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’m still ashamed, even though I now recognize it was a December Mom thing.
There’s simply no excuse for being — I can still recall the out-of-body experience of watching myself do this — the mom screaming across a crowded coffee shop at her child. “Jake! Jake! JAKE! DO YOU WANT A BAGEL?” As if no one sits hunched over a laptop trying to experience a little peace and a nice cup of coffee between her and her child.
Yep, that was me.
On that early December Saturday afternoon, I became someone I never thought I’d be. The mother all us peaceful coffee drinkers hate. The woman oblivious to the fact that others do indeed occupy the somewhat inappropriate space to which she has spirited her children.
The one who is finally shamed by the sweet older man passing her as she gathers compostable forks and napkins and cups of water simply saying, “Quite a handful, isn’t it?”
On Sunday I climbed the curved ladder to the top of the play structure for the very first time.
Jake beat me to this milestone by several months and four decades. But that didn’t cheapen the fun of climbing, rung by rung, up and then, a little at a time, over until I crouched horizontally over the ground gazing at the mulch beneath me in giddy, defying gravity (sorry, stuck in my head from last week’s episode of Glee) motion.
It was yet another 75-degree November Sunday, surely the last of the year, and I had cheerily left Lily at home napping with Dad while Jake and I headed to the park for what I felt certain would be another morning of Mommy socializing.
Surprisingly, it seemed that all of our friends had something better to do with this glorious day than hang out with us for some impromptu playground partying.
For a while, I followed Jake around, dutifully pushing him in the swing as I scanned the faces of the other adults in attendance for some spark of familiarity. We headed for the play structure, and I settled myself on a nearby bench while Jake headed down the slide by himself.
This was, I thought smugly, far preferable to the days when I was obligated to accompany Jake on the play structure, him being too young to, oh, slide by himself without possibly flipping over the side or failing to stop at the bottom, instead landing in a heap of mulch and tears and possibly a few stitches. How lucky I was, I thought, that my child was old enough to entertain himself. I performed a few quick mental calculations to determine whether Lily would magically be old enough come spring for me to escape the awkward Mommy-on-the-play-structure phase entirely.
Except that my continued hopeful gaze at the faces of strangers — like a puppy at the pound hoping some nice person would take me home and love me — reminded me that I was, frankly, bored. I mean, it was nice and warm and sunny and all. But I was mostly checking my cell phone every few minutes to see if it was late enough to call friends on the west coast to distract me from what I was treating as a chore.
A chore. Hanging out with my beautiful son on a beautiful sunny day. This was, I began to fathom, not desirable behavior.
That’s when I headed for the curved ladder, casting aside habitual vestiges of self-consciousness, fear of falling, and adult-acquired reservation.
It was time to play with my not-quite-three-year-old.
Continue reading ‘Jake and I Go to the Dentist (and Have Fun)’
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.
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
As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.
What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor. More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me. Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work. I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.
Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.
All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on. Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.
There are times — many, many times in the life of a mother of two children under three — when you know that whatever it is that is making you cry is a normal part of parenthood. The incident that has driven you to tears of despair is, you could easily tell yourself, a positive sign that your child is developing properly. No other parent has ever cried in similar circumstances, you may even lie to yourself, so buck up.
But you will cry anyhow, and you will feel good and sorry for yourself as you do it.
By all rights, my latest bout of tears should not have been induced by the simple fact of Lily awakening twice in one night. Because who would cry over something most other mothers of infants I know take as a fact of life? And what sort of ingrate would not be able to take a few days out of the five-and-a-half months of her daughter’s life when she loses a little more than a little sleep?
By all rights, in other words, I should instead have been crying when I was sitting on the dirty floor of a Target bathroom at eight o’clock last night, my baby strapped to me in the Ergo, the toilet paper dispenser empty, and my son’s brand-new Big Boy underpants, shall we say, soiled.
But I didn’t cry then. In that moment, I could find quite a lot of humor in just watching myself. It’s in the middle of the night that my outlook on life is more than a little bit less inclined toward laughter.
Continue reading ‘Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)’
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’
