The Brink

I can count on one hand the number of times that my mother let me down. The number of times she over-reacted, spoke too harshly, cursed, scared me into obedience. One. Hand.

Today, I had to apologize to my four year-old son, because I'm exhausted. Because my patience only wears so thin. Because, even if he doesn't understand why I said I was sorry, I know that I let myself down. Because...he deliberately pooped in his pants and then looked at me with moon-eyes and told me it was an accident.

And, even though I know that it has to be a reaction to suddenly being a big brother to two siblings, a reaction to suddenly not being the only son, to being my errand boy, to the pressure of being big and reliable - all the time. Knowing all this - with an infant crying and his sister squirting glitter glue all over the kitchen table, her fingers, her arms, her cheeks - I simply could not deal with being lied to, or, worst of all, the warm, stinky, poop in his underwear on my bathroom floor.

I. Snapped.

Into the shower he went - because I know the shower terrifies him. And as he cried and begged to be let out, I went on a verbal rampage. No cursing, but if those were the sort of words that were somewhere in the default of my arsenal, they would've come out, I'm sure. I was blinded by exhaustion and rage and that awful smell - and I just lost it.

It was the sort of anger that happens rarely, and when it does, I know better than to do any disciplining. It's "go to your room for a few minutes while Mommy calms down" sort of anger. Unfortunately, when your child is standing before you with smears of feces on his skin, there's no option but to deal with the situation in hand - anger and all.

And I failed.

My mom assures me that she had these exact moments when I was four. That she sat me on the couch and screamed that if I wanted to leave, I could just leave. That she too had been to the brink and wondered if she'd crossed it. And, you turned out ok, didn't you? She asks.

Did I?

Of course, I did. Of course.

This too shall pass.

Triple Pooper

(What? Two posts in one day???)

First, Lila dropped one on the floor behind the play house in her bedroom - in a moment of unsupervised naked-time while I was on the phone.

It's cool. I have two kids, I left her in only a diaper to answer the phone. My bad. I get it.

Second, The Boss man decides to fore go using the potty in favor of stinking up his pants, screaming all the way to the bathroom and then pitching a fit when I put him in the shower - not even as a form of punishment, but as a cold hard reality - if you get poop all over yourself, you will need to be cleansed.

Third, I take a walk (if only to get away momentarily from the feces flying in my house) to check the mail, and find my thin little self-addressed stamped envelope. The one I sent off with my short story manuscript two months ago. Of course, it would've been far too easy for it to have worked out so smoothly, and I am really happy that they even asked to read the thing in its entirety in the first place. But still. It's poop.

Staying Home

It's nice. Today is actually my first day without having to go to work at all, but the past two days I have enjoyed having my children all to myself while working shorter shifts, later in the day.

Today is the first time I've attempted to write something new -- in a long time. I've been stuck in a rut, using the whole 'working two jobs, my husband is out of work, I'm going crazy' thing as an excuse to not be productive. Until I learned last night that another of the stories I've been pimping to a couple of literary magazines has been picked up. Which is great, don't get me wrong. It's a fairly new magazine with a lot of buzz and the selection process for publication was quite competitive. So I'm pleased. But this also means that now I can no longer "waste" time submitting it to other journals.

And so now, it's on the shelf for me. Leaving me with a hole in my day. One less story to try to place. Back to the drawing board, so to speak.

I'd forgotten how difficult this is to do with the kids - fighting naptime and demanding things like diaper changes and lunch. Pshaw.

Even typing this - my daughter insists on squeezing herself between my knee and the keyboard and my son just burst from his room (where naptime has apparently failed...again) demanding a cracker - and now I feel terrible because in response to his plea for carbohydrates and artificial preservatives, I snapped at him with a resounding NO!

*sigh*

I'll be back. Maybe.

Because It Always Comes Back to This...

The Boss drags me to his toy area to play trucks, then leaves me and runs off to the kitchen. This behavior isn't that unusual for him. He has a tendency to move me places and then go off somewhere else. This time though, he returns, bringing with him a toy train and a definite stink.

"Hey, did you poop?"

He avoids eye contact and shakes his head, settling down beside me with his train. "Choo Choo!"

"Uh huh, that's a choo-choo. Good." I nod and lean closer to him, touching his diaper for a peek, but he stops me.

"No," he says, swatting my hand away and shaking his head. "I fart."

Nine times out of ten, he answers a question by repeating the question - to the point that my husband and I have questioned whether or not he's even listening. Apparently, he is. And apparently, when he does answer the question, he's lying.

Because that was not a pleasant diaper to change.

Lately

I've been very inward.

This is a natural for me. After intense periods of socializing, I draw back into myself. Think, write, find amusement in quiet things (and I've learned to accept the not so quiet ones as well, as is necessary with The Boss - whose silence is a sign of something awry, bookshelf torn apart or fingers near electric sockets.)

In the past, these periods of quiet have led me to write here. But lately, I've not had the slightest desire. So I haven't, (save an entry about a supermarket harpist,) for fear of forcing something. Writing blather just for the sake of it...just to make sure the blog still had a pulse.

This morning is the first that I've felt a twinge of desire - perhaps it's the beginning of the long crawl out of myself. Before it goes away...

Brief glimpses of the past couple of weeks:

...Push-ups. I've found that I can do ten regular, infinite girly.

...There's a small train museum in Danbury Connecticut that will charge you $6 to walk around their depot and press buttons to activate elaborate model train landscapes and look at pictures of the olden days of rail, or their photo collage of the time that Hitchcock used their depot in one of his movies. This might not seem worth it, however, if you have a small child who has been pent up in a hotel room for a day, they also boast a corner filled with train toys that will entertain him for at least an hour. In my opinion, six dollars well spent.

...Television is exhausting. While we were away, our DVR filled itself and we've been working (and it has felt like work) to watch the programs and purge them from the machine. After reading a post about wallets and DVR's over at Trapped in Colorado I'm stunned at the number of shows that DVR allows us to watch. We record too much. If something looks like it might be worthwhile, we record it, along with our weekly recordings of our other shows. Pre-DVR, we watched maybe two or three hours of television a week - tops. And that was only if we managed to catch "our shows." Now, with the convenience of watching things whenever we want rather than sticking to a programmed schedule, we're a mess of scripted madness.

...We've begun disciplining. The Boss has reached an age of understanding and it's time to begin enforcing rules, to become (gulp) parents, in the sense that what we say goes. Because if it doesn't, then we're going to lose him down a street somewhere, he'll run off our yard and just keep going, despite our calling out after him. He doesn't listen to No, doesn't stop when we yell stop - and he's old enough to learn that he needs to. For his own protection, we need to become the bad guys. It's hard. I don't like it. But it's necessary. I'm not from the camp of being buddies rather than parents. Of course, I'm not a drill sargent either.

...I miss living near the ocean and walking along the coastline with my friends. Not some glamorous oceanfront, but a concrete sidewalk lining a mediocre strip of gravely sand - a shoreline boarding a cold ocean that no one swims in for fear of contamination. Still, it's springtime, and I miss it. Cool salty wind and conversations between best friends.

...I've seen approximately twelve ants in the past two days. Mostly teeny-ones that scurry away from my fingertips as I move down to crush them - but also two big ones, carpenters, milling around in my son's play area. I am not pleased.

...My son has just brought me an empty pizza box (perhaps not the best thing to have out considering my previous mention of ants...but I swear, he pulled it from the trash. Ugh. Now that doesn't paint a pretty picture either, does it?) Now, Lila is stirring.

Time to go, hopefully not to vanish again...

Mommy-Guilt

Life as a parent is filled with questioning our choices. It's night's spent laying awake wondering "Did I double, no, triple check the label on that oatmeal bar I gave him...did it have nuts in it? We're not doing nuts yet. Oh no, I'm pretty sure there must've been nuts...why am I such a slacker? Why can't I even survive lunchtime without potentially killing my child?"

I live in a constant battle to keep Mommy-guilt in check. Constant. I need to breathe, in and out, to regain a sense of reality, the sense that not everything that I do to or with my child is going to impact him or her forever. Sometimes, an oatmeal bar is just an oatmeal bar.

And sometimes, watching an educational DVD, is just watching an educational DVD.

Yes. I let my son watch television. Shocking, I know. Give me a moment to breathe in and out, let my Mommy-guilt subside.

Ok.

The trouble is, in the modern world there seems to be no moderation, no middle ground - there is nothing but the "Don't ever!" and the "Sure, I plop my kid in front of that thing seven, eight hours a day - cheapest babysitter around!"

And so, I'm here, often feeling alone, or as though the "Don't Ever" camp shrugs me off as a lazy parent (or one who is either uneducated about the 'risks' of television, or simply dismissive of them), while the "TV=Babysitter" camp can't understand why I don't let my son watch anything other than specific programs at specific times, with a specific purpose.

The truth is, I choose to believe that the way that my husband and I have integrated television into our child's routine is not going to harm his development - and that the benefits of it (his vocabulary has sky rocketed since introducing him to a DVD created by speech pathologists for children his age) will outway the potential risks. (Much like how I choose to have my children vaccinated, falling again into a debate. As a person who hates to debate, I'm fairly sure that if I'd known how many heated debates that there are always raging in the realm of parenthood, I might never have come.)

What it all boils down to is this: Mommy-guilt exists because parenting is complex and difficult and filled with decisions such as how much (if any) television should you let your child watch, how and when to potty-train, what type of shoes should you buy - the good one's perfectly fitted to his wide feet, or just a pair from Walmart because he'll out grow them soon anyway. Each of these seemingly small decisions will weigh on me, and find me as I'm tossing and turning and trying to sleep.

If my son doesn't love books, I'll blame myself for letting him watch Blues Clues. If he doesn't excel in sports, I'll blame myself for stunting his feet somehow with those darned cheap shoes. When really, the fact is, sometimes, some kids just don't like books when they grow up - television or not. Long before the idiot box was invented, there were kids trying to get out of doing their reading to go outside and play. And as for my son's athletic prowess? Maybe he'll prefer to be in the band.

Parenting is difficult because no matter the choices that we make, the outcomes may not be that which we have intended or hoped for.

Parenting is difficult because we can not protect our children from everything that can harm them - and trying to shield them from everything may wind up doing more harm than good.

Parenting is difficult because other parents, teachers, grandparents, cousins, your neighbors, the lady behind you in the grocery store - everyone - has an opinion that they feel is worth sharing, under the assumption that it is the key - the golden answer to unlock all the mysteries of what-if's - the way to avoid ever needing to feel Mommy-Guilt again.

The way to raise the best child possible.

But the fact is, I don't want to raise anyone else's best child possible. I want to raise my own.

And no matter how The Boss or Lila turn out, they're the best that I'll ever have. The best that God has given me, and I'll know that I've done my best with them out of service to Him.

And I'm ok with that. Because when it comes right down to it, to the two-in-the-morning moment of the soul when I'm laying awake replaying each of the choices I've made that day for my child, this is what I know beyond doubt:

I want my kids.

Kids with messy faces and who hide behind the couch when it's time to put their bibs on for lunch. Kids who pull off their diapers and bring them to me, proudly declaring Poop!

I want kids who toss play food behind the toy chest, then walk around the house asking where it went. Kids who pull down book after book after book and imitate cow sounds, duck sounds, bird sounds, clock sounds, then point to roofs and chimneys and trees and rivers and kids who know them all by name, even though their tongue's can't yet speak them clearly.

I want kids who ask for Blues Clues, but still play nicely when it's not turned on. Kids who dance around to The Laurie Berkner Band with their arms moving in perfect motion, mimicking the people on the TV. Kids who reach for the guitar and try to play along. Kids who pull out notebooks and hunt around the house on a scavenger hunt, in search of Blues Clues, but finding their own imagination leads them different places.

These are my kids. And I won't let Mommy-guilt take away the joy that they bring me - or take away the pride that I have in knowing that though I'm not perfect, by the grace of God, I'm doing OK.