no matter what time of day they come knocking. It's a house in which no one worries that a game of touch football will wreck the lawn, and the grown-ups don't go ballistic if a bad word slips out once in a while.
Not to sound snarly, but I never wanted to run such a house. For plenty of good reasons: I have more children (four, ages three to 13) than most of our neighbors, I work at home and I have a genetic need to be organized. When it comes to entertaining young visitors, I've always favored booking appointments over walk-in traffic. If I couldn't exactly control all of the parenting variables, I figured I could at least try to predict them with reasonable accuracy.
Then, one afternoon some months back, as the clock inched its way toward the dinner hour, I started to get itchy because a certain preteen visitor showed no sign of leaving. It was six o'clock! On a Wednesday! Never mind that we weren't planning anything special (spaghetti, served to the four children at the countertop) or that this particular kid was among the neighborhood's nicest. We had rules, gosh darn it, and one of them was: No friends eating over on school nights.
"But, Mom, why can't he stay?" my son asked.
Perhaps it was his disturbingly sensible tone of voice, but for some reason I found myself actually mulling over the question. And I couldn't think of any good reason why he couldn't.
So he did. And all hell did not break loose. In fact, all the kids played a lively game of hide-and-seek after dinner, and when his friend finally did go home at eight, my son made a point of thanking me, sincerely and politely, for making an exception to the rule.
Epiphanies for parents come at odd moments, and rarely on moonlit mountaintops. As it happened, there in my kitchen, with spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove, I had an important realization that a home where my children know their friends are welcome will be a far happier place than one where order always prevails. Not only that, but it also was becoming pretty clear to me, as my older two edged toward adolescence, that if home isn't a welcoming place to be, they'll go elsewhere. The last thing I want is my preteens spending long afternoons doing who knows what, with who knows whom, who knows where.
So out, in short order, went an awful lot of those restrictive rules. In came the Nintendo 64 system the senior siblings had begged for. Into the cabinets flew treats like potato chips and Cherry 7-Up. More and more often, I started saying yes to sleepovers, to having six friends over at a time, to just a few more minutes on the computer.
Not that I tossed out the entire structure. Children need rules and routine. My little ones still need help scheduling their social lives. Most afternoons, however, I honestly have no idea who is going to climb off the school bus with my older children. And I've come to like that just fine.
No, my house is not as clean as it used to be. In fact, the ants running rampant in the kitchen (much to my daughter's mortification) recently sparked a conversation among four sixth-graders about what bugs they have in their houses. It was an exchange that kept me smiling for days. My home is also not silent. There's the constant thwack of a basketball in the driveway, the shrill sound of the Spice Girls drifting down the stairs and, yes, sometimes, the arguments of warring factions (middle-school boys against the middle-school girls, or the kindergartner and pals annoying the heck out of everybody else).
Mostly though, it's a happy chaos. The children, thanks to the respect they learned when all those rules were in place, and thanks to the structure that still stands, are well behaved. And now I know their friends. I know their lingo. I know their music. Best of all, I know them. I'll take that over order any day.
Writer Nicole Wise lives in Stamford, Connecticut.
