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’
My approach to the end of a good vacation is to panic.
My stomach twists into a little cherry-stem bow at the very thought of resuming a regular life. I see the piles of laundry arranged almost neatly in the suitcases as mountains of unsettled-ness to be scaled before I can breathe again. I feel like a small child clinging to the idea of having no responsibilities, coddled, cared for, and carefree. (Never mind that I seldom felt care- or responsibility-free in my actual childhood.)
If this is the way I feel after a merely mediocre time away — say that late fall weekend we spent in Hilton Head shuddering at the suburban-ness of it all, mourning the fact that we managed to book only two of our three days at the hotel with the good indoor pool, and reduced by unending rain to the playground at the outlet mall — imagine how sick I was to leave Los Angeles after days of 80-degree weather and the excitement of my sister’s wedding.
[A mea culpa here to all my LA friends who are just now discovering that I was in town and didn't bother to call them. We were consumed by wedding, which merely intensified my fantasies about a three-week visit to Southern California where we can properly see everyone we love. And then, I promise, I will call.]
Even if the only time I ever want to once again live in my old bedroom at my parents’ house is when I wake up in that bedroom the morning before getting on a plane home, the fact remains that I very much wanted to stay. Did I mention it was eighty degrees during the wedding weekend?
My mother-in-law was visiting as well, making the full-time childcare that usually renders me twice as exhausted at the end of a vacation as I was at the start of it much more of a breeze. “Do you mind if I leave her with you for a little while?” I would say, handing my fussy baby over to her grandmother’s eager hands as I rushed off to a yoga class.
And then there was the elevator drop of a let-down after the big wedding for which we’d been planning, the weekend of seeing relatives and friends. My mind was set for a Big Event and couldn’t quite settle into the concept of quiet, daily rhythms again.
And yet, as much as these feeling swirled me in circles of rising anxiety, it all paled in comparison to the task ahead: ferrying a three-year-old and an eleven-month-old to LAX, onto a plane for a four-and-a-half hour flight, and then into a car for another two-and-a-half hours to Asheville. Thank goodness for Backyardigans DVD’s.
Continue reading ‘When the Vacation Ends and You Still Have 2,500 Miles to Go. With Kids.’
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’
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson when I looked at my butt in a mirror at my sister-in-law’s house while four months pregnant.
You would, in fact, not be expecting too much to think after that shock I would be smart enough not to look at my butt in a changing room mirror at a Nordstrom in Charlotte when I am ten months postpartum. When I am forty-three years old. Or ever, for that matter.
Some explanation is required.
Today is Lily’s first day of full-time daycare.
Just writing it is making me cry again. (As is wandering past my bedroom and the empty bed on which she is not napping and knowing that I will not have that unspeakably joyful moment of my day when she first wakes up from her nap and grins at me and I lie next to her pulling her still-sleepy body against me and kiss every part of it I can find.)
It is, I know, time.
I have been spending months injecting little veins of longing to return to the things I have put on hold in my life into the warmth of our mornings together, like the marbles of fat that add richness to those pieces of red meat I have eschewed for the majority of my life. Maybe that’s why it’s not taking — because I don’t eat red meat the bits of fat that are my longing just aren’t sticking in my gullet. Instead, they hover out there as a concept that I don’t feel right now. Time for my own life? Pshaw. Who needs it?
And yet I soldier on in a direction I know in my core is right even if my surface emotions — the ones that made me start wailing when I put away a carton of formula this morning in a house empty of her — can’t bring themselves to agree.
I dress her before breakfast. I pack up lunches for both her and Jake. I unload on Jake’s teacher in a babble of still-postpartum hormones how I am freaking out about her starting full time. (”You have to do it,” she says kindly.) Even when Jake begins to scream and grab onto my leg, even as I walk stoically down the hall away from him abandoning my older child as I prepare to abandon my younger one, I stay on plan.
I drop Lily off with a smile spread across her pudgy cheeks. When it is time for me to leave, she looks at me for a moment as if she is going to cry, then turns around and gives a shriek of pleasure to the line of doll people her teacher has set up for her and never looks back. I have to turn off the radio on the drive home because my mind is feeling cluttered and unhinged. “Just make it home,” I tell myself. “Write about this. Start that legal project you’ve been putting off. Go to a yoga class.”
Now I’m home and I’m writing. And — I can see the humor in this, like a mediocre romantic comedy — I am still running from my desk to grab a box of tissues, the muscles in my jaw pulling the corners of my mouth into a clown frown as I cry in a hyena-like warble and whine to no one in particular, “I miss my baby!”
Next to my side of the bed there is a large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards. On the other side of that large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards there is room to open the drawers on the left side of my dresser. In between there is space for my discarded shoes and socks to breathe without having to tussle with Mike’s.
What is not on my side of the bed any longer is the co-sleeper.
For those unfamiliar with this piece of modern baby-raising apparatus, the co-sleeper is a not particularly attractive crib-like thing that attaches to the side of the bed. The idea is to more or less sleep with your baby while theoretically eliminating the risk of inadvertently crushing her. (Couldn’t one still throw a sleep-heavy, errant arm on top of the innocent sleeping child? I wonder. Best, I suppose, not to contemplate the possibility, as I’m not a limbs-flinging sort of sleeper anyhow.)
Given my love of the middle road, the co-sleeper is the perfect invention, a detente in the polarized sleeping-with-baby debate, a way to hush Lily back to sleep in the middle of the night without ever having to leave the cocoon of my down duvet wrapped around me in the hours since kicking Mike out of bed for snoring.
Just as Lily has grown up with the scent and sound of me sleeping a foot away, I have come to love the feel of her within arm’s reach. I have become certain that there is nothing better upon awakening than propping up on an elbow to watch my angel sleep. Except, perhaps, that moment when her eyes pop open and she greets me with a big, sunny morning grin.
Only now the co-sleeper is gone, the victim of increasing baby mass and the fact that I have been dying to get to those dresser drawers for eight months now and just can’t wait any longer.
And in that once longed-for space is a big empty hole. Sort of like the one in my heart.
Continue reading ‘The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On’
On Friday, Lily will be the same age Jake was when we moved to Asheville two years ago.
Just typing those words is sending me into a shower of I-don’t-know-whether-to-explode-with-joy-or-cry-uncontrollably emotions. For months after Lily’s birth I had to consult Jake’s old baby pictures to remember what he was like at her age. Now, however, I have stumbled into a landscape littered with mile markers that make Lily’s every new trick — waving good-bye, handing me toys, figuring out how to remove the Robeez boots I dug out of the bottom of a pile of Jake’s old clothes — into a reminder of just how little Jake once was and how soon I will lose both of my children to time.
This makes me more than a little sad at how quickly indeed the time has passed. And then even sadder because missing baby Jake makes me feel as if I am wishing away the remarkable boy Jake is right now. Not to mention the potty-trained one. Why on earth would I ever go back?
Mostly, though, putting eight-month-old Jake next to eight-month-old Lily collapses two points of my life, like a Wrinkle in Time tesseract. And while it makes me a little bit seasick to contemplate how unstable I was in the first round of motherhood and how not exactly solid I am now, it also allows me to see how comfortable I am with the whole “I’m a mother” concept.
Which, honestly, is a good thing.
Until I take a step back and wonder how the single yoga gal going out drinking with her friends turned into the mom who thinks Sunday morning on the playground is a big, hot social hour.
Continue reading ‘A Truly Scary Halloween, or How I Crossed Over’
Actually, I don’t really know that it’s H1N1 with whom we’ve tangoed over the past week. But I’ve been told that right now anything that looks like flu must be of the swine variety.
Like most of the H1N1 lore I’ve been hearing, there’s no telling how accurate this information I’m spreading around is. But no one is going to confuse this site with the CDC’s and, besides, H1N1 makes for a timely and eye-catching title.
So, full disclosure: No bodily fluids, no soaring temperatures, no stories about persevering despite record-breaking dehydration here. Just trying times and trying to be mindful. And yoga.
Nursing my daughter in the back seat of the Honda as we left town for the weekend — me kneeling over her with a hand braced against the window as if to wave (or perhaps hold out a big STOP!) at passersby — probably should have been a good clue that I would be facing some unique challenges on our travels.
You’d think I would have chosen this moment to consider the other adjustments my children would demand of me while we visited my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia. You’d think I would have pondered how a seven-month-old might respond to a new setting, new faces, and the absence of the hound dogs with whom she is so fascinated. (No worries on the last front, as Pete and George made their houndness roundly accessible to her.)
I am sorry to report, however, that the only thought running through my mind as I leaned over Lily’s car seat while we idled at a traffic light was how glad I was that no one was waiting at the bus shelter at which my position required me to stare as if looking forward to a chat with whoever was sitting there ogling me.
Continue reading ‘New Places, New Faces, New Records for Lack of Sleep’
