Clean Fu.
Poop and Redemption
This is a story of poop and redemption.
Our middle child is three, which means he is full of words and energy.
I was so excited to send him fishing with my dad and husband last weekend, for the simple reason that I needed a break from the words. There are so many of them, and he’ll throw in a “MOMMY” just often enough to keep me from completely tuning it out.
In my excitement, I threw a change of clothes and a few wet wipes in a backpack and ushered them out the door. I didn’t ask specifically where they were going. I didn’t pack them any food. There was no pomp and ceremony. I said here’s the backpack, don’t forget the sunscreen, kissed them both goodbye, and shut the door.
You see, when you are where I am in life, you don’t ask questions beyond what is absolutely essential. After almost seven years of constant interruption, Robbie and I have learned how to communicate in shorthand:
Hey.
Hey.
(Insert hand signals so the children don’t know that we are discussing going fishing on Grandpa’s boat.)
Awesome.
Bathroom?
Yes.
Be careful.
Love you.
Love you.
Bye.
Five hours later, I got a text.
Our poor boy got diarrhea, in the boat, in the middle of a body of water. He NEVER gets diarrhea. What are the chances?!
During the second bout, Robbie was holding him over the side of the boat, because apparently that’s what had to happen, as our child simultaneously peed all over him and shat down the side of the watercraft. It was probably at this point that my husband hit rock bottom.
Meanwhile, my dad just kept fishing.
The moral of the story is that from this point forward, whenever I find myself on my hands and knees cleaning congealed oatmeal off the kitchen floor, thinking that today is the shittiest day EVER, I’ll remember the first time Robbie took our middle child fishing.
And then … I’ll feel better.
How It All Began.
October 9, 2005.
Namaselfie.
Sometimes I do weird things in semi-public places, simply for the sake of this blog.
An old lady was totally staring at me while this happened. It’s fine.
Yesterday morning, after I had my coffee, I opened up social media and saw glaring headlines about certain wine brands being laced with arsenic. Rather than looking into it further, I texted my husband and informed him that I know how I’m going to die.
I’m going to die of arsenic poisoning.
“No you won’t,” he said. “You’ve built up an immunity to it by now.” Apparently, a person can actually become immune to arsenic over time by putting small amounts of it in their system.
Whew. That was a close one.
Bitches Spelunk.
I am the mother of three small children.
I am the only child of an ailing parent.
I am a wife, a friend, and a person.
It’s a tight space, where I live. It’s often dark. The oxygen feels low. I have to concentrate to breathe. Sometimes, the air gets squeezed out and I’m breathless.
It reminds me of the time I went spelunking in college. I’ve never been a fan of small spaces, but it sounded like a fun adventure. I could do anything at that point in my life. I was fearless, and would try anything once … which is probably why I have done a whole lot of things exactly one time.
The darkness in that cave was suffocating. I’d never been in a place so pitch-black before. I had to focus my breathing, continually reminding myself that this is fun and I will not die. When we finally burst back out into the open air, I nearly wept with relief.
That’s what this tight space feels like. It feels like spelunking.
I hate spelunking.
But.
I won’t sit down on the cold cave floor and wait for my circumstances to change. I’ll keep moving, keep bumping around and fumbling in the dark because THAT IS WHAT BITCHES DO.
Now, if you know me in real life you know that I’m not a bitch at all. I’m actually a very polite, kind person — the opposite of a bitch, actually. In this case, I am using “bitch” to mean a woman who isn’t lost in the fire, but is made from it. That’s a quote I read somewhere recently, and I love it.
Bitches don’t sit and wait to be rescued from their life. Bitches make their life awesome in spite of. Bitches take situations around the neck and OWN THEM.
I have a good life even though it is happening in a very tight, very difficult space. And I’m still breathing, even though sometimes I have to work at it.
This is a picture of my son making the most of his current situation. No, he doesn’t have a swimming pool to play in, but you know what he DOES have? A BIG PLASTIC BOX.
So darkness be damned, I will make the best of today because that’s what bitches do.
I’m going to OWN IT.
Making Bitterness My Bitch.
Today I took my 3-year-old and my 1-year-old into a public bathroom, not because I wanted to, but because I weighed the options and public bathroom won out over let’s roll the dice and see if we can make it home.
Ironically, because I was so valiant in my effort to keep them from touching every surface within reach, my little girl tripped over my foot and belly-flopped onto the floor of the bathroom stall. Her face may have actually made contact with the tile … it’s unclear because I have already stricken the details from memory.
While I worked to lift her upright and mentally checked into my safe place, my son busied himself with touching every single part of the toilet. Apparently he saw the opportunity to send me over the edge and ran with it.
After almost four years of being a full-time stay-at-home-mom, I’m tired. My nerves are raw. I feel frayed, just like the green blanket that my child has rubbed and loved on until there is nothing left but a mangled, nubby wad of material. A friend told me when I first quit working that there would be a honeymoon period, followed by an adjustment period and settling in. And then, I would either love it or I would hate it.
I feel like maybe I’m in a transitional time where I’m not sure how I feel about it. I do know that I need to do a better job of being grateful for the privilege of being home. At the beginning of all this, I told Robbie on a daily basis how grateful I was to him for working so hard and allowing me to focus solely on raising our children. Somehow, over time, that has shifted to bitterness. Four years of cooking, shopping, and cleaning — all things that I used to enjoy — changed me.
What happened?
I have allowed myself to get bogged down in responsibilities, and I have lost sight of the reasons why I wanted to do this job in the first place. And remembering WHY I AM DOING THIS is where I find my peace and my joy.
So, you know what? Screw bitterness. I’m going to make bitterness my bitch.
I am grateful that I am the one who gets to wrangle my children in bathrooms outside of our home … because no one else could scrub their little hands as thoroughly, and with as much love.
I am grateful that I am the one who wipes their noses a million times a day, because someone else might not notice, or worse — let it run freely (shudder).
I am grateful that I oversee everything that happens in this house, because while that may be an exhausting endeavor, I know things are done well here. No one will get Salmonella on my watch.
I am grateful. I am grateful. I am grateful.
When I take the time to think those words, roll them over in my mind, and write them, I realize they are true. I really am grateful. I just don’t take the time to say it enough.
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Joy.
Daddies, daughters, and pigtails. These are a few of my favorite things.
Not pictured, but also my favorite:
1. When my 3-year-old quietly listens to me read “Llama Llama Mad At Mama” and then says Mommy, I’m happy at you. It makes me happy when you read to me.
2. When my oldest and I go for a long walk and we have time just to chat about whatever, without interruption.
3. When my children are sleeping.
4. Boxed wine.
I’ve struggled lately to find the joy in my life. I’ve found that happens when I get super busy and overwhelmed with things that do not pertain directly to motherhood, and then my kids are all, “WTF, Mother — pay attention to us,” and so they go lick a bunch of toys at the gym nursery and get sick so I will have no choice but to focus on them.
Yeah.
I don’t have a specific answer to the question of “how can mothers find their joy?” But I know that after a good night’s sleep, a strong cup of coffee — okay, maybe two cups — and a close to this hellish week of sick children, seeing their dimpled faces smiling sure did help.
A lot.
It also helped to feed them 4 meals in a row that required zero effort or preparation on my part, the last of which was a trip to our local Burger King, where we allowed them to mash their faces on every possible surface as I prayed for deliverance from whatever germs resided there.
And wine. Always wine.
Everything That Is Right.
They say men are simple and have simple needs, and I agree with this most of the time.
Robbie needs very few things to be happy, but he’s also strangely multifaceted. He can do things like accompany me to a photo shoot and seamlessly alternate between playing with our toddler and making really inappropriate hand gestures behind the photographer to illicit a “natural-looking smile” from me.
If you know me in real life, you know that I’m not very good at producing natural-looking smiles on command. Being put on the spot makes me anxious. This is also why I’m terrible in interviews.
When I was 12, I had a bad habit of closing my eyes at the precise moment a photo was snapped.
Thankfully, I outgrew that.
Also thankfully, modern technology allows for horrible photos to be deleted and re-taken over and over again until a semi-decent one is created. It makes me a little sad that the youth of today won’t have as many awkward and cringe-worthy photos to dig through when they are in their mid-thirties. It brings me a sense of satisfaction to see how far I’ve come since the days of that Laura Ashley dress.
Last weekend, I met my friend Rachel who is an amazing photographer (you can view her site here) so she could get some head shots, because I am trying to be a professional with professional-type paraphernalia like business cards. I have a book to sell, you know. It’s time to get my shit together.
Rachel snapped this unplanned picture of us, and when I saw it for the first time tonight, tears came to my eyes.
Photo credit: Rachel Ezzo Portraits, LLC
This. This is what happens when the background noise fades away, and it’s just us.
We do not live a charmed life. Some days, it feels like everything is stacked against us and nothing is easy or simple and we’re always going to be behind in every possible way. I try not to focus on the hard stuff, but sometimes it’s hard not to.
Whenever I get mad at him or feel like everything is all wrong, I’m going to look at this picture to be reminded me of everything that is right and easy.
Where Are My Earplugs?
Yesterday, I made the grave mistake of looking at the school calendar. The realization of how quickly the school year will end and Summer Break will begin threatened to choke off my air supply.
I wish I could be one of those moms who gleefully await summertime. Those are likely the same moms who do fun activities with their (calm, obedient) children while I frantically try to keep my (energetic, experimental) kids from setting the house on fire. I wish I could be more optimistic and just have fun, but the truth is that I am always on pins and needles waiting for one of them to get seriously injured.
I love my children, but they exhaust me. Does that mean that I’m not cut out for motherhood? I chose to be a stay-at-home-mom. WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! Am I too uptight? Am I doing it all wrong?
I’m admitting out loud, right now, that motherhood is ass hard. That does not mean it’s as hard as my ass, which isn’t hard at all. This is not a literal statement. I mean to say that IT IS SO HARD THAT THERE ISN’T AN ADEQUATE WORD, SO I ADDED “ASS” IN FRONT OF IT. If you can’t get on board with that, then I don’t know what to do with you.
I make this proclamation after a long stretch of parenting issues that individually aren’t that bad, but added all together at once are just a lot. I’m exhausted. I feel like I have nothing else to give, and yet — there it is, another snot bubble on the horizon. There’s another person who can’t figure out how to get his underwear right side in and needs help because he cannot possibly put his underwear on if they are inside out.
At night, when all of the children are tucked in bed asleep, after the middle child has been taken to the bathroom to pee so he doesn’t have an accident in his bed, and I have spent an adequate amount of time with that strange man who lives in the house with me, I insert my ear plugs and pray that whatever rest I get will be enough to get me through the next day.
Today, when I sunk to a low point and looked at the clock for the umpteenth time to see that it was still not 5 p.m., something snapped me out of it. I got a moment of beauty.
Our baby, the same one who tries to stick her head in the oven on an almost-daily basis, learned how to stack blocks.
And I was there to see it.
So yes, I would be lying if all I did was talk about the beauty of motherhood. It’s not mostly beautiful. It’s mostly painful and frustrating and uncomfortable and scary and tiring, with moments of beauty sprinkled in — just enough to make it worth it, but not so much that it’s easy.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
The best part about being a mom is that those sprinkles are all you really need to push you to the next level. My little block-stacker spends most of her time undoing everything I’ve done: she puts important mail in the trash, pulls clothes out of baskets and contents out of cabinets, and tries to systemically empty every box and bin in the house. But damnit, SHE CAN STACK.
I’m a proud, exhausted mama. Now … where are my earplugs?
This Is Three.
Modern Mommy Madness 