Dirty Little Secret

I have just received Ironflower’s 8 PAGE packet for her dance recital. Now, I might welcome the packet if it told me exactly what make-up to put on her or what to do with her beautifully unruly hair. I might welcome the packet if it laid out her 2 routines so that we could practice at home. I might welcome her packet if she wasn’t in preschool. But instead I look at the packet and think, are you FREAKING SERIOUS?

I still don’t know how to do her hair or her make-up. . .or even what her costume looks like (which doesn’t really bother me because the recital is not until late May, but why not just include this info in the packet?). But I do know that we can’t make our own DVD of the recital AND that it will cost us $40 to buy one. I also now know that I can purchase extremely over-priced bouquets and photos. Oh, and there’s a complicated lottery system for ticket purchases. I have also read about the procedures for picking up my child after the performance and extensive details about the dress rehearsal.

I am also to provide non-staining snacks and toys for her use backstage.

Snacks????? Toys??????

You know what I did backstage during the myriad recitals and performances I was in?

I talked to my friends and I watched the other dancers. When I got older, I put on more make-up. And I didn’t get to eat anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I also walked 2 miles up hill to school (actually, I would have done that, if my mom hadn’t driven me to school most of the time) and survived just fine.

I am usually the person who stands up for the booster seats until they can drive (or whatever the rule is now),  helmets and bouncy playground surfaces. I’m reluctant to leave my children with a baby-sitter or for them to have playdates without me. I overanalyze everything (which you have probably noticed if you’ve ever read this blog before). In short, I am a modern parent.

But I think we’ve gone off the deep end where dance recitals are concerned. First come, first served seating is no longer good enough for today’s families.  DVDs have to be professionally produced. Bouquets have be  big and expensive. Photos must be taken by an overcharging professional. Children must be entertained backstage. Packets must be sent home 3 months beforehand. All the spontaneity of live performance must be crushed.

I am so NOT cut out for helicopter parenting.

I do not have the heart of a champion. When I watch the Olympics and the announcers talk about various athletes being disappointed about getting the bronze or coming in 10th or whatever, I want to call those athletes and say, “Oh my gosh, you’re the 12th best skier in the world today – congratulations! You’re better than billions and billions of people!”

I’m a “good enough” sort of person. Partially because I’d rather be curled up on the couch with a book than, you know, actually working and partially because I think perfectionism can drive you insane. I tried to be perfect once – to excel at grad school and to keep a perfect house and to be a perfect wife and to look perfect – and it triggered my first flare of ulcerative colitis. And my subsequent divorce.

My “good enough” lifestyle has some benefits in parenting. My kids are really good at entertaining themselves, for example, because I’m don’t feel the need to be supermom and entertain them 24/7. They’re also good at doing things for themselves because I don’t feel like I have to do everything for them.

The problem is that I feel terribly guilty about this.

When I was teaching – another job you can pretty much do all the time and never reach perfection with – I didn’t feel bad when I happy-stamped instead of corrected homework or helped the kids earn extra recess so I could have a few more minutes to finish lesson plans.

But with motherhood, it’s different.

My not-quite 4 year old does not know how to write his name. I’ve tried to teach him, but he LOATHES it with a deep passion that I thought he only reserved for shots. The “good enough” person in me says that it’s no big deal and that he’ll learn eventually and to just let it go. The mother in me feels like a failure.

And when they’re all perfectly happy and I’m doing something like writing or cleaning or updating my Facebook status, I feel kind of bad about that too. Like I should be doing something creative with them, or at least talking to them. But in “good enough” world there’s no earthly reason to disturb happy children.

Is there a drug out there to ease the guilt? Or to make me perfect without going crazy?

I was a picky eater as a child. My cousins like to remind of the phase I went through when I wouldn’t eat green food because it was my favorite color. (Just for the record, that wasn’t really it. It was because I hated most green foods. Especially lima beans. And broccoli.)

Naturally, I assumed that my own children would not have to rebel in this way. I wouldn’t demand that they eat their vegetables, I would simply present them with healthy choices and eventually they would find fruits and vegetables that they liked.

Karma is such a bitch, isn’t she?

My children are worse than I ever was. They don’t even eat pasta or cold cuts, let alone vegetables. The only fruit Ironflower eats willingly is apples.

So we decided to try a more forceful strategy. Now they can’t be excused without trying  everything on their plates. We figured that if they tried enough new things, they’d learn to like some of them. According to the parenting magazines, it can take 20 tries. We knew we’d have to be consistent and persistent. We were prepared for that.

We were not prepared for Ironflower, however. At 5, Ironflower has the will of an Olympian. An Olympian who refuses to eat any vegetables. Recently we’ve been working on baby carrots. (Do not tell me about dipping. The child won’t use any dip but ketchup, and then only on some kinds of french fries.)

Is one bite of carrot really such an unreasonable request?

The child has refused the carrot 4 times now. Each time she has not been excused from the table. She has stayed there until bedtime. FOUR TIMES.

I mean, she’s KNOWS we’re serious. She KNOWS that we’re not going to give in. And yet. . .

She won’t take ONE FREAKING BITE OF CARROT.

We’ve had the same issue with peas. And green beans. And pears.

But carrots, dude. Even I liked them as a child.

Anyone got advice they can pass on before dinner this evening? Because I’m getting kind of desperate.

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.

The only New Year’s resolution I’ve really kept – for years and years – is the one I’ve never told anyone about. When I thought of it, I was a semi-shallow 17 year old. Now, (slightly) more than 20 years later, I still keep my nails neatly painted (clear counts, okay? My resolution, my rules.)

Now that I’ve mentioned it, I will probably have a horrible nail accident that prevents me from painting them for the next six months.

Anyway, I don’t talk about my resolutions anymore, for the most part. Partly because I tend to keep them so easy and manageable (“I will not let gray show in my hair for at least another 5 years,” “I will reorganize the hall closet”, “I will stop drinking wine because it gives me a headache”) that they don’t seem a proper response when someone tells me that her resolution is to run a marathon that year. And partly because I’m superstitious that if I tell everyone then my resolution will fail.

Not that I haven’t had plenty resolutions fail anyway. Such as last year’s “lose weight” and “stop yelling”. So this year one of my resolutions is, “Stop being superstitious about New Year’s resolutions”.

Another resolution I’m going to share with the 4 of you that still read this blog:

Chill the Fuck Out.

Yep, my resolution is so rebellious that it contains the F word.

Every year, I resolve to be a better mother, a better wife, a better daughter, a better friend. I plan to lose weight (except for 2008, when I planned to at least not gain weight and got pregnant a month later), eat healthier, exercise more, clean the house more, be more organized, take my writing more seriously, manage our limited financial resources better, create interesting projects for my children each day, learn to cook, make more money, learn Spanish, develop a supplemental home curriculum to boost my children’s learning, to volunteer at the preschool more and to never yell at my children.

Sure, I”ve made improvements in some of those areas. But mostly, I’ve just felt like a failure. And failures are not happy people, just in case you didn’t know. I know that there are people out there who do all of the above and more. Goddess bless them, it’s time to face the fact that I will not be joining their ranks.

Oh, I’m going to keep trying to be better. Much as I might be tempted to give up and turn into Peggy Bundy, I’d be bored in two days weeks. But when I don’t succeed, I’m going to chill the fuck out. And when I’m driving myself crazy to match up with the image I have of good mothers/writers/housewives, I’m going to chill the fuck out.

I’ve started small this week, because I’ve also finally accepted the fact that I’m better with small steps and not grand gestures. So this week, I’ve chilled out about the morning. For some reason, no matter how early we get up, I’ve always felt the need to hurry my kids in the morning. I’ve been wanting them to dress faster, move faster and eat faster for months (consequently I think that they’ve started to do things more and more slowly, but that’s another post) so that we could get to school on time.

So what if we were grumpy and harassed when I dropped them off? At least I’d fulfilled the good mother checklist of getting them there on time.

On the chill the fuck out approach, I’ve stoppped hurrying them. I’ve even stopped setting my alarm, because Lovebug will always wake early and thus so will I. And hearing him play is much nicer than the buzz of my alarm clock. I tell them what to do (and I’ve hedged my bets by laying out their clothes the night before) and then I just let them do it. I don’t rush them. We have conversations and hugs. I don’t offer dire warnings of starving until snack time while they talk instead of eating at breakfast.

Here’s the strange part: We actually made it to school on time every day this week.

I think I might really like this resolution.

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.

I felt guilty when I first read it. “Oh my God, I do that all the time! I did it to all 3 kids! I’m so irresponsible!” And then, well, then I took a deep breath. I turned off the “Supermom” voice, the one that screams (internally) whenever the baby eats a cracker from the floor, the one that panics (mostly internally) whenever she sees one of her child’s peers exhibit a skill her child doesn’t have, the one who is thinking about learning to knit just because she thinks moms should know how, not that she has actually interest.

I reread the paragraph. “What was she thinking?” I wondered this time around.

The “she” is some mom who wrote to Parents magazine because her daughter’s car seat fell off the shopping cart. Now that sucks, and I’m very glad the baby was okay. Apparently, the shopping cart went over a bump and the car seat fell off the top part. The part where I’ve been putting my car seats for the last 5 years.

I have never had a car seat fall.

Possibly some of that is luck. And possibly some of it is that when the terrain is bumpy, I freaking hold on to the car seat.

Look, I’m not judging. I’m sure this woman is much more patient than I am and spends hours reading to her baby every day. I bet there are no crackers on her floor. So I’m NOT saying I’m better than she is. I’m really not. I’m just saying. . .didn’t she ever notice what the car seat did when it was bumpy? How it bounces it bit? How did she not notice?

And why did Parents magazine have to publish this? Now poor new moms are going to be strapping their babies into Bjorns and not giving their poor backs a damn rest while at the grocery store. Why not just say, “Hold the car seat in the parking lot”?

Is it really too much to ask people who procreate to have some sense?

I am a yeller.

I didn’t think I would be. I never yelled (okay, except for that one time, but that class totally deserved it and it’s just wrong that my principal happened to be giving a school board member a tour that day) as a teacher. I am much more likely to mutter obnoxious comments under my breath, or write them during meetings to the amusement of my colleagues.

But then my kids started to, you know, bite each other. And I discovered yelling was effective.

I realized recently that I may have been doing a little too much of it, as I’ve had to get really loud for them to notice. Though that may be because once unleashed, my yelling voice has also appeared in traffic and around customer service representatives. So I decided to quit yelling. No matter how naughty the kids were, no matter how frustrated I was, I would not yell.

Today was Day 1.

I awoke at  5am to hear the boys talking to each other. Not that ChunkyMonkey talks, but he sure makes noise. I tried to ignore them, because I’ve discovered that I can’t force them to sleep and that when I talk to them at 5am I am tempted to yell.

By 7am, I had discovered that Lovebug had clogged the toilet with too much toilet paper . . .and pooped on top of it.

At 7:45am, a huge, full, glass jar of salsa fell onto the tile floor of kitchen. While I tried to clean up, Lovebug and Ironflower got into a wrestling match and knocked ChunkyMonkey over.

At 9:05am, a man began tailgating me and flashing his lights at me after I dropped Ironflower off at school. I was doing 36 mph in a 35 zone and he was in a hurry, I guess.

We avoided problems in the grocery store because I bribed the boys with toys and food. My grocery bill was $20 more than it should have been. (Does this mean my children would be well-behaved if we were rich?)

10;45 saw us driving home from the grocery store, with Lovebug yelling, ” I have to pee right now!”. We were 10 minutes from home and I did not want to clean up pee in addition to the poop and salsa, so I pulled over on a side street. This caused ChunkyMonkey to wail loudly as he wanted out too. I brought Lovebug over to a tree. I reviewed how to pee standing up because he generally likes to sit down. I don’t know why. Because of that, he kept trying to squat and I kept trying to make him stand up straight. Eventually he peed .. . . .correctly. . .onto my shoe.

12:00pm Ironflower, in her frustration over having to leave school, threw a rock in her brother’s general direction.

It’s now 2 and I am proud to say that I have not yet bitten though my tongue.

What do you do about your frustration?

PS If you happen to be a person who links to me – all three of you – could you please, please change your link to jerseygirl89.com? Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

There’s a business in a nearby town that is almost entirely devoted to personalized birthday favors. Well, I think it is. I’ve never actually been in there. But the kids have gotten adorable gift bags with personalized frisbees and whatnot in them. As well as candy. All from a store that I’ve never heard anyone refer to in any other context.

We’ve been to a birthday party that had a moonwalk, clown, hot dog cart and 4 cakes. And that was a first birthday party.Mostly, we’ve been to parties at indoor play places. But occasionally we’ve been to decked out yards, with visits from Dora and Diego. Once we went to a party that had a clown, a singer and a balloon maker.

I mention all this because Ironflower’s birthday is a scant 2 months away. And there are 19 kids in her class. So we’re looking at inviting 25 kids to the party, or thereabouts. That will pretty much double the exorbitant fee we’ll be paying for the party space in the first place.

When I relayed this to a Kansas City friend of mine, she was kind of horrified. Party spaces and personalized favors didn’t happen in her preschooler’s world.

And when I lamented to a New Jersey mom that I wished my kids had been born in the summer so I could have a party in my yard, she was horrified by the thought of the clean up and organizing involved.

All I can think is, isn’t celebrating a birthday supposed to be FUN? Why am I stressing about this 2 months ahead of time? Oh, right. Ironflower wants what all her friends have: her class at a party place where she will get to be the center of attention. And cute gift bags. And probably a new outfit for the event.

At least I’ll have  break until Lovebug’s birthday in March. And at least his class is small. And he probably won’t care about the outfit.

What about you? What are birthday parties like in your neck of the woods?