Soap Box

Originally uploaded by laundrylessons.

Laundering clothes for six people requires the industrial box of Tide. I haul the thirty pound box home from Sams Club because it works and I don’t have to buy soap every week. These boxes usually don’t overlap in the laundry room. I try to keep the full one in the garage until the old one is empty. But John, trying to help me out, stacked the boxes and now they have a commanding presence in the small space.

At the dinner table last week, I realized I was also trying to command my presence on the scene unfolding. Table banter had gotten out of hand. Sometimes a kid starts it, but often my biggest kid, John, starts it. Usually I let the bean throwing contest, or creative fork demonstration continue for awhile before I put a stop to it. Families are supposed to have fun at the table right? But on this night, I’d prepared a Bobby Flay, grilled Halibut with a sweet pepper pesto and didn’t think my efforts deserved to be interrupted by a reenactment of the playground supervisor’s verbal lashing of the fifth grade boys.

“Just SIT DOWN and eat,” I barked from my soap box. All eyes turned to me as I stopped the fun. The faces read, “Aww, it was just getting exciting,” as JP slumped back into his chair. Standing on a soap box, trying to raise children can be a lonely place. Anyone who has to make a stand against the majority has felt the isolation. That night even my husband thought I was the meany.

Teaching my children manners and how to converse at the table is an important lesson. Making beds with tight corners is not. Eating a wide variety of food is one of my passions, but sweeping the floor after dinner is not. I’m trying to pass on the things I’m passionate about, but sometimes I sound like I’m preaching on the corner. “Napkin in your lap, Graham. JP, no fingers in your food. Chin over your plate, Paige.” My need to preach sometimes takes the fun out of dinner.

But some products, like Tide and moms, have to do the dirty work. Like it or not, moms were designed to take the goofiness away from the table, the mud off the shoes and the jumping kids off the beds. Sometimes we get our jobs done by attracting attention with our bold packaging and big soap box. But other times we are more affective in warm water, gently dissolving a crisis, or soaking out a stain.