Once when I was in high school, I had such a severe stomach flu that I was taken to the hospital. The doctors gave me medicine intravenously to stop the vomiting, then advised my mom to settle in and get comfortable because a side effect of this particular drug was deep and heavy sleep. The good news: I was going to be healthy and feel better when I woke up.
“So she’ll be sleeping for a long time?” I heard Mom ask the doctor, and maybe for a moment I thought that was strange, but the medicine began to take effect and my eyes grew heavy. Each time I felt myself getting drowsy, I opened my eyes again to make sure Mom was still there. A few times she had her purse on her shoulder and was standing by the door.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” I asked.
“I’m right here,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
I woke up several hours later, and Mom was sitting in a hard plastic chair in the corner of the room. She was balancing her checkbook.
For all I knew, Mom had stayed in that plastic chair the whole time I slept. Then one day many years afterward, when I was an adult and had a child of my own, Mom and I were talking about women’s superiority over men at multitasking. “Remember when I left to get the oil changed in the car while you were asleep in the hospital?” she said between laughs.
My laughing came to an abrupt halt. “What do you mean? You didn’t leave. You stayed in that plastic chair, remember?”
Mom suddenly looked apologetic. “The doctors said you were going to be fine,” she said. “And, well, I did need to get the oil changed.”
I didn’t know whether to be angry or to stare at my mom with awe and admiration. Talk about multitasking!
Seven years and two more children later, however, one thing is definitely clear: Parents do many things that their children don’t see or can’t understand until later. Some examples:
— When playing Chutes and Ladders (a game more boring than watching C-SPAN) with a child who cannot count, a parent will sometimes move her pawn ahead six spaces even though she only spun a 3.
— In the winter, when it gets dark earlier in the evening, parents use this seasonal phenomenon to put their kids to bed at 7 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. (“But it’s only 7 o’clock, Mom!” “Yeah, well, look at how dark it is outside. Time for bed.”)
— Before kids can tell time themselves, parents will sometimes get them to bed even earlier than 7 p.m.
— When the bedroom door is locked, it’s not because your parents are “getting dressed.”
— If a parent is almost to the gingerbread house in Candyland (a game only slightly less boring than Chutes and Ladders) but stuck in the Molasses Swamp, then flips a card that tells her to go back to the Peppermint Forest, she will slide that card underneath the pile, say something like, “Oh, that card doesn’t count,” and then select a new one (one that she hopes says “move ahead 10 spaces”).
— Children can do anything — short of burning down the house or harming each other — if they will let their parents sleep in one extra hour.
— Yes, parents know that you are downstairs eating three helpings of waffles and watching back-to-back episodes of “SpongeBob.” They just want to sleep in, darn it.
— Parents don’t “do the dishes” or “clean up the kitchen” after kids go to bed. Sometimes they eat more desserts, the very ones they told you were off-limits for the rest of the night. (This is why there was a plate full of cookies when you went to bed and only three left when you woke up.)
— Parents are lying when they say there is nothing good on television past 8 p.m. so “you might as well go to bed anyway.”
— Leaving the front door open won’t “heat the entire neighborhood.”
— Telling you that you can’t have a snack before dinner because it will ruin your appetite was just your mom’s way of getting you out of the kitchen while she cooked.
— Other kids did not necessarily shovel snow, mow the lawn or rake leaves when they were 10 years old.
— Misbehaving in a crowded restaurant was the perfect time to get anything you wanted. (“Do you want to get ice cream after dinner? Then sit down and be quiet.”)
— Your mom threw away 80 percent of your drawings and schoolwork.
— She keeps the special 20 percent in a drawer and cries over them as you get older. (“Look at how little his hands were!”)
But mostly what I’ve learned about the secrets of parenthood is this: When parents say they love their children, they really, truly mean it.
Maine author and columnist Sarah Smiley’s writing is syndicated weekly to publications across the country. She and her husband, Dustin, live with their three sons in Bangor. She may be reached at sarah@sarahsmiley.com.