Ten Ways That Motherhood Has Made Me A Crazy Person

1. I'll drive to three different stores to find chicken nuggets with all natural ingredients, and then not blink an eye  
   when my kid eats it off the floor
2. Doctor's appointments are right up there with DisneyLand.  Waiting! With magazines!
3. $1200 for a bed for four seems not only reasonable but necessary
4. I regularly clap for natural (and usually private) bodily functions
5. Someone peed on my kitchen floor and I thought it was hilarious. Like, couldn't stop laughing.
6. As I near my car in a parking lot, I start chanting "Touch the car! Touch the car! Touch the car!"
7. I become paralyzed with fear anytime either of my children is too close to a banister, railing, or too-clean
    window. I fear that they will be possessed and jump, or that someone will push them, or the floor will fall out
    under them. Because that happens all the time.
8. I have thought through and strategized exactly what I would do if my car plummeted off the side of a bridge
    (hint, a hard-sided cooler is required).
9.  Most things I do are accompanied by a snazzy little song Who picks apples?! We do! We do! Do we pick
     apples? Yes we do!
10. I often refer to myself in the third person by a name that no one calls me. Just me. About myself.

How has motherhood made you crazy?

The downside of kindergarten

Eli has totally kicked butt in the transition to a bigger, more standardized kindergarten. Every single thing that I worried about was a non-issue. He loves it. His teachers say he's one of the brightest, most polite kids. He keeps getting in trouble for talking over people. He has a ton of friends, homework, and a special snack bag.

BUT. There are a lot more kids in the class. 99.999999% of the time, this is great. The kid is a social butterfly and he loves having all these kids around. He is also a follow-their-lead kind of kid. And today that bit me smack in the ass.

I came home and Eli met me with a huge grin. "Mama, I learned a funny song from a friend today!" And then he burst into a short, catchy rhyme, with actions, that was probably funny. In the 50s. To middle class white men. And never around anyone they didn't know to be of like minds.

I love that he's getting old enough that I can go beyond, "We don't say things like that." It dovetailed with conversations we've been having about how he and his sister are mixed race and that they have several cultures to identify with. I think he got it, and later he apologized to me, his dad, and the people he might have offended. We talked about how he needs to think for himself and decide what's right based on what he knows and believes in. All very valuable lessons. But combined with the fact that we had to talk, yet again, about physical boundaries, good touches/bad touches, and in a moment of frustration, why some of the men Mama works with have to live in prison/there are bad people in the world, I seriously contemplated home-schooling. This shit is hard.

It's an area where I wonder how much is me being shrink-y and how much is me being a concerned parent. Am I over reaching? Should I stick with, "We don't do that." And how do I handle the fact that it is one kid that he seems to be picking most of these new things up from? I'd love to hear from other moms (and dads) who've had similar experiences. How do you handle this kind of thing?

I'd hate to ruin his fun...

Besides, who wants to spend their Monday evening folding clothes anyway?

Days like this

You ever have one of those days? You load up all the kids in the car, sniff, and realize that you didn't take out the rag your husband used to clean up after the carsick baby so now your new car has the awesome aroma of stale vomit? You trudge on, but as you walk your snowflakes into their daycare, you realize that both are wearing clothes that are quite obviously outgrown and worn through. No matter! You make the most of every day! So you drive, 45 minutes, to work and attend 8 hours of the most awful training you are required to do every year. Driving home, decide with your husband that you're going to live it up. Take a day off from the diet and go eat pizza? Splurge and then realize that after your diet, your body no longer enjoys pizza. Wish you'd had more salad, then feel both old and a little pathetic for having that thought. Decide to hit what everyone's saying is a great sale to maybe buy your kids some clothes. That no one else has ever worn. That fit. That they may even get to choose? Arrive at said store to find the sale racks picked clean of everything except SpongeBob paraphernalia and shirts that advertise "Daddy's Little Goldigger!" Continue to look, like the good stuff may magically appear, while your toddler screams and pinches and hits until you put her down, where she runs maniacally away. Take your 5 year old to the bathroom 3 times in 45 minutes, with no explanation as to why but you're not brave enough to deny him and besides, he's grabbing his junk like a Chester in the making so you better give the impression that this is unusual. Resign yourself to having complete ragamuffin children with shorts too short, grabbing themselves and assaulting their mother. Become "That mom?" In public, of course.

Yeah, me neither. I'm far too organized, awesome, and centered for a day like that.

It was bound to happen

C and I were laying in bed this morning, squeezing out those last few precious minutes before you have to choose between dragging yourself out of bed or being negligent to the two unkempt heathens currently running amok in your bedroom. Eli and Syd had found their way into our bathroom and were playing nicely, so we weren't too eager to interrupt and remind them of their need for breakfast/cartoons/"that lego guy I had that one time that has suddenly become the only toy that will satisfy me!" As we were laying there we realized that it had gotten very quiet. Too quiet. So C calmly calls out "Eli? What are you guys doing in there?" "I'm reading a book to Sydney!" "Oh, that's great Bud! What a nice thing to do! What are you reading her?" "Puh, puh, Playboy?" Yep. That got our attention. Apparently the kid can read better than we thought. So C went in to find more "appropriate" reading material and Eli got upset that his magazine was being taken away. And I swear, he yelled at C, "But Daddy! I was reading the article!"

Sleep schedules

7:00 Me: "Eli! Fifteen minutes before bed!"

7:15 Me: Totally distracted by something shiny or colorful

7:45 Me: "Eli! Ten minutes!"

8:00 Reading Eli's story

8:02 Tuck Eli in

8:05 Send Eli back to bed

8:11 Send Eli back to bed

8:12 C is asleep on the couch

8:15, 8:17, 8:26 Send Eli back to bed

8:35 I and a strangely wired Syd clean out the car and install the FORWARD FACING carseat (OMG MY BABY MY BABY!). At some point C gets in bed with Eli

9:20 Rock Syd to sleep

9:35 Got distracted by God-knows what on TV. Put Syd down in her crib.

9:36 Come back from the bathroom to find Syd in bed with C.

9:37 Give up. Facebook.

10:35 Go to bed

2:25 Wake up to Eli confessing that he had an accident

2:27 Realize he meant, in your bed

2:28 Discover that you are soaking wet, and there's a spot on the bed bigger than he is

2:40 After changing you both and warning C about Lake Pissedonivus, climb into Eli's bed.

2:50 Try unsuccessfully to convince Eli this isn't a "Super Awesome Slumber Party and for the love of God please go back to sleep."

3:12 C wakes me up to tell me Syd is "looking for me." Take both kids back to the big bed. C settles into the guest bed.

3:15 Debate whether you can sleep with Syd banging on your face. Decide to try.

5:00 Alarm goes off. Get C, to play human bedrail, and get ready for work. Calculate that you've already been up for eleventy million hours.

6:00 Coffee

6:30 Coffee

7:00 Coffee

Try again tomorrow

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow." ~Mary Anne Radmacher

Last week I talked with a friend who confessed, with trepidation, that the night before she had lost her temper with her 1 1/2 year old daughter who would not go to sleep, and the mom had screamed. She felt awful, immediately apologized, and later called a friend to decompress. Essentially she did everything "right." As I laughed with her and commiserated with that feeling of desperation, the "Please, I'll give you anything if you'll please just go to sleep" she thanked me for making her feel normal. She said that with some other parents she felt inferior, like they would never falter to yell at their child or "screw-up." I'm lucky because, for my job and in my life, people tell me stuff. A lot of stuff. That's really normalizing, and I've heard a lot of shit. I'd like to pass on the favor. I remember that feeling, that everyone else is doing this mommy thing so much better than me. That I had been found wanting or that I was doomed to destroy this perfect little person I'd been trusted with.

I remember the first time I truly lost it with Eli. He was about a year and a half, and had been throwing the king of all fits every time we got into the car. One morning, after I was wrestled him into his car seat and sat in the driver's seat listening to him scream bloody-murder, I lost it. I screamed. I yelled "Shut up! Shut up! Just shutupshutupshutup!" In my world we DO NOT say that. Ever. It would have been better if I'd swore like a sailor. And I felt awful. I felt scared. I felt like the world's worst mother. And I promised myself it would never happen again. But it did, of course.

When I was pregnant I asked my mentor how she handled leaving her kids at daycare in the morning. Wasn't it so hard to leave them? And she said that yes, sometimes it was hard, but that sometimes it was very, very easy. I didn't understand for a little while how true that is. Most of the time I dread Monday, when there are alarm clocks and sleepy goodbyes, but then there are times when I cannot wait for the next workday. Today, if someone had offered me $100 and a box of Girl Scout cookies for Eli, I may have taken a few minutes to consider it. Today was a horrible, no good day as far as Mama/Eli days go. I don't know what happened, but imagine a whiny two-year old, possessed by a petulant, angsty 14 year old girl, crossed with an anti-social nine-year old boy, and you have my son today. There was door slamming, kicking, "You don't care about me!"," You never let me do anything!", "You're so mean! I don't love you!", "I'm boooooooooooorrred!" I tried, I really did. We went swimming this morning. Kid wanted to be carried around on his dad's hip the whole time. We did a puzzle ("I need help! You do it!") We took a nap. Nothing. I did all the shrinky stuff, maybe he needs extra attention, maybe he doesn't feel good, maybe we need to reframe! blah blah blah. Then I did the other stuff. "Go play!" "Go to your room!" my recent favorite and a gold-star MOTY winner "KNOCK IT OFF!!" At one point he yelled "I'm going to my room forever and never coming out and never loving anyone ever again" and I, in my most kind and nurturing voice, yelled back "Good!" I took him to the drugstore with me after 15 whole minutes of pleasantness and made the mistake of buying him a new toy car. We get back out to the van and before we're even strapped in he starts with "You never let me get anything! Why didn't you let me get the big car? Why can't I have candy? whine whine whine" So I took the car back, told him he'd lost the privilege of a new toy (thanks Imaya) and sent him to bed at 6:30. That boy.Oh that boy. A few minutes ago he came out and asked if I was mad. It was really hard not to immediately yell for him to get his butt back in bed before he loses all tv for the next year. But I didn't, and I explained that I was mad because he'd been behaving so badly and made it such a hard day for everyone, that I loved him but he really, really needed to work on his attitude and his behavior.

That's the thing. Today sucked, but we keep going. We try again tomorrow. So if there're any moms out there, or really anyone out there, who has felt that pang of loneliness, sure you're the only one who's falling short, truth in writing. We all do it. It took me a long time to figure that out. We're all just barely hanging on. But we try again tomorrow.

The boy, in happier times