Maverick has asked us repeatedly what “these things” are, and we have answered repeatedly that it is none of his business.
Finally, I guess he wore Robbie down.
“They’re for her armpits,” I heard him tell our son.
“What?! She puts them in her ARMPITS? Why?”
And then … I found him like this.
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Sometimes, like now, I find myself completely overwhelmed with my life and I wonder if something is wrong with me. Why can’t I just chill out and not care about the mountain of laundry shoved in my closet or the toothpaste that got squeezed all over the kid’s bathroom?
I have piles of paperwork-slash-multiple writing projects accumulating all over the house, and just when I get started on one, someone comes along and pushes the papers to the floor, poops their pants, or starts yanking on the cord of my laptop.
Robbie will look at me curiously and throw out comments like, why are you so grumpy? He says that he makes these statements hoping that it will, and I quote, “snap me out of my mood.” I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about how well that works.
Today we all got dressed for church and the children sat nicely on the couch in a row and definitely did not smack each other in the face while they waited for me to take their picture. Asher also did not get upset because his shirt was touching him. He was calm and completely rational.
Maverick listened to all of my instructions and did not squeeze his little sister until she started screaming. And she most certainly did not jerk the bow out of her hair multiple times.
So yes, excellent question, Robbie. Why AM I so grumpy?! Certainly not from tiredness. Since you’re home to watch the kids, maybe I’ll take a little walk and think it over … I’ll come back when I have it all figured out.
I may be gone awhile.
Yeah, we all know parenthood is exhausting, blah blah blah.
It’s emotionally taxing, physically draining, never-ending, HARD AS SHIT. You have heard it all, multiple times, because hasn’t everything about having kids already been said?
It has.
I just keep saying the same things, in a slightly different way, over and over. The thing that keeps it interesting is the children themselves, who continue to say and do things I never would have imagined them saying or doing.
Oh, and first-grade artwork. Which is pretty much the best thing ever.
This monster is totally going to eat me in my sleep.
This month I underwent an unplanned experiment wherein I was stuck at home with two sick kids for over 2 weeks straight. To say “it was hard” doesn’t really do the situation justice. I’m not cut out to be home all the time. I seriously thought I was going to LOSE IT.
Normally if I was stuck inside, I would just write a lot, right? And that would make it all okay. But during this time period I was not able to write because every time I started, Asher snotted all over the floor or Pepper pulled a shelf full of pots and pans onto herself. Because you know, small children.
It was one of those stretches of time where I just had to dig deep and force my way through it. I did not enjoy every moment. I enjoyed very few moments. But the good news is, we made it.
The experiment part is that I couldn’t make it to the gym at all, and this proved once again that exercise is a key ingredient to my mental health. I finally went back today, and after huffing and puffing my way through a class I was elated. You can see here that I was clearly much more excited than the kids were. They really are better, I swear … ?
Then we came home and I had to clean my house, my thighs are sore, the baby won’t nap because she’s cutting teeth, and I am no longer elated. I’m tired and annoyed. I have things I need to do and little hands keep grabbing at me. I just want to lie down without someone trying to sit on my stomach.
I have more to say but the baby is crying urgently from her crib, so I’ll have to stop here.
This is motherhood.
“She’s so wrapped up in this book thing that’s going on or whatever the hell, that she didn’t even notice that she forced me to break two cardinal fashion rules. I’m wearing HIGH WATER PANTS and they are WHITE. It’s October 15, bitch.
Just get me the hell home and help me find my lovey.”
I’m writing this post for my handful of long-time followers, as well as my close friends and family who have been riding this ridiculous train with me since 2010.
HI! I can’t believe you’re still here, but I want to thank you for staying. Can I offer you a drink?
Let’s talk about Maverick, my oldest child, aptly named. Remember all the times I honest-to-God thought something was wrong with my son? All the posts I have written (and they are countless, just type in “Maverick” or “ONE” on the sidebar and you can spend the next two hours reading about him if you’d like, which I’m guessing you wouldn’t) about what he said or destroyed, the weird things he did and the exasperation I felt at not knowing what to do … figuring out this child has eaten up a considerable amount of my time and energy.
I have called him high-spirited. I have said he was challenging. I have talked about his persistence, his rebelliousness, his penchant for questioning authority, his shocking hilarity, and my frustration at figuring out how to best parent him.
I have read books. I have read blogs. I have e-mailed people who specialize in challenging behavior to get their feedback and ideas. I made a counseling appointment and I cancelled it. When his preschool teacher voiced her concerns, I talked to his pediatrician who assured me he is normal. I experimented with his diet. I made him run around a lot to see if his problem was simply hyperactivity. I cut out TV. I encouraged him to explore outside.
I turned the TV back on again.
When close friends and family members voiced concerns, it weighed on me because I knew their concerns had merit. Robbie and I have worked tirelessly to parent Maverick to the best of our ability, but we still always seem to fall short. We knew he was special, and we believed we could channel it, unless we lost our shit first … in which case he would totally take over the household and start calling us by our first names.
Thankfully, we are more determined than he is. Thankfully, good parents don’t give up.
We are truly his biggest fans and advocates, tempered with high expectations. We have conversations like, “No, you may not call me Harmony. Yes, I know that is my name, but YOU call me Mom or Mommy. It’s a sign of respect. THAT’S JUST WHAT WE DO, NOW DO IT. No, I will not call you Mr. Hobbs. I also will not refer to you as Your Majesty.”
Maverick challenges me in every way imaginable, testing to see how far he can push me before I don’t love him anymore. Trying to see if I will give up on him.
I won’t.
Ever.
I sometimes feel guilt over the way I handled certain situations in the past, but I didn’t know what to do. And even if I took the information I have now and went back for a do-over, I’m not sure I could hold it together any differently than I did before. Motherhood is a cold-hearted bitch like that — some parts are just hard, any way you slice it. I’m not ashamed to admit that I struggled. The good news is I’ve learned to give myself grace, and we all have become experts at saying “I’m sorry.”
Six months ago, Robbie and I finagled our way into a great neighborhood so that Maverick could attend a really good school. I’m a product of a private school education and Robbie always went to public. He assured me our son would not come home the first day asking what a blowjob is, and I took a deep breath and really hoped he was right. People told us he was too young, especially for a boy, to start school. He was 5 when the school year began, barely meeting the requirements which state a child has to be six years old by September 30. But we forged ahead. Every child is different, and if nothing else I know that my kids don’t seem to fit molds very well.
We sent him to school and it’s been amazing. We’ve learned that Maverick is really … something. He’s very smart. I can’t say enough how validating it has been to have teachers review test scores with us, and I don’t mean that in a braggy way, I mean it a no wonder he gave me so much hell, he was totally bored kind of way. Yesterday we met with a teacher who he will be spending time with every day in his “Gifted Resource” class and it was such an incredible feeling to look around and see an environment that is truly made for a kid just like Maverick. I want to hug every single one of them and thank them for teaching my son, because I’m maxed out just covering the bases over here.
Here’s the best part. Nothing is wrong with my kid.
I am not a deficient mother.
He’s just too smart for his own good, and the rest of us have trouble keeping up. Wow. WHAT A RELIEF. If you happen to run into him, feel free to commend him on being such a hard worker and imaginative thinker. You can point out his confidence and his humor … but please, please, do not tell Maverick he is smart.
He’s five steps ahead of you, and he already knows.
DUDE.
My life is in major overdrive. Suddenly I have plans and goals, which is really disorienting because I can’t remember the last time I had plans or goals that reached past getting through the day at present.
I am accustomed to being in constant survival mode, because almost the entire time I’ve been a stay-at-home mom Robbie was working at a car dealership. Car dealerships can suck it. I hate them all. He pretty much lived at work while I was keeping our kids alive, all the time, and this went on for almost three full years. I don’t know how we’re still married, and I REALLY don’t know how I managed to function. I seem to have already blocked it from memory.
Now that he has a different job (working for my family — ahem) and very normal business hours, a whole new world has opened up to us. Our budget may be tighter, but we don’t miss an LSU game. We can have a social life again … well, first we have to find some friends … but once we do, we can totally hang out with them all weekend.
He took Maverick on a camping trip. They build Lego creations together and got up at 5 a.m. in the middle of the week to see the blood moon. We go on family walks and bike rides. We eat dinner together every night. I could go on and on listing the ways that our family life has improved, and it’s not all rainbows and roses over here, but it’s just really, really … nice.
It’s about damn time.
It took over a month for us to realize that we can slow down and enjoy our simple life at whatever pace we want to FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. Of course we wish we had more money to slow down and enjoy it with, but when we do things like make a campfire in our backyard and show the older kids the constellations it reminds me of why I quit my job in the first place.
At the end of the day, when we’re all together looking up at the sky and I am screaming “STAY AWAY FROM THE FIRE!!!” at my 3-year-old and “LEAVE THAT FROG ALONE!” at my 6-year-old, none of it matters. I just want to be with these people as much as I can until I’m sick of them and need to escape to Target for a few hours.
But don’t worry, I always come back.
Asher is in a difficult phase I like to call the “psycho threes.” Based on prior experience, I expect it to last until he’s about 5 years old.
I’m pretty much over it and it only began in earnest a few weeks ago, the epic meltdowns and unintelligible screaming over things like his sister sneezing on him or touching him or touching his blanket or staring at him.
Sometimes it’s over things like the fact that I broke his banana off the bunch because HE WANTED TO DO IT, or because there is sand on his hands after he got in the sandbox or there is a rock in his shoe after he walked through gravel.
I’ve gotten better this time around (because Maverick’s third year of life was literally the hardest year of mine, and this experience by comparison isn’t that bad) at maneuvering the whole living-with-a-tiny-psycho thing … but it wears on me. A lot. It begins first thing in the morning when he can’t get his blanket to hang just right on the back of his chair at the breakfast table, and it ends approximately 12 hours later when someone pulls the plug on his bath because HE WANTED TO DO IT.
Some days I handle it better than others. There have been many days lately where I just sat down and cried with him because I didn’t know what was wrong or how to fix it and frankly, I needed a good cry. Being a mother is so, so hard when you’re not at your best emotionally and physically, when you are tired and feel like you need a break and yet … they are still there, asking for things. Needing things.
But tonight, at the end of a long stretch of hard weeks, after a bath and dinner and a book and a bedtime struggle, came the arduous task of picking out just the right pair of pajamas and the right pair of socks and trying and failing to put them on himself. And then it was finally time to put that sweet, psychotic, three-year-old boy to bed.
I was so OVER it, but I was holding it together, masking my exhaustion by sitting calmly on his bed like I had all the time in the world. I said — because now I must ask first, instead of just picking him up and plopping him on my lap — “Asher, do you want to sit in my lap?”
And after a long pause, he broke into that dimply grin and said very seriously, “IT IS MY FAVORITE THING.”
Then he climbed up, leaned in, smelled my shoulder like someone would smell a bouquet of flowers, and put his head on my chest.
It’s my favorite thing too, you know. So at least we have that in common.
Sometimes I think my husband is an ass.
Sometimes I think my husband is a saint.
In reality, he’s somewhere in the middle; an Ass-Saint, just like me. Sometimes I look at him and I wonder how I got so lucky. Other times I want nothing more than to dump a box of dry cereal on his head and scream “HERE’S YOUR DINNER, MOTHER F-ER!” Do you think I’m a bad person or a bad wife because I am willing to admit that out loud? If so, then maybe you’re not so much an Ass-Saint … maybe you’re a Saint-Saint. And if that is the case, you have no business reading my blog.
Our 9-year wedding anniversary is next week and we haven’t even discussed it. I remember a time when I planned things way in advance — I would have selected a gift and a card and a special outfit for the occasion by now.
That particular season is now a memory. This season is chaotic, leaving little time for me to file my fingernails or think coherently, let alone plan ahead. I miss planning ahead. It’s one of my strong points.
Right now we are two Ass-Saints working together to raise our three children so that that they will not turn out to be Ass-Asses. And no matter what my husband may say or do that rubs me the wrong way, when I see a scene like this one, all is immediately forgiven.
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.
Modern Mommy Madness 