Humbling Readings

My husband and I still can't seem to come to an agreement on discipline.  I read a very disturbing article however that was all about tantrums.  

Basically it linked the uptight parent and their hurried agenda to the biggest cause of tantrums.  Natch. That's me.  I know that.  Usually, it's me who is being uptight.  I have all of these goals like getting the kids into bed by 8 or getting them off to school by 8, and mostly I just get uptight when the clock is ticking and we have more and more time outs.

The articles said something like, get a hold of your emotions before you start handling your children.  I just don't know how to stop.  No one is standing there judging me about what time my children go to bed or get to school, just me.  Well, the guard at school gives us a hard time for bringing the kids late, but my take on this is that they get more than my post-tax salary for taking care of my children so I don't really care what they think. 

 It's all of my self-imposed limitations that make me uptight about school and bedtime.  I know all about finding your limitations and superceding them from yoga practice.  I just can't seem to apply it to parenting.

This afternoon my husband and I were fighting and Iri had us both put out our hands so that she could draw smiley faces on them.  We weren't wearing smiley faces, so she tried to draw them on us.  We were so busy fighting that her small gesture was lost on us.  We've been fighting about everything under the sun.  What a surprise that she had several meltdowns throughout the day.  Wouldn't it be brilliant when we are having a disagreement if we could just put our arms around each other and say, here, let me draw a smiley face on you and it would all be better.  Maybe change does come in small gestures.

Responsibility

I just left my husband upstairs with our three year old.  She was trying to bargain her way out of bedtime and it was his turn to read books.  He fell asleep and I just left them upstairs together. I shut the door and walked out.  I suppose she could wreak havoc on the bedroom and mess it up a bit, but honestly, with two young children around, the bedroom is a complete disaster anyway.  What else might go wrong?  She might draw all over him with the markers or stay up another hour or two, but what do I care, I am downstairs, alone, writing and blissfully uninvolved.  

We keep talking about how we need to be on the same page with discipline, but, sometimes you just have to throw in the towel.  

What better lesson to teach than wearing yourself out and then putting yourself to bed.  Usually our bargaining chip every night is that if she behaves and stops whining an goes to sleep, mommy will come in the room for a while.  I am angling for something else.  If you misbehave long enough, I will shut you in the room with daddy and he will fall asleep and you can learn self-control enough to get bored and put yourself to bed. 

Tonight it is working brilliantly.

The only catch? I just locked myself out of the house in the cold!

Amendment.  Don't let sleeping dogs lie.  They wake up incoherent, come downstairs looking for a pen cap or some other nutty thing and don't have enough wits about them to just brush teeth and go to bed.  An hour long, over-tired screaming, whining fest ensues, little sister is awoken and one hour later all of our nerves are shot.

Why we hate our mothers.

I am embarrassed to say that I am not a very good mom.  I thought I was better equipped to handle all of this, but I'm really not.

Before I had children, I had set out to answer one of the most disturbing conundrums.  Why do we, especially American women, hate our mothers? Now that I have two girls, I wonder why is it that our mother's don't hate us, an why are they not more insane?  Somehow I know this experience should make me respect what my mother did, an I do but there is too much baggage built up to not be resentful.  I cannot imagine staying home with my children all day.  David Sedaris tells a story about how they would get home from school and his mother would tell them to go outside and play, she would lock the door and lay on the couch smoking and reading books and not let them inside until dinner time.  When I read that, I thought, wow, poor,crazy woman.  Now I think, my hero!!  That sounds like utter bliss.  

It is one of the most nerve wracking jobs that I have ever encountered.  Repeatedly, I go through these  days where my children drive me to the brink of insanity with crying, tantrums, manipulation, sugar highs, sugar lows, not enough sleep.  I am talking about them but could just as easily be describing myself, functioning at a sub-par rate.  If anyone knows the secret for getting through all of this, please let me know.

Fantasy vs. Reality

I went to pick up my daughter early from school.  I know how excited she will be to see me since she is usually the last child to be picked up.  She runs into my arms with a big smile and says "Mommy, I love you"!  It is bliss and I am transformed by the wonderful reaction by this three year old.  We fall into each others arms planting kisses and talking in our secret language.  What bliss it is to be a mom.   

Reality check.  I arrive 30 minutes early and my daughter hisses at me.  She continues to play in the loft with her friends, one by one their mothers come and they embrace them  and leave.  

Finally it is me, my daughter, Kyle and teacher Jasmine.  I make light conversation with her teacher and Kyle's mom shows up.  She takes pity on me and gives me a sticker to entice my daughter away.  My daughter shoves me.  

Kyle's mom offers me a lollipop to entice my daughter.  My daughter says adamantly "NO"! I try to hide the tears that start to fall involuntarily.  

I tell her that everyone is leaving and that they will turn off the lights and leave her there alone.  She says, "OKAY"!  

Oh god, my daughter would rather stay in the school with no one here, than go with me.  

Eventually, we are forced to leave as her teacher drags the trash in one hand and holds my daughter's hand with the other.  

I know somehow I am supposed to be pleased that she likes school so much, but I feel incredibly useless, let-down.  It is time for some serious behavior modification.  I'm not sure if it is hers or mine.

Ha, Ha Ha! Take That King of Disco, I Will Be Long Gone!

I thought that it would be a good idea to try for two children in order for them to have each other, since we are older parents. I didn't realize how important this would be until we had two children. It is so challenging sometimes to have two that I don't think we will make it 15 years.

Our neighbor and friend is Randy Jones, the cowboy from the Village people. He is married to a man, approaching 60 and never having children. He looks incredible, somewhere between 30 and King of Disco.  He looks, well, fabulous.  We saw him on the street the other day and he asked how it was going with two kids, he was sort of laughing at the absurdity of it all. Mind you, he's known me since my cool punk rocker twenties and I look, well, haggard, now.  

He then asked how old we will be when the girls hit the fun age of eighteen.  Kevin and I looked at each other and replied, "We will be dead"!  

It is no wonder parents are crazy, or alcoholic or hated by their children.    

Frankly, we don't know how we are going to survive the first five years, much less 15.

PS. Randy, We have bequeathed the girls to you!

How to Talk to Your Mom

I always wanted to have important conversations with my mother. The problem was that by the time she had me she was only 23 and hadn't had much time for self-reflection. She was always in some sort of survival mode. I don't think she had given much thought to her role as a mother or as the important female role model in the lives of two young women. I don't think she ever rehearsed any of the conversations she might have with her daughters about the essential transitions in their lives. I, on the other hand, rehearsed those conversations with her hundreds of times. I spent hours figuring out how to ask her to take me to buy my first bra or make-up, when I could wear deodorant, and what to say to boys that I liked.
Mind you all of these conversations were with my mirror.
I tried out conversations that were succinct, to the point. "Mom, I think it is time I started to wear deodorant."
Or pathetic, "Mom, all of the other girls are wearing make-up and bras, could you please let me do it too"?
Or sympathetic, "Mom, there is this boy in my math class that I think is cute and he won't give me the time of day, you dated a lot of boys, how can I be attractive to them"?
I never actually had any of these conversations, I never seemed to have any one-on-one time with her and I could never find the entree into the conversation. I ended up going bra shopping with my older brother, who teased me mercilessly about it. I used the old make-up and deodorant that she threw away and muddled through hairstyling by observing my older sister.
I talk to my mother almost every day now, but I still don't feel like I can broach any subjects that are personal or difficult. I certainly can't talk to her about her alcoholism or her inability to really express how she feels or her lack of self-esteem.
A friend of mine just finished the prenatal course with Gurumukh. She had so much to tell about babies and birthing and mothering. One really important piece of advice she had was, work out the idiosyncrasies that you can before you are a mother. I worked out a lot of things. Or maybe, better said, I became aware of a lot of my habits and qualities that will make being a mother challenging. I tend to be aloof and have a convoluted way of relating to others. I know how to make someone angry at me so that I can blame myself for them not liking me. I know how to turn any feelings of pain or being left out into me just being crazy and paranoid. I know that these are qualities that I inherited from my mother. I wish I could talk to her about them. I know that I inherited these habits.

I now have two girls and I want them to be able to have these conversations freely with me when the time comes. I could never really talk to my mother about anything important. I want my daughters to feel that they can talk to me about anything. Perhaps having rehearsed all of the angles of conversation, I will be able to start these discussions with them before they start to really wonder about these essential qualities of girlhood. It may be simply that I need to make the space for those one-on-one conversations now, when their questions revolve around finding their place in the world and understanding why the sky is blue and what makes the seasons, so that we can broach the far more complicated questions that will come later.

Do you want to play with me?

I had a particularly emotional weekend when my best friend came to New York for a concert.  My life theme seems to be one of being left out.  I have all sorts of issues with this and have had to try to come to terms with it in all sorts of weird ways.  This issue runs deep in the fabric of my life and I won't go into to much detail.

Suffice it to say, we had a misunderstanding and I thought I was being left out of an opportunity to revel in debauchery with my friends one night when she was visiting.  I spent the next day waiting to be included and post-partum depression makes me cry.  I cried all day.  When Iri saw me crying and asked why I was so sad, I explained that it was like when you see a whole bunch of friends playing and you want to join them but you don't know how, you feel left out.

She looked at me with a sad little look and  took my hand.  she looked at me and said "mommy, do you want to play with me"? Now that is compassion.  And I did.  It helped me to stop crying.