There are a lot of questions I’ve learned not to ask, as a parent.

They are completely unproductive. For instance, “Why?!” Why ask why? It’s not as if that question ever garners a satisfactory response. Half the time the child doesn’t even know the answer himself. And yet… I found myself asking that question, at an embarrassingly high volume at the top of the second floor spiral staircase, eyes raised in horror at the third floor spiral staircase that was dripping blood.

“What in god’s name did you do?!!! WHY is the staircase dripping?!!”

Not blood. Wine. Red wine, obviously.

 The evening was going so well. I’d managed to produce tortillas that Josephina would almost have been proud of me for. The pollo dorado wasn’t too dark. I’d sipped port, cooked happily, hummed along to my music for the hour and a half that dinner prep took in an almost zen like state. Ezra wasn’t even pecking at me as much as usual, or perhaps he was and I didn’t mind as much today. 

Tony came down, we chatted about nothing and he casually asked, “Elisha, would you go upstairs and bring down the two bottles of wine, the red and the white?” And with that innocent request, given to the eleven year old, not the nine year old who can’t be trusted, the ominous fate of our dinner hour was sealed.

The only possible scenario involves Elisha’s insatiable curiosity about things that the rest of the world just leaves off as unimportant getting the best of him and him clinking the two bottles together as he stood at the top of the stairs, wondering what they would sound like. 

They sounded a lot like his mother screaming her head off. 

We heard the clink, and then “OH NO!!! DAAAAAAADDDDD!!!!”

I’ll spare you the chaos and the expletives as kids scattered to collect towels, buckets, bottles of bleach, oxy clean, and all the paper towels we had in the house. 

I’m pretty sure it was not the remaining litre of wine in the bottle that was dripping from the ceiling, running down the walls, pooling on the spiral staircase, sprinkled like confetti across the white carpet of the second floor, smearing down the window, littered across Gabriel’s desk, dissection kit and all. I’m almost certain it was more like twenty gallons that he quickly brewed up and then used a fire hose to deliver across an unbelievably wide range. 

• Gabe cut his finger on a piece of glass (did I mention that the bottle shattered like a car window into a million green diamonds?) 
• Ezra whipped his socks off of his feet and turned them a brilliant purple mopping up pools on the carpet. 
• Hannah rescued school books and moved cabinets with more common sense than all three boys put together. 
• Tony and I bleached walls and soaked carpets with cleaner as fast as we could while continuing to ask the asinine question. 

Why?

• Why would any reasonable child clink two wine bottles together? 
• Why would any reasonable child ruin a perfectly good dinner in favour of THIS kind of drama? 
• Why does the cottage we’re RENTING have white walls and white carpet? 

Why, oh why, OH WHY?!!!

 Needless to say, Tony did not have wine with his dinner.

The white remained, unscathed, thankfully, because after that little production, I needed a drink. “Well, Elisha,”

Tony sighed as we microwaved cold plates of pollo dorado, black beans that had hardened into mud bricks & no longer completely pliable tortillas, “You’ve officially won the title of worst spill in the history of the family.” Elisha sniffled, he didn’t look proud.

“Previous to this, Gabe held the title,” I reminded him, “He dumped a glass of grape juice the length of our living room carpet on the morning we left our house in NH to start our travels. Daddy and I had just put white carpet in to sell the house… I yelled at Gabriel too.”

“Yeah, probably just as bad!” Gabe chimed in.

“No, not hardly,” I apologized, “Any time I get clear to the F-bomb, it can’t get any worse!”

“Well ya got there today, Mom!!” Ezra pointed out with a giggle. 

Not my proudest moment.