Hibernation

January has almost always involved a little post-holiday letdown mixed with cabin fever and a struggle to return to the routines of real life.  But it’s also always held the promise of a new year, a clean slate, a big thaw some time in the future. 

As you can see in the pictures, much of January so far has been spent in low light in our pajamas.  Hibernating.  What these pictures don’t show is the way a mama bear sometimes wants her child to stop whining and just do as she says and lay still and be quiet and give her some peace.  What these pictures don’t show is that once the baby bears know mama will react when they irritate her, they make a game of doing it over and over and over again.  And what these pictures don’t show is that if a mama bear growls when her babies misbehave but only growls and never follows through with the things she has threatened to do, the babies stop listening and think it’s just another fun game.

Parenting constantly challenges me to relax and be flexible and patient and accept that I have to let go of control on some things but be firm with other things. I never knew how much I liked to be in charge until suddenly I wasn't. The things we learn about ourselves from our children

Mama Bear needs to do two things if we’re going to survive the rest of the hibernation season:  1) get some mama bear alone time, and 2) follow through with being a little more firm with those baby bears.

They say Parenting is the hardest job you’ll ever love, but to be honest, when it’s this hard, I don’t love it.

 Homemade Ice Cream tastes good no matter how cold it is outside.

 Not sure why I thought putting together a children's kitchen would be a fun family project.

The kids survived several mommy meltdowns, and Sam kept reminding me to do belly breaths..

 Hex Bugs - building and bugs - two of Sam's favorite things in one toy.

 Eva hangs with the "big" girls at a New Year's Eve party.

 Happy New Year!

 One of the few times I've seen Eva play with her babies.

 A New Year's Hug (brought on by a fear of the puppy).

 How we finally calmed the boys down on New Year's Eve

 Sam is great at creating entertainment for Eva.

 My little artists

 Making quick pizzas with crescent roll dough.

 Eva is all ready for the Wild Card Game.

 Training the kids to make their own French toast in the hopes that some day I'll be able to sleep in.

Black Leather and Oxygen

I spent much of this past weekend in the black leather rocker that was my nearly constant companion before I had kids.  I used to spend hours in that chair, rocking and reading, losing myself for days in a Toni Morrison novel or the latest issue of Best American Short Stories or maybe 20 minutes with Alice Munro’s latest fiction in the New Yorker.  But that chair and I haven’t spent much time together since my second maternity leave, since Eva’s eight short weeks of exclusive mommy bonding time expired and I returned to work and a routine that rarely affords me time to sit down let alone read. 

Last week when a friend created a cash mob for our local independent bookstore, I ventured out without my children and bought two Toni Morrison novels (I’m that far behind) and the 2012 Best American Short Stories and Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things.  And despite the long list of things I needed to get done this weekend in between meltdowns and meals, I rocked and read and lost myself in the stories and the beautiful, compassionate, generous advice of Cheryl Strayed’s online persona Sugar.  While I read her advice to married men contemplating affairs and single women contemplating motherhood and scared young people trying to figure out how to get unstuck, my children made forts out of the couch pillows and threw play-doh against the dining room walls and scribbled all over the barstool cushions with permanent black marker.  But I sighed and folded back the front cover of the book and kept reading.

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it,” Sugar writes to a divorced man trying to understand love.

And in letter after letter, she responds to complex emotions and difficult problems with simplicity and empathy.

Parenting is one of those things that teaches you about yourself over and over again.  Being a mom has changed me because I can see not only what I've been avoiding learning about myself, but I can see what I want my children to learn.  Would I want my children to learn that it's okay to invest energy in a relationship that is sucking energy from them?  No.  Would I want my children to learn that life is always easy and life is always fair?  No.  Would I want my children to learn that people can simply be labeled as good or bad and that there aren’t layers of complexity in between?  No.

I want my children to learn that people are basically good at heart and life is sometimes messy and painful but life is often joyful and these two things go together and that is the beauty of life.  I want them to learn that when others hurt us or anger us, it’s not always about us.  I want them to learn how to feel safe and yet how to take risks.  I want my children to learn about loving and forgiving and being compassionate and setting boundaries.  I want them to learn to soar.  I want them to learn to risk failure.  And I want them to learn that no matter what, no matter what, it will all be okay.

Flight attendants on an airplane tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first and then take care of others.  And this is something I’m often saying to friends.  This weekend as I set out to lose myself in the pages of a book, I instead reconnected with my writer/reader self and the rocking chair that helped me weather painful breakups and job losses and the death of my father.  Thank you, Sugar, for helping me put my oxygen mask back on.

This post is another installment for thenextfamily.com, and you can read all my previous posts for them here.

Halloween in the St. Mary's Parking Lot

The cold, fall rain comes down fast as we pull forward in the St. Mary's parking lot, and Sam points to the small white statue on the west side of the building.

"There's Jesus's mom," he says. 

"Yep,"  I say.  "That's Mary."

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t fret about a whole lot when it comes to parenting.  I generally feel comfortable with decisions I make and mostly have an attitude that they will turn out okay no matter what.  But some of my closer friends will tell you that there are two things I do worry over: what to teach my children about God, and what is the best schooling solution for our family. 

"Jesus is everywhere," Sam says, and his 4-and-a-half-year-old friend E who sits in the booster seat beside him agrees.

I won’t lie.  Sam goes to a Catholic pre-school not because I believe anything they teach him about Jesus and God but because it’s the most convenient pre-school for my work situation.  I don’t know what I believe about Jesus and God, but I also know that Sam is learning to be a good and loving person from good and loving people.  And the school is just a few blocks from my office.

"Jesus is in your heart.  He's everywhere.  Even in your skeleton," Sam says.

"He's not in a skeleton," E says.  "Skeletons aren't real."

"Yes they are.  They're your bones.  Your bones are real."

"But skeletons are not real."

"Yes they are," Sam insists.  "Everyone has a skeleton inside them.  Your brain tells them what to do.  When you want to move your hand, your brain sends a message to your bones and your hand moves.  And when you walk your brain sends a message to your foot to walk.  Skeletons are real."

And there you have it.  Sam sums up science and religion and Halloween in the St. Mary's parking lot.  This mama has nothing to worry about.

(This post has been modified since I originally posted it, and it's part of my series of blog posts for thenextfamily.com.)

Girls Can Drive Dumptrucks and Boys Can Dance

Another installment for The Next Family:

“I wish our family had two moms,” Sam says, and I am caught by surprise.  I am loading the dishes into the dishwasher while Sam puts the head on his new Lego alien minifigure and Eva pulls at my pantsleg begging for her bedtime cup of milk.

“Why is that?” I ask.  Our family has one parent.  One mom.  And it’s never going to have two moms.

“Because moms are great, and if there were two moms one could play with me while the other mom puts Eva to bed.”

Since he came home from the hospital I’ve been talking to Sam about how all families are different.  We have books that talk about big families and small families, families that adopt, families with two moms or two dads, families with just one parent.  We have books that explain IVF and how a child can come in to the world with just a mom. 

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” I say, both pleased and curious as to why he didn’t say he wishes our family had a dad.

We know lots of different kinds of families.  Families with adopted kids.  Families with foster kids.  Families with moms and dads.  Families with just one mom.  But I don’t know that Sam has ever been exposed to a family with two moms, and I wonder where this came from.  Has he already learned the wrong message that moms do all the kid stuff and take care of everything or is he just wishing there were two mommies because he wants two of ME?

I lift Eva on to my hip and drop silverware into the dishwasher before handing her a sippy cup, but these thoughts stay with me as I walk into the nursery and change Eva’s diaper.  Eva holds up the Cinderella and Snow White dolls that came with her Little People princess castle from Grandma.  Earlier in the day Cinderella drove a dumptruck while Snow White road in the bucket, and Snow White answered the door when the fix-it guy (that actually came with the dumptruck) came to fix the broken balcony on the castle and ended up dancing in front of the princess mirror.  And before I put Eva into her crib Snow White and Cinderella will be placed side by side in the little pink plastic bed on the top floor of the castle and Eva will tell me “Shhhhh.  They sleeping.”

Eva is just on the verge of learning boy versus girl, and now that he’s in pre-school Sam explains to me about girl things and boy things, but I hope that both of my children will always believe that girls can drive dumptrucks and boys can dance and the world is made up of all kinds of families including families with two moms.

You can see all my previous blog posts for TNF here.

For information on Minnesotans United for All Families and the upcoming marriage amendment vote in Minnesota click here.

Roadside

Another installment for The Next Family:

The Mazda that I purchased three months ago is dead, stranded at an odd angle next to the stop sign on the county road that turns to The Berry Patch.  I was revving up and passing a Honda, keeping my eye on the clock and thinking we were probably going to be late, when things went wrong.  Now we’re definitely going to be late. Across the highway hundreds of small orange pumpkins cover the field, and beyond that the dead stalks of corn that has been harvested but not yet cleared sway in the wind.  We are still ten minutes from town.

“What are we going to do, Mommy?  Who are you calling?”  Sam asks.

He is in the back, his fingers covered with powdered sugar and sticky banana mess.  He is buckled into the passenger side and Eva is tucked into her car seat behind me.

“I don’t know, Sam. I’m just trying to find someone to answer their phone,” I say as I try a third neighbor.  Nobody answers their phones at 7am.  

As we were passing the Honda, Sam cheered the way he always does but then our Mazda revved and sputtered and I grabbed the gear shift.  It was in Drive but we were losing speed.  I pulled over to the side of the road and pushed the Info button on the dash.  Remaining Mileage and the clock are on a toggle.  Empty.

When my dad died almost a decade ago I laughed at my mom and told her she’d have to start watching her fuel tank.  Dad used to rescue her at least once a month.  I’ve never run out of gas.

We live in a small subdivision twenty minutes from town, a rural neighborhood filled with families that have bonfire parties and go to Country music concerts, mothers that play bunco together once a week and fathers that go away for fishing weekends together.  I was invited to join a bible group a few years ago and I occasionally get a facebook notification for a Pampered Chef party, but mostly we don’t fit in.  The only reason I have Mr. Jeff’s phone number is because he changed a flat for me once.  He is the neighborhood fireman who takes care of preschoolers during the daytime and mows my lawn in the evenings and somehow fascinates my 4-year-old who thinks that Mr. Jeff is the strongest guy there is. 

“Mr. Jeff has real guns,” Sam once told me.  “Did you ever see them?”  How does he know these things? 

Eva starts jabbering loudly and I crawl out and close the door behind me.  Cars are whizzing by.  Nobody even slows down.  When I was in college the timing belt of my red pontiac convertible went out during a trip to Michigan, and within thirty seconds two different cars pulled over. 

Tears are building in my eyes as Mr. Jeff’s phone rings a fourth time and I compose a voicemail in my head.  But then he answers and I ask if I woke him and he says he was just getting up anyway.  His wife Sarah gets her cell and calls another neighbors’ cell and within fifteen minutes the neighborhood comes to my rescue and the optometrist’s pregnant wife pulls up and hands me two big red plastic gas containers.

When we’re back on the road again we pass a soybean field that has started to turn golden in the chilling fall air, and Sam talks about the Packers and the Badgers and how he wouldn’t want them to play against each other because then he wouldn’t know who to cheer for.  My hands smell like gas and my shirt is damp from sweat, and I exhale and let a tear run down my cheek.   

This week it would have been my parents’ 47^th wedding anniversary.



You can see all my previous blog posts for TNF here.