Listening To The Signs

One of the hardest things about being a parent is figuring out when to fix our kids’ problems, and when to just listen and offer support. I’m learning this lesson, right now, with my five year old.

This is how it all began:

Cricket was busy at her small wooden craft table, cutting out random shapes and taping them together to form some kind of reptile. From the kitchen I saw her stand up to tape her creation to the art wall. All of a sudden she was on the floor. I think she had slipped on either a colored pencil or a coloring book. All I heard was the sickening sound of bones hitting hardwood.

I rushed over to see her on the floor, her legs wedged between the table and one of the chairs. I stooped down to help her, probably saying something like, “Oh, my goodness what happened? Are you okay?” I tried to help her up, planning on scooping her up in my arms to comfort her. She started screaming at me to get away from her.  And not just screaming: her face was scrunched up in anger and she backed away from me so I wouldn’t touch her.

I was stunned and a little confused.  Wasn’t it just this morning at 4:20 that she was in my room, wanting me to console her for having that bad dream about an animal catching fire in our living room? And now she’s screaming at me to get away from her?

My husband Bill thinks her reaction was just a surge of adrenaline from being startled. But it’s happened quite a bit since then  (I guess she’s kind of accident-prone) and the screaming was getting a little out of hand. I never knew when to help or when to hang on the sidelines. So we taught her to hold up her hand like a stop sign to let us know that she’s fine, instead of lashing out and yelling at us when we try to help. This sign language seemed to be working: She was able to communicate with us without yelling; we respected her need to be independent.

Today Cricket got hurt again; this time she scraped her thumb on the metal teeth of the tape dispenser. I heard her cry out in pain and walked over to her, waiting for the stop sign. I thought to myself, This is so far-fetched.  I’m a mom.  My daughter is hurt.  She cries; I rush to help.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But still I waited for the sign, but she did nothing. She just sat at her table covering her thumb with her other hand. I asked her if she wanted help and she said yes.  After I scooped her up and hugged her, I said, “You know what Cricket?  I think we need another sign.  If you want help you can either say Help please or make a come here sign with your hands.”

Now when she gets hurt or seems really frustrated with something, I approach her slowly –swallowing my parental impulse to rush over and fix everything for her –and wait for her sign.

While I’m still a little hurt that she doesn’t always want my help, I’m thinking that long term, this nonverbal communication is going to work for us. She’s learning how to tell us when to help or when to just be there to support her; we’re learning how to respect that.  

Mythical Mean Mom

I've reached a milestone in my mothering, but it's not one you're bound to find in any what to expect book. In fact, it's something I never expected either.

It happened at the dinner table when Cricket –after she had already watched two episodes of Dragon Tales – pleaded for another one. I kept saying no. When she asked me the fourth time for "just one more; I super promise I won't ask for another one; please, Mom, please, Mom, PA-LEEEEEEEESE," I had to turn away, open the refrigerator door and unleash a chuckle onto the yogurt. The pathos was just too over the top. I held my ground and dispassionately replied, “The TV is off for the night.” That’s when, for the first time ever, she spewed that inevitable and vitriolic phrase, "You're so mean!"

The consensus is that I should be proud of reaching the Mean Mom Milestone, which was bound to happen as surely as teething and tantrums. Apparently, I sailed through it like a seasoned professional. Take, for example, my Facebook comments:

·      Congratulations! You must be doing a good job!

·      Welcome to Motherhood!

·      Comes earlier than expected doesn't it? You did the right thing. 

·      Brace yourself - "I hate you" follow close behind.

I should have expected these responses since my Facebook status had in fact read, "I am to be congratulated for today I have achieved a milestone of motherhood: my daughter told me I was mean!"  I, too, thought that being called mean proved that I was doing a great job, unyielding when bombarded by the dreaded Preschooler Whine.

At the time of the Mean Mom Comment, I crowed like a peacock, calling both my husband and mother to boast. But in the quiet of the evening after Cricket was asleep, her words resounded and stung. How could she call me mean? I pouted. Hadn't I driven two hours for a beach play-date when we live a three-minute walk from the beach? Haven't I willingly cupped her bodily fluids in my hands as they flowed simultaneously from every orifice? I was sad and angry and bewildered.  I searched my Facebook comments in vain for a hint or a suggestion for swallowing this bittersweet pill.

After the dichotomous mélange of pride and distress had subsided, I was left with one thought: Why did I think our tête-à-tête was inevitable? How, when and why did the belief first enter my head that my daughter would undoubtedly call me mean? It’s baffling since I don't recall ever slamming a door in my mother’s face or telling her that she was the meanest mom ever.  I don’t recall ever having had an argument with her at all.  Why, then, did I assume that this moment would come for me? With every new question that night, I felt the foundation of my parenting philosophy slip away like a house built on quicksand. Finally.

I’m beginning to think there’s a collective consciousness among mothers –one in which I’ve somehow gained admission – in which clichés and stereotypes of raising kids are perpetuated, and therefore have become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we’re steeling ourselves for the terrible twos the tantrums will come. If we’re waiting for the moment our teenage daughter climbs out her bedroom window, she probably will.

Perhaps by preparing for these things we are willing them into fruition. Haven't we been inundated with this mindset in all aspects of our lives and from a wide variety of sources? The main tenet of that new age self-help book The Secret is that we attract whatever is going on in our mind. Proverbs 23:7 tells us that as a man thinks, so he is. Isn't this the same idea behind if you build it they will come from The Field of Dreams?

And, it seems, we do the same thing in parenting.  Through folklore, fables and old wives' tales, we are warned about the challenges of every stage of child, and we seem to accept these things without challenging their validity. A quick glance at child-rearing books proves this:

·      Your Marriage Can Survive a Newborn – Warning! Your 7-pound baby seeks to destroy your relationship!

·      Toilet Training Without Tears and Trauma –Peeing in the potty can send you and your child to psychotherapy!

·      Deceptively Delicious –Thinking about serving up those peas? Don't even bother; children are born with an aversion to green food!

·      Parenting the Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence –Lay in wait!  Get them before they get you!

·      Yes, Your Teen is Crazy –Accept it; prepare for it.

I know; I know. Child-development experts have empirical date to prove that our children will go through stages of growth –cognitive, emotional, social, etc. –in which they will test us, exert their independence and rebel against authority in an effort to build their identity. It’s normal, we’re told. But are the slammed doors and I-hate-you’s really inevitable? Is there an inherent adversarial relationship between parent and child for which we need to be proactive and on guard? I'm beginning to think not.

Cricket’s Mean Mom Comment was right on target: I have, in a sense, been mean. I’ve been laying in wait, assuming that she will loathe me at one point in her life. And maybe she will. But I’m no longer going to assume it will happen and prepare for it and other negative stereotypes. I’ll always remember My Mean Mom Milestone not as the time she stooped to my low expectations but as the time in which I jumped off this collective consciousness roller coaster and start taking things as they come. Maybe you'll call this my Naïve Mom Milestone, but it's what I'm going with for a while.

Mea Culpa, Momenclature

I once heard someone say: "A mom should never apologize" for stuff like being late for work, for kids' missing homework or for what she and her kids might look like at early morning playdates. Or maybe I just made this rule up myself. Regardless. Irrelevent.

I agreed with this for a long time but lately I'm thinking why the heck not? Why should moms get a free pass? Aren't we human?  Don't we have feelings, failings and manners? If you prick us do we not bleed? [Five points for the origin of that line!]

I think it's necessary for everyone –even (or maybe especially?) a mom –to apologize for what we haven't done that someone needed us to do, or have done to someone that caused pain. Or, in my case today, something that we know is good for us yet we've avoided doing.

Yes, I am apologizing for not having web-logged for nearly five months. After 120 posts over the course of 2 years, I screeched to a halt. No one is forcing me to apologize. I'm apologizing mostly to myself. 

For even though I enjoyed virtually every moment of not blogging, I still had that small restless voice inside of me telling me, "Go. Do it. Write it down before you forget." Somehow I was able to squash that voice through a late summer and full fall's worth of illness, drama, surgeries and highs and lows I'll probably ended up writing about. And yet, I feel like I would have been able to face all these things –the acute and the mundane alike –that much better if I had been writing.

But the main reason I haven't blogged is that I was just so sick of contributing to all the noise, noise, noise! The noise of the mommy wars: the hovering, helicoptering; the how-to's and don't dare's; the 20 reasons why you should or shouldn't relating to all-things babies, toddlers, preschoolers, 'tweens and teens. I felt like I really had nothing left to say that hadn't been said before.

But that voice can't be quashed anymore and I realized that it has all been said before.  Even famous writers took ideas from their predecessors, from as far back as Troilus and Criseyde to Romeo & Juliet to West Side Story. I guess there really is nothing new under the sun, [another 5-point reference!] except our own spin on it. I feel like a better person when I blog, better able to take care of myself and my family, kind of like the sign on an airplane that tells you to put that oxygen mask on yourself before attempting to help someone else with theirs. When I write I can breathe better.

So I'm back. If you've never visited here before, you might want to know that I am a mom through adoption, a retired English teacher, home full-time, and writing when I can. My daughter Cricket is almost five years old and we are 44 years apart. So that puts me in a lot of different categories of motherhood. But mostly, I am "simply" a mom, writing about what it means to me to have arrived here.

My writing is sometimes humorous, snarky, bitter, heartfelt, and Polly Anna-ish. I tend to like things tied up in a neat little bow, although I've resolved not to do that so much anymore, as that doesn't really reflect real life. I don't give advice but always strive to make you think, remember, laugh, and maybe leak out just a little pee or tear. There's that neat little bow again… But I do always look on the bright side of life. Oh my. Shakespeare to Python in 733 words.  I really need to sleep tonight.

MIT and ME

I'm tickled to report that I had a short piece published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency "list" column.

Being published in McSweeney's  has always been a dream of mine.  Not the fall asleep and dream that you forgot to wear your pants to that math class you haven't attended all semester and now there's a test type of dream, but more like a I'm Sally Fields and you really like me type of dream.

Anyway, it's about a list of writing projects I will probably never finish. Here's the link!

And a gratuitous picture of Sally Field as Gidget.