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’
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!”
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?”
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’
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)’
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.
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)’
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’
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.
I can’t remember the last time I went to Target on a Saturday.
As of today, I know why.
It was supposed to be my break, part of the divide-and-conquer strategy Mike and I launched on this Saturday morning of oh-so-cranky toddler.
And, indeed, somehow, I needed a break, despite having spent all of an hour or so with Jake. All of it, mind you, “getting ready” to go to the park. This involved:
1) Three peaceful minutes of saving Daddy from his breakdown as Jake raised my hopes by agreeably taking my hand and walking upstairs to “put on clothes for the park.” As he rarely agreeably puts on clothes these days for any reason whatsoever, even the park, I believed my calm and motherliness had finally prevailed over what I still fervently wish to believe is the myth of the Terrible Two’s.
2) One medium-length crying fit as I objected to Jake’s preference for playing with the obnoxious-in-the-way-only-people-who-don’t-have-to-live-with-the-gift can be (a little driving console with steering wheel, radio, and turn signals that all make different and equally grating noises) over listening to me. Not only am I particularly up in arms about his recent penchant for steadfastedly ignoring me when I talk to him, but my frustration is compounded by the fact that I am usually striving to give him the choices that are supposed to mollify and mature a young child. Really, how much good is it letting him choose his outfit when this scenario consists of me kneeling on the floor with a selection of three shirts draped over my arm like a maitre d’ at a restaurant serving up a selection of Old Navy toddler tops while he hunches over his race car console drowning out my pleas for him to make a choice with the VRR-VRR-VRROOOOOMM of a toy whose battery just won’t die already?
Not much good, if, like me, you end up threatening to and then taking the toy away, provoking the tears that it seems it is my job to provoke these days.
This crying episode, however, ended surprisingly well, as Jake actually heard and understood me saying that if only he’d make a choice I’d give him his toy back. Or maybe it was sheer coincidence. At any rate, he chose a lovely red shirt and I gave him back his toy. All was peaceful. Until –
3) Five minutes of me looking for a pair of tennis shoes to celebrate our 60 degree weather while he insisted on going through my shoe boxes and trying on a pair of heels so high I’m surprised I haven’t broken an ankle in them. He was unhappy when I wrested them away and put them back in a box, but was fortunately distracted by the much safer Ugg slippers my wonderful husband bought for my perennially cold feet at Christmas. Minimal tears were involved.
Perhaps Jake was just saving up for:
4) A good twenty minutes spent in the bathroom as I foolishly tried to change out a load of laundry and put shoes on him. There were three flaws in this plan.
The first was that these days Jake is fascinated with turning on the faucet and wasting as much water as he possibly can. While I fancy myself able to choose my battles, I had the now apparent misfortune of living through a massive California drought at the impressionable age of nine. This means that I am hardwired to freak out at the prospect of wasted water. To the point that my lawn in St. Louis was constantly brown, even as the neighbors explained to me that there’s this little river called the Mississippi from which their abundant water supply came. Of course, we had a small drought a year or two after I moved there, and my brown lawn enjoyed some company, proving my point but at the expense of positively fixing me in a state of water-mania for the rest of my days.
While I might perhaps have been making some headway with Jake on the whole water-conservation thing up until this morning, we then hit flaw number two — while I was putting on shoes in the bedroom, Jake had come across the fishy-face mask of his Nebulizer and was now discovering the great fun to be had placing it under the faucet and letting all the wasted water run through the tube attached to its “mouth.” (For those lucky souls unfamiliar with the Nebulizer, it is a very loud machine with which one administers breathing treatments to their child with viral pneumonia or, in this case, a more mild but threatening respiratory bug. Said child is much more likely to tolerate the Nebulizer mask placed over his mouth and nose if he has viral pneumonia and is too sick and weak to protest.) This Best Activity in the World made it that much more difficult to suggest to him that he turn off the water already. And, no, he was not amused by the substitute game I made up, whereby I turned off the faucet, he made his way off the step stool he uses to reach the sink so he could walk around to turn the water back on and by the time he made his way back up the steps to the sink I had turned off the water again.
Yes, I understand why he was frustrated. But I was too.
And so began more tears. Because, remember, that’s my job.
And we’re not even to the third flaw in my plan: thinking he would actually put on his shoes.
This was not an unreasonable assumption. On weekends Jake gets to wear his beloved pink polka dot boots, banished from the gym at school.
“Do you want to wear your boots?” I asked in that cheery, upbeat voice I can put on even when cheery and upbeat are the last two things I am feeling.
“Nooo!” Jake wailed. “Shoes!”
“Really?” I asked, untucking his pants from his socks. “Okay, shoes.”
I got one on. Then, “Noooo!”
“What do you want?” I asked. At this moment Mike came up the stairs.
“Daddddyyyy!” Jake howled. I did not like this answer. “Daddy isn’t going to hold you until you have your shoes on,” I said grimly as he squirmed in my lap. Anyone who has had a strong, howling two-year-old squirm in her lap will appreciate how much more joyous the sensation is when you are eight months pregnant and don’t have a whole lot of lap to accommodate such squirming.
And so we entered into a match of Who Is More Determined. I was fixated on getting that second shoe on Jake’s foot at all costs — it velcros closed I reasoned, it can’t be that hard! — and he was equally determined not to let me. You know who won.
“BOOTS!” he finally howled. “I want BOOOTS!”
“Then let me put your boots on!” I yelled, sounding — I cringe to admit it here — like my own mother. I was embarrassed to have even my husband hear me talking to my child like that. Even though there is a reason that all parents yell at their kids from time to time, and it isn’t that they’re bad parents.
The thing about me yelling is — whether I am yelling at my own parents or my husband or, in my past, roommates or boyfriends — it can end only one way.
I cry.
And I cry even more when my son is clinging to his father for dear life. The same father who had used the very same tone of voice with him a mere forty-five minutes earlier. Which only proved that I had blown it forever, provoked one too many tantrums, wasted all that good will built up over nine months of in-utero care and twenty-five months of hugs and outbursts of great love.
So I sat in the bathroom for a while, crying and wondering where, exactly I am supposed to draw the line. What battles am I supposed to pick when every single thing in Jake’s life seems to be a battle these days? How, in short, do I know when to say no?
Continue reading ‘Knowing When to Say No (and Not Just to Target on a Saturday)’
