile, and come happily towards me across the road.

WE’RE GOING TO HARVEST THE GOLDEN, they say, running past me, dropping all their things like shed skins across the driveway as they run.

The Golden. OK. “The What?”

THE GOLDEN, they yell over their shoulders.

It is a mystifying explanation, but at least I have something to work with. A small handhold for the unceasing wrangling effort that must occur between now (2:25pm) and dinner (5:30pm).

I follow them, yelling at the air about how they need to pick up their things as I pick up their things.

But they are already in the house. I bring their things in to hang them up. And then they are already out of the house, and then they are going back towards the road, one of them quite rapidly, upon an electric tractor.

I’m yelling something about waiting and roads. No one is hearing me. It’s like being in a bad dream. I have to pee and my coat isn’t warm enough and one of the kids is wearing a single layer of cotton into the 40-something degree wind. I grab two different-sized coats and my phone and trip out the door to tail them.

At least they’re lining up before the road’s shoulder to wait for me. It always baffles me how they know to do anything at all with all the NOT LISTENING we engage in. It’s like I just yell a lot of things all the time, in extra stupid mode, and then *only when it involves life or death*, the cosmos suddenly injects the knowledge they have actively eschewed directly into their veins through an invisible emergency IV.

I catch them up and try to slip a jacket onto the almost-naked one, which he shrugs off as he dismounts from the electric tractor and gestures widely with swinging arms about The Gold, The Golden!

I look to the coherent one and ask what is The Golden. She shrugs and points to the corn field, as if it is entirely obvious: “The stalks. They’re golden. We’re going to harvest them.”

“You saw the cut cornstalks in the field from your seats on the bus and decided you were going to harvest them because they’re beautiful?” I ask.

“Yes!” She smiles enthusiastically, relieved my dim bulb has finally flickered on. She takes my hand in a small warm paw and we all cross the road and jump the ditch and now and the game is on.

The best spot to harvest is of course at the TOP of the hill, right in the belly of the wind’s howl, which is straight from the hell of winter, April be damned. I tell them I will wait at the base of the hill. OK, they say. NO PROBLEM. Hurry up, I want to say, but if they do, then we will be inside, where hitting and pinching and biting and wrecking things are the order of business. So I shiver in silence and take photos instead. Your children are so beautiful, I hear in my head. It is a good thing, I say to the imaginary people, who have the excellent quality of actually listening to me.

Once we have a pile large enough (I’m still not sure what this harvest is for), they’re ready to go in. They’re sufficiently excited that they don’t even make me carry the loot: they pick it up themselves. I am calling it a win at this point, but have failed to clock the fact that a large pile of busted cornstalks is about to take up residence in my living room.

On the walk into the house it becomes known that we have gathered The Golden in order to MAKE GRIZZLY’S HOUSE. OK, I think, we can make a house out of cornstalks. I think we have wood glue somewhere. I have, as usual, underestimated the scope of the Vision and the depth of its Need.

The next two hours are a tightrope walk of speed and desperate, partial competence. See, if I can keep up with their attention spans by somehow immediately supporting their architectural visions adequately using only the materials I can find in the kitchen and yard, we might make it to dinner without having to resort to television, which will be deeply unusual and make me feel like a Decent Parent. So I dig in with both canines. Any chance at even a vague sense of decency gets me frothing with efficacy.

With some intermittent help from Dada, who is engaged in trying to free our house from under its built-up garbage with a trip to the dump, we locate some plywood, wood glue, trussing string, and several cedar shingles, which we are just barely able to get one of the children to slow down enough to brush the dirt and pill bugs off of before adding them to the cornstalk pile, which is now rapidly shedding at the un-mercy of several sets of crafting scissors.

The parents share the Enthusiastic Receptivity burden as the children describe GRIZZLY’S HOUSE at an explosive yell, nodding and “OK”ing and “wow”ing appropriately while I scuttle to get a sharpie, some acrylic paints, three sets of scissors, a pile of rocks, and some gem stickers. It turns out that Today’s Vision comes from a Netflix show called Grizzly and the Lemmings, and it has increasingly specific features, including TWO FLOORS LOTS OF BUSHES AND A TALL TOWER WITH CRISS CROSS WOOD.

I show the kids how to cut the stalks to spec, which they ignore, while I start assembling the random-length stalks into a cabin, tying every three or four layers with trussing string.

THIS THING LOOKS AWFUL, my son tells me on repeat with each layer. I inform him on repeat that it will take some time to look like a house.

The whole project starts to go off the road when they begin to understand how long this is going to take. Desperate to keep them engaged, I jump up and say, as if I have just remembered, “Grizzly is going to need a yard! And possibly a pond!” I thrust green and blue markers at them and point to the plywood base we’ve dragged in from the garage. They leap to work and I now have about five more minutes to get the stalks to look like a cabin.

Which, I am informed, is actually for Ratty and Hammy, not Grizzly, but the place needs to LOOK LIKE GRIZZLY’S HOUSE AND HAVE A RED ROOF ON THE TOWER.

I moderate the altercations and bouts of despair that crop up over the Plywood Coloring Activity while I raise the height of the cornstalk cabin to about a foot, and then, just as they’re threatening to peel off again to lose interest and go fight with each other instead, I say, “Now we need a roof!”

They scramble to get the sort-of-brushed-off cedar shingles and we hold them over our “cabin” to check the size. They are of course All Wrong, these materials, but one of my absurd superpowers is using Stupid and Poorly-Suited Things to Build Stuff, so I feel the lightning current of the universe run through me as I rotate the shingles and find the only angle at which they will both make a roof and be joinable by trussing string.

We do eventually have to separate the children before the conclusion of the project (if such a thing can be said to exist) and red paint definitely gets on the kitchen table and several cups and my daughter’s dress. And when we hit cleanup time, a lot of yelling has to happen before I remember to bribe them instead.

By dinnertime my back hurts from leaning and threading trussing string and my head hurts from fielding the surges of ecstatic inspiration, but we have Grizzly’s House more or less done.

THIS THING IS LAME, my son proclaims. I stare at him for a second and choose with effort not to say anything, because 42-year-olds aren’t supposed to get butthurt about their cornstalk projects.

I take a breath and explain how using whatever you have is a SUPER cool skill to have, and how although Results May Vary in such cases, you’ve done a way more impressive project than the girl on YouTube who uses $30k and 3D printers to make giant habitats for her axolotls.

“We should send pictures of this habitat to Jaime,” my daughter says, in her silvery voice. Apparently the revered aquarium YouTuber has a name. Of course my daughter has stored that information away while the rest of us just call her “The Girl.”

SHE WILL BE SO IMPRESSED, her brother says. He’s suddenly on board and gesticulating. THIS THING IS EPIC MOM SEND A PICTURE TO JAIME SHE’S GONNA GIVE US SO MANY AQUARIUMS WHEN SHE SEES THIS.

My son, like me, is a little confused about what exactly the function, purpose, and value of the Aquarium Info YouTube channel is. I feel we are both justified in our uncertainty, given that Jaime wears bathing suits to make giant aquariums and turn rich people’s bathrooms into rainforests with real animals in them.

“Be sure to subscribe for a chance to win,” my daughter says under her breath.

I tell them I’ll send a picture to Jaime, which pleases them greatly, and they head off to begin the coercion phase of dinner (“finish this bowl of broccoli and THEN you can have your pasta”).

I think, at this point, that I’m mostly done with what we’re now calling The Habitat. (For those of you who have been tracking, the evolution of the naming here is, loosely: The Golden—> Grizzly’s House —> The Cabin —> Ratty and Hammy’s —> The Habitat.)

But I am of course incorrect, since that evening, my son requires that The Habitat come up to bed with them.

The children wake up half an hour early before school the next day to play with The Habitat, and it has to be carried downstairs again, which of course taxes the wood glue and trussing string to a truly precarious extent.

Also, after school the following day, there is a screaming tantrum about going to the Y for our swim appointment, which goes on until I can persuade my son to use his words, whereupon he states, sobbingly, that he needs to stay home to play with The Habitat.

The only way I am able to get everyone calm enough to make a drive to the Y safe is to put The Habitat in the car with us.

We engage that evening in cutting a door in the front of the thing, so that Ratty and Hammy can get in and out, which basically collapses the front of the structure, despite my continued/preventive efforts with the trussing string.

So anyway. The Golden, now The Habitat, went to the neighbors’ house for dinner last night, in case anyone’s wondering. Getting it around in the car with us is proving difficult but basically doable, at the expense of any structural integrity it may have had.

And there are plans— visions—for a future in which we spray-paint it gold.

Golden, I should say.

Last week Substack let me know that this publication hit #75 in Parenting, WHUUT?, didn’t even know that was a thing, so… THANKS for your likes and subscriptions and shares and comments!