Month: September 2014

Children, What Say Ye?

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“Mom, um…um…what did I wear when I was a ballerina?”
“Oh this?” I ask, holding up what I think sparked this conversation.
“Uh huh.”
“A leotard.”
“What? A lenar?”
“Le-o-tar-D.”
“…I do NOT know what you just said.”  –my spunky 4 year old girl

“Say you could do anything you wanted today. Go-”
“Stay home.”
“-anywhere and it wouldn’t matter-”
“Home.”
“-how much things cost.”
“Play games on the Wii.”
“Really? Not Disney World or some wild adventure like hiking the tallest mountain in U.S.?”
“Actually, playing Wii all day with Tyler.”   –my introverted 7 year old boy

“I feel like a slave,” she says looking at the mound of crisp, flowery-smelling, perfectly folded clothes she must organize.
“Well, how should I feel then?” I smirk because I’m giving her the reality check of a lifetime.
“Like the King of slaves.”
Until she says that.   –my sassy 9 year old girl

 

Roll up them sleeves, Women

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5521102662_0f81745fca_oThe car moved with the highway, and I along with the car. My thoughts trailed like the curves and turns.

“Where’d you go?” Chase asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking about that woman’s boots. How they’re cute but not something I’d buy.”

My guess is this is when he started to second-guess his question.

“And I was thinking about how we passed each other a lot last year but she never talked to me. You know, when I was depressed and a good day was when I was wearing actual clothes instead of something suitable for crawling back to bed. She talked to me this morning. I wonder if it’s because I’m, well, more put together.”  Seemingly, anyway.

“Women are so good at relationships,” he says. “But there are times, when I’m around a lot of them, it’s also kind of scary.”

To be honest, I can feel the same. And why? It’s a question that plagues my journal. Here’s some of what I’ve wondered.

First, there’s immense pressure in our culture to possess several personalities. We must be Rosie the Riveter when taking care of our homes, flexing our biceps and waging war on dust and clutter.

We’re supposed to mimic June Cleaver for field trips, clad with gluten-free, soy-free, nut-free, good-for-you cookies and an adventurous yet sweet disposition, even while on the bus ride home. Five boys to one chaperone? Not. Happening.

When meeting the girls for dinner we have to be Carrie Bradshaw, steady in our high heals and up-to-date in fashion that looks effortless. Pa-lease. 

When our kids get home from school we are supposed to turn into Mary Poppins, complete with a British accent, powers for tea parties on the ceiling, and a song for practically any circumstance. Now that, would be cool.

By day’s end, we are to greet our husbands as they walk in the door like Kate Upton in an apron. He wishes. (eye roll)

All this to be pulled off without a drop of perspiration or frazzled behavior. Tough enough, smart enough, gentle enough, sexy enough without ever looking like we try. That’s a lot to carry, if you ask me.

Second, we mothers can be ruthless, making every method of parenting or choice for food an opportunity to cast a raised eyebrow.

We are afraid to vaccinate. We are afraid not to.
We are afraid of germs. We are afraid of chemicals, pesticides, and toxins.
We are afraid of public education, private education, the perfect charter school. We are afraid of homeschooling.
Essentially we are just afraid.
We stand in pick-up lines with moms who wear yoga pants. With moms who wear yoga pants and actually work out. I think it’s obvious how I know there are two categories.
Spanking or timeout or both?
Career or stay at home or both?

I think we are hard on each other because we are hard on ourselves. If we fail or think we aren’t meeting the bar of what we see, we feel shame. And since we all walk around like we just woke up with these black eyelashes, rosy cheeks, de-crusted watercress chicken salad sandwiches in our children’s lunchboxes, and marathon legs, that doesn’t take long. Funny thing is we are trying to keep up with each other so we feel like we’re good. Like we belong somewhere in this rat race of outrageous expectations. Like there’s someone out there who will say, “Me too.”
The truth is we have to make a lot of difficult decisions. Little lives have been put in our care and that is both exhilarating and terrifying.

What if we dropped our shoulders with unhinged vulnerability and just said, Yeah, these boots are adorably trendy but my socks have spit-up on them…from, yesterday?
If we knew that other moms let their kids O.D. on Pepsi and cotton candy once in a while, show up to volunteer in the kindergarten class on the wrong day. That some school years are rough and leave us unsure what it means for the future. That no mother, and I mean no mother has completely escaped the scars of pregnancy and birth. In the least we all threw up or had to use Tucks medicate wipes. Yes you did.
How the calendar has sex scheduled. AND a reminder. (Not that I personally know anyone who does that, of course.)

My youngest has been running a fever for the last two days. I’ve held her too-hot body, rubbed my fingers across her clammy forehead, and skipped sleeping. This is when I realize we parents want the same things, to teach well and love ferociously. Illness knows not suits or jammies. Coughs don’t distinguish between uniform vests and regular t-shirts, or yoga pants for shopping and yoga pants for yoga. Our sons and daughters don’t care if their muffin is made with cage-free eggs. They just want to know when they call our name in the middle of the night, we’ll raise the puke bowl and say, I’m here.

Roll up your sleeves and put on your polka dot bandanas, women. We’re in this together. And who we are is enough.

photo courtesy of http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=535413, Flickr

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

Beuford the Skeleton

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They come off the bus like bouncy balls on stairs and I greet them with a smile that cannot contain the love I feel.

“Hey guys. How was school?”
“Amazing!” my daughter says. “We started our project on Ionic and Covalent Bonds and oh, Mom, it was so easy.”
“Whoa. Good, Sweetie.” I turn my attention to my son by wrapping my palm around the back of his neck. “How about you, Bud?”
“Recess was awesome! We played football in the open field and I threw the ball like, 25 yards or something and we scored right before the bell.” My eyebrows raise in awe. “The guys were freaking out and lifted me on their shoulders. They carried me all the way to the classroom, can you believe it?”
“That’s great!”

Reaching the house we all notice who is now up from nap. Behind folds of her blankie she runs to give them hugs. “I missed you,” she tells them.

“Okie dokie, let’s get your backpacks put away and have a snack. Do you want chocolate cake with Ganache frosting and a raspberry center or triple fudge mint ice cream? Because I made both today.”
“Mmm, Mom did you clean? The house looks fantastic.”

By now I hope you’re as annoyed with this story as me. Because it’s a load of bull.

I sit down to Pinterest or a Family Fun Magazine spread and this is the kind of scene I’m presented. Pictures of laughter and camaraderie. As though my kids will cheerfully, compliantly do the crafts I’ve so thoughtfully planned and paid for, sing songs about love, use their manners to pass the glue, and ask for extra hummus and carrot juice, if I will just follow these 27 1/2 simple rules of parenting.

Somehow in the distance between the accordion doors of the bus and our front porch, hell breaks loose in place of hand-holding skips.

They hit the pavement like trash bags. “The new driver is SO slow I want to tear out my eyeballs.”
So do I at your attitude. “I noticed you’ve gotten here a little late the last few days. How was school today?”
“Good.”
“Yeah? Why was it good?”
“I don’t know.”
How utterly thorough. “Well, what did you do?”
“Nothing really. Mom, can I play Wii?”
“No.”
“But why? I didn’t get to play at all yesterday and you said.”
“I said nothing. There was never such a conversation as this in the last 24 hours. I’ve seen your face all of a couple sec-” We hold our breath because somehow we just know we must. “Who, what…is that your sister?”
“That’s definitely her.” He says it without the urgency I think a statement in this situation deserves. Dare I say, he thinks it’s funny.

We reach her hysteria and I feel in my bones all the cracked blinds of neighbor’s windows. But since she’s my third child I’m not too concerned and figure they can thank me later for not leaving her in the yard to work it out on her own.
“You, lef, me, I, din’t, know, whe, you, were,” she says through hiccups. Well, Little One, if I can hear you through the house walls I think I’m close enough.

Scooping her, I smell the trash I won’t remember to take to the curb until I scramble in pajamas the next morning hoping beyond hope the garbage men will take a little longer at the next door.

Through the house is a swamp of backpacks, strewn shoes, papers about after school clubs and fundraisers.
“Excuse me, am I the only one living here? Pick up your stuff, please.” Actually, let me be honest. I didn’t say please. And I growled the other words.

There is fighting, sneering over snacks they claim to have forever hated, and despising of homework (and they don’t really like it either). There’s second grade football that is cancelled after we risk our lives in rain and lightening on the field. There is more fighting on the way home, not from the kids. There’s yelling to get ready for bed.

We’re so far from a Pinterest square that I’m ready to shove my computer somewhere a lady should never speak of. So I won’t.

Then I get an idea.

“Brush your teeth, grab a pillow and meet me back on the bed.”
“What are we doing?” they say suddenly interested.
“You’ll see.”

My youngest can’t keep still, my oldest is trying to wedge her skinny butt in the best seat, and if I don’t hurry we will have gained nothing.

“We’re going to build a story together. You get one sentence and then it’s the next person’s turn. You start,” I say to my son.

“Once upon a time there was a skeleton,” he says with a machine gun giggle.
“He loved eyeballs so much he wanted some.”
“Um, I um, I don’t know what to, umm. He had some eyeballs!” More laughter.
“His name was Beuford and one day he saw a beautiful girl skeleton named Susan.”
“He fell in love with Susan and grew a heart.”
“Oooo. Tee hee.”
“The end,” he says. And we all crack up.

Beuford, the skeleton who will never have craft instructions or make children content, but who one night made a family, a family again on a queen-sized bed.