Negotiating with My Terrorists
MoM warning: rants recorded while under the influence of medication may result in nonsensical tyrades that only make the author giggle and are generally packed full of grammatical and spelling atrocities. If this post is not entertaining, call a prescribing physician, or check in next week when MoM is sober.

I am debating a name change for this collection of published rantings. I chose the title of my blog with great care and heed to the fact that when properly abbreviated, Mistress of Mayhem spelled MoM. (A fact that I am sure is not lost on my brilliant and growing readership.) I have decided however, that a change to be the Mistress of Mayhem and her Maniacal Mercenaries would be a more accurate reflection of my daily struggles since the word “minion” implies a certain degree of obedience and cooperation toward a common goal, and my offspring in no way exude that commonality in purpose.

I will preface this prolonged parental whine with the confession that I am a diagnosed sufferer of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Many people believe that this affliction has to do with humorous situations involving alphabetizing and light switches, but it is truly the nagging discomfort of realizing that my world is absolute chaos and I am helpless to abate the confusion.

This being said, I have voluntarily accepted about three weeks of situationally-inherent chaos. I am not one of those people who inflicts their mental disorders on the people around them. My expectations are modest and require only the most minimal of participation from my family. I merely expect to be able to conceive, plan, and execute my vision with the utmost organization and minimum of forgetfulness. These perfectly executed plans generally involve several alphabetized, laminated, and color-coded lists that sit smilingly atop neatly stacked piles. See...completely modest, if you stay the HECK out of my WAY! The past three weeks I have subjected myself to packing six kids for a major vacation, only to be topped with major surgery.

I often read my friends' social statuses about being sick or injured and the sudden outpouring of assistance from their charitable offspring that brings a tear to a grateful mother's eye. As I sit here this unearthly hour of the morn, I realize that the concept of charity is completely lost on my band of cutthroats. Wrestling my children into doing altruistic housework is like hustling at a poker table in Vegas. My eldest minion is the mob-boss of disciplinary hustling. Our conversations of late have progressed like this:

Eldest minion:I will see your selflessly doing dishes and raise you an hour of video games.

Me (moaning incoherently through pain and pain killers): Haaaalf hour and wiiiiiipe the counters.

Eldest Minion (menacingly handling a lead pipe): Listen to me, old lady. The video games are not up for negotiation, the question is whether or not I pretend to do the dishes as a show of good faith. (Cracking his knuckles and practicing his Pacino impression.)

Okay, so maybe some of this is fictionalized or an exaggeration of the pain meds, but still. The result of my weak powers of negotiation or my negligible skill at Jedi mind tricks, has resulted in a much celebrated four days of mind-melting video games, peppered with inane and non-socially redemptive television programming. The whole week of gluttony has been nutritionally void except for the random traces of calcium in the milk that made the cheese on their pizza or that washed down their cookies. The house is still erect, so I am going to count this as one in my win column.

I am finding that this same mercenary sensibility has resulted in the odd infestation of Migrating
Minutia. In an attempt to pre-empt the complete psychological meltdown that my husband knew was evident post-surgery, he purchased a gigantic push broom. His brainstorm was that he would push the chaos into one concentrated pile of insanity in the middle of the room and the minions/mercenaries would then pluck the salvageable items from the pile and the rest would be round filed, a phrase I have found to mean heedlessly thrown in the general area of the trash can with some acceptable spillage. What has resulted is that salvageable items migrate an approximate two feet away from the original pile and mysteriously hide. As work on the pile continues, the concentrated clutter is subject to the scientific process of diffusion and migrates to new locations, still not the correct ones might I note, throughout the house. The process begins anew, like some sort of hoarding circle of life without the inspiring Elton John crooning. I am trying to adopt the “out of sight out of mind” philosophy, but being that I am bed-ridden, it is completely IN SIGHT and therefore the peanut butter and jelly sandwich grinning stickily from inside the school desk is nagging at me.