One More Story from the Book I Never Wrote

It’s important to have healthy outlets for anger and frustration besides ones that damage stuff or make big messes, because guess who has to clean it up? One time I was coming in from shopping with my five small children who had been fighting all the way home from the grocery store. (Why on earth I took all five with me is a mystery.)  I was in a hurry to get all the food unloaded from the car and into the house, because someone needed to go to dance or something, and we were running late.  I had everyone helping but they were still fighting, making rude remarks, etc. to each other and I was to the boiling point.  After repeated efforts to get them to stop with no success, I finally decided to drive the point home.  I grabbed whatever was on the top of one of the grocery bags nearest to me, which happened to be a two-pound sack of powdered sugar and started swinging it at the nearest child.  He ducked, and I kept swinging and he kept ducking.  I don’t remember the details clearly, except that out of the corner of my red rage, I noticed something white flying through the air. When I finally stopped swinging and tried to make sense of what was going on around me, I realized that, yes, they had stopped fighting, and oh no, the white stuff was powdered sugar, about two pounds worth, coating most everything in the room, including the children.  Big mess, huh—what did I tell you, don’t use powdered sugar as an outlet for anger.  It was complicated by the fact that our table on which we were unloading the groceries was on a small area of carpet, original color unknown, which I had scrubbed previously that day and was wet, with a fine dusting of white sugar which was being soaked up by the water still in the carpet.  At that point I mumbled something like, “Clean this mess up by the time I get back,” knowing full well that I couldn’t clean it up by the time I got back, let alone four kids who would each need several towels and all the rags to themselves.  As I was driving up the road, my youngest who was with me ventured a comment to me, saying, “Mom, you got to admit, it was funny when the bag broke.”  I had to agree and we giggled all the way to dance class.