I hope you all had a Happy Holiday, Merry Christmas and a festive gift giving season. I hope none of you had fist-a-cuffs at your holiday celebration. However, if you did, I am not judging you and I hope you don’t judge me by the next story I am about to tell.

My children were young and it was our second year living in our new house in Pennsylvania. The children had caught on that around the holidays the mail is not like regular mail, it’s more enticing and should be regarded as “The Mail”! Now my two oldest children a girl and a boy would take turns to get the mail. It was privilege to get the ordinary mail, but it was an honor to get “The Mail” and they need to take this shit super fucking serious. Like Dead serious. One particular day they were waiting for the mail lady to come by with the mail and they sat anxiously awaiting her arrival in the sitting room peeking out the window. We live in a cul-de-sac and so it is a slight torture to await the mail because she has to drive around the circle to get to our house. She then has to stop at each mailbox before getting to our mailbox. All the while my two oldest children are perched like hawks ready to pounce. I am getting my youngest to sleep for her nap.

I am not really certain what happened in the time that I left my children, who were anxiously anticipating “The Mail”, so I will now go on my imagination because I’m awesome that way.

The young girl with her long dirty blond hair and the the young boy with short jet black hair sat in the window for hours awaiting the packages of the day. They are agents of the Royal Majesty and the packages are of the utmost importance. These were no ordinary children, no, these were secret royal mail carrying spies that must make sure that the packages get delivered to the Queen with great speed and without being thwarted. This mail is The Most Important Mission to date. No other Mail will ever be as important as this mail today. The two secret agents sit in wait at the window in the sitting room scarcely breathing for fear of fogging up the window. Both with their steady blue eyes checking every direction for the mail truck but also enemies of the palace. The enemies are vast and they are surely out there just resting on their haunches in preparation to pounce on the Royal Packages.

The boy sees the truck and he points it out to his partner. She sees it too and they must now each take turns watching the truck as the other gets their gear on. First the boy puts his technologically advanced boots, his specially designed parka and of course the most important mittens and hat made from the wool of a steel sheep grown in the Royal lab underground for specific agents with great missions as this one. Next the girl gets her boots on when something happens while she is gearing up with her spyware, the boy takes off running. The girl haphazardly throws her gear on while running for the door. She must act quickly for she is the head agent and if her brother spy is out before her and gets injured it is on her record and conscience for life. She takes off with great speed. As she is running out to cover her brother agent she takes in the scene and a peculiar tingling sensation runs through her. There are no enemies in sight, no one is there. But why is the brother agent running so quickly? As she assesses the situation she has quickly determined that the brother agent is not working for the Royal Queen at all, he is a DOUBLE AGENT. (insert dum dum dum dah music here)

The older sister agent who has been on “The Mail” job much longer knows that the quickest way to the mail box is not down the curved sloped driveway but straight through the grass and the Royal Wishing Well Garden, which typically must never be walked in. She also knows her brother agents weakness as she has trained him. She taught him everything that he knows but not everything that she knows. She is in hot pursuit of “The Mail” when her brother agent shows that he has been learning from another agency and he pulls out some moves she isn’t prepared for. They both reach the mail box at the same time and they know that it is a fight that is going to secure the packages for the Queen. They start hand to hand combat and the battle begins. The ground is covered in snow and ice and each blow is cut with the sharp cold air. It feels like millions of shards of glass cutting through their flesh. She finally secures most of the packages but some of the secret files were caught by a breeze that blew them from her hands. Brother agent isn’t concerned with the files, his mission was to retrieve the box from Nana and that is all. He is on the ground in a snowbank trying to use his secretly altered boots to kick the package out of the sister agent’s hands. But what he doesn’t know is that the sister agent has some moves he isn’t prepared for. She too has specially designed boots for such an occasion. 

This is when I look out the window and there are my two children kicking the shit out of each other over a fucking package meanwhile the other regular mail, ie bills, advertisements and Christmas cards are blowing through the yard and street. My Son is being pushed into the snow bank as his sister is kicking him senseless. He then jumps up and charges her for the box. She is knocked off of her feet. I race down the stairs and to complete the neighbors vision of this display of white trashism I holler out to them “Y’all better round up that mail and get your God Damned Fighting asses into this house right now or you are really going to regret your display of family tragedy down at the mail box. Don’t make me count!”

My two children look up at me : The Royal Queen announces that this was a test and they have both failed. They must now collect the files and the package and present them to her at once. She will go through the protocols and show them the footage. The training proved to be quite informative and they will be all the wiser from this test. It taught them to work as a team. They mistrusted each other too quickly and the Queen sensed this. She wanted them to go into the bunker to train in trust.

“Do You HEAR Me? I want both of you to sit in my room and with on another until I can think of an appropriate punishment. I want you to sit quietly and wait until I have my patience back so that I can be fair to you both. But I will say this, Don’t you EVER beat the living hell out of one another again. Family is forever, you got that! You will need to lean on one another and have each other’s backs. You should never turn on one another.”

They both sat in my room and one thing they didn’t know was that I knew that if they were in deep shit together they have a common enemy and a common goal. They would begin to get along and they would work together to get themselves a lesser punishment. They apologized to one another and came up with their own sentence. They created a “Mail Chart” and who was going to collect the mail from now on. By the time I had “enough patience” the problem and solution was all worked out.

I then told them that they needed to go and apologize to all of the neighbors for having to watch them fight out at the mailbox. My children hung their heads but they did it and still remember having to do it and still talk about ‘that one time mom made them knock on all of the neighbors and apologize for fighting.’

Moral of my story: I don’t know, kids beat the hell out of each other over bills and shit. Just do your best to teach them that they shouldn’t and if they do give them a common enemy and common goal. Also I thought teaching them to take responsibility for their own actions by apologizing to those who have witnessed such a display would make my children honorable and strong. They are honorable and strong so maybe that worked, maybe it just humiliated them, that’s the thing with parenting you never know what worked and what didn’t, it’s a crap shoot. You just hope for the best and carry on as best you can.

Until next time 🙂