I’m not a perfect parent (haha, really?). I always said I didn’t want to be that parent who yells at the kids and yet I do. I mean, I don’t scream non-stop at them all day, every day. But I do yell, especially when they’re pushing the boundaries.

I also have clumsy kids who don’t pay attention to their cups of water/juice and who don’t always listen to us telling them to sit still and stop fooling around before they spill something. And I swear, something gets spilled here on an almost-daily basis. Sometimes it’s multiple times per day. It drives me crazy and I have been known to raise my voice at them. When it’s a genuine accident, not so much, but when either George or I have just finished telling them to settle down and they don’t and they knock a full cup of juice onto the floor, it’s extremely frustrating.

And yet, every time it happens, I am reminded of a day when I was about nine years old, give or take. My parents took us to visit with some people who had two kids of their own – one was roughly my age, the other was a couple of years older. My mother and their mother had worked together at Sunlife and she was really nice, as were the kids. The father was a bit of an asshole – my father actually couldn’t stand him, but he tolerated the guy.

I spent the day in one of the bedrooms with the girls, playing and talking and checking out what they had. They ended up getting me into collecting stickers – they showed me their albums and even gave me a bunch of stickers to get me started. I was having a great time.

They lived in a house with a nice, finished basement, which is where the family room was. We all got a glass of Coke from the mom and went to go downstairs to play, which is where the father was sitting and watching television.

(And as an aside, who does that? I mean, family watching TV while you’re over is one thing, but who has company over and sits down to watch TV? Rude much?)

I was already downstairs and turned to wait for my new friends to join me just in time to see the youngest one lose her footing and tumble head-first down a full flight of stairs. She landed in a heap on the floor at the bottom, sobbing hysterically, clutching herself in pain.

And the asshole father leaped out of his chair and started screaming at his wife to hurry downstairs – so she could clean up the beige carpet before the Coke the girl had been carrying could stain. He berated his crying daughter for ruining their nice carpet. And I was just rooted to the floor, my jaw hanging open, shocked that he never once asked her if she was okay, if she had broken anything, if she was seriously hurt.

I was only little but I was old enough to understand that there was something wrong with a man who cared more about his carpet than his daughter’s well being. She hadn’t been fooling around, skipping down the stairs or balancing her glass on her head, she was just walking like any normal person and she slipped. She could have broken her arm, the way she landed. But he cared about his stuff instead of his child.

I get it, it’s frustrating when your kids ruin the nice things you have, either by accident or on purpose. My end table has so much crayon all over it that I don’t even bother anymore. There have been drawings on walls. We have a stain on the front of our couch from a rogue juice box. But my god, the day I yell and scream at Hayley and Breanna for spilling something while they lie crying on the floor, hurt, I hope someone will grab me by the shoulders, shake me a couple of times, and tell me to get a fucking grip and worry about the more important issues.

The Coke came out of the carpet, and it was fine and you probably couldn’t even tell the next day when it dried. I wonder if SHE was fine the next day. I wonder sometimes if she remembers that day. Because if I can remember it so clearly and can think of it on a regular basis, I have a hard time imagining that she would have forgotten the day her father cared so much about a carpet that he would scream obscenities at her while she lay on it in a crumpled heap.