Mama, I don’t know how we do it. There’s so much packed into M-O-M that it would be impossible to write a job description. I’ve spent the last few weeks pouring over a calendar trying to carefully plan an appropriately stimulating summer break for my 2 kids while we go to work. I realized the magnitude of this task about 15 seconds after I quit paying for full time daycare and sent my kid to preschool. Here come the holidays. I remember the first time I heard a preschool mom talk about her spreadsheet for summer break when Bailey was 3. I was very puzzled and thought it was ridiculously over the top. I get it now. I kind of need one but can’t figure out how to make one. Sure, there are great summer camps out there, like fairy ballet camp which is destined to be your little girl’s dream come true for the cost of one week’s groceries and only covering 2 hours of your 8 hour day. Oh, and the nine year old boy can’t stay home and wouldn’t and shouldn’t wear tights. I feel like I’m part of a strategic planning committee with the sole purpose of preventing my children’s brains from turning to mush while providing a safe, loving environment free of property destruction. I’m the chair and there are no board members.
And it's the end of school. The last few weeks are filled with testing, parties, and ceremonies, field days, and field trips - all the fillers that they need to fit in the the instructional year or saved for their last hat trick to entertain when the kids are buck wild. The outside activities that are trying to wrap it up too - cramming baseball games into every night of the week, recitals, plays, etc. The standardized bubbled in testing week nearly killed us. Four straight days of bubbling in answers after 3 weeks of multiple choice practice tests sent my impatient and distractible boy into a fit of rage. He looked longingly outdoors as we fought to the finish of 40 more bubble questions. He wore me down to the point where I quit checking the answers and just settled for finishing - I was impressed with his educated guess on Harriet Tubman. And, the folder. Sometimes I forget, ok, maybe a lot. The surprise extra homework makes for interesting breakfast conversation on nouns and verbs. I'm over the conduct grades - Bailey gets to give his to himself and he follows the rules. Kate is 75% excellent and 25% talks too much, so we're good. And the lunches. They are tired of picking out what they want and I’m tired of giving them choices. Even though I never pretended to make the Bento style Pinterest lunch, the lunchables that I used to save for when I was in a real hurry are becoming all too frequent. I’m not proud, but they are fed.
We are tired, but so were our mamas. Forever engrained in my memory is the sound of my mother’s footsteps back and forth across our ranch house’s hardwood floors every morning before she came into wake me up for school. I now know how precisely timed all of this madness was, and what madness it was. She was almost running - the plates in the china cabinet shook every time she walked from the kitchen to the bathroom, bathroom to the bedroom, the hairdryer blowing, curling iron slamming, breakfast cooking, slinging lunches. She even ironed the clothes. Then she went to yelling the wake up calls - first me, then my brother, then my brother, then my brother. I wondered why she drank so much coffee. Poor thing, that coffee slid off her dashboard more times than it stayed on when she backed out of the driveway to go to work and teach other people’s kids, and heaven knows she needed that coffee. I sure do.
And that’s just the every day. On top of that, we are supposed to make productive citizens out of these short people that look like us. The footnotes include conversations on how to talk to adults respectfully and choose your friends wisely, serving as mediator between Coach Daddy and boy child when the frustration turns to yelling over not swinging the baseball bat in the game, and listening to your new reader sound out every word of a 30 page PInkalicious book. Again. Because you, mama, hold the magic key. You understand the souls. You know when and why they are afraid, frustrated, exhausted, sick, need to be held, loved, and understood. You held them, fed them, looked into their baby eyes with your bleary weary eyes every night while the whole world slept. You can detect a fever from across the room, a cough in the middle of the night, and your own kid’s cry among a crowd of 100 kids even if you can’t see their face. You anticipate their needs. You take pride in the quick reflexes it requires to get the trashcan to catch the puke before it hits the carpet and your “seatbelt arm” is second nature even if they are all buckled in the backseat. You can fry bacon, clean a skinned knee, and call out spelling words at the same time. You know what makes them tick, what excites them, and what’s going to make them sad. Because, you will be sad too. You bow up when somebody messes with your baby and the a mad mama evokes more fear in the eyes of coaches or school principals than any other human on earth. When the lunches are packed and they are at school, you start worrying about dinner, spelling words, getting to bed on time, remembering the red bandana and the extra large box for the train you volunteered to make for the graduation ceremony, and what in the world you’re going to do with them when the bell rings on the last day of school.
I was listening to the Today show the other day and one of their segments on Mother’s Day was about how research has been done that proves that being a mother actually helps improve women’s memories. First of all, I must say that it’s absurd that someone funded a research study on this and after I pondered over how much money must have been wasted on this, I laughed. Of course it does. Let’s save that money for cancer research so we can all hang onto those memories a little longer. As soon as you’re handed that baby, you go instantly from a life of self absorption and self-centeredness to focusing on the demands of a precise schedule of feeding and caring for a newborn on no sleep. It’s a rigorous exercises in memory development. At first it’s about stamina but then over time you start taking pictures of things in your mind and store those for later out of survival - where’s the pacifier because if you don’t know, you’re life will not be pretty, where’s Thomas the Train, Lightening McQueen, my baseball hat, my Barbie shoe, that little Happy Meal toy that clips to my backpack, my homework sheet, my red socks, my shoes. Then it becomes just what you do. Your husband calls to ask where the so-and-so is and you instantly shift your brain to the left side of the top cabinet above the washing machine, under the couch in the living room, or the last place it should be - in the closet where it belongs. It won’t do to say, “I saw it somewhere,” so you store it, along with the schedules of 3 people in the house, your grocery list, and oh, yeah, BUY TOILET PAPER. In all that remembering, you also somehow became the holder. Hold the baby doll, the iPod, the gum wrapper, the snotty kleenex, the chewed gum, the cool bug that's barely alive, the limp flower she picked for you, the shiny rock, the dress-up shoes because her feet hurt, the purse you begged her to leave in the car, the five-year-old because she's tired. You are mom. You hold stuff and you know where stuff is.
Yes, it is clear that while the daddys have strengths they are not running this circus. My husband called me this week in the middle of the day to talk about what he might grill this weekend and then another time demanding to nail down our summer vacation plans at that very moment. And, has the nerve to ask about details of some message I sent to someone months ago. I thought you were working? I am. I love him but, really?
But, there are the moments that make it all worth it. There is the end of the day when I’m finishing work on and decided to download the Frozen soundtrack for Kate to listen to so I could get something done. I’m laughing so hard at her passionately singing every word to those songs to my computer that I get nothing done. Or, one day after school last week when my boy made me an afternoon snack of flavored water and peanut butter crackers. You know he loves me because he hates peanut butter. There’s watching him be so excited about getting to play in the infield for the first time, practicing his fake pitches during the game, and then somehow in all that dancing around he was doing, actually stopping the ball. Sure, we lost but he had more fun at that game than any he’s played all year. There’s the night that I decided we had enough daylight after dinner to work on riding a bike without training wheels and she got it, in about 5 minutes. There’s my patio full of flowers I’ve never seen because I let her pick them out and help me plant them, who knows if they’ll live. And, my favorite. There WILL BE handmade Mother’s Day Gifts. God bless those teachers who remember the mamas. We love them - especially the handprint ones.
So, no, my nails aren’t done. Ever. My underwear usually doesn't have holes, I don’t have time or money for massages, or sometimes even my own lunch. I'm more jealous of the gal down the street's minivan with the remote door opener than any convertible I see. But, I’m doing it. I'm there. I’m at the baseball game, the kindergarten graduation ceremony. I pause what I’m doing to watch the neighborhood boys play kickball in my backyard, run out to the street to yell at my kid for forgetting his bike helmet, and drive back up to the school to deliver the picture money and the homework folder. I get my kicks through the excitement in my kids eyes when their seeds they planted sprout up, when I watch them ride a bike for the first time, and when they pile on top of me on the couch every time I sit down. I let her wear red cowboy boots with smocked dresses and pick out my jewelry for church. I take pictures of the chalk mermaid she drew on the concrete, and the first frog of the year that he picks up and squeezes til his eyes bulge out. I take pictures in my brain of her “dance routines” to LET IT GO (bless it), and him running across home plate. I answer questions like, “how do mama birds teach their babies to fly?” and “do you ever get mad at your friends?” because they are teachable moments that I hope will be stored in their memories.
Yes ma’am, we are the CEOs of a corporation with unlimited opportunity and unlimited benefits. We’ve earned the right to say, “because I’m your mother, that’s why” or “because I said so.” We’ve earned the right to a clean house, to use the bathroom with the door closed, to 30 minutes of silence, to sit on the couch and do nothing, get our nails done, or buy ourselves some nice flowers, even if it’s for a day. Of course, none of this will happen and we know it. Even still, the return on our investments will be great. It’s exhausting and never-ending but there’s no better job.
I love this quote from Kelly Corrigan where she compares motherhood to the skill needed in a game of golf:
“Perhaps the precision involved in holing a crucial putt is, by comparison, a smallish party trick when held up to delicate, well-timed conversations about prejudice, self-respect and personal standards, faith, citizenship and STDs.”
Happy Mother’s Day!
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| January 12, 2005 |
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| May 19, 2008 |
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| 1977 |
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| 1986 |
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| 1997 |
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| Mother's Day 2009 |
I wonder what they will remember from the summer. I have tried to think of my own memories and most of them involve time - with my grandmothers, family, cousins, friends. For them, I seriously doubt it will be the baseball camp or inventors camp, hopefully VBS, but probably not pottery camp except for the ceramic bird to remind her one day when she’s 36 and dusting underneath it. It certainly won’t be the hundreds of dollars we forked over for to various people and organizations in our city, but maybe they’ll call and thank us when they write their own checks. I bet it will be their daddy driving them to get ice cream in a new really used Jeep, baseball with neighborhood kids, first sleepovers, crashing other people’s pools, berry picking, popsicles, lightening bugs, catching frogs, watching baby birds grow, riding scooters in the streets even after the lights come on, and being generally carefree. I’m sure it won’t be how their mommy made them make their beds, read books, and organize their legos by color because they don't remember that now. 
