Sharing is good?

"Sharing is good!" I once heard my uncle explain to my then five year old cousin. That sentence has been rolling around in the back of my head for at least 25 years now. I don't like to share, I'll tell you that right now. So how can I teach my kids something I don't really believe in?

Sharing sucks. Especially when it comes to your kids or worse, your husband. They just ruin your nice stuff anyway, so why give them access to it in the first place?

Take for instance Poptarts. Strawberry filled, frosted Poptarts, to be exact. Are there, really, any other kind worth eating? Okay, granted for the last few years, I've been on a health kick, and have forced my family to eat an organic, low-animal product, low processed food diet. But come on, sometimes you just need something totally junky to make it through the day.

So when I had the chance to buy a box of Poptarts while visiting the US, I jumped on it. I can get them here, I know. But they go for like 5€ for a six pack (or the equivalent of roughly $6,000,000.00, give or take). I bought them, and put them in the pantry, thinking no one would touch them because (1) they don't know what they are and (2) it's OUR pantry, you can't find ANYTHING in there.

So imagine my surprise, my rage, my utter loss of control, when Sweet Papa comes in to the room with a half eaten piece of strawberry filled goodness in his mouth saying, "This tastes like cardboard. Do you want the other one?" If I wasn't in bed with my new laptop on my lap, phone in my ear, and tax papers strewn all over, I would have leaped up and strangled him. Instead I just started screaming in my phone, "What are you doing? Are you eating my Poptarts? You, you, you, you can't touch those. Those are sacred! Those are sacred!" I thought I was going to cry. Not only did he eat one of my Poptarts, he made a whole pack - he sacrificed two, TWO! Poptarts that I had been saving for the right moment to savor in peace, in quiet, alone with my thoughts.

And then the incredible happened. I hear Kiki from the other room saying, "I don't like it either!"

What? How many did he make? What was he thinking? Doesn't he know? How could he not know? We've been married 14 years. How could he not know he's not supposed to touch my stuff???!!!

"How many did you make?" I shrieked.

"Just two packs."

"Just two packs? Just two packs??!!! It's only a 6 pack. That means we only have 2 left. And we don't fly back home for another 2 months! How could you do this to me? What were you thinking?"

I started walking around the room waving my hands in the air screaming, "How? What? Oh my God! Why do you do things like this?" All the while still on the phone with my sister saying to her, "Can you believe it? He ate my Poptarts! He ate my Poptarts!" She didn't seemed phased. She tried to talk me out of buying them in the first place. She was alright with the two family-sized jars of high fructose corn syrup infused grape jelly, and the 60 pack of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and she even helped procure the 10 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for me. But Poptarts, I guess, crossed some kind of a line for her.

This, of course, was not the first time something like this has happened. But I've learned to stash my good stuff away (in my closet, above the 3 feet line, or in a cupboard, behind the first row of uninteresting looking healthy food). I buy two sets of art supplies - one for me to cherish, one for my kids to destroy, luckily Sweet Papa isn't interested in creating art (unless you can eat it).

But sometimes, when I'm busy or tired, I get careless. It only takes a second. Leave your artwork or tax papers on the table and run to lower the heat on the pot of spaghetti boiling over on the stove and come back to find a layer of thick red paint on your dining table, sofa, carpet, window, cat, child's face, child's butt (because they tried to wipe it off), child's shirt (because they tried to wipe it off again), child's arms and legs (because wiping it off seemed like so much fun).

After three kids and a husband, there's just no place for sacredness. I grab the plates away from Sweet Papa and Kiki and eat every last crumb I could find, and glance over at Bugsy to see if he wants any because he's the only one who understands how good they really are. He slowly retreats in fear and politely says "No, thank you."

I take the remaining packets out of the cupboard and bring them to the safety of my clothes closet. Squint my eyes, pinch my lips together and flash Sweet Papa that "Don't you EVER touch my stuff again" look. He just pours himself a glass of milk, puts on his headphones and loses himself in a game of World of Tanks. The kids go back to watching the Disney channel, and I think by now my sister has hung up on me.

Payback

This is dedicated to my new baby niece (not technically a niece since she's my cousin's daughter, but in my family, if a person is younger than you, they are a niece or nephew and if they are older than you, they are your aunt or uncle, but then I had one kid try and call me "Aji" (grandmother) because I am cousins with their father's mother who is technically considered my sister because our fathers are brothers - but then I was like "no way, dude, I am NOBODY's Aji! I am WAY too young for that kind of responsibility).

This is a story about PAYBACK. 

Something happened to me a while ago that brought me to knees, and nearly made me crumble. Kiki didn't want to go to Hort (afterschool care). And she was adamant about it. Not sure what started it. Not even sure what ended it. But it was dreadful. Now, it may not seem all that bad to you, but to me it was tragic.

Over here, for first and second graders, school ends, on some days at 11:10. Yep that's right, 11 freakin' 10! School starts at 8:00, and it takes about 10 minutes to walk back home after dropping her off, and 10 minutes to walk back to pick her up. So that gives me 2 hours and 50 minutes to shower, eat breakfast, look for jobs, write cover letters, translate them to German (get my proofs back from Sweet Papa claiming that my grammar sucks), create project proposals, make all my job related calls and hope people don't call back when my kids are home and I have to try and sound professional while using gestures and hand signals to threaten my kids to leave the room and be quiet.

To be fair to the German school system... No wait, this system sucks. Kiki gets out at 11:10 twice a week, 12:15 twice a week, and one day a week she gets out at 1:00! Hurray! 4 hours of freedom! I just might get time to get some groceries without a kid demanding everything from cookies to Hello Kitty printed toilet paper, or worse yet, a kid who HAS to poop just at the point where your shopping cart is full and you're behind 15 people, including the old guy at the front who is trying to pay for beer and candy with pennies!

When I took her out of Hort for a week, Bugsy said I was too easy on her. He's right. I never would have given in to him. I think he tried, but I was so sleep deprived overwhelmed with the two younger ones that I couldn't give in to him. Plus he made friends and learned the language way faster than he would have being home with me speaking English and watching TV all day. Yeah, I guess I could have planned better and taken them to the playground in between nap time (which changed daily or sometimes never happened) and cooked nutritious meals for them (without groceries because I had to leave them at the store and get my kid to the nearest clean toilet before the poopy came out only to find that it was a false alarm, and to later find said poopy on my living room floor an hour later because it was the exciting part of The Lion King and they couldn't get off the couch to get to the bathroom on time). Sorry, mama.

But Bugsy was different. He's stubborn, but at some point he'll cave. It might take a while, but he'll give in eventually. Fifi, pretty much will find the adventure in anything, and only needs a few minutes to warm up to an idea. And when not, she can easily be bought off with a bar of chocolate. Kiki, though, I have met my match with that one. She is more stubborn than me and Sweet Papa put together. She will stick to her guns on everything. She. Will. Not. Budge.

It's terrible. At first, I thought this, for sure, was a trait she got from her dad (which he got from his mom - but that's another story altogether). But apparently, according to my cousin (different cousin than the one that had the baby - this one lives in India and therefore has much larger gene pool to study) my family is famous for its stubbornness! Famous!

This wasn't just about not wanting to go to Hort or school (which came later). This was about PAYBACK. When I was in first grade, my mom got a call from the school nurse EVERY SINGLE Monday morning saying, "Mrs. Vernekar, your little daughter has a tummy ache." as my mom continued to remind me for years afterwards trying to imitate the nurses' southern accent while speaking with her own Indian intonation.

What had I done to my mom all those years? Was I really that bad? Was I really that annoying? When I first found I was pregnant with Bugsy and was feeling weird and nauseous, my mom laughed and said to me "Guuuuuuudd. I hope he gets you!" What? What kind of sympathy was that from my own loving mother? What had I done to that woman? I mean besides the weight gain, lack of sleep, interruption of her college studies, pulling her hair while she was learning how to drive, slapping her in the face when she tried to sing us to sleep, and the worst - scratching her precious two-year old prince of a son in the face whenever he came near her. I was a tiger!

Then it occurred to me. All my kids got the worst traits, not just from me, but from Sweet Papa, AND all of our siblings! It's not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most annoying! Bugsy and Fifi got the non-stop talking gene from both our sisters (a double whammy). Fifi got the gotta-be-friends-with-everyone-gene from my sister. Kiki got the must-fill-my-pockets-with-leaves-and-other-random-trash from my brother (although to be fair, he only collects leaves, seriously, borrow one of his jackets and you'll see what I mean). Fifi most definitely got the shoe-lovin' gene from my sister-in-law (really? you want to wear your sparkly but flimsy sandals on a 2 hour hike?). Luckily Bugsy and Kiki got the night owl gene from us, but Fifi didn't. She's the only morning person in the family, which was hell for me until we re-programmed her so I could get some sleep. 

So, Baby M, although your mom was the cutest baby ever, and she claims, right now, that you are a calm baby, I know what your uncles are like, and I can't even imagine what you might be getting from your father's side.  Be careful what you do to your mom and dad in the next 20 or 30 years, because it'll all come full circle when you have kids of your own (or when you're asked to babysit my grandkids).