Category: Parenting

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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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How My Mother Made Me a Mom

I was not that little girl growing up that knew she always wanted to be a mother.  I rarely played with baby dolls and never had interest in babysitting as I got older.  Raising children just didn’t seem to be my calling.  And that was okay with me.

Even when I married at age 30, children seemed far away – something on the horizon, perhaps, but perhaps not, too.  My life was full, and good.  I was working, very happy and satisfied with being a social worker, helping older adults cope with the challenges of aging.  My career was my identity.

Every six months or so my husband and I would get around to the subject of having kids and every six months or so I would keep putting him off.  I had waited a long time to get a proposal, the least he could do was return the favor, and give me time to make a decision about having or not having kids without undue pressure.  At least that is what I kept telling myself.

Truth be told, I was not that interested in having little ones.  My life was wonderful without them.  I loved my work, I loved my husband, and our home together.  We traveled and enjoyed a lot of freedom.  The idea of losing that to make room for children and diapers and sticky fingers was not one that appealed to me very much.

But life has a way of changing our plans, doesn’t it?

One afternoon my office phone rang.  It was a nurse in an emergency room in Biloxi, Mississippi.  Was I Sheila Quirke?  Was my mother Donna Quirke?  Yes, and yes.  That nurse was sorry to inform me, it appeared my mother had had a stroke.  My father had been informed and was on his way to the hospital.  My mother had asked to speak with me.

My heart was racing.  A stroke.  I knew what that meant.  A shiver went through me.  My Mom got on the line.  Her voice was almost unrecognizable.  She said, “Okaaaayyy,” like a question, and kept saying “okay” over and over and over.  Except it was not okay.  I knew in that moment that things were definitely not okay.  Her words were slurred.  She did not sound at all like herself.

Over the next few weeks, my family would learn that it wasn’t a stroke that my Mom had suffered, but instead, an undiagnosed brain tumor that had started bleeding out.  As soon as she was stable enough to travel, my Mom was flown back to Chicago where she would have surgery to remove the tumor.

It was cancerous.  Her neurosurgeon told us bluntly that she would die from it.  He was right.  And the damage that was caused by the bleeding was irreversible.  My Mom would never walk or talk or read or be independent again.

Just like that.

I used to pride myself in how late I would stay at the office to finish up paperwork.  It was the dullest part of my job, so I would always put it off until the end of the day when the phones stopped ringing and I could sit in quiet and concentrate.

But when my Mom moved back home, all of that changed, too.  At 4:30 on the dot every afternoon, I would leave my office and get in a car to travel to my parents’ home.  There was laundry to be done and groceries to be bought and dinner to cook.  My Dad would be exhausted from helping my Mom all day, bringing her back and forth to therapies and doctor appointments.  He needed me.  She needed me.

After five years of facilitating a caregiver support group, I became a caregiver myself.  I didn’t even realize it right away, as I was too busy doing.  Caregivers do, you see, they don’t really sit around and consider.  When the people you love need you, you simply do for them.  There is no other option.

One day, about three months into caring for my Mom, all of this hit me.  Like a brick wall.

I was spending a Saturday with my Mom, giving my Dad a rare few hours to himself.  After I got to their home, I made her bed with sheets I had laundered the night before.  I bathed her, helped her use the bathroom, got her dressed, and prepared lunch for us.

I turned around to sit for a moment and realized, like a switch had just been flipped, “Oh my goodness, I think I am ready for motherhood.”

In that moment I understood with a ferocious clarity that the reason I had kept putting off having children was because I feared my selfishness would somehow preclude me from caring for another living being.  And yet here I was, caring for another living being, caring for my mother – the one who had cared for me.  And I was good at it.  And I didn’t feel burdened by it.

I had convinced myself, in putting off motherhood, that I did not have what it took, the selflessness, to put another person’s needs ahead of my own.  What I had forgotten to factor in was the love.

All of those things I had feared about motherhood were myths busted by the act of caring for my own mother.  Caring was a loving act, an honor, sacred. and I was capable of it, much to my great surprise.

I shared that revelation with my Mom a few weeks later, my motherhood epiphany that I had come to so very late in life, at 35 years old.  Her cognition had changed with her cancer, so I don’t know if my Mom ever truly understood the role she played in helping me find my way to motherhood.  I think of it as one of her very last lessons to me – a gift of love that would take me through the rest of my years.

There is a great sadness in that for me – that I have only ever mothered without my mother.  But then I remember, that were it not for my mother, I would never be a mother.  For that I am truly grateful.

My Mom and I on my wedding day, May 2001.
My Mom and I on my wedding day, May 2001.

 

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Whose Lap Is This, Anyway? Some Thoughts on Motherhood

My youngest is an inordinately active two-year-old.  He and I were cuddling in bed the mother morning.  “Cuddling” is actually a misleading description.  Mary Tyler Toddler is not much of a cuddler.  He’s more of a rough and tumble kind of guy.  He cuddles, sure, but quickly.  He’s like a drive-by cuddler.  He loves to run to me, grab his affection, and then, BAM, he is off to the races.  This kid has bigger fish to fry than lazing around all day snuggling with his mama.

So in those moments when he does want to cuddle, I take full advantage, soaking the fleeting nature of toddlerhood in like it is my last time at the toddler rodeo.   Because, well, it is.  I vacillate between extreme exhaustion slash frustration and a miraculous state of being in wonder and in joy.  And I am not too ashamed to admit the relief I feel knowing he is my last.  It is well past time for this 46-year-old to hang up her raising-young-children-chaps, speaking of rodeos.

And with that awareness that the end is near, I am working hard to be attentive to what it is like living with and caring for and raising a toddler.  This age is a trip. Some days I want to laugh, other days I want to cry.  Take for instance the putting on of the jacket.  It seems this would be a simple enough event for mother and child. Invariably, every single time I reach out to my boy with a sleeve to put on, he offers up the other arm.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Mama takes a deep breath in, and calmly readjusts sleeves.

But I’m here to talk about laps.

Whose lap is this, anyway?
Whose lap is this, anyway?

As we were playing and cuddling on the bed earlier this week, my toddler announced that he would be sitting on “my lap” — not “your lap,” mind you, but his lap.  My lap, you see, was his lap.  I laughed when he said it, playfully correcting him, “Hey, kiddo, that’s my lap you’re sitting in, not your lap!”  We giggled together, the boy appreciating it was a game, but in no uncertain terms, he announced, “NO, MY LAP.  I SITTING IN MY LAP.”

I paused for a moment and realized how correct he actually was.  It was his lap.  I mean, the lap exists on my person, sure, they are my legs, my thighs, but those are really just details. That lap is his.  His spot.  His nest.  His.  He helped me understand.  This was not a lesson on correct use of pronouns, but a lesson on motherhood he was teaching me.

I am grateful to him.

My toddler’s insistence was a reminder of our relationship, how we fit together.  He knows that, at least for now, what’s mine is his.  His needs supersede mine, again, at least for now.  It is how this whole motherhood thing works.  I exist to raise and comfort him, keep him safe, provide him with everything he needs to grow and thrive and morph from baby to toddler to child to adult.

That is the gig.  Motherhood.  Mi lap es su lap!