Today went well except for a brief period this afternoon when I felt like such a bad mother I stared out the window of my car at the pissy rain, earnestly believing Sophie and Nels would be better off without me. I don’t have a choice, of course. I could never abandon them in any way, never screw up so badly I could leave, but that’s not the choice I’m talking about anyway. I mean I don’t have a choice whether I’m their mother or not; I am forever and ever, Amen. For better or worse, and this time I felt worse.
Luckily such episodes are short-lived; and in part this is my own doing because in some ways I’ve raised the children well. One of the more amazing things about growing a couple kids is that soon they are able to help you with some of life’s thornier problems. Like today when Sophie and Nels sat and listened to me tell them fuck it (I didn’t use that phrase), I wouldn’t take them swimming – it was just too frustrating that they hadn’t helped me pack the swimgear and that Nels had been shouting at me all morning – and Sophie looked straight at me and although I was telling her about the worst thing she could imagine (she loves swimming about a thousand percent), she remained calm. “Is there anything you haven’t done yet that I could do, Mama?” The crazy thing is she wasn’t trying to save the swim date by being “good”. She was trying to solve a problem. I didn’t change my mind about the family swim-date and she took it in stride. We’re going to try again tomorrow.
Later in the day after Nels ran outside of the grocery store, got in the car and kicked over my coffee, she righted the cup and said, “Oh Mama… I’m so sorry this happened,” and put her little arms around me. My children’s hugs are the Best Thing Ever, and I’m kind of wondering if they feel the same way about mine.
A tangent, sort of: I met my online friend Jasie for the first time in person on Saturday, during Ralph’s Port Townsend show weekend. I’ve met many people online and met them later and it always been a little odd – no matter how much I read about their passions, opinions, or activities, the pieces that include their voice, mannerisms, and physicality is often a bit disconcerting. But in this case it wasn’t, as the woman herself has blogged many pictures and videos and I had a more well-rounded formation in mind. It felt like meeting someone for the first time that I’d already met.
The day before we laid eyes on one another she wrote a blog entry entitled “insecure perfectionism”, well-worth a read for those of us who have children (and honestly, those without). And although at first glance it may seem I don’t suffer from perfectionism and a lack of good-humor for my mistakes – I’m attempting both a novel and running a 5K in public this month, for crying out loud – I felt like I related, big time, to what she’d written. After all, what else could one call it, being prone during personal setbacks to despairing that I’m such a bad mother (not “parent”, interestingly) I might as well give up?
It makes me wonder: how bad of a parent do you have to be before you should give up? My guess is: it doesn’t matter.
Never give up.
I am not glad to hear that you felt like that, but I am relieved that other people feel that way too.
Yesterday was somehow totally fucking awful. Boots was cranky and tender (the day started by him crying when I put his juice in the wrong cup, and then it just got worse). The highlight of the day was me throwing a tantrum that he wouldn’t try to do something (write the letter S) that he says scares him because he won’t do it right (we had an occupational therapist at one point who would try to get him to draw or write what she did, and he hated it and refused, and really he is not great at that kind of thing and is afraid to practice, but now it’s probably because he mom throws fits when it’s time to write and I felt like I could and should gnaw my arm off or beat my head against a wall, and not because of him, because of me and how I occasionally feel like I am ruining his life and ruining him and I love him so much but I will turn into my mother anyhow and so on).I didn’t want him to learn to read right now – he wanted to. And I should just drop the letter writing stuff, but somehow I didn’t. He didn’t ask me to help him learn to write. And though he wants to do the “lessons” in the book, he gets weird and squirmy in a way he doesn’t when we look at actual books.
it is just now hitting me like a train that i am my three-week-old daughters MOTHER. like, forever. and no one else can be her mother. and this is a huge deal.
three weeks in, i’ve already made about a zillion mistakes. it’s overwhelming, really, to think about how many more i’ll make over the next…forever.
so i like this post. i get this post. even three weeks in.
Laura; I’m glad you like the post. I mean if you are a mom to a brand-new, innocent, awesome three week old baby and you don’t judge me for my Mama faults, I have to give you big props.
And yeah, it’s FOREVER, or at least for as long as you and your child lives, which is forever as long as we can totally know about. And although it can be scary it’s also something awesome no one can take away from you.
Shelley, I wrote this super-long response to your comment, and now I see it got eaten or disappeared or whatever. The long and the short of it is, I get you, and I have done the same things with my children – suddenly found myself frustrated at them (usually based on my own anxieties and fears) and feeling shittier with every passing second. The only thing I know about those bad moments is, they do pass.
I think it’s kind of cosmically unfair that our kids can be very ambivalent about things and we’re called to make a judgment call (help them to read, write the letter ‘S’, remove them from a playdate) and sometimes they just go crazy or cry or hit or yell and we aren’t given a moment – we’re ambivalent and scared and upset too. It’s hard stuff, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t always this way, if the individual circumstances might change.
Thanks for commenting.