Oh, transcription for those who can’t make it out:
HAYDEN ONLY.
REBCCA ONLY TOO.
RACHEL ONLY TOO.
DADY ONLY TOO.
MOMY ONLY TOO.
HAYDEN’S ROOM ONLY.
.A.N.T. JASMINE TOO ONLY!
NANA AND RARA P POPO PO [Papa/Poppa]
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Tag: writing
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This one little thing
Every once in a while, I get fixated on this one little thing. It might be having my son participate in his preschool Christmas program, or my daughter take dance lessons (okay, that one hasn’t happened yet). I want my child to do this thing that really isn’t all that important in the long run, but for some reason it means something to me, like singing “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” in front of 75 strangers proves 
I’m raising a well-adjusted three-year-old.
Um, no?
Yes, it’s not asking much. But it seems like when I get so excited about these supposedly fun little things, they never go how I want.
The same thing seems to happen with little things that might not be so little—the small gestures I anticipate, like that first smile or first Mother’s day card will be the one little thing that convinces me this motherhood thing is worth it, that I’m not driving myself nuts watching Curious George and teaching the alphabet and trying to get! them! to! share! completely in vain.
Those are the little things that are really dangerous, because I can become so fixated on them that they become the reason for motherhood itself. And when they don’t come—and it seems like they never do—I’m so ready to give up. “All I wanted,” I want to scream at the heavens, “was this one stupid little thing. This one gesture to tell me I’m doing the right thing—one tiny tender mercy. Why are you withholding it from me?”
I’ve gotten better about these little things, but sometimes they sneak up on me. Hayden was “keeping a secret” about his Mother’s day gift at school (not really at all): a book he was writing for me. (It’s his second. He’s pretty prolific; he gets it from me. 😉 ) It was supposed to be a book about how great I am.
I knew better than to get my hopes up. I mean, the child is six. For Christmas, he got me an airhorn at the dollar store, an “attention-er,” he called it. I’ve never received a gift that filled me with so much guilt: my first thought was that he was under the impression that I yelled all the time and needed the help. (Ryan set me straight: he was five. He thought it would be fun. Therefore, he reasoned, I must have thought it would be fun. Child logic.)
Still, Hayden was very excited about his book. A few days before Mother’s day, I arrived to pick him up, and he was distraught. “The wind blew your book away!” he pouted. And it had, the staff verified: this four page book he’d spent all week on had been taken by the (surprisingly stiff) wind.
I was not going to accept this! We marched four blocks, scouring in yards and under cars, looking for that book. And I’ll admit it, my mind really wanted to go to that “Why are you taking this one stupid little thing from me?” place. That “Why can’t I get the smallest vote of ‘thanks, Mom, nice job’?” place. That “Do you not care?” place.
The search seemed to mollify Hayden, at least—my biggest concern at the time (yes, it was). He told me what the book said (I’m a great cook and I give him hugs), and said he’d make another at school the next day.
After we’d been home for a while, I remembered his teacher was sending home a certificate for some award he’d earned. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, so I was pretty surprised to find the president’s signature on the certificate:
As proud and as happy as that made me, though, it paled in comparison to the other homework he brought home:
Yep.
It’s not about these little things. It’s about the sentiment behind them. And that will be there whether I get the book or the air horn or nothing at all.
How have you found fulfillment this week?
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Hayden’s a ham
Hayden should start working on his stand up routine. This is from the last week:
“I’m a fan of Phineas and Ferb. I have been since I was born.”
Discussing weather appropriate attire: . . . “Short sleeves, which I’m wearing, and short pants, which I’m not wearing. . . .”
“I’m a fan of monkeys.”
“Why do you always have to go putting the brakes on my fun?”
But I don’t find this funny at all—I find it adorable:
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Living your dreams now
Maybe I just follow too many fans of the Catholic Register (or just Jen at Conversion Diary), but I’ve heard such good things about Simcha Fisher. However, I don’t think I’d read anything by her until my dad sent me a link to her article “The Time to Thrive Is Now“:
Certainly the “trenches” of motherhood are a time of sacrifice, and a woman in that phase of life can drive both herself and her family crazy by trying to have the same lifestyle as her neighbor whose youngest child is 12. It would be hard for, say, a mom with a baby and a toddler to do everything on the list above. But I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and in many cases the message has morphed from “you shouldn’t try to do too much when you have young children,” to “you shouldn’t try to do anything when you have young children.” And I think that that’s a problem.
It’s definitely true that raising children is a bit time consuming 😉 . But I think Simcha is right—there perception in popular culture has shifted from “time consuming” to “all consuming.”
I am a mother. 24/7, always on call, never get a vacation mom.
But while my children are so much of my life—figurative and literally—I am still a person. I have three small kids, but I can do more than just change diapers, ready preschool books and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” (It’s a fave.)
I have dreams—the big one of writing, of course. In the last four and a half years, I’ve written seven novels (hoping to make that eight soon). While having one two three kids at home full time or nearly so. Some of my dreams will have to wait until my children are older—but my whole life doesn’t have to wait.
What are you doing to capture your dreams today?
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Hayden’s writing, too!
Hayden isn’t just reading—he’s writing, too. He was rambling about putting a period at the end of a sentence, and I stopped him long enough to understand that he knows what a period is.
Then I found this in his backpack: illustrated and written by Hayden himself.
It says “I ate spagetti.” AKA “I a A.” Note the table, plate, and fork in the picture.
So I promptly sat him down at the table and had him write a sentence, using two sight words, a word from a story we’d read that afternoon, and a word he could sound out.
Then we sounded out/practiced his full name on the back and left the note for Dad on his pillow. He was pretty pleased (and surprised!) to get it.
Time is tricky in motherhood. Hours and days crawl by, while weeks and months fly. We focus on the things we’re looking forward to—kindergarten, babysitting age, the last one to kindergarten—so much that it’s sometimes hard to appreciate the now. We start to get dissatisfied with our lives now until we aches.
And sometimes, that’s not a bad thing. I came across an article
called “The tension of the already, but the not yet” that points out that this longing is good when it prompts us for growth:
Maybe this tension is a perfect place? Not because we love being there, but because it’s the beginning of the end of our striving? Maybe this is when we realize that it’s not about us? That ultimately, we’re just part of a greater story that takes time to be written and revealed and at the point of these questions, we don’t know the full story yet.
This reminds me of something I’ve heard about writing. (Sorry, this is so generic that I’m blanking on who said this. Someone who knew what he was talking about.) An experienced writer argues that when we begin writing, we get very discouraged, and consider our writing terrible. And it probably is—and it’s a good thing.
It’s a good thing that we can see the difference between where we are now and where we want to be. We’re comparing our writing to published authors’—people in another stage of their journey, who have more experience and help than we probably do—and we naturally come up short.
But, this writer cautions, don’t let that stop you from writing. Push through this uncomfortable phase, writing and practicing more and more—learning more about and actually becoming what you want to be—until that feeling of being terrible passes. Change your circumstances, and change your attitude—and improve. That feeling keeps us working to get better.
We can’t make time go faster so we can enjoy the next phase sooner (and let’s be honest, we’ll probably still be looking forward to the next stage then), but we can channel this tension, this cognitive dissonance into looking at our lives now to see how we can enjoy them more—and what we may need to change to value and enjoy the present more now.
What do you think? How can you value and enjoy the present more now?
Photo by Joe Philipson