Oops, I Did It Again

It was one year ago today that I uploaded a very personal essay I had written in the throes of the most stressful time of my life (thus far) onto something called "Blogger" and hoped that someone out there would read it, identify with it, and then offer some validation in the form of feedback.  In other words, millennial technological naval gazing at its finest.  You know the story.  I was stressed.  I was sad.  I had lost some people close to me and I had watched others suffer.  I was taking on what I thought was too much responsibility for someone my age.  I was pretty angry.  I was insecure; trying to be the best mother I could be while trying to be the best daughter I could be while trying to be the best wife and woman and person I could be.  I wanted to cry, but I had to laugh too.  I wanted someone to laugh with me.  When I failed, I wanted someone to say that she failed too.  And when I was alone, I wanted someone to say, “No, you’re not alone.”  Hence, the mommy blog.

I’ve been asked, “What’s the point of writing a blog, much less a mommy blog?  Who cares what you have to say anyway?  Why would people read your blog?”  I’ve asked myself those questions too.  You may not care at all what I have to say.  You may be the one who asked me those questions.  After laboring over those questions for a year, I have an answer. 

Because I said so.

I’m kidding.  The truth is, I don’t know, dang.  I don’t know what the point was of writing my experience and putting it on the “internet” for “everyone to see.”  I don’t know if anyone cares about what I have to say.  I admit, the blog has taken a back seat to some other things going on in my life and I haven’t kept up with it as much as I should.  I’m sure you’ve all been hanging on the edge of your seats hungry with anticipation, anxiously awaiting any word on my son’s nose picking, winky touching, letter writing, poop leaking, gas passing (oops, that was me), binky loving, song singing, fit throwing phases.  Well, haven’t you?  I don’t even pretend that you do.  I’m not that naïve.

I will say this; I have a lot of fun when I write.  And what little feedback I do get from other moms satisfies a very specific longing in my scatterbrained, insecure mind.   You don’t have to agree with me or do what I do in order for this to work.  We just have to be there for each other.  That’s how that works.

Not that long ago over coffee I told a friend of mine, who asked how my son was doing, that I am officially the mother of a pre-schooler.  I talked about my son for another thirty seconds before I somehow managed to make the conversation all about me.  I told my friend that I’m completely intimidated, once again, by the seemingly perfect supermoms at his school.  My rambling was an echo to what I said almost a year ago when my son was in pre-preschool (and yes, once again, that is a real thing).  It went something like, “They drive shiny mini-vans or giant SUV’s that they must surely take through the car wash at least once a week.  They wear tight yoga pants, as if all they do for the two hours their children are in school is work out.  They have perfect ponytails and no fly aways.  And get this, they flooded my inbox with ideas and assignments a month and a half before the classroom’s Halloween party, the party for which I had to volunteer when the teacher cornered me.  I volunteered to bring goodie bags, which was a huge mistake. Because now I feel all this pressure since one of the supermoms already brought goodie bags for her daughter’s birthday and I swear Martha Stewart made them…”  I continued on with other examples of why I thought these moms had it all together and why, once again, I felt like I would never fit in to this suburban Stepford mommy culture, all because so and so’s mommy made cute birthday goodie bags.  My friend stopped me, “You think they are supermoms but you make this judgment call after seeing them a total of what, not even five minutes a week?”  I said, “But you don’t know what these women look like.  You don’t see them.  You didn’t see those goodie bags.”  My friend said, “Don’t you think they could be thinking the same thing about you?”  I laughed at that.  “Trust me, nobody thinks that about me.”  Right?  Then my mind flashed back to a conversation I had just a few days earlier with another mommy friend from church who told me she thought I didn’t like her when we first met.  “Me?” I said defensively.   She told me how she thought I was “one of those moms” who only wanted to be friends with perfect moms.  “Me?” I said again in disbelief.  I laughed at that misconception and said, “That was before you knew me, right?”  I then admitted to her that I didn’t like to eat around her because she is in very good shape and I thought she might be judgmental of my food options. We agreed that too often our own insecurities block us from seeing the truth about others sometimes and, flash forward.  I told my friend that night over coffee that “You’re right,” which is really hard for me to do.  I see these women for about a minute twice a week.  I never thought I was a judgmental person but I…me?...yes, even I judge people. 

Shut up.  You know you do it too.

I am trying to raise a son who will respect and appreciate differences, not be frightened by them.  And yet here I was, intimidated and judgmental over what, a goodie bag?  Who does that?  Better yet, what has my life been reduced to?  What did I think, that the kids would line up the goodie bags and do some sort of American Idol panel judging of them?  “Katie’s mommy really made the bags her own.”   “Buddy’s mommy tried her best but overall the bags were a little pitchy, dawg.”  “Junior’s mommy should choose a different dream.”  My son doesn’t even wait until we’re in the car to tear into his goodie bag when he gets one and the contents of the bag last about two seconds before he’s gobbled them up, or stepped on them, or lost them.  So if it’s not the kids I’m worried about, who then?  Ah, the supermoms.  I don’t want to come in last place when I am judged in the great Mommy Beauty Pageant.  Of course, that’s all in my head.  There is no pageant and even if there was, there are no impartial judges.  The expectations we have of ourselves far exceed anyone else’s expectations of us.  It’s stupid. 

In all likelihood, so and so’s mommy put together those goodie bags to show how much she loves her daughter and how special her birthday is to her, not to make the other moms in the class (i.e. me)  feel bad.  That must be her way of doing things, just like I have my own way of doing things.  Not better.  Not worse.  Just different.  I post videos of my son saying his ABCs backwards on my Facebook page, not because I am trying to make other moms feel bad, but because, and let’s be honest, it’s difficult for even grown ups to do.  Seriously though, it’s because no one loves my son like I do.  I am his mommy and I am proud of him.  Plus, and I’ve said this before, he is a genius.  I don’t know if I can take the credit for his brains.  It’s best to just give mad props to God for that.

It’s easy to judge people when you are not walking in their shoes.  Just last night I watched a show on T.V. about a “working mom.”  She and her husband enrolled in a new age baby class to learn the proper “peek-a-boo” technique (it was actually a pretty hilarious show) and her biggest nemesis in the class was a, gasp, stay at home mom who of course was portrayed as super judgmental and superior to the working mom.  I’ve seen this before, in another show, and in a popular movie that was just released.  Is this what people think of me?  That because I am a stay at home mom I think my parenting is superior to others?  They don’t know me.  They don’t know how insecure I really am and how goodie bags cause me anxiety.  They’ve never read my blog.  If they did they’d know I will simultaneously defend my decision to stay home and support their decision to work.  In the words of my dear husband, “I’m doing the best I can.” And I have every reason to believe that you are too.

Once again I have to say that I think if women didn’t compete so much with each other and just learned how to support one another we’d be so much better off, myself included.  I have to always remind myself that it’s not a competition; I’m not going to come in last place and there is no first place.  Insecurity holds us back and stops us from getting close to other women, women that could support us and lift us up if we’d only let them.  We’re not “The Real Housewives of Fill in the Blank.”  We’re real.  I’m reminded of a friend of mine who is literally one of the prettiest women I know.  Looking at her you’d never guess that she struggles with anything, much less with what the rest of us do, insecurity, self acceptance, parenting.  Before I got to know her, I actually thought that there was probably no reason as to why she would want to be my friend.  Now I’m glad that I overcame that initial intimidation and because of it, I think we are both benefiting from knowing and supporting each other.  It just goes to show, you have to go deeper.  You can’t look at someone and figure them out right away, especially other women.  Chances are you will have more in common than you think.

…Which brings me to the big day of the Halloween party.  I was ready to prove that I was just as super as all those other supermoms.  I even wrote every child’s name on the foam pumpkin that was attached to each bag.  I had curled all the ribbon that was left after tying perfect little bows on the bags after stuffing them full of play dough and bubbles, stickers and suckers and peanut free (I learned my lesson) candy.  As I walked in with the box of my most carefully packaged, kick-ass (if I do say so myself) goodie bags, an unusually tall blonde mom stopped me and asked me to carry in some balloons, which I gladly did, and she was very grateful.  She was wearing a witch’s hat and to my surprise, was prepared enough to bring hats for all of the moms to wear, which she thought “would be fun.”  With our hats on and "The Monster Mash" playing, we all decorated the room and set up the crafts for the party and eagerly anticipated the return of the kids from outside.  And for the first time, I actually talked to some supermoms and found out that most of them loved parties, had great senses of humor and were not so different from me after all.  The blonde Amazonian supermom even complained about having to spend extra money on balloons because the dollar store doesn’t sell helium anymore.  “Yes, I know!” I said, shocked that someone who looked like her shopped at the dollar store.  I later found out she was the very same so and so’s mom and the designer of those trendy little birthday goodie bags.  And she was very nice.  I left that party super impressed, but this time I was impressed with myself.  Yes, I can still learn lessons, even in my thirties.  It was fun to wear the witch’s hat.  It was a great party.  Supermoms are a myth.  We’re all just moms.  We can support each other.  We can learn from each other.  Look, mom, I’m growing.

The contents of my son's goodie bag are still rolling around in the floor of my car.

A year ago I ended my first blog entry screaming at the top of my lungs, wondering if anyone was out there, if anyone was listening.  Now that I’ve calmed down I know that, yes, you’re out there.  Thankfully, I’m a little less stressed now, a little less angry and sad, and only a little insecure (around party time).  I’m still in the middle of this very crowded landscape of mommy blogs but I’m not screaming anymore.  I’ve found that I don’t have to scream at all to be heard.  I just have to follow the very first rule my mother ever taught me.  Be yourself.

Thanks for listening.

Boys Don't Cry

In a future blog, I will make sure to list in alphabetical order all of the things I hate about the McDonald’s Play Land.  For the sake of argument and time, I will just proceed with my story.

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law took all of the grandkids to McDonald’s for lunch and I tagged along.  With five kids in tow we of course had to sit at the table right next to the Play Land.  It smelled like feet, as most play areas do, and was full of bacteria.  Feet-stink mixed in with chicken-nugget-stink made the place almost unbearable.  My mother in law, ever vigilant and detail oriented, spent half the time pointing out all the kids who weren’t wearing socks and how the sign clearly states that ALL KIDS MUST WEAR SOCKS.  She also noticed the neglectful mother/grandmother at the table behind us who was letting her son/grandson (we couldn’t tell which) run amuck inside the tunnels and terrorize the rest of the children.  My son was way too excited to eat and barely touched his Happy Meal.  As soon as I said the word “go” he sped off and up the stairs and into those dreaded tunnels above us.  On my list, “T” will be for tunnels, because I hate those things.  I can’t see what’s going on or what tunnel my son is about to come out of.  I understand they need to economize space but why do they put the tunnels above our heads?  I can’t move my wide hips up the steps that lead to the tunnels much less fit through the tunnels themselves, you know, if I would have to find my son in the event of a freak out.  Play Land was probably designed by a mother who couldn’t stand her children and wanted to lose them for a couple of hours while she ate twenty cheeseburgers in peace.  Listen to me, if you have a child below the age limit on the Play Land Rules, don’t send him up.  It’s like a roach motel for toddlers, “Kids go up, but they never come down.”  When my son was smaller it was like a game of Marco Polo to get him to find his way back to me.  On this particular day we had backup.  Four of his older cousins were up there with him, so for once I wasn’t too terribly worried about him getting stuck, or lost, or falling out of a hole in the ceiling.  I knew that they would keep an eye out on him and lead him back to safety should he lose his way.  I love that about family. 

Just as I started to relax about my son being in the Play Land maze, all hell broke loose.  You have to understand that as my son gets older, his control freak tendencies (which he inherited from, well, I won’t name names but it starts with “d” and ends with an “addy”) are surfacing more and more every day.  He does this thing now where he just sort of sits at the entry ways to tunnels or slides.  He does it at the park, at the mall, and anywhere there is a distinct “in” or “out.”  I think he likes to pretend that he’s the gatekeeper of a portal to the other worlds, or perhaps a bouncer at a trendy nightclub.  Only the cool kids can enter.  While it entertains him it can be very frustrating to other little kids who just want to crawl through the dang tunnels or go down the slide.  And that’s exactly what happened that afternoon.  Some little boy wanted to pass through a tunnel that my son was blocking and instead of being polite about it he screamed right in my son’s face.  This was the same little boy whose mom/grandma was ignoring him and reading a magazine--as he screamed in my son’s face.  Not to be outdone, my son screamed right back.  They screamed back and forth for a minute until I thought some punches might be thrown.  As I perched on the edge of my seat, ready to grease myself up and wiggle through the tunnels to my son, the other little boy finally gave up and came down the steps.  My son followed.  I gently reminded him that he needs to move out of the way and to not block the tunnels.  It wasn’t the perfect moment to gently remind him of anything.  I could see that both the screaming match and my admonishment had hurt his feelings.  My son is a lot like me, he can’t get into an argument without crying.  I hate that about myself.  Every time I fight I always have to cry.  I feel too much.  Sensing that his feelings were hurt, I asked my son to come to me as I held out my arms.  “I’m not cryin’,” he said, as he turned red and stuck out his bottom lip.  His face looked like it would crack if you blew on it.  “I’m not crying!” he screamed at me.  As I neared him and tried to calm him down and comfort him, he said it again, “Mama I’m NOT CRYING!”  And shortly thereafter, he started crying uncontrollably as I scooped him up and carried his flailing limbs out of McDonalds.

I don’t get boys.  There was a time when my son would hold his arms up to me anytime he was barely hurt so that I could comfort him and hold him.  That time has passed.  Now when he’s hurt, physically or emotionally, anger always follows.  He throws a fit of anger and then follows it up with “I’m not crying,” which is my indicator that he wants to cry so badly that one wrong look will send him over the edge.  I want to know where this machismo comes from.  It certainly wasn’t me.  Who taught my son that crying is unacceptable and where is that person so I can pound on him a little bit?  To be fair, I don’t think anyone taught him to be like this.  He’s a boy.  Of course, I’m finding out every day there are more differences between boys and girls besides the obvious one. Boys like to act like nothing hurts them.  Girls get hurt if you cross your eyes at them.  Boys don’t like to cry; girls make it their nightly entertainment (see: slumber parties for sixth grade girls.) 

I know all about girls, having been one myself now for thirty-three years.  We cry.  Ok, I cry.  Over everything.  Now that I have a child I have to confess that I have cried and probably would cry again at the following things: Oprah’s last show, the youtube video of the lion hugging its former owner, Folgers commercials at Christmas, John Wayne movies, the montage of neglected pets with those Willie Nelson/Sarah McLachlin songs playing in the background, the Coke polar bears, mother’s day cards, father/daughter dances at weddings, mother/son dances at weddings, the moment on Full House when the music starts playing, driving past my old house, homeless people, and against my better judgment, while listening to country music.  I cry a lot.  It doesn’t take much to hurt my feelings either.  You’d think by now, having been through so much, that I would have toughened up, but my skin’s as thin as an Olsen twin.  My husband is constantly telling me that I need to stop letting people hurt my feelings.  I don’t ask to get hurt.  Let’s be honest, people suck.  I’ve been made fun of.  I’ve been rejected.  I’ve been ignored, laughed at, given dirty looks and insulted and I’ve cried almost every time it’s happened.  I laugh it off sometimes but when I’m alone, yeah, I cry.  I’m a girl and I’m sensitive.  As much as I try to toughen up, it’s just the way I am.  I’m easily wounded and I cry but in the end I survive.  It’s kind of my thing.

But boys?  I still don’t get them.  I sleep with one and I’m raising one, but I’m still learning about them.  If you think there’s not much to them, you’re not paying attention.  My son teaches me more than I will ever teach him.

REM said it, everybody hurts.  I’m fascinated though at how differently we all react to it.  Right now my son reacts to being hurt with anger, followed quickly by hysteria.  With me, obviously, it’s crying.  Some people lash out at anyone in their path when they’re hurt and some push away the people they care about most.  What’s the healthy reaction?  God only knows.  No, I don’t want my son to be a sissy cry baby, but I want him to feel like he can still be a man and cry when he’s hurt.  I don’t want him to have to convince me and himself that he’s “not cryin” when I know that’s exactly what he wants to do.  He’s only three years old for crying out loud, pardon the expression.  I want him to let it out now at Play Land so that later in life he’s not some tattooed, tobacco chewing tough guy who starts bar fights.  Because you know it’s just a few short steps between McDonald’s and the neighborhood tavern. 

I know.  I counted.

...And Keep Your Hands To Yourself

I’m just going to come right out and say it.

What is up with little boys and their winkies? 

No.  Seriously.  My son’s obsession with boogies and picking his nose has waned and his new obsession has proven infinitely more entertaining to him and, though I didn’t think it was possible, even more embarrassing to me.  A couple of weeks ago while I was on the phone with my sister I heard him say, “Oh, it fits!”  That’s never a good thing to hear when your back is turned, as moms know all too well that “it” could be a number of things fitting into a number of orifices: bean in the nose, pencil in the ear, or anything from the floor in the mouth.  I looked over from where I stood in the kitchen. (Why do these things always happen when I’m on the phone?)  My son had pulled down his underwear and his pull-up and all I could see was his naked lower half.  He stood with his butt cheeks clenched as he pushed out his pelvis, all the while trying to slide a small play-dough tube over his, well, you know.  “No don’t put that on your winky!” I screamed in a panic.  My mind flashed forward to trying to explain this to an ER doctor:  “I’m sorry but we need one who specializes in winky tube removals.”  I said to my sister, “I gotta go,” to which she replied over her uproarious laughter, “Yeah, they never grow out of that by the way.”

I can’t help but think that this is all my fault.  Up until we started potty training he hadn’t paid much attention to the thing.  We’d strip him down before a bath and let him run around naked, thinking it was a healthy expression of his natural state of being. In fact, it took him a while to actually run naked.  For the longest time he walked bow legged throughout the house, knowing something was down there but not fully understanding the what or the why of it.  That was a hilarious, innocent time in his and my life.  But as we all know, a boy can’t stay in diapers forever and it was unavoidably time to go tinkle in the big boy potty.  It seemed like all it took was for the underwear to come off and a downward glance and poof, the world made sense.  When he was in diapers he only reached down to touch it occasionally as we changed or bathed him.  He had no idea what it was actually capable of doing.  Then all of a sudden he was being told to pay attention to it, nay, to focus intently on it and, oh boy, point it at something.  It was like he discovered a new playground at the end of our street.  Now the boy is constantly touching it, pulling it, opening his shorts to look at it, even bragging about it, “Look at my big winky mama!”  (He doesn’t suffer from any confidence issues, to be sure.)  I’d like to share in his enthusiasm over his newfound thingy, but because I don’t have one myself, I really don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I pretty much feel about those things the way I do about the telephone poles in my backyard; I understand their purpose and I would like for them to work properly, but I don’t want to stand around and look at them all day. “Yes, baby, you tinkle out of there,” is all I can say in response to him, and then offer a distraction, “Look!  A bird!”  

Please God, let’s go back to the nose picking phase.  I’ll take big boogies over this any day. 

Are all boys like this?  (Yes.)

Downtown at the City Garden as I was changing my son out of his swim shorts into some dry pants in front of God and the AT&T building, he looked down and said in a loud voice, “Hey, where’s my winky?”  I said, “Shhh!” which we all know works great when I’m trying to get him to be quiet.  He said it louder and with more punctuation.  “WHERE’S.  MY.  WINKY.  MAMA?”  I tried to explain to him quietly that it was just cold but he wasn’t buying it.  “But it’s hot mama.”  I couldn’t disagree.  Come on guys.  I didn’t sign up for this.  I’d like to have a “pass” option and field all of these types of questions to my husband.  Although, I wonder how mature that conversation would be since the man tells my son to “shake the dew off the lily” after each tinkle.  When the hubby is not around it’s totally up to me to explain these manly things.  Grasping at straws, since “it’s cold” wasn’t an acceptable answer, I followed up with, “It’s like a turtle.  It will come out again when it feels safe.”  Thank God that he quickly forgot about that analogy because I don’t want him calling the thing a turtle.  Winky is bad enough.  Turtle will for sure get him beat up in high school.

You guys, I have never in my life talked about winkies this much.  I'm going a little nuts.  (Pardon the expression.)  I’m so sick of them.  I wish I could go back in time and tell the misogynist Sigmund Freud that, uh, yeah right.  There are people who suffer from “you know what” envy and guess what?  Those people ain’t women. 

Or as Elaine from Seinfeld put it, "I don't know how you guys walk around with those things."

This may seem like inappropriate talk or taboo subject matter to you but it’s my life.  God help me if I have more boys.  Please don’t stop reading my blog.  I promise to not write about winkies ever again.  I don’t mean to offend your delicate boundaries or your moral sensibilities, I just need to talk to someone about this.  We never, ever, talked about our private parts growing up.  Remember, my mother’s disapproval of all anatomically correct language forced me to come up with substitutes like “cookie” and “winky” in the first place.  The woman called everything, front and back, a “bottom.”  I never understood what, or where, she was talking about.  This is why she nearly had a heart attack when we were at an all-you-can-eat-pizza buffet and I gave my son a small ice cream cone for dessert and he said, “Grandma, my winky looks like an ice cream cone!”  Heck, she’d have a heart attack if she read this.

I don’t want to shut down my son because I’m overly sensitive about stuff down there, but how do I get him to stop already?  Once again I’m forced to walk a fine line of discipline.  Encourage a healthy appreciation for Mr. Johnson but not a clingy, stalker like obsession with it.  Make sure he knows that it’s okay to talk about it but let’s be careful to pick our time and place.  (Like, a blog that all of your friends from church can read, perhaps?)  I think I’ll have to be as delicate as I can with this one.  No overreacting but no giggling either, which will be and has been difficult for me.  Every time I tell him to “keep your hands to yourself” I cringe…and then smile.  And I have a sneaky suspicion that while you might not admit it, you've probably done the same thing. 

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

I’ve spent every day for three years now with my son.  I don’t care who you are, if your child is your pride and joy and your only reason for living in this world, or if you’re one of those mothers who can’t stand the sight of her own children, that is a heck of a long time to be around someone.  But I love him so much that it makes the whole joined-at-the-hip thing pretty tolerable.  In fact, his little idiosyncrasies have grown on me.  Most of my complaints, if I would call them ‘complaints’, are the usual mommy grumbles: He won’t eat his vegetables, he doesn’t listen to me all of the time, he throws fits when he doesn’t get his way.  You know, the normal day to day stuff of raising any preschooler.  He provides me with more entertainment than annoyances, usually.  I don’t mind that he wants to put the Barney DVD on repeat and watch the thing half a dozen times.  And sure, he loves to listen to the same song in the car five times in a row.   He sings one song so much that I’ve woken up from a deep sleep singing it.  He even knows what number the song is on the CD player, “Play number 8 mama.”  I admit, there are times that I do get a little sick of the song but all in all, I appreciate his consistency.  The kid knows what he likes. 

My son, as you probably know by now, is a bit more precocious than the average boy.  He sings.  He dances.  He brings his own microphone to our church worship service.  He loves to bang out rhythms on coffee cans, buckets, the backs of chairs; anything that could be a make-shift drum.  Needless to say he loves music and probably has more rhythm than most other white toddlers that I know.  The next Justin Bieber?  Maybe.  He knows more song lyrics than my husband does, but that’s not saying much.  My husband unintentionally figured out one of my biggest pet peeves a long time ago and since then, anytime we are in the car it seems like he goes out of his way to do the third worst thing a person can do to irritate the heck out of me.  Honestly, I don’t know if he can help it, because he has a pretty terrible memory for someone who designs databases for a living.  My rule is, and always has been, this: if I don’t know the correct song lyrics, I won’t sing along.  Sometimes I think my husband goes out of his way to sing incorrect lyrics and in doing so, inflicts a torture on my ears similar to that of listening to Christina Aguilera sing the National Anthem.  Because he doesn’t just sing the wrong lyrics, no, he sings them at the top of his lungs.  He sings over what I’m singing which are usually the correct lyrics.  He won’t stop until I call him out on it, which I do every time this happens and believe me, it’s quite often.  “It’s not ‘Above the fruit and grain.’  It’s ‘Above the fruited plain.’”  I mean, come on, “America the Beautiful.”  Even the dumbest American knows that one.  At least sing "Something something plain," if you don't know it.  "Something," to me, is a more respectable alternative because it at least indicates a playful self awareness.

Don’t judge me.  We all have our limits.  I can’t tell you how much this thing bothers me.  I’m weird like that.  Curse at me.  Call me ugly.  Give me dirty looks.  I can handle it.  But whatever you do, don’t sing the wrong lyrics.

My son has picked up this terrible habit.  Like I said, I can stand a lot of his little quirks but this, I just don’t know.  His childish vocabulary and a lingering mush mouth make for some interesting song lyric interpretations.  I try my best to get his attention and gently correct his mistakes, but it’s just more fun for him to mess up the lyrics, just like his dada.  For instance, a song that we sing at church that goes, “For the King has carried the cross, He is risen from the grave,” sounds like “For the key was carried to gob, he is ridden from the gay.”  Yeah, it’s all kinds of wrong.

For being as uptight as I clearly am on this subject, I'm not fundamentally opposed to the hilarious misheard song lyric every now and then.  A woman I used to work with swore that the lyrics to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston were “I’m asking you cause you know about feet stink.”  She’s the same person I got into a week long argument over whether Wham’s “Careless Whisper” was “Guilty feet have got no rhythm” or “These two feet have got no rhythm.”  I won, by the way, because the lyrics are totally “Guilty feet have got no rhythm.”  I take song lyrics seriously, which is why I posted large signs all over her desk that said “GUILTY FEET.”  She was still finding them a month later.  I’m also not above mishearing certain lyrics myself.  I’ve had my own slip ups but I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to finding out the actual words to any given song.  And once again I have to apologize, because all of my song references are, of course, from my favorite decade.  My top misheard lyrics include the Petshop Boys, “In a Western Town with denim walls, the Eastern boys and Western girls,” and Paul Young’s, “Every Time you go away…you take a piece of meat with you,” and mine and everyone else’s favorite Manfred Mann tune, “Wrapped up like a douche another rumor in the night.”  These are funny misheard song lyrics that I will only sing out loud to be ironic.  Only for a short time did I believe these to be the actual words to the songs.  For about a second, I thought that the opening line to Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” went, “She Dutched by me and blamed it on James,” (Actual lyrics: “She touched by me in painted on jeans.”) or that the chorus to Toto’s “Africa” went, “I Dutched the rains down in Africa.”  (Heck, I don’t even know what the actual lyrics are to “Africa” and I’m pretty sure nobody else does either.) Was it possible that sometime in my youth I thought that the Netherlands had invaded 80’s Pop?  How did I make an entire race of people a verb?  Trust me, once the 90's came around and I explored the World Wide Web, I found the correct lyrics to each one of those songs so that I and those I cared about would no longer make those embarrassing mistakes.

(I invite you now to take a few minutes to look up those two songs on YouTube.  Listen.  It really does sound like "Dutched." Go ahead.  I'll wait.)

Ask my husband, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to lyrics.  That, thank the Lord, might be the only thing I’m obsessive compulsive about.  It’s because I believe that the writers of these songs took great pains to write them.  I would hate for someone to call my website “Confessions of a Staid Gnome Mom.”  Call me crazy for respecting the original intent of the written and sung word.  I know not all song lyrics are poetry and more often than not, the actual song lyrics don’t make much more sense than the made up ones.  Surely Jimi Hendrix did not mean to infer that he dabbled in the love that dare not speak its name when he penned one of his most famous songs.  Thousands of people all over the world have gotten it wrong for decades now because they didn’t have mothers who were obsessive about correct song lyrics.  But my son will be different, my son will know.  Someday I’ll explain everything to him.  I’ll teach him the things that really matter in life.  And hopefully he will go on to tell others, or at least his someday-wife, “No honey, it’s ‘Excuse me while I kiss the sky.’” 

Then my work will not have been in vain.

Goodnight Nobody

I’m really getting tired of indecisiveness.  Is it too much to ask that people make a decision and stick with it now days?  My son is three, so every day I have at least ten conversations with him that usually go something like this:

“Mama, I want something to drink.”

“What do you want baby?”

“I want some apple juice.”

“Okay.”

“No, I want orange juice.”

“Okay.”

“No, I want milk mama.”

“Well, which do you want?  Orange juice or milk?”

“No, I want apple juice.”

This flippancy is enough to drive even the sanest of mothers insane.  Since I can’t very well blame society (yet) on my son’s daily battle with indecisiveness, I have to go ahead and blame human nature.   When presented with a myriad of drink options, my son is like a contestant on “Let’s Make a Deal.”  If he chooses incorrectly, he’ll end up with some bogus prize like a pair of porcelain dogs.  If he chooses wisely, he gets the whole showcase including the trip to Paris and the car.  Ok, so he’s choosing between milk and orange juice, but still.  We humans are so afraid to make a choice and stand by our decision because we think about the “what ifs” or the “what could’ve beens.”  Oh, if only I’d have chosen the milk, I’d be so fulfilled right now. 

Life is so hard for a three year old.

Every time this happens I want to say to him, you know buddy, the milk is still in the fridge, cold and ready anytime you want it, ding-dong.

It is this same indecisiveness that prolonged the selling of my mom’s house in Maplewood and made three people back out of three contracts on the house.  I want it.  I don’t want it.  We’ll close in two weeks.  No, I don’t want to anymore.  I felt like every time we were getting ready to close on the house that I was dealing with yet another three year old who couldn’t decide if he wanted milk or orange juice.  A short sale on an as-is, fixer upper of a house which should’ve closed in a month took six months to finally come to an end, and all because of a stinker neighbor and three very indecisive, big fat babies.  The fourth contract was the charm.  Eight thousand dollars and five months later, an adult came along and finally decided that yes, I’ll sign the contract and see it through.  I could’ve French-kissed the guy. 

And so today I said a long overdue goodbye to my childhood home.

Technically, I didn’t say “goodbye” to the house. I more or less took a look around and said thank you God that I am done with this.  Hopefully the gracious and dedicated buyer who finally bought it will fix it up and another family will move in and have good times, or at least more good times than bad.  My mother, on the other hand, actually said goodbye to it.  She needed to.  She told me, “Well, this morning I let it go.”  Which, for her sake and for ours, needed to be done.  We couldn’t have kept this thing going much longer.

For me, every milestone in my son’s life has been an emotional bowl of mixed nuts.  Sad, relieved, happy, embarrassed…I can’t feel an emotion without another conflicting one bubbling up every time something big happens in his life.  I guess it’s the same way for my own milestones. I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from my chest only to leave a small vacant hole, maybe for the rest of my life.  It’s probably different for my siblings because apparently, before I was born, my parents moved around a lot.  But since I can remember, excluding my current residence, it’s the only house I’ve ever lived in.  I don’t really know how I expected to feel.  I certainly felt like I was ready to say goodbye to the place back in February, when we were scheduled to close with the first buyer.  In fact, I was ready to kiss the place goodbye.  I was tired of it, sad about it, and could only think of the bad things that had recently happened there.  It was a burden.  It wasn’t home.  It was something else, something sad.  The rooms inside that used to hold our holiday sing-alongs and the walls that could barely contain our laughter were cracked and chipped and stained with cigarette smoke.  The floors that we used to sleep on when we had slumber parties with thirty of the neighborhood kids had sunken in, held up by unstable two-by-fours.  My parents' room, which used to be my safe haven in thunderstorms and where I'd sneak into when I had bad dreams was where I watched my dad take his last breath and then leave us forever.  Every time I walked through the hallway there was the pictorial from my sister’s funeral staring me in the face.  One of my cousins called it “the house of death.”  It wasn’t the same house that I grew up in.  It was a liability, more than any of us could manage. Any money that came from selling it was, disappointingly, just barely enough to get my poor mother out of debt.  In many ways, yes, I was so ready to say goodbye to it.  And in other ways, no, I don’t know if it’s even possible to say goodbye to something like that.

Saying goodbye to something is probably easier than saying goodbye to someone, I suppose.  A house is just a place to make memories, but then, it becomes a part of you just like your own last name, a part of your identity.  I haven’t been “Carrie George from Maplewood” since I’ve been married, but, I always felt connected to it.  Growing up I couldn’t wait to get out of it and now, I kind of miss it.  I guess it’s time once again for me to grow up, to let go of some things and hold onto others.  Let go of the sadness and the memories of death and hold onto happiness and the memories of life…sleeping in front of the fire place on Christmas Eve and watching my parents sneak into the living room with presents; running up the front steps after playing all day and smelling fried pork chops and mashed potatoes; dancing and singing with my siblings when my parents were gone; spying on my sister’s goodnight kisses from the living room window and then finally being old enough to have my own goodnight kisses on the front porch; walking in from a date late at night and finding my mom praying and/or listening to Johnny Cash records; watching my grandma sing “Grandma’s little blue eyed boy” to my son; watching my dad’s eyes light up at the sight of my nephew, his first grandson; holding hands around the dinner table to pray; life. 

These memories keep me balanced, you see, the yin and the yang.  Or as an 80’s sitcom so aptly put it, “You take the good, you take the bad, you take ‘em both and there you have…” My life.  A bowl of mixed nuts.  I know I won’t be able to shield my son from all of the pain of the outside world, but I hope our home is a safe place and the pain he feels inside of it is bearable.  I hope that someday he’ll think of his childhood home and choose to remember all the good times that are still to come.  As for me, I think I’ll choose to remember the good too.  I guess today I didn’t say goodbye to my childhood home, I just said goodbye to the house I now saw as an adult. 

I think I’ll hang onto my childhood for a while.

Mama Bird

It seemed like my worst nightmare was coming true.  About a month ago, I noticed some blood on my toothbrush while brushing and then later that day, when I bit into a bagel, I noticed that there was some movement in one of my teeth.  A crown was loose.  If any of you have crowns, you know that what’s underneath a crown is very scary and gross and if that crown were to actually come off in public you would probably look like a banjo-playing cast member of “Hee Haw.”  My crown is right up in the front and center of my mouth.  There was no ignoring it, it was loose.  The problem was that I had waited an embarrassingly long time to have my teeth cleaned, and in doing so ruined the chances of my dentist finding the loose crown before it managed to get too loose.  I mean I had waited, like, a really embarrassingly long time to put off going to the dentist.  We’re talking full on neglect.  I could place all the blame on my son who takes up all of my time, but I know it was me.  I lost track of time.  After my son was born, I kept putting it off and putting it off until the morning that I woke up, turned around and he’s three years old and my teeth are falling out.  I am forced to deal with the reality of time, or as Ferris Bueller so eloquently puts it, “Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I used to count down to the minutes until my husband would get home from work when I was a new stay at home mom.  The days felt like they lasted forever.  The weekends were gone in a blink but the week stretched out for miles.  I felt like I was running in sand, always working hard but not getting very far.  That’s how the first year of my son’s life felt.  I kept waiting to get the “hang of this thing” but that felt like it would never happen.  Once it did happen I was too busy to notice, until someone pointed out to me, “You know, I think you might have the hang of this thing.”  Sometimes I still question it.  In fact, I was so entrenched in the seeming endlessness of being a stay at home mom that I forgot that babies don’t stay babies forever and kids, you know, they grow up.  Now that my head isn’t spinning I’ve adjusted my focus and at this moment, right now, my son is telling me all about his day at school.  My son wakes up on his own and comes into our room in the morning, ready to play.  My son feeds himself.  My son can drink from an open cup and sit in a regular chair to eat.  My son can pull down his pants and pull up a stool and tinkle into a toilet.  When did this happen?  Why didn’t I see this coming as I was working so hard to achieve it?  I know I was present for and even facilitated most of it, but how did it happen so fast?  And what’s next?

Don’t answer that.  I know what’s next.  Today he’s three, tomorrow he’ll be sixteen, and the day after that I’ll be weeping openly at his wedding.  And then what will I do?  For my son's first Easter my sister gave him a set of rubber duckies.  One is a large mama duck and the rest are three little baby ducks that fit perfectly on her back.  When you put all three baby ducks on her back, the mama duck stays perfectly afloat.  If you take one of them off, or god forbid all of them, she tips over and floats on her side. 

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Oprah said that being a mom is the “hardest job in the world.”  She wouldn’t know because she doesn’t have children.  No, five dogs does not equal one child, but I’ll take a grateful nod of recognition from the queen of all things.  She’s right, it is the hardest job in the world.  It is hard to carry a child inside of your body for nine months, take care of that child and devote entire portions of your life to that child and then, all of a sudden, to switch gears yet again, to switch purposes and realize your child is grown and doesn’t need that constant care anymore.  I’m looking into the future of course, my son is only three.  But imagine when he leaves for college.  Oh, the identity crises that are yet to come, and after I’ve just managed to squeeze through this one.  Moms, we are the special ops soldiers of life. 

At one of the most sentimental and emotional times in my life, I started writing a letter to my son that he could read later in his life.  I imagined some profound mother/son moment as I hand him the letter, maybe at his wedding, or his graduation and we cry and hug and he says, “Aww, mom.”  And yes, I do get my fantasies courtesy of Hallmark, Folgers and the Lifetime Television Network.  Nonetheless, I had a sneaky suspicion that time was going to get away from me, as it did, and as it will, and that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to talk to him about everything that I wanted to.  He was fourteen months old at the time.  The letter starts like this:

July 26, 2009

I’ve just put you to bed.  I am sitting in the office typing this letter, listening as you hum yourself to sleep.  You do this so often now that it’s hardly a novelty but I swear, it’s still one of the sweetest sounds these ears have ever heard.  It is merging with the sound of the crickets outside.  It is a symphony of hums and rhythms and a new song, a song of life.  A celebration of you, my little songbird.  Earlier this evening we went for a wagon ride around the neighborhood.  You have a fixation with the American flag right now, which we think is possibly a phase.  You are far more patriotic than your mommy ever was.  You must get it from daddy’s side.  You held on tightly to that flag the whole wagon ride.  When we returned home I gave you a bath and cradled your wet face in my hands.  Your eyes sparkle and widen to twice their size when your little head is wet.  I love how the water sticks to your eye lashes; you are the most beautiful thing.  The world is perfect in our tub, with your boat and the mama duck and baby ducks that ride on her back.  They are all smiling.  I read stories to you.  I gave you milk.  I rocked you in my arms and you made sucking noises with your binky.  I kissed you for the hundredth time and put you in bed.  In my head I am wishing a thousand sweet dreams for you, praying a thousand prayers, saying a thousand thank yous.

Just so you know, I inherited my tendency towards the melodramatic from my parents.  Let me share something with you that's even more personal but really cool.  Not too long ago when we were cleaning out my mom’s house in Maplewood, I found a poem my mom had written for me when I was sixteen months old.  I’m sharing it with you now because I think that, one, it shows how creative and wonderful my mom is, and two, to see if you can notice the similarities.

Carrie

Butterball of love

What a privilege to hold her in my arms

She says I WUV YOU in a sing song musical voice

She sings “Yes Jesus Loves Me” and lifts

Her hands and praises the Lord because it’s

Fun and we clap

She sings in a soft high voice

What could be more beautiful

She reads books in little nonsensical words

She’s into everything

She hates being alone

She has a dimple and waddles when she walks

Like a baby duck

She’s my buddy

Has a mind of her own

Laughs when we laugh

I LOVE HER I love her I love her

-MOM

I cried when I read it, as any daughter would, and my mom and I had our much deserved Hallmark moment.  I know my mom felt about me the same way I feel about my son when I hear his little voice singing songs that I know, and when he makes up new songs.  What’s better than hearing the sweet voice of your reason for living? 

As Mother’s Day approaches, I'd like to say something really profound about being a mother, but I realize that I’m incapable of saying anything new to you moms out there.  You know how incredible you are.  You know that it’s the moms who carry the weight of the world on their backs.  I know you, like me, wouldn’t trade a second of it, even your most frustrated times, even when you had to neglect yourself to nurture someone else.  I know you soak in little moments, even after time gets away from you and you have only a second to catch your breath until the next one comes along.  I know you, like me, have breathed in the scent of the top of your baby’s head as you rocked him and wished it would always be like this.  And hopefully, you somehow found time to stop and look around.  Hopefully, you listened.  Moms, you are the caretakers of the little voices, the ones who bring the most beautiful music into the world.  As we fill our little ones up with love, they release the sound of it back to us.  What a gift.  Little songbirds who, like the song says, “know the score.” 

And to my own little buddy all I can say is, “I love you, I love you, I love you, like never before.”

Go With the Flow

I recently celebrated my sixth wedding anniversary with my husband.  We went out to eat on the same night that tornadoes touched down and destroyed several neighborhoods in northern St. Louis County.  A tornado warning went off as we ate dinner and even more afterwards as we headed out to one of my favorite places to eat dessert.  My always cautious husband heard the sirens and rolled down the car window as we approached downtown.  He looked at me and said with all seriousness, “Well, I guess we should probably go home.”  I laughed in his face and then in the face of danger. “No way,” I said. “We are going to have a romantic night out if it kills us.”  As we sipped our chocolate drinks and ate our dessert, watched the wind and rain whip against the window right next to our table, we toasted, “To weathering the storm.”

It wasn’t an exaggeration.

Scenes of the devastation were all over the news when we got home from our date.  The next day we saw the destruction that the storm brought to some of the neighborhoods just north of where we had eaten dinner.  I felt a little guilty for my statement made in jest.  It’s just, we hadn’t been on a date in a really, really long time.  I didn’t want to be home by 7:30 on the night of our anniversary, not after the year we’ve had, especially since we already had a babysitter.  And those of you who know me know that yes, I would risk my life for chocolate.  It was that good.

We thought that the worst was over, but over the next couple of days the rain came down pretty hard and consequently flash flood warnings went up all over the metro area.  And while it didn’t affect us directly, I can say that to a certain extent, the flood gates were opened in our house. 

Or, in other words, something big happened.

Wait for it.

My son, my first born, my beautiful, now three year old boy, has officially gone tinkle in the big boy potty.  He peed, I cried.  Don’t think I’m perverted, but I also thought it was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, even when some of it landed on the floor.  As with sleeping in his big boy bed and getting rid of the binky, I had built this moment up in my mind to be something that would be nearly impossible to accomplish.  It caused me such anxiety and stress.  It didn’t help that all of my friends had two year olds who were almost or completely potty trained.  My son hadn’t even gone in the potty once.  Remember, he’s the one who screamed and cried every time I would try to even sit him on the potty.  And once again, I had put unnecessary pressure on myself, feeling the heat of competition and wishing that my son wasn’t such a scaredy-cat.  I felt so much pressure, even after hearing from several moms that “Your son will let you know when it’s time” and “Don’t even try to start until he’s ready.”  This seemed a little ridiculous to me, that a toddler would know what’s best for him.  It kind of goes against every motherly instinct I have, to let him decide for himself when he’s ready.  But I’ll be a son of a gun, that’s exactly what happened.  He just decided.  One night as he ran around naked, he paused and stood in a way that, if anyone has ever had a puppy, is recognized as “the pee stance.”  That’s when my husband, God love that man, asked my son if he’d like to use the potty and I almost fainted when he responded, “Yes!”  Cue the waterworks, for both of us.  Then, miracle of miracles, my husband showed my son how to tinkle standing up.  And not in the little potty that his Gaga had bought for him (i.e. the Cadillac of baby toilets) because that would be too easy.  No, my son actually tinkled in mama and dada’s toilet.  He is the porcelain king!  He skips the minors and goes straight into major league big boy potty training!  There was much rejoicing and singing and dancing in our house that night; lots of squeals and as I mentioned before, lots of tears.  You know I can’t experience this kind of relief without a hint of sadness.  My baby is officially a “big kid now.”  He has gone at least four times a day on the potty since then and is reaping a great harvest of stickers and new underwear.  We are well on our way to overcoming this mother load (no pun intended) of all milestones.  He’s not “trained” yet by any means and we have had our fair share of accidents.  But I see the finish line, and I am full of hope.  I told some friends of mine that I am tempted to put down newspaper like I would for a puppy so as to not turn our entire house into one huge toilet, but I’m just kidding.  I am so proud of him.  I am so proud of my husband, and okay, I’m a little proud of myself.  Let me promise all of you moms and dads out there that, listen, it’s not so bad.

Did you hear me?  I said, it’s not so bad.  That’s quite a different tone than I had in my last blog entry, to be sure.

My son says that a lot lately, “It’s not so bad.”  I guess he picked it up from me after he spilled juice on the floor and I said, “It’s okay buddy, it’s not so bad.”  Now he says it after every bowel movement, “It’s okay mama.  It’s not so bad.”  After every fit, “It’s okay to throw fits sometimes mama.  It’s not so bad.”  And after every time he falls, he shakes his head with tears in his eyes and convinces himself, “It’s not so bad.”  How reassuring and promising, that whatever it is he’s dealing with, he knows it’s…not so bad.

Lesson learned.  I take his lead.  I just have to relax and go with the flow.  Why does it take so long to learn lessons like this?  Time and again it’s been proven that if I am just patient and remain faithful, that most things will just work themselves out. 

As if the miracle of my stubborn son peeing in the big boy potty wasn’t enough, we were told last week that the neighbor is going to cooperate with the prospective owner of my mother’s house and we are set to close, or at least try for the second time to close, in just two short weeks.  I admit I am scared because of what happened the last time.  I pray every night that this thing works out and please God, don’t let anything else go wrong, as if He was the one who let it go wrong in the first place.  Silly, self-indulgent Carrie.  But this time, I see the finish line.  I am full of hope.  It’s just the way of life, I guess.  Storms only last for a short time. You can’t worry about when the next one will come, just get through this one.  There’s hope.  The rain will stop and the sun will come out.  The other day I saw a double rainbow and I thought, yes, there it is.  There’s my promise.  Now I can be grateful, which is what I should’ve been all along.  Because honestly, if I didn’t go through all of this, I couldn’t look you in the face and say with all sincerity, “Hey, it’s not so bad.”

I promise.

Running Up That Hill

I’ve had a series of bothersome dreams lately.  I am talking with my dad and in mid-conversation I realize that he’s not alive anymore.  I say to him, “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”  And then I wake up, disappointed. 

A couple of days ago my son, who’s going through a phase now of asking for things over and over again, asked me fifty times in a row if we could go to grandma’s house.  He followed me into the bathroom and said, “I want to go to grandma’s house.”  After a long process of first ignoring him, then explaining to him that grandma was at the doctor’s office, and then promising him that we’ll go see her tomorrow, I finally had enough and turned around and said as a matter of fact, “Yeah, well, get used to disappointment.”  I shamed myself for teaching my son the word for when he doesn’t get his way, the feeling which is responsible for the fits of crying and the begging.  Now he knows what to call it; disappointment.  He didn’t understand what I meant and of course kept asking to go to grandma’s, but I thought, wow, so far that is the most cynical thing I’ve ever said to my son.  I said that.  Me...who is supposed to be an optimist.

So bear with me.

A friend of mine asked me recently when my next blog entry will be and I had to admit to him and now to all of you that I’ve hit a wall, creatively speaking.  I like to keep my topics somewhat light, unless I’m obviously working through some inner demons and therefore devote entire entries to sad or profound subjects such as family members dying or Chinese mothers.  Lately, well, there just isn’t a lot of “funny stuff” going on in my life.  I like the funny stuff.   I know you do too.  We all know I like to laugh at myself.  I like to confess the most embarrassing things about my life because I’m naïve enough to picture another mom out there nodding her head in agreement and laughing at herself too, right before her own kid comes into her room covered in lipstick or missing a huge chunk of hair because she found the cuticle scissors in the dresser drawer.  There’s something universal in laughter.  When we all laugh at ourselves, we are united.  We are harmoniously telling the universe that this is our response to the seemingly random ups and downs that life has to offer.  No matter what happens or how much crap we have to endure, our senses of humor will remain in tact, if only to make it through one more day.  I like to think of it the way Matthew Wilder did, “Aint’ nothin’ gonna break my stride, nobody’s gonna hold me down.  Oh no, I’ve got to keep on movin’.”  Only instead of “movin,” I’ve got to keep on laughing. 

I don’t have to tell you that life isn’t always like an upbeat ‘80’s tune.  If these are my true confessions, then I have to tell you something that you probably already knew but that I’m too stupid to admit.  Lately, I’ve been a little sad and disappointed.  Isn’t that awful, that I can’t just come out and say that?  I am disappointed.  I’ve hit a wall not just creatively, but in my efforts to help and financially stabilize my mother.  For a year and a half now I have been working towards one goal, to put my mother into a new house and to sell her old one.  For a year and a half we've been spending money, working with lawyers, worked our fingers to the bone, juggled the responsibilities of two households, family members have died and one had a stroke…and the night before we were supposed to close on the house and find some peace and resolution in this project, our realtor calls and tells me that it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to waste anymore space describing the details of how the selling of my mom’s house in Maplewood has almost altogether been sabotaged by her next door neighbor, but I will tell you that something has come up that was unexpected and has to do with about three feet of shared driveway space and that I myself am powerless over the situation.

I hate that feeling and that god-awful word, powerless.  When you feel like your fate rests solely in someone else’s hands and that all of your hard work was in vain if all it takes is one person to ruin everything.  They have power.  You have none.  Lately, this “not so funny stuff” is affecting my every day life.  It's why I haven't written in a few weeks.  I feel like a fake.  I talk about joy and laughter and try so hard to be optimistic, but when I’m alone, I’m scared and unsure.  I am full of doubt.  I am disappointed so often now that it is filtering into my dreams and even my parenting.  And then again the dreaded pressure, which I try in vain to elude, creeps in.  I feel like when I’m around people that I should try to laugh and tell funny stories.  I feel like if I have nothing encouraging to say, then I have nothing at all.  I also take it upon myself to be the optimistic and upbeat one in any given circle of friends.  I don’t want to be so encumbered with my own business that I can’t take on the problems of my friends and listen to their stories.  This is all in my head of course.  I’ve admitted so many of my failures and insecurities as a parent on this blog, why am I scared to admit my fears, as a person?  I’m still a person, in spite of being a parent, right?  I’m still an optimist in spite of being disappointed.  Right?

Watching and reading the news lately hasn’t helped much with my feeling of disappointment.  But it is keeping me grounded.  My problems are so small.  I read an article on the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and now, the nuclear threat in Japan.  A woman and her five year old son waited in an evacuation center as her husband was working to try to avert a nuclear disaster nearby.  She said, “I cannot imagine the future at this moment.”  My heart went out to the woman who stood next to her boy, her precious baby, as the world around her broke, drowned, and burned.  Mothers have to be so strong.  Being a mother has made me weaker and stronger.  Weaker in that now I have something huge at stake that relies on me to protect it and holds me accountable for everything I say and do.  Stronger for the same reason.   This poor woman had lost so much and was at risk of losing so much more.   I felt her loss.  Then I was disappointed in myself.  I have everything.  My problems are nothing compared to the suffering this woman is going through. 

I'd like to think that if I lost everything tomorrow, I'd still remain hopeful in Someone that is much bigger and greater than me and my circumstances.  At least I'd try to remain hopeful.  Sometimes I feel like it would be easier to not believe in God.  Then I wouldn’t feel the misguided need to hold Him accountable when things go wrong just because I give Him the credit when things go right.  It might be easier to not believe in Him, but for me, it just isn’t possible.

So how do you overcome disappointment?  I’m trying, you guys, I really am.  I’m trying to listen for whispers of encouragement and keep my eyes open for signs.  I’m trying to believe that the suffering on the other side of the world isn’t the result of a cruel or uncaring God, no matter what the cynics say.  I’m trying not to ask the same questions as they do.  I’m trying to believe that there’s a good reason that my father in law had a stroke after taking such good care of himself, and that there is more good that will come out of it.  I’m trying to believe that my good intentions to change my mother’s life will not fail after all of this hard work.  I’m trying to convince myself that when I wake up from those dreams saddened that my dad is no longer alive, at least I can take comfort in my belief that he is somewhere.  At least, I’m trying.  At the most, I’m...trying.