Tag: self-image

Categories
Fulfillment Faith

Motherhood in perspective

A repeat of an oldie but goodie, from the days when I had only one child!

When something goes wrong for Hayden, he sometimes has a tendency to overreact. I take away his current play thing, he screams. The ribbon from his balloon gets caught in his toes, he squeals and kicks. We try to see if he has any new molars, he arches his back, struggles and wails.

I’ve called him a bit of a drama “king” before. But really, I don’t expect anything different from someone who has no outlets or resources to draw upon when he’s frustrated. I also don’t expect anything different from a child of mine. I’m hardly any better than Hayden at handling my frustrations, despite decades of knowing better.

I’m trying to help Hayden learn other ways to deal with his frustration, even though they can’t really help him right now (things like, “You don’t have to scream, you can ask for help.”).

But really, both of our frustrations come from the same problem. It’s a larger problem than simple impatience. For me, it’s as if I develop tunnel vision. I can’t think of anything else in the world other than this insignificant thing. I always say, “I just expect things to work right.” And it’s true, I get frustrated when something doesn’t work as expected.

But really, my problem is that, for those moments at least, I lack perspective. Hayden isn’t old enough or experienced enough to see the big picture, but I should at least be developing that ability.

Perspective is often difficult to obtain. Sometimes one of the most difficult things to put into perspective is the big picture. For example, I know that in the big picture, I’m a mother. But what does being a mother mean?

The perspective that we’re given today says that motherhood doesn’t mean a ton. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger wrote an equation this week that struck me:

Personal Worth = What You Achieve + What Others Think of You

He was speaking in the context of blogging, of course, but acknowledged that his thoughts applied to other spheres. He continues:

The problem with this equation is that in every sphere of life (especially blogging) it is very difficult to live up to this equation. There are times in all of our lives where we fail or fall short of what we set out to achieve and where other people’s opinion of us are not high.

Rating our worth as a person in this way can be a trap and as bloggers it can be an easy one to fall into.

On a good day where traffic is up, people are saying nice things, all the blog ranking tools rate us highly and we’re getting good press it’s easy to be on top of the world – but when it all falls in a heap the lows can be very low if we tie our personal worth to how our blog performs.

Personal worth comes from something deeper than what you do (or fail to do) and what others think of you. I won’t push my own opinions of where this worth comes from (for me it’s tied to my spirituality) – however I encourage bloggers to do some realigning and gaining of perspective in this area.

Fulfillment, which today I’ll define as contentment with your assessment of your personal worth, doesn’t come from external factors. If we continually rely on others to give us fulfillment, we’ll find ourselves emptier than before.

Like Darren, my personal worth, my contentment with my role as a mother, comes from my spirituality (I’ve expounded on those beliefs recently). For me, my spirituality is one way of internalizing the big picture.

The big picture is that mothers matter. The big picture is that the greatest impact my life will create will probably not be the great American novel, even if I do write that novel. The big picture is that the most important thing that I can do with my life is to raise my son to be a good person.

I still struggle with the day to day frustrations, but keeping motherhood in perspective keeps me grounded. It helps me to recognize my personal worth. It doesn’t come from awards or professional achievements. It comes from recognizing the importance of tiny triumphs.

And for Hayden�and for me�a day without frustration would be a triumph indeed.

Categories
Random

To be so young and so serious

Things are going well here in Seattle. It’s a little weird to be “working” again. Actually, since I’m at a conference, it’s almost like being back in school. Except I never had a laptop in school (Thanks again!! to my brother-in-law who let me borrow his at the last minute). But I type notes frantically and study instead of making friends and type as much as I can but actually hear very little. People keep asking me if I feel as though I’ve learned things here. I’m like, “Are you kidding? I’m not listening; I’m typing!”

On a related note, when I look up and see other people on laptops checking their email, surfing or playing solitaire, I want to shout them, “Hey, you or your company paid a lot of money to get you here and you should pay attention!” Come to think of it, I felt the same in college when people were playing on their laptops in class.

I was really surprised at how young some of the people that I’ve come to “know” through their industry blogs really are. Or look. I know when I talk to these people—some of whom are surely older than I am—I feel as though I’m the old one. After all, I can hardly make it a paragraph without mentioning my husband or son. To be married and have a kid makes you old, right? at least one person (who was old enough to have grandkids) was surprised to learn I’m so young.

I don’t feel like I look terribly young. Maybe I do. Maybe I’m a poor judge. I was at a Mary Kay facial thing a few weeks ago and someone asked me if I was engaged. I told her, “No, I’ve been married for three years, almost.”

“Wow,” she said, “you look good.”

Um… what part of three didn’t you understand? It’s not a long time ago. And I know I don’t look 18, thanks.

Sigh. Should I keep you in suspense? Care to guess how old I am? (Family members: hold your tongues fingers.)

Categories
Kids/Parenting Random Fulfillment

Through a glass, darkly

I’m always fascinated by seeing myself from the outside. I don’t much care what other people think of me, but I’d love to know how they’d describe me. I’ve asked my husband a few times, “How would you describe me to someone who’d never met me?” (He’s always responded with a helpless “I don’t know!”) Last night, I suddenly gained the tiniest glimpse into how other people see me.

We were at a church activity. There was a girl there that I’ve always thought seemed really nice, if a little shy. Although I knew just about everyone there, and we all live in the same neighborhood, none of my “regular” friends were there, so I couldn’t slip into my comfort zone. I decided to approach this girl, since she and her husband were sitting alone and I was alone as Hayden and Ryan ran off to play with the other kids in the park.

Luckily, we had a very obvious conversation starter—she is 8 1/2 months pregnant. Aside from the fact that she is a very cute and nice girl, being a mom, I feel drawn to soon-to-be mothers. (It’s a good thing this wasn’t happening about this time last year, when I would have probably hissed something like, “RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN!” or said something more sage like, “Make every night a date night while you still can.”)

So I plopped myself down on the table next to them and struck up a conversation. My favorite way to do this is to verify their names, even though with my position at my church I already know everyone’s names—well, all of the ladies’ names, at least. It never hurts to double check, and it makes it easy for me to introduce myself and reduce their discomfort at not knowing my name.

What do you say to someone so close to the beginning? I’m sure she realizes this is only the beginning, even though it feels like it should be the end.

I didn’t impart any sage words to her. I just chatted with her. I asked about the name they’d picked out and where they found it, how they met, what she did, what he did. While her pregnancy and impending parenthood was a large part of the conversation, I realize now that I did focus on her quite a bit (her husband soon wandered off to play with the kids)—which might be nice. Might be the last time in a long time.

Oh, that glimpse thing, right. As we started talking, she commented on how cute Hayden was. He had been running around the pavilion, enjoying everything immensely, emphatically intoning his jibberish (which he would direct to my new friend a few times during our conversation, and even slap her knee for emphasis), squealing at other children or dogs in the park, riding in a neighbor’s wagon, and playing with all of the teenage boys of babysitting age.

She asked how old he was. As I told her, for a split second, I could see our scene as if from far away. I was one of those people I’d always thought had it all together—a young mom who was pretty, active in church, outgoing (or at least friendly), but not so uptight that she had to hover over her toddler every minute. She was a good mom and she was still her own person—but being a mother defined in large part who she was. Even though you knew her as a person, you often (or always) thought of her in conjunction with her child(ren). To me, these were the women with six month olds who brought me sumptuous dinners that lasted two, three or four nights after Hayden was born and was flat on my back for a week.

I suddenly understand why my neighbors thought I was taking motherhood in stride when Hayden was born (while I was dying!).

I think everyone, at some point, sees another woman while she’s out in public—dressed, well-coifed, at peace with the world, social and with child in tow—and thinks, “Man, she’s really got it all together.”

Guess what, my new friend? I don’t. But I’m slowly getting my act together.

Categories
Kids/Parenting Fulfillment Faith

Motherhood in perspective

When something goes wrong for Hayden, he sometimes has a tendency to overreact. I take away his current play thing, he screams. The ribbon from his balloon gets caught in his toes, he squeals and kicks. We try to see if he has any new molars, he arches his back, struggles and wails.

I’ve called him a bit of a drama “king” before. But really, I don’t expect anything different from someone who has no outlets or resources to draw upon when he’s frustrated. I also don’t expect anything different from a child of mine. I’m hardly any better than Hayden at handling my frustrations, despite decades of knowing better.

I’m trying to help Hayden learn other ways to deal with his frustration, even though they can’t really help him right now (things like, “You don’t have to scream, you can ask for help.”).

But really, both of our frustrations come from the same problem. It’s a larger problem than simple impatience. For me, it’s as if I develop tunnel vision. I can’t think of anything else in the world other than this insignificant thing. I always say, “I just expect things to work right.” And it’s true, I get frustrated when something doesn’t work as expected.

But really, my problem is that, for those moments at least, I lack perspective. Hayden isn’t old enough or experienced enough to see the big picture, but I should at least be developing that ability.

Perspective is often difficult to obtain. Sometimes one of the most difficult things to put into perspective is the big picture. For example, I know that in the big picture, I’m a mother. But what does being a mother mean?

The perspective that we’re given today says that motherhood doesn’t mean a ton. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger wrote an equation this week that struck me:

Personal Worth = What You Achieve + What Others Think of You

He was speaking in the context of blogging, of course, but acknowledged that his thoughts applied to other spheres. He continues:

The problem with this equation is that in every sphere of life (especially blogging) it is very difficult to live up to this equation. There are times in all of our lives where we fail or fall short of what we set out to achieve and where other people’s opinion of us are not high.

Rating our worth as a person in this way can be a trap and as bloggers it can be an easy one to fall into.

On a good day where traffic is up, people are saying nice things, all the blog ranking tools rate us highly and we’re getting good press it’s easy to be on top of the world – but when it all falls in a heap the lows can be very low if we tie our personal worth to how our blog performs.

Personal worth comes from something deeper than what you do (or fail to do) and what others think of you. I won’t push my own opinions of where this worth comes from (for me it’s tied to my spirituality) – however I encourage bloggers to do some realigning and gaining of perspective in this area.

Fulfillment, which today I’ll define as contentment with your assessment of your personal worth, doesn’t come from external factors. If we continually rely on others to give us fulfillment, we’ll find ourselves emptier than before.

Like Darren, my personal worth, my contentment with my role as a mother, comes from my spirituality (I’ve expounded on those beliefs recently). For me, my spirituality is one way of internalizing the big picture.

The big picture is that mothers matter. The big picture is that the greatest impact my life will create will probably not be the great American novel, even if I do write that novel. The big picture is that the most important thing that I can do with my life is to raise my son to be a good person.

I still struggle with the day to day frustrations, but keeping motherhood in perspective keeps me grounded. It helps me to recognize my personal worth. It doesn’t come from awards or professional achievements. It comes from recognizing the importance of tiny triumphs.

And for Hayden�and for me�a day without frustration would be a triumph indeed.

Categories
Kids/Parenting

The weaner

No, that’s spelled right. Today is the fifth day that I have not nursed Hayden. I think I’ve decided that he’s weaned.

It hasn’t totally hit me yet. I suddenly realized when talking with a friend on Monday (yes! I have friends! She even called me and invited me to go out and DO something with her!) that this might change more than just what undergarments I can wear.

When Hayden was about 3 weeks old, I was feeling like I’d been through the wringer basically since his birth. No, I didn’t have one of those moments where you arrive home from the hospital, place the baby in the crib and in a state of sudden panic ask, “Now what?!” I’d like to think that I’m better than that, because I do know ‘now what’: the rest of your life. Take care of him. Hold him. Love him. And feed him every 90 minutes. (The truth is that I’m not better than that; I was too sick for nearly a week after we got home from the hospital to do anything but panic over how I would ever cope with raising a child while lying flat on my back.) (And feed him every 90 minutes.)

Anyway, at about 3 weeks, I felt like I’d given my baby my very soul and left nothing for myself—and he didn’t even know. He barely acknowledged my existence.

Ryan was holding him one evening and Hayden began to fuss. We decided he was hungry (it had been 90 minutes!) so I came to feed him. Mind you, it had only been 90 minutes since I nursed him last. I was hardly sleeping (at about one week of age, Hayden developed a mean grunt which kept us all up from 2-5 AM), healing, leaking milk, and completely over- and underwhelmed. Underwhelmed because for as much work as a baby requires, there is a LOT of downtime—which feels like wasting time. (I hate taking naps; they waste time and make me grumpier.) On the other hand, a baby requires more work in a day than can fit in 24 hours.

So on this day, as I came over to take Hayden from Ryan, whom I sure had only held the baby for a few minutes, I asked, “Does he even know who I am?”

I know the studies say that babies know their moms by smell virtually at birth and recognize their voices and can even distinguish between their own mother’s milk and another mother’s milk by two weeks, but I didn’t feel it. My sweet baby was a quiet, passive lump. His eyes could barely focus on anything—so he seemed to stare through me as I slowly killed myself for him.

Ryan knew I was having a hard time (though I think this post might surprise him). He looked at me with compassion and answered my question: “Of course he does [know who you are]. You’re dinner.”

We laughed. I needed to laugh then. I was getting all caught up in my hormonal and emotional overload and taking myself far too seriously. As much as I resisted it, I did need to lose myself to become a mother. I hated feeling my old self slip away and I didn’t like the new self that was emerging (she was crabby!).

But I was dinner. Most nights, I still am (I like cooking for the fam). I took that badge and wore it with honor. I AM DINNER.

It meant that I was strong enough to be a mother and provide for my child well. It meant that I made important sacrifices for his wellbeing. It meant that he needed me—and maybe even loved me. I promised myself that if I ever wrote a book about parenting, it would be called I Am Dinner.

I’m not dinner anymore.