Growing Pains

-->

Those who have sent a child off to kindergarten or are about to embark on this journey can relate to my melancholy and nostalgia tonight. It began when I opened my laptop at work this morning. The default site for my Internet browser is my district’s website. A seemingly innocent choice, but today, much to my sorrow, the district had posted the dates and times for kindergarten round up.

I’ve known this day was coming for quite a while. Reminders keep popping up in the most unexpected places that my little boy is going to be “school-aged” next year. First, it was Target, where we had to abandon the comfort of racecar jammies and Sesame Street shirts and move across the aisle to the size 4-6x racks. I shed more than a few tears over the fact that there will be no more puppy dog-themed outfits, but that I will now have to buy clothing covered in skulls and cross bones (he’s going to kindergarten, not joining Hell’s Angels for crying out loud).

While gathering ideas for our family vacation this summer, I was looking up information on a popular theme park. As I scanned the admission prices, I noticed that by summer R will no longer be four and under. More tears.

Outgrown car seats, the end of the pages in the baby book, and moving up on the dosage table on the back of the Children’s Tylenol box; all signs that I should have heeded, yet I was still caught off guard by that screen this morning.

I’m excited for R. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s ready for the challenges of kindergarten, and I look forward to watching him go from preschooler to elementary student, but I’m also wistful for the years that are now behind us.

A couple of months ago, I was cleaning out an envelope of old papers that had been stuffed in the trunk in our bedroom and forgotten. I came across an old piece of notebook paper from the winter that R was two. Hastily scrawled across the page were funny things he had said or done that year. Here are just a few of my favorites:

One night we were sitting in the living room after work and daycare, playing before dinner. R turned to me out of the blue and said, “You’re a feisty girl.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before bedtime one evening, R was really wound up. He had been talking and chattering for almost an hour non-stop. Suddenly, he became very quiet. I asked him what was wrong. “I think my mouth needs to take a rest,” he said.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not long after he was potty trained, R was at daycare when he told his daycare lady that something in his pants “hurt.” Concerned, she checked out the “situation” and found that it was caught in the waistband of his underwear. She fixed the problem and turned around just in time to hear R say, “Ahhh! Better.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One day while we were playing outside, R climbed inside his red, blue, and yellow Little Tikes car and announced to me that he was “going to the grocery store.” He proceeded to drive the car to the end of our driveway, then turned around and drove back to the top. As he climbed out of the car, he said, “Hi mom! I’m home from work as a doctor.”

During a recent baby shower I attended, the guests were asked to write a piece of advice for the new mother-to-be. I noticed that one of the guests had written this: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Truer words were never spoken.

Veggie Tales

-->

Dinnertime. A part of my day that I have come to simultaneously anticipate and dread. On the one hand, I love the image I have created in my mind of the four of us gathered around the table, trading accounts of our day. R smiles and asks if someone can please pass the steamed carrots. J compliments the seasoning on the tilapia, and the baby coos sweetly from her high chair and patiently waits for a refill of her sippy cup. Norman Rockwell took his inspiration from my vision of the perfect family dinner. Unfortunately, when humans replace paint strokes, things have a way of turning out differently.

First, there is the dilemma of what to fix. The tastes in our household are varied. I love foods of different colors. Fajitas with red, yellow, and green peppers, salads with tomatoes, avocados, and feta cheese, broccoli in my soup, and blueberries in my oatmeal. At least two of the people in my house seem to be going through a yellow, brown, and white phase, meaning if it isn’t one of those three colors, you can forget about it. J prefers meat at every meal, while I would be happy with the occasional piece of turkey or chicken. The sight of raw hamburger makes me want to gag, but I love seafood, which J has never developed a taste for. As I survey the refrigerator each night, I get a glimpse into what it must be like to be the leader of the free world. The balance of world peace lies in this one decision. Once made, some will be overjoyed, and others will revolt.

I refuse to make multiple meals to appease the masses. In the short term, this would probably be a viable solution, but do I really want to live the rest of my existence as a short-order chef? Instead, we have established some rules for dinnertime:

1.     No one has to eat anything they don’t like for dinner. If you don’t like dinner, breakfast is in 12 hours.

2.     If you don’t take at least one bite of everything on your plate, and eat a pre-determined number of vegetables, don’t ask for an after-dinner treat. If you’re hungry enough for cookies, you’re hungry enough to eat your asparagus.

3.     If you whine, cry or disrupt other people’s dinner, you will be asked to leave the table. (My husband has only had to leave the table once on fish night.)

4.     If you choose not to eat, you will remain at the table until the family is finished eating. (I’m going to have my Rockwell moment, dammit!)

On a positive note, my son has become a master negotiator. He’ll see your three bites of peas and raise you two graham crackers. (Maybe someday when he’s a government diplomat, he will recount the many dinners of his childhood and dedicate his memoirs to me.)

A couple of weeks ago, my mom served broccoli for dinner at her house. R solemnly announced to her that he only eats the “hairy” pieces. Confused, she finally realized that he prefers the tops of the broccoli and not the stems.

Another time, after I referred him to Rule #2, he wailed, “But I’m only hungry for things that aren’t good for me!”

K has recently decided to get in on the fun. I noticed the other day that she was methodically picking through the pieces of food that were not to her liking and throwing them off of her tray. I said her name (in a stern tone) and shook my head no. She looked at me, grabbed another handful, chucked it off the high chair and shook her head right back. How do I argue with that?

While art history books praise Old Norm’s (can I call him Old Norm?) portrayal of realistic images of family life, I have my doubts. For example, none of his paintings depict whining children shooting peas out of their nostrils and smearing ranch dressing in their brother’s hair. The mother is always smiling, while the father looks adoringly upon his well-behaved brood. The vegetables in the middle of the table are described as “nature’s bounty,” not as “eewy,” and no one appears to be banging an empty sippy cup against their head. The white tablecloth is spotless, as if it hasn’t been sitting in that morning’s spilled cranberry juice for 8 hours. I just don’t buy it.

Love, Guilt, and the PTA

-->

Mothers of my generation face a unique predicament. Having watched and/or studied the struggles of our foremothers to carve a place for themselves outside of the kitchens and laundry rooms, to trade house dresses for pinstripes (remember Dress for Success and giant shoulder pads?), and grilled cheese sandwiches for work luncheons, we feel compelled to prove that we too can have successful and fulfilling careers. On the other hand, many of us (my cohort group here is female friends and family members) either secretly or outwardly feel guilty about putting our children in daycare 8 hours per day while we earn a paycheck.

I don’t think stay-at-home moms are immune to mommy guilt either. Even when I’m home with the kids during the summer, I worry that I’m not playing with them enough, that they’re bored, that I should spend more “quality” time with them, do educational activities like reciting works of Shakespeare and creating dioramas of the world’s various habitats out of shoe boxes and construction paper.

We all know (or have heard about) selfish mothers. The ones who use the grocery money to buy crack, and allow their toddlers to wander the streets at will. But most of the women I know do not fit into this category. Instead, we overcompensate. If we took a poll, I’m willing to bet that more than a few of us have found ourselves frosting cookies or cupcakes to look like clowns/cute animals/holiday decorations at 2 in the morning for a classroom party the next day. How many mothers do you know who are up early on Halloween to put the finishing touches on the costumes? And mom is almost always the last person in bed on Christmas Eve.

Where did we learn this? Probably from our own mothers. I can clearly picture my mom staying up until all hours of the night before a junior high school dance to finish sewing my dress together because nothing in the store fit my exact specifications of 7^th-grade fashion. She sat through my sister’s 3-hour dance recitals, arriving an hour early to get good seats, and spent several blistering summers learning baseball lingo so she could cheer on my brother’s team (and my mom doesn’t even LIKE baseball). Mothers make sacrifices, not because they feel guilty, but because they love their children. And we do it gladly. Check the manual; it’s in the job description.

Maybe I’m stereotyping here, and I apologize if there are exceptions, but fathers don’t seem to share the same guilt. I’m not suggesting fathers don’t love their children just as much as mothers and spend just as much time with them. If truth were told, J is much better at just sitting and playing with the kids than I am. I’m more of the planning, organizing, and executive function in our household. But when it’s time for fathers to take a break, they seem better able to do so without feeling the need to rush through to get home to the kids. We moms could learn a lot from their example.

A few weeks ago, I got strep throat for the first time since I was a kid (Note- Strep throat is either MUCH worse in your 30s, or I’m just a much bigger wimp than I was when I was 6). I was lying in bed thinking that I might die, but also going through the running list of things I SHOULD be doing instead of being sick. It was a weekend, so I was feeling guilty that I was missing out on precious non-working hours with the kids. This experience got me to thinking.

Moms get tired, and sometimes we get sick, and sometimes we just want to lie on the couch and read a book. It’s okay for kids to learn to play alone and to sometimes be bored. (If I recall, the best games, plays, forts and costumes happened when adults weren’t involved.)

So my resolution for this year is to try to feel less guilt when I spend time working out (that’s my other resolution) instead of going to pick the kids up right after school. I also want to reconnect with my girlfriends who I extraordinarily miss. Most of them have their own children and guilt, or will very soon so it’s a challenge for us to get together. But we need to laugh and drink wine before we aren’t allowed to imbibe because the alcohol will react badly with our blood pressure medications.

I also want to practice being. Being is the state of consciously doing one thing at a time, something at which fathers excel (I meant that as a compliment in case it didn’t come across that way). If J is watching TV, he watches TV. If he’s playing with the kids, he’s playing with the kids, and so on. Conversely, if I’m watching TV, I’m also checking my e-mail, attempting some new project that will not be recognizable when placed next to the picture I saw of it on Pinterest, or making a grocery list. Often, when I’m playing with the kids, I get up in the middle to check on dinner or straighten up the living room. My goal this year is to enjoy whatever it is that I’m doing in the moment instead of constantly thinking ahead to the next thing that needs to be done or what we can do next with the kids.

German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Nothing is worth more than this day.” Maybe he was on to something. Happy 2013!