Archive for the 'Mommy time' Category

Is Patience an Achievable Parent Virtue?

Published
by
Melissa
on March 9, 2010
in Mommy time, balance, centering, compassion, expectations, forgiveness, grace, patience (and losing it), practice and toddler tantrums
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When I was in seventh grade my health teacher, Mr. Phillips, told me I would make a good teacher because I was so patient.

I immediately declared that I would never be a teacher in the kind of bratty voice that comes with being nearly thirteen years old and not particularly fond of Mr. Phillips.

This brattyness, I believe, was not entirely unwarranted.   How much kindness can a middle school student be expected to show to a teacher who tries to cultivate some cred with the class by mocking the then-current ad campaign for Alien by saying, “In space, no one can hear you pass gas”?  I mean, come on.  If you plan on teaching a bunch of twelve-year-olds you should at least be aware that they will laugh at the word “fart” but will find “pass gas” squirm-inducingly square.

Nonetheless, ever since then (a shocking thirty years) I have considered myself a Patient Person.

It has been only recently — most often when I hear myself telling Lily to Stop Yelling At Me! — that I have thought maybe it’s time to reassess.

Continue reading ‘Is Patience an Achievable Parent Virtue?’

The Triple Crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent

Published
by
Melissa
on March 3, 2010
in Mommy time, awareness, change, daycare, feeding my child, gratitude, illness, letting go, practice, sleep, social life, structure, stuck at home with a child, surrender, too much to do and work
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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’

Lily Goes Full-Time

Published
by
Melissa
on January 4, 2010
in Mommy time, being connected to everything, being in the moment, breathing, centering, change, daycare, following your heart, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture, too much to do, trust, vacation, work and yoga class
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4 Comments

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!”

Continue reading ‘Lily Goes Full-Time’

Jake and I Go to the Dentist (and Have Fun)

Published
by
Melissa
on November 18, 2009
in Mommy time, being in the moment, chattering mind, friendship, letting go, practice, school, social life, stuck at home with a child, too much to do and work
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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.

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H1N1 Pays a Visit

Published
by
Melissa
on November 3, 2009
in Mommy time, being in the moment, change, compassion, expectations, forgiveness, grace, illness, letting go, practice, school, structure and stuck at home with a child
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1 Comment

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.

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Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)

Published
by
Melissa
on September 3, 2009
in Mommy time, change, forgiveness, gratitude, letting go, potty training, sleep, structure and the bigger picture
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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)’

Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)

Published
by
Melissa
on August 18, 2009
in Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, change, daycare, following your heart, grace, gratitude, letting go, partners, practice, sense of self, social life, stuck at home with a child, surrender and vacation
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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)’

Are We There Yet? (Part One: Internal Version)

Published
by
Melissa
on August 12, 2009
in Mommy time, compassion, daycare, discomfort verus pain, illness, nonharming, partners, practice, respecting your body and too much to do
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1 Comment

We got our first, “Are we there yet?” in the car on Wednesday.

Mike and I both grinned at each other like kids taking their first bite of a Quarter Pounder — thrilled but also queasily aware that we shouldn’t be.

The great, grin-inducing thing about Jake’s “are we there yet?” is that it lacked even the hint of a whine.  It wasn’t a poorly coded way of telling us he would rather be just about anywhere than in a car with us heading away from home for a long weekend with his extended family to celebrate his grandmother’s eightieth birthday.  No, Jake meant exactly what he said — he wanted to know if we had arrived in this curious place he had been promised.

“Is that Grandma’s birthday?” he asked, pointing out the window at one of the countless tourist traps lining the main road in Cherokee.  It displayed Southwestern Native American blankets even though we were in North Carolina passing through a land trust belonging to the Cherokee tribe, whose members, to my knowledge, have never resided in the Southwest, except perhaps once they retire.

“Not yet,” I said.  “If you close your eyes, when you open them we’ll be there.”

Fat chance of getting him to nap, I knew.  But I didn’t much mind.  I was off on a mini-vacation (if anything that involves bringing your two children under the age of three qualifies as a vacation of any magnitude).  My husband was characteristically cheerful at the prospect of spending time with his family.  And, perhaps most importantly, I was pain-free for the first time in days.

Amazing how good not being in pain can feel when you’ve recently been reminded of the alternative.

Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part One: Internal Version)’

Poop, Pee, and a Port-a-Potty: A Parent’s Life

Published
by
Melissa
on July 23, 2009
in Mama instinct, Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, discomfort verus pain, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, practice, social life, toddler tantrums and too much to do
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3 Comments

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’

How Can You Love Me So Much When …?

Published
by
Melissa
on July 10, 2009
in Mama instinct, Mommy time, awareness, bed time, communicating, compassion, daycare, feeding my child, forgiveness, grace, opening your heart and social life
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0 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘How Can You Love Me So Much When …?’

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