It’s Just Sauce

I’m in the kitchen, cooking for an impending camping trip. Owen (7) is helping tidy up the kitchen. Max (3) is growling and chewing a giant chunk of an everything bagel. I look up from my work to see Flynn (12) rubbing his twin sisters’ feet in the living room. A few moments later I see they have switched and Iris is now massaging his feet. A civilized foot massage exchange. Micah (10) has mentioned to me twice in the last 24 hours that he believes that he has poison ivy. He showed me a red area on his ankle. I made the connection, “He has poison ivy…again…” But then something more pressing than the beginning of our summer-long battle to keep this old familiar rash at bay came up, and I was immediately distracted.

I only remembered his freshly brewing poison ivy later that day when I heard him shout from upstairs,

“So Flynn, do I wash it all off now?”

I then listened as Flynn directed Micah in how to use one of the many poison ivy washes that we offer here at The Krouse Family Poison Ivy Survivors Clinic. No joke. We get it in all the places you “hear about someone getting it..” The eyes, inside the nose, in the ears… and other places. I have some pretty gnarly photos of Flynn and Micah from 2 years ago…and I purposely lost Chris’ “Quasimodo picture,” from the episode when one entire side of his face swelled up to 3 times its size resulting in an oozing slit for an eye. Special times. You wanna know what a batch of poison like that does to a marriage? Abstinence. That’s all. Firm, unspoken, automatically assumed abstinence.

As Flynn bestowed his well-earned poison ivy first aid expertise on his younger brother, it was one of those “failed as a mother while succeeding as a parent” kinda moments. I knew that a less distracted, more caring mother probably would have taken the time to assess, diagnose and treat the child’s condition more adequately. But the parent in me has somehow helped to shape people that are smart enough to care for themselves and still other people who are willing to assist those in need.

Still later that evening, Noah (1) on my hip…my time in the kitchen has not yet ended. Micah hollers from upstairs,

“MOM! Max is bleeding!!” I march to the bottom of the steps, all senses heightened.

“What? Why isn’t he crying?”, I’m more worried than my tone implies.

“I don’t know!” Micah also sounds worried.

“Can I see him…can he come here?”

Micah disappears from the top of the steps,

“Max, come here…mom wants you to go to her…”

I am waiting to look up and behold the bloody toddler.

“Oh wait.” Micah reappears at the top of the staircase, a goofy look of complete relief has washed over his face.

“Sorry, mom. It’s just sauce or something.”

Of course, it’s just sauce. That changes everything. You know what it doesn’t change though? The very real stress that I still had to live through in the 60 seconds it took to discover that it was “just sauce.”

I felt some level of satisfaction that Micah got to live through it with me. He just experienced what most every parenting moment feels like all the time. Most days for me feel like a series of events that possibly include blood but end up only being a smear of some kind of sauce. Moments of screwing up so bad as a parent that I’m sure that no one involved is going to be ok… and then I get to see a glimpse of their sweet hearts, and I’m just glad to be a part of it.

Lately, I’ve realized that I will never be afforded the luxury of feeling like I have it all together or that I’m doing a great job all the time. Most of the children are usually lightly dirty because I couldn’t find 1 of my 10 packages of wet wipes when I left the house, and if you want to know if that’s me and my kids eating a Mexican casserole on a blanket at a little league baseball game with a bunny and a guinea pig, Yes. And it probably isn’t going to end well. But we can all sleep easy knowing it’s just sauce and not blood.