parenting

I’ve Become My Mother


When we were children, warm weather meant our mother could safely banish us to the outdoors for hours on end. She would even lock the screen doors and find us our lunch on the picnic table. Getting back inside for any reason other than using the bathroom called for inventiveness and mom usually would just hand us whatever we asked for and closed the door with us on the other side.

Today, I became my mom.

BabyDaughter and NephewTwo have been told that the indoors is off limits because it is a beautiful day out and their grandparents are sleeping. I haven’t hooked the screen doors but I am beginning to understand why mom did all those decades ago. Just putting the indoors off limits have made them infinitely more attractive than anything they could be doing outside. And they have plenty to do outdoors.

After a morning spent at the local version of Home Depot shopping for supplies that Rob needs to make a few repairs and to get a new handrail up for Dad, a trip to hospice with mom for more information and the usual laundry and cleaning (wasn’t I supposed to be on holiday?), my inner muse was cranky and wondering when we were going to get a little writing time. This meant banishment for the wee ones.

I joke about how mom spent more time attending to the house and the chores associated with family than she did on actual quality time with me or my siblings, but an article at the Huffington Post today by Laura Vanderkam confirmed that women spent less time in 1965 with their children than do mothers today and this is in spite of the fact that 50% more moms are in the workforce now than then.

Vanderkam was writing about the growing outsourcing trend of parenthood which I wrote about not too long ago. Apparently this type of mothering has a name. Didn’t you just know that it would? Is it possible to be a parent today without being slotted into some demographic or other?

Core Competency Moms are, as nearly as I can tell, women who believe that “quality time” with their kids trumps cleaning, laundry and food prep. This applies primarily to working women as SAHM’s are still spending more time on being the house’s wife than entertaining their children.

The idea is essentially that things like washing clothes, doing dishes and feeding your family fresh food are time sucks. How can you be a good mom and work AND take care of what is basically maintenance that you either aren’t all that good at or just dislike? A core competent mom has a housekeeper come in and with the time saved, she takes her kids to the pool or the park or volunteers to buy cupcakes for the school bake sale (because baking sucks and someone at the local grocery does it better anyway).

Children need to be reassured about a myriad of social issues and how can this be done while folding laundry simultaneously?

My biggest issues with this core competency thing – aside from the fact that there is a difference between being a parent and a hand servant – is that the whole idea is terribly elitist. What does the working class mom do to outsource her housework? How does the single mom shift responsibilities when she is the only adult in the household? Where is the money for all this “convenience” coming from and at the end of the day are we trading the notion of teaching our children basic survival skills and healthy eating habits for a couple of extra hours a week of entertaining them?

How will our children learn to problem solve and occupy themselves if as they age we don’t begin to disengage from their every waking moment?

Can’t heart to heart talks be accomplished while preparing dinner or over the clean-up afterwards?

And if my teenager’s jeans need washing on a Saturday when I’d like to take her to a movie or on a hike, what’s preventing her from tossing them in the wash? Last I checked we weren’t taking the laundry to the nearest source of running water to beat them against rocks. Wash is an hours long process that doesn’t require much watching (unless you are that apartment dwelling working family from whom the laundromat doubles as an outing).

More and more society seems to expect that mothers in particular indenture themselves to the fruits of the womb. I think I am going to pass on this Competent Core Mommy thing. It sounds like more work than I am already doing.

 

Updating My Dear Readers


Looks like my sixth revision is the charmed one and will go off in the post today. I hacked about 600 words from it. It was very heavy with exposition, mainly backstory. The original was not part of a series of short stories though now, I think, it is on the verge of being a novel.

Sometimes characters and situations just spring to life and take over.

Life in the non-drenched corner of Iowa is still precarious. It seems my youngest sister, her son and her son’s dad (who is not my ex-brother in law despite the fact that I grant in law status to my brother’s ex  – and that is such a long and trailer parkish story it should get a blog post of it’s own, so remind me someday) descended on my folk’s home because nephew wants to move back in.

Quick backstory. My sister was living in a hovel with nephew. At his 15 month check-up it was discovered that he had high lead levels. Not a surprise. Their living arrangements redefined the word “dump”. Living in a parked car would have been a step up.

So I (yes it was me and my parents NEVER let me forget that) convinced the parental units to let BabySis and Nephew move in. It was not supposed to be a permanent arrangement.

They just moved out at the beginning of the month (not quite 13 years later).

BabySis is in Wisconsin with her boyfriend to whom she has been engaged for the last six years. He is the one who knocked her up the first time back during her junior year of high school. Their daughter mercifully escaped being raised by them and last we knew was quite happy with her adoptive family. She is twenty-two. Boyfriend took up with BabySis again after a hiatus of sixteen years. During his wanderings he actually had dealings with my CrazyBrother in California. CrazyBrother called home when he spotted Boyfriend and offered to have friends “take care of him”. My parents declined. See what happens when you are good Catholics?

Boyfriend is a drunk. He has lost his driver’s license so many times that he has given up driving and rides a lawnmower to his job on a dairy farm. Although he has managed to get arrested driving drunk on that too. They can’t prohibit you from exercising your right to ride a LawnBoy however.

Nephew went to live with his father. He was excited and really wanted to go but is homesick now and forced his dad to drive him the 70 some miles to my folks to try and convince them to let him move home.

This is what Nephew does when he is living with my parents. Anything he fucking wants.

So BabySis, BioDad and Nephew proceeded to shatter the calm of my parents home with a knock down that lasted a couple of hours, reduced my mom to tears and guaranteed that dad would get upset and short of breath to the point where he was needing O2.

Fun times. I am so looking forward to next week.

I only discovered the doings because I called to check up on them and to let them know that CrazyBrother was physically okay. After I hung up, I called DNOS and told her what was going on. She headed over to the folks immediately to make sure that Nephew went home with BioDad.

Nephew is home with BioDad. BabySis is home with LawnMowerMan. All is once again on the functioning side of dysfunction on the WestEnd.

Did I mention that I finished my story and am sending it back to the magazine?

Well then, next there’s the packing – overpacking really. How do some people manage to travel with just a suitcase? One freaking suitcase?

I have three right now on the bed and two are full. This will not do.

So, packing. Blogging. Basking in the glow of a finished story that just might be published. And relieved that we will not get to my parents’ and find BabySis and Nephew. Just that damn bird he left behind. He named it Princess and then it got the other bird pregnant.

Five more days. Then I could be live blogging all this. Better than reality tv.

Father’s Day


As we were preparing Rob’s carb-laden breakfast in bed tray this morning, Katy diligently prepared the card she’d picked out for him, a Transformer theme with Optimus Prime on the front that said “Transformer, unite.”, or something like that.

I had written out what she wanted to say on another piece of paper and she copied it proudly.

I love you Daddy.

I had checked with her first on whether it was to be “Daddy” or “Rob”. She mainly calls him Rob but there are more and more instances of her addressing him as Dad or Daddy and she mostly refers to him that way.

She wanted to go with daddy.

“I need to practice saying daddy,” she told me.

Interesting. A few months ago she’d resolved to call him “Poppi” like Dora the Explorer does with her father. That really went nowhere. Now it is dad and with Jordan living at home again for a while, I don’t doubt that her calling Rob dad all the time will speed up Katy’s processing a bit more.

People who know our story – Katy’s and mine – like family and close friends – are thrilled that she has a father. They don’t seem to think that I have pushed Will, Katy’s biological father, out of the picture by allowing her to form a father/daughter relationship with my new husband. They see it as a win-win. I have found love and contentment and Katy has a father who loves her.

Given my own state of being as an adopted child, I don’t understand the whole “biology” thing. I have talked about this before. The people who love and care for you are family. The people who raise you are your parents. Biology is not a guarantee and its worship in our society leads to the devaluing of families who fall outside the “norm”, leading children who don’t have biological ties to their parents feeling “less than”.

I remind Katy still from time to time – and she me – how lucky we are to have had first Will and now Rob in our lives. We talked a bit about Will today at lunch. He liked to cook and she found this very interesting. She hasn’t forgotten him and is unlikely to do so. Both Rob and I keep Will very much alive for her through the wall of photos she has in her bedroom and our willingness to discuss him.

She isn’t the least bit confused and her early conflict has faded into an acceptance that this is just how our lives are. Children are much more capable of an expansive heart and an open mind than we adults are, I think.