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.
