Mornings

The Storm Before the Calm

by Daniel Griffin

At one point this morning, everyone in my family was screaming. All five of us. We were one great, howling choir. We drowned out the radio, sent the cat flying from the room and probably started the neighbours planning an intervention.

Our two-year-old, Vivian, was screaming because she didn’t want to eat her Cheerios. Tess, our four-year-old, was upset because she wanted someone to dress her—she sat naked on her pile of clothes, bellowing at the top of her lungs. My wife was trying to brush our eldest daughter’s hair (once every few days, Evelyn wakes up with a knot the size of Texas in her hair.) Although Kim was going at it with all the kindness she could muster, the knot soon got the better of them and both ended up yelling—Evelyn holding her hands over her head and hollering to stop while my wife threatened a hair cut.

Through all this, I was standing at the kitchen counter screaming that everyone had to hurry up because we needed to be out the door in 10 minutes. Of course, no one was listening to me any more than I was listening to them, but I kept at it: “Ten more minutes, everybody, ten minutes.”

When I was a kid, my family lived a block from school. I woke up five minutes before the bell, rolled out of bed, took a piece of toast on my way out the door and ran for it. I was late just about every morning, Labour Day through June. For a while, my teachers would ask how I could be late so often when I lived so close. I had no real explanation. A few months in, they would generally stop asking and stop making me get late slips.

Until now I’ve been more or less happy to follow this kind of approach with my kids. So we’re late, big deal. It’s primary school. This year, however, Evelyn has to take a bus to school and the bus waits for no man. The two younger kids are in preschool three mornings a week and with my wife back at work part-time, we need every minute of child care we can get. It adds up to a schedule we’re determined to keep. Kids out the door on bikes or in the bike chariot by 8:15 a.m. Weekday mornings around 8:00, unless everyone’s ready to go, I find myself bellowing about how late it is.

There are certainly good, quiet days, calm mornings when everything in our house moves smoothly, but there are also days when we yell. I yell at Evelyn, she yells at me, I yell at my wife, she yells at me, I yell at the younger kids, and even Vivian, the almost-three year old, is good at yelling back. The exact words depend on that morning’s particular crisis. It’s usually a mix of dire warnings about the time, accusations about who lost which permission slip or homework sheet, orders to finish breakfast and get dressed—you get the idea. The only one consistently quiet on these hectic mornings is our poor cat.

To be honest, I’m rather surprised. I never pictured myself a bellower. I grew up in a house of relative serenity—as serene as it can be with three boys running around. Neither of my parents bellowed at us, but here I am eight years and three kids into parenthood and I’m already in a screaming match at least one morning a week. It’s nothing that lasts. And it’s never anything personal or hateful. Even on a day like today, there’s a serenity to our 10-minute bike rides. We sail peacefully in the calm after the storm. While the younger two chatter away in the chariot, Evelyn and I talk. Some days we discuss her after school plans, other days the books she’s going to take out of the library or the story she’s writing. Today, when a cyclist zips past us, Evelyn asks, “Why do other people get to ride out in the middle of the road, but you’re always yelling at me to stay over?”

In a calm, steady and level voice, I say, “Staying to the side is about safety. As for the yelling, it’s just one of those things adults do sometimes.”

Daniel Griffin is a writer and a father of three.  He lives in Victoria.