Dirty Little Secret

Dear Lovebug,

You have become such a little boy in the last few months. I think back to the first time something you said surprised me (you weren’t two yet and we were playing a “guess the animal” game with Ironflower and suddenly you popped up with the correct answer, even though you were hardly talking yet) and I realize how much you’ve grown up. Every day you say something that surprises me!

I love that you are so independent, that you enjoying playing by yourself and doing things for yourself and yet you still need lots of hugs. The other day I watched you playing rough and tumble games with your friends, constantly expecting you to get upset. But you didn’t. You were having fun, just like a big kid.

You are brave, Lovebug. I know a lot things worry you and new situations cause you anxiety. And I’m so glad that you’re opening up and telling us about it, which is brave. But not only do you do that, you’re starting to do things anyway, even if they do make you nervous. That’s makes me so proud.

Your interest in trains has grown to include cars, trucks and airplanes. You build complicated track systems and roads so well. What has really developed this year is your passion for Legos. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build every day. Even if it is during breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner.

You are such an amazing brother. You look out for your baby brother and share with him more than anyone could expect. And you stood up to the boys from Ironflower’s class who chased her and her friends, even though they were bigger than you are. You miss Ironflower a lot when she has her long day at school.

You, Lovebug, are a really cool kid. And I am so lucky to be your mom.

I love you,

Mommy

Yesterday the kids’ preschool had a free movie day at a local movie theater. We are on winter vacation this week (around here there are 2 post-Christmas vacations, 1 in February and 1 in April; it’s great if you can afford to go to the Caribbean, not so great if you are trapped in 2 feet of snow with 3 small children) and as I am recovering from the flu from hell (why yes, that is the medical term for it) I thought it would be suitably mellow.

Boy, am I dumb.

The first problem was that Hot Guy was not going to be able to hang with ChunkMonkey as I had hoped. But I figured that if he fussed, I would just take him to the hallway because surely the older two would be settled with their friends.

Ha.

Lovebug started crying as soon as we entered the theater. He hated the curtains. He hated the seats (he has amazing recall. Once a theater chair sort of folded with him in it and he’s never forgotten it. I don’t know why he hates curtains.) He hated the dark – which hadn’t even happened yet. He wanted to sit on my lap before I’d even gotten ChunkyMonkey settled and the stroller out of the way.

Oh, how Lovebug cried. I wanted to just leave, but that set Ironflower off. It was like Sophie’s Choice, but with really low stakes.

Moms around me gave me sympathetic glances, but there wasn’t much they could do. Eventually I moved us farther away from the curtains to a spot behind Lovebug’s best friends.

Still there was wailing.

I believe I asked my son the horrible questions that I swore I would never utter: “Why can’t you be normal and have fun like the other kids?”

This, you can imagine, did not immediately calm the boy. So I hugged him. I let him stand in front of me. And I prayed that Toy Story would do its magic.

God Bless Pixar.

The movie entranced Lovebug. . .hell, it entranced ChunkyMonkey.

Which is when I started coughing. Not throat-clearing little spasms, either. Great big hacking-oh-my-god-is-she-going-to-die coughs. I drank the baby’s juice. I tried to take deep breaths. But I just couldn’t stop until I basically coughed up the human equivalent of a fur ball. Luckily I had tissues. Not-so-luckily, my aim sucks and I had to use some of those tissues to clean off my poor sons’ shirts.

Ironflower glanced at me in concern, but averted her gaze when she saw the crisis.

Again I was tempted to leave, but they were all so into the movie.

A little mucus never hurt anybody, right?

So I painted Lovebug’s nails the other night.

Why?

Because my almost 4 year son asked me to, that’s why. He asked without whining, with just the sweetest expression on his face. I had just painted Ironflower’s nails a lovely pink. I started painting her nails a few years ago to get her to stop sucking her thumb. Totally worked, but now she wants me to keep doing it.

Plus we may have watched RuPaul’s Drag Race together. (Look Hot Guy’s been gone a lot lately and sometimes I need adult TV that isn’t going to scare the kids. Plus, hello? Drag Queens? I totally wish I could be one.)

Anyway, the point is that I pointed my son’s nails. I used clear, which I explained as the appropriate color for boys (unless they are drag queens, but I didn’t want to remind him of that, because what if he’d then asked for red? I’m sure our family already gives the staff of their preschool enough laughs.)

I like to think of myself as a feminist. I raise my children to think that they can be anything, that toilet cleaning knows no gender and that drag queens are cool. But my boys are obsessed with trains and cars and my daughter loves princess Barbies. . . . . .and I’m really comfortable with that.

I felt sheepish when Hot Guy asked me why Lovebug’s nails were so shiny. He just shook his head at me while refraining from comment.

So I’m curious to hear from other adults, would you paint your son’s nails? And if so, would you force clear on him? Or let him go his own creative way?

(I want to state for the record that if he wants to paint his own nails when he’s a teenager or an adult, I’m fine with it. It’s the fact that’s he so little and that someday he may call me from his therapist’s office and talk about how I feminized him as a preschooler that freaks me out.)

I always thought I’d be one of those really creative moms, the kind that do amazing art projects with their kids on rainy afternoons and let them dress however they wanted. I thought I’d just quietly walk out of the room when angry, or quietly lecture them until they apologized and never did it again. I thought I’d always be happy to read a story. I thought I’d be good at this.

Which just goes to show that life must really begin at 40, because before I had kids, I certainly didn’t know myself very well. While it’s true that sometimes I liked to draw or color to relax, the only time I ever did amazing art projects was when I had to do them to make examples for my students, and even then I only did them while I was watching movies and talking on the phone. As for dressing, well, I tend to conform. And the only time I’ve ever been quiet while angry is right before I’ve exploded. With regards reading stories, sure I LOVE to read and I do enjoy quality children’s literature, but that’s not what my children want to hear. They want to hear Thomas stories and rehashings of Disney movies.

And as I struggle to convince my fiercely independent children that nose-picking is gross, that vegetables will not kill them, that they can let me direct the imaginary play just once and that matching socks are fun, I kind of want to laugh. Not at them.

At me.

How on earth did I think two stubborn, loud parents would produce quiet, malleable children? And turn flexible and quiet upon parenthood? What the hell was I smoking?

What’s really funny is that my belief in an easy child and my subsequent ideal motherhood were going to happen with ChunkyMonkey. Like any third child in our family wouldn’t realize that he’d have to yell just to be heard each day. And like adding a third child to the mix wouldn’t increase my older children’s independence and my own willingness to encourage them to entertain themselves.

And that’s how I know I’m done having kids (aside from the realities that we don’t have enough money or room to have another, of course). I may be a little sad to realize that I won’t be buying baby stuff anymore and that I’ll never nurse again, but the bloom has worn off. I know if we had a fourth s/he would be even more passionate and loud than the other three and that I would become even less of an ideal mother, possibly by barricading myself in my room during play time and letting them all fend for themselves.

That’s what my son said today, after I prompted him to say good-bye to a boy from Ironflower’s class. The kids like to run around a bit after being picked up from preschool, because apparently freezing temperatures, a biting wind and snow on the ground are not half as important as playing with their classmates for an extra few minutes. Today I’d seen Lovebug argue with the boy, a nice kid from Ironflower’s class. As it didn’t get physical and no one came to me about it, I figured all was well.

Until, as we walked to our car with the boy and his mom, my son said, “Good-bye, you bitch.” The look of shock on her face combined with the shock I felt made me giggle. I covered my mouth. I made him apologize. I repeated, “We don’t call people that” like a mantra.

But of course, we do call people that. Not me, actually – my favorite word, as I’ve mentioned, is “shit.” But my husband and possibly my brother-in-law prefer the term “bitch”.  We just spent 10 days at my in-laws, a number of them snowed in. Add in the 3 days driving there and the 3 days driving home and well, we’ve had a lot of togetherness lately. (Yes, you read that correctly. Three days in the car back to the farm outside of Kansas City, 9 days in a house with no internet, and three days home.  And we’re all more or less intact.)

None of which excuses the fact that we’ve been swearing in front of the children again. Well, in front of Lovebug. Ironflower doesn’t seem to notice most of what we say (even when it’s directed at her), but Lovebug is like a little sponge. A sponge that called a bigger boy a bitch in front of his mother.

I personally don’t care much about swearing, which is good since that would make me a total hypocrite. But name-calling really disturbs me. Maybe it’s because I can still remember being called names – that still echo in my head – as a child, but don’t even notice most swear words anymore. The only reason I haven’t hijacked all of Lovebug’s Thomas trains is that I don’t think he knew that he was name-calling.

But he’d better remember next time.

Even though Hot Guy grew up around guns and hunting, we’ve avoided the gun issue as parents of young children. Why teach them about guns before they were ready to learn gun safety? In fact, my kids didn’t know what guns were until they went to preschool.

Then Lovebug came home shooting things.

He points his arm out and says, “Pishew! Pishew!” to indicate that he’s gotten us. He doesn’t call it shooting, he calls it , “Pishewing”. He calls the things he makes out of Legos his “Pishewers”. And we avoid the “g” word, because I don’t think guns should be thought of as toys. But I also don’t want to stop what appears to be some sort of instinctive male tendency.

Then we met the boys with guns.

Not much older than Lovebug’s 3, the boys carried water guns as tall as they were. They carried them into my parents’ town pool after the following directions from their mothers, “Shoot away from people, boys.” One boy found that boring and put the gun by his mother’s chair. The other also found that boring, but his solution was to shoot at people. People like my Lovebug.

Lovebug, being a lover and not a fighter – as well as no fan of the water, came running to me in tears. I said the boy was mean and to stay away from him. Lovebug, Ironflower and my mom built a sandcastle. The boy came over to shoot it with his water gun. Why? I don’t know. I loudly told him to stop and go away. I had to stand up and loom over him for it to work.

His mother did not notice. She did not notice a strange woman practically yelling at her son. She did not notice when he shot other kids in the face. She did not notice when he tripped over the large gun. She did not notice anything until he blasted her with water. Then she told him to stop. Twenty times.

And I stood there wondering, do toy guns make kids aggressive? Or do aggressive kids want toy guns? And what kind of IDIOT lets her son loose with a giant water gun at the crowded kiddie pool? And should I go say something to her?

What are your thoughts about toy guns?

There’s just not enough chocolate in the world for this shit. I think I need some Percocet or something.

I’m sick. The big kids are sick. Aunt Flo has dropped in and she seems to have brought extra luggage. Hot Guy and my parents, aka the only other people who watch my children, are out of town. I’m so behind in writing assignments that I don’t think I’ll ever catch up. I’m getting three hours of sleep a night. I’ve developed a Lexulous addiction (that’s Facebook Scrabble for those of you smart people who avoid Facebook). I have six loads of laundry to fold. The baby is teething. All of which I might be able to handle if….

Lovebug has lost his mind. He’s keeping himself awake at night (after a week where all my other schedule and sleep tweaks had him sleeping well) and demanding that I come in to his room during the night – ignoring him results in tantrums, which wake the baby and result in me going in there anyway. He’s crying and screaming every time he doesn’t get his way or is told how to behave. Consequences make him even more crazy, but half the time he calms down immediately when I tell him the tantrum will get him in even more trouble. And no matter how immediately the consequences happen or how many times I explain WHY he got in trouble, he seems to make no link between his behavior and consequences. I know he’s only three, but he understands other kinds of cause and effect and quite well. I just don’t know what to do with him. He has so many moments of sweetness and kindness that I’m reasonably sure he isn’t a lost cause, though he may well be if I keep yelling at him.

Any ideas? Or good drugs?

They tell you that motherhood profoundly changes you. They tell you that you’ve never imagined love that deep. They tell you that you will become more selfless than you’d ever imagined. They tell you that your life will never be the same.

And you realize it quickly, as you stare into that little face. As you function on two hours of sleep. As you read the same story for the 1,000th time. As you try to give your friend advice on what to wear to a formal event and realize you haven’t been to one yourself since 2002. As you physically miss your children when they spend the night at grandma’s.

What they don’t tell you is how your capacity for grossness will change. Sure, they mention dirty diapers. But I was a nanny. I baby-sat. Dirty diapers hadn’t fazed me in the first place. But it wasn’t until I was a parent until I realized that dirty diapers are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Ironflower had gastric reflux for the first 8 months of her life. She threw up everywhere, all the time. We told each friend she threw up on that could call themselves aunt or uncle. And I, I whose stomach had retched so easily at just the thought of vomit, was totally calm. In fact, I became rather scientific as I cleaned up each round of vomit – what color would it be this time? Hot Guy was even more impressive, though. Once, as he held her over his head, she threw up. Into his open mouth. The fact that he didn’t run screaming out the front door then has always made me a bit complacent about our family.

Next came Lovebug. He seemed so clean, comparatively speaking. Rarely threw up. Had lots of little poops instead of big explosive ones. Wouldn’t eat baby food, so he didn’t really eat solid food until he was old enough to keep it in his mouth. I should have known that he’d get back at me eventually. He STILL won’t poop on the potty, you know. He waits until bedtime when he’s wearing his training pants and then goes for it (Although the other day he went up to his room in the afternoon, changed into training pants, pooped, then changed back into his underwear. Quite a kid, my Lovebug.). Then takes off the training pants and drops them on the floor. The carpeted floor of his room. So now I’ve been an expert at scrubbing shit.

Now the bodily functions of my children don’t bother me at all. I don’t even have a moment of nausea, or repulsion. Which is why – and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, except that I’m kinda hoping that someone else will admit to doing the same thing – I watched as ChunkyMonkey pooped this morning. He’s just started having solid ones. Thinking he was done, I started to change him. But he had more and I watched it come out. I was kinda fascinated. I have never seen that much poop come out of a baby. Seriously, it was impressive.

If anyone had told me five years ago that I would just sit there and watch my baby’s poop come out, I would have thrown a drink at them.

So yeah, there’s deep love and fierce protectiveness that comes along with motherhood. And, apparently, also an ability to appreciate a big poop.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Is it bad to think about slipping your children Benadryl so that they’ll sleep at night? Is it bad to actually do it? Or is it worse to tell your three old that he’s ruining the family’s well-being because he won’t go to sleep until 10pm, he wakes up at 2am to play with his trains and then wakes again at 5am, each time waking his baby brother and mother in the process?

Uh, this is all hypothetical, of course.

Two boys have been sharing a room for a while now. The three year old used to at least go to sleep on time. Now he stays up. . .disturbing his six month old brother. He gets up all the time. . .disturbing his brother. He plays with his trains .. .waking his brother. Then his brother wakes up close enough to three year old’s version of morning that they’re both up by 6am.

And, uh, the mother is starting to lose her shit become concerned. She knows their horrible behavior is coming from lack of sleep. She keeps the room dark. She has a bedtime routine with relaxation techniques. She’s been reluctant to take away the trains, as they are security for the three year old. But he also has a stuffed animal that he loves and doesn’t play with. And he thrives on any kind of attention, being three. So when his mother yells in frustration discusses the situation, he doesn’t care. He also doesn’t seem to relate consequences from behavior the night before to punishments the next day.

Does anyone PLEASE have suggestions for this poor woman? She is actually losing short term memory skills from lack of sleep. Really. Between this and her red eyes from crying in frustration, people are starting to think she’s a stoner.

Dear Lovebug,

I can’t believe you are three. You are growing up so fast. I’m so proud that you have learned to put your own sneakers and coat on. And you are so polite with people, asking their names and introducing yourself. And to think I was so worried about your speech!

Watching you become a big brother has been amazing. You are so gentle and sweet with your baby brother, even using “mother-ese” to talk to him. For a kiddo who still loves the word “no”, you are always willing to help with your brother. I love watching you give him a kiss every morning.

Sometimes your passion wears me out – sometimes I’m not sure why you are SO upset for no apparent reason. But as I listen to you play – I love how you act out stories with all of your Thomas trains – I realize that there’s a lot more going on in your head than you’re telling me. I can’t wait until you’re ready to tell me everything.

And Thomas. I’m not sure what you’d do without trains. You play with them so well – for so long. But you’re also interested in them, beyond just the Thomas stories. You pick out non-fiction books to learn about trains and cheerfully watch specials on the Discovery Channel about them. That’s pretty cool for a three year old.

You are my little Lovebug, filled with kisses and hugs and tackles. I love you so much and I’m so proud to be your Mommy.

Love,
Mommy