Motherhood Uncensored

The lucky one.

Immediately following the labor and delivery of my first child, I loudly and exhaustedly proclaimed that I was never going to do that ever again. And then when I had my two miscarriages, I realized that I might actually end up being a parent of an only child.

As you might know, I went on to have two more kids, for which I'm thankful (and wouldn't trade in or sell on eBay).

But this past week, I found myself surrounded, both in person and online, by moms of only children - due various circumstances like loss, choice, and that royal bitch mother nature or whoever is in charge of dealing those crappy hands. And I imagined all the comments they must endure, some probably from well-meaning friends and family who insist on asking when they’ll be "adding to their brood" and others probably less tactful, if questions like that could actually be considered tactful.

None of which, I imagine, are welcomed or appreciated.

Granted, we parents of two plus get our own fair share of Nosy McNosertons, but never with the long sordid reputation that parents of only children endure - their little selfish singular offspring, with the world revolving around their spoiled world. Perhaps slightly less stinging for those who didn’t actually choose to curtail their right to breed at just one, but still rough nonetheless.

And admittedly, I have, along with friends, tossed a few chuckles in the direction of a few of these parents, perhaps because they remind me of how I was with my first child - with four gallons of hand sanitizer, a high-chair cover, and table mat just to eat at my own friend’s house, although, I tend to think that has more to do with the parent’s personality than it does with having an only kid.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve encountered plenty of rotten little only children. But I’ve come across an equal number of little brats who have plenty of siblings that should have beaten the snottiness right out of them.

And I wouldn’t say that parents of one necessarily have it easier, because aside from the obvious benefit of having siblings entertaining them with wrestling matches and play dough fights, unlike many of us who have two or more, the responsibility of breaking those age old stereotypes rests on their shoulders.

And let’s face it. The more kids I’ve had, the better at this I’ve gotten, which isn’t really saying that much I suppose, but it is nice to not always feel like I’m doing something for the first time.

Always doing something fresh and new can be exciting, but also challenging, particularly when you don’t have a chance to try it again - this time with less broken bones and hopefully more sleep.

And in recently watching a lovely family of three interact - the great care and attention they were able to afford their one daughter, I have to say that I didn’t think of her as spoiled, not even for a second.

Just lucky.

Wild nights

On any given night, our home resembles the inner workings of the nocturnal house at the zoo.

With the exception of Quinlan, who has thankfully outgrown her penchant for 2am crib parties and will actually sleep late (which, don't get all jealous because it's 8:00am if we're lucky and we need not go into how sad and pathetic you have become when you declare that 8:00am is actually late but, alas, we're parents and we're here to redefine word meanings), my two younger kids alternate late night visits or wake up calls at the most inconvenient of times.

Which, when you're soundly sleeping, is always.

Now my son likes to pop into our room around 2 or 3am and give us some ridiculous sob story about it being too dark (hello, bathroom light shining brightly like a mid-day sun) or he's feeling alone (with his sister sleeping in the bed less than a foot away) or he's cold (even under his huge heat producing comforter).

And then to avoid the tantrum that will surely ensue and wake up the entire neighborhood from telling him that he must return to his brightly lit, well-populated room all alone, or at least "until the light shines through your window if you want to watch your shows darnit" [note: that was the nice version] I walk him back, which has, on occasion led to me sleeping in a twin bed with my son laying across me horizontally.

On my extra lazy and less empathic nights, I'll offer him some sort of outrageous reward, like a box of donuts, his own lifesize bulldozer, or other such nonsense and he will return on his very own, with visions of glazed donuts and John Deere tractors dancing in his head.

So far, I owe him an entire Dunkin Donuts store and a collection of construction trucks. Thank God the kid can't add yet.

Now Margot, on the other hand, who has been weaned for a couple of months now, will generally sleep through the night, and then wake up up around 6am screaming her head off, which is about 45 minutes before everyone needs to wake up for school and requires a mad dash to shut the older kids' door and turn on their bathroom fan to cover the desperate cries so that they get that precious 45 minutes of sleep.

Of course, they usually hear me close the door or turn the fan on, and then they're wide awake but she's already fallen back asleep and I'm *this* close to losing my mind.

And meanwhile, even if I do fall back asleep, I'll get a whopping 30 minutes which means I'll be more tired than if I would be if I just stayed up and did something smart like make breakfast early and pack the school lunch at the last minute because who does it the night before? That would be, um, prepared and all.

But truly, the best part of all this is that, as you might have guessed, they only want me. Not Daddy, who they don't often see, and who is really quite fantastic at returning children to bed (isn't that in their job description?).

Nope. My son heads straight to my side of the bed marked "Sucker" or just stands at the door way begging for me, which wouldn't be so bad except when my husband budges to get him he starts yelling my name louder as if he's releasing my son's mute button when he gets up which really, my son has no mute button, so the volume goes from 25 to 47.

And even Margot's French-inspired and very cute "mah-MAW!" is not endearing, though she does get extra points for attempting to lure me in with an accent.

On many occasions, I have longed for a night where I can put them in bed and not see them until they come running in when the sun comes up. I mean seriously people, when will it ever end?

But then I figure that we'd probably be so worried that we would go in and check on them because OMG ARE THEY OKAY? and inevitably wake them up.

Oh the damn irony.

My daughter the pro-lifer

All boy

Ever since I had my son, I find myself still saying "I don't like to gender stereotype" but now always followed by a gigantic "but..."

I'm certainly all "RAH RAH GIRL POWER!" and "Anything you can do I can do better" or at least equally well, perhaps in stilettos and pink lace, but yeah, Girls! Rock!

But boys, especially the rambunctious ones, are just different.

Well, for more than the obvious reasons.

I've seen and heard about my fair share of wild little girls - many of whom are the lovely daughters of my friends. And in many ways, they are very much like my wild little son, who responds best to the Cesar Milan method of parenting (you know, walk them into submission type thing) and requires constant supervision and activity lest you find your walls and his face covered in marker.

And that's on an easy day.

But there's just something about their DNA that makes their "wild" just different. Whether it's bolder, bigger, louder or faster, it's decidedly boyish, no matter how much it pains me to admit it.

And so, I have to say that I had all but given up my little pipe dream of my son ever occupying himself on his own with something constructive, at least for longer than a few minutes, and without the assistance of our friendly babysitter Diego, or his Jurassic playmates, the complete cast of The Dinosaur Train.

That was until, this weekend, when I took him, along with his collection of diggers and dozers to "the gravel pit" - or basically a huge driveway at a local park, an idea given to me by my mother-in-law who had done the same thing to day before.

(Go mother-in-law, which, well, I can't believe I said that).

And that's when I saw it. A little boy in his element, completely enraptured by pushing dirt and rocks around for almost 45 minutes.

He did the same thing the next day in their flower bed. (Whoops).

While it took me just as long to clean him off, I didn't mind the scrubbing of his dirty feet and and the scraping of his fingernails.

And instead of feeling guilty for not thinking of this sooner, and perhaps, parenting him the way I thought he should be rather than the way he really is (hey, I'm still learning), I just enjoyed watching my son be himself.

All alone. And happy.

And all boy.

Speaking of boys, I recently read an post by Jen Singer about boys and reading that you moms of boys (and hey, girls too) might find interesting.

Permission

A couple of days ago I hopped into the middle of a conversation on Twitter where Slouchy was apologizing for being insensitive. After a few clicks, I realized that the tweet was in reference to a few reactions to her tweet about a breastfeeding study that had just been released.

"I may be prouder of breastfeeding my kids until they were 20 and 14 months, respectively, than of anything else. esp. after latest study."

A few people responded (which prompted the apology tweet that caught my eye):

*(In reply to @suefisher - who tweeted in reply to Slouchy but locks her tweets): "@ewiller: Hey. Thanks for speaking up. It makes/made me feel small too."

Slouchy made no comments about people who couldn't breastfeed or didn't breastfeed. She just mentioned the study and how it felt good to have her experiences (and as I tweeted, the sacrificial deflated boobs) validated.

The truth is that we could probably all find research studies to support some (maybe all) of our parenting choices, some of which were completely out of our control. And really, if we lived by what the research studies said, then we'd probably drive ourselves crazy, or better, find ourselves as participants in our own kind of research study.

It's no surprise that breastfeeding is a huge cause of guilt for many mothers, but not the only one. Devra Renner and Aviva Pflock's widely-read book on the topic of Mommy Guilt makes that perfectly clear.

In fact, a survey of over 1300 moms discussed in the book found that 96% feel guilty about some aspect of parenting.

There are more than enough choices that will make us feel guilty during our long mothering career. But yet, it seems, that at a certain point in time, many moms get over it. Sure, there are still tinges of guilt, perhaps brought on by tweeted research studies, or that playgroup mom and her bilingual child, or a blogger you read who writes a post about food assholes and reminds you that you're over it.

But I have found that you reach a point where you can listen to your friend talk about her handmade dresses and not go home and Google local sewing classes, and you can sniff that homemade bread and still pick up the store bought one in the bag without batting an eyelash.

And you can listen to a mom talk about how long she breastfed her kids and not feel obligated to explain why you only went for six months, or one year, or hell, not at all.

Regardless of how adapted you are to mothering, I'd say most, if not all, moms have their hot button issues. The one, two, or bunch of things that makes us look at ourselves and say "Damn."

The one thing that makes us feel like crap when we hear it, even if a person isn't rubbing it in - they're just talking about their own experiences. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And that's really what it comes down to, isn't it? It's not the poor person who proudly tweeted, or the mom and her pretty damn good homemade bread. It's our own inability to give ourselves permission to believe in our own choices (or get over our stupid bodies who didn't cooperate how we thought they should), and plant our feet in the mud of our own mothering livelihood and not regret it.

There is, at some point, a time when we need to tell ourselves that we did what we had to do. Sometimes we could have made better choices. Sometimes we still make them.

But our children are the sum of a whole hell of a lot of parts. And not the few times you had to put the television on as a babysitter. Or when you knowingly fed them hot dogs and french fries for dinner without a vegetable. Or because you couldn't breastfeed them. Or had that c-section you really didn't want.

Or even when you acted like a complete and utter fool, yelling at the top of your lungs at your kid because you were trying to put breastmilk in her eye.

I appreciate the work of women and mothers who work to further the cause for best choices for babies, be it natural childbirths, breastfeeding, organic foods - the list goes on. But I also know that many of these movements don't help in alleviating the enormous guilt that many moms who did not make these choices and/or were not able to make these choices feel.

Holding onto the guilt will eat you from the inside out.

From where I stand, we need to be more attentive at giving absolution to our friends and fellow moms when they need it. Sometimes just a smile, or "it's okay," or "I bet it won't affect their chances of getting into Harvard," can kick the crap out of the guilt that a mom would have carried with her for a really long time.

Truth is, the guilt we carry with our parenting choices hurt us more than they probably ever "hurt" our kids.

*[Edited: The tweet quoted above marked "@ewiller" is a public tweet by @ewiller. I used the "@" symbol to show that it was a twitter handle and mentioned @suefisher to provide context that the tweet I was quoting was a reply (from @ewiller) to someone else (to @suefisher).

So really, the only person that should be pissed at me is Emma. (Ha!). But based on her comment below, she's not (Thanks for being a good sport, Emma!).

I did want to mention Emma's follow-up tweet, which I was searching for, which was really an impetus for discussing how research studies about this stuff can bring on the guilt for moms:

"No, it's not at all personal [to @slouchy]l. I didn't mean it like that. Just any talk about studies like that, and I have the guilts again."]