My Daughters

Originally posted April 29, 2008.

I had just finished a long day – six hours of driving roundtrip for a one hour meeting – but I was finally home. No sooner had I set my briefcase on the floor when my wife says, “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you, but I’m going out with my girlfriends tonight. Dinner is on the table. Bye.”

Not a problem, or so I thought. I would soon learn that our seven year-old and four year-old daughters had been at each other’s throats all day. And all dinner.

And our eighteen month-old daughter NEEDED some daddy attention. Exclusive daddy attention. Yell-and-scream-at-your-sisters-for-even-trying-to-speak-to-daddy attention.

And then, little did I know, the vomitting would soon start.

When our seven year-old and four year-old fight, they fight about everything.

“She’s looking at me!”

“Her foot touched me!”

“She’s chewing too loud!”

When it gets this bad, we put them in separate rooms to cool off. But it was dinner time, I was hungry, and I was just too tired. I was, however, losing all control of the situation. Their bickering turned to yelling, and no cajoling by me would get them to settle down.

Suddenly the four year-old got up from the table, ran to the middle of the living room, declared, “My tummy hurts!” and then…

Do you remember that Monty Python sketch in The Meaning of Life with Mr. Creosote?

“Better get a bucket.”

Of course, we had the latte-sipping liberal version of Mr. Creosote’s vomit, complete with soy milk, pealed cucumbers, diced peppers, baby spinach, whole wheat pasta, and organic tomato sauce.

In a voluminous stream.

Projecting six feet through the air.

My four year-old is crying because she just got sick. My eighteen month-old is screaming because I’m paying attention to someone else. And she is running straight for the debris field. Meanwhile, my seven year-old is describing, in excruciating detail, the smell, consistency, color, trajectory, and splatter pattern of her sister’s emesis.

I stood there, stunned, defeated. Everything was spinning out of control. And I didn’t know what to do. Well, other than clean up, of course.

So I scooped up the screaming eighteen month-old in my one good arm.

Oh, yeah, I didn’t tell you about the one good arm, did I? It’s a long story. And kinda funny. But I’ll keep it short. It was the result of a terrible butt-wiping incident. And no, Larry Craig was not involved.

I was helping my four year-old clean up after some loose “business” when I tripped over her and fell over the step-stool in front of the sink. So one surgically reconstructed wrist and one ulnar nerve transposition in my elbow later, I am wearing this Transformer-like contraption on my left arm, rendering it nearly useless.

Where was I? Ah, yes…

So I scooped up the screaming eighteen month-old in my one good arm, made a quick trip to the kitchen to get The Bucket, ran back to the living room to give the four year-old said Bucket, pleaded with the seven year-old to please stop describing the vomit and come upstairs with me.

I put the baby in the crib and asked the seven year-old to find a way to keep her inconsolably crying sister entertained while I cleaned up the four year-old. And so I went back downstairs.

To the crying four year-old.

With vomit everywhere.

And as I began to clean her up, a funny thing happened. The crying upstairs stopped. It had turned into… laughter.

After cleaning up the four year-old (and the living room), I set her in her bed and told her I would be back after putting her baby sister down for the night. I went into the baby’s room and thanked my seven year-old for helping me. I asked her to finish up her homework and start getting ready for bed.

I got the baby changed and settled into her crib. When I came back out, I saw that my seven year-old, instead of doing as I asked, had gone into her four-year old sister’s room and started reading her a bedtime story. There was no more fighting. No lingering bitterness. Just the love of two sisters who were able to settle their dispute. Without daddy. They knew what to do all along.