Background Music

If there were a theme song played in the background of my daily life it would be titled "Bring on the Bicker." In our house, our title track has gone platinum and hasn't left its reigning perch at the top of the Household Billboard ranking.



The beauty about bickering is that no subject is off limits. Last week at the bus stop, Remi found a demolished remnant of a rubber Jets figure. Instantly, Chad decided it was his and demanded she return it to him. I could hear their verbal punch and counter punch and see the backpack body checking from across the street, and continue into our house. It concluded with my throwing both of them in their rooms and metaphorically hollering "for the rest of your lives". 



If there is a totally bicker-free home, I haven’t been in it. In ours sibling bickering has become a sport all three excel in. Heck, they're champions. If only they invested such intensity, focus and determination into their homework, respective sport or room cleaning!  Instead, Todd and I are subject to a litany about whose turn it is to go first. Which kid gets the middle seat in the car and who had it last? Why the sky is blue and the grass is green.

Post bicker face caught on film

Our older two, when they aren't giggling hysterically together, are at one another. This one chews too loudly, bicker, bicker, and bicker. That one didn't retell a story the right way - more bickering. Todd and I just want to make it stop. I would be lying if I told you we didn't consider running far away, joining a parental witness protection program and changing our names. Arizona is supposed to be lovely…

But how to live with the inevitable? 

I haven’t figured it out. Considering there are usually three sides to any story and no two people experience a moment the same way, judgment calls are difficult. And who wants to be the judge, the jury, and the mediator. Once, I over heard Remi and Chad arguing about a childhood memory that both were too young to recall. What's next, bickering about moments from when they were gestating in my uterus? Bet on it.  

My mom told me her mother used to tell her and her brother to kill each other but not in her earshot. I get it. 

It’s not that I am noise averse (okay maybe a wee bit) but still. I don’t care what the kids’ volume is when they are playing happily.  The summer drone of lawnmowers to our left and right, front and back all day long, manageable white noise. Three competing televisions, amped up too loud screeching iCarly or Zoe 101 or Power Rangers, barely an auricular tickle. Three children incessantly bickering, chipping away at the veneer of my soul, torture.

And then there is the car, where you cannot send kids to their rooms to cool off and the trunk of the car is not an option. Driving with sniping children is akin sitting next to a chronic sniffer on a plane, a heavy breather, an armrest hogger at the movies or someone on the LIRR or nail salon or wherever who thinks everyone wants to share his call. Eventually, it cannot be ignored any longer. Eventually I want to stand up and scream at the top of my lungs "ENOUGH ALREADY, ENOUGH!"

But I’m smarter than that.  I am the Queen of this household, a power player on our chessboard acre. And when the bickering seems like it will never end, I do the only thing a good Queen reigning over a revolting Queendom can do... I drive and drop off my unruly subjects at the Queen Mum's house...