eye-pop

Last Saturday morning, we bundled everyone in the car and went to IHOP for breakfast.  ("Eye-pop" my son calls it, and it's true on many, many levels.)  We were given a table in the very center of the restaurant floor, so our waiting-for-a-meal antics were visible to all the breakfast-time diners tucked into the booths around the walls. 

I was surprisingly relaxed, somehow, although the activity level was the same as usual: pepper shakers sailing through the air, Equal packets torn open and dumped on the table, stress testing of the restaurant chairs.  The food did take an awful long time to come, and before it did, Father Bird and I were ferrying children back and forth to the bathroom. 

One of the great sorrows of my life is that my baby boy wasn't a girl.  Of course, now that we know him, he's perfect just as he is, but a girl would have evened the score, see, there would have been three females and three males in our house, and another boy tipped the scales dangerously in the male direction.  Now there's just me and my daughter in a house with a man and three boys.  And it's amazing how one more boy can turn a house into "a guy house".  Things are different in a guy house than they were in a gender-neutral house.  There's much less patience, for instance, on trips when we have to stop to find an actual bathroom.

The women in this house are a discriminated-against minority, that's all there is to it.

But since we were in a restaurant, everyone was equal in his or her use of a real bathroom, and since we'd been there more than five minutes, all the children needed to go.  And here's where I, the mother of three boys and one girl get back a little of my own.  Father Bird, bless his long-suffering soul, gets to take three children to the bathroom.  I get just one.

When Father Bird returned to the table after his trip, he had a half-smile that I noticed a second before taking my own bathroom shift.  I wonder what went on in there, I thought as we headed off.  When my daughter and I were washing our hands, a lady in the restroom noticed her coat.  "Oh!" she said, "what an adorable coat!"  I thanked her and went back to the table with my own half-smile.  I was reflecting on how a compliment can brighten your day, and how I ought to give more, when I remembered to ask what Father Bird had been smiling about.

"A man in there," he said, pointing at the bathroom door, "looked at all these and said, 'Love them while they're little, they grow up so fast.'" 

Everybody says it.  Along with "You've got your hands full, don't you?" and "Are all these yours?" "Love them while they're little" is one of the most common phrases we hear as parents of many small people.  And yet, doesn't it convey, just a little, the aching of a parent of older children, reaching out to harried toddler-parents to help them understand what they have?  What other words can they say?  What will I say when my own children are grown, and I see younger parents struggling with little children?  I know I'll probably wish they knew how short this time is, and wish I had something beautiful to say that they'd always remember, some stellar piece of advice that would take their parenting cares away.  But I'll probably look, and remember, and, with my own little ache, say, "Love them while they're little.  They grow up so fast."

As annoyed as Father Bird and I were at having to drag children to and from the bathroom that day, each of us carried back to the table a little gift given to us by the people we'd met in the bathroom, something we could open and examine together.  I thought mine was pretty good, until I saw his.

He says it's called "Eye-pop" because your eyes will pop when you get the check for feeding pancakes to four children, a task you could have done at home for nothing.  I think it's because of the pop-in-the-eye feeling you get when you realize that some strangers, even in bathrooms, understand.

~MB~