Paint Splatters

My walls are currently covered with chocolate finger smears about 3 feet high.  If you’ve ever watched the Bill Cosby comedy special “Himself”, you’ve seen his funny bit about how if you only have one child and something gets broken or damaged, you know who did it.  More than one child leads to wide-eyed, oblivious, finger-pointing children yet there’s never a guilty one among them.  I can relate to that frustration on so many levels.  Luckily, I’ve developed ways of gauging who did what by keen knowledge of my suspects and often the height requirements for each offense helps tremendously.  I’m not the first parent to use these techniques…  Growing up, my dad was a musician and I had a bevy of amps, microphones and guitars to play with.  After one spirited session being Patty Loveless on my dad’s mic, I carefully put everything back where I found it and went about my business.  A few days later, my dad called me into the bedroom to ask if I’d been messing with his equipment.  I vehemently denied it.  My dad turned, grabbed the mic – still nestled in its stand – and placed it directly in front of me.  The microphone couldn’t have been any more level with my mouth had I used a measuring tape.  The jig was up.  I guess the completely defeated look on my face that read of “whoopsie?” amused my dad enough to let me go unscathed.  If memory serves, I think he even cracked a grin.

It’s a process of elimination, really.  For example, someone was too lazy to take their glass back downstairs so it was stuffed in the back of the TOP shelf of a closet.  I know this was Drew based on height.  I don’t even have to delve into the other clues that it was him.  Other clues being that this offense is about level of laziness.  Drew isn’t my most active child…  He would rather stay in his room, on his laptop than go anywhere.  I occasionally go in and put a mirror under his nose to check for signs of breath and encourage him to roll over to prevent bed sores.  Getting up to go downstairs and put the glass in the dishwasher really isn’t going to take precedence over scratching and video games…

I know the chocolate finger smears are Reid’s based on height and who’s been on the chocolate bender.  Reid is just my dirty little boy.  He wipes his hands on the walls, wipes snot on his arm and has no reservations about farting in quiet waiting rooms.  I love that he loves the goodies I make for him so I follow him around with a wash cloth and dust pan.  The chocolate finger stains were everywhere.  I love magic erasers but they don’t work well on painted walls.  Particularly painted and textured walls.  It just takes off the paint and shreds the magic eraser.  I like to keep around back-up paint for nicks and digs and once I have a certain amount of scuffs, I break out my paint.  I put on my ancient painting/hair dying t-shirt I’ve had since Jason and I were first married.  After I covered up all of Reid’s handy work I sat down and looked down at my old paint/hair dye-covered polo shirt.  I noticed all the different colors it’s collected over the years.  The first color I noticed that made me smile was a bright yellow color.  Our apartment in Dallas, when we first moved here, I painted bright yellow.  I think its hideous now, but I’m sure it made sense in my mind at the time.  I was going through a very minimalistic, art deco stage.  I had a pretty active social life at that time and everyone I still keep in contact with today remembers the yellow apartment.  If those walls could talk…  I’d cut their tongues out.  I did a lot of evolving in that yellow apartment.  I don’t look back at everything in that yellow apartment with positive memories but it was part of the process of becoming who I am now.

As I looked deeper and deeper on my shirt, I found the hair dye from the time I thought I thought I’d look great as a sparkplug redhead.  I found the paint from the haunted house we lived at in Hot Springs.  It brought back the memories from that house.  The strange whispers in my ears, the fact that “it” knew my name and liked to tap on glass.  Jason never believed me.  I also found several layers from the intense sea foam green phase I went through in the late 90's.  Then under all that, I found the paint from Drew’s first nursery….  Wow.  I had no idea this shirt represented the many colors and phases of my life; different locations, different stages, different tastes, different emotions.  I’m no longer the girl who liked sea foam green but I remember her.  I think she was naïve and innocent.  I think she he had really bad taste, too.  I don’t dislike her, but I think she had a lot of learning to do and she and I probably wouldn't "get" each other today.  I had no clue who or where I would be when a lot of these splatters made it onto this shirt.  I wonder if there are any traces of the girl who liked sea foam green so much still in here. 

Maybe I'll look back at the paint on my shirt from today's task in a few years and won't recognize the me I am right now.  The me before having started school and still being a stay-at-home mom covering up Reid's little hand prints.  I’m really glad this shirt got me thinking about all this because I don’t think the paint I just used to cover up Reid’s chocolate smears is an exact match.  Had this not taken a deeper turn I could potentially be in panic mode right now.  Oh’well, it’s just paint, right?  It’s not like it means anything.  Or so I thought…