'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.

TIME TO GET ILL

In my teens, I thought that everything my mother said and did was an affront to my fragile self esteem.  I thought that every time we were out in public she should adhere to my strict rules and not speak or look at anyone and sometimes not even move, because the woman brought nothing but utter humiliation to me.  Now that I’m older I realize that I was such a brat.  I had a super sharp tongue and a wall of insecurity.  I took lessons from the Darlene Conner School of Smart Allecks.  Even though there are very specific instances where my mother embarrassed me, like when her slip fell down around her ankles on the steps of my high school surrounded by hundreds of people on the night of my graduation, I know now that she wasn’t trying to embarrass me and more often than not, I was just a terrible, defensive ingrate.  My dad, on the other hand, went out of his way to save his most embarrassing moments for my friends and worse, my boyfriends.  In retrospect, he was a novelty, a real one of a kind.  But back then, as a self-conscious teenager who just wanted to appear normal, he was my kryptonite.  Dad laughed the loudest at his own jokes, which most of my friends didn’t get, and he always sang ridiculous songs at the top of his lungs and told the most absurd stories to my friends.  They politely appreciated his wackiness while I died a little inside. 

Now that I have a child of my own, I realize that anything my parents intentionally or unintentionally did to humiliate me as a teenager was just payback for all the things I did as a kid that probably heaped humiliation upon them. 

Kids are embarrassing. 

I’ve told you enough stories of the public meltdowns for which my son is notorious, but I’m finding out every day that there are deeper depths to this kind of embarrassment.  My son has been sick lately with a cold and congestion that probably started from seasonal allergies.  As a result of this, he discovered the joy of picking his nose.  It started out as an occasional finger in the nose to clear out some of the crusty blockage from his cold but now he’s just camping out up there.  His finger is always in his nose.  He used to pull on his ear as a measure of comfort when he was sleepy, or when he was acting shy or put on the spot.  Now anytime all eyes are on him the finger goes up, you guessed it, straight to the nose.  One time in front of my girlfriends when I asked him to spell “water” he raised his finger to his nose in slow motion.  As they all laughed, he realized that not only did he enjoy a finger in his nose but others must enjoy seeing it there.  That positive reinforcement was all it took for him to cultivate this gross habit.    He’s gotten pretty good at pushing it up there as far as it will go and has even given himself a nosebleed.  It was cute at first, I’ll admit.  I laughed along with my friends when he first started doing it, gently correcting him as I smiled.  But now, well, it’s another thing that pushes the limits of my grossness tolerance.  His habit has evolved, as nose picking does, from finger, to nose, to mouth.  And repeat.  The kid has boogers.  Big ones.  He loves them.  It’s like winning the ultimate jackpot when he pulls out a big, fat, round booger, or boogie, as well call it.  It thrills him to no end.  It’s like a little golden nugget, which I guess is where the term “diggin’ for gold” came from.  His precious boogies are carefully scrutinized, as he inspects them, rubs them delicately between his finger and thumb and smells them.  They are monstrous things.  Who knew a little kid could have such huge boogies?  He’s proud of them, much like he is with his toots.  “Look mama!  My boogie!” he says anytime he pulls one out.   And while I scramble to find a tissue to dispose of the nasty thing, sometimes I make it in time and sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes it’s gone by the time I turn around.  I try not to think of where it went.

I was in Sears with my mom not long ago when my son decided to indulge in his new pastime.  As I was nearing the checkout line, I heard my mom say to my son, “Now,” which is how she starts a lot of her sentences when she is displeased, “Now then, don’t do that.”  I looked around and saw half of his finger up his nose.  “No buddy, don’t do that,” I echoed.  “Don’t do that,” he laughed, mimicking us.  To be fair, it is funny to an almost three-year-old to have two grown women tell you in stereo to stop picking your nose.  But then, it stopped being funny.  Out came a boogie.  A huge boogie on the tip of his finger; a golden nugget he was so proud of that he had to announce, “Look grandma, a boogie!”  My mom pulled him aside and dug in her pockets, then asked me for a tissue.  “I don’t have one!” I said as I searched my bag.  I went to the next best thing, a wet wipe, but by that time my mom had already convinced him to shove the boogie in his pocket.  She’s very resourceful.  He did shove his hand into his pocket but when he pulled it back out, so too came the rubber cement like boogie, stuck to his finger.  “Look grandma!  My boogie!” he said again with all the joy of finding it the first time.  As much as we tried, we couldn’t get him to “shhh” or “be quiet.”  He was getting the best of us and he knew it.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, he’s smart.  Finally, I grabbed his hand and wiped his boogie and threw the wet wipe in my bag.  He cried and pointed to my bag, “My boogie!  Give my boogie back!”  Then he told on me to my mom, “Grandma, Mama took my boogie!”  To which the woman responded, “Ahh, poor baby.  It’s okay.”  United front my you-know-what, she actually sympathized with the little booger, pardon the expression.  That’s when my genius son did a little deducing of his own and came up with an ingenious plan.  “That’s okay,” he said after some crying.  “I’ll get another boogie!”

And so it was.

I’m sure I did embarrassing things like this when I was a kid.  I’m absolutely sure that my siblings have.  I’ve heard my family tell the story of how my sister asked for prayer in Sunday school for our mom because “my dad threw a coffee table at her.”  That didn’t happen.  My dad never threw a coffee table at my mom.  My siblings were terrible children and always getting into trouble.  The best story I’ve ever heard is about the time my siblings caught a bunch of baby frogs on a float trip down in St. James, Missouri and stuffed as many as they could into plastic ice cream buckets.  They then put those buckets in the back window of the car and halfway home, when my dad had to slam on the breaks, down came the buckets and out came the hundreds of baby frogs.  They hopped everywhere.  While my siblings died laughing, I screamed and cried because I was still quite young and the frogs freaked me out.  My dad screamed and cursed and ultimately had to pull over on the side of the highway to exit the car and drop his drawers as tiny frogs leapt out of them.  Standing on the side of the highway shaking frogs off of you with your pants around your ankles in broad daylight pretty much beats any humiliation that I’ve had to endure so far.  So you win, dad.

Payback comes in all forms.  I suppose one day the opportunity will present itself for me to utterly humiliate my son, whether I intend to or not.  I know me, and most likely I will intend to.  One day something I wear around his friends, or say, or sing, or interpretive dance will be viewed through his eyes as “humiliating.”  Will I take pleasure out of it?  Will I go out of my way to pay back my son for all the fits in the middle of stores, all the times I’ve had to carry him in public kicking and screaming, all the “Eurekas!” of picked boogies?  I mean, what am I working towards here if not payback?  That son of mine had better watch out for, in the words of Indigo Montoya, “Humliations galore!”  (Oh yeah, that will be part of the humiliation.  I will randomly quote ‘80’s movies and listen to ‘80’s music around his friends because by that time, the ‘80’s will not be cool anymore.  They will be like what the ‘50’s are now.)  Better yet, if my wildest dreams come true, he will be in a bookstore holding a copy of “Confessions of a Stay at Home Mom” and someone will say to him, “Did you know this woman’s son used to pick his boogies and eat them?”

He has no idea what’s in store for him.  After all, I learned from the best.

Mister Brightside

It is a nondescript Tuesday night.  We are taking yet another family trip to Target.  (We go there a lot).  We walk into the store and in order to cover more ground, and so I can have a few moments of peace in the makeup aisle, we split up.  I am alone and free, at least for a few minutes, to shop without my son.  I am perusing the clearance rack of clothes on my detour to makeup, checking out a few cardigans and raincoats when I hear a faint scream that seems to come from the opposite end of the store.  I move down the rack to cargo pants and, listen.  Wait a second.  I know that scream.  I walk through the shoes, through the cleaning supplies, past the diapers, and into the baby clothes to find the source of said scream.  My son.  Screaming and throwing himself on the ground in the middle of Target.  I look to my husband who’s smiling and who has obviously lost control of this situation.  “Is this funny?” I ask, “Why is he crying?  And why are you smiling?”  My husband tells me that my son tried to pick up one of the red Target page phones and wanted to call Gaga.  (His Gaga, which is what he calls my mother in law, not Lady Gaga.)  My husband took away the phone and that’s when the fit began.  My husband is smiling because he wants the people who watched the whole thing go down to think that he’s a level headed person and that nothing this child does bothers him.  I see right through his mask.  “Stop smiling.” I tell him, incredulously.  I bend down and tell my son, “Do you want to go to school tomorrow?”  “Uh huh,” he cries.  “Then stop throwing a fit.”  And he straightens right up.  Yes, I realize this bribe will not always work the older he gets, once he realizes that school isn’t all that great.  But for now, it works.  I look over to the smiling couple next to us, her belly ripe with pregnancy, registering for a baby shower.  I assume it’s their first and I laugh, “Are you guys sure about this?”  They laugh nervously.  I follow up, “Oh, it’s not always like this.”  Yeah, sometimes it’s worse.

Sometimes I can’t get him to stop.

Ever since I’ve taken away my son’s binky I’ve realized daily just how great a purpose it served.  Anytime I wanted to plug him up (I could’ve used one in Target) I just whipped out the binky and crisis averted.  It also served as a filter.  With the binky in his mouth, he observed a great deal more without actually processing it verbally.  I complained for so long when he wasn’t talking. All I wanted was for him to talk.  Now he won’t shut up.  Seriously.  The kid will not shut up.  Everything he sees and hears is processed out loud.  When he learns a new word or saying, he says it over and over until I regret teaching it to him.  When he sees something he wants he asks for it a million times.  And if it’s not given to him, or if he thinks you’re not listening, he knows exactly what to say and what to do to convey his dissatisfaction.  I have the overwhelming urge to shove something into his mouth, if only for a second of peace.  I lament the binky.  

As my son inches towards turning three, I keep hearing a friend’s voice in my head that said to me a while back, “The terrible twos are a misnomer.  They are really the terrible threes.”  To which I balked, yeah right, because, come on, can it get much worse than two? 

Hear me now.  Yes.  It can.

I’m kidding.  Kind of.  The funny thing about kids is that they learn so fast who they can go crazy on and just what exactly they’ll be able to get away with.  That’s their jobs, to figure out the boundaries and then to push them as far as they can.  Our jobs are to set the boundaries and enforce them.  I get that.  What I don’t get is how quickly they learn the give and take.  I don’t get it when I ask my son’s teacher how he is in school she always says, “Great, he’s so well behaved” and also that he’s “one of the shy ones.”  Really?  The kid who had a roomful of people applauding him as he sang “Single Ladies” into a microphone last weekend at my mom’s house (that says a lot about my family, that we just have random microphones and amps lying around the house, just in case anyone has the urge to break out into song and needs some juice), the kid who danced around like a kid on “Glee” is shy at school?  The kid who throws himself on the floor at the mall when I announce it’s time to leave is well behaved for his teachers when they announce that recess is over?  What’s up with that?  He learns so fast.  Your kid does too, probably.  He knows the difference between mama and the teacher.  He knows very well the difference between mama and dada.  Oh boy.  He knows that I have actually followed through with some of my threats.  Not going to the park if he doesn’t stop throwing a fit.  Taking toys away from him.  Not giving him cookies because he didn’t eat his green beans.  At least I try to set the boundaries and enforce them.  Dada however is such a softy.  He hates to see our son cry.  It’s not like I love it, but I think being a stay at home mom, I am a bit more desensitized to our little guy’s waterworks.  Lately my husband appears like he doesn’t even know what to do when our son throws these fits, besides riding them out, ignoring them or laughing at them like he did in the store.  My favorite is when he responds to these fits by yelling out, “Carrie!” as if he’s sinking to the bottom of the fit abyss and has no choice but to cry out for a lifeline.  Our son can throw a doozie of a fit, I know.  And they have gotten much worse in the last couple of months.  He’s bigger now and it’s getting harder to just scoop him up and quickly haul him out of any public place.  He has my husband’s build so he’s all legs and they flail all over the place when he’s throwing a fit.  This throwing himself on the ground thing is new too.  Verbal skills, plus size, plus a keen sense of observation and self awareness equals a demonstrative attack on all boundaries.  But where I refuse to give in, my husband’s heart caves like a Chilean mine.

I’m not attacking my husband, don’t get me wrong.  I’ve learned a lot so far as a parent but I still feel like sometimes I have no control.  I hate that feeling.  But I feel like I am a master of manipulation and can calm down or avert most fits with a simple “this” or “that” method.  My son is pretty responsive to this technique.  I don’t think my husband has a technique yet.  He’ll learn.  He’ll have to.  He lets my son get away with so much more than I do, so when he tries to enforce inconsistent boundaries, he gets a huge fit like the one in Target.  As I approached the scene the other night, I felt like the situation was out of control and then shortly thereafter, realized that I was the only one with control.

And then it occurred to me that I am the disciplinarian in my household.  When did that happen?