GOING DESTRUCTO

My Kids Ruined $2600 worth of Carpet in 20 Minutes

And Other Ways They Ripped Our Living Space A New One

The year was 2009. We had just moved to the high desert outside of Los Angeles for my husband’s skyrocketing career. But the Southern-California real estate market was in freefall.

So were our home’s chances of being in House Beautiful.

My dearest dream was to be a mother, but the #childfree movement has cogent points, too. When you sign up for children-ing your life you commit to taking the whole thing down to the studs. Some of the tiniest fine print in the parenting contract involves the wild fuckery that betides your living space and personal property.

Buyer beware.

I don’t care how many wholesome kids Joanna Gaines has or how churchy she claims to be: odds are good she’s dropped some F-bombs over red Gatorade stains on white travertine.

Habitat destruction starts young. Our oldest started to giving our carpet the old Hershey-squirts when he was a few weeks old. And since due to Joe’s career we’ve moved 9 — count ’em, NINE — times in 18 years, there’ve been lotsa times that I was distracted.

Many fresh surfaces got wrecked.

There’s always positive discipline. But it’s not like giving anybody four or five minutes in The Chair¹ was gonna help unf*ck the tabletop. It’s a good thing kids are cute!

¹ The “time-out” one. Not the electric one.

John, Wes, and Easter were 5, 4, and 2.5.

I’d been working on an online masters in biology. Still thought I might go into the paid workforce one day. It was nearly the height of the Swine-flu thing [external link], and even though the kids had just recovered from illness, they weren’t yet clear to go back to preschool.

I was trying to stream lectures, write a term paper, and juggle three messmakers. Or maybe I was trying to grab a nap while Lightning, ‘Mater, and a bowl of raw brownie batter had my back for 15. I dunno. It was a long time and a whole ‘nother pandemic ago.

Silence is rarely innocuous, in any case.

I came down the stairs —

“Jesus H. Christ with a Super Shammy.”

When your kids take fistfuls of permanent marker to your rental’s vacant living room, up a flight of stairs, and into a hallway, you shout bad words louder than Billy Mays said, “Broken! Busted!”

And there’s no washing any of that out with OxiClean — never mind soap.

Somehow I had the presence of mind to take a short video, narrating a disgust with myself that I’d ever bought non-washable art supplies. (Why???) I do not see the clip on my Google Drive, though. It must be somewhere in the Facebook archives from decades past.

The kidlets knew it wasn’t all good.

“Are you gonna call the police?!” Wes yelped.

“No, honey. But I’m very, very, very, very sad.”

“You should have said yes,” commented my friend Carmen on Facebook, when I posted Wes’ quip.

We bought a house that next spring, by the skin of our asses. We almost didn’t have enough cash at close. I gave up on bleaching or restoring the carpet.

When the professional carpet-cleaning guy came, all he could stammer was, “This is…substantial.”

And while my regret for having children will never be substantial, our rental deposit got the “Billy Mays” treatment.

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