On Being Mom

Maybe, of the million life options in front of my eldest, someday she’ll be writing soppy homilies for Reader’s Digest on ‘My Soccer Mom.’  Hopefully I’ve given her sufficient fodder:  “Multitasking like the best of them, my mother worked a full day to support the family, bought my birthday presents on her lunch break, wrapped them while sitting in the stands watching my gymnastics lesson, and stayed up late writing my birthday note.”

There are mothers – hundreds of millions, all over the world – who really do sacrifice for their children.  There are parents who die for their children.  And if that were ever required of me, I hope I would do it as instinctively as the next.  But the thing about being a middle-class American mother is that, frankly, it’s all about being incredibly selfish.

For me, the most revelatory thing about having children is the internal psychological piece of it.  For the purposes, presumably, of continuing the species and all that, there’s a part of my brain that truly believes that my children are not just an extension of myself, but a superior extension of myself.  Back in the days of the sabertooth, that meant I’d leap out and distract the beast (or at worst give it the full meal of myself), while the kids had a chance to escape.  But here in my own fortunate fairyland of a comfortable wage, the family sedan, and suitable clothing for every season,  all this means is that the potential range of my own personal self-satisfaction index is extended three-fold (in both ways, up and down, of course – but since this is a soppy homily, let’s ignore the ‘down’ part).  Any praise given to my children is as pleasing as if it were given to me, any success they achieve as personally satisfying.

I have always been a seriously Type A character, with the prickly need to be best at everything.  I have not only competed with my siblings, my classmates and my colleagues, but I’ve competed with my husband and my best friends.  It’s not a characteristic of which I’m proud, and my only excuse is that during the days of the sabertooth, my having a trophy shelf of sabers in the back of the cave might have been good for the clan, as well as for my own self-preservation.

But my competitive streak is entirely absent vis-a-vis my children (well, not in relation to my children’s relation to other’s children; of course I think of my own as the Supreme Cream of the Crop – but again let’s focus on the positive, here).  I can watch my eldest cartwheel across the floor, twirl around the bars, and flawlessly execute the balance beam, wearing an extremely expensive new Danskin – all things I could never do, in clothing I never possessed – and feel absolutely, completely, and only, deeply proud and satisfied.

There are frightening ramifications of this, such as the intimation of my internal anguish when this piece-of-me seriously rebels against me.  Sometimes I wonder whether the whole ‘teen thing’ isn’t so much the misbehavior of the child, but of the adult parent, who's caught in that sudden realization that the child is, in fact, an entirely separate, and separate-thinking, entity.  Or what of the bewilderment when they leave home entirely?  I never really feared the ‘empty nest’ syndrome, believing myself fully equipped with a thousand alternatives to the way I’m spending my time at any given moment …. but maybe, after all, the loss of two parts of myself will be more than temporarily wrenching.  However, focusing again on the ‘now,’ and the positive:

There’s little in life more satisfactory than being the mother of a new-minted seven-year-old, and her little sister too.

And tomorrow Ms. 6 is.....

Seven!

Singing in Silence

I've never actually heard my current favorite country artist. 

However, I watch one of her music videos at least once, if not two or three times, during my 45 minute lunchtime exercise session (music videos being MUCH easier watching than the headline news, with the two scroll bars of unrelated information and the talking heads talking nonsense, or the latest bash on off-the-mark celebrities, or the latest breathless news of war and destruction).

So I don't believe in headsets in the exercise room.  I want to hear myself breathe.  I also want to catch the amazingly frank discussions occuring between the actual exercisers and their idle hangers-on, talking about the intimacies in their lives in loud tones, as if all us other strangers were just so much livingroom furniture.

But on days when hangers-on are sadly lacking, I read lyrics on the music videos.  And so it wasn't just the fact that Gretchen Wilson looks just like one of my favorite Xangans, it was her flinging a shapely leg over the muddy four-wheeler and then throwing her striped bra in the bin while banging out: 

I'm a redneck woman

I ain't no high class broad

I'm just a product of my raisin'

I say 'hey y'all' and 'yee-haw'

and I keep my Christmas lights on

on my front porch all year long.........

.....and I was hooked.

I've spent a lot of time and effort pretending I have no hint of redneck in me, but I can appreciate a true-blood when I see it. 

I just hope her voice is as good as I imagine it to be.  Maybe I'll keeping waiting to find out.

Taking Stock

So Monday I'm 43.  I thought for a while about this, cleaning up the garden on an unseasonably warm Sunday.  Then I went in and got the digital to illustrate my scattered thoughts.

When you're 43, like your gardening boots, you might show a few signs of wear -- the unpolished surface, the odd rip or tear, the scuffed uppers and the irreparable sole.

On the other hand, there's still a bit of multihued harvest visible amid the wrinkled leaves, every now and then.

And even in this advancing middle-age, there's a green shoot or two; sometimes a bit of young leaf or, startlingly, the occasional flower. 

And there's always the golden fruit of the full-fledged harvest of experience.

Well, okay -- it's all a bit tongue-in-cheek, but still and all I wouldn't choose to be any younger.  And I'm definitely looking forward to getting a lot older (good fortune, good health and any pertinent deity willing).

Vignette

This morning at the local business inn's front desk, a tall man in a conservative suit-and-tie graciously welcomed his overseas business associates:  "Good morning!  How was your trip?  I hope you slept well?"  The guests, also gracious, gave the expected answers until his last question, at which they giggled a little, with the giddy air of slightly sleepless sports fans on the morning-after.  "Oh, no!" they chorused.  "We were watching the American election!"

Their host's face lost that professional politesse, and his response was more curt than was entirely fitting.  "Don't talk to me about it," he said abruptly.

For 51% of the electorate, it's a day of celebration.  And for 48%, a day of mourning. Perhaps really the only thing to be said is: that's a helluva lot of people, both ways.

I'm not sure there's a clear path of healing, but in any case we probably all need to walk delicately for a while. 

In case there is such a path to be found.

Time

"There's not enough time for that," said M.s 4.  "Time?" sneered Ms. 6 scornfully.  "There's always plenty of time."

I did my standard 'open-mouth/close-mouth/think-instead' routine.  On the face of it, the proclamation that there's always plenty of time goes against all the training of my almost-43 years.  Plenty?  What??  Reviewing the maxims imposed on me from infancy, one could argue that time is the one thing of which there is a constant paucity:  Time is money.  Don't waste time!  Can I please have a little of your time?  Time is of the essence.  Time's a-wastin'!  Give me more time!  No time like the present.  Be sure to track your time.  Don't spend time on that!  Time and tide wait for no man.  Now is the time to act!

Literally, however, Ms. 6 has it absolutely to rights, space and time being two of those impossible-to-grasp, greater-than-gargantuan concepts.  Time stretches, without end, from the infinity of the past into the infinity of the future.  There is always plenty of time.

The issue about humans and time, though, is linearity.  Time is linear, and us exceedingly finite humans each own only a very small piece of the Timeline.  So it's not actually time that's in short supply.  It's our existence in time that's limited.

Most thinking adults grasp their own finite existence full well, but most of us also live in a dual reality in that regard.  I know I don't have much more time.  But somehow I manage to live from minute-to-minute as if I had all the time there is. 

It jolts me, in an important way, to meet people who don't have that luxury.  This is one.

Unrelated Excerpts

The girls are collaborating on a pencil-sharpening effort.  What began as Ms. 6 casting about for something to do (because for one day of the week I have refused to bring her anywhere or amuse her myself) has become a game in which she is the matron of a store.  Her job is to sharpen all the pencils.  Ms. 4 has been corralled as a lackey whose current duty is disposing of the shavings flying around Ms. 6.  Ms. 4 is bustling around and bumps into something.

Ms. 4:  Oops, I just broke the most valuable thing in the store.

Ms. 6:  (dismissively)  You are the least valuable thing in the store.

Four continues bustling without comment. 

I open my mouth.  I contemplate the fact that no-one is crying and everyone is engaged (even if one is engaged as an unappreciated slave).  I shut my mouth.

--<<>>-- 

I am walking back from a solitary trot along the bike path over my lunch break.  It’s one of the most glorious days in the world.  The sun is high, the wind brisk, the leaves at the height of their color.  “Eli” is coming back from his own jaunt in the other direction.  He pauses outside the door, waiting for me.  I come up.  He smiles slightly.

“It’s all really useless, isn’t it?” he offers in his inimitable kibbutz accent.  Eli’s world-weary cynicism underlies every word he utters, and to communicate well with him the American needs to turn off linear thinking and turn on (as best we can) the sort of intuition born of millennia of tradition.  Sometimes I manage, and this is one of them.  I smile and nod.  Every other conceivable reason not to stand here in the balmy fall of color (the end of the lunch break, pressing meetings, documents to file, calls to make) does indeed seem entirely useless.

Keeping Up Appearances

Yesterday was kiddie picture day at my kids' school.  I spent some time listening to Ms. 4's preschool staff relive, with many a roll of the eye and evocative grin, their efforts at making all fifteen of their three- and four-year charges sit in some semblance of a collectively photogenic pose.  Apparently the hardened photographer was brought to the brink of tears.  I'm sure the result, however, will be complete perfection.  What would a preschool photo be, after all, without the kid with the finger up the nose, another with the hand down the pants, a third without one shoe, and so on?  It's completely endearing and it's altogether expected.  It's also completely silly that us adults spend any time at all trying to make the kids pretend they don't do these things that we ourselves are only slightly better at pretending not to do -- on camera, at any rate.

America is very much a nation on camera, and even more-so in the last frantic weeks of a presidential election year.  Not being a tv-watcher, and being particularly busy at mommying, working and (non-political) volunteering just now, I've managed to avoid the brunt of the onslaught.  But I can't avoid being on all my friends' "copy all" lists.  So I've got the one that gives you a daily update of predicted electoral college votes, the off-color "celibacy day" joke, the link to purported "family" (actually rather far-removed cousins) of one candidate who are voting for the other candidate, and a variety of funnier and therefore hearteningly meaningless visual jokes from one side or the other.

And then there was Ms. 6's homework in her Weekly Reader.  It opened with a mom-and-apple-pie "nonpartisan" piece to which Diane Sawyer of CBS had affixed her name.  For the political adult it was full of hidden meaning, at least one of which didn't get by Ms. 6 either.  "Mommy," she demanded, "Why does she say that the man who gets the most votes may become President?"  Ah, yes.  Well.  Half an hour's explanation later, we looked at her part of the exercise.  Two big blank circles, intersecting slightly, opposed smiling images of the two main candidates and a brief bio.  Where they were born, where educated, to whom married, how many children, the names and natures of their pets.  'Write in the circles,' said the merry instructions, 'what is different about the candidates and what is the same.' 

I gagged.  "Honey," I said, "Sure, these guys both have daughters and wives and pets and stuff.  But let's talk about what's the same and different about them that really should make people vote for or against them, okay?"

It may just be election year ennui, but in general as I age I find I'm losing patience with fakery.  Can we all just simply admit what's really going on behind the smile?  Even admit we spend half our time with a finger up the nose or a hand down the pants? 

Wouldn't we all be a lot more emotionally stable for that acknowledgement?

Introducing My Halloween Hallmark

There is really nothing like a dear friend giving you an unexpected gift to lighten the spirit.  Pull up a pumpkin, everyone .

Employee Quotes of the Week

Context:  It's Monday.  The women's bathroom is reverberating with the usual chit-chat.  A colleague who bikes to work is changing.  We're in the midst of a political discussion, when she suddenly stops dead:

"Omigawd!  I've lost my bra.  I'd better run out and make sure it's not lying in the entryway."

Response of my ebuddy colleague upon being informed (very much out-of-school) of the incident:

"I'm picturing the bra pinned to the hallway wall in a made-for-the-occasion corporate lost-n-found section with the prominent note: 'Is This Yours?'"