I don’t like to whine to my mom, I really don’t. I like to be a sturdy person — a self sufficient person. I like to keep my whining private — you know, between me and Brett. But sometimes I really yearn to whine to my mother because … well, because she’s my mom.
I have cried more to my mom this past year than I have for a long, long time.
So I feel better now. Moms are good stuff (at least my mom is good stuff).
One of the things I whined about is that I’m tired of things not coming easily to me. I want things to come easily. I want to stop having to work so hard because frankly, the thrill of accomplishment isn’t making up for the agony of defeat. I want some reward without any struggle. I want good things to drop into my lap just because I asked for them. (Remember, this was whining — full-out tearful venting.)
My mom, god love her, said, “Well, you’re the girl who sat under the shadowbox and got a cannonball dropped on her head. What do you expect?”
This is true. Shadowboxes are a thing in my family and we all have one (they’re all printers’ drawers like this one in the top picture). Mine doesn’t happen to be up right now because I never did put it up after we moved, which I should rectify like tomorrow now that I think of it. Anyway. My parents had an old Civil War cannonball up in theirs. At least I think it was a cannonball because it was too big to be a musket ball and it looked a lot like this and the measurements sound almost right (I want to say that ours is a little bit smaller but not a whole lot smaller).
My seat at the dinner table was under the shadowbox as I recall and one day as I was sitting there (maybe in the banana chair, which was what we called the old yellow high chair once we grew out of the tray part of it and for a long time I didn’t realize the banana chair was a high chair without the tray and it only became obvious to me when I saw one at a garage sale) when the cannonball tipped out of the shadowbox and landed on my head. (What it was doing in the shadowbox, I have no idea because it was too big to be there.)
Actually, I think it was long after the banana chair but then what do I know? I was hit in the head with a Civil War cannonball as a child and my memory is faulty.
The point my mom was making is that it’s ok to be unhappy when good things don’t drop in your lap and instead cannonballs drop on your head but for some of us, life is just a little bit harder. What’s funny about the way these things work is as soon as my mother says, “Oh honey, sometimes life is harder” I immediately began blinking away my tears and started thinking about all the ways life is easier and in many ways good. I don’t know why this is but when people tell me to be grateful, I just feel worse and when people are all sympathetic (especially when they are my mother or my old therapist who reminded me of my mother), it makes me feel better and not so entrenched in my misery.
Let this be a lesson to everyone who is afraid to offer compassionate sympathy in case it might make people soft! It is my belief that compassionate sympathy actually toughens people up.
Back to my mother. She also told me that my kids aren’t being ruined and stuff, which I don’t really worry about except when I do. I just keep thinking that I didn’t want to homeschool the kids so they could sit around and watch me work even though they’re actually playing and laughing and reading and dancing to Hairspray and running around outside and stuff. Because when I feel bad, I just feel bad not logical.
It also helps that Noah got his Hebrew/Religious school report card with lots of teacher gushing about his kindness and leadership abilities and general smarts, which proves I haven’t broken him (yet). (As an aside, when I met his teacher at some event or other, he asked me where Noah went to school and I said he was homeschooled and the teacher was surprised but then said, “I thought he might be in some kind of gifted program because he’s so bright but homeschooled! Really! Well, that’s wonderful! It’s certainly working for him!” Let me indulge this bragging because lord knows I’ve taken homeschool heat on this blog and I didn’t brag when it happened but today I’m feeling moody and self-indulgent.)
So the kids. They don’t seem to be suffering by having a mother who lives in the basement and only comes up to make banana muffins and force them to vacuum and say, yes, you can play Pandora on my iPod but put it back and other motherly things. I guess I don’t remember my mom being all that, you know, present for me either. I mean, she was always comfortingly there but she wasn’t full of games and tricks and activities so I guess I will cut myself some slack. Only with homeschooling you theoretically are supposed to do stuff with them like build catapults and fingerpaint. Of course Noah never wanted any of that, preferring to play alone without me bothering him (and ask his Hebrew teacher, he’s fine, right?) but it seems like Madison would be more amenable or even enthusiastic about lots more hovering so I wish I could do more hovering.
Talking to my mom made me think that actually what I ought to do is ask Noah to break out the science kits with her because she’d love it and he wouldn’t mind if I don’t make him do it all the time (he is wonderfully easy-going about doing stuff as long as we’re reasonable and even sometimes when we’re not).
You know, sometimes I forget that my kids get a different perspective. So even while I’m hamstrung with guilt over here, it might be that Noah is growing up feeling important and needed. It might be that one reason he doesn’t bitch about picking up the living room or making lunch for Madison or sitting on the front porch with his book so he can keep an eye on her scootering is that he knows I really need him to do these things and I really appreciate it. Perhaps it’s even — dare I think? — a good thing that I can’t do the mothering I want to do. Maybe it sucks for me but isn’t so lousy for the kids after all.
Or maybe I’m just justifying the reality of our lives right now.
(sigh)
In any case, my parents glued the cannonball into the shadowbox with superglue after it fell on my head and I do believe my dad got it in the divorce. (I’m pretty sure he got the other civil war bullets so he likely got that one, too. My mom got the pregnant girl figure from WWII that says “Kilroy was here” so I think she got the better deal.) In any case, it hasn’t dropped on anyone else’s noggin so at least my suffering saved another person from a headache. I can take some comfort in that anyway.
(Madison is going to love the shadowbox. Now I just need to figure out where to put it and where in the hell I put all the little tiny things I had in it. Hmmmm.)
TGIP-Thank God It’s Potluck!!!
Oh, I needed to hear this. That level of comfort, and being able to complain to my Mom is the biggest thing I miss in my life. And, I too have those feelings about not doing enough with my kids… when they are in fact thriving, and doing perfectly well, using their own brains. Thanks.
Wow, this hits home for me in a number of ways… the biggest being that I am currently going through a really tough time with my mom, verging on estrangement, and I am so freakin’ lonely it’s unbelievable. I keep comparing it to a bad breakup — the kind where you are so tempted to run to your ex for comfort… except he’s the one that caused you to need comforting in the first place.
As for the back-and-forth over kids and work: YES.
Oh Michaela, I *hate* it when my mom and I are arguing. I’m so sorry. I hope it resolves soon.
It’s the validation your mom gives you that’s priceless. “Buck up, soldier!” just doesn’t work.
I’m glad you wrote about Noah’s Hebrew school success because, although anybody who knows him can see he’s full of awesome, it’s nice to hear it from somebody else. And we homeschoolers don’t get to brag every quarter when report cards come out.
My mom was not full of compassionate sympathy, or at least not reliably. She tended to blame one for one’s problems, however ridiculous the connection was. And she always told us we were fat. But she had other redeeming qualities, like being more interested in me than any other person on the planet, and I really miss her. I’m having cancer preventative surgery in a month, to prevent the cancer she died of, and I wish she was here to make me casseroles.
To end on a funnier note, this morning I got back from taking the baby to daycare, and my daughter met me at the door with a list of complaints, “Daddy wouldn’t let me take down the legos. And he wouldn’t let me have raisin bran. And my crackers squished my cheese and I don’t like saltines…” And instead of explaining why each thing was ridiculous, such as we don’t play with legos 5 minutes before the school bus, you don’t get a different breakfast after the first one you requested is made, crackers don’t squish cheese, I was sympathetic. For some reason, having her be so kidlike made me really happy today. I really like being a mom, and I think you do too, and I think that’s the key to being a good mom and having happy children.
My kids are both in school now, but even when I was a stay-at-home mom with kids at home, or every summer when we’re all home, I never play with my kids. I set up play dates and then shoo them away to play, I’ll sit on the porch with a book or my lap top while they are riding bikes, I’ll take them to a playground and knit, but I don’t play. My partner will play sports or board games (I hate both), but that’s it. I do stuff with them — we read together, cook together, garden together, clean together, hike together — but their kid world of play is all theirs.
Recently I was talking with a friend whose daughter died leaving two young girls — my friend’s granddaughters — and he was commiserating about the fact that practically all of the protagonists in children’s literature are orphans — or I would add, completely neglected by their parents — and it got me thinking about this device. In children’s literature, at least, you’ve got to get rid of the parents in order to have space for a true kids’ world.
And I think that’s a more normal model for how families have functioned around the world and for most of time. Parents, including moms, have always worked, older siblings have always helped raise younger ones, and adults have rarely ever hovered the way middle class American parents do these days.
I don’t think you need to justify anything. I think if you are unhappy with your work, or with the balance of it and other things you wish you were doing, then your sadness is perfectly justified. I hope you can figure out a plan that will get you where you want to be in a time frame that doesn’t feel unbearable. But your kids are fine. They are more than fine. I think you are probably doing them a favor by letting them be competent and independent and by letting them have some measure in taking care of themselves and each other.
I have three always unschooled children, and for the last three years, I was incredibly busy as a student midwife. It was a huge adjustment, since they were used to having me around full-time, but the sky hasn’t fallen, they are still fabulous, and while I still have moments of guilt, I am seeing that this way of existing can be just as healthy and beautiful. It is rough sometimes, though… and I agree with you that being soft and sympathetic can actual help people find their inner-tough. It feels much nicer than the alternative, too.
Dawn, you are beyond fine. I’ll take a moment to be Twisted Pollyana here and comment that in most of the world, through most of history, Mom was too busy doing any one of the following to properly care for her children — and many of these things still ring true:
1)Hauling water
2)Dying in childbirth
3)Breaking up the hard ground with a hoe in order to plant a crop that might not grow well, therefore thrusting her kids into a life of crime/prostitution when the family ran out of food
4)Tending livestock
5)Peforming backbreaking housekeeping tasks
6)Working as a prostitute (see #3 above — there are sad economic reasons why HIV/AIDS is rampant in some areas)
7)Gathering nuts and seeds, checking fish traps
8)Pounding or grinding nuts or grains into something cookable and eatable
I mean, 3 year old children were exptected to tend the geese at various times/places in the world. Does Madison have to tend geese? No. Does Noah have to break sod? No, he gets to be a SCHOLAR, for pity’s sake! What could be better at Hebrew school other than being kind?
Not everyone can do what you do, but heck, you can write about it and keep us up to date.
That’s a great story, Dawn. I sure wish I had a cannonball excuse for my lack of short-term memory! (You do “know” me, I’m Veggiemama on LJ, you just might not remember me.)
The question I have is – what happened to your head? Did you need stiches? Did you have a concussion? Did you pass out? I think you really need to make more of that story Dawn!
Also, the bit about Noah’s Hebrew teacher and the bragging? We want to hear that bragging! Don’t you be holding back on us now! (I’m sounding sort of Southern US in my head right now, not sure why…)
I didn’t need stitches, I know that, because the only stitches I’ve ever had were (ahem) due to pushing Noah out. I honestly don’t remember what happened after. I remember the sound of the ball hitting and crying and my family fussing all around me but that’s it. I should ask my mom!