Coming of Age and Coming Clean

Recently, I watched Fr. Barron's series on Catholicism. It's quite good.  At one point, he takes us to tour the room where Saint Katharine Drexel worked and lived.  He shows relics, examples of her extreme poverty including stubbed pencils.  She gave away everything and wasted nothing.

I need more spiritual growth to reach her level.

This week, we ran out of grown up toothpaste and I'd not replaced it yet.  Alas, the Spiderman blue goo doesn't cut it for me.  Granted, I keep it in my bathroom so when the kids are done with their bath, brushing folds easily into the routine, but after two days, I wanted adult something. I looked around at my house.  Shampoo? Yellow Baby stuff.  Menu?  Simple plain kid friendly food.  Television?  The most adult we get is Dr. Who, and that's limited viewing.  The last movie I saw...Monster's University.   The last book I read ...okay, it was aloud at story time for them, but Lily's Big Day.  The part of me that recognizes she's been on this earth 47 years rebelled. The Spiderman goo represented the absence of an adult life, a relic of what I lacked.

If wine and coffee had been in the house yesterday, I would have blended them into a smoothie and drunk it as proof to the universe, yes, I'm of age, I'm an adult, and there ought to be foods and things in my house that don't scream wash and wear, sippy cup and crayon.  

Rather than create a toxic beverage sure to make me and anyone who thinks about it too long ill,  I grabbed my coupon for free bonus bucks at our local pharmacy, (yes, I'm living large), and bought myself a deluxe souped up tricked out tube of pearly whitening stuff.  I locked myself in the bathroom and allowed for two minutes of pure adult brushing teeth pleasure, interrupted only twice by the little people outside, beating on the door to gain access. One to join me (I said No) and offered the goo but he declined, and the other, to ask if she could watch.  I let her.  But I'd done it. I had something not hand me down, not childish. I had a tube of not rated G toothpaste.

That night, after I'd tucked in everyone, done the dishes, encouraged the teen still working, locked the doors and turned off the lights, I began my bedtime routine only to discover, my little tube of refuge gone!  The list of suspects in my head lay three deep, all three in opposite ends of the house, such that if I really wanted this, I'd have to go about the home when sleep beckoned.  That Spiderman goo started to look acceptable.  But "No!" I told myself, this was a matter of principle.

"No!" again I said, walking to the first bathroom, finding it bare of said item.
Again "No!" when I went downstairs to check the girls bathroom for the toothpaste.
Naturally, it lay upstairs, next to the sink in my son's lavatory.   He lay sleeping. Wake and lecture or take and run.  I opted for the later.

But I left him the Spiderman goo. He had the grace not to ask what happened to his tooth cleaning options the next morning, but I smiled an extra dazzling white at him when I asked, "Did you brush your teeth?"

I'll probably be stuck in Purgatory writing "I shall not spite my teenager about taking my toothpaste." using stubby pencils under the direction of Saint Katherine, or having to brush away my sins with Spiderman blue tooth goo.