Author: Sheila Quirke

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I Am a Mom

This is part of the ChicagoNow Blog-a-palooza challenge.  Once a month all bloggers are given a writing prompt at 9:00 PM and instructed to write our little hearts out until 10:00 PM when all involved post simultaneously. Here is today’s prompt:

Write about something you learned or experienced since you woke up this morning.

Dammit.  I have not left the house today.  I did manage to change clothes, though, but that was sort of a bonus and not really intended.  I was standing in the downstairs hallway, just outside our laundry room, and realized I had been wearing the exact same clothes since Monday.  Today is Wednesday. That’s over 48 hours in the same fleece and Lands End stretch pants, and yes, underpants.  Ugh.  I stripped naked in the hallway and added them to the mounds of laundry, already separated, just waiting for me to take it to the next laundry level.

What in the hell has happened to me?, I thought to myself, standing naked and shivering in the cold hallway — I’m such a mom cliche.  Like a bad mom cliche.  And then it hit me:  I am a mom.

Whoa.

When in the Sam Hill did that happen?

Well, technically, it started about 8:10 AM on the morning of July 20, 2005, when my oldest child was born.  But that is when I became a mother, not necessarily a mom.

Those are different things, you know.

Today, all day, throughout the day, were these kind of, sort of LOUD announcements that I am a mom.  Standing naked in the pile of laundry was one.  An obvious one.  Doing dishes three times today was another.  Feeling stretched between my crying, hungry baby and my little boy home sick from school with a fever was in there.  Seeing my hair pulled back in a ponytail was one, sure.  Oh, yeah, and there were those piles of Christmas boxes needing to be brought back downstairs and no one to do that but me.

Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.  “MOM!  Can you put my juice on a coaster?!”

I honest to goodness never aspired to motherhood.  In fact, I think I was the least maternal woman I knew.  But things change, and so did I.   And now, right now, being a mom is the most important thing I do.  It is a repetitive gig. God love motherhood, but it is mind numbing at times.  The dust and the dishes and the laundry and the bed making.  I about want to scream some days.

But then a baby smiles at me in a way he smiles at no one else.  And I swoon.  And find the strength to wash his bottles and bibs.  Again.  And again.

Today, late in the day, really, the baby was sleeping and my boy was comfortably watching television.  I crept downstairs to tend to that laundry, still in progress.  For the first time in hours (days?) I was alone.  No one in my arms, no one clinging to my neck, no one asking for a snack or art supplies. I took in a full breath and moved the laundry.

Rather than cart the clean laundry upstairs to fold and put away, I opted to fold it downstairs.  It felt luxurious, that folding of laundry all alone.  I clicked on the television and those Real Housewife bitches (who you never see doing any damn laundry — real housewives, my ass) kept me company for the 20 minutes it took to fold the bibs and burp clothes and towels and boxers and super hero t-shirts.  Dare I say, it was relaxing, those twenty minutes of solitude and laundry.

As I made my way up the stairs, I heard a whimpering, a sniffle, a padding of footie pajamas on the hard wood floor.  Is that Mary Tyler Son, I wondered?

It was.  And he was scared and crying and looking, suddenly, not much bigger than his three month old brother.

“Mom, where were you?  I was worried,” and then another round of fresh tears burst out.

The poor honey.  I dropped the laundry, scooped up the boy and cradled him in my arms just like I would the baby.  You don’t really get the chance to cradle four year olds much anymore.  I soothed him and assured him and apologized profusely.

“Mommy’s here, pie.  Mommy’s here, sweet pea.  Mommy’s always here.  I will never leave you.”

I am a mom, a MOM, dammit, and these little people need me, rely on me, worry to the point of tears when they don’t know where I am and think I have left them all alone on a cold winter’s day.

That is some serious stuff, my friends.

So today I learned, that I am a mom.  And I have the kids and laundry and dishes and dust to prove it.  I am a mom.  That makes me one damn lucky lady, laundry and all.

Laundry

 

 

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Christmas Memories

Tick tock, tick tock, folks.  Christmas, that most stressful/joyful of holidays, is only a week away.  Hop to it, am I right?

Not me.

I get reflective this time of year.  Things are winding down, a new year is about to begin, another year is ending.  I miss the people I love who have died.  I think a lot about all the years that have passed, all the Christmases that have come and gone.

As a parent now, I am the one responsible for helping my sons make their first Christmas memories.  I want them to be happy memories, joyful memories, loving memories.  So, I do what I can, suck up my grief and sadness, and get about the work of “making memories.”

For me it is work, always has been.  Along the continuum of Scrooge and Merry Martha Stewart, I fall somewhere left of center, inching dangerously towards Scrooge.  But I try.  I do.  And the trying helps.  It’s best for my kids and, no doubt, I could try even harder and it would be even better for them. Sigh.

This year, I find myself thinking a lot about my Donnas — my Mom and my daughter, both buried now, dead from brain tumors that took them too soon.  I think about my childhood Christmases and my eyes well up on an almost daily basis right now.  Water works, folks.

One thing that helps when I feel sad and weepy is just to embrace it.  Wallow a bit.  Feel all the feelings.  So here they are, a few of my memory snapshots that have me weeping this year.

  • I remember the potent smell of dust and must as I stood behind the heavy draperies in my childhood dining room looking out the windows up at the night sky on Christmas Eve, scanning for Rudolph’s bright red light, guiding Santa to our home.
  • I remember the Christmas I had chicken pox and spent the whole holiday in pajamas, separated from my brothers, sisters and cousins.
  • I remember Midnight Mass and how very crowded the parking lot was and walking into church up way past my bedtime and my breath, visible in the cold, stretching out in front of me.
  • I remember the year I proudly wore burgandy colored knickers, Calvin Klein brand, bought in a flight of indulgence on my Dad’s part, after telling me about the knickers he wore as a boy.
  • I remember how incredibly stressed and short my Mom would be trying to corral all us kids to clean up our holiday loot before the guests arrived and how all that stress and shortness just disappeared as soon as the door bell rang.
  • I remember being the youngest of four kids all piled in my parent’s dark bedroom on Christmas Eve, feigning sleep, anxiously waiting for Santa to arrive.  The doorbell would sound five, six, seven times, my Dad’s voice would boom out, “HO, HO, HO!  Merry Christmas!”  A few moments later we were allowed to run down the stairs to a living room full of Mom, Dad, Grandma, and our two nuns/aunts, settled around the sofa and the tree surrounded with wrapped gifts.  In just a few minutes the gold carpeting would be littered with scraps of gift wrap and smiling faces.
  • I remember licking the homemade crochet bell ornaments made by my Baba (Croatian grandmother).  They tasted like sugar, year after year, as she had dipped them in sugar water to help the fibers harden.
  • I remember the sound of the tea kettle, calling us all to the kitchen table on Christmas Eve, sandwiched between our gift opening and our Midnight Mass sojourn, for cookies and cheer.
  • I remember the artificial tree, well past its prime, that challenged anyone who tried to construct it, just one more year.  I remember the toy blocks, red and blue squares, that we had to nudge in between the tree and the silver screws that barely did the job they were charged to do — keep the tree from falling over.
  • I remember Baby That-a-Way and Tiffany Taylor — both Christmas gifts and the only dolls I ever played with my whole childhood.
  • I remember being at a Knights of Columbus Christmas party and entering the whistling contest.  We had to eat a number of saltines and then whistle into Santa’s ear.  The first one to whistle won a prize.  That poor Santa’s ears were flooded with half chewed saltine globs, mine included.  Poor, poor Santa.
Clearly, I was ambivalent about Christmas at an early age. Me and my brother, c. 1973.
Clearly, I was ambivalent about Christmas at an early age.  Me and my brother, c. 1973.

I could go on, but I won’t.  My own tree still needs trimming, my boy is home sick with a cough and headache, and very soon, the baby will need a bottle.  I’m the Mom now, not the kid, despite still feeling like a kid myself.  There are some memories that need making and as hard as it is, I want those memories to be sweet ones.

Love to you as this Christmas countdown continues.  Feel free to share your own Christmas snap shots.  I will read them tonight over cocoa.

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Newtown: Speaking Up About Gun Violence

A year ago tomorrow I was driving home from a lunch with two old friends in Milwaukee.  Mary Tyler Son was giggling in the back seat and I called my husband to let him know when we would be back in Chicago.  He was audibly distraught and asked if I had heard the news about the latest school shooting.  I hadn’t.

I waited until my boy fell asleep and then I turned on the radio.  It didn’t take long for me to start crying.  I didn’t have to see any footage of desperate parents or scared children.  Just the idea of what had happened a few short hours earlier was enough to cue my tears.

For a few days there, my little corner of the Internet sobered up.  We empathized when we picked up our children from school that day.  We collectively strategized about how to discuss a school shooting with little ones.  We confided in one another about our fears and our vulnerabilities. And then, well, life went on.

Except for a lot of families in Newtown, Connecticut, life has not gone on as before.  Their lives are forever changed after losing someone they love, twenty of them children, to gun violence.  Their lives are a shadow of what they were before that December day.  Those families have forever lost their innocence.

One of the details that has stuck with me is hearing from parents of slain children what it was like to have the clothes that their child was wearing the day of the shooting returned to them. The clothes tell the story of what really happened in those classrooms.  They have holes that shouldn’t be there and are covered in blood that shouldn’t be there.

The clothes tell the truth of what guns do and how they kill.

Something changed for me that day last December.  I spoke up about guns. As a blogger, guns are sort of like religion and politics — they are taboo. They provoke too much intensity on the Internet to create discussion. Instead, when you mention guns in your blogs, people tell you you’re an idiot and threaten to teach you about why you should own a gun in the first place. They talk about knowing your address and how many kids you have.

It’s scary, to be honest.

But enough is enough.  Something needs to change.

You can argue that the problem is really about mental health.  I won’t disagree with you.  Our mental health system is as broken in America as is our gun regulation.  I dream of a day the mental health lobby is as powerful and feared as the gun lobby.  We will all be better off.

Today another school shooting occurred in Colorado.  A high school student brought a gun into his school and harmed two students before killing himself. Not an hour after that was reported I am already starting to see status updates blaming the mental health system for failing the shooter, his gun a seemingly insignificant detail.

Give me a freaking break.

Enough is enough.

We need to do better.  All of us.  I don’t give a flying fig if you own a gun or not.  The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, if you feel the need to do so.  Have at it, folks.

But if those arms can be bought without any sort of delay or registration, yes, I have a problem with that.  If those arms are the type that soldiers use in combat, yes, I have a problem with that.  If they are left out in a place that kids can access them, yes, I have a problem with that, too.

Common sense gun laws.

The impact that the children and families of Newtown had on me was significant.  Some would say, living in Chicago, that my response is hypocritical, as gun violence is epidemic in my hometown.  That’s a fair assessment and I own that.  Somehow, it’s been too easy for me to chalk up Chicago violence to gangs and drugs — things that are well out of my day-to-day life.  Newtown helped me to see the global aspect of gun violence on children, including those in my own back yard.

Here’s the thing.  You read my words.  You’re reading them right now.  My blog is a part of life for some of you.  That is some hard core stuff.  And so, I use my voice now, when the spirit moves me, to write about guns.  I worry a little about if that could hurt me or my family in some way.  I worry more about staying quiet about something so important.

Right now, Mary Tyler Son is standing over my keyboard asking the question, “What are you writing?”  “Well, I’m writing about guns, and how they hurt people,” was how I responded.  I want him to know, just as I want you to know, that we need to do better in America where guns are concerned.  And I will keep writing about it, too, until we do.

Since last December 14, here are the posts I have published about gun violence:

I get that I’m one mom blogger in a sea of thousands.  I know that while 25K folks might follow me on the Facebook, I’ll be lucky if two thousand of you read this post.  I’m not curing cancer here, I’m not testifying before Congress, I’m not organizing protests or leading marches.  But I am doing what I can to educate and start a discussion about the impact of guns on America.  And the reason I am doing that is because of the 26 people who died on December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut.

I write for Charlotte Bacon and Daniel Barden and Rachel D’Avino and Olivia Engel and Josephine Gay and Dawn Hochsprung and Dylan Hockley and Madeleine Hsu and Catherine Hubbard and Chase Kowalski and Jesse Lewis and Ana Marquez-Greene and James Mattioli and Grace McDonnell and Anne Marie Murphy and Emilie Parker and Jack Pinto and Noah Pozner and Caroline Prividi and Jessica Rekos and Avielle Richman and Lauren Rousseau and Mary Sherlach and Victoria Soto and Benjamin Wheeler and Allison Wyatt.

I write these words because sometime after that horrible day, the families of the people who died got a package containing clothes worn by someone they love, most of them children, and that clothing had holes and blood that shouldn’t have been there and that blood and those holes told the story of how their loved one died.

And nothing about that is okay.

Newtown Angels