Because You Can

So I write a lot and about 90% I don't share and about 10% I do. Today I was just having those thoughts I wanted to share. I've spent a good amount of time working on my interior dialogue and who I want to be as a person. I think I'm right where I need to be with myself and being comfortable in my own skin. (but as always, I am open for room to improve when I can) Once you get to that point, I think it's important to share what you can with the world. There's a lot of narcissism and bullying and whatnot on social media as well is in real life. I challenge us all to be different. Be the person who lends a helping hand. Set aside judgement and be a listener to someone who needs it. Go the extra mile and don't ask for credit for it or accolades. Just be a good human.

 Because you can. 

Ask someone what you can do to help. Be there for someone without them having to ask. Step up to the plate, be willing, be open, stand up for someone, quietly support a struggle, just BE THERE AND BE A REAL HUMAN UNDERSTANDING PERSON. Encourage someone to say their truth out loud and then stand back and embrace it without judgement or criticism, just support. Drive that person to the airport who needs a ride. Take someone's child for the day to give them a little break. Bake it, make it, buy it, bring it to someone who absolutely needs it and is unable to reach out and tell you they are in need. Make an extra trip, go out of your way, take on an another task because someone's life is made better by you doing so. Life is hard, motherhood is hard, parenting is hard, work is hard, adult-ing is hard, human-ing is hard. Be that person who makes it easy. Because life can also be great.

Because you can.

***Feel free to share this. But in this case make sure you give me the credit. I am a writer after all. 

Parents trying to write a parenting blog

So I took an unwitting hiatus from blog writing. Why? Well I have a very energetic and talkative five year old. This would not be a problem but I am a very energetic and talkative forty-nine year old. It's like having two monkeys bouncing off the walls and making merry together.

The thing about being a parent writing a parenting blog is....well, you're busy being a parent. I also do not work outside the house so my energy gets sucked into this vortex of shenanigans that is also labeled "stay at home parenting". But here you go, no more excuses. One of my thoughts for this year was that as writer I have been busy being a parent and forgot that I was a writer. Now it's time to...wait for it...do both. And it's not a parenting blog anymore, I think it's just a busy life blog, something we can all relate to.

Here's a typical dinnertime exchange between me and the five year old force of nature:

Last night's dinner stream of consciousness. It was just he and I chatting. (I've started writing these down as we go.)

Nicholas: Scuba divers!!!!

Me: What about scuba divers? What made you think of scuba divers?

Nicholas: Listen Mama. Scuba divers don’t get water in their masks. They can keep their breath working. I’d like to do that. And wrestle a bear.

(pauses to eat some of his food)

You know, you could be a chef. You can cook and do your own restaurant because you’re an adult grownup person. You can wear the chef hat.

Me: I don't really want to own a restaurant. Do you?

Nicholas: I don't want to own a restaurant. I can't wear the Hat! Duh. I am not a grownup person. Aren't you listening!??! 

(takes a few more bites)

How come sometimes when you make me Mac and cheese the cheese gets crispy. I don't like that most of the time. But today I did. I like when you kill the cheese on top. I love corn on the cob! Do monsters eat corn on the cob? I bet they burp when they do. Go look that up for me. (waves me off)

The Bewitching Hour

Hey Mamas, it's that time of day again.

Some of us have been chasing the day to get to right now. Some of us have been so busy having fun that it seems too early to end the day. And some of us just throw our hands up as today is just like every other day at this time...a challenge.

 Some people call it the "witching hour". (When I was single, I called this time "disco nap happy hour". Boy times have changed!) When you are a mama, whether it be to one baby or many, this is the time of day that can go either way, good or bad, very quickly.

Now that my son is not a tiny baby, I try to take this time and turn it into the "bewitching hour". I want this time of dinner, bath, and bedtime to be a precious time. When your kids are very little (mine is 19 months old now), it seems like the day was a marathon and this is right when you exhaustively cross the finish line. The days are long but the years are short. We've got this mamas. It can be a long day as a mom. As a stay at home mom, it's a 12 hour work day that has come to a close. As a working mom, you are just getting home and have a host of jobs still left to do for your little ones. As a single mom, you know there is no one to hand that little one over to for a few minutes, it's all on you. We all wish we had a moment to just BE.

 But I think we can just BE, with our little ones. My son is ON THE MOVE now, all day long. I take this time and turn it in to cuddle time and kisses time, a time filled with twilight and moonlight and magic. It can be very easy to forget that this time is fleeting and that in a few months, in a year, in 5 years, there will be no cuddling with this little one or ones in this way. They will be busy growing up, growing independent, growing away. When it seems like your child is a koala bear, attached to you at ALL TIMES, remember sooner rather than later, they won't want to be held or cuddled or kissed. They are going to want to be a big boy or girl. And that this moment, no matter how today went, is a gift.

It's ok, Mamas, we've got this. We can find a way to just take a moment to savor these wee ones, to find that pause in a hectic day. We can take this "bewitching hour" and let it cast its spell on us. We are all trying to do the best we can, juggling our obligations, tending to our marriage and relationships, and finding the balance in a very off-balance season of our lives. We are ok. Some days we are just managing. Some days we are exceeding expectations. And some days, we just get into bed as fast as we can and hit reset for tomorrow morning. But we are all ok.

Mamas, let's try to pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves some credit. Managing the lives of PEOPLE is not easy. We are the human resource department of our families. We carry the burden of integrating personalities with schedules, plans, events, activities and emotions at play. We have the demands of other people, of jobs, of financial restrictions and of our physical location to consider when planning our days.

Let's try to savor this moment, to either laugh or cry about, to either embrace or run from, to FEEL or to IGNORE without judgement. Let's acknowledge that it's a hard job raising human beings who feel and love and cry and rage. It's our time of day to take the "just" out of "Just a stay at home mom", "Just a working mom", "Just a single mom" when we describe ourselves. It's our time to embrace the "Bewitching Hour" in all its glory and make it our own.

Tonight, Friday night, I am taking the time to touch little fingers and toes, to make my little one giggle so I can giggle too, to honor the mother-child bond and to remember that the moments in the day that are hard are the contrast of how easy it is to just love my child. I've got this... and you do too.

“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

"Today was one of those days. Teething baby up all night so he woke up a crabby toddler, very clingy, very sad for being so tired. We didn't get to go to a play date. We didn't get to leave the house. But we did get to cuddle, which I hear is a commodity that dries up sooner than you think. We got to laugh a lot and play with some of the favorite toys, read the favorite books. We did what it took to make us both feel better. The day didn't go according to plans. But that is usually the day I know the little fella needs me the most."

 This was my Facebook post a couple weeks ago.

Does this sound like you? More often than not, it happens. You don't have it all working well. Nothing goes right. You are NOT in control. The pieces don't all fit and everything does not get done. But guess what mamas, it's ok. This constant striving to keep it all together can be exhausting. Taking these moments and turning them into mama gold is the challenge. When you can't get out of your own way, stay home. I don't believe in being that mama who is telling her wee one to "hurry up".  I remind myself in these situations that we are not performing brain surgery. No one's life is on the line if we don't show up to that play date, class or other engagement because the day isn't working. Sometimes you know it by 7am. Other days it creeps in on you all day long in series of falling dominoes of everyday life with a baby, toddler or preschooler. Those are the days you realize too late that you should've thrown the towel in. Quitting is not for losers, quitting sometimes is for those who realize it's not working, it'll get worse, and our little ones can't always vocalize their feelings in time.

If we are feeling overwhelmed, imagine how much worse it is for our child when things are flopping. It can be the time where you turn around, take them out of the car seat, go back into the house and take a stack of books and sit quietly to read with your child. Or where you take the detour from where you were supposed to go and do something different like swing on a swing in a quiet park. You step away from the art project that is not going well or that your child is just not feeling. Or maybe just give hugs, lots and lots of hugs to our little one. The modern culture is full of people suffering anxiety. I think there's so much pressure of failing or not living up to expectations put onto us and our children. They learn from us at a young age that things "have to get done", "we have to succeed" "we need to go NOW!"

  What we don't teach our kids or remind ourselves, is that a failure is a learning opportunity and that when things don't work, be ok with a Plan B or Plan C. Instead of rushing into that doctor/dentist/haircut appointment late, call and cancel and regroup. No one will be crushed if you do so. You might just save the day by turning back and holding your little one's hand and saying "let's slow down" instead of screaming "hurry up!"  We're not always going to be in this season of our lives and things will evolve. It's ok mamas, we got this.


“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”
-CS Lewis

Anybody really know what time it is? Anybody really care?

 
The whole time-space continuum goes into bizarro mode once you have a baby. I used to be that person who lived by the adage that "being early is being on time, being on time is being late, and being late is unforgivable." Then along came the BabyGuy. The first few months you just have no concept of what day it is and what time. You spend endless hours stuck on the couch with a tall water bottle, the remote control, and a baby on your lap who is either eating or sleeping. People tell you, "I'll come by around 11" and you are genuinely surprised like it's the first you've heard of it when they show up. You retain no knowledge, you keep no clock, you are in survival mode. Where does the time go?!? Admittedly, you know there's some falling asleep that goes on...by you. It's hard to be tired and timely!
   Then the time comes when you can get out of the house to do errands and be out in the world of other humans with your child. It's all fine until you have to meet up with someone at a certain time. I never knew how hard it is to get somewhere on time while handling a small human being. There are always diapers that go wrong as you are about to leave, shoes that are lost, hats that are thrown into the deepest depths of a pile of snow. Trying to arrange doctor's appointments becomes a crap shoot. I began to refer to a meeting time as "a window of time when I most likely will arrive....or maybe not." This of course goes against all my innate punctuality. But, I had to throw in the towel on this one. In trying to be the best mother possible, I had to concede that being on time was not going to be part of the package.
   Over the course of the first year of your child's life, things get a little more social. You have classes you start taking with the wee one, play dates, and mother's group events. Leaving an hour beforehand to go ten minutes down the road is not unheard of. Why would anyone do this? Well, on your way to wherever you are going, chances are you forgot a bottle. Or your diaper bag. Or sippy cup. Or your dear child has decided to fall asleep in the car and you don't want to wake him, so you will sit in the car and let them nap for an half an hour until they wake up. And you will still be ten minutes late. I don't really understand how this crazy math of being a mom and being on baby's schedule works, but YOU WILL NEVER BE ON TIME. SO STOP TRYING.
   I do have to say, being a student of meditation has helped me tremendously with all of this. Doing mindfulness meditation has given me the ok to live in the moment to experience fully the precious time I spend with the BabyGuy. Kids are slow, mainly because they are learning to do something new nearly every day. They don't just go for a walk with you, they savor the click-clack of the stroller wheels over blocks of cement on your stroll through the city. They enjoy grabbing and examining the leaves of the trees you pass on your walk through the park. Everything ordinary can become more special to you if you enjoy the gift of time, the time you are spending with your child. Using mindfulness to be organized helps but the factor that is constantly changing and can't be guaranteed is the personality of your child on that given day that you are trying to get somewhere or do something.
I find that I am very tired...and it comes from trying to keep a very fast tiny human from doing dangerous things like pulling furniture down on himself, putting things in his mouth that he can choke on, throwing himself headfirst off of his high chair, etc. It's like being an on-duty cop, you can't ever shut it down, you have to be vigilant.
  The time doing something is always three times as long for you as the time it takes your child to un-do it, cleaning for example. It's a new kind of math, the mother math. Time for yourself, well, that goes away for a while. It's been eight months since a haircut, nine months since a weekend away, seven months since a romantic date night out. But as they say, the days are long but the years are short. Every night before I put the BabyGuy to sleep I tell him, "you will never be this little again. You are only getting bigger each day." So I try to savor the slowness of the day, the magic of little fingers that are trying hard to do something new, the tentative steps that soon turn into a run, because as cliche as it sounds, it all goes by so fast.
 So to everyone I am late for, I'm sorry, but it's just where I'm at right now. Bear with me, it won't be forever and it's not an implication that your time is not valuable to me. I'm just on the mommy train and it never leaves the station on time. And as BabyGuy would say, "toot toot beep beep." We'll get there eventually.

Don't Take Facebook Personally...Really

 Facebook has become the yardstick of how people compare themselves. There was a parenting blog that was asking what people thought of posting photos of your kids with their pile of Christmas presents they were opening. Some voted obnoxious, others said who cares, and yet others found it insulting and upsetting to those who couldn't provide as much for their own children. Most of the responders were very upset with the braggery. Why do we always feel like someone's good fortune is our misfortune?
    I think you can compare anything someone posts on Facebook and make it personal to you.... but it's not. When you don't have a job, it seems like everyone is posting about their fantastic totally fulfilling and awesome career. When you don't have kids, everyone is posting poems about "how amazing it is to be the mother of a daughter" and the like. (I definitely felt sensitive to this before I had a baby.) When you can't afford the nicer things in life, you get slammed with people's photos of their "once in a lifetime cruise" or their "totally amazing trip to Atlantis". It's hard to keep perspective.
    But listen people, especially those in the parenting race, IT'S REALLY NOT ABOUT YOU. People are not posting as a personal affront to your lifestyle. As a new parent, I found myself really vulnerable and second-guessing myself. That is not a good moment to go on Facebook or any social media. There's a lot of bragging and a lot of "show me yours, 'cause mine is the BEST!" Christmas is the worst time to feel a little less than. When you look on social media, you are convinced that everyone has bought the most fabulous presents (with no regard to money or being in debt in January), is going on the most incredible holiday getaway to some warm island, that their children have the perfect outfits and are well behaved but the reality is this....no one likes to put the ordinary moments on FB. There are no poop blowouts, boogie noses, meltdowns in the Target checkout aisle, surly in-laws and siblings, travel disasters, epic arguments, and vacation failures in photographic form. People want to show their good side and I think we forget to keep it in mind. It's like staging a house, you're showing the good stuff, not the everyday nuttiness.
 It's time to take a step back and remember that social media is "social" and it's a way of just showing your far-away relatives what your kiddos look like. Or finding your long-lost grade school buddy. Maybe it's sharing a joke, funny or self-deprecating. Or connecting with people because you are a stay at home mom and it's cold outside and you just cannot bear to leave the house even though you are dying to talk to someone.  When you feel frumpy, you don't look at Vogue and wallow in it, right? The good thing about Facebook and other media is that you can always block people who make you feel bad. Or keep things private that only your besties can see. You can connect without letting in the things that get you down, because let's face it, for every braggart there's also a "Debbie Downer" whose posts make you want to throw back a pint of vodka and put your head under the covers after reading.
    And this time of year, even though many people are counting their blessings, there are also people who are having a tough time in either their personal or professional lives and feel like its magnified. Whatever side you are on, remember that social media can be manipulated to be whatever you want it to be. Use whatever you need to feel validated or to feel protected from it all. Don't ask for advice if you don't want it, don't open yourself up to criticism by asking for feedback you don't want to hear and don't "selfie" yourself if you are not feeling your best. Use your head not your heart. And remember to put it all into perspective. It's not personal, it's just Facebook....and you can always turn the computer off and just enjoy the silent night.

Mindfulness (or lack thereof), Christmas Rush and the Elf

Being mindful is not the easiest task when you are a mom, especially when you are new in the role. A lot of talk went on this summer over the Georgia father who left his child in the hot car to die. Numerous mommy blogs then kept popping up with moms confessing to accidentally leaving their child in the car, at the store, lost in the mall, and sharing their guilt. I personally don't feel that moms should be put on the spot about this and feel horrible that it became a news story that then morphed into a whole zeitgeist about lack of mindfulness in parents. This man hurt his child purposefully and moms and dads who have a momentary lapse due to exhaustion, lack of mindfulness and the general chaos of being a parent, shouldn't feel like they should be sharing their guilt and self-punishing, because the way he did it was by leaving his child in the car.

 I think its hard to be a mindful parent in a society that values multi-tasking. Its very hard to do anything with 100% focus and accuracy when the pressure to be doing many things at once is put on parents. When mothers say they are a "stay at home" mom, the question they usually get is, "how do you fill all that time?".... which of course leaves us SAHM scratching our heads. TIME? WHAT TIME? You mean in between getting household and "life" things done all day, helping out doing things for the hubby that he can't do because he's working, trying to figure out how to do the same things you used to do but without mom's income, and taking care of one or numerous little humans there should be some time left over. Really? REALLY? Such a premium is put on how much you can accomplish during the course of the day and social media means we can see how successful everyone else is at it compared to ourselves. And working moms don't have a minute to themselves and start their day at home after their work day, how can you do it all? You can't.

The holiday season is the prime time of year for burnout and lack of mindfulness for everyone, not just moms. The rushing around to get things "perfect" can make you crazy. But ever since motherhood became this all-consuming, all encompassing role of epic proportions, there seems to be no room for error. You have to NAIL IT or we get critical of ourselves. The perfect and clever family portrait on the ridiculously over-priced cards (Yes Tiny Prints, I am calling you out!), the Facebook photos of all the fabulous holiday activities like tree trimming, breakfast with Santa, caroling, and the whole checklist of things you should be doing can make you feel bad if you're not keeping up. This is the "keeping score" that wears on people and is not what this time of year is supposed to be all about. Eventually, all this pressure can start making people mean-spirited and jaded about the Christmas season. This makes me sad.

A lot of people out there are trying so hard to be snarky and clever to deflect this pressure. In the process, we are losing the real meaning of the season, which is to enjoy the family and friends around them and the fun you can have with all the Christmas traditions.

 In particular, people seem to be taking out their frustration on the Elf on the Shelf. This poor guy, he's just trying to give kids a little fun before the big day and to keep them behaving for mom and dad. But since the vignettes started popping up on social media of all the fun and exciting things that some crafty parents set up, the average parent who just moves him or her around the room now feel like they aren't trying hard enough. Now people want to strangle him. It's an ELF people. This is supposed to be FUN! WHAT HAPPENED TO MAKING THINGS FUN!?!? Even if you just phone it in and move the elf from the kitchen counter to the dining room table, the kids find it FUN and you will not be graded on how original your move is. Fun really is under appreciated. But to your kid, fun is everything.

 I think Christmas is a lot more fun when it's not perfect. The stories of the the tree toppling over, the photos of our little ones hysterically crying on Santa's lap, the newborn Pinterest fail portrait where the baby in the Christmas sleigh looks like a crime scene...that's the classic fun of Christmas. There's a whole book of Awkward Family Photos devoted to the holidays and there's a reason...it's funny and fun! I'm so happy to share the traditions of Christmas (which is what we celebrate, and I wish happy Chanukah and Kwanzaa to my friends who celebrate that and I will not genericize it with just the word "holiday") with my little boy. I want him to revel in the joy and wonder of the season and not stress and fret about everything being just so. I want this time of year to be about loving the people around us, celebrating that life is good, and also remembering to reach out to those that are having a tough time. There is enough time the rest of the year to search for perfection and to try to compare yourself.

I want to keep my Christmas purely fun from here on in. I did all my shopping online and am done with the commercial stuff. Even a sick kid can't derail things as I definitely just want to spend time with him, even if it's just rocking him in comfort. I want the next three weeks to be about enjoying each new festive thing my son does and remembering what it's like to be kid again. Our family is just going to do what works for us and not keep score of what everyone else is doing. I want to socialize, laugh, love, and be immersed in the spirit of things. The theme for my holiday this year is humor and finding the smiles that somehow have gotten lost in the shuffle. I'm going to be the nut job wearing the Santa hat, singing carols in the grocery store, and smiling like I am getting paid to do it. I am truly just going to enjoy things this year. I owe it to myself, my family.... and to the elf.