Many times I am startled by how my identity and feelings have changed once I became a mother, and I know most of my Mom friends have been in the same boat.
Good Morning! I wanted to advertise that a short piece of my writing has been published on the great website Literary Mama. It was my response to a prompt about finding peace and solitude to write as a mother, and for me that it would feel impossible.
This link should take you there.
Thanks!
Easter has its eggs.
Christmas has its sugar cookies.
Halloween has its Jack-O-Lanterns.
All are perishable materials that have potential to go rotten all too quickly. They are holiday treasures that wild rodents would feast on if given the chance. They are mere decorations that take effort and planning to execute, only to be tossed out once they start to smell.
I love it.
I love how fleeting these three are, and that the opportunity to partake in these traditions comes and goes so quickly. Even if you’re a planner, you cannot do these six months ahead of time. If you are a procrastinator you absolutely have a hard and fast deadline for completion. Since I can be both simultaneously, this tiny window of opportunity keeps me in the moment.
The knowledge that these creations will be eaten or thrown away so soon also has the power (however temporary) to stop me from being a perfectionist. I am considerably less worried about making mistakes when I know my artwork isn’t meant to last. I take chances. I take risks. I have fun. I make mistakes and it isn’t the end of the world. The rest of the year crafting -essays, costumes, turkey dinners- can bring out the worst in me. I become a wreck when I miss a detail or when an innocent bystander has gently pointed out a flaw. There have been tears and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The kids have picked up on it. By nature and nurture they are doomed to be perfectionists, too. At least these few guaranteed times a year I can model something different for them.
Don’t get me wrong, I do put a lot of effort into these creations. I spend a lot of time meticulously layering colors and tape to make an Easter egg that looks like a strawberry. For a skunk-inspired Jack-O-Lantern, I made the kids model their best “I smell something nasty” faces. I take time and I put thought into it, but if frosting smudges together, or dye isn’t quite the right shade, or if an idea I thought was clever doesn’t pan out (one year I tried to make a pumpkin who was horrified that his brother pumpkin had been made into a pie and had to explain it to everyone) it doesn’t matter. It will not stand to haunt me for the rest of my days, and it isn’t the only time I’ll ever be allowed to try something new. There is always next year.
And for once (or technically, at least three times a year) I am so not worried about how my stuff is turning out that I can really enjoy what the boys and my husband are making. I am not just watching them make art as a spectator or a member of their audience. I am not trying to carve out quiet time away from them so I can finally concentrate on what I’m doing. We are making things together as a family. The best part, we’re having fun
The weather changed. The air got colder, rain fell for days. Each night this week a little hand would reach out in the dark to find me. My little guys would discover that I was still there sleeping right next to them, and feel comforted enough to know that they could try to fall asleep. I would know, as soon as they did, if their barking cough turned frightening; they wouldn’t have to try to call for me with no breath left.
We kept the window open a crack, a towel sitting right up against the threshold to catch rainwater before it flooded the inside of the house as it had flooded the street. The cool damp air helped us all breathe better.
It was just the three of us for days. Both boys missed a whole week of school. My husband had gotten on a plane for work on Monday. Between the rain and our colds we stayed home doing just the minimum to get by. Watching movies. Taking medicine. Eating food. Sleeping. Cuddling. It was as if we had stepped back in time, when I was a stay-at-home mom with two small children too small for school.
For this one week we didn’t rush anything, not waking or dressing or eating or thinking or deciding or cleaning or bathing or bedtime kisses. When homework and playdates and PTA folders disappeared, other things reappeared. Well-loved toys that had languished in the back of cabinets now spilled out all over the living room floor, useful again. Movies that we had outgrown, at the oh-so-mature ages of five and seven and thirty-five, got new viewings-with popcorn when our scratchy throats could manage it. I got to go back in time, to when coloring with my child was part of my job description, and napping with them was an important part of our daily routine.
When they were so small and helpless before, the isolation of these sorts of days had felt stifling and dangerous. The responsibility for their health and safety weighed so heavily on my every move, and the length of the hours taxed my soul.
Now that these days are a pause from normal life, rather than normal life itself, I am able to see the gifts those long sequestered days had given them and given me.
I know them better than I know almost anyone else on earth.
We had time together to just be, before clocks and schedules ruled our days.
They know that they only need to reach their hands out a little ways for help, and I’ll be there.
My oldest is complaining again, “It isn’t fair!”
Okay, I’ll bite. I ask back, “What isn’t fair?”
“You tell me ‘no’ all the time.”
“Well, of course you get told ‘no’ all the time. You ask for hundreds of things every week. If I said ‘yes’ to everything you ask for nothing else, literally nothing, would get done.”
“You never say yes.”
“Wait a minute-did we go bowling two weeks ago? Did we go fishing this week? Did we read the book you wanted to read? Did we put the Lego set together? Did we play poker? How did we do all those things, things that you wanted to do, if I never tell you ‘yes’?”
“But you never say ‘no’ to my brother.”
“That’s because he barely ever asks for ANYTHING! I say ‘yes’ to about three requests from each of you every week. Just because he only asks for three things a week and you ask for a hundred does not mean I am unfair. The percentage of time that I tell you ‘no’ is higher, but the actual number of times I say yes is exactly the same.”
His face softens and he tells me, “I guess…I guess I just feel disappointed.” His shoulders slump. I would have never argued with his younger brother this way, and I’m ashamed that I debated him until he had to admit that I was right and he was wrong. Whatever equations I’ve created in my mind to prove how fair I really am-how we spend equal measures of time, energy or money on each kid-I was totally unfair in how I responded to him. He is only seven, after all, and if he were his five-year-old brother I would have asked him gently why he felt the way he did. I wouldn’t have tried to crush him with statistics, ignoring his feelings.
But, I tell myself, they are different creatures. My oldest is the squeaky wheel, persistent about expressing his needs and not afraid to be argumentative when he is shut down. Eventually he can be persuaded by logic and resigns himself to reality. My youngest is silent about his thoughts and needs most of the time. When he finally does express himself it is a loud tantrum that he refuses to explain unless you gently, subtly try to coax a reason out of him. At least, that is how they normally operate.
I was talking to the boys the other day about how beautiful our trees have become this fall. We talked about the purple-red edged giants, the flaming orange stunners. The year before, when I drove my youngest to preschool, there was a whole street on our route that was lined with a particular type of tree. These trees had yellow-golden, tiny, tiny leaves that shook down like confetti. I asked if he remembered them. I then started going on and on about how red some bushes were by my oldest kid’s elementary school, and how they were so vivid I had to take a picture of them.
My youngest sighed then, and I asked him gently what led to that sigh. He looked resigned and sad and his brother and I were quiet enough that he actually spoke up.
“You must have liked the red leaves better.”
What?
“No, sweetie, of course not. I like all of them. Why would you think I like them better?”
“Well, you never took a picture of my trees. They must not have been good enough.”
Here was my youngest, quietly speaking up for himself, quietly presenting me with evidence I couldn’t argue with (though if it had been my oldest, I surely would have tried). Me taking the time to record one tree, and not record the other, was the same as valuing the experiences I shared with his brother more than the experiences I shared with him. This was a way of being unfair I had never thought about, never accounted for, though it instantly made sense. Sharing the things we love, making sure we don’t forget them, making and preserving those memories together is very important.
I stalked those trees for weeks, working to get a picture of them fully golden with their glittering leaves shaking down. I wanted to make it right.
I apologized to my oldest for arguing with him so much.
I am trying, very hard, to be fair.
I had the boys try candied orange peels last Christmas.
There was a recipe I had wanted to try for years (actual, literal years). I had to track down raw hazelnuts, white pepper, candied lemon and orange peel and candied citron. The result, a tooth-breaking concoction, is a story for another day. In the end, I had quite a large amount of orange, lemon and citron to figure out what to do with, because I will most likely not be trying that again.
I really tried to sell those leftover candied orange peels. I explained how people knew how to make candied fruits before there were knights. How the process to make these is involved, taking days of boiling and boiling again and soaking everything in a thick sugar syrup. How this was a way to preserve sweets before electricity and refrigeration. How back in time nothing was wasted, not even peels. How it used to be when you yourself took the time to plant and harvest, raise and slaughter, grind and bake all your own food.
The boys took one ginger bite each. “This is what people used to have for candy?” My oldest is grimacing, but trying politely to hide it.
“Well, yeah…”
“You know, I feel really bad for people back then, that this is all they had. Especially if it was so hard to make,” he concludes.
“Mommy?” My youngest is trying to hand his peel back to me. “Do I have to finish this?”
I say what I always say in these cases, “No, honey, you never have to finish dessert.”
It is clear it is going to be up to me alone to eat these; no one else will be helping me do so. I cannot just throw them away, especially after all the weight and importance I put on them. I’ve started to feel bad for the Medieval children who would have treasured these, those poor souls my own child pities not because they had horribly short life expectancies or lived in disease-ridden poverty. He pities them for their lack of M & M s and Reese’s Cups. I vow, solemnly, to enjoy them before buying any more treats for myself.
That vow was broken almost immediately, and shamefully, by a McDonald’s apple pie. It was purchased as one of two for a dollar. The other pie was thrown out when I realized eating both secretly in my car would have cost me 500 calories. I tried to give the second one to my youngest in the backseat. He had the good sense to tell me, “I don’t really want any. You know, you don’t ever have to finish dessert, Mommy.”
If any fourteenth century kids ever time-travel and witness this, I am certain that they would shake me by the shoulders, maybe even smack me around a bit, and throw a very sorry, pitying glance at my son for having to live in the world in which he does.
I have fibromyalgia. That means, for me at least, that at any given moment pain or exhaustion can take over my body and steal the rest of my day. I have little to no control over what will push me over, thugh I do what I can to delay that crash. I bribe my body with exercise and sleep, vitamins and a careful diet, meditation and stress-reduction. But I have as little control over its function, ultimately, as I do over the weather. On occasion my nerve endings send pain signals from all over my body, making me believe that I have suddenly been attacked by a swarm of bees. Or that invisible spirits have started stabbing me. Or that an electrical storm has started sweeping over all my muscles, all my bones, all my skin. I sometimes jump up or yell out from the pain. When I am home it is all right. My boys and my husband know what is happening. When I am at my son’s soccer game, and the temperature drops from 68 degrees to 48 degrees in less than an hour, when a real storm rolls in and I am trying to keep my other son warm and dry and make sure my Mom and Dad watching the game are also okay, when I am trying to remember how to do simple addition to get snacks for the team, when my oldest son gets angry at me for insisting he put on his jacket and for not asking him what kind of Gatorade he wanted, when my muscles cramp up so badly I’m twisted up in pain, when my own personal storm has started shocking me everywhere I can feel, when other nice parents are trying to keep up small talk, when something is stabbing my eyes and I want to cry but I can’t, I just can’t, not in front of the whole world, not again, it is not all right. As soon as that soccer game was done, I ran our stadium chairs and my youngest child back to the car. Threw up in the parking lot. Sat in the car and cried. Hoped no one saw that. Hoped that if they did they didn’t think the worst. What the worst is, I don’t know. A sudden drop in temperature, a sudden storm destroyed that day. There was slow, gradual recovery, but I never got the rest of that time back. I thought about that day again the other night at soccer practice as black clouds rolled in across the sky, and I tried not to panic and make myself worse. This time the clouds only opened up to a drizzle and my body didn’t betray me. I thought quickly enough to stop myself from yelling to the sky, “Why? Why not this time? What did I do to deserve that last time? What did I do to deserve this now?” Instead I was able to laugh dryly for just a second. I muttered quietly to myself or God or someone, “Thank you. Thank you for letting this time not be as bad.” Though, I would still like to know why.
Legos can be…tricky. Like a blank page and all the words in the English language, a bucket full of pieces seems to offer infinite possibilities for creation. When you get into constructing your vision you start to see all the problems: how two pieces won’t actually fit, or how it doesn’t look how you imagined it or how it could fall apart at any second. It can be difficult when it looks easy.
My youngest had been working very hard and very frantically at building a spaceship with Legos. Because he wanted it to be something no one had ever dreamed up before, his older brother and I couldn’t help with its architecture. We couldn’t really point out where a wing could be reinforced or where landing gear could sit without being knocked off the first time it “landed”. He had a vision we couldn’t see yet.
I had been casually calling out to the living room, “Hey buddy, dinner’s almost ready,” while getting out dishes and turning off timers. As I brought one thing after another to the kitchen table, I could glimpse him with the Legos on the couch. I could sense him getting angrier and angrier, and I just assumed he was mad at me for interrupting his game. A little annoyed that he was getting annoyed, I tried one last time to get him to the table to eat. “Hey, come on now, you need to come to the table. I gave you fair warning that it was time.” At that he let out an anguished cry and threw his whole spaceship to the ground. It broke, scattering hard-edged colors in every direction.
“What on earth was that?” This is not a destructive kid. Except for one strange week near his fourth birthday, he has never thrown or broken anything.
He screamed back at me, “I couldn’t get it right!” With his eyes scrunched tight and hot tears coming down, I could see him as an adult throwing a thick manuscript into a fire. A bitter, worn, angry old man willing to call his work garbage because it wasn’t what he wanted it to be. Destroying every word, every sentence, every page all at once.
When he looked down at what had really become of his spaceship, he saw that not one part could be salvaged. The horror of what he had done overwhelmed him. I’ve never seen him sob so hard.
I held him for a while but I couldn’t really calm him down. I tried to convince him that maybe using the bathroom, eating, resting would help. Eventually he sat in his own chair in the kitchen, quiet. Even more quietly, he slid out of his chair and into the living room. He sat on the rug and for the next twenty minutes he rebuilt his spaceship. When he was done he came back to the table and ate his now-cold dinner without a word. His older brother and I ate silently, watching it unfold.
I’ve heard experts say please, please let your children fail when they are still children. Let them lose a game, mess up a friendship, fall off the playground without intervening so much. Their lives are going to be filled with problems and they need practice solving them when the stakes aren’t so high. Let them work through difficulty instead of rescuing them. This time, even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t rescue him from his creative frustration and I certainly wasn’t able to comfort him. I got to watch him decide what to do about that demon that told him his creation wasn’t good enough, wasn’t right. He wept over the aftermath of destroying it. He decided on his own that it was imperative to try again.
At bedtime, I told him I was proud of him. One day it might be an entire manuscript that he wants to hurl violently away. And maybe some memory of this, quiet and still, will make him pause before he can do it.
This summer I started reading the Ramona Quimby books to my boys, books I absolutely loved as a girl and had not thought to read at bedtime, yet. I could not remember what order they were supposed to go in, whether Ramona and her Mother came before or after Ramona and Beezus or Ramona Quimby, Age 8. I lucked out and picked Ramona, the Brave in which she is six and about to begin the first grade. Perfect for my five-year-old who is nervous about starting kindergarten, and my seven-year-old who has just finished that school year.
Oh my goodness, thank you Beverly Cleary! Thank you for remembering so clearly what it was like to be a young child, one who feels insecure when she says something her parents think is funny or who cannot decide which is worse, a tattletale or a copycat and that being the girl who scrunches up someone else’s paper owl is worse than either. I don’t know if you have ever read this book, or if you remember it well if you have. In one chapter Ramona, who is already feeling terribly misunderstood, has worked very hard to make a really lovely paper bag owl for Parent’s Night. The girl in the desk next to her copied every detail of Ramona’s, owl making Ramona angrier and angrier. She tries to shield her owl from the copycat but only succeeds in hiding it from her teacher. The other girl is praised for her lovely, wise owl. Ramona scrunches her owl into a tight ball. My boys literally gasped when I read that part out loud.
A week later in the story, when Parent’s Night rolls around, when the girl who copied draws attention to the fact that Ramona does not have an owl to display, when Ramona has to lie to her teacher that she, “Does not care for owls,” even though she does very much, Ramona’s feelings boil over and she destroys the other girl’s owl and runs home. My boys cried. They felt absolutely horrible for her. And for themselves, I suspect. There is an all too real possibility that something like this could happen to them, that they might get so upset that they would do something they know they shouldn’t. That they might feel like they aren’t good kids, or that no one understands, or that they might be even more upset with themselves for doing this naughty thing than any teacher or parent could be. And they get to see Ramona come to terms with this awful thing she has done, and that she is not a thoroughly rotten person for doing this one thing. We cried and we talked about it, I told them about times I had gotten in trouble in school and how it felt. That it was normal to feel all of the things Ramona was feeling.
I guess books like this are why, though I appreciate fairy tales and superheroes, Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings I am more in love with stories that feel real and may look small on the outside. Those small, real stories do not feel small when you are in them, when you live them. Those stories, short on special effects, show great respect for ordinary moments and the experiences of real people. My boy’s reaction to Ramona crushing her own, then someone else’s owl was stronger than their reaction to the ending of almost any Disney movie. And that made me happy.
When I was a new mother and had a six-month-old who had begun trying solid foods, some overly concerned women who worked with my husband exclaimed, “She’s home all day and doesn’t make her own baby food?” He relayed that conversation to me with a shrug and support, “You know I don’t care if you make baby food right?” Then he handed me the baby-food cookbooks these women passed to him, to pass on to me and I stared up at him hard. My heart sank so far down. Here was another way I was failing as a mother, how I was wasting hours and giving my baby less than he deserved. Not to my husband, thankfully. Again he said, “I really don’t care one way or the other. They mean well. I brought them home only to shut them up and…well you did like to cook, before.”
I did like to cook before, before I had post-partum depression, before I felt cocooned from the world. The only news from the outside came from women who were preoccupied with how my baby was bottle-fed or how I couldn’t keep my child from mouthing cart handles or how I didn’t steam and puree organic fruits and veggies. But, cooking had always been a way for me to enjoyably fill the hours; sharing a meal with someone I loved made me happy. Maybe I would ignore the books (especially the one which advocated for brewer’s yeast as a snack) and pick some foods that my baby couldn’t get it a jar. I would cook for him.
Pureeing watermelon was an all day project, or else sleep deprivation just made it seem that way. Hacking away the rind, mopping up the pink juices before the ants could find it on the kitchen floor, digging out the food processor and figuring out how to get it put together took too long. Maybe it was the prospect of keeping my baby safely away from sharp objects while entertaining him that may it seem intermitable. Eventually I had a small mound of fuchsia mush I felt somewhat proud of.
My baby took one bite, shot a look up at me that said, “What the hell is this?” and refused to open his mouth again. As I think back now I’m sure the coarse texture paired with an unusually sweet juice startled him and felt wrong. Or perhaps he just knew that this is never what was meant for this poor melon-a spoonful made of loneliness and self-consciousness. I stared at him for a moment before getting up slowly and retrieving Gerber sweet potatoes, which he devoured happily.
I felt just hopeless, because this had failed, because I couldn’t prove to anyone that I was a worthy stay-at-home mother, because I hadn’t saved any watermelon in large juicy crunchy pink triangles for myself. All I had was this slushy, lukewarm pile that not one of us was going to touch. Down the garbage disposal it went.
Today he is seven and a half and just ate about half a watermelon with dinner. I feel vindicated that I hadn’t ruined him for good food. And, I feel extremely angry that I had let some random woman make me feel that I had, that I was not doing enough, that I wasn’t enough because I bought a few, tiny, glass jars once upon a time.
Kristin DeMarco Wagner 