Four children fly through the air. Jared bounces off his bed and lands on the rug with his legs together — he always sticks the landing — then gyroscopes into a series of tumbles. Hannah jumps up and down on her bed, screaming at the top of her lungs and thrashing her head about. Barak hops up and down with his bedcovers draped over him, a ghost in training. Asher — big brother to the other three, who are triplets — balances on his bed frame and whips pillows at his siblings. I sit on the bathroom floor, running hot water into the tub, ignored and irrelevant. I told them to remove their clothes 30 minutes ago, but you can't give anarchy a bath. When the tub is full, I corral them behind the security gate. Of course they can escape easily. The gate now exists as a purely symbolic gesture that my wife Roni and I command a physical and intellectual superiority against which their childish machinations are futile. But children do not understand the finer points of symbolism. Their ability to jimmy, pick, pry, climb, leap, scale, or bulldoze through the gate only serves to embolden their belief that they represent the superior intelligence in the home. It is a belief system I hesitate to dispute. Saddam Hussein, Britney Spears, telemarketing — adults have a lot of explaining to do.
Eventually Barak decides it would be fun to pelt me with dirty clothes, and the others follow suit. The four kids strip down and bomb through the house, naked and laughing and screaming. The house has five interconnected bedrooms through which the children create a berserk feedback loop. Imagine a 1970s hard-rock band let loose in a new hotel after a long gig. They chase each other relentlessly, their giddiness expanding until they enter a state of aerobic hysteria. Books, CDs, and stacks of clothes fall to the floor, cups filled with loose change spin end over end and doors slam shut, threatening to amputate fingers. I exert as much control over the fury around me as an old man in Boca Raton who finds himself inside the eye of a hurricane. Finally, something snaps, and the glee turns into cruelty, rage, and bitterness. Fists, accusations and oaths of revenge fly as the bonds of mischief break apart, replaced by the yoke of sibling torment. And yet, in another ten minutes, the triplets yodel, snorkel, and splash in the tub, while Asher climbs on me as if I were a jungle gym.
My children don't play, they rampage. They don't eat, they ravage. They plop down into chairs with the grace of incoming rounds of mortar. The triplets are six now, Asher, nine, and we live in a state of near-constant chaos. The kids begin to wake at 6:15 A.M. and the last pleas for water, a lost toy, one more minute of TV (blessed, holy, life-sustaining TV, just one more minute, I swear, please!), snuggle time, snacks, or some suddenly remembered errand do not end until 10, 10:30, sometimes 11 P.M. I will never understand how they produce and sustain this volume of energy. I took chemistry in high school and cannot comprehend how their intake of calories supports 15-16 unrelieved hours of turmoil. Are the bodies of children that much more efficient than adults? Is anyone at Exxon-Mobil or DARPA studying children to see how this chemistry can be applied to weapon systems, public transportation, cars, or parents?
I pray for those first moments of peace and quiet, when I can read the newspaper and enjoy my nutritionally disastrous 11 P.M. dinner. While my wife sinks into the couch with her bowl of salad, a smile plastered across her face, I guiltily review my impatient reactions, my demented parental instant replay. Guilt and chaos are my peace and quiet.
I still wake up several times every night to check on the children, a habit from the baby years hardwired into my neurological control panel. By 6:15 A.M. I am finishing all the chores left unfinished from the day before, the Sisyphusian reality for any primary caregiver of small children. The battles begin when I shut off the TV, spooned out like chocolate to induce them to dress. They fling clothes in one another's faces and a dozen skirmishes erupt, but time-outs and removed privileges do not make the clock tick any slower. At breakfast, the kids quietly eat a bowl of cereal and chat about a hundred goofy topics or suddenly splinter into Balkanized fighting. The battle over leaving pitches forward, pitting inertia against momentum. Children instructed to tie shoes develop obscure and time-devouring problems elsewhere. By the time we reach the car and they fight over seating arrangements, it feels as if a day has passed. I drop them off at school, feeling relieved and, after they see their friends and scoot off, slightly melancholy. They will enjoy innumerable adventures whose descriptions will be unforthcoming.
When my father came home from work, he expected to be greeted by peace and quiet, a concept I never understood. When I worked at a fulltime job I hated, I rushed home to see the kids, to wrap myself in the warm cocoon of their hectic, noisy, perpetual-motion world.
That feeling has not changed, even though I work at home full-time now. I snuck out of my home office yesterday to make a FedEx run and found the kids in improvised costumes — Hannah in a police officer's tunic and cowboy pants, Jared in a Superman cape, black gloves, and plastic lizard face, Barak in a horse-breeder's outfit, and Asher in a bright polka-dot clown suit, complete with nylon fright wig, his personality demonically corrupted. Asher sang monstrously inappropriate songs the triplets repeated with a cluelessness matched only by their enthusiasm. Asher ran them in circles, egging each child on to greater heights of feral play, the conductor of chaos, ratcheting up the noise, confusion and sonic miscegenation until the lead-based paint peeled off the window frames. Roni turned red with impatience, so I sent her outside to dig holes for the tomato plants.
It has taken me years to understand that their play has an organic rhythm that cannot be felt from the outside in. If I sit in my office and let my temper burn down over the preposterous wall of sound beyond my door, I am surrendering to my impatience. But when I observe them, I see that the wall of sound is a complex organic entity, like a river, and if I course along inside of it, feeling the rapids and waterfalls and steaming pools of deep water, I can appreciate the internal beauty of their world. In this universe they maintain their own, unspoken language, like a lost Amazonian tribe, a rich language of play, noise, disorder, rebellion, turmoil, discord, excess, self-expression, bonding and love.
My father screamed at my younger brother Paul and I when we wrestled, but we were only playing, not fighting, and his emotional control was too fragile to let us be ourselves. Peace and quiet was a Biblical commandment.
Noise and chaos are the gravity of our universe. Getting ready for school, coming home after a shopping trip, those ill-defined time periods between activities, all are opportunities for disorder to take over. And yet it always puzzled me why bedtime was always the most difficult. Now I understand that they are articulating a simple joy at being, and they see sleep as an unfair and unwelcome intrusion. Why should they be robbed of so many squalling hours of life just to lay down their heads and dream? I explain the scientific benefits of rest, but they react suspiciously, as if I am pulling a fast one. I understand their skepticism. When the house is quiet, it feels as if something is terribly wrong.
— Bruce Stockler is a media-relations consultant and humorist who lives in the suburbs of New York City. His essays and op-eds have appeared various newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, and Esquire. His memoir about family life and fatherhood, I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets was just published by St. Martin's Press.
