A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
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.
Continue reading ‘The Triple Crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent’
I had a heady moment of deja vu this morning.
There I was, crouched over my son in his car seat, using my knee to push his arching body back into place as I struggled to buckle him in and heard a gutteral voice that sounded suspiciously like my own hissing, “You sit down NOW! Do you want me to take away The Backyardigans tonight??!!” just loudly enough to be heard over his wails.
The only difference between this episode and the spate we suffered about a year ago was the specter of his little sister staring at us from her seat.
That and, as I got behind the wheel of the car and slowly cooled myself down, the realization that all this ruckus could have been avoided if only I’d granted Jake his not as unreasonable as it sounds request to start the car.
I thought I had it under control.
A couple of years ago I had that breakdown over Jake’s fifteen-month evaluation at preschool — the kind where they determine whether said fifteen-month-old can say anything more than “Mama” and “Dada” and pick up a Cheerio with his fingers. And that breakdown, I felt, brought me to a place where I could let go of needing to make sure everyone in the world knows that my child is a genius. Let it go, I told myself, and everyone will figure out he’s in line to win a Nobel Prize one day without you pointing it out to them.
Since then, I’ve become firmly convinced that I’m not one of those mothers who pushes. He’s in preschool, for goodness sakes, where mostly what he’s learning is that it’s not okay to hit your friend in the head with a bucket (especially when you are on the receiving end) and that “poopyhead” is a potty word that will make your friends crack up and will make adults frown and tell you not to say it before they crack up too.
Plus, I tell anyone who will listen that Jake won’t be starting kindergarten until he’s nearly six because I’d rather he be older than the other kids than younger. Subtext: Even if he is a genius, I recognize it will not hurt him to spend that extra year in preschool. Or a good Montessori school where he’ll probably learn so much he’ll end up skipping first grade anyhow.
And so it was that I was truly pleasantly surprised when the head of Jake’s school told me that he would be moving up to the next class.
Until this weekend, when I found out he’s not moving up quite as quickly as he was supposed to. And, behold, the pushy mom popped out of my relaxed mom facade like the creature in Alien who, it turns out, was only biding her time, incubating until she could erupt with maximum, frightening force.
Continue reading ‘Imagine How Pushy I’ll Be By the Time Jake’s in College’
By the end of our Thanksgiving meal, life as a mother, as someone who is (can it only be?) eight-and-a-half months postpartum, and as a still relative newcomer to my new home — it was all beginning to seem manageable, pleasurable even.
And then Ellen turned to Mike. “You and I should have monthly Iron Chef-like competitions,” she said.
Ca-thunk. That was the sound of my perennially left-out, insecure thirteen-year-old self dropping like an air conditioner out of a New York apartment window into my stomach.
It’s true that Mike’s turkey was a piece of edible art. And Ellen is the only person I imagine has the culinary talent to turn green bean casserole into something approaching gourmet and without a hint of canned soup in sight.
But there was a time, not so long ago, when I considered myself a pretty awesome cook as well. In fact, it was Thanksgiving just fifteen years ago (eegads, fifteen years — can I still say “just”?) when I tested the waters of my fantasy escape-the-law-firm job of opening a catering business by cooking a kick-ass meal in a tiny apartment with a kitchen that measured approximately one foot by three feet.
Granted, I’m not much of a foodie these days and pretend that it’s just that I really like the taste of unadorned food, not that I’m too lazy to cook a proper meal with seasoning and sauces and stuff. Nonetheless, I’m more than a little bit sensitive about the cooking thing, for reasons I can’t begin to articulate.
All I know is that when Ellen summarily eliminated me from the Iron Chef competition it made me really sad to think that no one knows I can cook — and that maybe I no longer can.
Continue reading ‘I Can Cook! And Lots of Other Things You’d Never Know I Can Do’
There are those (my husband) who will think me a little bit nutty for saying this, but windy days breed anxiety.
One might suggest that I am simply looking for something other than my mother to blame my anxiety on. And that may be the case. But I have it on good authority — my acupuncturist, no less — that I am on to something. Windy days make us feel ungrounded, scattered, and, yes, for someone prone to anxiety like me, anxious.
If I require more proof — which I don’t — I need look no further than yesterday morning, when the wind rattled the maple trees in our front yard and rained bits of debris on the tin roof while I held my puzzled, hungry baby in my arms sobbing, “It’s not your fault! It’s not your fault!”
Anxious. Crazy. Indeed
Today was the end-of-the-school year potluck in Jake’s preschool class. Same summer-ish excitement that I recall from the end of my somewhat-older-than-two-and-a-half-years-old school years. Same excuse to eat ice cream instead of lunch. Same sense of happy displacement at having parents on the playground in the middle of the day.
Plus, as a mother, a little something more: Brwaaaah! My baby’s growing up! sadness.
I am not, I’m proud to say, overwhelmed by the sadness. In fact, it’s sitting comfortably beside a more solid sense of excitement. Jake’s moving into a new classroom! Jake’s nearly potty trained! Jake pontificated this morning on the progress of the garbage trucks as we stood on the front porch with Lily watching them make their way down the block!
“I think it’s across the street,” he said thoughtfully as we watched one turn around. “I see two lights,” he added, as if by way of explanation.
“Those red tail lights?” I asked, actually interested.
“Yes, the red tail lights,” he confirmed as if teaching me an important lesson about garbage trucks.
It thrills me, then, to watch my boy grow up, even though it makes me sad to know that these hefty thoughts of his will cease to be so all-consuming cute when they come out of an older mouth.
At the same time, it makes me sad to see the graduation bags in one of the preschool classrooms and to realize how quickly the time will arrive when Jake is the recipient of one, although I’m feeling pretty happy about his progression to an older class.
And then I have my comforting moments when I know that he can be growing up without being quite so grown up.
Like at the potluck today when he took Wendell’s ice cream.
Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)’
Frequently, in child rearing, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does.
Take the day my son pooped on my foot.
We’ve been doing a gentle form of potty training in our house, the kind that does not require us to abandon the four-month-old for an entire weekend spent running around after our naked son with his potty in our hands. Instead, we cajole him into hanging around the house naked for an hour or two at times when we can be bothered to ask, “Do you need to sit on the potty?” at five-minute intervals.
This was one of those mornings when he was happily naked. Happily, that is, until he noticed the package of pull-ups I rather unwisely bought a couple of months ago. I thought they were a plausible step toward potty training until Mike pointed out in rather strident terms that they do not work so conveniently when there is poop involved.
Based on this information, I tried to dissuade Jake from his fixation on the pull-ups by promising him he could wear one once he had pooped on the potty.
“I want a pull-up!” Jake responded.
“When you poop on the potty,” I repeated patiently.
“I DO WANT A PULL-UP!” Jake insisted in that way of his that reflects his conviction that if you say “no” you must not understand what it is he is saying.
“When you poop on the potty,” I said in a firm, motherly tone designed to mask a fury of impatience with a two-year-old’s reasoning skills. And I walked out of the bathroom.
The tantrum that followed bordered on the epic.
After a few minutes that felt like years of abandoning my poor, beknighted, sobbing child, I sat on the floor next to him and asked him if he wanted a hug. Drawing ragged breaths around the thumb in his mouth, my beautiful, pants-less boy snuggled close in my lap.
Unbeknownst to me, this was the moment he pooped on my foot.
Continue reading ‘Poop, Pee, and a Port-a-Potty: A Parent’s Life’
Lily and I are having a bit of a love fest these days. We gaze into each others’ eyes. We smile and giggle. I marvel at the double dimples in her elbows and the figure-eight temple dents she inherited from her father.
And then, after forty-five minutes or so of mutual adoration, I whisk her off to daycare and plop her in someone else’s arms. Getting to do so doesn’t make me love her any more; it just makes it easier to spend forty-five minutes telling her so.
But much as my daily three-hour-break from my baby makes me, if not a better mother, at least a happier one, it is powerless against those “I’m exhausted and you are making my nipples sore” moments. Which are relatively rare, but still all too common.
We have reached that precious stage of infancy where Lily is alive to everything around her, singing out the sounds of conversation to us, staying awake longer between naps, and not looking quite so ridiculous in teeny tiny little dresses. This can mean only one thing:
Just when I have the most to write about I have the least time to write about it.
I would, for example, like to write about the frustration and guilt engendered when the desire for sleep overwhelms the biological imperative to tend to an infant’s needs in the middle of the night; the conflict between hunkering down to endless rounds of goo goo goo with an infant and the desire that arises after about thirty seconds of it to be doing pretty much anything else; the uncertainty revolving around whether I will ever get everything necessary to my sense of self done in the five hours when Lily is finally at day care (a good hour of which will be consumed with her breast milk consumption); and, of course, the Terrible Mother-ness that revolves around sending one’s three-month-old to day care in the first place. (I have lost count of the number of times I have deleted “part-time” from sentences involving day care as I recognize that it is not technically relevant even though it feels absolutely necessary to state.)
However, as Lily demands eye contact during her waking hours and, consequently, as I will not be writing about these topics in any timely manner, I pledge instead to:
1) hold onto all these lovely lessons barreling at me and trust that if I lose any ideas before I have time to write about them properly it is probably to the benefit of my readers, since those ideas must not have been particularly compelling in the first place;
2) continue to use the most certain nap-time for my yoga practice because if I stop practicing yoga what will be the point of anything I manage to write here?;
3) practice patience and the belief that my life will some day return to me (see necessity of #2 above);
4) enjoy these last few weeks before Lily starts day care (see #3); and
5) know that even if I don’t write a thing between now and the day she starts, I will have plenty of fodder for YogaMamaMe-ing the second she does.
Et voila! She awakens.
Friday night, after a lovely family evening eating pizza at an outdoor table overlooking a local parking lot, I relaxed on the couch and looked through old pictures of Jake when he was Lily’s age.
That was my first mistake.
