The End of Motherhood?

seeds of doubt

So a while back, one of you asked me if my kids read my blog.  Dutifully, I went and asked them and they all answered with some version of a resounding, "Uh, NO!"  I believed them and that was that.

But the other day, I got an invitation from Middle to a presentation he was giving for his history class.  And he signed the card, not with his name, but with "Middle."

The thing is, I don't call him Middle in real life - only here, in blog life.  Suddenly, I found myself wondering, is he reading these here scratchings?  And what if he is?

Well, first off, if he lied to me about not reading the blog (which I doubt) I would be disappointed.  I always expect my kids to tell me the truth and have on a few occasions felt compelled to tell each one in turn that I only know how to mother children that I trust and if I can't trust them, I'm not going to know how to mother them and we are all going to be in for a very nasty ride.  So really, could they please do us all a favor and remain trustworthy?  And with the exception of a few little glitches, they have done just that. (It helps that I have a truly uncanny ability to know when they are lying. They each have such a cute tell.)

But I digress.  It is of course also possible that Middle started reading the blog after I asked him if he read it in which case I need to ask him again.  And I will. 

But in the meantime, I had a post I was going to write today.  It was about Middle and trust me, it would have been funny and sweet and explain who he is right at this moment: a drop-dead gorgeous jock who retains just enough nerd to make him impossibly endearing.

But I don't feel like I can tell the story because I realize that if he read it, he might be embarrassed by it.  He might not want total strangers imagining what it was like in his math class, when the teacher made a math joke - a math joke! - and my Middle laughed heartily while his classmates stared blankly, not getting it. Not getting it at all.  And who knows, some of the other kids involved might read it - and then what?  I remember, oh how I remember, the infinite black hole of high school shame.

So now I feel oddly hamstrung.  Much as I want to tell the story, I can't - or won't. 

Instead, I am going to throw out to you all the questions I have been pondering. I think they are important ones for us blogging mothers and fathers to be asking ourselves:  How much of my children's lives is it appropriate for me to scatter like seeds into the blogosphere?  Am I somehow abdicating my primary job as Middle's mom if I use his life - even in a loving way - for what is fundamentally my own purposes?  Isn't it possible that the act of blogging about my children at all - or featuring them in a post the way I would have with this story - is a kind of exploitation?

Do you ever ask yourself these questions and if you do, how do you answer?

want to play couple's therapist?

Middle is waiting for an invitation that is supposed to come today.  He desperately wants this invitation and has worked incredibly hard to get it.  He is hopeful, nervous, and excited - all very appropriate feelings.

Mate and I, however, are total wrecks.

I know there are many things more difficult than fearing your child will be rejected, but right now I can't think of any. 

The invitation, if it comes (please make it come!) will arrive in Middle's email. Since I am the resident IT maven around here and set up everyone's email accounts, I happen to be in possession of Middle's username/password combo.

Mate, whose normally unflappable self has been replaced, in this situation, with something akin to a Victorian lady who spends a lot of time on her fainting couch, wants us to check Middle's email on a regular basis today. 

I am resisting the idea.

I have tried to talk my way into agreeing with my Mate.  I mean, if I know in advance what the outcome is, won't I be better able to help him with his feelings?  If it's bad news, I can work through my own disappointment on his behalf, right?  And then be there for him when he hears the bad news?

I'd like to say my resistance comes from my commitment to mother less.  I mean, I can't really hold my head up with all of you if I'm going around checking my kid's email on a regular basis because I can't stand the thought of him being rejected.   

I'd like to say the resistance comes from my awareness that the true job of mothering in these situations is being a home for the feelings my child will have at the end of the day - whatever they are.  But (can you see me hanging my head in shame, here?) it's not that either.

The bald truth is that I don't want to check his email for fear of jinxing him.

OK, This is where you get to play couple's therapist:

Sunday Night Anxiety...

I called Oldest earlier today to wish him a Happy Easter.  He had spent the morning with numerous members of my family at my youngest brother's house.  From the sounds of it, the yearly tradition of the grown-ups-in-name-only hunt for the $100 egg did what it always does - it sent my purportedly adult male siblings hurtling back to their childhood personas.  There is a certain competitive fire that can only be found in the bellies of siblings whose childhoods can lay claim to the descriptor, "Darwinian". If your from a big enough family, you probably know what I am talking about.

Anyhoo, Oldest sounded fairly chipper and after our convo, as he would call it, I hung up missing him but happy that he had been with family today.

When the phone rang again shortly thereafter, I was surprised to see his number on the caller ID.

He skipped the social niceties and declared without preamble, "I'm having an anxiety attack."

Since these kinds of situations are right in my wheelhouse, I was able to calmly ask, "What's going on?"

"I am worried about that ticket, I can't work anymore because the cop took my fake ID, I don't have any money so I can't go anywhere for Spring break next week AND I have a ton of homework for mid-terms - I have to read a WHOLE BOOK online."

"Hmmm, that is a lot," I replied. "Do you have any sense of what kicked off your anxiety?" 

(Can you tell I have spent almost as many years in therapy as Youngest sends text messages in a month?)

"I don't know."

Oh well, off went the therapy hat.  On went my mother's eminently practical, problem-solving Mom hat.  "Well, all that worrying is not going to help anything.  So let's look at all the things you have to worry about and figure what action you could take right now to deal with any of them.  The ticket?  Nothing you can do now.  Getting another job?  Nothing you can do now.  Money?  Nothing you can do now.  Where you are going to go next week?  You could probably do something about this now." 

"I don't want to do anything about it now."

"OK, well that leaves homework and mid-terms.  You can do something about those."

"But it's Easter Sunday. I don't want to do homework."

"I get that, but the only way to work yourself out of an anxiety attack is to pick something you actually can do right now and do it. Figure out the next action you can actually take and take it."

Silence.

More silence.

"OK, I'll go work."

We hung up, and to relieve the anxiety that our call had stirred up in me.  ("My baby!  He's all alone. He's too sad! I should send him money, stat!), I sought out Mate and told him all about it.

"Sunday Night Anxiety," he said calmly.

His stubborn refusal to do the gentlemanly thing and relive me of my anxiety led me to depart in a huff, carrying my unloaded anxiety with me.  What was the next action I could take?

I could call Oldest!

I know what you are thinking. The last thing a mother should do when her child is anxious is to take on that anxiety and then look to said child to relieve her of its burden.  Well, you weren't there to shake your head disapprovingly at me so I went ahead and dialed his number.

"Whatcha doing?" I asked innocently, as if we hadn't hung up, oh, nine minutes earlier.

"Working."

I'm not sure who was more relieved.

***

Once you get past the day-to-day busy-work of mothering, the wiping of noses and butts, the making of lunches, the putting to beds and the getting to schools, the instilling of language and manners, not to mention the explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem, you are left with very little to do but tolerate things. Last week it was not knowing, today it was anxiety.

There are plenty of semi and completely gross things that I became inured to as a mother - snot, vomit and shit spring easily to mind.  Before becoming a mother, any single one of those would have made me recoil in horror.  But over time, they lose their power.  You get used to cleaning up messes.

Given the choice between tolerating anxiety and a stinky three-pound diaper, I'd take the diaper any day of the week and twice on Easter Sunday.

inquiring minds...

Mizmel wants to know if Youngest has a girlfriend. 

So do I.

In fact, I have many questions about l'affaire cell phone.  Who was the girl?  Was she a friend who happens to be a girl or a girl who happens to be, yikes, a girlfriend?  What was the "issue"?  Why did she feel unable to deal with it face-to-face?  Are they still friends?  Did they break up? 

And while I'm at it, how close were/are they to having sex?

I know that growth is gradual, but sometimes it really doesn't feel that way.  Sometimes, like now, it feels as if a chasm suddenly opens up between myself and my kids.  My questions swirl around in that wide open space, knock into each other repeatedly, echo off the walls.  No answers are forthcoming.

Youngest is beginning to insist on his privacy.  I know this is developmentally appropriate.  I know it is natural.  I even know, deeply, it is both necessary and good.   

Still, I hate it.

More precisely, I hate the loss of the intricate web of knowing that we built over all those fourteen years.  He would point and I would name.  He would cry and I would put his feelings into words.  There were endless "why"s, an infinite chain of questions.  I had all the answers then.

Now, I have all the questions. 

I think part of mothering less, but no less than necessary, is knowing when to insist on knowing and when tolerating not-knowing is the job.

If only not-knowing were my strong suit.

cell phone dilemma resolved, kinda....

He emerged from his room, adjusting his boxers and blinking in the early morning light.

"Youngest, " I said, brandishing the 18 page Verizon bill, "do you know that you had more than TWO THOUSAND text messages last month?"

He grinned sheepishly as he headed toward the garage/lgym/laundry/TV/storage room to pick up something clean to wear.

Since he had only just woken up, I let him go, but when he returned, fully dressed, I was still there, brandishing...

"Over TWO THOUSAND," I exclaimed on the off chance he hadn't heard me shriek the words earlier.

"Uh, he replied, "I can explain that.  But, it's kinda personal so can you give me a couple minutes?" 

He poured some pancake batter onto the griddle while I contemplated how my fourteen year-old son, who just minutes ago spent considerable amounts of time on my lap, could have become such a forthright and sensible young man without me noticing.

"Explain what?" asked Middle, as he emerged from his room,  adjusting his boxers and blinking in the early morning light.

"Youngest had over 2000 text messages last month."

Middle smiled approvingly.   "And it was a short month. That works out to...69 a day."  As he disappeared into garage/gym/laundry/TV/storage room to pick out something clean to wear, I contemplated my seventeen year-old son's blistering computational speed and wondered if he could have been switched at birth, given that Mate and I still count on our fingers.

This detour into visions of swapped infants gave Youngest adequate time to collect his thoughts:

"You see...Well it was this thing between me and a girl friend..."

I missed the next few sentences because his voice was drowned out by the following flood of internal dialog:  "WHAAT?!?  Did he just say what I think he said?  DId he mean "girl friend" as in a friend who is a girl or "girlfriend" as in my Youngest, my baby, my last, has a (tell me it isn't so!) girlfriend?"

I yanked my thoughts back to Youngest who seemed to be finishing up a thought:
"And there was this thing.  And she didn't want to deal with it face-to-face.  And so we had to text."

"Is it over?" I asked, "'cause you know we can't be having more than 2000 texts from you a month."

"Yeah, it's over." 

What, exactly, is over I do not know but I decided to leave my Youngest to his pancakes and possible heartbreak.

And then I went and took $11.69 out of his account for the overages.

cell phone bill dilemma...

Indulge me, won't you?  and hazard a guess:

How many text messages do you think Youngest sent and received in the last month?

and that's not the half of it...

Two days before I took the picture of the vodka bottle in Oldest’s bathroom, I was in our garage/gym/laundry/storage/TV room when I heard Oldest’s car come up the driveway.  We had had a fight the day before and were now speaking only when required.   I heard him get out of his car and walk to my car.  I heard him rustling around in the plastic shopping bags I keep in the trunk.  I don’t even think I went so far as to wonder why.  It was a slightly odd occurrence.  I may have wondered idly, "Why the fussing? Why not just get one and put it to use?" But probably not. I was still annoyed.  I didn’t think anything of it.

Despite the fact that he made an effort at dinner that night to participate, to pull his weight, I was still annoyed with him.  He got up after dessert and said he was going out.  From outside, I watched as he walked across the length of the living room. He carried a plastic Whole Foods bag.  I noticed that he carried it a little oddly, not hanging from the handles, but slightly strangled, a shade too tight, a hairsbreadth too self-conscious.  I was still annoyed.  I didn’t think anything of it.

In the night, he walked past our room without announcing his return.  I was still annoyed. I didn’t think anything of it.

The next morning, I went rowing early and as I eased my car into our crowded driveway, I saw his car.  Something made me think of the rustling of plastic, the strangled hold.  The idea of the bag, like a particularly buoyant piece of wood pushing its way through the flotsam on a crowded watery surface, arrived at the top of my brain.  What I thought was, I wonder what was in that bag?

I went to have a look.  It was right there on the passenger seat.  Since I don’t much believe in snooping, you might think I would have been more conflicted, but I wasn’t.  I looked in the bag.

Two half-empty bottles of Coke.  One half-empty bottle of Jim Beam.

I don't know what or how to think.

a little context

Not that I always, oh, well all right, not that I ever do it, but I know that in highly charged situations with one's children, it is always a good idea to examine one's own emotional terrain before engaging with them in theirs.  To wit, I grew up in a house in which half empty vodka bottles, some stashed in hiding places, some in plain sight in the liquor cabinet with a tell-tale loosened, carelessly returned cap, figured mightily. 

That may have had just a little to do with my obsessive organizing of the pantry, dontchathink?

chaos vs. control

What would you do if your almost nineteen-year-old Oldest were home from his first year of college and you walked into his bathroom to put something away, and you turned to leave and you saw this?:

 

Here's what I did: 

Egg hunt, re-imagined...

I am here to report on our newly-refined Easter egg hunt.  As you may recall, the idea was that each person would write a word on his or her egg, a word that described something he or she wants in life.  A sampling of words written on eggs: joy, light, today, $, inner peace, being, my thumb, a 6:20 2k, driver's license, awareness.  After each person found one egg, we went around in a circle and talked about our reaction to what we had found. 

I found $.

Not what I had expected from my experiment in deepening our holiday tradition. 

That said, it was interesting to be brought to thinking about money, the idea of finding it versus earning it, how lucky we are that we have enough of it. 

And being brought to a place of gratitude, that's a deepening.

Writing the words with the "invisible" crayon was only marginally successful.  Requires a bit of practice.  The effect, if it works, is fantastic.  The word is ghostly against the colored dye.   

Note to self:  next year, stronger dye.

But the newly revised Easter egg hunt?  I think we'll keep it.

More gratitude goes out to my mom, who came up with the idea and also sent me this...

I hope all your celebrations bring you a deepened sense of connection to what is most important to you and those you love.