Ohhhhh, my Si-bug!

I am firmly convinced that L'oreal and Clairol make the majority of their profit off of the mothers of three year-olds. Hershey's, Ben and Jerry's, and Jack Daniel's are also richly blessed by our travails, but no one knows the toll that being "Da Mama" can take on your hair as well as the mother of a child who recently gone from the terrible two's to the "OMG, this is supposed to be getting BETTER!", three's. My beloved youngest son, Silas,

is no exception. He's going through an independent streak right now, not independent as in "No, Mama, I want to do it MYSELF!" or "No, Mama, I want to wear THAT one!" Ohhhhhh, no, not Silas Henry. He's too much Isabella Grace's little brother, and as anyone who has spent more than 20 seconds in Hurricane Isabella's presence understands all too well, she doesn't know the meaning of the word "subtle". Silas turned three this past July 19th; he went to bed the night of the18th as my easy-going, Mama-worshipping, ever-lovable little Velcro baby and woke up the next morning as the scary grey kid from "The Grudge". In the space of about 12 hours, we leaped the chasm from "Mama, I WUBBA you! Keewee (carry) me, pwease!" to "You're a GIRL, Mama!!" (his idea of the world's most horrible insult) and "NOOOOOO!!!!!! I don't WANNA, leave me 'LONE!!!" Cooperation has suddenly become a dirty word, sibling rivalry has reached epic proportions, and after spending entire days at a stretch yelling nothing more articulate than "Hey! Hey! HEY!!!! I have seriously considered adopting an orange sweatshirt as my official uniform. I am totally at the mercy of a short, skinny tyrant with an oversized head and the ability to launch me from dead calm to sputtering mad in no time, flat. And the bad part of all this bad stuff is that Silas is not reveling in three year-old behavior nearly as much as some other kids I have seen out in public. For all the fuss he makes over putting on his shoes, 9 times out of 10, I can wheel him through the toy section in Wal-Mart with nothing more than a disappointed "Awwwww!!!!" when we leave without a new addition to his beloved Hot Wheels collection. For all the time he spends screaming bloody murder for reasons apparent to nobody but himself, there's nothing sweeter than his pipey little voice when he spots a baby-and to him, anybody smaller is a baby-and exclaims "Ohhhhh, Mama! Look at da COOT liddle BAY-BEE!!!" I do not have the world's worst kid, by any stretch of the imagination, but there are so many days when I wonder if I'm going to make it long enough to get him safely into grade school. Maybe it's because I am a single parent, Mama and Daddy all in one frazzled package; maybe it's because Silas is so much more explosive than Bella was at this age, so much more of a screamer and a howler and a foot-stomper and a "You can't MAKE me!" kid than she's ever been. Or maybe it's because he's always been a Mama's boy, so much clingier than his sister was, or is, and so much more needful of  my constant, concentrated attention. Even now, in the middle of some of his stormiest moments, he will look up at me with angry, teary eyes and hold up his arms and whimper "Mama, I WANT you!!" and it will be all I can do to hold firm and follow through with whatever it is that I am trying to get him to do. Nobody can drive me as crazy as this one child can, no one else on Earth can make me as angry or frustrate me as quickly or make me wish as fervently that I had a one-way ticket to Bimini. But the same instinct that makes me want to start running and never look back is the same one that propels me into his room every night of my life, the same one that makes it impossible for me to settle down and go to sleep without checking first to make sure that he and Bella are in their beds and not curled up asleep in the toy box, that they are tucked in and warm and that the windows are locked tight against the dark things that lurk in the world outside. It's the same instinct that would compel me to turn that one-way ticket into three tickets, because what is life, even life in Bimini, without my babies there with me to make it worth living?