My kids are the gross ones, I’ll give you that.
I’d know them anywhere, because mine are the ones with not one, but two or three stains splattered on the chests of their shirts.
They are the ones with sticky jam smeared across one of their cheeks, and between all of their fingers.
Mine are the ones with the chocolate moustaches and accompanying beards, to prove their guilt in their sneaky schemes.
Mine have only 3 nails in total that are trimmed.
My girls have mismatched socks, and I am well aware their shoes are always either a size too small, or a size too big.
Their lunch bags come home looking like vomit, and one’s always smells like rancid yogurt no matter what I do.
My girls wear the same four things on rotation- so, like, every day.
I have the dirty kids.
Mine have crusty noses, bruised foreheads and their nail polish was last done at Christmas.
I pick pieces of tape out of their rat nest hair, and there are brown remnants of temporary tattoos as a permanent fixture on both forearms.
To remind us of home, there is always chicken shit on at least one boot so I keep the baby wipes in the car, if only I could find them.
The girls’ stuffed animals have hair cuts, collars and paper shirts.
Their walls host chalk-drawn bunnies, their floor has splotches of paint from a craft gone wild.
Our living cat wears a tinfoil collar.
The tub walls are a crayon’d canvas of letters and flowers, the mirror a marker’d montage of mixed contemporary art.
The bathroom sink hosts glitter potions, baths for baby dolls and toilet paper bridges over soapy rivers, and the floor hosts that river part, too.
My couch is my hamper, and my hamper hosts the kitty condo, and the cat’s food dish always has a noodle in it.
That is just our deal.
When I started this gig I didn’t know I’d churn out the dirty kids, and I didn’t really aim to. I didn’t know we’d be trailer living in a tin box atop a hill with just pennies to our name.
But I did plan on living.
So judge me if you will, but this is us now.
My life is messy and my children are worse. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Signed,
That dirty mother
