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.