Lest You Feel Inadequate

        Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins. -Erma Bombeck

       I look at you young moms raising your precious children in this day of Instagram, and my heart goes out to you. I honestly don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning after perusing your daily feed of gorgeous skinny moms, with their perfectly styled children, living in their HGTV worthy spotless homes, eating their organic snacks. I would have imploded under the pressure. Every once in awhile one of those instamoms will put a token post out there showing her “real life”, you know with a few little cluttery toys on the outskirts of the area that she is photographing. They try to put us all at ease with their mild, yet strangely still staged, messes. They post the day that junior dropped a box of cheerios on the floor to show just how “chaotic” their lives are. Man oh man, if I’d had Instagram at my finger tips when I was raising littles, the world may have gotten a little more realness than it had bargained for. It’s probably good that all that crazy stayed safely hidden behind our own four walls.

            Lest you sweet young moms are feeling slightly inadequate in this day of staged and filtered parenting, let me share a few precious stories with you about my young mommy days. Surely you’ll stand a little taller after the read. Most importantly, you’ll understand that despite all the realness of parenting, these children of ours live, and thrive even. They somehow survive and forgive us and enter adulthood with mostly warm happy memories. Somehow the less than stellar moments take a back seat in our kids’ minds while the best moments tend to move to the forefront. What a tender mercy afforded we mothers who struggle everyday in the trenches. For every mom of young children, who is doing her meager best everyday to love and nurture those little ones, I extend a hand of solidarity. This mom made it out of those trenches and finds herself in a whole new set of trenches, wondering how I’ll ever finish raising these big kids of mine. Rather than struggle in solitude, I’d prefer to put voice to this thing called mothering. May you find a little laughter and a lot of relief as you read along.

            I could fill a whole book with stories, but I’ll try to narrow it down to a few of my favorites. I certainly couldn’t narrow these experiences to just one post. I’ll share a story a day until it gets old. How’s that?

            Sabrina was close to a year old and at that crawling everywhere and getting into everything stage of babyhood. I tried to keep all doors shut and all harmful things at least two feet off the ground, but motherhood is crazy, and sometimes you leave a door open, heaven forbid. I suppose if we mothers got onto our stomachs and army crawled the course of our entire house, we’d be shocked how many hazards are at our babies fingertips. And yet, they live. Case in point. I was going about my busy day of laundry and clean up, when I noticed in horror that my baby had been strangely quiet and MIA for a good ten minutes. I frantically searched the house until I found my blue-eyed little darling in my…BATHROOM. I think you know what’s coming. No good comes from finding a crawling infant in her parent’s bathroom. Zero good comes from that.

            I found her near the toilet. Heaven help me. The whole front of her little shirt was wet. She wasn’t pulling herself up to things yet, where did this water come from? My eye fell upon the toilet brush sitting on the floor. This wasn’t the horrific part. You know that little trough thing that you stick your toilet brush in when you’re done cleaning? The one that always holds about two inches of months old putrid dirty toilet water? It sat tipped over and completely empty. No water was on the floor. It was all down my babies front. That little plastic tub looked an awful lot like a sippy cup or plastic cereal bowl. Sabrina looked up at me with her slobbery two-toothed grin, and I died. It would have been better if she had straight up been playing in the toilet. How much did she swallow?! What does a momma do when facing such horror? It’s not 1890. I don’t own ipecac. I grabbed that giggling little bundle, ran to the bathroom sink, and began to shovel handfuls of water into her face. She sputtered and whined. Not one of my better ideas. I don’t work real well under pressure. It was fruitless. Nothing could be done. I resigned myself to the inevitable. I gave her a bath, put her into some fresh clothes, gave her an actual sippy cup of juice, then waited patiently for my second born to die of giardia. Which she never actually did. No diarrhea, no throwing up, no fever, no coma, no brain damage.  All those paranoid thoughts I had harbored for ten straight days were for not. The child was fine. She lived. She grew. Her brain developed into quite a marvelous thing. She’s got the most robust immune system of all my children. If I’d known better, I would have skipped the vaccines and just had all of my children drink stagnant feces water at age 11 months. Well, you can’t do everything right all of the time.

The Inevitable Emptying of the Nest

“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.” -Andy Bernard

From my journal: 08.23.17

     We packed up our second child and took her to college yesterday. By some miracle it happened, though exactly four days ago her bedroom floor was knee-deep in eight months worth of dirty laundry. Somehow the clothes got washed and packed, along with four dozen “quiet films”, a dozen hats (placed carefully in hat boxes), and two dozen or so books selected most heart-wrenchingly.

     We filled the van, and Sabrina drove, so as to overcome her anxiety over the sixty mile commute. We pulled into her housing, unloaded the van, helped her set up her bedroom, met her cute roommate, went to Walmart and spent upwards of a million dollars on grocery items, met her sister for lunch, drove to campus and rented a Marriage & Family textbook for a mere $84.00, took her back to her apartment, met another roommate, did one more Walmart run, choked back tears while hugging Sabrina goodbye, then left. That sixty mile drive through the canyon, just the two of us, with our child’s absence already being acutely felt, is a killer.

     We got home at nearly 7:00. Jonah was downstairs, laying like a slug in front of what I fear may have been his eighth hour of Gravity Falls episodes. Spencer was getting ready for work as the pizza boxes and pool table balls strewn about the floor acted as a dead giveaway that he had perhaps over-enjoyed time with his friends in an unsupervised house.

     It was exactly 12 hours before these two summer sloths, we’ll call my sons, would be starting school. Jonah still needed a belt and a haircut. He has that awkward 24’ waist that, for some reason, both the men’s and boy’s section considers No-Man’s Land. It took two stores, and a full hour of shopping to finally stumble upon that blessed 22’-26’ reversible black/brown belt. Upon returning home, I sent Neil and Jonah to Smith’s to conjure up whatever Jonah might deem as edible lunch items.

     There I sat, alone, in the quiet cluttered darkness that was my house trying to process my feelings. They were the same feelings I experienced after dropping Jessica off in Logan almost exactly 3 years ago. They were…non-feelings really. Moms often describe the two days of sobbing that ensue after their adult kids leave home. It’s different for me. I can only say that I feel empty. It is an empty, helpless feeling as you try to grasp that half of your children no longer reside safely under your roof. It is a mind-numbing mess to try to work through.

     And I still haven’t worked through all of the feelings. It will be a process, just like every part of parenting has been. I spent the first ten years of adulthood preparing and filling my nest. I spent the next ten years nurturing the little chicks within that happy little nest. But nobody prepares you for the inevitable emptying of the nest. No one prepares you for the emptiness. Nobody teaches you how to look into the void and to somehow continue to breathe. Eventually we figure it out, just like we figured out breast-feeding and potty training and back to school shopping and driving lessons. Parenthood is one constant stream of exchanging an old comfortable normal for some new panic-laden territory. Eventually the panic burns off and is replaced with normalcy. But that is not this day. This day, I will deal with the ache every time I pass Sabrina’s empty bedroom. This day, I am practicing breathing through the emptiness.