Mystery

Everyone knows Dum-Dums are the only decent lollipops around: they are the perfect portion and unlike Jupiter-sized Tootsie Pops don't have a protruding equator designed to slice the roof of your mouth open. Cream soda is the best flavor followed closely by mystery. Ah, it took me years to discover the mystery pop was not always the orchid-purple color the wrapper suggests. Cue the late night I watched Unwrapped and learned the mystery pop is the lollipop factory's remains of the day. Meaning if the factory makes blue raspberry, watermelon, grape, and cherry lollipops on Monday, then Monday's mystery pop is the combined leftover syrups from those four flavors. (Which reminds me of sixth-grade boys making "graveyards" by putting their cups under every soda dispenser nozzle at Skatin' Station and then drinking them while we girls made sounds of disgust.) Every Dum-Dum day a new mystery is born. I'd like to think the sugar scientists over at Dum-Dum never mass produce opposing flavors in a single day because a mystery pop made from butterscotch, root beer, orange, and lemon would be disgusting. I think there's more to the lollipop business than I've given it credit for.

LDS Living's May/June publication of this year had a Q&A with James the Mormon. He was asked:

What was the most memorable part of your mission?

He replied:

Every day on my mission I wanted to go home. And every day on my mission I never wanted to leave.

This basically sums up how I feel about motherhood right now. Every day my heart explodes with confetti from the sweet words, faces, and actions of my children. And every day I want to board a bus to the coast because I feel crazy and depleted. 

My life could be described as "Currier & Ives Gone Wild":

Biscuits and gravy. I snap an adorable photo of flour-coated boys sitting on the counter with rolling pins, Everett with his barracuda underbite smile. Two hours later after the morning routine and basement roughhousing I crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees checking the clock for naptime. Naptime is heaven. Everett wakes up happy and ready to play with Archer, at which point Archer starts getting really whiny because he's four and doesn't take naps. Then there is nonstop fighting and making up or what I refer to as "An Afternoon of Wailing and Gnashing" or "A Heap of Bodies With Two Blonde Heads". Whatever I can throw on the table counts as dinner and just as our house is about to fall apart at the seams Dad walks in from work. Then we're back to adorable with pod races in the basement and riding on Dad's back. RE reads them stories in front of the fire and I want time to stop. We read a few verses and say family prayer in the "circle of love" (that Everett pronounces "circle of yuv" in his scratchy voice) and I crawl back up the stairs on my hands and knees to clean up crumbs, Legos, and sofa cushions. RE and I watch the moonrise from my bed at 9 pm and chase it with a Hallmark movie because bedtime schmedtime. Way after midnight I pop a square inch of carmelita in my mouth (even though I already brushed my teeth), turn off the last light, and slither into bed thankful for a heated mattress pad and the valley's outlined rooftops.

The mystery pop is my life's spirit animal. Every day it takes everything I've got to get to the end of the day. I wake up and know that the day won't have just one flavor; it's going to have many. Every day of mine is a random concoction of planning (my calendar! my lists!), chaos (my texts! my floors!), fulfillment (I love being a mother!), dread (but I hate making lunch!), energy (naptime!), and exhaustion (after school!). Every day is a chameleon-colored mystery pop with cream soda moments; some taste better than others.

I can't post an entry called MYSTERY without including my favorite lyric from the Indigo Girls' song of the same title:

Maybe that's all that we need
Is to meet in the middle of impossibility
We're standing at opposite poles
Equal partners in a mystery

It has nothing to do with lollipops but something to do with my extreme struggle to score par.