The Good Enough Mom

I question my ability to mother every single day. Some days I get it right. Other days I get it very, very wrong.

It’s easy to announce all the wondrous things I do as a mom but the truth is, in my mind, there are very few things to shout across the universe about.

I get up at the ass crack of dawn not because I want a jump on motherhood but because I want an hour of peace and quiet with my coffee and computer before the wild rumpus of life begins since I do actually live where the wild things are.

The boys…oh, the boys!…they will fight in that way that boys do. One has no filter or boundaries while the other is going through some big changes that make his temper volatile. I don’t stand between them like the zebra-striped referee anymore because it makes me tired. I shrug and walk away. Let them work it out. If someone hits the floor, well…they hit the floor.

I no longer make up fun and age appropriate words when I need to release my inner bitch, especially in the car. Alternatives such as ‘fudge’, ‘cheese and rice’, ‘shitake mushrooms’, and ‘son of a biscuit’ -why are they all food-y?? –  just don’t have the same soothing affect on my damaged psyche as the more lively words. I don’t incorporate them into every sentence but they do make it in from time to time and, yes, my kids are around.

Fuck, shit, and son of a bitch release an amount of tension even Xanax can’t touch.

You can quote me.

I don’t always feel like making lunches so my kids are forced to eat the shitty school lunch. They live to tell about it, and tell about it they do, to which I respond heartily and without so much as a grin that it didn’t kill them.

Dinner is pretty much the same. I hate to cook but I wake with the best of intentions every day…going to the grocery story, buying all the organic and good-for-them things but more often than is probably “motherhood correct” they get chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese….the processed Velveeta kind.

Oh! And let me not leave out Hamburger Helper.

Long ago, I quit trying to be the mom who gives the greatest and most creative gifts for teacher appreciation week. I do manage to bake Pillsbury pull apart cookies and put them in a pretty recycled Birchbox and my go-to gift is a Starbucks gift card. Not creative but it gets the job done.

I’m not above telling them that I’m going to sit down and write or catch up on reading or nap and that unless they are bleeding, and pretty badly, they should think twice before stepping into my personal space.

I tell my homeschooled daughter to skip the schedule some days and take her shopping. I’m a shitty learning coach on the days my Kohls cash is going to expire.

When I am in the throes of anxiety and can’t catch my breath I go to my twelve year old daughter and hold her hand. Some say that’s a lot of pressure to put on a twelve year old. I say you don’t know her.

I yell, I slam doors, I threaten to throw their crap in the yard or run it over with my car if they don’t pick it up. If they don’t bother to tell me they don’t have clean socks or underwear for school, I tell them to take it out of the hamper and turn it inside out. That’s their bad.

But….

my kids know I love them. I tell them every single day, more than once. More than twice.

I show up. To all the things. Always. I am now and will always be their biggest (and loudest) fan.

They know without a doubt I would turn the world upside down for them and then lay down my own life if it came down to it.

They know me well enough and, better yet, respect me enough to give me the time I need to deal with being human. Most of the time anyway.

My daughter sees me in all my imperfect, insane glory and sometimes she comes to me, just to hold my hand for five minutes because she knows, even when I try to hide it, that my mind is spinning and my heart is pounding; she knows just from the look on my face or the tone of my voice. She realizes I am not a super-human. Just a regular one dealing with life and some of the less pretty stuff that comes with it.

They eat just as much healthy food as they do garbage and are all growing and glowing to show for it. The proof is in the penciled marks on their bedroom door frames. Did I mention they love Hamburger Helper?

The boys haven’t killed each other yet and I’ve only seen a couple of marks. I grew up in the days of far less paranoia and fist fought my brother until he outgrew me by a foot and I knew I could no longer win. I’m still here and I’m fairly sure they will be too.

My daughter is finishing her honors courses with all A’s and a B this school year. Retail therapy is obviously a fantastic tool.

The teachers may not say, but sometimes do, that the cookies and Starbucks cards? They are the best gifts ever.

As for the words. They are just words, expressive and colorful. If they are going to say them one day it will  be with or without my help. Mostly, they just ignore me.

I’m not a perfect mom. I don’t need to be.

My kids love me just the way I am…flaws, bad cooking, anxiety, curse words and all….I am their rose with many thorns.

I am a good enough mom.

They wouldn’t trade me for all the chicken nuggets and mac-and- cheese in the world.

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Pixabay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How I Built My Summer Kitchen

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten  ~  Natasha Bedingfield

If I stop and look back at the past few months I find that I have been in a very bad mood.

I try very hard to be an optimist but I have to admit that lately I find myself standing with my toes on the edge of that fine line that crosses into the land of pessimism. It has become harder..near to impossible…to keep the mask of optimism in place.

Perhaps it’s the never ending angst and calamity in the world. In the interest of time I won’t list all of the hate by category, i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation….. so let’s just call it what it is:

People against people.

These stories seep into my brain to the point I want to scream out loud and I have to turn away in despair and utter exhaustion.

I know there are still many, many good people in the world. They want to make things better, make things right. What I am finding the more I look around is that this is becoming an uphill fight. Up a hill the size of Everest.

In addition to any outside influences, my inner turmoil is affecting my already finite patience. It is at this point little more than a distant memory. I have none. My desire to be nice seems to have packed a small bag and joined the exodus. I feel like an emotional volcano, waiting to erupt at any moment without warning spewing crazy, burning rain down on the world. Anybody and everybody in it. I have been taking ‘fake it ’til you make it’ to a whole new level.

I have just felt like checking out, moving out and moving on, disappearing into the proverbial woodwork.

My life is run like a machine. Constant movement. Continuous motion. No time for anything but what the job entails and yes, I have days when I think of raising my children and running my household as a job. One with lousy pay and meager benefits at best. On the rare occasion I find my self alone in my car, on yet another tedious errand for toilet paper or some other trivial shit, I turn up the music and consider never coming back.

My sanity returns just long enough to scream, “Stop!”

Yes, it is mentally draining to hear about the indifference or disdain people have for one another but why am I letting the pessimism and anger of the world affect me so drastically?

When will I wrap my head around and learn to accept the fact that with age comes change and not all of it good?

Why would I even consider for a millisecond leaving a home full of the people I love the most, who love me back and consider me their most important person?

Because sometimes it’s hard? Because I’m tired?

Fuck that.

Yes, life can have periods of time when it feels like a load of bricks with one, two, or three more being piled on daily. It can be painful and the struggle to carry it can seem impossible.

If I lift my head for one moment….raise my eyes to life level and see what is in front of me, have the good sense to shrug off the weight of martyrdom and self pity for just a moment, I will see many in front of me. Folks with wheelbarrows and work gloves paired with strong shoulders and willing hearts to help me unload that burden.

If I shrug off a brick at a time, two if I’m able, I can focus on what’s important in each minuscule and very fleeting moment in time.

I know if I just allow it more of those bricks will fall away or be lifted away by others I didn’t expect.

I imagine one of the most interesting thing I will find is that of the people standing in front of me there is a mix of not just family and friends. There are strangers, too.

I am making the effort to bring back kindness to my life.  I realize that this is the only way the bricks will fall. My life is not a job. It is a gift. Every day I wake up warm and healthy and each night I will go to sleep clean and well fed, surrounded by people who love me even if these days they are simply tolerating me, and I get to do things so many others wish they could.

I get to hold these precious people, my family, for every single second that they allow me and thankfully that is still quite often.

Most importantly, I simply get to live. Where is my gratitude for that simple grace?

So today, I will work on dropping the bricks. I will bring the kindness back.

I will be generous with compliments.

I will hold open a door.

I will smile at strangers.

I will pay something forward.

I will make time for silly.

I will love and be loved.

With each act of kindness another brick will drop.

And I will use them to build myself an amazing summer kitchen.

 

In my recent mindset I have had a terrific case of writer’s block. This post was quite literally written in my head while my husband and I were laying bricks for a summer kitchen on my back deck…proof positive that a writer’s inspiration can be found just about anywhere. 

 

 

 

How To Save A Life

I’ll be your keeper for life as your guardian
I’ll be your warrior of care your first warden
I’ll be your angel on call, I’ll be on demand
The greatest honor of all, as your guardian

~ Guardian, Alanis Morissette

I opened the door and there they stood. My drug addicted daughter, who had the good sense to leave her piece of shit husband in the car, and my 3 year old grandson. My first thought is always that he looked so pale and dirty. And unhappy.

They walked in with his tiny suitcase, which I will open later and find it holds only a few items of clothing, most of which don’t fit. There were no toys. No stuffed animals. No books. Nothing offering the comforts of ‘home’.

That is likely because he didn’t have any of those things. Including a home.

She walked in to the kitchen where my husband and a notary are waiting, papers lined up on the kitchen table.

Two days prior, my daughter called me and asked me if we would take her son. They had no home. She and her husband fought all the time. He was a thief and a drug addict. Come to think of it, so was she. They needed someone to take this boy…because he’d become inconvenient.

My husband and I scrambled to find a family lawyer that could get this done quickly before she had a chance to change her mind and take off because neither of us believed this little boy would survive what was coming.

I don’t believe she doesn’t love him. I know that she does and I know the pain she was in at that moment as she approached the table and eyed the words on paper that, instead of legal jargon, said in her eyes, “I’m a failure as a mother. I am giving up the right to call my son…my son. I will have no rights to him. He will no longer be mine. I am giving up this little person who loves me more than anything, despite my faults.”

She signed the papers and with a quick goodbye, she walked out the door. She walked out the door without her son. For all intents and purposes, he was now mine.

In the midst of lawyers and judges all in a span of two days, I had made him a room in this, his new home. There was a big bed with clean sheets. There were toys offered up by my then seven-year old son. There were stuffed animals lovingly placed on the bed from the stash of my then eight-year old daughter. Clothes that my son had outgrown that I had been saving for him were now clean and folded, stored in the drawers of his very own dresser.

The delight in his eyes was heartwarming yet sad because there is something he didn’t know.

He doesn’t know she isn’t coming back. The task of telling him has been left up to me. What is worse? He doesn’t know who I am. He thinks I am a random stranger because in their whirlwind life of addiction and chaos we didn’t see him much for two years. The only time he’s ever stayed at our house overnight was the night my daughter was being arrested for shoplifting at Macy’s and I had to go pick him up so they wouldn’t call social services.

He came to live with us on September 15th, 2011. My daughter asked us to keep him for six months.

He is still here.

I love him and I’m happy to have him. I think my daughter did the right thing and I never in a million years would have said no. Never.

Since the day she left, she stayed high. She’s called me suicidal and I’ve spoken to her on a cell phone, trying to find out where she is while having my mom on the land line calling 911 to send help to her. I’ve put her in rehab facilities, hospitals, and pulled strings to get her into a domestic violence shelter while her husband was sitting in jail, only to have her leave and go back to him as soon as he was freed.

For two years I raised a troubled kid, because all that he had witnessed and been subjected to had fucked him up. He was holed up in dark places with only God knows what going on, moved from place to place. The first time I put him in a bathtub to clean his dirty body and hair, he screamed like a wild animal the whole time. Why? He was three and couldn’t tell me so I had to let my imagination take flight which wasn’t a good thing. He wasn’t potty trained and wouldn’t be until well into his sixth year. He was prone to violent outbursts. He didn’t have any idea how to interact with other children. To this day he has a hard time making friends. He had no filter and no boundaries and they are minimal today, at best. As recently as this past December at a family dinner he asked me how I knew his mother. WHAT? He still has no idea how he fits in with all of us even though it’s been explained several times.

He didn’t hug. He had never been read a bedtime story. It took him two years to say I love you in response to the same. If I told him I loved him he’d say, ‘Okay’.

She filed for divorce from the asshat but didn’t leave the addict life. She did what she had to in order to feed her demon and I never saw her or heard from her. I think she was just quietly waiting to die while I quietly waited to find out she had.

Her addict lifestyle eventually caught up with her and she went to jail. Then she went to prison. The downward spiral was quick and, I’m sure, very painful.

Whether or not there is a happy ending to this story for them as mother and son remains to be seen. She was released in December 2014. She is living with her grandparents and, thanks to having a family owned business, is gainfully employed. She is working on one thing at a time, keeping her expectations low so as not to overwhelm herself with all that needs to be done to once more become a responsible member of society. She sees her son every week at our home. He deals with it the best he can, usually by becoming obnoxious, because he has no idea how to play the hand he’s been dealt.

Because it sucks.

Except for the fact that he has a very good life. It has had its challenges and not just for him. My other children have had to make adjustments over the past three and a half years and not all of them have been easy.

I had never, ever been called to the principal’s office at school. I have now. Twice.

I’d never been physically pushed into a bathtub by a four-year old. I have now.

I’d never carried a crazed screaming child across a parking lot in 100 degree weather with strangers staring at me like I was a kidnapper. I have now.

I have never felt like I’d saved someone’s life.

I do now.

He has lived with us now for what will be four years this September and there is no doubt he will be with us longer. His mom has a long way to go and being a recovering addict myself I know it’s a tough road she has ahead. I know life would be less stressful if he could just be our grandson, visiting on weekends so we could spoil him and send him home to his mother.

Sometimes that’s just not how things work.

I don’t write this so that others will stand me on a pedestal and tell me how wonderful I am. I’m no saint. I realize that my own active addiction had an impact on my daughter. I am not a victim of circumstance. I am not a victim by any stretch of the imagination.

These are consequences of a chain of addiction, silence, shame, and fear in our family history. I know I am not alone.

That is why I write this.

 
photo credit: Teddy via photopin (license)