Friday, April 26, 2013

Joyless

Me, age 34

My house is a disaster, and I am a hot mess.

My husband has just gotten home from work (where he’s enjoyed adult interaction! And eaten his lunch uninterrupted! And used the bathroom without a child trying to peer between his legs to watch the urine come out!). He walks in the door to find:

1. The contents of an entire box of uncooked couscous strewn upon the kitchen floor.
2. Dog pee on our bedroom carpet.
3. One clean load of laundry in the dining room, one dirty load of laundry in the hallway, and one load of laundry (which, disconcertingly, appears to be half-clean/half-dirty) in the bathroom.
4. My four-year-old twin daughters running around, completely naked.
5. My one-year-old son running around, completely naked – except for a tiara and a pink high heel shoe.

My husband is curious to know why our children are naked. There must be some explanation, but I’m at a loss. I can’t grasp how they came to be unclothed. As I explain this to my husband, my voice creeps up an octave, which is never a good sign. Before I can stop myself, I’m launching into a tirade.

I don’t know where our children have put (hidden?) their clothes. Nor do I know why our son is wearing a tiara and a high heel shoe. I don’t even know why I’m letting him wear a high heel shoe in the first place because he’s going to injure himself. I haven’t had a single minute to drag out the vacuum to clean up the couscous. I’m trying in vain to locate the carpet spray to deal with the dog pee. And although I keep tripping on the laundry baskets, they’re going to stay exactly where they are because my laundry-management skills suck.

My husband – who, it must be mentioned, is a great sport and rarely criticizes my mothering abilities or the state of our household – stares in fascination at the large vein pulsing visibly in my forehead. “Take a deep breath,” he says. “Everything is fine.”

He’s trying to get me to lighten up. I am not in the mood to lighten up, and I tell him as much.

“Honey,” he rubs my back. “Don’t be so joyless.”

I am aghast. “I am not joyless!” I say to him. “What a horrible thing to say!”

The truth, however, is that I am joyless. At least in this particular moment. OK, in many particular moments.

In fact – now that I’m giving this some thought – I embrace my joylessness. This is because it’s entirely unrealistic and absurd that, as a mother, I will feel joyful at all times. I wish someone would have alerted me – and my husband – to this dirty little secret before I became a mom. It would have saved us a lot of angst.     

“To hell with being joyful,” I mutter to my husband, who is swiftly retreating. “I’m just trying to survive.”
                                                                
As I resume my fruitless search for the carpet spray, I bolster myself with inspirational thoughts. One day, I tell myself, I will look back at this moment and laugh about it. One day, I’ll be able to manage naked children and spilled couscous (which is freaking everywhere, have I mentioned that?) with serenity and fortitude. One day, I will congratulate myself on how very far I’ve come as a mother.  

But today ain’t that day.

And that, my friends, is OK.



Thursday, April 18, 2013

The things we carry

At the end of the day, I turn the pockets of my jeans inside out and find many things.

These things are sometimes remarkable but usually not. I carry these things throughout the day, up and down the stairs of my house, in my car, around the city.

I marvel at how I’m able to fit so many things in my pockets. They bulge, stuffed and misshapen, cradling the little pieces of my life as a mother.

I’m sure my pockets resemble yours.

The things we carry are largely determined by the age of our children. When they’re infants, we carry pacifiers, extra wipes, teething rings. When they’re toddlers, we graduate to baggies of goldfish crackers, lollipops, small toys to entertain during a trip to the bank. Soon we carry racecars, rubber bands, plastic barrettes, the phone number of a new mom-friend whom we really need to call to set up a play-date.

We carry band-aids, chewing gum, fresh tissues, dirty tissues, safety pins, bobby pins, paperclips, retainers, tweezers. We carry antibacterial gel for dirty hands at the park, a rusty nail found in the grass that we don’t want a bare foot to step on, a button that needs to be sewn back onto a jacket. We carry a perfect tiny tooth that has just fallen out, and we carry a $1 bill so we don’t forget that the Tooth Fairy needs to make a visit tonight.

We carry these things out of necessity. We carry them because we are practical and prepared. We carry them, above all, because we love our children, and who knows when one of them will require tweezers or a paperclip?

As mothers, we carry ourselves with grace, a kind of dignity. Now and then we face moments of anger and frustration, when we’d like to fling the contents of our pockets at our children and tell them to carry the things themselves. But then we take a deep breath, bearing in mind that these days of crammed pockets won’t last forever. We won’t always need to carry these things. Before we know it, our pockets will be barren of the miniature burdens of motherhood, and we won’t know what to do with all that empty space. 


My thanks to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a remarkable book of fictional stories about the war in Vietnam, for inspiring this post.  




Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Standoff

Owen, age 3

My son and I are having a standoff.

Impossibly stubborn, Owen refuses to poop in the toilet. After weeks of cajoling and bribing and failing, I am at my wit’s end.

Owen has mastered peeing in the toilet, but for some reason I can’t discern and he won’t communicate, he cannot bring himself to sit on the toilet and defecate. I know that potty-training has its ups and downs, but I have reached the end of this road. Owen’s poops are now man-poops, which is to say they are significant in size, scope and odor. To peel off his dirty diapers makes me gag. I cannot do it anymore.

So I’m taking the advice of a good friend. I am aware that Owen has to poop at this very moment, so I have removed his pants and diaper. Without a diaper, he has to poop in the toilet, right? He is bare-bottomed and growing visibly uncomfortable. Our conversation goes something like this: 

Me: “You have to go poop, Owen? Why don’t we go sit on the potty?”

Owen: “No, I don’t have to go poop, Mommy.”

Me: “Are you sure, buddy? Why don’t we just go sit on the potty and see?”

Owen (starting to turn in circles, much like my dog does when he has to poop): “I don’t have to poop!”

This goes on for awhile. Owen’s face begins to take on a greenish hue. He’s hobbling around the room, legs pressed tightly together. He is trying to act as if everything is fine. But then, he squats. Squats as if he’s going to poop on the rug.

Me: “Owen, stop! You can’t poop on the rug!”

Owen (quickly standing up): “MOM, I DON’T HAVE TO POOP!”

He is a bad liar. I watch in disbelief as he takes his finger and proceeds to stick it up his little butt-hole. I sense he is doing this in order to prevent anything from escaping. His situation is dire.

I am icy calm. As a mother, I know that we have to pick and choose our battles with our kids. Well, I have picked this battle. I will win this standoff.

I carry Owen to the bathroom, his finger still sticking up his bottom, and gently place him on the toilet. He releases his finger, and out comes the poop. I want to cry out in joy. I do cry out in joy. Owen has pooped in the toilet! I hug him and congratulate him and do all the happy things a happy mom is supposed to do when her impossibly stubborn child has done something momentous.

Our standoff has come to an end – as (blissfully) has our need for diapers.

I’m sad to report, however, that my sense of victory is short-lived. This is because every new day with my children presents the opportunity for a new standoff. Often, these standoffs aren’t as dramatic as the scene between Owen and me – they’re usually about getting out of bed to go to school, doing homework, or brushing hair – but they have the potential to wear me down.

What’s a mom to do?

I’m learning that keeping my eye on the big picture is imperative: What is tolerable? What is intolerable? Am I forcing my own agenda on my child? Should I let him do things in his own time and in his own way? If his way is not the best way, will he be harmed, traumatized, or screwed up for life? Will he need therapy? Will I need therapy?  

My most effective standoffs are those that entail strategizing on the front-end. When I’ve done my research and put a plan in place, that’s when I fare best, ultimately encouraging my children to cross a milestone, accomplish something meaningful, or discover that they are capable of wonderful things.

On the flip side, when I feel myself tipping toward a standoff but haven’t yet asked myself those crucial questions or gotten my thoughts in order, that’s when I get tripped up. The standoff turns into a messy argument, and no one benefits.

So which standoffs are worth our time and sanity? Which aren’t? And which are simply a matter of refusing to reach elbow-deep into a three-year-old’s man-poop? The answer, I think, depends on the day, on my mood, on the child.  

The most important thing I’m realizing? Motherhood is a long road, and it’s hard to walk gracefully when my heels are dug in too deep.

 




Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Once upon a time

Me, age 39

After years of empty nesting with my dad, my mother has decided that she’s sick of my old stuff cluttering up her closets – my stuff and the stuff of my three younger sisters. Prom dresses, diaries, yearbooks and the like. She’s lobbed everything into boxes and has summoned us to claim our personal effects at our earliest convenience or they will be chucked in the trash.

Let’s be frank: After perusing the contents of my boxes, I see that much of it does indeed belong in the trash, or at least on e-bay. Particularly an old Madame Alexander doll whose pupils seem to follow me wherever I move around the room. I found this quality unnerving as a child and even more unnerving as an adult.

While sorting through my stuff, eager to part with most of it, I find a stack of old high school newspapers. The issue on top appears to be the last of my senior year, a sort of retrospective of our time in high school, including the results of a senior survey. I can’t remember anything about said senior survey and am thus alarmed to see my name listed smack in the middle of the page. Good God, what did the senior survey have to say about me?

Thankfully, I am not “most likely to be a brown noser.” (An unnecessarily harsh category, I reckon.) Nor am I “most likely to be president.” (No surprise there.) Instead – drum roll, please – I am “most likely to get the whole fairytale.”

I read it again, stunned. Most likely to get the whole fairytale.

“Most likely to get the whole fairytale? What does that mean?” I ask out loud.
                                                                                                                                                
What can high schoolers possibly know about fairytales and who is most likely to get them? What does a fairytale look like in the first place? Does it have a different sheen and shape to an 18-year-old than it does to a grown woman with a family, a house, and loads of responsibilities as well as laundry*? And why ever was I picked among my graduating class of 1992 to be most likely to get it?

These questions, however, are completely irrelevant. Towering over all of them is the great big important one: Did I get the fairytale after all?

Like most mothers and wives, I don’t feel like I’m living anything extraordinary. More times than not, my hair is askew and my clothes are crumbly with some sort of dried food. I clean toilets and help the kids with their homework. My life is not glamorous.

And yet.

I have good health, a great husband, three bright kids, a close-knit extended family, and a house perfect for hosting dear friends. There are days when I feel like Cinderella (the shabby Cinderella, let’s get that straight), scrubbing, cooking and generally serving as my family’s doormat, but don’t I have everything I’ve ever wanted?

Yes, I do.

Furthermore, I understand that fairytales go way beyond princesses and fairies. They dig deep to find meaning, humor and even entertainment in the messy stuff of life. From this perspective, I guess I’ve got a fairytale.   

“I guess I’ve got a fairytale,” I say out loud. It has a nice ring to it.

“I’m good at digging deep, just like a fairytale,” I add, with growing enthusiasm.

Except – wait just a minute – that is not exactly accurate. 

I’m good at digging deep only when I’m not inches away from insanity trying to manage a household and raise three children. So let’s be honest: I’m not good at digging deep, because I’m never not inches away from insanity.

But isn’t it possible?, I wonder, avoiding the gaze of the Madame Alexander doll sitting next to me. Isn’t it possible to have a fairytale while at the same time struggling not to lose one’s mind? Like so many women I know – friends who are mothers and wives and countless other things on top of that – can I try really hard to take a step back and reframe the messy moments of my life, looking at them in a different way?

And, even more important, can I summon up the courage to share these messy moments with other people, being brutally honest and saying the beastly things so many women feel but don’t want to admit to?   

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I can.”

And I will.

The result, as it turns out, is this blog. Thank you very much for reading.


*Laundry will play a recurring role in this blog. In fact, the repetition of laundry in this blog will mirror the role that laundry plays in my real life: It never goes away. Just when you think you’ve seen the last of it for awhile, it comes back. If you get sick of hearing about my laundry, you’ll begin to understand how sick I am of the laundry itself.