A mother's love

My almost 4 year old daughter is now re-potty trained. On on outing this weekend she insisted on going to the bathroom by herself and locking the stall door in a public restroom. Against my better judgement I relented. Naturally when she tried to unlock the door she was unable to do so and proceeded to panic. I reassured her through the door, tried to coax her into continuing her attempts at unlocking it and after several tries, gave up and crawled on the floor (ugh!) into the stall to free her. Several women in line commented that my action was a true demonstration of love. And I laughed and flippantly said, "A mother's love knows no bounds." And while I inherently believe that same love should extend to all other living things, I can't say for certain that I would be so generous with a stranger. Would you crawl under a public bathroom stall to free someone you didn't know?

Message to my nephew who got 2 puppies

Drew & Savanna- Y'all have let the Texas heat go to yer brains, child! Whaddaya thinkin'???? Cute, sure. Mischievous, you betcha. But they's gonna grow up to be TWO BIG SMELLY, HAIR SHEDDIN' FLATULATIN' POOPIN' beasts!!! Y'are crazy!!!
Seriously, they are too cute. And now you have a reason to keep your jobs, never leave the house without them, wake every morning at the crack of dawn when THEY decide they want out and generally turn your lives over to a being that has a brain 1/4 the size of yours but somehow knows more!!
And remember when they chew the remote and your shoes and the CDs you left out, and when they dig up the entire acre of plants you spent ALL weekend digging and planting, and when they tear holes in the screen door cuz they want out, they don't mean to be bad, they just can't help themselves.
And everyone lies. Dogs are not "just like having kids." Dogs you can leave outside all day (unless you live somewhere godforsaken, like Texas), dogs will be OK if you forget to feed them once or twice. Dogs will self-entertain for a long, long time. Dogs will not pretend to be potty trained then change their mind, while they are sitting in your lap. Dogs will not make you get up 6 times in the night for months at a time. Dogs do not have an uncanny ability to know when you are really in a hurry and stage a meltdown 5 minutes before you are about to walk out the door. Dogs don't projectile vomit down your front and back & sides, leaving you to wonder how a stomach so theoretically small could possibly hold that much. Dogs won't say to their teacher "Mommy hit me." Dogs don't announce during a quiet moment, "That man has a penis. He has a penis. HE HAS A PENIS, doesn't he momma????!!!" Dogs won't ever say that the busboy is "ugly" leaving you to wonder in which plate he's going to hok a huge looey. Dogs don't turn into teenagers, they just get old and start behaving like your parents- whining and arthritic. Insisting that they must stay right next to you every moment you are around.
Congrats! And, get them and you trained. I think you're going to need it!!

Does the Y chromosome make you unable to think about others?

My partner travels about 50% of the month. It's OK with me for several reasons. One is that he has ADD so whenever he is gone I can be as compulsive and obsessive as any mother of a 3 year old is allowed. The surprises are reduced significantly (as in Surprise! The milk was left out all night long (again), or Surprise! The flame on the stove has been left on all day or Surprise! There's no more (insert common household item here) and you'd better get creative cause you still need to pack a lunch). The possibilities are endless. The second reason is that I've been pretty self-sufficient and independent for a long time and grew up in a household with a parent present only about 25% of the time. And thirdly he is an absolute slob. So when he said that he'd agreed to put up his 16 year old twin nieces for 3 weeks in our already overcrowded 1100 square foot house I was understandably reticent. The week & the weekend before their arrival he was out of town. I caught a monster cold and had no relief for a full 7 days, plus had looming pressure of important deadlines at work and no way to get any extra time in at the office. I was, understandably, stressed. I had asked for the schedule for this 3-week-visit about a dozen times (not an exaggeration, this is life with someone with ADD, you can ask, but you are unlikely to receive) and had not had a chance at all on the weekend to get any groceries in the house. So I left work a little early on Monday hoping to get a few things done before the arrival of the nieces and he calls me while I'm in the car to say that he's going to get dinner ready for the girls & was planning to put chicken on the grill & then head to Trader Joe's for food for them for the week. I reminded him that I'm a vegetarian and probably wouldn't eat the chicken and asked what he was planning to get for his family for the week. Nothing- this is just a trip for the girls. Then my eyeballs exploded out of their sockets and I saw red and just lashed into him. How inconsiderate. And I was reminded of an evening at the end of a long weekend when he & I and our 12 month old were at the grocery store and I was so very tired I coul barely think and he walks up to me & announces that he's found something for himself, we can go now. He just presumed that the kid's menu was my responsibility, like he assumed that it's my job to make sure there is food in the house for the family and despite him making dinner, he wasn't about to make the effort to make something that we all (including me) could eat. Just didn't occur to him at all. Is it the ADD? Is it the y chromonsome? I checked in with my sister and she said her husband does the same thing. Comes home with a bag of groceries for himself, without calling to see if she needs anything at home. Her husband doesn't have ADD, but he does have the Y chromosome...

Dear Joan Letter

Dear Joan,

My daughter, your son's daughter, is now at an age where she asks a lot of questions. She is completely observant of her world and capable of expressing many facets of emotion. Your presence is confusing to her. Who is this woman who periodically shows up at my house? Why doesn't she engage with me? Why is my mom so tense when she comes? Momma, did she hurt your feelings? She doesn't know you as a grandmother, she doesn't know you as part of her world. Do I answer her questions honestly, " This lady is not our friend. In addition to being a bitter, jealous gossip who spreads lies (yes, Joan everyone you complain to about me tells Greg what you have said, your daughter included, and he shares everything with me), on the 3rd day of your life she passed out drunk with you in her arms, she is abusive to her grandson and she is an inconsiderate, narcissist who is unable to relate to another person. She is too self involved to be trusted with a child. And if that isn't enough to convince you, she is happy to see your home, all that you have known for your short life, taken away from you in her fit of greed and vindictiveness."

I think you will agree that it's best for everyone if you just stay away from my child and home. You were allowed in on Saturday as a nod to Shannon, who probably doesn't know how horrible you truly are, but I'm not feeling so forgiving any more as I see what your presence does to my child.

Protection

To what ends would you go to protect your child? I use the train analogy frequently, "I'd throw myself in front of a moving train..." but it's scary that the real example is that I wouldn't knowingly put her in the presence of an abusive person. Not knowingly. Not in the mix of a large or small crowd. Not at all. My daughter's paternal grandmother (if you can call her that) is abusive. She's emotionally and verbally abusive to me, horrible to her third grandchild, whom she openly hates & belittles and is emotionally abusive to both of her 2 children. So that is why I refuse to let her near my 3 year old daughter. My own mother didn't afford me this level of protection, and whether it was intentional or accidental, I can't forgive her this oversight. From the time I was 10, she threw me out. She did this frequently, asserting that I was a "piece of shit" and she couldn't take another minute of my presence in her house. I'd usually go to my grandmother or aunt & uncle who lived about 4 hours away. They were hellish car rides with my mother spewing every kind of vile thought my way. Interestingly she didn't ever lash out at my 2 sisters, one older and one younger, in this particular way. One summer, I might have been 11 or 12, she took me to my grandmother's, who lived in new Jersey. This summer my grandmother was staying at the shore with her brother-in-law Joe & his wife Fran. My mother stopped for gas and as she was filling up she warned me, "Don't be alone with your Uncle Joe." I didn't understand why and must have asked, but have no recollection of this part of the conversation. Perhaps I knew better than to engage & just accepted her advice. But I distinctly recall the warning. I got to my grandmother's, we headed to the shore and I wanted to go to the beach. Of course the 2 old ladies didn't want to go, so Uncle Joe volunteered to take me. We weren't technically alone, since we were heading to a very public place and I REALLY wanted to go to the beach. So we went & I must have swam in the ocean and played in the sand, but I don't remember any of that. I only remember the walk back to the cottage & Uncle Joe says, "Give your Uncle Joe a kiss." And, of course, having been indoctrinated in the school of respecting your elders and kissing old ickky people, I complied. And as soon as my lips met his, his tongue shot down my throat and his hands were all over my budding breasts. I knew it was wrong. Amazingly, at this age I'd done enough petting and stopping short of sex to know what sex actually was. And I knew that I had been told not to be alone with him, and I'd done it anyway & so I was at fault. I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't be rescued. Once again, I was on my own. And somewhere in my 30s it occurred to me that it wasn't my fault at all. My mother fed me to this wolf- this pedophile- this asshole. How could you put your CHILD in this position and expect them to come out OK?

So I have a not of sensitivity and, perhaps, drama, when it comes to this stuff. And I won't EVER let my child be in the presence of a known abuser. No matter what.

Cake me out of the bathroom

I have made more cakes/cupcakes from a box in the last 3 years than I have over the last 20 due to the presence of my daughter. Not that I make them frequently, but 2x/year is still a HUGE increase for me. The last time I made cupcakes I was overwhelmed by the smell of the cake batter, so I gave it a little taste, then another and another. It was calling my name and I ate many spoons full of the stuff. Fortunately there were no witnesses to this act of complete gluttony, most fortunate of all my daughter did not see this behavior. And I did have sufficient batter left over to make a enough cupcakes for her class. Today I walked into the restroom at work and the cake batter smell hit me full on. They have changed the deodorizer and it smells exactly like cake batter. I want a big creamy bowl of the stuff and a spoon. I'm obsessed, feeling deprived and jonesing for the batter. What is in cake batter that makes it so alluringly good? Someone suggested vanilla, but I know the smell of vanilla, and while it's intoxicating, it's not addictive.

the hard questions

The other day my daughter (3.5 yo) asked me what god was. I don't believe in god, but think it's up to each individual to make his or her own decisions about religion and spirituality. So I asked her what she thought god was and she replied, "Daddy says it's the man in the sky." My reaction was hard to conceal, I was irritated that he'd given her that kind of BS answer and insulted that he decided to tell her that god was a man. I explained to may daughter that no one really knows if god is a man or woman or something in between, since no one has ever seen god and that we would continue this discussion when Dad was around to explain his answer a little more completely. He came home and I asked him about it. He said he initially told her that god was an omnipresent being, but, being 3, she didn't understand, so he dumbed it down to "man in the sky." Trying to provide my own perspective, I told my daughter that I thought god is like santa claus or the easter bunny or spider man, they are all characters who have been made up to explain a story. She asked if we had the story of god in the house. I said no, but we could look for one this weekend. Sigh...

My friend relayed a story about her hard question this week from her 4.5 yo daughter who asked what "this" was and pointed to her nipple. My pal said, "nipple." "No" her daughter explained, "the stuff around the nipple." "Oh that's your breast" "What's in it?" "Well, there is muscle and tissue..." "TISSUES???!" "No, not kleenex, but, ah, like the stuff in your arms." "What do they do?" "When you grow up they will grow and you'll wear a bra, like mommy, to support them and be more comfortable (and my friend clued me into her internal narrative of 'lie, lie, lie' regarding the comfortable part) and then when you're a mommy (and I interjected with 'when you're 35') they bring milk to the baby to feed him or her."

I so want my child to be curious and bright and know everything she needs to know to survive and not make the same stupid mistakes I made, but how do I see into the future to know whether she will need something like religion to get her through? When do you tell them the bad things and how do you know you've told them enough? These are the hard questions, I think. And what I really want is the wisdom of my grandmothers to guide me on this, but, alas they're gone, and I wasn't smart enough to really pick their brains while they were alive, as if I'd remember any of it anyway. This is why you need a mother and/or father who is around, to help answer some of these questions. It's why I need to take great care of myself, so I don't abandon my daughter the way my mother abandoned me. So she has someone to talk to about the stuff you don't give a lot of thought to anymore.