peevish mama

Happy belated Mother’s Day to all you sweet mamas out there, including my very own sweet mama, Chuchi. I don’t know about you, but I love Mother’s Day – more than my birthday, more than Christmas, more than Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. Being a mother is something I cherish (despite periodic appearances to the contrary) and it feels good to be fêted for something I’ve earned. I didn’t have much to do with being born and although I suppose we deserve to be congratulated for having survived another year, I don’t feel as comfortable wallowing in all the attention surrounding my birthday. But Mother’s Day is another story altogether. All those unseen and unappreciated things we do to keep our families healthy and happy and together, to keep our homes warm and bright and joyful, to keep ourselves sane and healthy and open, it all does deserve some recognition. We deserve to step out from behind the camera, stove and steering wheel for a day. I say, bring it on, lovies. Bring on the homemade breakfasts (delicious, Doctor Dash). Bring on the flowers and cards and little clay bowls and necklaces and paintings and all the dear dear things that little kids make for their mamas for Mother’s Day. I love it all. I even love the short story penned by Supergirl called “The Butt.” Last year, Saint James wrote me a song on the piano. This year, I get “The Butt.” It’s not about my butt, mind you, but riveting nonetheless.

And although I haven’t been able to spend Mother’s Day with my own mom for years, I think she knows, hope she knows, how much she means to me and how much my parenting mirrors hers. My house isn’t nearly as clean as hers, but in so many other ways, in ways that I can’t help, in ways that I don’t even notice, my mother colors the way I go through my days with my kids. I’m not a mirror image of her, but rather, of the same ilk. As if a painter did a series of paintings, variations on a theme, with obvious, superficial differences, but with a common thread – but what is the thread? Soul? Disposition? Habits? I’m not sure I can put a finger on it, but it’s there.

I’m not a mother who hides her emotions from the kids. For better or worse, they hear about the dark and the light. I’m a mother who thinks sitting down together for home cooked meals every single day that it’s remotely possible matters a lot. I’m a mother who’s indulgent, who believes in treats and pleasures and the beauty of saying yes some of the time. I’m impatient in so many ways, but I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to quell that in myself. I like plants and sun and watching my kids play sports. I don’t say the rosary in the car like my mom did for my brother’s nail biter tennis matches, but I gasp and eek and cover my eyes with the best of them. I don’t put a premium on my own perfection, but I do value solidity, reliability, warmth. I don’t let them touch my sunglasses, but I do let them play with my shoes. I’m not very subtle about trying to influence my kids to love the things I love: music, books, food. I leave sports to Doctor Dash. And technology. I’m bad at making my kids do chores; bad at taking money from them when they promise to pay me back. I’m a distracted mother a lot of the time, until those moments when I’m not. Be present is my mantra and my greatest seemingly insurmountable challenge.

I don’t like labels like “good” and “bad” as applied to mothering because I can be both within a span of moments. Motherhood is nuanced and complex and nothing short of a million words will do to describe any one particular mother. A million words. Or maybe just one.

Love.

Happy Mother’s Day to Chuchi and to all you other mamas in the trenches with me.

Here’s St. James waiting anxiously to be scooped up for his very first ever weekend away. He’s beyond excited to be going to his oldest buddy’s cabin for a couple nights. I, on the other hand, wish I could have limbered up and climbed right into that little rolling suitcase. Instead I made him a sandwich to take with him.

I’m still in disbelief.

About the sandwich.

But I will say this:

It made me feel better.

Maybe when the only thing you’ve accomplished with your day is eating a bacon cheeseburger and a coconut cupcake, it isn’t wise to attempt to remedy said pathetic situation by trimming your child’s bangs.

And yet, I will.

I wrote another article over at Simple Good and Tasty about making lunch for my kids and ALL that entails. Check it out here if you’re so inclined!

It all started out so innocuously. The time: after school. The scene: the minivan.

Saint James: Do we have anything going on tonight?

Me: Nope. We’re probably going to Punch Pizza later, but that’s it.

Saint James: Can I go down to the park to skate?

Me: Uhhhhhhhhh.

Saint James: I can go by myself. 

Me: Uhhhhhhhh.

Saint James: I can tie my own skates.

Me: Uhhhhhhhh. Uhhhhhhhh. OK. I guess. OK. You can tie your own skates?

And so, for the first time ever, I let my boy walk down to the park on his own. It’s not far. A couple blocks. But it’s out of eyeshot and as he smiled, proud as can be, and trudged off with his skates hooked on his hockey stick like a winter sports lovin’ hobo – I held my breath. And I went into full-on cartoon fantasy crazy head. I imagined slamming the door and running up the stairs to the second floor, then running up the stairs to the third floor, then opening a secret door and running up more and more and more stairs until I was in a super high teetering crows nest on top of our roof, from which I could see the park and my son’s little dark green jacket in the distance. I pictured scurrying back downstairs, opening the front door and pulling a telescope out of my pocket. With a shwooop sound it would extend down to the street, take a right and extend all the way to the park, my eyeball bulging out of the end of it, looking left and right, blinking. Ah, the modern conveniences of Looney Toons. How I wish.

The truth is, every fiber of my being (except for maybe one or two) knows that it’s absolutely OK for him to go the park to skate on his own. And not only is it OK, I think it’s good. For a couple seasons now, I’ve been loving the wilderness that is park pick-up hockey and all the lessons it has to teach.

Saint James is kind of shy, so the fact that he manages to nudge his way into games is surprising and makes me curious. Does he ask? Does he just sneak in and start playing? It’s all very mysterious to me.

He and Supergirl go down with Doctor Dash quite often, and sometimes Saint James comes back flushed and happy. Sometimes he comes back pouty and pissed off that the bigger kids weren’t passing to him. In a life of coached, closely supervised, highly taught, pre-packaged sports, he’s not used to being ignored. There’s always a coach with a whistle, making sure everyone gets a chance. Saint James doesn’t know his place in the pecking order. I don’t think he even knows that there is a pecking order. The way I see it, he should be happy to be on the ice with a bunch of older kids that don’t know him and his geeky snow pants from Adam. He just has to keep showing up and eventually he’ll break into this band of unruly ice rats who are too cool to wear jackets or helmets. Some of them don’t even wear gloves! Gasp! Where are their mothers?!

There’s the possibility that he’ll get roughed up, that some little punk a couple years older will say something mean and the thought of that just about slays me. There’s also the possibility that he’ll skate his face off, forgetting about school, piano and his mother. That the feral boy who’s in all our boys will get to come out and play. That his heart will pound and his lungs will ache and he will know no greater happiness than the present moment. I get that. I want that for him. So I let him go.

Yesterday Nanook, Crackerjack and I headed downtown with our poor neglected, understimulated third born girls to MacPhail Center for Music for a Mom Culture event featuring Adam Levy. Adam Levy plays in a few bands around here, our favorite being Hookers and Blow. We had heard that he started a kid music band and thought it might be entertaining to see this guy do his thing for the kiddos. We’ve enjoyed some silly, dance-a-licious Hookers and Blow adventures and are trying to make up for the serious paucity of story times, music classes, and gymboree type shit that has been the fate of our thirds, so there we were.

Before he came on, there was a music class led by a hefty lady with a guitar. Seriously, is this an archetype for music teachers? The girls were not interested in her operatic crooning of Wheels on the Bus and within minutes I found myself outside of the auditorium digging through my purse for one of the three bags of Cheez Its I had brought with me. As I sat in a corner, I watched some well-scrubbed mommies packing up their elaborate snacks into little glass and stainless steel containers. As my daughter licked cheese dust off her fingers, the well-scrubbed mommies offered their toddlers another bit of edamame, a little more red pepper, just one more cube of tofu. Good God, I thought to myself peevishly. There was a time when I would have felt a tinge of inferiority at such a display of peripatetic culinary organization and motivation, but I have completely retrained my thinking and in a masterful feat of mind judo, I turn the tables and manage to feel superior. While they were chopping tofu into perfect little cubes, I had time to peruse all the dresses from the Golden Globes on line. Who’s the sucker? And then Nanook comes out in her sexy brown thigh high boots and tosses a package of fruit snacks on the table for her daughter and I realize that this right here is one of the reasons why we’re friends. (The fruit snacks, not the boots. Well, maybe the boots too.) Maybe the well-scrubbed mommies will become as lazy as we are someday. Maybe not. The point is, after all the switcheroonies took place, we shared a chuckle about the lovely cheese and fruit snack we had conjured out of our bags and went back to enjoy the show.

But I’m not always this blasé about snacks. In fact, I’m about to lose my shit over this whole snack business because Devil Baby is a relentless snacker. As someone who tends to eat in more of the boa constrictor mode – gigantic meals that leave you so stuffed you can’t even think about food until all of the sudden you are starving and ready for the next gigantic meal – I abhore being asked for food every twenty minutes. It just doesn’t seem to be a healthy habit to be thinking about food, much less eating food, with such frequency. I understand little kids need snacks, so I’ve gotten sucked in to the whole thing – especially since my particular little kid will NOT take “no” for an answer. I dole out snacks for peace. If I cut up an apple, she’ll stop asking for food, at least for a few minutes. If I say no, I will find her hooking up her carabiners and scaling the pantry shelves to help herself to some Oreos. So I give her a snack because at least that way, I get to pick what it is and I don’t find myself prying something unhealthy out of her death grip, or more often, just letting her have it.

Every night she sits with us at dinner, not touching a thing on her plate, and Doctor Dash listens patiently while I bitch: Uh, it’s obscene! She doesn’t eat a bit of protein! She eats crap and carbs all day long, she’s a dough girl, this is horrible! She’s not touching her food! Look how she’s not touching her food. It’s terrible! This has GOT to stop. I can’t stand it. She doesn’t eat a speck of meat! What the hell is wrong with her? Here, Devil Baby, one bite, here it’s dipped in mayonnaise, one bite. Arrrgh. Sweet mother of God I’m so sick of this! etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This morning Doctor Dash sent me this article from the New York Times before he went to work and I devoured it with my coffee, muttering like a mad woman Yes, yes, yes!

The point of the article is that snacks are ubiquitious these days and heavens knows, no one is in danger of starving. At first when Saint James started playing soccer, I didn’t really care about the snack. It was our only activity and a rice krispy treat or a Kudos once a week seemed like no big deal. In fact, the first time some parents banned the snacks and juice I thought they were total buzz kills. This is childhood! Where’s the sugar? Where’s the sweetness for our perfect little angels? Well, people, I’ve come around. And then some. Those parents probably had older kids and had had their fill of watching their kids’ bulging-eyed fish faces as they frantically sucked down Capri Suns after every single game and every single of their siblings’ games. Obviously the kids are thirsty after a game, so those juice boxes are drained in an instant. That’s kind of gross. What’s wrong with the water bottle we dutifully schlep every time?

So I realize I’m veering around like a drunken old lady with my flower hat all akilter. On the one hand I scoff at the mommies with the super healthy snacks in pcb-free bento boxes. On the other hand, I would be happy if snacks and juice were banned from all sporting events from here on in. I just think we don’t need to be EATING all the time. It’s about DELAYED GRATIFICATION. The reason I bring snacks around now to a much greater degree than I did with Saint James and Supergirl is because, unlike my other kids, Devil Baby will kick my ass all over the soccer field if I don’t have something for her to graze on while the others play. I didn’t used to be this way. I’m not a Boy Scout by nature. I don’t like to plan ahead. That’s why I nursed my kids – zero prep, zero planning, just a little exhibitionism – that much I can handle. If we really find ourselves starving out in the world, we can always drive somewhere and get a bite, right? If I had packed snacks for the park every single time, how many ravenous hair raising drives to Galoonies for steak and cheese subs would we have missed out on? Practically all of them! And now that Galoonies is gone, I’m so glad we weren’t sitting in the sand eating carrot sticks all those times.

Today I was visiting a potential pre-school for Devil Baby for next year and the tour guide was describing snack time; she said they provide Club Crackers, Ritz Crackers, gold fish and the like and one of the other mothers raised her hand and asked: Are the snacks just crackers or do you include vegetables and protein? I couldn’t help myself. I had to turn around and take a look. And guess what!!! Sister didn’t look so svelte. Maybe she’s a music teacher. Or maybe someone should tell her that if her snack features all the basic food groups, it’s not a snack – IT’S A MEAL!!! 

Maybe that’s why my on-the-go snacks are so half-assed. I don’t really want to admit that I’m planning ahead – I want to pretend we are unfettered by and independent of the tyranny of food. If we happen to squeak by a morning without digging into the celophane, so much the better, no big deal, no harm – no foul, I can save it for the next time. But you better believe if I had boiled edamame or cubed tofu, I’d be busting that out before the first stomach rumble.

Food for thought.

“Everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Paul Bowles

I came across this quotation weeks and weeks ago over at Sweet Juniper (a blog I love written by a stay-at-home dad and a fellow Detroit homey and ex-attorney). It’s been been steeping in my mind all these many weeks and unbeknownst to me, coloring the mundane in deeper, richer shades. Sometimes you read something and it stops you cold. Sometimes you read something and it creeps up on you. In either case, one small string of words allows you to see something in a completely new light – manages to unearth the thing behind the thing.   

I constantly struggle with the idea of being present, being awake, staying in the moment, living in the now. Especially when it comes to my kids. It’s something I aspire to, it’s something I work on, but it’s not something for which I have a natural aptitude. I am analytical. I am a worrier. I am hyper verbal. I am impatient. I am easily bored. I am a malcontent. And all of these things conspire against me to take me out of the moment. I go to yoga not only for my body, but to try to quiet my mind. I write this blog in an attempt to pay attention, to elevate the minutae to the level it deserves, to give the stuff of life the credit it is due, to remember. I make promises to myself. I start fresh nearly every day. Sometimes more than once a day.

I look into my childrens’ eyes, at the striations in their irises and try to stamp them into my memory: Saint James: stormy sky filled with black birds, Supergirl: green grass and honey, Devil Baby: blue cotton candy and swirls of sweet cream.

But inevitably, I fail. The whining gets under my skin, someone runs through the house in muddy shoes, I have to make dinner, the laptop beckons, I just want to collapse on the couch to watch a show with Doctor Dash, the phone rings. It is so easy to get pushed out of the moment. And such a struggle to get in, to stay in.

And if you think I’m so intent on being present for the benefit of my kids, you would be wrong. I seek this for purely self-interested reasons. In the most ludicrous feat of mental and temporal contortionism, I find myself worrying about a certain time in the future when I will be filled with regrets at all the small moments with my children that were lost, ignored, overlooked, or just plain wished away. I will ache for the time when all they wanted was my attention, my time, me. I manage to have piercing nostalgia for the time that I’m in right now. How is this possible? Why don’t I just fully relish every waking moment with these guys now, and save myself the regrets later? It seems so simple, but the doing of it is anything but.

Which is where Paul Bowles’ beautiful words come into play. We all know that whatever phase of life we are in is fleeting, that time flies, that all those cliches and platitudes are true, but perhaps that’s all too amorphous to mean anything. The notion that specific things happen a certain number of times is chilling. But it’s concrete and something I can wrap my head around. It is something I can call to mind and feel in my bones every time Saint James climbs into my lap. Every time Doctor Dash carries Supergirl to bed after she has fallen asleep in ours. Every time I read a book. Every time I make a puttanesca sauce. Every time I hug Devil Baby in the morning, breathing in the biscuity smell of baby dreams and pee. How many more times will I get to do that? It’s pretty easy to figure out. She’ll probably be out of nighttime pull-ups by this spring and after that, mornings will never smell the same. How many more letters to Santa will Saint James write? One? Maybe two? And what about all of those things that have already been counted to their finite end? How many times did I nurse my babies? When I was in it, it seemed limitless, infinite, but now, on the other side, it’s one of the things I miss the most.

It’s not possible to live in a count down. It’s not right. But the idea that every act, memory, sensation, emotion has a number while terrifying, is oddly helpful to me. It gives me something to hold on to, a foothold, a way to stop myself from spinning and taking everything for granted. It makes it easier to stop and look and say yes, I’m here.

One morning you notice your kids hug you goodbye as soon as they spot the bus, before it gets too close. And then when they get on the bus, you see one hop into the first seat, the other move to the very back, as far apart as two siblings can possibly get. You watch and wait, a twitch in your wrist where a wave waits to flutter free. You see both kids on their knees in sweet profile, their noses, shoulders and words pointed excitedly at someone in the seat behind them. They don’t look back at you. The bus door closes with a sigh. And all is right in their world.

The other day, Saint James and Supergirl shared a hearty chuckle at my expense, for the first, but undoubtedly not the last, time. It started with a little laminated map of the world that’s been floating around the house for eons. Every time I clean up, it gets propped on a windowsill in the kitchen, shuffled into my planner or a stack of place mats, or stuffed into the cupboard where we keep the playdough and paints. It hangs around the kitchen mostly, but I have found it fraternizing with the dust bunnies under Saint James’ bed and once it was in my tub, a world patiently waiting to float away.

I’m convinced someone is paying my kids to quietly and deliberately carry things around the house because this is what they do with a thoroughness and alacrity that can only come from mucho cashola. I picture their employer as a shadowy figure sitting with his back to them, a halo of cigar smoke around his bald head muttering in a ripped paper voice: You just move things, right? Ya take your toys, don’t even play with them, you just move ‘em. Up the stairs, down the stairs, just put ‘em in a different spot. The floor’s good. Always good. And if it’s not a toy, even better. More money for moving household items. Kitchen stuff. Always good. The whisks, the oven mitts, the tape. Always good. Always good. Take ‘em to another room. Better yet, take ‘em to your mother’s car. Drop ‘em. Always remember, a ladle in the minivan is a beautiful thing. Same goes for a box of bandaids in the freezer. Stuffed unicorn under the sink. Always good. Always good. Don’t over think. Just keep moving. You pick it up, carry it, drop it. Simple. Capish? My children nod solemnly, their eyes as big as saucers.

This all by way of saying, the mapa mundi has got some legs. So the other day I decided to put an end to its shifty and peripatetic ways and tape it to a wall. Specifically, the wall next to the toilet in the kids’ bathroom. Supergirl, who never misses a thing, came sliding out of the bathroom with an exaggerated, Disney tween show intoned Can someone please explain, like, WHY there’s a map, like, in the bathroom? To which I responded, simply: So you can learn about the world while you poo. And that’s when it happened. She and Saint James chuckled, and then they LOOKED AT EACH OTHER and laughed some more. And then they repeated what I said, and laughed even more! They were sharing a laugh. At me. At something I said. I walked away with a secret grin, letting them revel in a rare moment of solidarity and mirth.

With that little exchange, I realized that their sense of humor is evolving, ever so subtly. They are precariously perched in that spot where I can make them laugh because I’m so smart and funny and that spot where they can laugh at me because they’re so smart and funny. I can tickle them and still make them laugh. I can make a cross-eyed bucktooth face and still make them laugh. But not for long. Someday, that behavior will elicit nothing but groans and eye rolling and the only giggles I’ll get will come from general battiness, slips of the tongue and tumbles of words. Lucky, for all of us, I’ve got those in spades.

I’m not sure why I’m so obsessed with Saint James’ musical maturation, but I am. It’s fascinating to me. Maybe it’s because I was such a late bloomer when it came to music (and admittedly fairly regressive considering the tunes that are passing my ears these days). Or maybe I’m just obsessed with Saint James. He’s just so darn cute – exactly the kind of boy I would have had a crush on in fourth grade: the cute, smart, quiet one. 

The other day I went to pick him up at school and was scanning the school yard, doing a Where’s Waldo of shaggy haired dishwater blond boys, when I spotted him with a little clump of older kids huddled around an iPod. Two of the boys each had one earbud in his ear and the rest were standing by with heads bent toward the ground, listening by osmosis, I suppose. Being the fiendish mother I am, I stopped in my tracks, bit my lip and feeling all gushy and mushy, decided to give him a few more minutes to listen. Or maybe I was giving myself a few more minutes to watch. I never did find out what they were listening to, but wouldn’t I like to know! (You see? Even though I’m a total crazy mother, I’m savvy enough to control myself so he has no idea I’m a crazy mother!)

A few days later I was putzing around the kitchen, Saint James on his perch at the laptop, when I hear a little She Wolf. Aaahh, Shakira! What’s not to love? That girl taps into my basest and most hoochie Latina impulses, the ones that were basically eradicated by virtue of growing up in snowy Michigan as the first born daughter of Argentine parents who had no tolerance for hoochiness. I happened to glance over and realized he was watching the video, not listening on iTunes as I had assumed. I watched for a couple seconds from a distance and Ay caramba sweet sabrosa Maria Magdalena Madre de hoochiness! does Shakira have it going on in this video! I thought I was familiar with her pelvic gifts, but she takes it to a whole other level with the cage and the skin colored leotard. She does this move where she starts on her stomach, holy shit, and ohmyGod you’llknowitwhenyouseeit!

In the past, I’ve been rather blithe about censoring music. I don’t believe in it, mostly because I choose to assume most of it goes over their heads, and when it no longer goes over their heads, then hopefully they’re old enough to understand that it’s entertainment, that it’s part of a whole, that it may represent someone’s truth, but doesn’t have to be their truth. As a prolifically profane person, I take the position that all words should be loved, regardless of what they are and how they are strung together (not true for words of hate and racism, but true for my sweet, sweet cussin’).

But visuals? Visuals are a whole other ball of wax. Watching Shakira gyrate around in her cage, my first impulse was to leap across the kitchen, landing on my side with my chin in my hand in a perfect breakdance denouement, the laptop shutting with a soft click under my deftly placed ass. But I couldn’t. That would embarrass him, maybe make him feel guilty about checking out this Shakira he keeps hearing on the radio. I’m the one who has been encouraging him to explore, after all. Furthermore, if we lived in Argentina (or Brazil, Uruguay or most places in Europe, for that matter), he’d see the likes of Shakira shaking their moneymakers in commercials for everything from yogurt to snow tires. After all, she’s just singing and dancing. Cough, cough. In the few seconds that I stood frozen like a deer in Shakira’s headlights, he clicked out of the video. Had he seen enough? Had it made him uncomfortable? Had it bored him? Had it scared him? I felt like I needed to address it somehow, someway, so that he wouldn’t be left holding a big bag of confusion. So I cleared my throat and plunged right in:

Me: Well! Well! Wooowee! Wow! Some of those South American ladies sure do know how to shake their bootays! Phew! My goodness!

Saint James: . . .

Me: Holy moly! Um. Guacamole. Ya, they have a whole other way of dressing and dancing! Don’tcha think? They are something else. Some of those. Uh. Ladies. Woowie.

Saint James: . . . 

Me: Um, ya. So, ya. I think that everyone’s used to the ladies acting a little crazy down there. Like it’s no big deal to dance so, like, hubba hubba. Er. 

Saint James: . . .

Me: Wooh. That dance is a little much, but I really do like Shakira. She’s got a great voice. She’s from Brazil!

Saint James: Columbia.

Me: . . .

There seems to be some law of nature that I mustn’t be allowed to sit on my laurels, wallow in any semblance of contentment, cruise along a highway of satisfaction or otherwise exist in a state devoid of neurotic self torture for too long. My last post about traveling soccer was what, two days ago? I was feeling good about sports. I was beaming at my boy’s skills. I was basking in the afterglow of a game well played by my really handsome son with great footwork and even better hair.

But along came Top Dog Hockey Camp to do me in. I was already feeling a bit sheepish and stupid about my kids’ over-scheduled lives. I try like the dickens to weed out extraneous activities and avoid chasing that elusive prize of having the most “well rounded” kid. But I have failed. Miserably. There is, quite literally, no end to all the things a kid can do these days if you have the time, money and inclination to sign’em up. There are wacky building laboratories for blossoming inventors. There are music, theater and dance programs at our top notch and beloved Children’s Theater. There are naturalist and biology classes at myriad nature centers where kids can learn to do field research, monitor and preserve ecosystems and generally muck around and take stewardship of our earth. There are rock camps, art studios, pottery studios and writers’ lofts. And that’s but a tip of the iceberg, not even touching sports!

I believe you can’t do it all. I believe you shouldn’t do it all. I believe kids need time to be bored so they are forced to seek out neighborhood friends, crack a book, climb a tree, color all over their bodies with face paint, make potions in buckets out of mud and sticks. I spent an entire summer concocting perfumes with my friend using petals from her mother’s garden. I believe in idle time, lazy time. I love myself a bit of leisure. I do.

Then how to explain the hour of cringing guilt I spent on the top bleacher of the Augsburg Ice Arena yesterday?

We didn’t put Saint James into “BIG HOCKEY” because that particular year, Devil Baby was a squawling, colicky newborn who had us on the run. As a couple, Dash and I were in total survival mode and taking on what we perceived to be a huge lifestyle commitment just wasn’t in the cards. Doctor Dash had played hockey and loved hockey, so we thoroughly tortured ourselves, but ultimately decided against it. Eventually we found out about  neighborhood park hockey where the kids play for a much shorter season, splitting their games between indoors and out. It seemed a perfect fit for us. Saint James would still learn how to skate and we liked the “pond hockey” vibe of the whole thing. This year Supergirl played too and we had a blast. They’re cute, they look like they’re skating underwater, they score sometimes and when you don’t think about the kids in real hockey, they actually seem pretty good.

Last summer I signed Saint James up for Top Dog Hockey Camp because his buddies were doing it. As luck would have it, he broke his pinky and couldn’t go. So this year, I was determined to use our credit and signed him up again. On the first day I was a little shocked to see how small all the other players were, but it was on the last day, when we got to watch a scrimmage, that I realized what we were dealing with. A self selecting group of campers, these puny babies were skating circles around Saint James. I sat in the bleachers thinking he looked like a retarded giant compared to the rest of them. (Hush now, I said retarded giant, not giant retard – big dif). Saint James never looks like the retarded giant. But he did yesterday. These much younger kids possessed that fluidity and ease that comes from lots and lots of hockey. Beautiful to watch. As opposed to Saint James tripping onto the ice holding the bottom of his stick. Who holds their stick from the bottom?

As I watched with increasing dismay, I felt myself shrinking. Oh God, it’s my fault for being so lazy that I didn’t sign him up for hockey and now he sucks and it’s too late and he must feel so bad being lapped by midgets and why do I even care, this isn’t his sport, but I love hockey, I got the hots for Dash watching him play hockey and now Saint James will always be awkward on the ice which is blasphemous for a Minnesota boy and no one will get the hots for him and it’s all my fault and Devil Baby’s fault and I suck and he sucks and we all suck and oh God get me out of here. 

Sigh. Yes, I know. Psychotic much?

And after it ended Saint James did feel bad. He’s no fool. I didn’t even get to take a shot on goal, he grumped while I helped him get his gear off. I really didn’t know what to say – the kid was right. But as it tends to go with him, the clouds eventually lifted and in the quiet minutes before he went to sleep, he told Doctor Dash that he liked the camp, that it was good overall. Oh, my dear sweet little retarded giant, way to be a trooper.

So I guess I just need to chill out. Lesson learned: it’s OK to suck and play anyway. It’s OK to play for – dare I say it? FUN! As much as I fancy myself to be mellow about my kids “performance,” I suppose I’m not all that far removed from the mothers frantically rouging their daughters’ smooth cheeks for beauty pageants. I want to be mellow, but I am not mellow. I need to chill. The hell. Out.

                                                                          Devi the Mother Goddess

If it’s in the New York Times, then it must be true. This article in yesterday’s magazine talks about the dawn of a new era in parenting. Helicopter parenting is passé, and suddenly it’s cool to be cool about raising your kids. Over programed, pressure cooker childhoods are theoretically being phased out in favor of freer, more idle ones. My favorite term in the article is “free range parenting” which is something I’ve talked about here and here  and here (hell, ninety percent of this blog is me flailing good mother and bad mother hats around, frantically trying to see which one fits). I love the idea of allowing our kids to roam a bit – letting their limbs and hearts grow strong, giving their confidence and street smarts a chance to rub up against something real, possibly even rough. In theory, I love it and I’m taking little steps to put my money where my mouth is. Saint James and Supergirl are allowed to “go exploring” at the creek in front of our house as long as they stick together (although, I blushingly admit to concocting a plan to go to REI to buy them super loud camping whistles to take with them on these excursions – I haven’t done it yet, but I might). Of course, this winter when they went, Saint James came back with a broken arm after having fallen out of a tree – which I took as a cosmic slap for my having shooed them out the door for a bit of peace and quiet, er, I mean, fresh air.

The article’s author, Lisa Belkin, points out that this new found laid back attitude may just be another permutation of the hyper aware parenting we are all guilty of. We are constantly analyzing and questioning our methods and our motives when it comes to our kids, and this could just be the next fad, an extension of our parenting neurosis. Maybe we are starting to wonder – what good are Suzuki violin lessons and Chinese lessons and hockey and karate if our kid ends up an ineffectual stressball incapable of making his own decisions? Now it seems we want our children to be socially conscious and creative thinkers and we’ll be damned if we don’t figure out a way to get them there.

I think she’s right, but I also think that regardless of how we arrive at it, the end result of backing off will benefit everyone. If we need to rationalize it as being good for our children, then so be it. We need to disentangle a bit – redraw the line between grown ups and children. We need to take back some of the pleasures of adulthood (drinks and uninterrupted conversation) and in turn give our kids back some of the pleasures of childhood (time – time to be bored, to read, to pretend, to create something out of nothing, to run for the hell of it). There must be a reason the words idle and idyll are so close phonetically. Why, in our super crazed lives, do these words seem like polar opposites?

I fully admit that my constant musings on this topic are partially borne of old fashion laziness. I don’t want to be in the super mommy competition anymore. Here, take my sensible shoes and my flash cards. I make a point of surrounding myself with other slacker mommies whenever possible. It just makes life more bearable and as it turns out, we’re right on trend. Our kids are gonna be genius! Bring on the kitten heels and the gin and tonics, girls!

Supergirl came home today and announced that her favorite show, Zoey 101, is over because Zoey is pregnant. Shit. Shit. Shit. How did she find out? Curse those too-wise-for-their-years-kids-with-older-siblings! When she and Saint James started watching the show, Jamie Lynn Spears’ indiscretions were old news to this pop-culture vulture, and I actually considered banning the show. I decided against it, ignoring the feeling that this might come back to bite me in the ass. I suppose I deserve this for letting them watch crap TV, but no one can be highbrow all the time – and if you are, you’re an asshole. The show is harmless and Jamie Lynn, despite her sad, misguided older sister, is actually rather cute. As long as her abdomen remained innocently flat, I saw no reason to pull the plug.

But the jig is up and Supergirl wants to know exactly what Zoey did to get this baby when she was so young. Oh dear sweet patron saint of child rearing, whoever you are, and I’m sure you exist because there are patron saints for everything, including mice and dysentery, help me, I beg of you! Supergirl is only six and not only is she fishing around for the birds and bees talk, she’s treading on teenage pregnancy issues – the urges, the hormones, the fumbling, the peer pressure, the danger. No way, man. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I was utterly flummoxed and said something which I fear came out sounding like babies are nothing more than TV show squelchers. I know this was one of those “teachable moments” everyone is always nattering on about, but I’m the one who needs the teaching. What am I supposed to say? How much is she ready to hear?

I begged off in a panic, telling Supergirl that we would talk about it when we had a little more time and Devil Baby wasn’t around to bug us. I need to come back to this with her. I need to close the loop, clarify, make sure she is not left wondering and confused. I need to begin the conversation about sex and sexuality which, hopefully, will go on for a very long time. I feel pressure to make sure I get this right – I want to be the one she comes to when it really matters. I’ve got no problem with the biology part – I think she wants to know the truth. I have trouble with the fact Supergirl has connected pregnancy with this sweet little girl on TV. Were all those judgmental, conservative alarmists kind of, I can’t believe I’m going to say it, kind of, sort of, right?

I don’t think so. No. No. They weren’t. This is why I didn’t ban the show to begin with. I think the atmosphere of witch hunts and sanitization we live in is totally counterproductive. My kids need to learn to separate entertainment from real life. They need to know that you don’t make heroes out of TV characters. They need to understand fallibility and consequences. They need to know that everything is not black and white –  they need to see the gray and learn to navigate it with care, with confidence, with open minds, with a strong moral compass, with humor, with humility. Celebrities shouldn’t be their role models. Dash and I are their role models. Their sweet babysitters who play soccer and musical instruments are their role models. Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy is not teaching little girls that it’s ok to get pregnant. With the right conversation, it could teach quite the opposite.

I just.

Need. To think.

A bit more.

This was a Mother’s Day I will not soon forget. It was the Mother’s Day that fell five weeks into my sentence on crutches, the Mother’s Day I wasn’t feeling like much of a mother. Notwithstanding everything, my little family rallied around me and made me feel like a queen. A lucky, lucky queen with some ridiculously cute constituents. I got glazed donuts and hot coffee for breakfast. I got painted frames and water colored cards. I got little pots of flowers and a gift certificate to Cliché. I got hugs and sloppy kisses. I got a picnic in the Rose Garden, some time to lounge on a blanket in the sun, watch them play through sleepy, slit eyes, and breathe Spring. Best of all, I got a little concerto in the basement at the end of the day. They played piano for me in their pajamas, their hair still wet from their baths. Saint James wrote me a song called Rain. It was short and beautiful and pierced my heart like an arrow. 

Yesterday, in a rare moment of solidarity, Saint James and Supergirl stood in front of me, grinning secretively with their arms hooked around each other’s necks and asked what I wanted for Mother’s Day. I practically had to clap my hands over my mouth to stop the words from tumbling out – Nothing, I don’t deserve anything. What? WHAT? Have I gone insane? Have a mere four weeks of disability basically annihilated nearly nine years of mothering? Just because I haven’t cooked them a meal, met them at the bus stop, washed their clothes, made their lunches, picked up their rooms, bathed them or gone to the supermarket in weeks, doesn’t mean I’m not still their mother and deserving of all the love and attention and little kid handcrafted goodness they choose to shower me with! I still clip their nails, read to them, fold their laundry, chat with them, drive them to school, watch their soccer games, but what? Is that not enough? Apparently not for this fool.

Consistently through out this recovery process, I have been confounded by what a mind fuck it has been. The physical upheaval does not begin to approach the mental. I thought I was just feeling humility slash humiliation at having to depend on others for everything. I thought I was just feeling guilty for leaving so much work for everyone else to do. I thought I was just feeling foolish about boohooing my own situation when other people have it so much worse. I thought I was just feeling angered by my physical limitations, with my inability to work out my excess energy, angst, and emotion by moving my body, by sweating. I thought I was just feeling lonely, with only Legasus as my friend. I thought I was just going crazy from the stillness, the introspection, the time in my head. As it happens, that’s not all. I was also losing my identity.

I am floored by this. It turns out that motherhood is more a state of doing, than a state of being. It sounds like crazy talk, but stripped of my “jobs”, I feel useless, superfluous, more like a coddled visitor than the beating heart of this family. I know that’s not true with my head, but I can tell you that in those seconds my kids stood in front of me, half dressed for school, my heart felt undeserving and that’s just sad. And unnecessary. 

So I collected myself and said what I always say. I would love it if you wrote me a story.