Month: June 2016

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You Be Happy, Mama

Sometimes it’s a question, sometimes a demand posed to me by my two year old.  “You be happy, Mama?” has become a common phrase in our home over the past few weeks.  My little one with his bright blue eyes and red, red lips and long blond curls looks up at me, pleadingly, “You be happy, Mama?”  He needs and wants for his mama to be happy.

Smile! Be happy!
Smile! Be happy!

No matter where I am or what I am doing when I hear these words from my little one, they make me pause.  My heart momentarily cracks and leaks, wondering what is behind his often asked question.  Am I doing something wrong with this mothering thing that my two year old feels a misplaced responsibility over my mood? Does he mistakenly believe that we all need to be happy all the time?  How should I respond?

What I typically do is feel an immense sense of mother’s guilt as I pull my kiddo close and say, “Oh, honey.  You don’t have to worry about Mama.  Mama is happy.” The thing is, sometimes that’s a lie.  Often when Mary Tyler Toddler poses the question, “You be happy, Mama?,” it is immediately after I have reprimanded his brother for leaving his yogurt wrappers in the living room or his socks under the dining room table.  In those moments I am frustrated and mad.  Sometimes the little one catches me in a moment of sadness or reflection, thinking of our girl and how she would be turning 11 this summer.

Full disclosure, I am not always happy.  Nope.  Not even close.  And I’m okay with that, because I’m not always sad or morose either.  My emotions are a continuum and they fluctuate.  Sometimes daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes from moment to moment.  Emotions are exhausting, yo.

I understand that my heart breaks a bit when my boy poses this as a question because what he is saying with his words is that he needs for me to be happy.  No pressure, Mom, but get it together and slap on a smile for your little ones.  Stuff the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the grief and be happy, dammit!  It’s for the kids!

If only it were that easy.

I do believe that, overall, our kids do want and need for their moms to be happy.  Happy is secure, safe.  Happy brings hugs and kisses and chocolate milk and adventures.  Happy is calm and peaceful.  Happy is good.

I will never forget, just  a few months after the death of our daughter, I was sitting in my hairdresser’s chair, talking about, well, everything, when she stopped me and said, “Your son (just a year old at the time) deserves a happy mom.”  Her words have stuck with me ever since.  I believed them then and I believe them now, seven years and one additional son later.

I will never forget the therapist we were mandated to see when we were working to qualify for adoption.  The adoption agency was very concerned that my husband and I had never received professional counseling after our girl died.  In an individual session I had with the therapist I revealed that my truth was that I was sad every day.  Sadness is a fact of life for me, like having blue eyes or brown hair.  It just is.  She corrected me, in a coaching manner, to reframe that as “I remembered every day.”  Pffft.  No.  I am sad every day.  I remember, too, sure, but the act of remembering often leads to sadness.

There are messages all around us about the importance of being happy.  “Choose happiness” is a catch phrase I see more and more.  The stick figures on the bumper sticker proclaim that “Life is good.”  Those are wonderful sentiments, but not always realistic.  Some days, happiness will elude you, and life is decidedly not good for all people at all times, sometimes life downright sucks.

But back to my toddler and his need for his mama to be happy.

Two years old is a little young to consider the nuance of emotions.  He won’t right now be able to necessarily hold that when I am frustrated trying to hustle two little kids out of the house in the morning, it isn’t a sign that his safety and security are in jeopardy.  For him, in that moment, they are.  I need to respect that.

Where I can help him better understand and slowly come to appreciate emotion is when he demands me to be happy.  “You be happy, Mama!” is quite a different beast than the more vulnerable and empathic, “You be happy, Mama?”  The question form has a kernel of empathy attached to it and an awareness that, in that moment I am not acting happy, while the demand form is almost brutish.  BE HAPPY, DAMMIT.  Because I say so.  Nope.  Changing my emotion based on the demands of my toddler is not a good thing, methinks.

Motherhood and parenting is hard.  So much of it is working to stay in tune with the emotions of our little ones.  What messages are they sending us?  What is the subtext in their communication, especially when words are not fully in place?  What are they needing from us right now, in this moment?  Another part of mothering is modeling for our children that emotions are healthy and natural.  They are to be felt and not feared.  And they’re not like watching TV with an OnDemand button.

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Camp Mom: Muck My Life

This is a cross post blog experiment with dear friend and fellow blogger Katy from I Got a Dumpster Family.  You can read Katy’s post HERE.  

I love my friend, Katy.  She is awesome and amazing and so dear to me.  She wears high heels and red lipstick and is smart as a whip and as compassionate as anyone you will ever meet.  Trophy friend!  Occasionally, we get our kiddos together and somehow manage to get a few minutes of adult talk in, in between the “Be carefuls!” and “Pick up your hat!” reminders that we cheerfully call out to our kiddos.

Two mom bloggers walk into the woods . . .
Two mom bloggers walk into the woods . . .

This week we made plans to have a Camp Mom date.  Specifically, a nature walk.  Camp Mom is something I devised the first summer my boy was out of school and I hadn’t really ironed out a lot of plans for him.  Most of his friends would be in camp for those weeks, so, out of optimism and desperation, I started calling our time together that summer “Camp Mom.”  Simply put, Camp Mom is anything we do together over the summer months that is not as lame as going to the grocery store, but not as cool as the museum camp weeks I can never quite seem to get my act together to register for.  Possibly because you’re supposed to do that stuff in February.  I am definitely not thinking of summer in February.

Anyway.

Now that Camp Mom is in its fourth year, lots of my friends have signed on with their own versions, Katy being one of them.  We decided to combine our Camp Moms at the Linne Woods this morning for the aforementioned nature walk.  Blue skies, fresh air, green trees . . . what more could our kiddos need?  The weather forecast was a perfect 83 degrees with bright sun.  Lovely.

We met at the woods.  We were both running a few minutes late, Katy because she picked up chocolate donuts for all the kiddos (I told you she was a trophy friend!) and me because, well, me.  After brief hellos and kisses, I mentioned that despite the boots I had encouraged her to wear when we finalized plans yesterday, I had opted out of them for any of us, despite my husband’s encouragement.  Pffft, I thought, it hasn’t rained in two days, we’ll be fine.  Katy agreed, noting it was hot and none of the kids would be comfortable in heavy boots.  You can think of this conversation as foreshadowing, my friends.  Also, because we both adore shoes and are dorks, we had texted one another photos of the boots we would be wearing.  The yellow ones are Katy’s, while mine are the polka dotted wonders.

It's amazing what pops up when you Google, "hooker rain boots."
It’s amazing what pops up when you Google, “hooker rain boots.”

So, yeah, no boots were worn.  We started out on the paved path easily enough.  Aside from the angry cyclists screaming out, “TO YOUR LEFT!” to the toddlers and moms who kept clumsily crossing the yellow line on the path, we were doing just great.  Soon, though, the kiddos were hungry and knew there were chocolate donuts to be eaten.

After seeing some horses and riders emerging from one of the wooded trails, we decided to find some logs and let the kids enjoy their sugar fix.  They did.  It was time to walk again.  “Watch out for horse poop!” I called ahead to the little ones happily skipping ahead of us.  Yes, this was a trail frequented by both horses and humans. Toddlers love horses, so it added to our excitement.  Katy and I hung back a bit, me lazily pushing the stroller that held Mary Tyler Toddler and the pile of things that accumulate when you go for a walk in the woods with kiddos — diaper bag, extra snacks, mini-backpacks, water cans, empty donut bag, etc.  We chatted a bit and caught up.

Soon enough, we ran into another group of horses and their riders.  Three or four older ladies who paused as we collected kids and clung to the edge of the path.  I love seeing the horses up close, but as the riders passed, a group of older women, they called out with a smirk, “BE CAREFUL OF THE POISON IVY!”  What?  Oh damn.  Yep.  Katy’s two little ones, in an effort to get out of the path of the horses had sure enough sat on clumps of poison ivy.  “If leaves of three, let it be” was not really something any of us were thinking about in that moment.

Oy.

Katy quickly pulled out the wet wipes and gave those twins the wipe of a lifetime.  I encouraged her to bathe them as soon as they got home to get any residual oil off. But this was Camp Mom, yo.  We are mothers, hear us ROAR!  Onward we went, dodging what seemed to be increasingly big pools of mud.  As we walked, we commented, too, on those horse riding gals who seemed to wait for our kiddos to sit in the poison ivy before gleefully shouting out to us as they passed, “You know that’s poison ivy!  Watch out!”  Clearly they never got the memo about it taking a village.

Soon enough, my oldest boy was leading the troops and was occasionally out of eyesight.  Before we knew it, Katy’s twins were out of eyesight, too.  Whoops.  We sped up our pace a bit, as best we could, because those puddles of mud and standing water were quickly morphing into pools of vast mud and muck and horse shit (poop that has become water logged and smeared with dirt now qualifies as shit, yo) as far as the eye could see.  This was not good.

Two walking toddlers, one toddler in a stroller, a bigger kid, and two moms.  We all convened while the moms hashed it out.  Move forward into the muck, certain to ruin my super cute purple Nikes and Katy’s fresh pedicure?  Retrace our steps back, hoping against hope that the increasingly tired and hungry toddlers would make it back to the cars?  This was serious business, my friends.  I made a case for separating, but Katy would have none of it.  We were in this together.  This was Camp Mom, dammit — no moms would be left behind on Katy’s watch.  Onward, we agreed!  Into the muck it would be!

So, you know, that’s what we did.  Katy went ahead to keep eyes and ears on the three bigger kids while I lagged behind with the stroller.  I tried to push, but with mud several inches thick on the wheels, that stroller needed to be pulled, not pushed.  So pull I did.  Those purple Nikes are trashed my friends.  The ooze of the mud and shit is all up in every single crevice that exists on those shoes.

As I huffed and puffed and swore once or twice (funny how muck rhymes with another choice word, isn’t it?), my sweet boy happily sat back and rang the bicycle bell that had landed in his hands that morning.  Brrrrring!  Bbbrrrriiinnnnggg! is what I heard while I inched our way through the mud.  Such an awesome metaphor for motherhood, isn’t it?  Muck and shit and sweetness all intertwined.

Two-thirds through the worst of it, I saw Katy come to check on our progress.  And there was a man in blue.  I stood up to catch my breath and Katy, God bless her, confirmed that we were through the worst of it, clear sailing ahead.  And, before I knew it, after a few pleasantries, that man bent down to help me pull that massive stroller to sweet, sweet freedom!  Thank you, kind stranger, for making my day.  Thank you, dear Katy, for snapping a photo of us.

My favorite hero of the day, the man in blue! Thank you, kind stranger!
My favorite hero of the day, the man in blue! Thank you, kind stranger!

Camp Mom, yo.  It’s not for the faint of heart.  But we did it.  Katy and I got through it, keeping our heads on straight, allowing our kids to find the fun in a situation rather than moan and pout and whine.  Nope, we moms set the tone.  With a little help from our friends.  It’s such a good reminder of what’s truly important in motherhood and friendship and life.

#friends #gratitude #muck

 

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In Defense of the AR-15

Earlier this week America experienced its most lethal mass shooting in history.  Fifty people dead, including the shooter, fifty-three more injured. These mass shootings feel almost inevitable to me now, part of our culture. I feel myself numbing to them, this despite two acquaintances of acquaintances being among the victims in Orlando.  I am shamed to admit that, my numbness, to the violent loss of life.

I’ve written about gun violence before, so my stance is well known.  My earnest arguments in favor of common sense gun laws are received well by those who hold similar views and I am torn to shreds by those who disagree.  The futility does not escape me.  But on Monday morning, I found myself drawn to the Internet, reading articles, watching some news footage, quickly closing my laptop at times, lest my toddler be exposed to something no kid should should have to consider.

What I found, in researching the AR-15 gun that was used by the shooter, was what led to this gallery.  It’s a collection of t-shirt graphics, of all things, that pretty much captures how and why the AR-15 is, as the NRA calls it, “America’s Rifle.”  The sentiments on the shirts are evidence of a nation greatly divided.  Rather than talk with those who disagree with us, we shout, we demean, we name call, we seek to silence them, we threaten.

Today, I will devote my blog to better understanding why it is the AR-15 is the most popular rifle sold on American soil, it’s purchases reaching an all time high in the days after the Orlando massacre.  I am holding up a mirror to ourselves, our division, our passion and obsession with guns, our beliefs. And I will let the t-shirts speak for themselves, but not without a wee bit of commentary.