The Chicken Knows

Ah, peace at last.

If you're ready for some nasty stuff, read on. Otherwise, go fold your hands and think nice thoughts.

Tonight Martin managed to come home for dinner. I was ready for a little time by myself, if only to sweep up the waves of rice that flowed from our table during supper. But the bliss was short-lived, since after depositing the children in the bath he selected music, packed up his guitar, and took off to his literary magazine's twice-annual open mic.

By now I'm pretty used to evenings with three children and only one of me, and I thought tonight I had things pretty covered. But have you noticed how things always go wrong in droves? Never only one thing goes amiss--say, baby scattering dirt all over your rug--but there are three more that follow, and they are always totally unrelated to each other. You'd think, for instance, that the three things going wrong at once would make a cohesive, interrelated whole: for instance, the baby gets into dirt, the toddler eats it, and the older child slips on it on the way to the bathroom.

But no, my life is more like this: the baby scatters dirt WHILE eating it IN a leaky diaper; the toddler runs into a wall two rooms away and bleeds on your friend's book she lent you; the older child's tooth falls out; AND aliens land in your back yard and flatten the petunias. These four things are completely unrelated, and yet, like old Murphy warned, once the chaos gets rolling, that's it. You may as well hang up your sanity on a hook and chuckle dryly to the five-foot chicken on your right. "It's happening again," you tell the chicken, and the chicken nods and clucks and reaches for The Economist. "Let me know when it's over," the chicken tells you, "And we'll have a beer together."

Anyway.

So pleasant scene: children splashing, cleaning themselves, luxuriating in the warm water. Merry lets out a scream. It turns out that Elspeth has leaned over and in a sort of gothic sisterly love, bitten her on the stomach. I haul Elspeth out the bath, wrap her in ducky towel, and march her downstairs, where I strap her into the time-out chair. She pulls the ducky beak off her head and begins to audibly protest her just punishment. This protest lasts all evening until much later.

Upstairs, the scene is once again charming. Merry innocently queries: "Why is Elspeth crying?" And then she says, "What's all this floating in the water?"

I glance over. "It's just fluff," I say, "From socks or something. Don't worry about it."

"Okay," she says, and proceeds to wash her hair. The baby continues splashing. Elspeth screams from below decks. Then Merry holds out her hand. "What's this?" she asks.

You know what it was, right? Let's just cut to the chase: POOP. A nice little baby poop pellet. And that alien substance all over was NOT fluff from socks.

Informed of the truth, Merry stands up from the bath, gouging her back on the faucet: she begins sobbing rather loudly. The baby splashes on and I comfort Merry and begin to drain the water. As the water drains the baby begins to splash her feet more and more vigorously, dislodging yet more excrement from her seat.

Knowing that my journey has just begun, I decide to pee while I can; I sit down and realize there is no toilet paper.

I told you this was not pretty. Add to this that we were completely out of easily accessible diapers.

Merry looks at me and observes, with dawning happiness (she's a writer), "This is a BAD night."

* * *
Well, to make a long story short, I survived, all the while retaining my calm--and soon all the children were freshly showered and bathed and all was right with the world again. I even got some laundry folded. Maybe this doesn't sound all that chaotic to you, but there's some spirit of chaos that presides over chaos that doesn't help matters much; the events become much more than the sum of their parts. You people know of what I'm speaking, right? Everybody has their own muse of chaos. Mine only happens to be a five-foot chicken. He never gets his wings ruffled; he just stands around, totally useless, reading the material I never get to, while I run around like the you-know-what with the head cut off. It's ironic, really. And yet this Chicken of Chaos knows the secret to his success. It's the secret that keeps us friends, keeps us popping cold ones at the end of the day.

Rock on, my chicken.