Meet the denizens of Pandemonium
There are four demons currently living in my house and I gave birth to all of them. Before you ask, no, I am not a demoness or even something close to that. I am a part-time domestic goddess, chef, chauffer, laundress, drill sergeant, photographer, writer, freedom fighter, child advocate, psychologist, wife, former journalist, marketer, communications professional, and mother.
The demons are my fabulously funny and entertaining children. My husband, Patrick, and I had four, count them, four, unplanned pregnancies! Most people look at me a little oddly when I tell them I have four kids. Every time I was pregnant someone would ask me, “Don’t you know what causes that?”
Really? Is this a question that should be asked? I always thought I should answer with something like, “Yes, but I always thought if you had sex upside down, you couldn’t get pregnant!”
I wonder what kind of reaction that would have gotten? Instead, I always found myself grinning and thinking back to the circumstances that prompted whichever pregnancy was being frowned upon. Let’s be honest ladies, some women only dream about liking their husbands enough to have four kids with him and I really, really, really like my husband.
Anyway, I was going to introduce you to the demons. The first fabulous demon cannot be introduced without a spotlight and a drum roll. She’s that fabulous and dramatic. Drama should have been Dayanera’s middle name. Her name is pronounced Day-uh-nair-uh, by the way.
I should have known when I gave her such an airy-fairy name that she would be unique. Dayanera is the most unique child on the planet as far as I’m concerned and an endless source of entertainment, frustration, fierce love, and fear in my life. Dayanera has autism, but it doesn’t have her.
Her big dreams have spanned the spectrum from a desire to grow up and marry Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks to her current desire to move to Japan and be a famous anime artist. Everything is huge, wonderful, bigger than life, and magical in her world. I often wish I could live there.
She can sing, dance, and loves the stage, which is odd for a person with autism. Yeah, so definitely unique. She saw a performance of The Nutcracker when she was two. This was not a short performance either. It was like three hours long. She was glued the whole time and never took her eyes off of the stage. The stage and the center of attention is where she used to love to be. These days, she still likes attention but isn’t keen on showing her face.
Demon number two is my son, Maverick. I can see you rolling your eyes at the name. If I knew what I know now, I would have named him Tom, George, or Frank, I swear! He is just like his name. He’s an opinionated, deadly smart, diabolically clever, fiercely independent, just-like-his-mother, demon of the first order. He’s also wonderfully his own person and doesn’t care about what other people think. He likes what he likes and he wants everyone to live and let live, or live life golden, as he likes to say. He’s also the Golden Gambit and the person behind the live life golden stuff here on this website.
He got all the best and worst of my personality, but has his daddy’s looks down to the bone. He is a force to be reckoned with and he’s also the most interesting, occasionally sweet, heroic, little devil you’ve ever met.
When he was three, he invented these super heroes named Cheese Man and Lava Mouse. He would talk non-stop for hours about all of their adventures. He’s also the kid who would try to sneak wearing the same clothes by me for more days on end than I care to count. Boys are just gross. Thank goodness he’s grown out of that as a young adult!
The super demon of my bunch is the little tornado named Stryker. Do you detect a theme here with the names? I didn’t name him that, by the way. Maverick and Patrick picked that name. I had these two lists of names and that one was on the too-cool-for-real-life list. My husband didn’t think it was too cool and I was too miserably pregnant to care so he got named Stryker. Both boys, incidentally, have Patrick as one of their two middle names. This was Maverick’s idea because he didn’t want Stryker to feel left out because he didn’t have daddy’s name too. Cute, huh?
When Stryker was three there never was a busier child! Busy is the nice word that my grandma would use to describe children who are constantly into everything.
Stryker is an endless source of frustration, humor, and broken stuff. He spent a good portion of his toddler years always nearly naked. Every time I turned around I had to put clothes back on the kid! You have no idea how disconcerting it is to see your child waving happily at the UPS man butt naked in your doorway. He was also always over five feet in the air. No shelf or object in my house was safe from climbing by this little demon. I used to swear that he’s either going to be a nudist who spends his spare time as a mad scientist or an aerialist for Cirque Du Soleil who builds rockets for NASA in his spare time. He’s diabolically smart too and could give Houdini a run for his money.
Then there’s the baby demon who used to walk around looking like a little angel, Bryndlee. She has the sweetest smile, but don’t let that fool you. She happens to be the biggest diva on the planet and refuses to be ignored. She’s daddy’s little angel and doesn’t let him forget it.
She’s currently in the dreaded pre-teen phase and, as all the moms out there know, pre-teens are worse than actual teens when it comes to drama, intrigue, and attitude. She’s also the big cat lover in the family.
My mother says I shouldn’t call my kids demons and should call them angels instead. Mmmm. I don’t think so. They aren’t bad kids, but they aren’t angels either. There is a story as to why I call my children demons and it started in a classroom, when I was a teacher.
I was that teacher that made kids write definitions from the dictionary as a punishment for acting up in my class. I always felt they should learn something from the experience of getting into trouble so I came up with the definitions as a way to widen that sad, sad, word list that passes for a vocabulary with today’s high school students. Anyway, there was a particularly rambunctious (see I have a fabulous vocabulary) student in one of my classes who drove me nuts. One day I assigned the word “pandemonium” to him as punishment for disrupting my class.
I got an education on this word as a result. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines this word as:
1: the capital of Hell in Milton's Paradise Lost
2: the infernal regions : hell
3: not capitalized : a wild uproar : tumult
The dictionary that I had in my classroom defined it as a place in Hell. Oops! I always thought it meant chaos and craziness. I did not realize that it was also a place in hell. Interesting. Needless to say, I didn’t assign that word again.
Anyway, my house is a place of warm chaos and craziness. It only occasionally resembles hell. It’s only hell at 8:30 when the youngest demons are being marched to bed under duress or on Sunday (cleaning day), when the demons try to revolt. Calling the kids demons is my little joke on myself because I’m the queen of all this pandemonium and you have to laugh at this stuff or else you’ll go nuts. As queen of my castle, I can make fun of myself and my kids.
I have to make fun of all this craziness or you would find me in a straight jacket in a padded room somewhere screaming about how my laundry room is a secret dimension of hell. It is seriously.
Are my kids awesome? Yes.
Do I love them fiercely? Absolutely.
Are they angels? Sorry mom, but, are you kidding?
Are they demons? Well, not really, but it’s funny to call them that. ;P
