Who knew joking about (snarking on) Mother’s Day was such a controversial move?
This Babble post on 5 Mother’s Day Do’s and Dont’s was intended as a jokey gift-guide anti-Precious Moments commentary. But the smoke is coming out of their ears, people!!
Clearly, mothers should be glad of any gift they’re given and just be quiet already.
Sometimes I feel like a transvestite trapped in a straight woman’s body. Heels? They should be high high high. Makeup? Sparkly, heavy, and colorful. And dresses? Yes yes yes.
There has been much talk on the ’sphere lately about women who deign to write personal things on blogs about their children, or feelings, or political beliefs… About how the act of creating art is so devalued and fetishised in our society that anyone who even dares use the word “art” or “muse” is chased with sticks.
Especially in a day and age where the Internet cloaks people in enough anonymity that they feel free to let loose their mean subterranean rage. Don’t believe me? Check out the rage this little opinion about $4 gas evoked…
Self-expression, whether sparkly gaudy makeup, religious beliefs, writing, or spouting opinions is a dangerous and necessary act. If one has the courage to speak from the heart, after the kids and the marriages and the mortgages tell us we better shape up and act like a lady (or at least act “mature), the pressure to keep it all tamped down is pretty strong. But let’s not fool ourselves, also scary as hell.
So today I dare you to do something that is from your heart. For you. Some small secret place you’ve been waiting to open up and tell someone about.
Do you dare?
If nothing else, go share her wonderful news!
This article in the March Atlantic Monthly is stirring quite a controversy. In it, Lori Gottlieb declares that single women with children should marry whoever… The premise is “Mr. Good Enough” is a more realistic goal than “Mr. Right.”
I think this is akin to that Newsweek piece 20 years ago which claimed women of a certain age were more likely to get killed by a terrorist than marry. In short, a scare tactic to encourage women to wholeheartedly lower their expectations.
On the other hand, she does have a point. When does our desire for someone to help us raise the children outstrip our desire for someone to help us raise our roof?
We have a 20-something writer at Strollerderby and her perspective on it is quite radically different than mine.
******
For a laugh today, check out Cracked’s Top 40 most inappropriate children’s book covers…. (this is one of them)
Part of the twelve step program I’m practicing includes a “fearless and thorough” moral inventory of one’s life. If you’re past the age of 20 and have a pulse, this can be a daunting prospect, though the details of the inventory aren’t as important of the practice of it.
Its essence is the consideration of one’s own responsibility in every single relationship or significant event in one’s life. Reflection not as terrified clothes-rending remorse, but as a sober and serious accounting of one’s past actions and their impacts on the lives of those around you.
The next step is to talk these things through with another human being, anxiety over which is far worse than the actual experience. In any event, this list of things to be sorry about, become aware of, leaves me feeling in a funny limbo between light and dark.
Dreams of flying and of meeting up with ex-husbands and boyfriends happen nearly every night and I awaken at times wondering where I am, which part of my life I’ve surfaced into… Sometimes the dream person and I are laughing over our hard times (in retrospect only are they amusing), sometimes they’re yelling my faults out to me so that I wake up curled in a ball of misery.
And so it goes.
In the end I wonder who it is I’ve been dating and marrying all these years. A darker part of myself? Someone to punish and excoriate after loving lightly for awhile? If it’s true that wherever you go there you are, then I mate and date over and over again with the same person, the same man.
Someone who loves me in part, scorns me in part, but someone who can never know and never understand, because I won’t let him in. I simply don’t know how.
Home sweet home. Where the air is fresh, the trees are green, and the routines and personnel are highly trained and accustomed to the Way of the Rugrat Raising Warrior.
Me and the kidlings had some fun in Tucson, saw some cactus, swam, and enjoyed the sweet grandparent love connection, but oy with the delayed flight and the unfriendly co-passengers who wouldn’t switch seats so a mama could sit by her babies. Die die venomous swine!!
Here are the twinklies next to a huge lovely cactus.
And in case my feelings on the matter aren’t patently obvious, here is: Why Older Children Rule at Imperfect Parent
So it’s been 75 days since my last drink and nearly 4 months since I began this odyssey — to sober up, wake up to my life, start a daily spiritual practice something like worshiping a higher power, something like trying to be a more loving person.
As slowly the cravings, mental and physical subside, replaced by new rituals and people and habits, hope increases. Hope that there is more that I can give, more to experience, and a greater sense of gratitude folded into the dailyness of things.
I used to think that a cracked up wit, saucy attitude, and brain full of literature were the tools I’d need to combat the challenges of motherhood and life over age 25. Turns out it’s all so much more prosaic than that. Soft heart, courage, determination, and humility seem far more important to the task these days.
All is not perfect happiness by any stretch, but broken down into 24 hours segments, I can say I haven’t felt this hopeful and resourceful for years and years.
V & I on a quiet snowy afternoon — just one of life’s joys I would have missed before…
Meanwhile, more at Imperfect Parent.
First Christmas play, 6th birthday, 60 day coin. It’s been a wonderful week in Redsy-land. Nana is visiting for 3 weeks and the girls are loving her extra attention and special goodnight kisses. Despite the challenges of the past months, I’m reassured that my daughters are loved and adored by grandparents, parents, caregivers, and teachers.
They are angels. They deserve it.
And slowly, slowly, each of us in our family is looking inward and finding the strength to ask for what we want, need, and deserve. Whatever happens, this is what we’ve learned this year…
Hard to believe there are any edges left around here. What with the new sobriety, the daily attempt at spiritual practice (some days merely trying not to swear every other sentence or hate on slow drivers), I feel like a worn out old flannel shirt, dirty and tossed way down under the wet rags and muddy socks of life. Edges, those things that keep my vanity and pride humming along, can serve a purpose –a toughness in defense of precious littles, a determination and will to go on stepping, even through the concrete confusion of grimly long days. But it’s the softness that catches me by surprise.
Attending meetings daily opens my eyes to the beauty of softness. The edges all gone as people admit their foibles, their struggles, their deep dark shame. And I can see and love them for the brokenness and openness and humility without farce or false poise. They help me get over all the fighting words and fake courage of hip parenting, huge vocabulary-ed striving (well, almost).
And something else.
Softer is happier. Softer is relaxed and rested (and also admittedly weepy). Softer can be me and can be, sometimes for a flicker, okay.
****
Is there a link between clinging to our pre-parent selves and alcohol abuse?
And on a lighter note, seems the people can’t get enough of the push presents..
What riches what riches and how many hearts have been given me for safekeeping. I am not sufficient to the task, but with help and as a conduit, I can be enough.
Welcome Morning
There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.
All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.
-Anne Sexton
#56
I eagerly awaited my very first parent-teacher conference today. I dressed up and left work early to get there in plenty of time. I loved school as a girl.. books, pencils, learning, it still makes me sigh. I love the girls’ school — it is a private school in town with sweet uniforms and relatively small class sizes. And their teacher has “the gift.” She’s loving and goofy, and patient and kind… When I drop the girls in the morning I’m leaving them in loving and skillful hands.
I chirpily sat at the little table with the twins’ Dad and Step-Dad and Ms. D handed us the written evaluations. I should have heeded the funny feeling in the pit of my stomach when the teacher tipped her head and mentioned that “O. has been having some problems” in class. She’s been withdrawn, anxious, and obviously stressed out. I mentioned that O tells me she hates school, but that I thought it was sort of the normal adjustment period for kids who haven’t had much structure prior to Kindergarten.
There was a pause.
I felt the tears well up as she pointed out that it’s nearly December and adjustment problems aren’t probably what is going on here. My little sunshine quiet and withdrawn? How could that be? I barely registered her words. She asked if there was anything going on at home… and all of a sudden I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.
Of course she’s stressed and anxious and withdrawn! She knows things at home aren’t right. For some reason, I thought we could keep the kids in the dark about our struggles (I know. Stupid) and thereby protect them.
We put our heads together and came up with some steps to improve O’s school experience. But I feel like the woman who missed the train everyone else is on… In fact, I didn’t even know there was a train and that I was supposed to have purchased tickets to the thing.
I’ll do better here forward. In the end, that’s all any of us have.
#51
