The Clean Badge of Motherhood

It's late, time for sleeping and lately Sam has been unwilling to end his days, to fall asleep as he used to, snuggled up close until we drift off peacefully. I don't know what has changed for him--nightmares, growing up, not wanting to be parted from his Thomas trains, it's hard to say. So now, I read, sometimes for hours, until he falls asleep.

But tonight we are fuming at one another, feeling huffy and annoyed. For he has a smelly load in his diaper and I want him to change it but he refuses. These moments are often the worst of my career as a mother, the times when I am indecisive, angry, unsure what the hell to do. Because all my prior conditioning tells me this--that you can NOT let your kid go around with a dirty diaper, let alone the fact that he is even still wearing diapers at this age. It's not right, it's not healthy, I am a Bad Mother, it's just not OK.

And yet, here we are. So much of my life is lived to the soundtrack of that tape playing in my head--it's just not OK, it's just not OK, you're not OK, your life is not OK, your choices are not OK, you are not OK, and your mothering is really not OK.

And yet, here we are.

What I have learned from unwilling experience is that, in fact, it doesn't seem to harm him in any way to carry around this foul smelling business in his diaper for hours on end. He doesn't get a rash, he is not unhealthy, nothing about his life has changed except that now I have become a nag, the thing I was quite sure I would never do. This poopy business pushes me up to the very wall of my ability to expand, to love without condition, to mother with my heart instead of my head.

Because here is this child who smells terrible and who fiercely lays claim to his right as sovereign leige over his own body, his own poopy and his own smell. And I have pledged myself to the service of this sovereign. I have said that I believe a child should have dominion over his own body but I had no idea how hard it would be to truly live this ideal. I want my son to remember his own innate wisdom about how the body works, I want him to remain connected to the vessel that will carry him throughout his life. I don't want to teach him to abhor anything about himself, his body, the way the natural world works.

And yet, here I am. Angry and annoyed that he won't agree to change his diaper, that he is so offended by even the suggestion. Sometimes I see him standing there saying 'Love me, no matter what I smell like, can you do that? Love me no matter what I look like, can you do that? You, who have always preached such pretty words about unconditional love and yet, when you look at me, you see only my ratty hair and dirty diaper. You do not see ME, you do not see me standing here, you see only how the world will gauge your failure as a mother by the tangles in my hair and the poop in my pants.'

And there he is and I find that it takes absolutely everything I have to SEE HIM, to look past all the little failures that make me cringe, his dirty fingernails, his dirty feet, his dirty, tangled hair, and his dirty diaper, beyond which lie the sparkling pure truth, the clean soul, the real boy.

Because this is how the world has always judged our mothering. If we keep our children clean, their hair combed, their feet washed, their little bodies neatly dressed, if we teach them to use the toilet early so as not to offend, not to remind anyone unneccessarily of the animalistic humanness of our own bodily functions, if we see to it that all of these things are done, then we are Good Mothers.

And yet sometimes, the doing of these things requires that we hold our children down, that we ignore their protests, that we tell them they are wrong, that we establish dominance over their bodies, that we model for them that might makes right, and that what they believe about their bodies, what they intuit, what they feel, is invalid and untrue because it does not jive with our own conditioning, our own beliefs that cleanliness is next to godliness and that, therefore, we as mothers and the children we so love will fall from grace if we do not scrub behind their ears.

In my heart, I know this to be untrue. In my heart I know that what matters most truly is the ability to love this child unconditionally, even when he smells that bad, even when his choices result in what looks like Very Bad Mothering.

And yet, here we are.

Sometimes I nag and become self righteous. Sometimes I don't. Some days the smell is mild and I am really, totally fine with it. Sometimes I feel a rare confidence and I say simply that we all share this home together and the smell is too strong and he must do something about it, at which times he shrugs and says sure.

Of all my failures in mothering, I suppose I lament my inconsistency the most. I comfort myself with the thought that there is in me a core belief in the truth of the adage that love is all that really matters. But when I am caught in the quagmire of old thinking I wander far from this home truth, sometimes into a deep dark wood from which is is difficult to find my way out again. And my son, being my son, must wander there with me, poopy diaper and all.

I see that if I still believed in the idea of cleanliness somehow equating godliness, or if I still believed in the idea of rules, that I could simply make a rule and stick to it and all of this might, in fact, be a little easier for my son. But I no longer believe those things and so instead I wander these new paths, hacking my way through the underbrush, hoping to find a clearing with the sun shining down on it and daisies growing all around.

And yet, here we are. I manage to refocus my attention on the really great book we are reading and Sam's little body, stretched out long on the edge of the bed, finally relaxes. Within a few minutes, he's asleep. While he sleeps peacefully, I change his diaper, wash his little butt, dress him in clean pajamas and put him up on the pillow looking like the child of a Good Mother. The next time I see him, when he wakes me up in the morning, the pajamas will be gone and the diaper will be dirty again. And here we'll be, in a new day, a new chance to find the clearing in the woods.

I will be glad to get there, and I'm sure it will smell heavenly.

I am sitting at my computer, window shopping at Etsy for the various things on the Christmas list Sam and I made the night before. I am unsure just exactly how to fulfill this tall order, as he has decided that everyone he loves shall have a hat for Christmas. Some hats are easy--a frog hat for his beloved Diane's brand new baby, well, there are pages and pages of baby frog hats on Etsy. I pick a cute one and put it in the cart. A dragon hat for Jim--again I find a great dragon hat, but I'm not sure Jim would ever wear it (not to mention the fact that he HATES getting presents), so I put it on the favorites to think it over (and someone else snaps it up before I can make up my mind). But for Shelley, Sam wants a cup hat. And I wonder, what the hell is a cup hat?

And I notice that it happens more and more often these days that I ask myself that question--what the hell does that mean? Because somewhere in the past two weeks, must have been when I was making lunch or something, Sam grew up. Or, that is, anyway he grew out of toddlerhood and into little kidhood. One morning he got himself up without waking me, packed up his potato heads in a little bin and lugged them into Husband's room and woke him up to play instead instead of me! And when I woke up two hours later I felt like a brand new human being. It was the kind of luxurious, luscious sleep I haven't had in over three years, it was marvelous.

And he has done that every morning for two weeks and I can feel the difference in every cell of my body. Before I go to sleep at night, which now is when I'm ready rather than when the nagging voices tell me I should, I have learned to make Sam a yoghurt smoothie and a little peanut butter sandwhich and leave it in his special spot in the fridge to keep him fortified until I get up.

And he plays by himself so much more often and makes up many stories and words and worlds that all are all new to me, mysteries, things I don't entirely understand, things that live inside Sam, belong to Sam, that are all his own.

And on Jim days he runs out to meet Jim, comes back in and grabs his own clothes from the dresser (because he is otherwise always naked), heads out the door and I don't see him again for a couple of hours. A COUPLE of HOURS.

And I am sitting in my office shopping, lollygagging, dawdling, looking at all the pretty trinkets, wandering around shops that have nothing to do with Christmas hats, looking at things I love, doing and thinking things that are all my own. I am loving this stillness, the calm I feel because finally I have that sense of ease, that true knowing that Sam is fine. That frissure of anxiety that kept my shoulders hunched whenever I used to try to do anything else but be totally focused on him is gone. Somewhere in the night, or perhaps in the late hours of that first marvelous morning, it just left me. I am always attuned to my boy, but now in a way of circulating connection, not anxious worry.

Some mornings he still needs me to get up with him. Some days he still wants to play with me all day long. But things are different now, he is just so much more himself, separate from me. There is, of course, a way in which I grieve this, but it comes with the release of such a weight I didn't even know I was carrying that I can embrace this new phase of our lives with open arms. Now I know what it's like to just be, just be with my son, with my family, with myself.

I am loving this. But I still don't know what the hell a cup hat is...

I've wanted to have something to say for so long now, and yet have shied away from my blog, from the public airing of my thoughts, because they sometimes seem so twisted and repetitious. Worry, worry, worry and then a respite from the worry in which I am flooded with joy and gratitude, and then another bout of worry, worry, worry.

And yet, lately, I have finally come to understand that Sam is an ever changing, ever evolving work of natural beauty and art. So that one day, when it seems I am incapable of meeting the challenge of mothering this child, I go to sleep in despair. But in the morning awake to find that Sam has magically outgrown whatever it was that seemed so dire at the time.

We play, we talk, we tell stories, we fuss and sometimes we even fight. Because that's what people do. I am astounded by his strong sense of self, his inner balance and stable core. That is not to say he doesn't melt down from time to time, but it never happens without reason, and almost always could have been avoided by a little proactivity from me.

Most days, we have learned to walk, walk, walk until the anxiety, the tension, the agitation leaves us. We can walk far enough into the desert to leave most anything behind and, out there, in the clean and barren landscape, we become lost in our adventures, our imaginings, and we reconnect. So that when we return the bond between us is srong enough to weather my fatigue, his agitation, our collective angst and hereditary dysfunction.

In recent days we have walked and adventured, we have written a book, we have built block cities and introduced the dinosaurs to the doll dolls to see if they could cohabitate in the roundabout doll house (but they could not). We have cooked, and even cleaned a bit, and spent hours sitting in the bathroom reading while Sam waits to see if he can let himself poop on the potty. We have read books and told stories, we have shopped and gone visiting. We have watched movies and discussed movies and pretended to be Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Sam has become a 'big brother' to his beloved Diane's brand new baby boy, and he has helped me do the footwork, the organizing, the ground's preparation and the enduring of the Second Annual Firehouse Fling (which netted over four thousand dollars this year).

And we have bickered and irritated one another. It is strange, this feeling of irritation with my boy--new and uncomfortable, and yet, a part of this life as a family. It is hard some days to move on from the halcyon days of Sam's babyhood in which I still thought it possible to spend an entire lifetime with my son and never raise my voice or be annyoyed by him.

And sometimes, I find pure joy in the very fact that we have the downs as well as the ups, that we live a fully rounded life, that we are human, that we are fallible, and that it doesn't matter. Because this is just what people do.

I am sitting in the front seat of my car on the side of the highway, the car is running, the air conditioner is going full blast, Sam is asleep in the back. I know, of course, that this is one of those things you are not 'supposed' to do. But it is a little moment of quiet solitude, a chance to look through the patterns I found today, sit still, think my own thoughts, just be.

Except, of course, that Just Being in a small town is sometimes a little tricky. Because I am not just an anonymous car pulled over on the side of the freeway with strangers passing by. This road leads to a very particular place in the middle of nowhere, and most everyone who drives this way, especially at this time of year, knows me and Sam. Never do I attempt this but someone stops to check and see if we are OK (Auntie Whoozie now just slows, waits for a thumbs up, nods, and drives on).

Today, I look up to see the brake lights on my old beloved Subaru. Big Chris and his boy are making the U-turn to come back and check on me so I roll down the window and let them know I'm OK. The boy, with his bright red mohawk, looks quite concerned, and then relieved. He's such a great kid, so big, so intense, with a mind that works so fast and furious I can hardly keep up. He is maybe 12, sometimes a little awkward and hesitant, mostly barreling forward at a furious pace.

Last week he accompanied Theresa on her weekly visits to help us dig out from under the clutter of our lives and he played with Sam, pushing him around in the little red car. And it hit me that, like this nearly man sized boy, Sam is going to be a big man some day.

This realization astounds me when it happens (it has happened before). He will be big, bigger than me. He'll be big and loud and boisterous and maybe he will have a carefully glued mohawk standing on the top of his head.

You see, the thing is, that boy is so real but Sam still somehow sometimes seems like something I read in a fairytale. I guess it is that Sam and I and Husband live in a bit of a bubble out here on the edge of the world. Our lives are so quiet and easy, so peaceful and free (except for all the madness roiling around on the inside). It is a kind of fairytale we are living. It is a blessed and lovely life.

And yet sometimes I feel a frissure of fear when I think about Sam growing into a man. What if this life doesn't seem so enchanted to him? What if he wishes he lived more like other people? What if he turns out to be a freak completely incapable of socializing with other people? What if, what if, what if...

What if I am a failure? What if I can not do this? What if I am as lame at this as I have been at everything else I have ever tried?

But shhh, quiet little monkeys, I say. What if this is not about me? What if this is not about failure or success? What if we just live our lives and believe that love truly does heal all things when the heart remains open to it? What if we believe in miracles, what if we give our hearts to love, what if we stop thinking about the future and start living in this moment?

What if we Just Be, right here on this highway, no matter how many other cars drive by?

Today was an odd sort of day in which I continually flipped through the different versions of the story of my life, rather like changing channels with a remote. I saw my stories ebbing and flowing like the colors in a kaleidescope. I noticed that sometimes I felt quite peaceful and pleased with my life, and others I felt like an enormous failure. These dramatic shifts and swings in my view of my world I attribute to reconnecting with my beloved niece, whom I spoke to today for the first time in three years. It was a joyous thing to hear her voice, to learn about her life and all that she has created for herself. But in opening the door to her, a few little wispy black imps snuck in, scampering past her feet.

They are the little imps that used to always inhabit my thoughts, the ones that whisper that I am ugly, stupid and no good. They are the ones that inhabit any interaction with my mother and sisters, poking their bony fingers in all the old painful wounds.

I had no idea, until I stopped interacting with my family of origin, just how much pain I was carrying around, tightly packed away in the various corners of my mind. In the small hours while Sam sleeps, I have wandered back to the past, following the trails of the pain I feel now, back to its various points of origin. This is sometimes a horrifying process, for it means sitting still with things I have avoided for sometimes 40 years. I sometimes feel punched and pummeled by what comes up, literally feel the pain in my chest as the full impact hits me.

My mother left me. Because I was stupid and ugly and no good. And she left my sister, too, who must also have been stupid, ugly and no good. Because our mother took the other sister, who was pretty and clever and wonderful, with her when she went and left no forwarding address, just a bundle of food stamps and rent paid up until the end of the month.

And as a stupid, ugly and useless girl I presented myself to the world--a cracked and broken vessel into which no amount of love could be poured and ever reach the top. And I attracted very little love into my life, very little at all. Mostly, what I met with out there was desperation. I understand now that what I met was a match for what I carried inside--desperation.

Walking in the desert this evening with Sam I feel the perfect heat, the moment when the outside temperature matches my body temperature and the sun is low enough not to scorch, high enough to give the most lovely light. More and more lately this moment in a summer evening has tugged at me, gnawed at me. There is something I want from it, but I don't know what, and I remember that feeling of desperation.

Sam is roaring and chasing me and I can barely remember where I am going, that I am running, or why. I am having trouble remaining in the present, I am only here in this desert by the slightest thread of connection.

I want something, but I don't know what it is. I see hot asphalt and a Slurpee at 7-11, summer evenings, warm air, something lacking, something painful, something I want. It's back in Concord, where I must have been maybe 11. We lived there for a few months, I fell off a skateboard and broke my ankle. Construction workers brought me home, my father wasn't around so my sister called an ambulance.

I want something from that hot day, that memory, I want something that I can't have and I don't know what it is. But I notice for the first time that sense of wanting, it is something I carried with me for most of my life, so familiar that I never noticed it until I experienced the absence, and then return of it. That reconnecting with my niece, despite her own sparkle and loveliness, awakened old memories of my family, and of that feeling of emptiness and want so entwined with a dark sense of self loathing.

We are heading home me and Sam, the darkness is gathering, our foot tracks becoming indistinct. We reach the road--hot asphalt--and Sam trips over the toes of his new shoes and goes down on one knee hard. I am there in an instant, moving with that superhero lightning speed that eludes me in any other moment in time. I scoop him up in my arms and blow on his knee and give him kisses and snuggle him while I carry him home. Home is a long way away now, now that this heavy child is in my arms, but I carry him and he cries until he's done and hugs into me and as my breath comes heavier he pats my arm to comfort me.

And suddenly it hits me, I know what it is I want from that memory. I want this. I want someone besides a man in a hardhat splattered with tar, a man I don't know, to pick me up when I fall and break my ankle. I want someone to notice that it hurt. I wanted someone to hold me and love me up. I wanted someone to carry me safely home.

And no one did. Not then, or in all the years following when the injuries were so much more sinister than this.

And so later, I sit with that. And I'm sitting with it still, and writing it out here and tying off the end of this little helium balloon and sending it out into the sky. Get along little memory, go find a happy place to play. I release you now.

There was no one there that day, that year, that lifetime of mine, so long ago. But now, here I am. I am here. And suddenly, that is enough.

I scoop up my boy, I examine my heart, I look back at that child that I was. In the cool comfort of our home, we patch Sam's knee with an enormous bandaid and draw on it with magic markers. And then we play dinosaurs, start to yawn, go to bed, fall asleep.

We are safe, we are loved, we are home, we are whole. And, at least for now, the desperation has subsided.

Bless you Mom, bless you my sisters. I'll see you out there on that field, the one I read about somewhere the other day, the green meadow out there beyond the place of right-doing and wrong-doing, beyond the place of judgement, pain and hurt. I don't know when, but I will see you there one day.

Happy Birthday

What a lovely, lovely day! I love this day, I love remembering Sam's birth as a seperate person and my birth as a mother. I love eating chocolate cake made by Auntie Whoozie and Uncle Carl's mesquite grilled chicken made just for Sam. I love the friends who are our family. I love Theresa's grandchildren who brought Sam a home made card with quarters taped to it and John and Ryan and Shelley who came all the way here just to be with us and Karen who drove all this way and Diane and her big pregnant belly and Max and his happy smile, and Jim who came early and stayed late and sat outside under a tree when there got to be too many people in the house. There is so much I want to write about all that the celebration of this birthday means to me, but I was too busy living it and now I want to go to bed--so here is a happy photo instead.

Social Justice For Children

How exceptionally fabulous is this website???!!!!

http://www.parentingforsocialchange.com/index.html

This is just exactly what I've been wanting to say, or wanted to say some time ago, to an old friend who has always been on the front lines of the fight for social justice but felt it was good for her daughter to learn to suck it up when she didn't like her mother's choices. I know my friend loves her daughter and believes in her choices as much as I belive in mine, and I don't fault her for making them, but the irony of it drove me mad. I couldn't quite think how to put it into words, except to say that I now believe I understand why the revolution always seems to fail. Or that is, to succeed, because it's just a revolving power play, over and over and over (and therefore a revolution, rather than an evolution), the oppressed rise up, defeat the oppressor, become the oppressor. Because no matter how many NVC classes we take or how many collectives we participate in or consensus decisions we make with adults, we are raising our children to expect, to pariticipate in, to see as normal the oppresser/oppressed relationship because that is what they experienced with their own parents, no matter how well meaning or loving we may be.

Every time we say 'because I said so', every time we discount our children's voices, every time we insist that we know better, every time we leave them crying, or worse tell them to stop crying, every time we punish them in whatever way, 'gentle' or not so gentle, we demostrate to them that this is how the world works--oppressor and oppressed--I know what's right and you don't, I know what's good for you, I have the power so we will do it my way. How COULD we ever hope to break that cycle on a global, social level if we can not do it in our own homes?

Anyway, I love this website. She says it all so much better than I could!