My house is going - kids running out, my wife is running in and out - but I like to sit down and have breakfast.
I don't mind being a grandfather; I've been a mother for so many years. You just can't believe what it's like being a father. Especially when you come out of the chaos of the road to getting married and having children.
Our lives are so hectic and full, and we have a big family right now.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
When you've got a teenager and a pre-teen, especially a son and a daughter, and they're going at each other at the table, all you really want is just five minutes of quiet, but sometimes I have a moment during the chaos when I think, 'Yes, this is good.'
There were eleven kids, and we all shared a bathroom. It was enough to drive us all insane.
I remember looking at my dad and wanting to understand him. I didn't want to just write the guy off. He was lost. I can't speak specifically in terms of why and how he got to where he was - that was his journey. All I can tell you is, he was overwhelmed by life... My mother basically did all the work, and then they got separated and I didn't see him for a long time. He didn't try to help the family financially or spiritually, and I lived with the effects of the chaos.
My children are 12, 12, 8, and 7, which is bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, for mom going inside.
We always had so many kids in our family, running around the yard, sweaty little kids jumping in and out of the pool, the front door and back doors swinging open and shut, all of the parents getting pissed off telling us to stay outside.
I've come to see the mosh pit as an apt description of American society - and of my childhood home. I was number nine of ten creative, mostly loud kids competing for airspace.
Somehow, since I became a family, every minute in which I am alone and not listening to two kids screaming in stereo feels like a vacation.
For me, 'The Goldbergs' was about surviving a crazy family - and believe me, the show is a sanitized version!
Teddy said it was a hat, So I put it on. Now dad is saying, "where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?
No family is sane, is it?
I always say to people, 'You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them.' Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, 'Mama, Mama, Papa, Papa!'
It was always chaos with Mom, Dad, uncles, you know; we all lived in the same building. Dinner parties with 25 people every night.
When I was a kid, everything was so unplanned, my parents were so erratic, and my world was so inconsistent.
My mother was a master juggler. If you ask her, she'll say she was a wreck. There's plenty of screaming that went on in the house, but I think it was necessary just to be heard. There were eight children!
We've got eight dogs, a cat, a turtle, kids... yeah we have a lot of dogs. It's a lot of fur, it's a lot of poop... and that's not even counting Robbie. He's the hairiest most feral animal of all.
When everything kind of hit the fan, my dad married Jo Anne, and suddenly there were five kids from the Ripleys and five kids from the Doughertys. Then my dad and Joanne had a baby. I usually have to make a diagram.
What I did find out because I grew up with a lot of chaos early on: sometimes, you're born into a family, and their norm is already in your red zone of dangerous feeling or feeling too chaotic. You don't get to really do anything about that when you're a kid.
Someone asked me what three things I would save if my house was on fire. I said my cat, my salamander and one of the twins.
I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody's presents - everybody's - so by the time the rest of us got up, all the gifts were shredded, ribbons off, torn open and thrown aside.
Always, ever since I was a little girl, my house has been basically a zoo.
I believe there's a secret chemical that's turned loose when you have kids that says you've got to survive, you've got to be strong. That keeps you on your toes, besides all kinds of other things, when you have three little ones running around.
