Pillow Fights

Pillow Fights
By Janeal Mulaney

It was just days after my children and I moved out of my ex-husband house, the movers were do to unload our beds and other furniture on Monday, but until then my children and I had slept on the floor of our new apartment for the last two nights. My children and I had a lot of emotional baggage weighing us down with all the hurt and differences that were accruing in our lives. My oldest and youngest had been at each other’s throats all day. My oldest son decided to be the mediator as usual, but it hadn’t been working so as we got ready for bed the other two were still fighting.
The first blow came and Mitch hit both his sister and brother with one swing of the pillow. Before long we were all whacking each other with my old feathered pillows. We ended up tearing two of them apart and the feathers were flying everywhere, we were laughing so hard our sides were hurting, but we keep letting off steam and stress as we’d pick up another pillow and start up where a torn one left off. The pillow fight went on and on, the kids were laughing so hard they couldn’t even hit each other anymore. They were missing more then they were hitting someone, but the exercise was therapeutic for four people that had their whole world turned upside down in the space or one afternoon.
I was never so thankful that I had bought pillows every chance I got. We had gone through seven feathered pillows that night throughout our pillow fight. The stress was gone, but the mess was left to clean up before we could go to bed that night. The kids shook out all the bedding and I used the vacuum to suck up all the feathers from the carpet.
As the kids chatted back and forth about who got the best of whom, I vacuumed up all the feathers from the broken pillows. Then made out our temporary beds again. After laying down the kids talked to me about all the things that had been going on inside their minds with the separation, and us moving out of our family home. I tried to answer all their questions truthfully without putting all the blame on their dad. I tried to make them understand how couples some times grow apart, and how dreams can and do change throughout the years, and how some people want one thing and then for what ever reason those feelings aren’t there anymore. I’m sure if I talked to some professional about how we worked through our anger and hurt over the separation of our family, I would be told that I had handled it all wrong. I don’t know what the right way is, all I know is my kids and I bonded that night. That night they learned they had the freedom to ask questions, and talk to me about how they felt about any subject they wanted or needed to talk about.
We had many pillow fights after that, and I learned to buy some foam pillows just for the pillow fights, but that was truly one of my favorite pillow fights.