You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Motherhood' category.
Miss Attitude
One of the stated reasons that I choose to home educate my children is so that they will be free to follow their dreams so it seems odd in retrospect that I have been shooting down a dream. I only meant to be realistic but it seems that the universe might be trying to tell me something.
My daughter, like nearly every other little girl, wants to be a movie star or a model. I have always told her that it will never happen. She lives in Missouri, not Hollywood. Her daddy is not Billy Ray Cyrus. She is upper-lower class to lower-middle class with no friends in high places. She is pretty, but not drop dead gorgeous.
And I am not, not, not one of those moms. I cringe when I see little girls all dressed up with more make-up on than I own being dragged to ridiculous pageants. I admit that I judge those mothers harshly. I believe they are trying to live their own dream through their little girls.
But it just keeps coming up.
She was asked to help a university student with a research project. They came to our house with television cameras and interviewed her in her room surrounded by her things. She was only four. I asked why they wanted her when they had kids of their own they could have used. Because she would do a better job on camera, I was told. She’s bubbly. Out-going. Not shy.
Then Lexie was asked to model for the Springfield Ballet. She had an hours long photo shoot. She was in several of their advertising campaigns and brochures. She did a fantastic job. They approached us.
Then she was asked to model for the Discovery Center. She had an impromptu photo shoot in the science lab there. I never saw the flier or ad that came of it, but again, they approached us.
And now, tomorrow, Lexie is going to go shoot a commercial. I deliver her at 3:00 looking nice but natural. She will be on KY3. I got the phone call this afternoon. I don’t have any idea why she’s being asked to do this. I’m still shaking my head.
Meanwhile, I’m afraid I’ve been a bad mommy. I’m afraid I denied her a chance to follow her dream by telling her it was stupid and unrealistic. But her dream didn’t give up.
I feel like maybe I should have been dragging myself to ridiculous pageants all these years instead of insisting on science and history and reading. I feel like I should have sent her off to be on Kid Nation when she begged me to. I feel like I should have taken her to that audition in Branson to work in a show all summer even though I didn’t want her to work all summer long. I feel like I should have taken her when the Oscar Mayer Wiener people were in town looking for the star of their next commercial. And so on…
Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I can say, “All right. We’ll do this thing.” But I don’t know where to start. Where does one sign up to be in a ridiculous pageant?
My apologies to the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
If you give a kid an African Violet, she’s going to need to repot it.
So you buy a cheap clay flowerpot and tell her she can paint it. You get out the acrylic paints and brushes and she paints the flowerpot. The flowerpot is left to dry and the paints don’t get put away.
That night you stay up too late and since your son is gone visiting Grandma this week, you sleep til noon the next day.
When you get up you find that the kid has emptied eighteen tubes of acrylic paint onto a serving platter since her pallet wasn’t big enough for all of them.
She has painted a wedding gift for her aunt on which she used exactly four of the eighteen colors.
She has also painted a picture on 20# bond printer paper that she wants to enter in the fair. It’s a good picture but she can’t enter it because it isn’t on a canvas. It’s on printer paper. You try to remember where you put the canvases you bought last summer for the fair but realize you have to buy more paint now and groan because those little tubes of acrylics are so expensive. So are the canvases but you bought a dozen of them last year expecting lots of do-overs and she only ended up using two of them.
She has ruined a total of four kitchen towels and her clothes. If there is anything that takes acrylic paint out of cloth you don’t know what it is.
But you don’t complain about any of it. You don’t want to squelch her creativity. And anyway, it’s your fault for sleeping late when you should have been supervising.
So, if you give a kid an African Violet, you’re going to need new paint, new towels, and new clothes. And you’re going to realize that it is time to start stressing about fair entries for this year.
And the violet still hasn’t been repotted.
I went shopping for Mother’s Day cards and was surprised at how many random thoughts it inspired. I spent so much time in the card aisle that I’m surprised security didn’t come check on me.
I tried to avoid seeing the cards for grandmothers but I couldn’t. It was hard to shake the sadness that I no longer have anyone to give them to. It was also hard to shake the guilt over all the years that I still had someone to send them to, but did not.
As I chose a card for my stepmother I hoped that I would not forget to send one to my dad on Father’s Day like I often do. Some years I’ve forgotten to get Mother’s Day cards mailed and some years I’ve forgotten to get Father’s Day cards mailed. I hate it when that happens. I’m always afraid one of them will feel slighted, unloved and unappreciated. Forgotten. I also remembered the year that I found all the Christmas cards addressed, stamped, and under a car seat still not mailed. In February. I don’t forget people. I forget the post office. Really.
I thought about my Aunt Jean who has no children and how I’d like to send her a Mother’s Day card anyway because she has meant a lot to me in my life, and like my grandmothers will not always be there to send a card to. When I was a child, she sent cards and postcards all the time. If there is an Aunt’s Day, I am not aware of it. I opted not to buy one for her but I think I may go back and get one.
Which reminds me of my friend Rachael in Florida, who I have never met in person, and probably never will. Rachael will send me a Mother’s Day card this year. My own kids probably won’t. My husband probably won’t. But Rachael will. I can count on it. I can also count on her to send my kids birthday cards, Easter cards, Halloween cards, and little surprise gifts in the mail. She even made my daughter some jewelry and mailed it. I appreciate Rachael and her thoughtfulness and wish I were half as good a friend as she is. I’ve remembered to mail her son something once. Maybe twice.
I met Rachael on an MSN Group. I’m not very active there any more. I should be, but I’m not. I need to change that but there are only so many hours in a day. My excuse is that I really want to write seriously this year and Gather is the better place to practice that. But my excuse sounds empty. These women are my friends and I have neglected them. So I will send them Mother’s Day cards this year. I wish I could buy them by the box like Christmas cards.
Other friends from that MSN Group come to mind. Karel. I hope she knows how much I value her. I wish she were here. She writes short stories and they are good. She is here, but like Rachael, only to occasionally read my stuff. She isn’t here in the same way that I’m here.
Stephanie. She died on Mother’s Day. She was 29 years old. She had four little boys. One of them was still breastfeeding when she died. There will never be another Mother’s Day when I don’t think of her and wonder how her boys are. She was the kind of mother that I wish I was but never will be.
Then there are my Gather friends. Unlike MSN, I don’t have very many snail mail addresses. I worry that if I send a card to Friend A and not to Friend B, just because I have one address and not the other, if Friend B will find out and feel slighted. I wonder if Friend C should get a card even though she doesn’t have any kids just because I love her just as much as Friend A and have her address.
Thankfully, in the midst of all this worry, I remember not to forget my own mother. I don’t buy mushy, sentimental cards for my mother. It just doesn’t work. I grew up laughing and learned my sarcasm from the best. Flowery cards full of poetry seem like something we’d have made fun of back in the day. Feelings by Hallmark seem somehow cheap and insincere. Better to buy a funny card and tell her I love her in my own words than to buy words written by someone else. But what if I’m wrong and she’s spent her whole life waiting to get a mushy, sentimental card? I certainly can’t write that fluff myself.
I buy cards for my sisters. One sister I talk to almost every day. The other sister I see about once every other year. I don’t buy them the same card.
I wonder if I should buy a card for my mother-in-law or if I should expect her son, my husband, to do it. He will probably forget or wait until they are so picked over that we have to make our own. I better go back and buy her one.
This afternoon I was in the kitchen washing dishes while my daughter was watching Animal Planet.
She came in, as she often does, talking and waving her arms around, telling me all about the mating and reproduction methods of anglerfish. It went something like this:
“The female is ten times bigger than the male and when they mate, the male bites into the female and sucks blood from the female. Each day she absorbs more of him and eventually gets pregnant. Then after she has the babies he is just a lump and he stays there forever. And they stay that way for life. For life, Mom! Then he dies but he’s still there on her back for all eternity and she has to go get a new one.”
“Now, how would you like that, Mom?”
I am somewhat disturbed that my daughter seems to have some idea that reproduction is supposed to be enjoyable for the parties involved.
I just Googled anglerfish and found her account to be mostly true. From Wikipedia:
Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Since individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.
At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. When it is mature, the male’s digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish or else dying. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.
With a title like that I bet you’re expecting some kind of deep, philosophical, serious article. You aren’t going to get it. This is another one of my kid stories.
On Easter my daughter came out of her room with a gift for the young man she has a crush on. The envelope was sealed and had hearts drawn all over it. A package of candy was taped to the outside of the envelope.
Every day she asked me several times a day when we were going to deliver her gift so I figured it must be something special. I hoped it wasn’t something she was going to be embarrassed about later, but I decided not to pry so I did not ask her what was inside.
A few days later I saw my friend, Ellynn, who happens to be the mother of my daughter’s crush. I gave her the envelope to pass on. The next day Ellynn called to tell me what was inside the envelope.
It was a picture of the Grim Reaper. My daughter had drawn the picture. I’m told it was an accurate depiction with the robe, hood, and scythe.
We don’t know what to think. I’m sure the recipient doesn’t know what to think either. I did tell her the Christian story of Easter so perhaps this was a religious sentiment, “The Grim Reaper took Jesus!”
That’s all I’ve got.
At 8:30 tonight we realized that we hadn’t had dinner. It was too late to cook and we were too tired anyway. We decided to go to the Golden Corral. I know buffets are gross but I had my reasons. It’s close, a five or ten minute drive. It’s a buffet so the kids can always find something they like to eat. There’s no waiting, and the kids were pretty hungry.
After we ate some real food, I took my son to the dessert bar. He was looking at everything to decide what he wanted. There was this awful pan full of green jello. I wish that I had taken the camera because I can’t describe this vomitous bilge accurately. It was the most awful mess of nasty stuff I’ve ever seen.
My son says, loudly, “What is that gross stuff, Mom?” I took one look at it and busted out laughing. I told him that I though it was ogre snot. We were still laughing about it when we got back to the table, so my daughter had to know what we were laughing about. She made a special trip to the dessert bar just to see it. My husband refused to go look at the jello. Sometimes he can be a real fuddy-duddy.
My daughter then mentioned that they had gummy bears for ice cream topping and that was pretty gross too. I told her that the gummy bears weren’t for the ice cream; they were for the green jello. This started a whole new round of laughter.
Our poor server was in close proximity cleaning tables and doing whatever they do when they are getting ready to close and was hearing every bit of this and trying to keep from laughing.
I took my son back to the dessert bar to get another brownie and decided to fix my fuddy-duddy husband some dessert. I got an ice cream bowl and put gummy bears in the bottom. Then I buried them with the green jello. Of course my son and I were laughing so hard about this that we got the employees behind the dessert bar to laughing too.
We went back to the table and sat the bowl in front of him. Then he did the unthinkable: He picked up the bowl and slurped the jello and gummy bears down. Me and the kids almost got sick while he sat there laughing at us.
A little later when the server by to take our plates, my husband told her she earned a good tip for putting up with us. I said, “We weren’t that bad. All we did was make fun of the green jello.”
She said that it was green because it is March. I said, “Oh, for St. Patrick’s Day?” She agreed.
Then my husband, without missing a beat, says, “Oh my God! It’s been there that long?!”
I was so proud of him that when I stuck my fork in my apple pie I somehow flipped it into the air and it went flying.
We decided to leave.
The preceding has been a first and only draft, rife with grammar problems. I’m tired. Deal with it.
Yesterday was the big day that my mother came to town. My mother needed to go to the scrapbook store and a few other craft supply stores while she was in town to get supplies to make the invitations, bouquets, and other things for my sister’s wedding. Not wanting to go there with my kids, she went straight there when she got to town and I arranged to meet her on the other side of town with the kids for lunch since we needed to shop for my daughter’s flowergirl shoes and my dress after lunch.
I loaded my kids into the Crapmobile. I could write an entire article about why my car is the Crapmobile but for now suffice it to say that it has expired tags because it won’t pass inspection until I remove the duct tape that’s holding the headlight in place. The tags just expired the last day of February so I should have been safe from being pulled over until April. They don’t usually bother you if you’re tags have been expired less than a month.
Just a few blocks from our house there is a cop hiding to catch people speeding. My daughter picks the very moment that I drive by this cop to take off her seatbelt and hang half her body out the window to get some air. She’s on the phone with my sister, who hears me screech, “Lexie, get back in the car! We’re going to get pulled over if you keep hanging out the window!” The cop did not pull out so I figured we weren’t going to get stopped.
After we turned onto the next major street we passed another cop. He was going the opposite direction on a five lane street so he wasn’t going to stop us. We got stopped at a red light and I look into my rearview mirror only to see a cop behind us. I don’t know if it was the first one we passed, the second one, or a third one. But I did know that we were likely done for. The longer he sat behind us at that light the more likely we were to get stopped. The light turned green and I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped on the gas. That’s when his lights and siren came on.
As the cop walks to the car, my motormouth daughter smiles and waves, batting her big brown eyes at him. “Hi Mr. Police Officer! How are you today? It’s too bad you pulled us over. We’re going to meet my Mama Di for lunch and we’re starving to death. Are you taking my mom to jail? She said if I didn’t stop hanging out the window we were going to get pulled over. I stopped so why did you pull us over? If you take Mom to jail who will take me and my brother to meet Mama Di?”
The cop asks, “Do you know why I pulled you over, ma’am?” (Why do they always ask that?)
I say, “I figured it was for my expired tags.”
He says, “Oh. I didn’t even notice that.”
I say, “Crap. I told on myself.”
My son’s voice from the back seat says, “Oh great! Now we’re all going to jail.”
My daughter, who hadn’t ever really shut up, says, “But Mom, you should always tell the truth to the police!”
The cop asks me where my front license plate is. That must be why he pulled me over which is funny since it’s never been on the car and I’ve been driving it that way for years. I say, “I think it’s in the glove box here,” and open the glove box to dig for it. It wasn’t there. I turn around and ask my son, “Eric, did you throw my license plate out the window or is it back there somewhere?” My son handed me my license plate after finding it buried under happy meal bags on the floorboard and I handed it out the window to the cop.
He says, “They expired in 2006?”
I say, “No, I just never stuck the sticker on it since it wasn’t on the car anyway. I think the sticker is in the glove box here. There’s a sticker on the back plate. Will that do?”
My daughter tells him that she has some Disney Fairy stickers he can have.
He tells us to have a nice day and gets in his patrol car and drives away. I think he just wanted to get away.
I’m glad he didn’t ask her why she wasn’t in school.
This is when I should have turned the car around and went home. But I didn’t and a lot more happened to us yesterday.
Cast:
The Pot: Played by yours truly, aka Mom
The Kettle: Played by my motormouth daughter, aka Lexie
Striped Hair Guy: The stylist lucky enough to get assigned to the motormouth kettle, God rest his soul
Extras: All the other people in a large salon on a busy Saturday afternoon including my stylist
It’s been winter. The dry heat has frazzled our hair and we look like the wicked witches of Bad Hair Day Land. We haven’t had a haircut since early November just before our family portrait. And we’ve got a serious case of the grey-day winter doldrums. It’s time for mommy/daughter day at the salon! That should fix us right up.
And it did. I’m now too mortified to be depressed.
On a positive note my daughter is an out-going, friendly, never met a stranger, perky little thing. When people like my stylist or the neighbors are trying to make me feel better they say, “Well, at least she’s happy.” Really. I’ve heard those exact words before and I heard them again today.
As I was being shampooed I heard her voice all the way across the salon. Her voice carries well. She needs to go into politics. I am certain there was no one in the salon that wasn’t hearing her. She began to talk and she did not stop.
I was hearing her voice as my hair was cut. I stopped hearing her for a bit while I was being blow-dryed. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I heard her while I was being styled. I heard her while my uni-brow was being ripped off with hot wax in the very back of the salon.
I heard her stylist suggest that maybe is she closed her mouth she wouldn’t get hairspray in it. I heard that more than once. I don’t think she heard it.
Now I’m waiting for DFS to come and take my kids away to foster care and cart me off to jail or something. I should probably be getting ready for that instead of sitting here writing this.
She told them about every time in her life that one of our cats has pooped outside the litter box. She told them about my bulimic cat that eats too much then barfs all over the place. She told them about the time her brother made the mess in the bathroom. She told how much she loves being homeschooled because she can stay up all night playing the Sims. She told about our naked pregnant snowlady and how we used strawberry marshmallows for nipples. She pretty much shared every single embarrassing thing about our family and our home.
By the time she was done it sounded like we live in filth and squalor. It sounded like we’re a bunch of backwoods idiots that don’t need no learnin. I was mortified.
Then she asked her stylist about his sexual orientation in regards to his multi-colored striped hair.
Even as this was happening I was planning my lecture series. The lecture about not sharing embarrassing things with strangers and the lecture about what happens at home stays at home. The if-you-don’t-have-anything-nice-to-say-don’t-say-anything-at-all lecture and the don’t ask people if they’re gay lecture. The “Oh, my God, don’t tell people how far behind we are with our schoolwork” lecture. The “No one needs to know how laid back your mother is about bedtimes and R-rated movies” lecture.
Even as I’m forming my lectures in my head I realize that I have told many of the same things to strangers on Gather. I have told even more embarrassing things on Gather that my daughter (thank the fates) isn’t even aware of. To read my articles you’d think all my cats ever do is poop and barf and never where they’re supposed to. You’d think we haven’t touched a schoolbook since before Christmas and you’d be right about that one. (Hey, we have all summer to catch up.) You’d think nothing ever happens around here that isn’t a total fiasco. You even know that I flirt with strange men in the condom aisle.
So the pot has to sit the kettle down and have a talk. I feel like such a hypocrite.
Tonight my husband has the guys over to game. I cooked a very nice dinner and thought I’d have my evening to catch up on Gather. I’m a couple of days behind reading and commenting on my people. First I posted a few recent photo collections and was going to spend the rest of my evening reading and commenting.
Not.
My son frantically called me into the bathroom. I walked in to find this:
My naked son standing in front of the toilet in a pool of toilet water about half an inch deep that covered the entire bathroom floor. A bath towel half in the toilet and half out, dripping everywhere. My son’s cast-off clothing laying in the pool of toilet water. My son yelling, “Mom! I can’t get the poop off!”
Remember, we have guests.
The towel in the toilet was not just any towel. It was one of those decorative towels that people hang on a towel rod in the bathroom and don’t ever actually use. Pale yellow with satin daisies sewn onto it, it now sports streaks of human feces. At least I guess it’s human feces. I never did determine where the shit came from or why it was now on the towel which was now in the toilet. Beats me. Not only is there an ample supply of Charmin in the bathroom, there is also a full container of shea butter baby wipes on the back of the toilet for cleaning one’s ass.
Every bit of laundry in the house was clean for a change so there were no dirty towels to mop up the toilet water with. No, we threw the clean, neatly folded and stacked towels on the shelf into the floor to soak up the toilet water.
Toilet water dripped down the hallway when we carried the soaking towels from the bathroom to the laundry room.
I ran a bath for my son since he was already naked and really, there was shit involved at some point in this debacle. Now he is running naked in front of my husband’s guests and I do not care. I will not care. I am going to sit here and Gather.
Meanwhile the Ro-Tel dip I was making got scorched on the stovetop.
Lucky for you I forgot to grab the camera.
I originally sent this email to our local homeschool group on 12/14/06.
Go ahead and laugh at me now because you will be as soon as you read this. Add to your list of famous last words, “I wonder what that tastes like?”
Several few months ago we were given a very large cactus. Our neighbor was moving to Florida and couldn’t move it. It spent the summer and fall outside. When it got too cold out I brought it inside. Well, the dog was chasing the cat and knocked the thing over. It shot out this milky fluid all over the place when it hit the floor. And I say, “I wonder what that tastes like?”
Turns out it tasted bad, very bad. It was downright painful, burning like fire, swelling up my mouth and throat. Nothing helped. Not water, not milk, not mouthwash. Then I got dizzy and developed a migraine-like headache. I was sick for 24 hours.
Upon googling I discovered that it is not a cactus at all but a succulent of the Euphorbia family. It is highly toxic. Some euphorbias are used to make poison arrows. I have to get rid of it. We have six cats, one dog, and two small children. This thing is only suitable for a home without pets or small children.
It is a lovely plant and I really think it’s too beautiful to simply put out in the garbage. It is in the laundry room under a fluorescent light until I can find a home it. I had to rescue it after my husband evicted it into the bitter cold and I hid it in there. He’s bound to find it and evict it again. So if you have no pets and your kids are older please take it.
What does this have to do with homeschooling? Not much. Sorry about that. But homeschoolers do have a natural curiosity that could cause a story like this to be told.
