At the (spring) breaking point

When they're toddlers, you expect them to be tiny, chubby, unbearably cute weapons of mass destruction. No sense of right or wrong -- or balance -- leads to thoughts such as "I wonder what will happen when I drop Mom's big cloisonne egg into the porcelain bathtub?"

Of course, I'm translating from toddlerese. The actual thought was more along the lines of "Shiny thing go boom! Keewwwwlllll!"

I even expected a certain amount of puberty destruction. Boys may grow size 15 feet overnight, but they don't grow into size 15 feet for many, many years. If ever. Tripping, stumbling, or simply stepping on the cat's tail because there's not enough room for it and the giant shoes in one room -- these I expected. Those pre-teen and teen years also lead to the "Duh" accident, like the time the boys decided broomsticks made good light sabers and we didn't need that antique light fixture anyway. Or the time they decided the pretty green emu egg and ostrich egg someone had given me would make great footballs, and what would happen if they threw them at each other at the same time ...

What I didn't expect was the wanton, random, but oddly efficient destruction perpetuated by gremlins, those mysterious kobold creatures no one ever sees. I think in the old Family Circus cartoon, they named them Not Me and Ida Know.

"Who cracked the mixing bowl?"

"Not me," says Son 2.

"Who dropped the cloisonne egg into the bathtub?"

"Ida Know," says Son 3.

Son 1 was just as bad, but he now has the luxury of breaking his own things in his own apartment -- which may be why he passed the kittens along to me. Looking back, I think I should have named them Not Me and Ida Know instead of Karma and Kismet, because the sons have finally figured out the rambunctious critters make the perfect scapegoats.

"Who broke the last wine glass from the set we got for a wedding present?"

"Karma," says Son 1.

"Who shredded the roll of paper towels all over the living room floor?"

"Kismet," says son 2.

Actually, that one is probably true -- Kismet has decided that paper towels are the secret agents of an evil empire and it is his duty to destroy them on sight.

The lesson I've had to learn -- and I'll admit it took a few tears here and there -- was that if the item I didn't want broken meant that much to me, I needed to pack it away. We were recently given an old cabinet with glass doors on it, and I've managed to keep those treasures safe, and on view.

Sometimes, however, the treasure is something you use every day -- like that mixing bowl. It was one-third of the first birthday present I ever bought for my husband, a hand-thrown set of mixing bowls. I broke one, Terry broke another, and we replaced them with two more (luckily our favorite potter was always at the same spot at the craft fair, and he repeated glazes the next year.) We've broken and added to the set several times, until all we had left were the two big bowls and one small one­ the perfect size for scrambling eggs.

My kids are occasionally thoughtless and headless and reckless, but they aren't stupid, and when 10-year-old Buzz broke that little bowl, he realized that Ida Know and Not Me weren't going to take the fall for this one. He couldn't even blame the cats because at the time, they were still tiny and didn't weigh enough to knock a wine glass over, much less a chunky pottery bowl.

He came to me, crying, and while I felt that "Well, rats," twinge when I saw the blue and tan shards on the floor, I felt a bigger twinge when I saw how distraught he was.

"It's just a thing, honey," I said. "Things can be replaced."

Wine glasses, cloisonne eggs, mixing bowls -- all just things. If they can't be fixed, they can be replaced, and if they can't be replaced, well, get over it. I was more concerned about a broken heart than a broken bowl.

The nice thing is that Buzz actually learned a lesson from the incident, and it wasn't "Mom's stuff is expendable" or "I can get out of anything if I cry."

When we got the bowl he painted at the local pottery shop to replace the broken one, he carried it -- using both hands -- and put it in the glass-fronted cabinet. I don't mind losing a glass or bowl or two if being destructive leads to something constructive.