The triple crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent, as I have just now decided, is a marathon consisting of what at this moment strike me as the most frustrating parenting moments:
1) Staying home with a sick child. For a week.
2) Staying home with a child who is finally well on a snow day.
3) Dealing with an eleven-and-a-half-month-old who has decided she can feed herself and is wrong.
Round One: The Virus That Keeps on Giving
Look, I’m a veteran of the first-winter-in-daycare thing, and I get it. Either Lily gets sick now or we pull her out of daycare, keep her at home with jugs of hand sanitizer, and she gets sick the second she hits kindergarten, like an innocent doe in a sea of hard-bitten hyenas. (I don’t know why I chose hyenas, except that imagining a passle of kindergartners puts me in mind of them.)
During his first winter in daycare Jake succumbed to viral pneumonia that nearly landed him in the hospital. And has hardly been sick a day since, notwithstanding the fact that I regularly manage to miss the free flu vaccine clinic at his pediatricians’ office.
So you’d think I’d have spent last week nursing my sick baby girl with a selfish sense of how much time this will free up for me in the future and a beatific glow on my face, totally dedicated to my daughter’s wellbeing.
You would, obviously, be wrong.
Sure I had those days when she was under the weather enough to cuddle in my lap while I caught up on all the TiVo’d shows I’d missed when we were in California. And the nasty weather days when I was kind of happy for an excuse to huddle down in day-old clothes and pretend I couldn’t smell myself moldering.
But after a day, or two, or even three, it can get frustrating. No yoga. No work because Lily was just sick enough to need her mother to hold her while she slept. No taxes done, no bills paid, pretty much nothing accomplished beyond picking up a Purim basket some friends got for us on Friday and being way cranky when I did it because I could see poor Lily’s fluid-in-the-lungs sick eyes slowly drooping with the effort of being out of the house.
Then there was our regular night-time schedule. Let Lily sleep on our bed until it is time for us to occupy it. Hear her screaming an hour before then just as Jake is down so we have no Mike and me time. Let Mike hold her as he watches the Olympics while I am the one left to wash all the dishes and make Jake’s lunch, cleverly using the time to convince myself that I am the only one in the house who does any real work and everyone else of every age is just leeching off of me. By the time I scowl at Mike and then feel bad because, after all, he does a lot and earns our health insurance to boot, Lily has fallen asleep again. I offer her one more bottle before I retire, which she refuses. Wake up at three a.m. to retrieve her from her crib, where she is screaming — whether from illness, hunger, or anger at the shocking discovery she is no longer sleeping in a parent’s arms, I can’t be sure. Put her in bed with me, where I yell at her to go to sleep for an hour before finally sticking her under my arm like a football and making her a bottle while snarling that she’d better start eating during the day. Feel so horrible about it that I do not sleep for the rest of the night.
By six o’clock Sunday morning, two hours after I had decided it was time for Lily to go back to eating exclusively during the day, she had been crying for so long that Mike came in and asked if I didn’t think she should be allowed a bottle seeing as how she’s been sick and all. I had, at this point, given up on motherhood, so I let him take her. I was sleep deprived, I was depressed, and I was just deciding that maybe it is a good idea to second guess your decisions when they are really stupid to being with.
Mike held down the fort while I slogged around avoiding eye contact with my family until I could take a nap with Lily and become semi-human again.
Not a strong finish. But I made it through Round One.
Round Two: Snow Days. And More Snow Days. And Then One More.
Okay, so maybe if I liked snow even a little bit it wouldn’t be so bad. If my kids were old enough to make popcorn and snuggle under blankets in front of a Pixar movie. If Jake could shovel the walk for me while Lily mixed me a nice Gibson. If snow days weren’t largely a matter of me constantly calculating how many hours I have to fill until Mike gets home from work so I’m not the only one who has to listen to bored kids cry.
Or maybe I just don’t want to be the one responsible for letting Jake watch three hours in a row of The Backyardigans.
At first, I thought we were just looking at a late school opening — ten o’clock the director said on the phone message. So I cheerfully plopped the kids in a bathtub and let them play with bubbles until the time I could dress them and shoo them out of the house so I could finally tackle all the projects that had been on hold during Lily’s week-long illness.
I had just finished washing Jake’s hair when Mike came in to kiss me good-bye and hand me my cell phone. “It’s Ellen,” he told me.
“School’s canceled and we’re on our way to Health Adventure!” Ellen chirped with the kind of good cheer that momentarily fooled me into not crying about school being canceled. “Meet us there at ten?”
“Duh!” I said, or something like it that roughly translated to, “You think I want to spend a snow day alone in the house with two small children when I can drag them through the snow and ice just so I get to have some company?” I would have met her there even if she didn’t come with a son who is one of Jake’s best friends.
Two minutes later, the phone rang again. This time it was Wendell’s mother looking for a play date for him because she had to go to work.
“Um, I need to talk to Ellen,” I said, my day suddenly way more complicated than it should be at nine a.m.
“Sure, we can help her out,” Ellen assured me when I asked if she could come by our house to pick up Wendell and his car seat so we could all go to Health Adventure together. “I’ll call before I leave.”
While none of this was exactly what I had planned for my day, I was grateful enough for the company that I tried not to dwell on all the writing I wasn’t going to be doing for yet another day as I got the kids out of the tub and began the always confusing task of loading up the diaper bag with lunch and extra clothes and juice boxes. I usually lose my place about when I pack up too many bottles for Lily.
We were having a snack when Wendell arrived at 9:45. “I can’t believe they closed school,” Wendell’s mother exclaimed.
“Tell me about it,” I agreed. “It’s not even snowing any more.”
It was, however, by the time Mike sent me a text to ask if he could use the Honda at eleven to drive out to Warren Wilson College because his car is a hazard to himself and others in the snow.
I was on the phone with him when Ellen and Donnie arrived at 10:30. “We’re on our way now,” I said. “Why don’t I pick you up at work and you can drop us off at Health Adventure and pick us up when you’re done with the car?”
This may, by the way, sound relatively simple to you, but try figuring out these logistics with two boys running back and forth chanting Donnie’s name while Donnie cowers against his mother crying that he needs space and you try simultaneously to keep the eighty-five-pound hound dog from licking his face and to pick up Lily, who is wailing with frustration because she wants to run after the big boys and does not yet know how to walk.
Ellen and I shut the yelling and crying kids in the house and grabbed Wendell’s car seat. “Do you have a LATCH system?” I asked.
“No,” Ellen said. “But we can use the seat belt to hold it in.”
Ellen’s car does, in fact, have a LATCH system. Which is no help at all when Wendell’s car seat pre-dates this modern equivalent of the ice-dispenser in the refrigerator door. It’s not that you can’t get ice the old fashioned way. It’s just so much faster and easier now, and you don’t have to get your fingers cold twisting the ice trays.
We tried to secure Wendell’s car seat with a seat belt. A lot of times. So many, in fact, that I began to panic at how long I had left my baby inside a house with three three-year-old boys and no adult supervision. In my lax-approach-to-parenthood world, this is a long time indeed.
We returned to the house to find Donnie still crying, Jake and Wendell still running around yelling, and Lily at what turned out to be merely the beginning of an epic meltdown. It was, by this time, eleven o’clock, and Mike was calling wondering where his ride was.
“We can’t get Wendell’s car seat installed,” I explained. “What if you drive your car back here and we take Jake’s car seat out of it and put it in Ellen’s car?”
Ellen shook her head and pointed to the clock. “Donnie’s going to need a nap soon,” she said. “We need to get going.”
Lily let out another squall of hunger and exhaustion. “I think she needs a nap now,” I said, amazed yet again that parents with kids who nap ever get out of the house at all. “I think you and Donnie should just go.”
Which is what happened. Ellen and Donnie went to Health Adventure alone as they had planned all along, Lily went to sleep, and I spent a couple of hours trying to read a book between bouts of arbitrating Jake and Wendell’s disputes,
Hence was spent yet another day in which the tablecloths from Thanksgiving remain un-ironed, the six light bulbs that need replacing continue to need replacing, and all the beautiful pieces of art Jake and Lily have created for their grandmother, their aunt, and the seven-year-old boy with whom Jake cuddled in bed watching Batman on an iPod during our visit to L.A. continue to gather dust on our mantle instead of whisking through the mail to their intended recipients.
Frustrated? I don’t even know the meaning of the word any longer.
Round Three: Is Any Food Getting in Her Mouth?
Appearances to the contrary, I am actually getting used to having no time to myself and no time to sleep. I’ve learned that even if it’s hard to imagine, the day will come — and sooner than I think — when life will clunk back into the worn grooves of the ordinary. I will sleep eight hours without anything disturbing me, not a crying baby or a snoring husband or my own pea-sized bladder. I will submit timely and professional-looking legal projects to my client. I will post a piece or two here. Laundry will be washed and folded, dishes put away, dinners made.
But it’s hard to make it to this as-zen-as-it-gets-with-kids-in-the-house state when I’m pretty constantly frustrated by trying to get Lily to eat.
Lily, you see, decided, oh, three weeks ago, that it is not okay for me to feed her.
Not that she’s not pretty handy with a spoon — for someone who is just shy of a year old. Which means she manages to dip it in a bowl of yogurt. Even if it is upside down, a bit manages to stick. And though half of that bit ends up smeared across her face, a tiny drop manages to make its way into her mouth.
The real problem is that this process is fun for only a few minutes. At which point Lily decides that the full bowl of yogurt that remains is misleading and she is feeling quite satiated, thank you.
Hand her the Z Bar that she screams for any time the red and blue wrapper enters her sight line, and she will stick it in her mouth for a moment or two, work on it with those four crooked front teeth, and then put it aside in favor of the bottle she just knows is coming soon.
“She’s almost a year old,” I moaned to Mike the other day. “What are we going to do without formula?”
Mike quietly pointed out that it will be perfectly okay to continue giving her formula after she turns one if that is what it takes to keep her alive. I responded with a somewhat embarrassing in retrospect reminder of how expensive formula is.
Why the Frustration of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent Is Good for Me.
Perhaps it was this final escalation of the frustration that made it all start to slide away, like one of the big drifts of snow on our slanted tin roof. It sits there, getting heavier and heavier, before finally, with a sigh and a plop, it drops to the ground.
There is simply only so long you can torture yourself by trying to get your child to follow your timetable. Lily cares not a whit about what I have decided is the proper ratio of solid food to bottles. The weather is pretty much going to do what it does no matter how depleted our bank account. And that virus that has blown through Lily’s daycare? It wouldn’t spare my child even if you could talk to viruses and explain to them that I have work to do and am just not cut out to stay home with a child all week.
In other words, without any time to write and think and remind myself about the concept of surrender, I simply experienced it. I got so filled up with frustration that I had to let it go.
It’s like the moment in a particularly difficult yoga class when you either have to leave or suck it up and sink into garudasana. There comes a point where fighting is useless. You either give up or give in. And since giving up pretty much isn’t an option when two relatively helpless beings are relying on you for care and sustenance you give in.
It’s pretty incredible, now that I think about it, this chance to surrender without working it through first in my mind. We spend a lot of time in yoga cultivating consciousness. But there’s a triumph to the moment when our spirits move us without consciousness. When we are not acting unconsciously — that is, doing things without feeling or purpose just because we think we are supposed to — but rather moving along our path without analyzing it.
There are so many moments in parenthood when we have to seek this balance between consciousness and surrender. On the one hand, I want my children to guide me, to show me when they are ready to stop feeding themselves or to get dressed without my help or (it’s coming soon for Jake, I feel it) to sleep without a diaper. On the other hand, of course I have to take a step back and consider what’s right for them in the long run, to plan the art projects that will distract Jake from his fascination with the t.v. set and retrieve the musical ride-along zebra from Jake’s closet because Lily is probably ready for it. (And how!)
And that’s the practice, isn’t it? All the things our minds try to juggle — the tasks of daily living to be completed and prioritized and too often abandoned with that Thanksgiving tablecloth — until we have a moment of release when we let it go and see that there might be some other way to get it all done. Or that it doesn’t all have to get done in the first place.
Or, just maybe, an illness, a snow storm, and a stubborn baby who insists on feeding herself. Maybe they all have a different plan for us and all we can do is go along for the ride.
I Win the Lottery
I had just finished writing something to close off this piece about how much I learned in my first yoga practice back after 10 days off, how being off your game and then coming back gives you a new perspective, a sense of what you have, really, even if it doesn’t seem like it, learned when you lost control.
And then, into my big, smug, “I won the triple crown” dropped the phone call. That one telling me about Lily’s temperature and how she has to leave daycare. And stay out tomorrow.
Suddenly I’m not so smug and “oh, I’ve learned a lesson.”
So — and believe me when I say I’m speaking largely to myself now — rather than deliberately taking a break from something that gives your life structure, just be willing to let that break happen for you. Be ready to maybe even not learn a thing from it. Be grateful for the chance to feel frustrated — because it means you’ve got something that works for you going in the days that don’t get interrupted by babies with fevers and winter storms and children who suddenly won’t eat.
And if you should be so lucky as to have your rhythm uninterrupted these days, take advantage of it and delve deeper. Feel free to approach something important to you as if you really have been forced to take a break from it. Look at it in a new way. Try out different muscles in an asana. Take a fresh look at that spreadsheet. Say good morning to your partner as if it were your first morning together.
And feel gratitude for whatever it is in front of you at this moment.