Tales From The Crib

A difficult Saturday morning

Jennifer Margulis

Saturday morning, “Pajama Wake-Up” storytelling is a favorite with my three children. Last Saturday we planned to go.

“Let’s go there, please, please, can we?” My 5-year-old daughter Hesperus cried when I told her about it. “Hurry up. Hurry up.” She draped herself on the top of the couch by the door the entire time I was getting ready, moaning while I put on the baby’s diaper, whining while I brushed my teeth, sighing while I tied her 4-year-old sister’s sneakers, urging me to hurry while I hoisted the screaming baby into his backpack.

“I’m bored Mommy,” Hesperus groaned over and over again. “Hurry up. Can we please go now?”

Trying to find shoes for the baby, a clean shirt for me, and coats for everyone isn’t easy on the best day. Getting three little people and one under-caffeinated grown-up ready while one of those little people (who has neither her coat nor her shoes on) complains at top volume is a challenge I don’t wish on my worst enemy.

But, finally, we were off. The air crisp, we walked in the bright sun down the hill towards the art museum. The baby settled down, I held my daughters’ hands, and the anxious feeling I’d been carrying in my gut all morning started to disappear. It looked like we were actually going to manage to turn the morning around and enjoy being together.

We made it one block.

“I’m tired from walking. I’m so tired from walking,” 4-year-old Athena moaned.

I stopped mid stride. “Let’s go home.”

Hesperus’s impatience, Athena’s whining, the baby’s fussing — it was all too much. “I can’t take you anywhere when you are acting so difficult,” I said to them angrily. “It embarrasses me. Let’s go home.” A neighbor came onto her porch. I now had an audience for my mounting irritation.

“Fine,” Hesperus retorted. “I didn’t want to go anyway.”

“You didn’t? But you’ve been waiting by the door this entire time hurrying me!”

“We just woke up,” Hesperus explained. “Why did we even have to leave the house?”

All three children awoke at six o’clock in the morning. It was almost 10. We had been up for four hours.

I trudged home, completely dispirited. Athena dragged her feet and cried. Hesperus skipped along triumphantly. I could barely contain my frustration. If we had gone to the storytelling, I knew we would have had a good time. I often find that I am better able to summon my patience, rally my mommy energy, and keep my sense of humor when we go out. There are no dishes to do, no flower petals smeared into the carpet to pick up, no phone to answer. My kids, too, often get along better and behave more maturely when it’s not just the four of us cooped up at home.

The baby went down for a nap. I sat on the couch with Athena to read The Lorax.

Hesperus disappeared.

She poked her head in the living room. “How do you spell ‘I’m sorry’?” she asked quietly. I told her and she ran away again. She came back a minute later. “How do you spell ‘misbehaving’?”

Then, my contrite but proud 5-year-old came over with a present for me: a carefully drawn picture of a lady with green eyes and brown shorts next to a brown-eyed little girl wearing purple pants and a turquoise shirt. Both the mother and the little girl are smiling broadly, holding hands under a perfect rainbow. On the other side of the page in big block letters, she wrote: “I’M SORRY FOR MISBEH AVING LOVE HESPERUS TO MOMMY.”

Then she curled up next to me on the couch and popped her thumb in her mouth. While the baby slumbered quietly, my daughters and I spent the next two hours reading together, salvaging what was left of an otherwise impossible morning.

Jennifer Margulis is the editor and co-author of “Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love,” which includes three stories about her spirited daughter Hesperus.