The Sound and the Fury
I've never read any Faulkner (sorry, Oprah), so I must admit I have no idea what this title really means. But it was the phrase that came to mind as I stood in the kitchen around lunchtime today, shoving one strawberry after another into my mouth (thank God there was no candy corn in the house!) and wondering how things had gone so far south in such a hurry. Oh, the sound, the fury of a four-year-old scorned!
Our day had had an enchanting start. It began as most mornings do, with the kids pushing open our door and crawling into our bed, one on either side. Normally, they chat and shift about until we're too frustrated to sleep anymore. Today, however, I almost immediately asked them if they wanted some breakfast, mostly because I was hungry myself.
It was then that they broke into a Broadway-style duet of "Let's Go Have Some Breakfast." With voicings for alto and soprano and only those five words as lyrics, the song went on for a good minute-and-a-half before Daddy and I both burst out laughing. It was one of those priceless moments that one assumes forebodes a perfect, Brady-bunch sort of day.
Not so, my friend. Not so.
Besides eating cereal and getting dressed, the only things we did between the bedroom serenade and my strawberry binge were bid Grandpa farewell and go to church. While Grandpa's departure may have given rise to some grief in the kids, it seemed to have been tempered by their getting thoroughly muddy in the newly mulched hedge bed in our backyard just before we left for Sunday school. And church itself can only be an uplifting, mellowing experience, right? Uhhh...no.
It was raining when we arrived home around 11:30 AM, and the kids wanted to get wet. Wet and dirty. What could be better when you're two and four? But Mommy wanted the kids to come in so she could fix lunch, and she was ineffectually urging them to bend to her will. When Daddy observes this type of pleading in Mommy with no response from the kids, his tendency is to blow a small gasket, which, in this case, he did. Our four-year-old was swept into the house and up to his room, screeching as though he were being branded the whole way. By some miracle, he fell asleep before his time-out had expired.
While one temper had been quelled (or at least rendered semi-conscious), another was still raging. Daddy reappeared in the kitchen looking a bit like a bull in a cartoon, nostrils flaring as it faced the matador and marked the ground with its hoof. Clearly our son was not the only one with whom he was frustrated.
I asked him calmly, "What's wrong?" It could have been a red cape I had waved, because a full-fledged charge followed.
The gist of his complaint was that he felt unappreciated for all the work he had done the previous day on the hedge. I responded that I had indeed told him how great it looked and how nice it would be to see something green and growing out the kitchen window rather than the rotting old fence that had stood in its place. And as the statement rolled off my tongue, I realized that he was right--it did not contain the words "thank you" in any form.
In a knee-jerk defense, I argued that I, too, often felt unappreciated. Had anyone thanked me for making dinner and going out to buy six-packs of the workers' favorite beers to celebrate? But this is a familiar conflict, one that never reaches permanent resolution. I say no one thanks me for doing all the laundry; he says no one thanks him for earning all the money that we live on. We both make valid points, and for a while afterward, we verbalize our gratitude to each other openly and often. But it inevitably comes back to this: the sound and the fury of two individuals who have lost, perhaps forever, at least a portion of their individuality and their partner's recognition of it.
Or maybe it's that we didn't need that much recognition before for things that we just did: work, clean, pick up after ourselves. Now, there's so much else to handle that the daily tasks we didn't mind doing before steal the precious little time we have to be ourselves. They become noble acts of sacrifice, and when it comes right down to it, I'm not all that noble. Martyrdom is so much more attractive.
Our day had had an enchanting start. It began as most mornings do, with the kids pushing open our door and crawling into our bed, one on either side. Normally, they chat and shift about until we're too frustrated to sleep anymore. Today, however, I almost immediately asked them if they wanted some breakfast, mostly because I was hungry myself.
It was then that they broke into a Broadway-style duet of "Let's Go Have Some Breakfast." With voicings for alto and soprano and only those five words as lyrics, the song went on for a good minute-and-a-half before Daddy and I both burst out laughing. It was one of those priceless moments that one assumes forebodes a perfect, Brady-bunch sort of day.
Not so, my friend. Not so.
Besides eating cereal and getting dressed, the only things we did between the bedroom serenade and my strawberry binge were bid Grandpa farewell and go to church. While Grandpa's departure may have given rise to some grief in the kids, it seemed to have been tempered by their getting thoroughly muddy in the newly mulched hedge bed in our backyard just before we left for Sunday school. And church itself can only be an uplifting, mellowing experience, right? Uhhh...no.
It was raining when we arrived home around 11:30 AM, and the kids wanted to get wet. Wet and dirty. What could be better when you're two and four? But Mommy wanted the kids to come in so she could fix lunch, and she was ineffectually urging them to bend to her will. When Daddy observes this type of pleading in Mommy with no response from the kids, his tendency is to blow a small gasket, which, in this case, he did. Our four-year-old was swept into the house and up to his room, screeching as though he were being branded the whole way. By some miracle, he fell asleep before his time-out had expired.
While one temper had been quelled (or at least rendered semi-conscious), another was still raging. Daddy reappeared in the kitchen looking a bit like a bull in a cartoon, nostrils flaring as it faced the matador and marked the ground with its hoof. Clearly our son was not the only one with whom he was frustrated.
I asked him calmly, "What's wrong?" It could have been a red cape I had waved, because a full-fledged charge followed.
The gist of his complaint was that he felt unappreciated for all the work he had done the previous day on the hedge. I responded that I had indeed told him how great it looked and how nice it would be to see something green and growing out the kitchen window rather than the rotting old fence that had stood in its place. And as the statement rolled off my tongue, I realized that he was right--it did not contain the words "thank you" in any form.
In a knee-jerk defense, I argued that I, too, often felt unappreciated. Had anyone thanked me for making dinner and going out to buy six-packs of the workers' favorite beers to celebrate? But this is a familiar conflict, one that never reaches permanent resolution. I say no one thanks me for doing all the laundry; he says no one thanks him for earning all the money that we live on. We both make valid points, and for a while afterward, we verbalize our gratitude to each other openly and often. But it inevitably comes back to this: the sound and the fury of two individuals who have lost, perhaps forever, at least a portion of their individuality and their partner's recognition of it.
Or maybe it's that we didn't need that much recognition before for things that we just did: work, clean, pick up after ourselves. Now, there's so much else to handle that the daily tasks we didn't mind doing before steal the precious little time we have to be ourselves. They become noble acts of sacrifice, and when it comes right down to it, I'm not all that noble. Martyrdom is so much more attractive.
posted by Lisa Strandberg at 3:16 PM
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