Please just give me Five Minutes Peace!

Another issue of Another Gray Hair.

Moms never have any privacy or a quiet moment to themselves. This is manifest in a few different ways: phone calls, bathroom breaks, baths, and a few others. A Mom can never have a phone conversation without lots of little voices interrupting. It is as if children have phone radar, a sixth sense, when mom is on the phone.

This doesn’t happen with dad, just mom.

I can ensure that everyone is occupied with a task, project, or game - but never fail - three little faces asking for, needing, wanting something the moment I begin talking to someone. It doesn’t happen when I lift the receiver, or even while dialing, they are creatures of the night lying wait for the person on the other end to answer the phone before they pounce on me.

I have talked to friends by phone while running, not brisk walking, but full on running away from my boys throughout my house. Sometimes a mom just needs to talk to another adult once in awhile.

“Just go into the bathroom,” my husband has suggested.

“They just follow me then pound on the door . It echoes in there,” I explained.

He obviously has never tried to escape to the bathroom before.

A friend and I were lamenting about this the other day and she confided in me a trick that she once used for this very problem. She sold scrapbooking supplies from home, a consultant for a national company. There were many phone calls in a week that she would need to make: customer’s orders, other consultants, hostess follow-up, etc. She would buy a bag of M&Ms, the really big one, in preparation for her calls. After making sure she had her list of whom to call, the necessary papers, forms, phone, and the like, she would sit at one end of her hallway. She would dial a phone number, grab a handful of M&Ms, throw them down the hallway as hard and fast as she could, then as calmly as possible talk on the phone while her children were madly scrambling for the M&Ms at the other end of the hallway. She could see when they were nearly all picked up and quickly end the call, hoping that all business was complete.

We laughed and laughed until our sides hurt, then laughed some more.

“Genius!” I told her once I was able to come up for air. I made a mental note to try it.

A mom can never use the bathroom by herself. I can do all kinds of things in the bathroom before or after needing to use the commode, but the second I use it at least one cherubic face needs me.

At our house we have the bad habit of not closing the door while using the toilet. It may have come from potty-training and wanting all toddlers to see mom and dad using the toilet, or from having all males in the house except me, maybe just laziness but we are all in the habit. It is bad when friends & neighbors come over.

I have three little boys and often receive the question of why I have to sit for all lavatory use. We use anatomically correct names for body parts in our home and am often asked where mine is. I often wonder if my boys will ever fully understand what a girl is. I am the only example in their lives of the opposite gender - will that effect their romantic lives?

Another bathroom activity that brings all my boys to the door, this time closed, is when I take a bath. Everyone wants to join me.

There is a great book that my mom gave me called Five Minutes’ Peace by Jill Murphy. It is a delightful book about a mother elephant that has a typical morning but needs a break from her children so tries to take a bubble bath. The oldest interrupts to play his recorder, the middle child has to practice reading, and the youngest shares his toy into the bath. Soon all three children are in the tub with mama elephant. She gets out, goes to the kitchen, and I am sure you can guess what happens next.

I often have days like this and sometimes I yell and scream. All I have to do is to look into those big brown eyes, chubby faces and tousled hair of any one of my boys and my heart melts and I want to spend all day reading to, snuggling, and playing with each of them.