Standing in the doorway

Nine.  The number nine never held any significance for me, but as it turns out, it's a sneaky little number that I should have been watching for.  I was walking along, down a long corridor, holding the hand of my little boy, blissfully unaware that something was lurking in the distance.  Then, all of a sudden, the corridor ended and there was a doorway thrust before us, the number nine looming ominously large across the half-open door.  Something didn't feel right about this doorway, so I clutched his hand a little tighter and turned to go back.   We turned, but before we could take even one step, our feet stopped short even as a whoosh of air rose in our throats and we tried to pull back from falling over a ledge.   The corridor was gone.  The hallway we walked now invisible.  The doorway was our only option.

As I looked at my little boy standing in the big doorway, he began to change.  As though a fog were lifted from my eyes, I began to see him as he was.  He was no longer the baby that I sang to, no longer the toddler who made silly faces and used a towel as his "magician's cape."  He wasn't the little boy trying to figure out who Scooby Doo's villain would be or eating an apple despite a mouth full of missing teeth.   He wasn't looking at me with wide eyes and animated expressions telling a story and he was no longer the boy mispronouncing words with a cuteness worthy of writing down every phrase in his keepsake book.   He was big.  He was  a big kid...and just then I heard the faint strains of "Happy Birthday" coming from beyond the doorway.

My little boy was turning nine and all of a sudden, I knew.  I knew that once he walked through that doorway there would be no coming back.  Suddenly I wanted to grab him and wrap him in my arms and never let him go.  I knew that beyond that doorway he would continue to grow, only this time he would be big, then bigger and bigger.  He would soon be a teenager and then a man.   When he stepped through that doorway, other voices would grow louder and mine more faint.  He would think fewer and fewer silly things were funny.   His joyful and willing acceptance would be tempered by the balance of independence.  His choices would bear more weight and his decisions wouldn't necessarily include me.

It was just a doorway and yet, I knew.  Letting him walk through that doorway was letting him go.  I didn't see it coming and yet now, my heart beat out of my chest as surely as it would if someone had tried to grab him from my arms as an infant.   Nine.  It was halfway to eighteen.  My little boy was halfway gone.   And my heart was breaking in half.

Yes, I know, it was only halfway.  I tried to tell myself there was still a lot of time left.   But I knew the truth.  The time that lay ahead would not be the same as the path we'd already walked.  The days of him sitting on my lap were gone.  The silly stories and squeals of delight were but a faint echo in my mind.   The times I would be able to teach him new things, see the excitement in his eyes were becoming few.  And the hugs, oh the hugs.  How would I ever ever live without the sweet, all-consuming joy of those hugs?

So, I did what any mom in my position would do.  I stood in that doorway and held him tight and refused to go in until time itself reached through and pulled us forward.  And then, as he walked on excitedly and without hesitation, I sat.  I sat on his bed, looked around his room and cried.

I saw the dresser that just "yesterday" I was telling him was still a bit big for him, so he shouldn't try to reach the top just yet.  I saw the little plastic drawers that once held Happy Meal toys and view master reels.  I saw the myriad of posters that had marked his transition from one age and interest to the next.  I saw his closet where the shirts that used to hang from the top were small, yet now, overlapped the toys stacked below.   And then I laid eyes on something else.  There, on the wall, amidst the pictures of Sci-fi movies, super heroes and Lego creations was one of the original decorations I'd hung up for him in his baby nursery.   My sweet boy, through all the changes, through all the maturing and learning and growing up, still found it comforting to have something Mama made at the start of his journey, reminding him that he was on safe footing as he pressed on.

That one image made my heart swell and at the same time, shatter into a million pieces.  How much longer would that decoration hang there? How long til it no longer brought him comfort, but embarrassment or awkwardness?   Somehow the number nine suddenly felt like a thief.  Oh, it wasn't one that came in and grabbed things.  It sneaked them out slowly, one by one, so that I wouldn't notice.  But now, I knew the thief was in the house and I was powerless to stop it.   So, I cried.  And cried.  And cried some more.

Halfway to eighteen.  Halfway gone.  The days ahead may be joyful, but they would never be the same.  My little boy was gone already.   Where tiny arms once reached up for me, a  big kid stood in his place.   And though he looked a bit familiar, as I studied him I realized he was turning into someone I didn't know.   And it scared me.

Where had my little boy gone?  How could the years be over so soon?   When you get pregnant, you think you have eighteen years to raise them, but nobody tells you about nine.  Nine is the doorway.  The cute, cuddly, little years are behind and all that awaits is the unknown.   Nine comes fast, a thief, a ninja, a black shadow.  There was no noise, no warning.  Even my motherly instincts and intuition failed me.   Nine is a bully and suddenly, I remembered what it was like to feel very small.

Nine.  It was going to take some getting used to. The road ahead would be filled with fear, digging in my heels and trying to slow down time even as pain ripped through me.  Bedtime snuggles would be replaced with battle scars.   I would daily fight for balance between giving him strong, solid wings and wanting to build a bigger nest to keep him just a bit longer.

And yet now, even as I write this, the nest has grown smaller, my  fortitude weaker.   Another birthday is on the horizon and an even bigger enemy shadows over me. Though my own life may go on for many more years, I feel like my time here is short.  It's a strange, scary bridge that I'm crossing, but there is a drop off below so all I can do is put one foot in front of the other and hope, just hope that there is something worth reaching on the other side.

Publishing an e-book: You'd never guess, but it's a lot like having children

Somewhere between breaking up arguments, cleaning up messes, soothing the eighteenth  minor "boo boo" in a row and wondering why there is never food in this house despite having just gone to the grocery store, I got a zany idea.  I thought, hey, I should write a book! It would be so much fun. 

The idea that I could do something more than cook and clean ... well, okay, heat up hot dogs and clear a path...but still, I could do this!  But what could I write about?  And then it came to me - games.  Every person who has known me for longer than two minutes eventually calls me in a panic the week before, or sometimes the night before their kids' birthday party, Valentine's Day class party, Halloween party or other you-fill-in-the-blank event involving kids.  They have suddenly emerged from their party-planning shopathon to realize that though they have purchased a cake, planned out all kinds of themed decorations and invited 16 little rug rats to the big event, they have no idea how they are going to keep them all from climbing the walls or killing the goldfish.

Enter me, the gal with the freakish talent for spouting off activities as though motherhood hasn't robbed me of all my brain cells, even as I sit wondering where I lay the ice cube tray that is mysteriously missing from the freezer and a vague recollection of wanting to freshen up my drink floats somewhere between thirst and the memory of someone screaming my name for the fifteenth time.

It's true.  I don't know where this freakish ability came from or why it didn't vanish with every other bit of important knowledge I'm certain I possessed before I had kids, but nonetheless, it's true. I can come up with games at the drop of a hat, even when thirsty.  So, though the ice cube tray would most likely be found when I sunk my foot into a puddle at some point in the future, I could get started right away on a book about games.  This was it, I thought.  Games are fun!  Better yet - it's summer.  Let's make it a book about travel games for kids.  Writing a book about travel games would be fun!

Okay, let me just tell you something that I learned the hard way.  Writing a book about travel games was fun.  Publishing a book about travel games, however, was about as much fun as the twentieth hour of labor.

In fact, I thought afterwards, the only difference between childbirth and getting a mere eight hours of sleep over an entire weekend while trying to learn how to publish said "fun" book, was that after twenty-four exhausting hours of labor and childbirth, there was no four year old bounding into my bed, chattering on about nonsense in a voice loud enough to wake up the sun.

Yep, that was my weekend.   After rattling off a book full of games in rapid succession, even under the ever watchful eye of Big Kid, who insisted on looking over my shoulder and asking me if I was done yet every other hour, I set about the business of publishing my book for Kindle.

I had no idea that by the end of the weekend I would be ready to beg everyone I know to let me entertain their 16 rug rats if someone could just promise me that I'd never again have to learn how to sync some new-fangled gadget with some other new-fangled gadget, read 162 pages of instructions on 30 different websites representing 20 different opinions on what was the "easiest" way to accomplish just one of the fifty new tasks I would have to learn or that I'd never again have to peer at lines upon lines of computer programming language gobbelty-gook and tweak one space, character or page break at a time.

And then there was the repetition.  The uploading and syncing and checking only to see one part of the text had decided to separate itself from the others and do a wonky dance that would clearly label it as bizarre and me as someone who should have stuck with heating up hot dogs.  Back I'd go, coaxing that text into submission, only to upload, sync, read and scream when I'd see that a different line of text had chosen to be rebellious.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that publishing this book was exactly like having children.  Just when you think you've got everything under control, somebody else loses it, and it's never first thing in the morning.  It will always, without question happen when you are exhausted.

But you know what's worse than finding crazy-eyed, rebellious text while you're trying to publish your first book?  It's coming out of the fog that has been your learning curve overload for days upon days and just at the moment when you realize you haven't devoured this much new information since you read the What to Expect When You're Expecting book, you remember that you forgot to include something in your now published book!   So, after 36 straight hours in front of the computer, with the rope from the tire swing now strapped around me to hold me upright in my chair and my brain now mixing up letters, numbers and strange hieroglyphic symbols that I'm sure came from some long lost episode of a Sci-Fi show tucked away in my head, I had to now wait 48 hours to be able to unpublish the book that was now locked in online publishing limbo.

As I literally almost collapsed while brushing my teeth at 4:00 in the morning, I thought back over my weekend.  I vaguely remembered chatting with a friend online at the onset of this marathon when I couldn't even get my newly acquired Kindle to turn on.  That seemed like weeks ago.  I wanted to chat with her again, tell her all that I'd been through and the massive amount of information that had assaulted my brain that weekend, but as I tried to compose a quick email to her, I honestly couldn't even retrace my steps.  I felt like I'd run through a war zone of foreign programming language and devices that were each shouting their own instructions at me.  I had been involved in covert missions to download so many programs that I no longer even cared if they were trustworthy if they'd just help me find the way out of this battlefield and, I'd survived a minefield of people's opposing advice and sometimes nasty, surprise attacks.  I was exhausted and pretty sure I was bleeding.

So, I did what any mom in my slippers would do.  After realizing that I wasn't sure when was the last time I'd actually seen one of my children outside of a computer-generated image, I tiptoed into their rooms to plant a kiss on their patient, endearing little cheeks and then I fell into bed.

When Little Kid bounded into my room two hours earlier than her norm in what technically couldn't even be called the "next" morning, I was sure that I was being punished for some distant bad deed dating back to my own childhood.  I was so tired.  Why, why, WHY of all days did this child have to wake up two hours early?  Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning I had figured out down to the last possible minute how late I could sleep and still get my hair brushed, the kids to the babysitter and myself to work.  I knew I would already be in seriously hurting condition, dragging myself through my work day and oh God help me - my husband's day to work late - with nothing but Pepsi to propel me forward.  But when Little Kid's internal clock decided to wake her up before God himself could get his first cup of coffee, all I could do was crawl to the bathroom, lean against the towel rack and paint pupils on the outside of my eyelids to feign some kind of appearance of interest in this day.

All of this and I still had no book to show for any of it.  Thinking back to the twenty-four hours of labor before Big Kid was born, this book publishing was once again starting to seem a lot like motherhood.   A lot of hours, a lot of pain and nothing to show for it - at least not yet.

But, here I am, a few days and many hours of sleep later and I can say that though this experience nearly finished me off, I did learn quite a bit from it.   I learned that God made sleep for a reason, that even the best laid plans can be unraveled by a four year old and that I should always, always buy an extra 2 liter of Pepsi.   Aside from that though, I truly did learn that despite my daily fear that I have become nothing more than a walking manual on how to change diapers, potty train, chop food into miniscule pieces, use tiny fingernail clippers, wrestle squirming things into the bath tub, repair stuffed animals and pry apart Legos, I actually do still possess the ability to learn new things that don't involve cute little animals or silly lyrics.

It was quite liberating and as I look around at the dishes in the sink, the scuffs on the floor and the toys scattered about, I'm realizing I'd really like to savor that feeling for as long as I can.

So, with that being said, I'm begging you, read the book.    Read it because you want to help this weary mom feel like there is hope beyond the chaos, read it because it will remind you that you, too, can step outside your house-shaped box and accomplish new goals, and read it because it will absolutely save your sanity the next time you are trapped in a car with your children for anything longer than a trip to the grocery store.

My book is called Are We Thrilled Yet?  Fun Travel Games for A Memorable Road Trip With Your Kids.  If you've already got a Kindle, an iPad or comparable device, you can download it and take it with you on the road.    If not, you can use Kindle for PC.

And if you've made it to the end of this long-winded blog post, I'll even let you in on a little secret....for the first day, June 13th, 2012, it's free!  Shhh... don't tell anyone.... okay, actually tell everyone!   And be sure to drop me a tweet or an email and let me know which game you and your kids enjoyed the most.

Safely home

Have you ever found yourself so far off course that you didn't know how to get back?   Did you take a turn somewhere and then another and another until you were so turned around you couldn't figure out where you'd come from?  Or maybe it wasn't you at all.  Maybe the wind or the flood waters came rushing in so fast that all you could do was hang on and hope you survived, even if you found yourself 80 miles north of where you started out.

That's what happened to this blog.  It got lost.   Well, actually, it was there waiting for me all along, but I was 80 miles north and I couldn't find any landmarks to help me get home.  I think, for me, it was a combination of things.   I took one step in the wrong direction and before I knew it there was a storm blowing in like nothing I'd ever seen before.   The darkness that hovered over me was so disorienting that I never thought I'd see the sunlight again.

I wanted to get back to this blog.   I wanted to write.  Oh, how I desperately longed to write.  But as I found out, there are just some things in life you can't write about - not because you don't want to, but because you just can't find the words.   Sometimes the darkness is so consuming, the pain is so raw, that all you can do is hang on.  You take one breath and then another.  You wipe away the tears.  You try to breathe some more.   Amidst this alternately screaming into your pillow, screaming at God and your lungs screaming for air, you just hang on.

But even after the darkness begins to clear, there is debris.  There is rubble that you must climb and claw your way over or through to get back home again.   You can't go around it, and so, it's a slow, painstaking process just to clear a short path.  When you've got 80 miles to travel, sometimes it feels like you will never get home.

And yet, here I am.  I'm home.  At least, I think this is home.  It's not quite the way I remember it before the storm hit.  But it's the closest thing I can find, so I'm staying put.  It's been a long journey back and I'm weary.   I may never find the me that got swept away, but I'm trying to recreate myself the best I can.   I'm trying not to look back.  I'm trying to be grateful that I survived.  

Maybe someday I'll write about this past year and why it took me so far from home, but for now, I just want to settle into my blog, put my feet up and enjoy the company of my old friends.   I hope you still recognize me.  I'm sure I have some battle scars and like all writers end up doing, I'm sure my experience will seep out and fill the spaces between the lines of this blog.  I can only hope that as I keep looking for remnants of my old self, keep reclosing the wounds, keep calling out to God, you'll walk beside me and you'll remind me that I'm alive.   And maybe, just maybe, if you ever find yourself alone in the dark, you'll reach out and find my hand.   I'll help you navigate the storm.  I'll help you breathe.  And I'll walk beside you until you, too, are safely home.

Wrecked is not forgotten!

Hi, if you're stopping by for the first time, please don't go too quickly. I assure you this is not a forgotten blog! We're in the process of merging some content, so though the dates may fool you, there is most definitely more to come!

Bearing their burdens, building our faith

Big kid is well past the age where most kids learn to tie their shoes.  I'm well aware that other people may think we're lazy parents by not teaching him.  It's one of the things that has been on my mind a long time, and as he has grown in height and weight, looking more and more like a true big kid, it has concerned me that maybe his classmates would start to catch on as well and perhaps tease him about his lack of skill in this area.  

Looking back, I can't really say whether I never taught him because just as he emerged from the toddler years, my own life took a turn for the worst and I was too caught up in grief over a baby lost, a crippling financial blow or a myriad of doctors suddenly rushing me through a series of tests and procedures to rid my body of cancer - or if somehow, deep down, I just knew that teaching him would turn out exactly as it did today.

You have to understand, my big kid is the sweetest boy anyone could want.   He is big-hearted and wants to help others in need.   He is helpful and can do tasks independently.  He makes us laugh and when he finds a subject he is interested in, he learns every detail about it.   He, so far, has been a straight A student.   Therefore, one would conclude that he is intelligent.   So why this same child adamantly insists that he can not and will not ever be able to learn a task such as tying his shoes, is beyond me.

As a natural encourager, or maybe it's partly from being a mom, it's second nature for me to go to my Mama bag of tricks.   I pull out all the examples.   You didn't used to know how to do multiplication, but now you do.  Someone showed you how.   Now I'm showing you how to do this.   But I can't even remember all the instructions, he cries.  But you will, I reassure him.  Nobody gets it right the first time, maybe not even the fiftieth time, but you keep practicing.  Well, I better get it right after fifty times!  This thought has obviously upset him.   I try to keep my cool.   How many times did Thomas Edison fail, I ask him.   I don't know, probably a hundred, comes the answer.   Okay, so then you keep pushing through until you succeed.  What makes you different from the people who end up as failures in life is that you don't give up - not when you've wasted money or time or people have told you you'll never do it.  When you finally do it, that's when it becomes a big deal.

But this is different, he says.  Okay, well, you didn't used to know how to build all those huge Lego sets I say as I point to the shelves full of displays he has built.   In his twisted logic comes his response, well, the Legos have instructions and the instructions aren't moving!  Good grief, why is this child so difficult?   It's a shoe. It has a string.  I'm not asking you to train a crocodile to tap dance.

Do you think that you are a stupid boy, I ask.  He hides his face.  I ask again, do you think that you are not able to learn things, that you are stupid?  He's still hiding.  Great, so now I've got a game of cat and mouse which I would much more expect from the three year old.   I remind him that when he was little, he didn't know how to snap and zip his jeans or button a button down shirt.  He tells me that's different because we snapped and zipped his jeans for him.  Yes, but not forever.  Now you do it on your own.  How did you go from not knowing how to do it, to knowing how to do it so well that you don't even think about it anymore?   Well, you and Daddy didn't even teach me how to zip my jeans.  I just learned that on my own!  I disagree and my patience is wearing thin but I resist the urge to strike back.... okay, and so, you'll learn this on your own too, I say.

At one point, he was so frustrated that he threw the shoes.  I remained quiet, searching my bag of tricks and coming up empty.  Was it me?  Great, now the failure complex is settling in to my own brain.    So, I ask him.   Is it me?  Is it just that you don't think you can learn from me?  He says no.  I'm not sure whether to be relieved for my own sake or throw a shoe back and him and say, then WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

I show him once.  I show him twice.  When he fails, I show him why it failed.  I show him where he had placed the laces and he insists that he did not, in fact, hold the laces that way.   And yet, the shoe is still not tied, so gee, uh, yeah, you did.    I begin to question why I did not go directly to the computer and begin to work.   Why did I even make this sudden detour into his room and ask him to get out the shoes that have sat new in a box for over 6 months.  Why, why would I do this to myself without any time to gear up for such an ordeal?   These are the burning questions I'm sure I will have for God upon entering the pearly gates.   Why did you allow my brain to malfunction in such a way that it would only add more stress to my already bowing body?   Somehow, I picture God amused.

And yet, right now, I am not amused.   I'm wavering between wanting to scream, pick up the doggone shoe already and try, just try, that's all I ask - just try - and wanting to take him in my arms and hug away whatever is hurting him so much that he truly thinks he is incapable of learning.   I try the gentle approach, rubbing his back, telling him that it bothers me that he lacks the confidence to try.  It bothers me that he already has it set in his mind that he will fail the moment he sees the task before him.   I tell him that he is strong and smart and capable.  He still doesn't want to tie the shoe.

What is a mother to do when her child is so lost?  How did he get this way?  He cannot go through life like this.  I don't want him beaten down by life or never experiencing the thrill of new things because he was afraid to try.    I ask him if sitting in a desk at school is the only kind of learning he thinks he will ever do.   I tell him that he will be learning new things his whole life, whether it's driving a car or driving a fire truck or flying a plane.  I tell him that people learn all kinds of things like skiing or skydiving and when they first learn, they look like a fool.   I tell him I understand that when he was little, he was just so used to mom and dad helping him that it was easy to say, I'm little, I need help. But now that he's big, he wants to be able to do things on his own.  I get that, but he still has to start somewhere and he can't be so afraid to fail that he doesn't even try.

He is tired of me now.  I can see it.  He just wants me to stop talking and he never ever wants to learn to tie a shoe.   I have encouraged and instructed and even shown him two different ways to tie a shoe and yet he remains defeated.  And so, I am defeated. 
Why is that?  Why as moms are we so intertwined with our children and their emotions that we feel them as if they are our own?   The crazy thing is, this is not the first road I've been down with him.  There have been many other attempts to teach or instruct or encourage and they have turned out the same way.  He freezes up.  His first reaction is that he will fail.   He feels incapable, frustrated, defeated - before he even tries.

There is part of me that thinks he will secretly try on his own, when he's not under the watchful eye of Mama.  Mind you, I offered to go away and let him try on his own but that was met with frustration too.  It's like his brain just locks up and he isn't really even sure what he wants, other than for the task to go away.  He lacks the skills to go through the process of learning, meet the frustrations but push through to the other side.   So, I wonder, is this something that can be taught?  Or, is this just a personality trait that we are born with?  

There are people in the world who just seem to be able to persevere through any trial - the guy who lives for 7 days in the wilderness, treating his own wounds and surviving off berries, the girl who learns to walk again after a terrible accident, the woman who helps her family press on after losing everything in a fire, the boy who refuses to give up his dream of a college degree, despite the poverty he lives in as a child.   There are the people who can survive military boot camp and come out even stronger and there are other people who end up broken, addicted, suicidal.    What makes that difference in people? I am fascinated and terrified all at once. 

When our children are small and we accomplish tasks for them, we don't give it a second thought. We are there to be their caretakers.  But somehow, as our children grow, no one tells us that we, as parents, must grow too.   Oh sure, we realize that we can not send them to kindergarten with a pacifier or diapers, so we take the necessary steps to help them gain some independence.   But somehow, once those main milestones that we've had our eye on for several years have come and gone, we let ourselves fall into a routine and we don't see the other milestones up ahead.

I sure didn't see them coming.  And now, looking back, I'm not even sure what they were.  Should I have forced him to try more things?   Should I have given him harder tasks, but ones in which I knew he could succeed?  Should I have talked to him more about what would be required as he got older?  I just don't know.  I am baffled.  He is a straight A student after all.   I think that therein lies the problem.   Knowing that he is learning and getting high praise from teachers threw me into a false sense of security.  Just because he is smart, does not mean he is confident.   I never realized those two things may not go hand in hand.

But unless this child is going to become some sort of barefoot nomad the rest of his life, I've got to figure out how to fix this.  Or maybe I can't.  Maybe this is the part where I have to lean on God and believe that he will not let my child fall.  I'm not quite sure why that always feels like I am dangling my child over a cliff while balancing myself on one foot, but suddenly I'm feeling the need to read the story of Abraham and Isaac again.  There's probably a faith lesson in here somewhere.  I just wish I could learn it while Big Kid marches past me with his new shoes securely tied to his feet.

Access denied

I have always been fascinated by how the human brain works.    One time when I was peeling an apple, suddenly, out of nowhere, I remembered standing on a playground with some junior high school age kids when I visited a rural school that my friend attended.  That had been almost twenty years ago!   I had only visited that friend’s home and school one time, could not tell you much of anything that we did during our 24 hours together, and furthermore, was no longer in contact with that friend as an adult.    So, why?   Why on earth did peeling an apple spark that memory?   Had I eaten an apple that day?  Was someone on the playground wearing a shirt with an apple on it?  Did somebody make a joke or tell a story involving an apple?   Or maybe it was the knife, or the running water at my kitchen sink, or the rhythmic movement of my hands.    The possibilities are endless and unknowable but somewhere, deep in the recesses of my brain, an entire experience, a detailed memory, is trapped.

I once heard that every single thing we experience, every sight, every sound, every scent, every touch - everything - is all imprinted on our brains. We may not be able to recall even a small percentage of it, but everything we go through in life is there, like a little video in the archive drawer of our minds.

So, I am fascinated.  I am fascinated that sometimes the brain recalls seemingly insignificant details from our lives at odd times, and that same brain can not retain information that is desperately needed such as the babysitter‘s phone number, what time I last gave the child medicine, or when faced with a grizzly bear, how to deter him from turning you into his lunch.   Well, I guess the information is retained, but not accessible, which does me absolutely no good when I'm stuck in traffic, eye-balling the Tylenol, or wondering when is the last time that bear ate anything. 

It got me to thinking, is this what goes on with Big Kid?   Perhaps the very things I get so frustrated over are really not the lack of a common sense gene as I so often say, but rather that the information is in there somewhere, but he’s been denied access.

I’d like to think this is true, because the alternative is really going to make me lose my mind.   There just seems to be no common sense department in Big Kid’s brain, which is frustrating, but equally fascinating on another level because this same child is a straight A student, can rattle off movie and computer game facts by the millions, and has the vocabulary of an English college professor eight times his age!

So, why would this extremely intelligent boy, stand at the back door of our home, with belongings in each arm and say, “Uh, a little help here?”    Really?  I’m fifty feet away, chasing after Little Kid, as usual, and I have to stop what I’m doing because you can’t figure out how to turn a door knob?   So frustrating, I mean, FASCINATING.

And of course, I say to him the same thing, “Really? How do you THINK you might be able to solve that problem?” 

But I swear to you he stood there and stared at me like not a single idea fluttered through his mind, even briefly.    The access door to the common sense department was firmly closed, sealed on all sides, dead bolted, triple locked and set with an alarm.  Nobody was getting near that top secret information!

My very clipped words were an indication that my common sense door swings wide open and has a huge neon, flashing welcome sign on it apparently because I was very quickly able to surmise that if he just, let’s see, SET SOMETHING DOWN, he could then free up a hand to turn the door knob! 

The level of frustration this caused him was very apparent, but I just can’t help getting irritated.   I mean, if his brain were an old tv or a vending machine, I’d probably be smacking it on the side by now and ordering it to work. But as it is, I must fantasize about how wonderful it would be if he was the droid character, Data, from Star Trek, the Next Generation, and I could simply open a flap on the side of his head and start tweaking the circuitry in there.

I am in complete awe of the intricacies that God has placed in our brains, so complex that medical science is a long way from mastering an understanding of  it.    It is a strange irony that human brains are required to understand the human brain, and yet, we lack the consistent firing of all those little connectors to retain the information needed.   Whether this misfire happened after Eve ate that first bite of Apple (hey, maybe I was thinking about sin back on that playground!) or whether God designed it that way, so that he would always be looked upon as the only All-Knowing One, I don’t know.    But, no matter which way this miscommunication in our brains began, I sure wish he would have at least given us some sort of reset or reboot option. 

Big Kid has a glitch, and I just know that if I could “clear” a pathway to that common sense department, then at the very least, we could maybe drill a peephole in that door. Because seriously, if I have to give him step by step instructions on how to perform basic functions for the next ten years, while Little Kid is multi-tasking like a steak knife juggler who is eating an ice cream cone mid-act, I’m going to quickly lose my life long fascination with the human brain.

Jane Austen's got nothing on this kid

I am a worrier.   I can worry with the best of them.    I can obsess about those two little words, “what if”, like my very breath depends on the outcome.  But in all my days of worrying and panicking and probably sending all kinds of stressors to my heart and brain functions, I have never seen anybody worry like my Big Kid.

This child doesn’t just worry a little.   He is a full blown professional at the age of eight.  He can out-fret the little old women in Jane Austen’s novels.   You know, the ones who skitter about and have to take to their beds because they’re so upset they nearly faint every other minute?   I’m a worrier and yet I’ve never seen anything like it.

He’s always been cautious.  He has always taken his time to analyze a situation before jumping in to participate.    He’s always been meticulous in taking care of his things and listened, unlike Little Kid, when I told him not to dive into furniture or other hard objects with his head.   Even so, I didn’t see this coming.  

Somehow, he drove right past Mildly Concerned Court and wound up on Hyperventilate Highway.   I think he missed the exit around the time Little Kid was born, but I can’t be certain because I, myself, was too busy being on What Have I Done Drive.

And yet here we are.  We have arrived in Worryville and I don’t know what to do about it.   This child worries about everything from the fact that he can’t exactly, and I mean exactly duplicate the computer drawn model of a cursive letter for his homework assignment to the possibility that the first rumble of thunder may mean a tornado is headed our way.

He worries that my favorite bush has not received enough water of late, that the cat is going to scratch him, that a tiny speck of dirt is, in fact, a man-eating tarantula and that we don’t yet have a replacement for his near-empty tube of toothpaste.

And poor Little Kid.  That girl can’t wiggle a finger without him jumping up to make sure she isn’t sticking it in an electrical outlet - even though this is, miraculously the one source of trouble she has not yet discovered.   He follows that girl like a Child-Safety Stalker.   He seems to think that every time she picks up a piece of paper or taste tests an inanimate object, she is doomed to severe punishment or tragic injury.   He polices Little Kid like she’s got gasoline on her hands and matches in her pocket.  

I remember a time when we were standing in a Walgreens and I was trying to compare medicine labels, no easy task with two children jabbering the whole time.   But, the task became all but impossible when Big Kid began to give me reports on Little Kid’s every flinch, faster than Ashton Kutcher could tweet his way to a million followers.

She’s touching that, she’s got that in her mouth, she’s trying to get out of the cart, she is, she’s going to, she might….  I finally lost it.    I looked him square in the eye and told him that I have my own tendency to panic, my own irrational fears, my own pattern of freaking out, but even I could not worry that much!
I just can not comprehend what it must be like to live inside his head all day.   I’m torn between feeling sorry for him and wanting to shake the fretting right out of him.   It is exhausting, absolutely bone-tired exhausting to try to get him to stop.

It’s like he’s hard-wired for it, an entire circuitry of criss-crossed wires that can not be undone lest a bomb go off.    I try to talk him down from the ledge with love, but when he still throws one foot off the side, I end up screaming at him because it’s just the most infuriating thing I’ve ever dealt with.

How can a little boy who gets straight A’s in school, wield the vocabulary of a literary genius, garner compliments upon compliments for his manners and sweet behavior, be so tortured with worry within? 

It is mind-boggling.   Is his sister so opposite him in her adventurous spirit that he was thrown into some sort of personality-difference overload?  Have the Other One and I  done this to him somehow?  Did we satisfy his little genius-brained curiosity with too much explanation, too much information when he was young?   Or did I somehow corrupt him unknowingly by simply passing down the worst aspects of the gene pool?

Whatever the case, I sincerely hope and pray that he will grow out of this.    And the sooner the better because if being a mom and having to juggle 963 things a day isn’t enough, I feel like I have to be 14 steps ahead of any sign of danger at all times.   I’ve been a mom for a while now, so I’m pretty keen on being 2 steps ahead, but I can not fathom the infinite ways in which he conjures up scenarios that may destroy our very existence.  

But if I could, I’d probably have a lucrative career as an action-adventure writer.   Hey, maybe there’s hope for him after all…

I am woman! Hear me... please?

When did it happen?   When did I cease to be a woman and just exist as a mom?

I’m fairly certain that before I had kids, I had a life.   But then again, that was so long ago that maybe I’m just dreaming that up to fulfill some need to have stories other than those about childbirth, potty training or homework struggles.

And yet, I seem to remember a little red dress…  or was that a little red wagon…or a big red dog?  Oh, it’s so hard to tell anymore.  It all just blurs together.   

Still, whether “she” ever existed or not, there are times now when I desperately need her to appear or reappear.    When the Other One barely notices me or thinks my greatest need from him is to pick up milk on the way home, I just want to say - uh, hello, do you think I spent forty five minutes putting on makeup and curling my hair while lecturing on attitude with one child and trying to pry the other one off me, so that I could hope to be admired by the cat? 

And it would sure be nice to feel like a woman when I walk into a party or business gathering, but as it is, within minutes, somebody is asking me about the kids.  I mean, come on, I did my best to clean the spit-up, chocolate and play-doh off my clothing, put on a 3rd layer of under-eye concealer and shove my 4 belly rolls into the most snug-fitting clothes I could find; the least you could do is talk about the weather.  

Of course, I can’t blame any of them.  I am a mom.  And the truth is, these kids take up a huge part of my day.   Okay, they take up all of my day, because the little bit that is left after they’re asleep, is nowhere close to a woman, but rather just a big pile of exhausted bones.

So when?  When do I get to be a woman again?  Or did I somehow get duped into giving that up for good when I traded the little red dress for the little red wagon?  

There are times when I want to scream, “I’m still in here!”    But, I don’t think anybody can hear me anymore.   I’m just a mom, or mainly a mom, or only good at being a mom or some combination of all of it.    Nobody else can hear my voice and so I begin to think that maybe I’m imagining it too.  

But I long to step away from all of this.   Oh don’t get me wrong.  I see how fast the time is going when my children learn new words or skills, move up to the next clothing size, understand more grown up concepts.    But while time is flying for them, it feels like it’s screeching to a halt for me.    For though I love them and enjoy them (well until about that last 2 hours of the day) and would never in a million years think of actually, physically “stepping away” from them, there are times when I wish I could both speed up and stop time simultaneously. 

In my desperate moments, I want to speed up time so that I can get a breather.  But in the very next thought I want to stop time.   They are already growing up too fast and I want them to stay little and sweet.  I want to stop time because I know how sad I will be to see it all end, but also because if I could stop time, maybe this woman inside me longing to get out, could find her way back to the surface.

Somehow in my twisted brain, I think that if I can just get someone to see me as a woman now, amidst the whining and sticky fingers and eye rolling, life would be good.   But, the way things are going, that woman inside sinking further and further into oblivion, I fear she’ll never be seen again.  

For you see, I’m very aware of how old I was when I had these children, and thus, how old I will be when they are grown.    It is the imagined image of the much older face looking back at me in the mirror, the face I’m already seeing dreadful signs of, that keeps me clinging to my children’s youth for my own sake as well.    I see it all the time, that we are “growing up” together, and while the end of this road for them is just the beginning of a lifetime of new roads and opportunities, it feels very much like a dead end for me.

Oh, I know I won’t be that old in physical years.  It’s just that I’m afraid once I take off the Mommy robe, rather than discovering a beautiful woman still existing underneath, I’ll just disappear all together.  

Had I known when I hung up that little red dress that it would be for the last time, I may have strutted past my husband just a few more times.   Because now, this road that leads to my children's future is filled with both excitement and concern at the same time.  When my daughter sets out in her own little red dress and my son takes on the world in his suit with red tie, my own red dress will be faded.

It's strange.  I don’t know when it happened, this intertwining of who I used to be and who I have become, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a say in it.  

If I only had a brain

I’m not sure what happened tonight.  There must have been some sort of disruption in the solar system or fracture deep in the Earth’s core because somehow, I was allowed to leave the house for a blissful 5 ½ hours without children. 

Imagine a drive without bickering, twenty peaceful minutes without anyone calling my name, ten glorious miles without hearing a single song by The Wiggles or Veggie Tales.

It was like one of those sci-fi shows where they talk about anomalies and blips in the space-time continuum.  I’d been transported back in time, to the eerily quiet era before I had kids, while at the same time remaining at my current age, possessing the ability to appreciate the magnitude of getting five minutes of silence.

I don’t know what it is about kids, but there just always seems to be so much noise.   Even when they aren’t talking, which is almost never, there just seems to be some sort of sound emanating from them at all times.    Laughing, crying, screaming, fighting, whining, babbling, shrieking .   Tapping, drumming, scraping, jingling, stomping, banging, clapping, sloshing, slurping, thumping, rattling, or squeaking.   And those are just the sounds they can make without toys.  Add a few batteries to the mix and you’ve got enough baby dolls crying, toy dogs barking, lasers blasting and sirens blaring to drown out any intelligent thought you ever managed to string together for more than three seconds.

Sometimes the noise becomes so deafening that your nervous system is threatened with a complete meltdown if you should hear even one more small peep out of anybody.     It would stand to reason then, that with 5 1/2 hours to bask in joyous silence, a mom would be able to regroup and think through and solve all the problems that have been plaguing the family for months.   Shoot, with over 5 hours, you should be able to mentally rearrange the kids' rooms to make all their stuff fit inside their four walls, tweak that recipe that's been on your mind for 8 months, figure out what went wrong in last month's budget, plan several creative activities to keep the kids busy next week, take a mental inventory of calories and come up with a workout plan, create no less than five fun games for the class party and maybe even have time left over to start composing a bit of that novel you've always dreamed of writing.

It's a mystery then, that when you turn the key and pull out of the garage, you travel 9 blocks before you even realize you're driving or that you don't remember the last 5 stop signs.  You suddenly become aware, not only of your surroundings, but that your 5 1/2 hours on the clock has been ticking down already and you've lost precious quiet time.  You gather your wits about you, determined to think about important things, big things, adult things.   Then you travel another 6 blocks, realize you've done it again and make a more focused decision to pay attention.  After you've repeated this process about 5 times, you begin to smack your head against the steering wheel trying to jump start your brain. 

You are an adult.  Surely you have important things to think about and a wee bit of will power and self discipline will do the trick.  You try again, only to find that you can not concentrate on even one line of thought at a time.  By the time you berate yourself, an hour and a half is wasted. Okay, positive thoughts, you tell yourself.  You can do this. One task at a time.  Two hours later, you are at your wits end, sipping a frappuccino from the coffee shop drive through and hoping the caffeine will help your brain.  Another hour goes by and though you are now wired, you have yet to complete a single thought.  That's when the psycho analysis begins.   It must be something from your own childhood that causes you to lock up in a quiet atmosphere.  That has to be it.   There has to be a reasonable explanation.  After all, you're a grown woman with many important things on your mind.  And yet, at five hours in, not one of those important things seems to have surfaced.

With only a half hour left to go, you feel the onset of panic.  And then it hits you.  The problem is not you.  It's them.   Those tiny little people who follow you around throughout the week making so much noise that your brain has to restart every 2.2 seconds to absorb a new noise and try not to explode.  The constant rewiring of your circuits that keeps power going to all the right places instead of causing actual smoke to come out of your ears is great for safety, but not so much for your sanity.  You see, your brain, after children, is like a pinball getting whacked by a flipper every other second.  Just when you find your groove, something knocks the sense out of you, ricochets you off several obstacles and then drops you back down, ready to roll along in unsuspecting bliss for another half second.   You can no longer think - at all.

As the weight of this realization hits you and the clock taunts you, you do what any mom with only twenty minutes left would do.   You pull up to Baskin Robbins, order three scoops and then sit in your car and cry.

Five and a half hours.  Gone, just like that.  You will return home to the chaos having solved nothing, no Nobel Peace Prize in the works and no more illusions of seeing your name in print at the bookstore.   You wipe your tears.  You sigh.  You try to look at the bright side.   While it may take you a while to grieve the loss of a fully functioning brain, at least you did get out for a few hours.   And for once, you didn't have to share your ice cream with anybody.

Fear, foes and a fight to the death

It’s amazing to me how quickly a mother’s panic can change to drastic action when her child is in danger or hurt.    There is just something that rises up with a fierceness that you never knew was within you.

Today, as I loaded groceries into the trunk of my car, with my two year old sitting happily in the front of the cart, I had a moment of panic like never before.

I was aware that there was a young man out gathering up the shopping carts, but he was busy so I didn’t pay much attention to him.   That is, until I turned to see him, all within the blink of an eye, say to my daughter, “Let’s get you out of there” and  proceed to lift her out of the cart and into his arms.

In that split second, my Mama eyes did not see his store uniform, or the fact that he was a young guy with a baby face, or sadly even what I saw in hindsight, that I think he was mentally challenged.

All I know is that I went from one end of the cart to the other in single bound and snatched my baby from his arms, screaming at him the entire time.    Panic rose up, shock at what I was seeing, but then immediate action to save my daughter from any potential harm.

Fierceness I didn’t know I had in me.    As I yanked her from his arms and screamed at him to never ever touch someone’s child, and then marched back into the store to confront a manager as well, there was a blind fury that propelled me into action and I never once stopped to think about who I was dealing with.  

Later, after she was safe and I had calmed down, the natural fears set in again.  Would I have been so brave if it had been a big, burly man, or if someone had snatched her and ran?  The fear of seeing myself frozen in place sent shivers down my spine.    But, when I thought back on the actual moment that young man had her in his arms, I knew it didn’t matter who the would-be attacker was.   In that moment, all I had seen was a stranger taking my child, not the details of what innocent thoughts he “might” be thinking.   I jumped immediately to save her, not thinking of myself, or the weakness of my injured shoulder or what I was getting in to.   So, I’d like to think that if the situation had been worse, I would have reacted the exact same way.   Thankfully, this guy didn’t mean any harm and he was willingly handing her over, but I now know that I would be grabbing her with all my might and physically fending off the attacker if I had to.

I told my son later how the manager needed to be told because even if that young man didn’t understand how his actions appeared to others, he needed to be made aware because the next mother or father might knock him to the ground or punch him in the face to save their child.  I told him how, if I had to,  I’d dive at somebody’s feet to knock them down if they were running away with my kid.    My son remarked that then his sister would have fallen and gotten hurt.

But as I told him, a scraped up face or a broken bone can heal.   If a stranger got away with them, my heart never would.

It’s a scary world we live in, and it’s a shame we even have to be exposed to such fears, but thank God He jolted me into action and my baby girl was safe.

Someone you don’t want to be

There are moments in our Mommy lives that we wish we could take back.    Maybe you snapped at them a little too much.   Maybe you told them to shut up.   Or maybe it was worse.   Perhaps you let your pent up anger, rise to the surface and erupt toward the ones who didn’t deserve it.    Did you scream?  Did you scream into a little face?   Or maybe that little one wouldn’t look at you or cooperate or even ran away, so you pursued like some sort of deranged attacker, using your own superior strength to overtake them.  Maybe you weren’t even sorry … at first.

But those moments of ugliness have a way of seeping into our souls and tearing at our hearts.   The guilt is so great.  The empathy you suddenly feel when you see how frightened or sad your child must have been, is enough to drive you to your knees.   You are going along just fine, justified in your anger until you realize that if anyone else had witnessed your behavior, they would have had good reason to report you to the child welfare authorities.   The ugliness of your sin reaches up for a choke hold and digs its fingers into your conscience until you can’t breathe for all the remorse you feel.

You love those children like they are your oxygen.    And yet, they can provoke something in you that you aren’t even sure you wanted to know was in there.  Kids have a way of forcing us to face ourselves.  They remind us that even though we hold jobs, follow the law, lead the Girl Scout troop, bake brownies for the class, host the best birthday parties, give to charity and attend church regularly, we are still what God tells us we are, sinful in nature.

Not one of us can claim to have risen above, to be better than so and so who was in the news yesterday.  We are sinners.   Maybe some days we do better than others, but when our kids tap into that spot inside us that is raw, and we fill with rage before they can blink their eyes, we have to admit that there is something at the very core of our beings that is flawed.

For most of us, it doesn’t take much to become a little snippy.  Maybe it’s a computer that won’t cooperate and a child who has called your name 82 times since the last reboot.   Maybe it’s the hole forming in your pants leg where that little one has yanked at you the entire time you tried to make an important phone call.     But it usually takes a bit more than daily aggravations to really send us over the edge, into that darkest place where the fairly frustrated turns into Monster Mommy, some kind of thug with an arsenal of automatic weapons.

If you’re in the latter mindset, more than you care to admit, perhaps it’s time to deal with what is really bothering you, because you and I both know it isn’t the kids.

Is it the debt?  The constant pursuer who won’t slacken his pace for even a moment?  The rumors of job layoffs?    Is it the phone call from the doctor’s office that turned your world upside down?   Or maybe it’s the best friend, who turned out not to be such a good friend at all?   Is it the suspicious note you found in your husband’s briefcase or gym bag?  Or maybe your Other One just spat some words at you that cut you to the core, left you hyperventilating at the thought that it might be over between you?

Whatever it is, I know it’s tearing you up inside.  You feel like you can’t breathe.  You feel like you have a gaping hole in your stomach where your security used to be.   You don’t know what the future holds and you’d give anything to have more time to prepare, but life isn’t giving you a chance to get ready.  You’ve just been thrown in to the blender, blades chopping at you every which way until you’re too exhausted and scared and hurt to fight back.

And yet, you have to.   As you lay in bed in the morning just wanting to pull the covers over your face, you know that the kids will be up any minute.   You begin to cry and then shake, only to have to pull it together quickly when you hear the first pitter patter of the day.

The demands on a mother never stop.  You never get time to worry or grieve or just cry it out.   You have to take care of the kids, even when you’d rather lay down and die.   The pull of motherhood is so strong, that it lifts you from the darkest pit, even if sometimes the only motivation is a sense of duty or a fear that if you didn’t, someone would come and take the kids away from you.   But sometimes, it feels like you don’t even get to be human.

When the hurt becomes that strong, and the resentment starts to manifest, the kids are the easiest target for your anger.   But as soon as you blow up at them, you know.  You feel the tears from your pillow this morning starting to well up again because that hurt runs deep.  Much deeper than any minor irritation the kids provided.

As a mom, we have to make the hard choices.   So maybe, if more and more frequently, you’re turning into someone you don’t want to be, it’s time to make the hard choice.   Take that step to bring in more income and knock that debt down.   Get your resume in order.   Go see the doctor - again, and get those tests or procedures over with.   Tell your not-so-good friend how she made you feel or join a group and meet some new friends.  Confront that husband!   Trust God that if it’s over, there will be a new beginning.

Sometimes I think we become so paralyzed that we allow ourselves to wallow in the pain.  It’s easier not to make the hard choice.  That’s why it’s called a hard choice.   But you know what?  If you love your kids, and I know you do, it’s time to start thinking about how your avoidance will hurt them just as much as the circumstances themselves.   But then, you already knew that.   You just haven’t committed to making the hard choice yet.

But you can.  You are stronger than you know.  And even if you aren’t, there is one who is, and He will lead you if you let Him.

Open wounds

Sometimes somebody hurts us.  Sometimes it’s just a knick, sometimes it’s a flesh wound.  But other times, it’s a full fledged thrusting of the knife and twisting and tearing of muscle and tissue, slicing through arteries and leaving us to bleed out.  

No matter who the wound comes from, there is pain. But when the wound is a calculated knifing of vital organs from your Other One, you not only bleed out, but die with the taste of betrayal on your tongue.

Has your Other One hurt you today?   Has he become the menacing monster of your darkest nightmares, your deepest fears?  Are you left with such shock that you can not run from your place of victimizing?

When we are hurt by an enemy, we can shrug it off.  We expect those attacks to come.  When we are hurt by a friend, we wince for a while, but most of the time we move on and heal with a dainty little scar that’s barely noticeable.   But there is something about the wound of the Other One that will not, cannot heal, no matter how much you stitch it closed, smother it in ointment and bandage it.    It will inevitably break open again, each time with more depth, more blood until you realize that not even a tourniquet will stop the rush of life draining from your veins.

You have entrusted your heart to him.   You allowed your body to be taken over by uncontrollable forces so that human life could grow inside you, all to reproduce the intensity of love you felt for him.   You gave him the greatest gifts: children, a legacy, your unwavering devotion.

So when he takes that and dismisses it like it is meaningless, you feel the knife strike flesh.   When the demon menace takes over his soul and he attacks the very essence of who you are, a mother, the knife begins to twist inside you.

How could this man, whose love was once professed to such depths that you chose to bear his children, now take the very heart of you and use it for his personal poison?

It is a wound like no other.   You stare into the eyes of your attacker, knowing he will stop at nothing to take your last breath and you can do nothing to keep him from ripping the very heart right out of your chest.

But there lies within you a super power that he knows nothing about.  Your children.   The very children that he implies you are not good enough to mother, are your Kryptonite.   For even though it is the very Other One that you entrusted everything to, now attacking you, and everything within you wants to lay down and die because you can’t stand the violent pain of betrayal, you rise up instead.    You think of the children.  You see their faces, their smiles. You hear their laughter.  You see their innocence and the dreams you have for their future, and something inside you fights back.   

Oh, you may be hurting, you may be bleeding, you may even be dragging a limb or two behind you, but when you think of the pain your children will suffer if you don’t get up, you suddenly just know that you can stand.

On a daily basis, we may rant and rave.  We may scream and even curse.  We may feel like these children are going to suck the very life out of us with their exhausting questions and bickering and disobedience.

But when push comes to shove and you’re the one being bullied, those kids become the very life in you.  They are your lifeblood. They are your heart beating.  They are the miraculous healing of tissue and muscle and bone.    

For when those children grew inside you, a melding began that can not be undone.   They are part of you and there is nothing you wouldn’t do, no attacker you wouldn’t fend off to save them from ever feeling a second of pain.

That Other One - don’t listen to him.   He doesn’t know you.   He may have known you before, but he doesn’t know you now.    He doesn’t understand the transformation that took place when you became a mom.    And he sure doesn’t know that using the kids or any hint of parenting imperfection against you will incur a wrath that he is powerless to overcome.  

Oh, you’ll still be wounded.  You’ll choke down his words until you finally get them shoved so far down they turn your tears to anger.   And he’ll think twice about ever uttering another word.

But be comforted, because I know your little secret.   Even long after you have risen up and fought back and made a safe haven for your kids, the wound is still there.   You loved him with everything you had.   How could he hurt you like this? 

I don’t know.    I just don’t know.

But God knows.

Trust Him.

Wasted words and worry warts

At my house, there are some days when listening to the children’s conversation is quite comical.   It’s very apparent that there is an age spread.

Big Kid, in all his seven year old wisdom, is forever trying to explain things that the two year old can not possibly comprehend.    For instance, the other day, I heard him trying to explain that her baby doll was not a real baby.   Although she already knew this, I’m sure she found his explanation of plastics quite fascinating.    After he assured her that her baby could not eat or breathe, he launched into a comparison between human skin and plastic, which of  course, her baby is made of.   By the time he finished, I thought I should enroll him in college and give her an entire gallon of ice cream, just for listening to him.

Then there are those moments, when he’s trying so hard to ward off trouble, so he thinks if he just calmly explains to her why she shouldn’t climb onto the rocking recliner and hop on one foot while juggling steak knives, she will surely see his logic and appreciate his concern.   I feel for him, I really do.   Because while he’s still talking, she’s already surveying the room for items to stack and climb, to give her access to the  knife block.  And the poor Big Kid, he’s just oblivious that there is about to be a catastrophic storm blowing through the living room in about 8.2 seconds.

Other times, he just wants to be funny. But a seven year old’s humor is quite different than a two year old’s capacity to decipher his strange code.   He thinks it’s just infinitely amusing to say, “Hey, Little Kid, do you want some candy?… Well, you can’t have any!” or “Hey, Little Kid, do you want to see my game? … Well, you can’t!”    And this will always, without fail, take place in a moving vehicle.   And every time I ask, why, why, WHY would you do this?  You know it’s going to make her scream.   We were five minutes from home.  We almost made it.    But now, rather than spend my last five minutes in peace, driving along happily and still possessing the ability to hear oncoming fire engines, I have to listen to this child wail.    What kind of warped sense of humor do you and your friends share all day in seven-year-old world? Because here in grown-up world, we do not find this funny one bit, Mister, and you are now going to pay for it by listening to my rant.   

Then, sometimes, the age spread grows by about thirty years when he tries to become the extra parent in the house.   He’s barking at her for every move she makes, either scolding her for stepping one toe outside his designated good behavior zone or trying to protect her from the terrible evils of carpet fuzz or fruit snacks.  The poor Little Kid can’t blink without him giving her a lecture on the proper way to flutter her eyelashes.   He’s a worrier, to a fault.  He thinks up ways in which she will get into trouble and acts as though she’s already committed the unpardonable.   She’s tried and sentenced before I’ve got a chance to make him see that he’s the one who gave her the idea which, up until his lecture, she hadn’t even thought of yet.   Or, he frets over every breath she takes until he’s dreaming up scenarios in which something that will barely fit into her mouth, will somehow become so lodged in her throat that it will take a team of surgeons fifteen hours to pull her through the tragedy.     I have honestly never seen a seven year old child who could work himself into a full blown ulcer in under 5 minutes the way this child does.  I’d like to have grandchildren some day, but at this rate, I’m not sure he - or they - would survive it.

Through all of this though, without fail, there will be a moment when I’m busy doing some grown-up thing, and I’ll hear the unmistakable affection in his voice when he says to her, “You know what?  I like you.”

And it’s in that moment that I can let go of the breath I was holding while I waited for the next round of trouble to start, and believe that someday, this age spread thing won’t make a bit of difference.

It's only the beginning...

When you’re tired, stressed out, and pretty much to your breaking point, that’s the exact moment that some invisible force will flip a switch in your two year old and turn them into something between a rabid dog and a demon.

When the dishwasher is broken, the laundry is piled high, four bills you can’t pay arrived on the same day, your mother-in-law has made you crazy for the umpteenth time, you’ve popped sixty-three vitamin C’s trying to fight off the sore throat that you’re sure came from yelling at the kids to stop bickering, there are squirrels in your attic, the neighbor backed into your car, a huge tree limb is hanging precariously over your roof, it’s 104 degrees and you’re a/c is on the fritz, you spilled your twenty dollar bottle of hair color touch up, you’ve been diagnosed with something you can’t pronounce, your other half did something so stupid you can’t believe you ever found him intelligent in the first place, and you’re pretty sure when you looked in the mirror, you saw the beginning of a mustache forming - THAT is the day your previously angelic two year old will decide that compliance is for one year olds.    That is the day she will wage an all out war just to see what kind of ammunition you have.

Of course, since she’s had two whole years to observe how other kids do it, all the while quietly deceiving you, she’ll know that the best way to overtake the enemy (that would be you), is with a surprise attack at nightfall.     By then she will have already watched you clean up the dinner table, put in a load of laundry, wipe up the floor, help Big Kid with his homework, remove the mess the cat made, put away toys, school papers and clothing, prepare bags for the next morning, pop a few Excedrin, and collapse into a chair.   Oh she sees it, the exact moment of your vulnerability, and she knows just how to strike.

She’ll start with something small, letting you think it’s just an insignificant moment of weakness on her part.  Perhaps she’ll throw a toy or touch something she’s not supposed to be near.   Surely you’ll think a quick reprimand will distract her and she’ll go right back to merrily playing with her baby dolls.    But that’s where you’re wrong.

That statement which you thought was going to be a quick reprimand, was really you just taking her bait.    She’ll show you who’s boss, alright.   She’ll take your reprimand and hit you in the face.   When relegated to time-out, she will squirm and push past you with the might of a charging bull.    When you return her to her spot and hold her in place, you will swear she’s coated in baby oil because she’ll slip right through your hands again.   Determined to keep her in time out until she learns not to hit, you’ll hold her more firmly, to which she will respond with pushing back and throwing herself down with no fear of you letting go and letting her bash her head on the floor.   She knows you too well for that.

When your energy is spent, and you carry her off to a confined place for time-out, such as the crib or playpen, that’s when the real fun begins.   She’ll try to climb out, jump when you’ve told her to sit, and  promise to be good while still in the process of smacking you in the face again. 

Before you know it, you’ll have paragraphs of text from every internet page and baby book you’ve ever read, running through your head like a teleprompter, reminding you what you’re supposed to say.   But after another ten minutes of battling with her, you’ll start to hear the voices of news anchors, child psychologists, and your long-deceased Aunt Martha telling you to breathe deeply and count to ten before somebody gets seriously hurt.

After you’ve run the gamut of minor annoyance to thoughts you’d never admit to even your closest girlfriend, you start to pray, for your own soul and for her to be stricken with Narcolepsy.  Because if she does not have some physical ailment that makes her suddenly fall asleep, you realize that you may just have to shut her door and let her spin around like a wound-up top until she either passes out or declares defeat due to lack of audience. 

But then, you look at her and you see this evil little smile that matches the taunting twinkle in her eye and something in you rises up with a second wind.  You are the mother after all and you will NOT be defeated.  

You begin to craft an ingenious plan that will halt her canons on their axis and blow the match right off her next stick of dynamite.    You will so confuse the enemy that though she will flail around, trying to stick to her level of determination, ultimately she will wave the white flag.

And while she sits stewing in her place of confinement, you’ll pour yourself another handful of Excedrin and chase it down with something that will take the edge off, all the while giving the Big Kid a stare that says Don’t Even Try Me.

When they are both finally asleep, you lie in bed with a sense of dread.   For you know, you remember from the first kid, this is not the end.   This is only the beginning, and from here on out, it’s you against her.   You know that somewhere deep within you, you’ve got to pull out the Consistency Card, but with everything else in your life going wrong, you’re not even sure that card still exists.    You’re not playing with a full deck, and she knows it.  Oh, she knows it.   And it’s going to be a very long game.

Super powers

You know, sometimes I don’t understand why God didn’t actually make us with eyes in the back of our heads.   And while we’re imagining our mutant parallel selves, I’d also like to have those super stretchy arms, like Elastigirl in the Disney movie, The Incredibles.

Life with children would sure be a lot easier if I could see from every angle and whip out the super powers when most needed.

For instance, the other day, I was trying on clothes in a Goodwill store.  That’s right, Goodwill.  I’m not too proud to say it.    Anyway, I let Little Kid down inside the dressing room with me.   Oh, I made sure I had bolted the lock with the force of a vice grip, and had my legs positioned to block her escape via the space under the door, in case such a wild idea should cross her mind.   Because, seriously, knowing her as I do, I could easily see myself running through the store in my underwear to catch her, and being banned from all decent society forever after.

As luck would have it though, or perhaps an insufficient amount of sugar in her diet that day, she was in a pretty calm mood.    Of course, calm still means talking a mile a minute, but when trying on clothes, talking is better than movement.     However, just as I’d settled into my comfort zone, chatting away with her while I focused my eyes on the rolls of fat I was trying to shove into the four dollar jeans, she shot right under the radar.   I turned, just in time to see her examining something on the wall, with her finger.    It was a dark spot, a smear of some kind, brown…. oh nooooo!     In hindsight, chocolate comes to mind, but in the much needed eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head moment, that is not what came to mind.   Either way, it’s just not something you want to let your mind dwell on for too long.   Immediate action, then distraction.   Oh, not for her.  For me.   I could not fill my mind with random thoughts quick enough.

There are other times those eyes in the back of the head would be handy as well.   The spaghetti and corn painted kitchen wall comes to mind.   If God put an instinct in toddlers to throw their food, why couldn’t He have given us the ability to see it before it became a professional stain removal company nightmare, you know, instead of letting us stand there chatting on the phone and rinsing dishes in oblivion.

It’s not just the messes though.   Another set of eyes would really make discipline a lot easier.   Sibling rivalry would become extinct.   There would be no more innocent looks and “she did it first” nonsense.   They would take one look at mom’s eyes, all four of them and know she’d seen it all - the tiny shove, the taunting expression, the grabbing of the toy.  Justice would be restored and life long sibling resentments would cease.  Imagine, a world where nobody ever says to you, “Now, tell me about your childhood…” and then charges you four hundred bucks at the top of the hour, whether you’ve finished your story or not.

Stretchy arms would help with both messes and discipline.   I could reach across the room at lightning speed and grab the breakable jar, the credit card bill, the permanent marker, or the distressed cat from the Little Kids’ hands before catastrophe ensued.  Or, I could grab that blasted foam sword out of the Big Kid’s hands after he’d been warned not to touch his sister with it again for about the seventh time!   Of course, swords bring to mind danger, and that’s another reason we could have used more eyes and super powers.

How is it that children find some way to get into danger even after you’ve spent nine hundred dollars on all the recommended safety products and have removed from the room anything that spins, opens, involves a cord of any kind, or contains lead or Anthrax.

The minute I am safely inside the bathroom with the door locked, or sitting down to work at the computer, the Big Kid will inevitably be yelling “She’s standing on the table” or “She’s stuck behind the couch.”  Really?   Who does this?   Why would you have the desire to climb onto something from which you can not climb back down because your short little legs have kicked away the chair that aided your elevation?   And why on Earth would you end up wedged behind a piece of furniture twenty times your size if you obviously could not fit there in the first place since you had to keep pushing your way in?

I mean, seriously, do we have to live without any furnishings at all?  Or is that what someone tried long ago and thus discovered lead paint as their child stood there in the empty room,  licking the wall?

The longer I live with children, the more amazed I am that after thousands of years on Earth, we still have not done away with basic irritations such as clothing lint, light bulbs blowing out or batteries dying - because we most assuredly are born with enough imagination to have experimented with something that should have worked by now.

Oh, I’m sure there is someone out there reading this, probably a greeting card company employee or a pregnancy book author saying, “but a mother’s greatest super power is love.”   And to them I say, you go right ahead and delude yourself, honey.    No matter how much you hug them, kiss them, read to them, play with them and repeat cutesy phrases that convey your unconditional and unending love for them, the minute you relax and turn your back, they will climb onto a chair, grab the scissors and start shredding the tissues, the trash bag or the living room curtains.   But with eyes in the back of your head and super stretchy arms, you could see the temptation in their eyes and reach across the room to stop the madness before you’re cleaning up confetti for a week.  

And since you’d be able to wrap your arms around them eight times, you’d have one heck of a bear hug to boot.    

Sure, love may be a super power, but nothing says we have to have just one….

Hurting people hurt people

It’s one of those days.   You know, the days when you could easily blame the children, but if you tell the truth, it’s not really them.

Sometimes, it’s the Other One.    These are the days that are worse because if it were the children, you could chalk it up to kids just being kids.  But, when it’s the other adult, all you can do is sit in shock and bewilderment, wondering where on earth he gets the gall to act like this.

Of course, it starts out as shock and bewilderment, but then it turns to anger, and then seething anger.   Pretty soon you’ve got a list of wrongs dating back six years and you can’t wait to sling it in his face.   How dare he put you through this now, after all he’s already put you through!  

But as quickly as the anger comes, there is fear there too.   Is this the end of the road?  And then there is sadness - for what would be lost, for what could easily be fixed if he’d only listen to you, and for him - because you still love him and you don’t like to see him hurting so much that he can’t keep himself from hurting you. 

Still, as much as anything else, you get mad at yourself.    Why do we women fight so hard to be heard, to be treated as equals, but then find ourselves so dependent on these men?  

It’s our hearts.   We want to ride the high of his affection and we think we can weather the lows when he’s down.    But sometimes, life kicks you, and it kicks him, and then it kicks him again and harder and harder, until he’s so far down that you can’t reach him anymore.  He needs somebody to blame and you’re the closest target.   So then that heart, that soft heart that led you straight into his loving arms to begin with, is now broken, desperately wondering if he will ever be pulled up from the muck and the mire and return to the prince you once knew.   And you hate yourself for waiting it out.   But you love him enough to wait.

These darn female hearts of ours.    They take a beating until they are barely beating on their own, and yet they keep us bound.    For those that we’ve loved are forever entangled in our hearts somehow, and no matter how messy it gets, we’re in it for the long haul. 

But we’d give up chocolate and a good book and red wine if the long haul would take a serious shortcut.

Just hand over the drugs and nobody will get hurt

No matter how prepared I think I am, somehow our day always falls apart when somebody has to go to the pediatrician.  

The Big Kid has been struggling with a cough that just wouldn’t go away.   Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed all that much until my husband said something.  Oh sure, I knew he’d been coughing, but the way my days all blend together, I just sort of lost track of time while the lyrics of “hack, hack, cough, cough” played on in the background.   So, lest I be labeled a lousy mother, I called the pediatrician.

They could get him in at 4:10, which meant I’d have to ask my boss if I could leave a half hour early.  That didn’t sound too bad until I arrived fifteen minutes late.   Great, now I get to be a total loser, coming in late and leaving early.    But as it were, the poor child could not stop coughing long enough to get ready for school.    Around fifteen minutes before the bell was scheduled to ring, I gave up any hope of him being on time for school, or me being on time for work.

Instead, after the usual breaking up rivalry and screaming that somebody was going to get it and racing around to deliver 16 bags to the car,  I took him along as I dropped off the Little Kid at the babysitter’s house because it didn’t make sense to backtrack since school and work are so close together.    So, naively thinking I could still get it somewhat together at that point, I asked the babysitter to have Little Kid ready to go promptly at 3:00 in the afternoon, earlier than usual.   Then, I raced back to the car to get Big Kid to school.

Had I known he would have a substitute teacher who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I may have reconsidered taking him to school at all.   As it were, I didn’t want to lose out on my own paycheck as I can’t even afford milk right now, but after seeing this guy, I may have been willing to drink water for a week - or two.  I never thought I’d find myself enabling a child to get out of class, but after seeing this sub for five minutes, I wanted to write the entire class a pass to go to the nurse’s office.   This poor old man was part doddering professor and part military police.   He was teetering between biting their heads off for the tiniest flinch and scrambling to figure out what to do when they asked him about something that wasn’t on the lesson plan.   He’d tell them they could have more time to work on an assignment, and then two minutes later tell them they couldn’t because by golly, the lesson plan was laid out in 15 minute increments and they were already off schedule! 

Then, here we are, walking in late, completely throwing a wrench in the man’s obviously well-oiled machine.   I stood in the back of the classroom for a while, then even approached him and he still didn’t acknowledge me.  He had this dodgy sort of look like he thought if he just avoided my eyes, he wouldn’t get hurt.    I think he needed to go to the nurse’s office, but as it was, I forced him to look at me, so I could make him aware that my kid, unlike the three girls who had just returned from the nurse’s office, really was sick, so to please excuse him to the nurse if he complained or couldn’t stop coughing.   I left there, wishing my son well and completely confident that the man had no idea which child was mine.   I did, however, stop at the nurse’s office and tell her that if the correct child, somehow did magically appear in her office, to please just keep him there, away from that crazy old man.

When I finally arrived at work fifteen minutes late, I was already tired.  It occurred to me, however, that I had failed to make someone at school aware that Big Kid was going to need to leave early for his appointment.   So, I called and asked if he could be sent to the office when it was time for me to pick him up.   Apparently, it’s too hard to stick a post-it note to your forehead, or the clock, and just follow through, so instead, I was told I’d have to call back five minutes before I was actually on my way.   I already knew what would happen.  I would call and get the answering machine.   At 2:20, I called.   Turns out, I’m a genius.

So, after repeated calls, now wanting to bang the phone against somebody’s head, I got through to a real person, who had to be reminded what grade my son is in, but in the end, did say they’d have him sent to the office to wait for me.

At 2:30, I made sure I left promptly to reverse the whole line of pit stops, so that I could gather both kids for the thirty to forty minute drive to the pediatrician and make it there on time, because we all know that “if you are going to be more than fifteen minutes late for your appointment, you will need to reschedule”, and there was no way on earth I was repeating this day.

We actually made it there, and through the waiting room maze in record time, as there was light traffic and a cancellation.    When I got the kids back in the car, I started thinking how the consignment shop right down the street probably owed me money by now, and that might pay for the copay and prescription, if not a gallon of milk to boot.  So, I braced myself for the Big Kid attitude that would surely come when I told him we were making a stop.   Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t blame him, but since I’d had a rough day already and just spent 30 minutes driving out to the doctor’s office, never once hearing even the slightest cough, I figured I could let go of my guilt and get my money.

We weren’t inside the consignment shop five minutes before I heard those words every mother dreads, “I have to go to the bathroom.”   And of course, there is no public restroom at the consignment shop.   More attitude ensued when I told him there were no bathrooms within walking distance and we would have to get in the car to take him somewhere, but as much as I did not want to have to do the whole buckle/unbuckle of Little Kid again, I couldn’t really be angry seeing as how I’d given the boy a hundred ounces of water to drink for his now silent cough.

After we completed our bathroom stop, we were finally back on the highway.  But, by now, we were well on our way to 6:00 p.m. and we were all getting quite hungry and irritable with each other.    I had to decide where to get his prescription filled, as due to a certain strong ingredient, the doctor’s office was unable to fax the order over and have it waiting for me upon arrival.   Instead,  I had to deliver it in person and wait around, with two tired, hungry children.   Remembering that the grocery store closest to our home has the absolute worst pharmacy service I’ve ever seen, ignoring both the elderly and the pain-stricken children having a meltdown in front of their counter, I opted for a different grocery store chain, a little further down the street.  It was the best of both worlds.  We could drop off the prescription, shop for some groceries, then be on our way home to finally eat.

Note to self: anything that appears to be the best of both worlds, is really just my world about to spin off its axis.

When the pharmacy technician told me that they could not fill the order there, I felt the first tremor.   Apparently, due to the one strong ingredient, they did not keep it stocked there.

Now I had two tired, hungry children and a very cranky Mama who would have to do the whole buckle/unbuckle thing for a fifth time tonight, because we’d have to make yet another stop to drop off the prescription - somewhere!   Not knowing what else to do, we went ahead and got our groceries. 

By the time we were finished, even the shopping cart itself was looking quite appetizing, but we headed on down the road to Walgreens just the same.

On the way in, I started the lecture, “We are not stopping to look at toys, candy, video games or anything else.  We are walking directly to the pharmacy counter, we are dropping off this prescription, and we are walking directly back to the car.  I do not want to hear fussing of any kind, so please keep your hands to yourself.”

So, when we successfully navigated the store by walking down the very boring, hosiery aisle, you can imagine, I’m sure, the look on my face when the pharmacist there told me that they, also, could not fill my prescription.   Oh, they had it in stock - that was the first thing I asked.  I even still had the wherewithal to ask if it was fruit-flavored for kids.    They informed me that it was their last bottle, and that it was indeed, grape.

Wait a minute, back up.   Did I just hear that this was their last bottle, that I was honestly standing ten feet from their last bottle, now with two very tired and hungry children and an extremely cranky Mama and now cold groceries in my trunk as well, and they were seriously telling me that I could not have it?   In the morning, somebody was going to find the store alarm ringing and a very big hole where the brick went through the window.  I was getting this prescription - one way or another.

I managed to stay calm long enough for them to explain that the doctor’s office had left some number off the form.   Blasted nurse practitioners!  I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that sweet demeanor and winning smile.    Now I had cold groceries getting warm, cranky children and a diaper that was going to leak who knows what all over me any minute - all because of some stupid little number.    But oh my goodness, if we don’t have the number, somebody in the insurance company is going to have a meltdown and we can’t have that, can we?

I have to hand it to the Walgreens pharmacist.  He was a young man, probably not accustomed to dealing with a woman on the verge of becoming a vandal just so she could go home and eat, but he handled it with great courage.    I pulled the doctor’s business card from my wallet, told him to call the exchange and just fix it.  I did not care what it took - just fix it.   I was going to leave his store, take my bedraggled children and my luke-warm groceries home, change a diaper, and eat the first thing I could get my hands on and when I returned I expected to have a grape-flavored narcotic, bottled up, labeled, and ready to numb my child into 12 hours of sleep.    And while he was at it, he might want to bottle up something for me too, because I was going to need it.

Five minutes later, I was pulling into my driveway.   When I saw the lights that indicated my husband was home, rather than working late as I’d anticipated, and I began to wonder if I could have dropped these children off to him hours ago, or at the very least, sent him out for this ridiculous goose chase of a prescription, my unhappy camper status was instantly upgraded to outraged, don’t-want-to-cross-her-in-the-woods camper.   Somebody was going to pay for this day, and right then, it was looking like him.

When he became irritated that I barked at him to feed the children, he didn’t realize how narrowly he escaped harm when I found out that he in fact, had just arrived home too.
But I had no patience left to explain all that.  So, I barked, and let the chips fall where they may.

It’s only been a few days ago and I don’t even remember who put the Little Kid to bed.  I only remember that by 9:30, I had the yummy grape medicine in my hand, and soon after, into my child.   Not long after that, I dropped into bed and when I looked back over my long day, I realized that except for first thing in the morning, I’d never heard the Big Kid cough once.