My Own Private Brady Bunch

I am an only child. Just me. I grew up listening to adult conversations and learning to entertain myself. I had no one to fight with, except maybe my parents (not advisable) and no one to blame things on (“the dog did it” never quite cut it). It was lonely at times and for several years I thought I would remedy that by having a large family of my own. Say around 5 or 6 kids.

But then I dated guys from big families only to be shocked and awed by the chaos that pervaded their homes. I remember saying to one guy, “Your sister’s walking around in her underwear.” I was appalled. He merely shrugged his shoulders, never taking his eyes off the TV and said, “Yeah, she does that.” At another boyfriend’s house it was years before I realized that Molly was not some invisible slacker friend who crashed at their house constantly, but was, in fact, his sister, Colleen. Who knew that Molly was short for Colleen? There were always so many people running around that house it never seemed odd to me that I never actually saw this mystery person. At any rate, it was too all too much. I scaled back my family plans drastically to two, maybe three.

And now that I have two children, three is definitely out of the question and two might have been a bit ambitious. People think I’m just being silly when I say that I have my own private Brady Bunch, but wow, the chaos! The noise! The noise, noise, noise, NOISE! In addition to being a much less chipper and much more frazzled Carol Brady, I’m the Grinch intent on stealing Christmas and any other fun day from my dear little Whos by shushing them every second.

Who knew that merely going from one child to two would make getting out the door in an hour a near impossibility? Or that two children make 10 times the noise that one does? Or that two children spaced 5 years apart will fight an average of 20 times a day, or roughly every 36 minutes? And who knew that nearly every interaction they have would end up with one of them screaming? The two year old drools on the seven year old. Gross! Mom! The seven year old moves the two-year-old’s bear. Miiiiiiiiiiine! Or that they would both tease each other relentlessly (can a two year old really do that? Apparently.)?

I know. All you people with siblings are giggling, perhaps even guffawing. Intellectually, I know this happens. I know it the way I know breaking your leg really hurts, even though I’ve never broken a bone. But knowing something and experiencing something are two completely different things. And having now experienced life with two children, I feel like the most naïve, most frazzled, least organized and least tolerant parent ever. Some days, life in this house resembles nothing I’ve experienced before. I’m on a foreign planet. With the plethora of parenting classes out there I think there should be a few more. Like Parenting Twice as Many Children as You Grew Up With and Learning to Love the Chaos.

I try to remind myself that I’m in the infancy of this two child family thing. I don’t have a lifetime of experience to fall back on, to remember and compare. So I take a deep breath, tell myself to go with the flow, this is normal. This is not the Brady Bunch and you are not the Grinch.

About that time I’ll find two little blonde heads snuggled under a blanket on the couch watching Finding Nemo. Sweet, happy, best buddies. A part of me is the tiniest bit jealous of them having something that I never had and can never have now, but mostly I’m glad my daughter has a brother and my son has a sister.