“Every time my mommy takes us for a walk, she’s wearing see-through pants. EVERY. TIME. I would tell her, but I can’t talk, and my brothers are too dumb to notice.”
Monthly Archives: September 2014
The Hacking.
The baby was growing a mullet and something had to be done.
I pondered for several days and polled a few friends who have daughters before finally deciding I could cut it myself. I have one pair of all-purpose scissors that I assumed could handle the job, and I brought them into the bathroom with us when it was time for her bath.
I don’t know how to explain what happened next without sounding completely incompetent.
I gathered up my courage, combed her hair, took aim, and began to cut. But my scissors are so dull, they couldn’t cut through her hair. I stopped and considered the situation. Would it be better to leave the jagged mess I’d created until I could acquire better scissors? I couldn’t leave her in the tub to go search for better ones. Should I forge ahead?
I always, always forge ahead.
I hacked and I hacked and the whole time it was happening I kept thinking this was a mistake, and I was a complete jackass for trying to trim my daughter’s hair for the first time with a pair of kitchen scissors. I flashed back to when Robbie gave Maverick his first at-home “hair cut” right before he turned one. Want to see what he looked like on his birthday? Of course you do.
Maverick looks depressed. I wonder why?
He was bald. I was SO UPSET. Robbie kept saying, it’s not that bad. Well, yes, it was that bad. He looked like he had cancer.
So jackass or not, Pepper and I were in this together, and eventually I chewed through the last of her mullet. The result is fine — she has a cute bob. The sides are still uneven, but I will let a professional address that issue.
Friends don’t let friends hack hair … so if you decide to take matters into your own hands, make sure you get some good scissors first. That was the one detail no one thought to mention. And if you think I should have thought of it myself, try thinking of anything when you have a swarm of children at your feet 24/7, and then get back to me.
Catching Up.
A few nights ago I witnessed Asher accidentally pee into his own eyes. He screamed “there’s soap in my eyes!” And I said no, that’s pee, and as I said it I realized this was yet another situation I never thought of when I first pondered having children.
Robbie: “What’s your favorite letter, Asher?”
Asher: “Cake.”
Pepper still isn’t walking. She will be 16 months old next week. She’s making up for that by talking, though, so we aren’t terribly concerned about her development. She says: No, Mama, Daddy, Maverick, Pepper, Lemme out, I wanna get out, Hi, Hello, Bye-bye, Turtle, Kitty Cat, Monkey, Brother, Baby, Milk, Eat, Bath, Boat, Pig, and a whole bunch of other things. But her legs go limp when I hold her hands and try to encourage her to walk.
She has started getting up on her knees and “walking” on them, which is not as fast as crawling but it puts her up higher. The sweet lady at the gym nursery said she’s never seen anything like it. Well … that makes two of us. At this rate it will be Christmas before she’s walking, and yes, I am in a hurry for her to start. She is HEAVY and I’m tired of carrying her.
Thanks to a book from my parents, Maverick is now an expert on the Dead Sea. If anyone has any questions relating to that body of water, please direct them to Maverick.
You Are You And You Are Love.
My mother is very sick.
She is also a very private person, and probably won’t like that I’m putting on the internet that she is sick. But I am not a private person, and I don’t know how to deal, and by the end of this post you will likely understand why today is the day that I decided to write about it.
My mom and I are close. I don’t have siblings, and my parents were young when they had me — just 21 years old. I was so much older than that when I had my first child; I can’t imagine my 21-year-old self caring for a baby, but my parents were and are amazing. I remember my dad’s 26th birthday … he got an ax, and it totally freaked me out. What did he need an ax for? But there are pictures of him grinning with it, and he looks so young. I guess because he was.
A year or two later, my mother and I were in an accident. It was winter, and raining. She was wearing a plaid flannel shirt. Daddy wasn’t home yet, and she needed something from the store. We set out in the little tan Datsun, which had no seat belts. We were just a mile or two from home when we came upon a car that was sitting in the middle of the road. We swerved to avoid it, lost control, and flipped several times before landing in a ditch.
Esther, that’s my mother, slung her right arm across my body to keep me from slamming into the roof of the truck. When we stopped rolling, I didn’t have a scratch on me but she suffered enormous internal injuries. Neighbors came down and dragged me out of the truck window, and I remember seeing her bleeding hands and being terrified. For years after that she had the habit of slinging her arm across me in the car and I made fun of her, but now that I’m older and have my own children, I tear up every time I think about it. Because of course she held me down. I would hold my children down too, and slam into the roof of my vehicle a million times over if that is what it would take to keep them safe.
Mothers are amazing in what they will suffer for the sake of their children.
My mom has been sick off and on for as long as I can remember, and the doctors could never seem to get to the bottom of what was going on. In the past few years I have grown more and more concerned as I have basically watched my mother die right in front of me. Her skin, which is naturally a ruddy color, turned a shade of green that varied depending on how she was feeling, and finally it started to look gray.
The gray week was the week that her cardiologist told her unless she made some drastic changes, she was going to die.
I found this while going through an old folder of stuff my Grandma saved. It looks like she kept everything I ever gave her. My mom thinks I wrote this in first grade. It’s totally deep, right?!
When a parent delivers news like that, news you don’t find surprising because you already knew it deep down, the absence of surprise doesn’t make it any less upsetting. Once the words are spoken into the air, it’s real and you can’t get away from it. I am a person of action, which is both an obnoxious quality and an effective one, and the very moment she told me I started creating a mental checklist of things that needed to HAPPEN. For the next few weeks I was a mad woman, running myself ragged trying to take control of a situation I have absolutely zero control over.
The thing about grief, or in this case, worrying yourself sick, is that if you’re doing something you think will “help” it more than likely is not helping. It’s only making YOU feel better because you can lay your head down at night feeling like you didn’t just sit idly by and allow something terrible to happen. None of us have the power to “allow” or “stop” an illness, and yet, I had to do SOMETHING.
So I put her on every prayer list I could find. Catholic, Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist … I didn’t discriminate. If they were praying people, I asked them to pray for her.
I prayed diligently on my own.
I loved her even though I was mad at her for being sick, even though I knew she had no control over it.
I cried and I yelled.
It was literally all I talked about to my close girlfriends, BLESS THEM. I can’t say enough how vital close girlfriends are when you’re going through A Thing That Sucks. I love them for listening to me and loving me despite the nonstop barrage I hit them with on the daily. I would say, “I’m sorry I’m going on and on …” but did that stop me? Nope. Not in the least. If you have a friend who is going through something difficult and you feel awkward because you don’t know what to say to her, don’t let that stop you from listening. Having someone listen is incredibly helpful.
Eventually, I accepted that there is nothing I can do but love her through this journey she’s on, and hold tight to the belief that she’s going to get better and go on to live many, many more years. She has to. There is no other option.
I wanted to talk about this before, but it wasn’t the right time. Today is the right time, I think. I hope. I was inspired to share this particular story today because I was talking to her this afternoon and admitted that I’ve been experiencing major anxiety because, hello. Do I even need to explain? And our conversation turned to prayer. I totally believe in prayer. I’m no Bible-thumper, but I believe in God and I desire Him to lead my life even though I don’t live it in the most graceful and serene way all the time.
Okay, fine. None of the time.
Anyway, I said to her “Of course I pray, I ask God every night for protection and guidance,” and she cut me off and said in that stern way only mamas can, “YOU NEED TO STOP ASKING FOR THINGS AND START THANKING HIM FOR WHAT HE HAS ALREADY DONE.”
I have spent weeks, people. Weeks wallowing in deep, strangulating stress, asking and praying and muddling through. And the woman who has the most reason to be asking God for something told me straight up I needed to spend more time thanking God for what He has already done.
Despite everything she has been through and continues to go through on a daily basis, which is a lot, she is still thankful. She admonishes me every time I so much as hint that God might not know what He’s doing up there. Everything happens for a reason, she says. Well … okay. I try to accept that. Sometimes it’s hard.
My mother will maybe be mad at me for writing about her, but I had to because this is the woman who held me down in that truck. This is my mother. All mothers are extraordinary in their own special way, but mine has a distinct grace about her that allows her to happily say “It could always be worse!” even when the walls are all crumbling down. Because she’s right, it could always be worse. She could be dead, and she’s not. Because she’s going to GET BETTER.
So really, this is a damn good day. And if my mother can seize it and be grateful, I will too. And so should you.
Oh yeah … and my dad bought me a book. It’s perfect.
Hi, Honey.
Dinner In Thibodeaux
This weekend, we traveled down to the little town of Thibodeaux, LA. The landscape between Baton Rouge and Thibodeaux looks exactly like what you saw in last season’s True Detective (if you watched it). Sugar cane fields and old plantations, with a bayou running alongside the winding highway. It’s so beautiful, in that strange Louisiana way.
We went so I could see my friend Laure, of Finding Fresh. We stuck our husbands in front of a football game and watched our boys run around like wild Indians while Pepper crawled around and looked cute. All was well — my kids didn’t break anything that I am aware of, and no one said anything wildly inappropriate. This should have been my first clue. As we packed up to head out to dinner, I thought to myself how happy I was that we could visit someone’s home and be a totally normal, non-destructive, polite family of five.
Dinner was wonderful. The restaurant was thankfully almost empty except for the nine of us, and for whatever reason they decided to seat our party right in front, directly next to the hostess stand. Aside from Pepper throwing an absurd amount of food on the floor, we almost got through dinner without incident.
And then it happened.
The boys started getting a little stir-crazy. Asher was burping repeatedly and Maverick must have been laughing with too much food in his mouth and he started choking. I sat there staring at him, trying to determine if this was a real choking incident or if he was just being dramatic. Since I wasn’t taking action, Robbie came from behind me and started pounding him on the back. This is when I realized, hello, my child is actually choking. But he was definitely getting some air because he was able to cough and eventually puke it up. I then went to the weird place moms go when they have to deal with something they don’t want to deal with, and I held out my hand so he could cough masticated chicken nuggets into it.
He coughed with such force that it caused a nosebleed, which I wiped at with my other hand. By the time it was over, his shirt was covered in blood and ketchup and the entire place was silent. Laure and her family huddled on the other side of the table, staring. Later on, she commented on how calm Robbie and I were, but I don’t think it’s calmness. I think it’s desensitization.
When the bar gets set to a certain height, it changes things a little. When Asher fell in glass last year, I was beyond traumatized, so anything that is less serious than that (you can read about it here, or maybe NOT) just doesn’t faze us apparently. But wow … dinner with the Hobbs is kind of exhausting. And dangerous, apparently.
Sunday.
The face Maverick made when I told him he has school tommorrow.
Pirates.
In honor of National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I present to you … a picture of my daughter that she will one day hate. But she looks SO MUCH LIKE A PIRATE.
I like to fish, I like to fight
I like to stay up half the night
When I say “starboard” ye go right!
Me ma, she says, “Ye look a fright!”
– from “A Children’s Pirate Shanty” (find the rest here!)
Googling.
Robbie just found Maverick sitting on the bathroom counter, looking at his nose in the mirror.
Robbie: What are you doing?
Maverick: I’m Googling my nose.
Robbie: … Do you know what “Googling” means?
Maverick: Yeah! It means “to look up.”
(If you liked this post, then you should follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!)
Biscuits & Gravy.
I spend a lot of time writing about how my kids are driving me to drink.
I have blogged for almost 5 years about all the ways motherhood stresses me out. I’ve talked about the things my children have broken, peed on, or otherwise damaged. I’ve lost kids, locked kids in vehicles and houses, and made a fool of myself at drive thru windows. What makes it all so comical is that I really do consider myself to be a relatively capable and intelligent human being. When I got married in 2005, I was a woman who was always put together, knew what day it was and how much money was in her bank account. That person read magazines and newspapers and knew what was happening in the world. I was going to be somebody. I had plans.
I am now none of those things and I know none of those things. With age, I have realized I AM someone right in this moment. There is no more aspiring to become someone. I made three someones, and my plans now consist of getting those people to adulthood in one piece.
I don’t know the date. I don’t know which bills are due when. I don’t know when I last mopped. I don’t know where several important documents are located, or where the slips are that I signed for Maverick’s school. We do not have a family dentist and that FALLS ON ME. The burden of our oral health is resting on my shoulders. It feels heavy.
Women carry an unbelievable load that often is not recognized or applauded, because no one can see it. We carry emotions and feelings and worries and love. We carry plans, aspirations and schedules and love. We carry lists that are written on a million scraps of paper and love. We carry every sad look from our children, every wrong word spoken in haste, every runny nose and strange-looking dirty diaper and nuance that tells us something might be wrong, and love. We notice smells and changes in behavior before anyone else. We see when things are wrong and when things are right, and we know when the toilet is really, truly, absolutely clean … because we love.
Sometimes that invisible load is just so. damn. heavy. I get bitter and resentful and I take it out on my husband and my children, just because they’re there AND THEY WANT SOMETHING. I feel unhappy and alone and certain I’m the only person ever who has to cart around this kind of load. Does any of this sound familiar?
Today I remembered that as much as my children, with their chaos and incessant demands, add to my load … they can also lessen it if I let them. Because children — messy, sticky, loud children — emote joy over things like tall bar stools with seats that spin. They press their faces to glass cases and peer inside at all the different kinds of cake balls like it is the MOST AMAZING THING EVER.
They touch everything. Because they must.
They wake up excited to see what they new day has in store for them, and at night after they have run us ragged, they snuggle down deep in their beds and whisper “I love you, Mommy.” Children love life, and they breathed life into what would have been my very boring existence of knowing the exact date and time.
If you’ve ever wondered why people have children, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why Robbie and I have three of them … well, there you go. They give us as much as they take and more, in their weird, loud way, and I love them more than biscuits and gravy.
Modern Mommy Madness 