Daring Young Mom

It seems that everyone who lives within a 500 mile radius of Seattle just says they’re from Seattle to save time. I sort of fall into that category. Our plays, concerts, zoos, museums and company parties are in Seattle but our home is outside the city, a ways outside. We live where things are a bit cheaper and there’s more room to breathe but we still share the same clouds and beautiful green vegetative greenness.

The past couple of weeks we’ve seen much more sunshine than is normal. Cherry trees are blossoming. Stars have even been visible at night. I’ve had to dig out my sunglasses a couple of times and Wanda’s skin sparkles like diamonds when we go outside. It’s her first exposure to sunlight since birth and we’re starting to wonder about her…

As much as I love the sunshine, I’m suspicious of it. Why is it sunny? Is the frost going to kill all the flowers? Are we about to have a major “weather event”? Does this mean it’s going to rain all summer? Perhaps Al Gore is behind this. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to see it clearly because I am the proud owner of a new pair of glasses.

I recently went in to have my eyes checked. It turns out it’s been a few years since I’ve been to the eye doctor and some things have changed, things like clothing styles and my vision.

I went to Lens Crafters, which I am convinced is a vortex not unlike the Bermuda Triangle. When we walk into that store my electronic devices stop working completely and Wanda poops through whatever she’s wearing. We tried this twice in one day and it happened both times.

The doctor asked me to look at some things. Lights blinked. I showed my peripheral vision prowess. Someone blew a puff of air in my pupils. She asked me how often I wore my current glasses. I told her that I wore them if they looked cute with my outfit or if it would benefit me to look studious at the moment. She laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

When she asked me to read the lowest line of clear letters from the eye-doctor-getting-smaller-letter-card-thing, I started to rub my eyes.

“Things are a bit blurry,” I said, “I think I have some sleep in my eyes. Just let me get this, um, sleep out of my eyes and I’ll tell you which line I can read.”

The truth was that it was 11am and I’d been awake for several hours but I could not believe that I could not see the bottom few lines. I could always see all the lines. I kept rubbing the strange goo that seemed to be blocking my vision. The doctor suggested we try out some lenses so she brought out the crazy goo-goo goggles and started in with the, “Which looks better, one or two, and one or two, and now one… or two?”

After doing this for a while I found that things suddenly began to look clear, too clear, strangely, freakishly, stop-saving-for-the-HDTV-because-now-the-whole-world’s-HD clear. My vision is not that bad but the glasses really make a difference and I’m shocked at how long I let it go like that, not realizing that I couldn’t see as well as I should be able to.

For the next few days, I walked around lifting the glasses up and dropping them back down and smiling. Dan would say, “Do they still work?” They DO! There are so many things that I’ve discovered are supposed to have crisp edges to them, road signs that are legible way sooner than I thought. Seeing = fun. Hopefully they go with every outfit because as long as I can manage to remember them, I’ll have these babies on a lot.

“Her happy dance consists of lying flat on her back with her dip-cone mohawk vibrating, her eyes bugging out of her head, her lips pursed, and her arms flapping at her side asynchronously like two uncoordinated metronomes beating different times atop your grandma’s piano.” [Read more at Parenting.com]

In Costco today I spotted a man with a ponytail. He was wearing a Harley Davidson biker jacket with the slogan “No Child Deserves to Be Afraid,” across the back and I knew he had to be one of them. For some reason this made me giddy. I was standing behind him in line at the pizza counter trying to keep myself from tapping him on the shoulder to say, “Hi. I know who you are.”

Eventually he got his order and turned around to walk by me, his Bikers Against Child Abuse logo displayed proudly on the front of his jacket. It happened so quickly but I pulled myself together enough to say the first thing that popped into my head, “You guys are awesome.” With this statement, I instinctually raised my fist towards the logo. I’m not sure what I was expecting, a fist bump, a salute, but I only got one word.

“Yeah,” he agreed, almost smiled and swaggered off, leaving me hanging.

I dorkishly let my fist drop but my grin did not fade. I really do love those guys. I like that they take their big scary biker gangness and use it to protect kids. They befriend abused kids and tell them they’re not alone and then make sure that they are NOT. ALONE. They hang around the kid, intimidating the POOP out of the abuser. Who’s gonna abuse a kid whose best friends are a giant group of burly bikers? I ask you, “Who?”

Rock on, my friends.

Something happens to me after a baby is born. If you’re a mother, it’s probably happened to you too. I suddenly feel like the world around me is breakable, myself, my family made of shatter-resistant glass that’s fully capable of shattering if given the right opportunity. Like Corelle on a tile floor, we look sturdy but at any moment, SMASH! We could all fall to pieces.

With Laylee, it was a happy fragility, sort of a dreamy bubble where I smiled, clutched her fiercely and dressed her up like a doll, loving her and yet somewhat unable to believe that I had created something so wonderful. I was having the time of my life playing mommy and wondered if at any minute someone was going to wake me up from my reverie.

As I’ve documented here and elsewhere, the dish hit the tile when Magoo was born and then I spent 2 years seeking out every last shard of broken glass and painstakingly gluing them back together. There are so many happy memories from his babyhood but in between enjoying the kids, I spent much of my time searching for shards, painfully aware of just how breakable I was.

And now I’m on round three. I feel like I’ve got things together… a bit. Most of the time. There are sublime moments like last week when Laylee and Magoo cleaned the entire main floor of our playdate-trashed house as a surprise for me while I was feeding Wanda. Then there are moments like today when I found the big kids sitting with their arms crossed on the trampoline, facing each other and screaming until their brains were gone about who had won whatever game they were playing. In the end, Laylee tried to reconcile by saying, “I’ll teach you a new game then where there are no winners and no losers. It’s called Butt-Punch.” Magoo declined the game. I rolled my eyes and walked back into the house. Dan says that in a game called Butt-Punch, he’s pretty sure everyone is a loser.

Through the highs and the lows, I find myself managing but holding on to that glued-together plate just a little too tightly. Am I depressed? Tired? Afraid of descending into the pit I discovered Postpartum II? I’m kind of afraid to ask myself. It scares me a little that I have to try so hard.

My pendulum swings precariously. One day my house is a mess and I can’t force myself to deal with it. The next I’m cleaning and scrubbing like mad. Many days I feel like a hermit, not wanting to be bothered to answer my door or phone and the next I’m sad because people have stopped calling. I’m not doing the best in my church work or my role in the PTA. I’m letting things slip.

I tell myself that this is to be expected. The baby’s only a month old, two months old, five months old. Why shouldn’t I want to spend all day holding her and squishing her, playing cards with Laylee and Magoo and reading books at home? I should like my home, my little hermitty cave. Why would I want to go anywhere else?

I’m just holding on too tightly. There is a slightly strained sensation to the sweetness of this time. I’m cherishing the time with my kids because realizing that Wanda is our last has also made me realize that Laylee and Magoo are growing up too quickly and I don’t have a freeze ray. Heck, I don’t even have a time machine. I have photos and videos and the ability to make more. Dan just bought about a terabyte of storage space for our computers because I am on a memory-capturing rampage.

How can I make the most of every minute with my kids without squeezing the life out of those moments? How can I allow myself to just be the mother I am without questioning myself into a spiral of self-doubt? If I could just live in the moment, just be here and love it, love myself as much as I love these stinking wonderful Butt-Punch-playing, breast-sucking kids. If I could be as forgiving and gentle to their mother. If. I think I’d find that I could relax my grip and the fear in my throat and there’s a good possibility that nothing would break but my stifling itch for perfection.

If “gentle babies” use “gentle baby wash,” what do “ferocious, violent ninja babies” use?

This is just one more reminder that I need to watch myself because although my kids will inevitably grow to have unique talents, personalities, and interests, they’ll have a lot more of Mom in them than any of us really want to admit. [read more at Parenting.com]