The Stapler

 

When I was young, I remember my dad screaming about his stapler. It was either missing or broken. My brothers and sisters treated his desk as a portal to our adulthood. Stapling, taping, and scribbling just like an adult does, working on whatever they're working on at their desk.

My Dad was plagued by five kids who had no idea that the stapler had a real purpose, and wasn’t just amazingly fun to play with. We committed other criminal acts at the home, such as when thumbtacks were discovered inside the VCR. I was the family graffiti artist, and as a child, I took to our family van with a Sharpie marker. I remember when I drew all over my dad’s briefcase, and I was at an age when I was learning how to hold a pen, so it was just violent scribbling.

I suppose a child psychologist could have really tapped a pen at their lip while looking at the scene, but my dad probably just gave a furious roar, and then sucked it up, carrying that desecrated briefcase back and forth to work each day till my mom bought him a new one for Christmas.

I’m approaching my fourteenth year of parenthood, and I have gone through at least ten staplers. No one acknowledges when they broke the stapler. I find out when I go to staple, and I press it down to no avail. I flip it open and see that some part of the mechanism is broken beyond repair, but the staples have been colored rainbow with Sharpie markers.

I still think my desk is a sacred space. I love pulling my chair right up to it, organizing papers, and putting my pens in their little mug. It’s funny because even though I work at my desk, I end up taking most of my Zoom meetings in my bed, so I’m not interrupted. This is when the desk is free for someone else to pull the chair up to it. Maybe to pretend to pay the water bill by hole-punching it and sticking it inside the printer.

The wall in our entryway has a hole in it because someone repeatedly swung the door open like they were Kramer running into Jerry’s apartment. My brother-in-law had to fix our bathroom floor because of mindlessly showering with the curtain on the outside of the tub. Currently, the kitchen table has clay cemented to it from a volcano mold.

Aside from a furious growl and then a sigh of defeat, there is not much I can do about it. Now I know to buy scissors in bulk because they might be inter-dimensional objects, put a stopper in front of the wall to protect it from the door, and always have a stash of paperclips on hand.

Nothing like the act of paper-clipping to calm my nerves and remind me that I am doing important things at my desk. It’s not quite as good as a stapler, but I’ll put a new one in my stocking at Christmas.