Temporary Insanity

We all thought our parents were nuts, right?  Well, they were... at least temporarily.  And it was you, dear reader, that drove them to this condition.  And, I say this knowing full well that my siblings and I were responsible for our own parents' frequent trips to the looney-bin.

Actually, we all have moments in our life that drive us to the very edge of our patience and tolerance, and sooner or later, we all snap.  This is a condition that is brought about in our daily struggle to get along with other people. It all starts when we are kids.  You've asked your brother time and time again not to go in your room and play with your toys.  After the tenth time of telling him, then discovering that he did it again... with your favorite toy... snap... an ugly monster emerges in the form of a kindergartener with fangs and claws! The next thing you know, your parents are forcibly peeling you off of your brother and wondering if five years old is too soon for anti-anxiety medication.  To your parents, it seems like you've lost your mind.  To you, it was the only reasonable alternative.  Like I said... temporary insanity!

Life moves on and we get our own apartment with a roommate.  You've asked him a hundred times not to put his smelly, dirty socks on top of the coffee table.  The next thing you know, you find yourself trying to force his socks down his own throat while your girlfriend watches in horror at you losing your mind over socks! (Geez, what a nut-case!)  Years later, that same girl threatens to beat her husband with the toilet lid if he leaves it up one more time!

It also happens in the office, when the sweet young lady that volunteered to look after the break room puts up a nice sticky note, complete with flowers and hand-drawn smiley faces, reminding people that if they take the last cup of coffee, to please make a new pot.  Then it happens again and she sends out a sweet reminder by email.  Then another email, not so sweet.  This escalates until finally this sweet, mild-mannered, otherwise reasonable young woman is going from cubicle to cubicle with an empty coffee pot in one hand and a staple gun in the other demanding to know who left the empty coffee pot!

Now tell me, who in their right mind, when confronted with this vision of craziness is going to admit to leaving the empty coffee pot?  That's right... NO ONE!

Now, in the world of parenting, situations like this crop up on almost a daily basis.  When a parent says to a child, "how many times have I asked you not to ________ ?"  Fill in your own blank there.  What the parent is really saying is, "you are slowly driving me insane, and if you do _________ again, I might have to kill you!"  But what the child hears is "blah blah blah blah" and what they see is a crazy person moving their jaws up and down.  So, given these conditions, it should come as no surprise to anyone that when the parent finally hunts his kids down one-by-one with a block of dried-up cheese in one hand and the torn up wrapper in the other, that the parent has officially lost his mind! 

Yes, dear reader, the nut job with the cheese was me.  This moment of temporary insanity was brought to my attention by our fourteen-year-old, Nate.  Someone had clumsily opened a new block of cheese and left it unwrapped in the fridge, making a good portion of the cheese hard and uneatable.  This was about the ten-millionth time that this had happened, and I very nearly took a temporary trip to crazy world.  Fortunately for everyone else in the house, they had all gone to bed by the time I discovered it, so I had a night's rest to return to the land of the sane.

The next morning, I calmly asked Nate if he had opened the cheese, and he just started laughing.  I asked him what was so funny, and he proceeded to re-enact my reaction from the last time this had happened.  Stomping around the house in a fury asking each one of them who did it. 

I ask you again, which child in their right mind will admit to leaving the cheese open when confronted with this vision of craziness?  That's right.... NONE of them!

I must say, I was impressed with his acting skills, and his voice-over work was splendidly done as well.  But the real kicker was discovering that this one-man Broadway show of his had already been performed for his friends and classmates.  That's what he was laughing about.

That's when I began to ponder the craziness of my parents.  I remembered the times they lost their minds.  I remember telling my friends how crazy my parents were.  And, I remembered pointing this out to them, using my not-so-subtle skills of dramatic prose.  I vaguely recalled my mother saying something to the effect of, "one day your kids will make you crazy, and will act exactly the same way!"

Holy crap... Bill Cosby was right!  The "mother's curse" DOES work!

So, therefore Nathanial, I hereby curse you!  Here it comes....

One day your kids will make you crazy and you will act just like us!

Damn, that felt good.  I'm hungry now.  I wonder if there's any cheese...