Feeling rather lost, lonely, wandering. Where on earth am I going!!??
Feeling overwhelmed. Frenetic voices in my head. Coming. Going. Staying.
Can’t connect the dots. Don’t see the design in the tapestry.
No rest in my sleep, no life in my day.
Alone yet consumed by others. Giving giving, waiting to receive.
Not understanding, heart breaking at the torment that is loss.
I thought I was. I thought we could.
I am not. We cannot.
One of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The more I read her writing, the more I think we would have understood each other very much.
Irreparableness
I have been in the meadows all the day
And gathered there the nosegay that you see
Singing within myself as bird or bee
When such do field-work on a morn of May.
But, now I look upon my flowers, decay
Has met them in my hands more fatally
Because more warmly clasped,–and sobs are free
To come instead of songs. What do you say,
Sweet counselors, dear friends ? that I should go
Back straightway to the fields and gather more ?
Another, sooth, may do it, but not I !
My heart is very tired, my strength is low,
My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
Held dead within them till myself shall die.
Well there you go. There’s my beef for today. Non-parents, did I do the wrong thing? Should I have not answered the door? Should I have planned ahead and woke my daughter up and said, “If your tooth falls out or if you break an arm or something happens in the next few hours, please don’t bother me” so that the whole mess could have been avoided?
I know I’m being awful sarcastic here, but I just don’t get what happened.
If you really do not like or care for children that much, then do not place yourself in a situation with kids. Ever. At all.
I’ve had single non-parent friends who – while on a phone call some minor emergency comes up that includes bleeding or puking – respond to my profuse embarrassed apologies by saying “I know you have kids. This is more important right now and you need to take care of them. When you can, call me back.”
Wow. What a relief THAT is to hear. How respectful of me as a parent to have grace and honesty and understanding. To be selfless in their own needs and kind to my kids.
Like I NEED someone’s permission to talk to my kid in my own home.
My children are part of me, part of my life, part of my every waking (and sleeping) moment. If you cannot grasp that, well, I don’t know what to say.
I’ve never asked much of anyone with regard to my kids. I don’t walk around telling everyone how perfect my two are, that they’re the cutest in the world, the smartest, the funniest. I’m quick to recognize my kids’ faults and try to help them through it. I’ve never dated anyone and expected them to act like a potential future dad, (although I’ve been blessed to have some amazing dudes play with and care about my kids just because). I’ve never expected anything really, and quite honestly, I feel like being a single parent is a scarlet letter and every.single.guy will see kids/divorce as baggage and warning signs.
Quite unfair really.
I don’t expect or demand anyone change. I just expect respect and understanding for this situation. I expect my kids to be recognized as half-baked humans who aren’t done yet, and to be treated with respect as to who they are and what they are. And if my kids act up, it’s MY job to come down on them and fix it.
Yes? No?
Without sounding boastful, my kids really are good kids, so I suppose I’ll keep them around. Neither of them went through the terrible two’s, although they had a few rough patches at 3. And while we’ve had our issues, we use communication to get through our problems and we’ve made it through some really trying times that have impacted us and could have really made a dent in our personal character.
I treat my children with the respect that any human being, young or old, big or small, deserves. I want them to enjoy their life. On the flip side, enjoying life isn’t just about being treated with respect, it’s getting grounded when you need to be grounded, it’s reprimand, it’s discipline, it’s structure.
So here’s what all the fuss is about:
My kids know when I’m on the phone, some rules are automatically in place. Turn the TV down, keep your voices down, and don’t interrupt unless you have a legitimate emergency.
Hopefully I tell them I’m on the phone. But if they don’t know because they didn’t see me pick up the phone, and come running in from outside “Mom! Mom! Guess what I found!” well then it is up to ME to tell my phone person, “Just a minute please” and inform my child I’m on the phone and will come see shortly. And if that can’t happen, then I can point at the phone and give them the “just a minute” finger and hope they get it.
I don’t think that’s rude. I don’t think it makes my kid rude. I don’t think ANYONE should be offended, regardless of the tone or seriousness of our conversation, if I have to let someone know I’m on the phone.
Last night I had such a situation. I was on the phone having what felt like one of the most important and serious conversations of my life. It had the potential to blow up easily since emotions were high and vulnerability was evident on both sides. Behind closed doors and late into the evening, I figured the conversation was safe from interruption. I had waited on purpose for it to be a little later so that I could have such an ideal interruption-free time.
Knock knock.
Okay, so someone is knocking at my bedroom door. Whichever child it was didn’t know I was on the phone, and they were respectful of my privacy by knocking on the door.
What exactly should a parent do? Ignore the knock? Or open the door to see if there’s an emergency?
I chose the latter. I informed my conversation mate that someone was knocking to please hold on just a moment while I check to see if everything is a-ok.
Well there was my poor daughter, blood dribbling down her chin, her mouth filling with blood and saliva, her eyes wide open in the dark, and a tooth – what looked like an adult tooth – in her hand.
“Could I please call you back in a sec? My kid is bleedin!”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew my non-kid friendly phone mate would not be happy, and sure enough their response was an irritated reply that let me know I had offended them, made them feel unimportant and not-a-priority.
I flipped on the light, yanked my kid’s mouth open, realized she’d just lost a baby molar and it was just bleeding more than normal, told her to rinse gently and she’d be okay. I managed to call my phone mate back within a minute, knowing everything was good,
…but that wasn’t good enough for them. It caused our whole conversation to go downhill from there. They were really mad that I got off the phone – that apparently it wasn’t THAT big of a deal to begin with since I was able to call back so soon anyway.
And honestly, it hurt me more than anything. Not because my non-kid friendly phone mate was annoyed at the situation, but that they didn’t care about my feelings for my child. That they decided to use this as a perfect example of my kids interrupting “all the time.”
Do people not realize that children don’t have their shit together and make mistakes? That even the best, brightest, most polite child can do something that will rub someone else the wrong way?
I’ve done everything to shield my phone mate from any potential irritation from kids. Including, to my own shame, tossing them to bed early or allowing extra video game time so that we could have more time to chat or hang out. I pushed the limits with my kids for my own benefit and selfishness.
And, as children always will do, they reacted to it by wanting MORE of my time.
Do you remember being a kid? Do you remember feeling like an eternity was passing by waiting for your mom to get off the phone? For your dad to come home? For the car trip to end? Do you remember getting older and feeling like people didn’t treat you fairly or give you a chance to prove you could be responsible? I did. I tried my best but I remember feeling really let-down when I wanted to prove I’d learned from lessons taught but nobody would give me a chance. I remember hearing family members talk down to me in condescending tones just because I was younger. I’m talking early teen young – old enough to be taken more seriously than I was, but not having a “I know it all” attitude. Not yet anyway.
So being a mom myself, I try to remember how I felt when my parents, peers or adults in my life made me feel small, stupid or insignificant. I HATED asking if I could get something, do something, and the reply was “I’ll think about it” or “maybe, we’ll see.” What does that mean!? I had to sit and wait it out, minutes, hours, days… it would have been nice to have more information or a flat-out no.
All these things I try to remember with my own kids. I try to give them appropriate information when necessary, so they GET why I say no when I do, or yes when I do, so that if the situation presents itself again, they can already have an idea of this or that is appropriate or possible. It’s helped TONS when going to the store and I *know* my kids want to get something in the checkout lane. I am proud to say my children have never, ever pitched a fit at the grocery store. Sure, they’ve been cranky at the end of a long shopping trip, fussy, hungry and tired, but never something out of my control. I’ve never allowed it to happen, and I’ve staved off such fits by setting standards for them and creating a situation to minimize such risks. For example, don’t take your toddler to the store at nap time or snack time. Duh.
Still wondering where I’m going with this? Read on my dear friend.
I wanted to get to a specific point in this post, but I had to sort of set you up with where I’m coming from first. So just bear with me here. 
I have to admit it – while I’m the mom of two kids, I’m really not a kid person. Surprised? It seems that a lot of women have that built-in mommy-ability to be sweet, soft-spoken, patient and nurturing with children, their own or someone else’s. It’s a trait I see often at the kids’ school: teachers who have that gift to work with and handle children like magic. But for some of us, kids are like untrained dogs who push when you pull and run off leaving you feeling helpless, powerless, and ready to pull out your hair.
The thought of babysitting someone else’s kids usually makes me cringe, especially if they aren’t well-behaved kids. I had an experience once of having a gal come over to play with us and she decided to squeeze glue all over someone’s bedsheets and pillow, and to hack to pieces a $200 Lego Star Wars spaceship. I called her mom to pick her up asap.
Having just that one experience (oh, I’ve seen more, trust me) it’s really no surprise to me when I hear people (USUALLY younger, single boys males) say how kids are little *expletives* and that they’d never want to have kids or be around kids or date someone with kids. You see the screeching, snotty two-year old pulling on his parents or hitting a sibling at a restaurant, you see a 13-year old girl flip off her grandmother, well you get the point. It’s no secret that there are some spoiled, poorly raised kids in the world.
But if they are GOOD kids, kids who do well and try hard with the occasional hiccup because they have yet to refine their own social graces and manners, or they forget, or they run out of patience after 15 minutes of waiting for something and ask again “are we there yet” or “is it done yet” – well, is that really enough to make you hate a child? To cringe to be around them?
Kids in general don’t bother me. As a matter of fact, I find quite a bit of humor while just hanging around kids. They really do say the darndest things. They’re little people, not yet full of all the information they need to be adults like the rest of us. The only time a kid really bothers me is: if they’re incredibly rude; they won’t listen to ANYONE; they pick their nose and eat it in front of me; they are mean to or hurt my kid (or someone else’s). Even then, I’m not mad at the child. I’m annoyed at their parents for not teaching them and enforcing rules of acceptable behavior. The mother who says quietly “Now Johnny, don’t hit mommy. Now Johnny, stop biting the baby. Johnny we don’t throw knives at kittens” without giving discipline for repeated offenses, well, she deserves to be knocked upside the head. “Now Johnny” doesn’t cut it for some kids.
You probably want me to get to the point already. Ok ok, I’m getting there… read on to my next post.
PET PEEVE: I really hate it when I’m talking on the phone with another parent and their child starts talking to the parent. It’s not the child’s talking to the parent that bothers me at all. It’s the parent stopping in mid-sentence when talking to me, chatting with the child for 30-60 seconds and then saying to them “I can’t talk right now, I’m on the phone.” Wait, what? You just talked to your kid – which told them you can talk while on the phone. So telling them that now you can’t probably doesn’t make much sense to them and they will continue to talk to you when you are on the phone on other occasions. On the other hand, it would not bother me if the parent said to me “excuse me for just a moment”, told the child that they were on the phone to come back later, and got back to me.
Looking over my last few posts, I see that I was really struggling quite a bit with the job loss and all the drama with the kids’ dad. It’s really frustrating, not just because I feel like he does everything he can to make my life miserable, but because he does things that harms the children and there’s not much I can do to stop it. So every day that I can, I try to make sure my kids are happy and healthy and are emotionally strong and resilient.
One way I’ve tried to keep myself strong and resilient the past ten years of difficulties and hardships was to keep my faith. Not necessarily faith in God per se, but faith in something better. Faith in relief. Faith in better times to come. For me, using my faith is like this:
Imagine you are drowning in the ocean. The harder you fight, the more you lose your energy, or the more you are tangled in seaweed or any other thing that could ensnare you. It’s like a losing fight and you are doomed from the beginning. When teaching Mason to swim in the deep end of the pool earlier this summer, I told him that if he couldn’t make it (swim to) the edge of the pool and started to be afraid, I told him all he had to do was take a breath in and relax his body and go under the water. I told him to do what he was afraid of: going under. Oddly enough, it’s the relaxing, the ‘giving up’, the not fighting anymore that could save you. If you can take a breath and relax in the ocean that can swallow you whole, you can lay on your back supported by the water until you regain your strength or until blessed help arrives.
After a few weeks of fighting I decided it was time to give up. At the time, my giving up wasn’t taking a breath and relaxing or going under to get my strength back. It was the giving up that said I didn’t really care anymore and I didn’t know which way was up or down and would never figure it out. I lost faith in my faith, in my reality, in my self.
It’s obvious that I’m not in the throes of death in the middle of the ocean, so I didn’t drown from seawater and I wasn’t eaten by any sharks. But after I cried it out and pitched my fits, I allowed myself to take a breath and go under and let the water lift me back up to the top.
That’s when my perspective changed. I didn’t see endless waves of ocean without start or finish, I didn’t see the impossibility of my situation anymore. I saw the sky, the bright warm rays of the sun. I heard the call of the seagull and the gentle lull of waves. I know I can float on my back for quite a while.
I’m learning to seek out hope. Not just faith. Hope is like the fuel of faith. We can’t find what we want without hoping for it. And when we start to hope that something might happen for us, we need faith to get us there, faith that it will happen. Believing it will happen. Hope allows me to want something for myself and to feel like I deserve it. It allows me to be selfish in a good way. Hope says I would love to have a bowl of ice cream. Faith is what gets me into the car to drive to the store to see if they have the flavor I want.
I hope for many things today. I hope for my kids to be greater than I am. I hope to give them what their little hearts desire, things that have been for so long withheld from them. I hope they will grow up to be leaders and givers, people who carve their names on the heart of this world through actions of goodness and kindness and love.
It’s also for myself that I’m hope-full today. It feels good to entertain hope. I don’t have to try to figure it out or make it work. I can just lay in the water and let hope take me where I need to go.
Another boring and depressing day. Trying to push through but can’t break out of this yucky blah feeling that makes me feel so pointless.
Anyhoo – heading to the pool with the kids. Hoping the sunshine will perk up my mood a bit! Wish I had a laptop so I could write while we’re over there.
I was watching a television show the other day and a woman was in the midst of childbirth: there was much panting, wailing, gnashing of teeth and I’m sure some cursing, not to mention blood sweat and tears, not necessarily in that order. I rolled my eyes a little as I recounted my own childbirth experience 11 years ago at 3:20 this morning.
See, I pretty much slept through the entire birth of my first child, not by choice mind you, and not because I have super hero powers residing in my loins that cause child birth to be a painless breeze. No, no, not at all. Let me tell you how it all went down.
May 16, 1999. I was about 38 weeks preggers with my daughter. I was working full time and barely had a nursery ready when at around 3 that afternoon – my day off – I got a phone call from my OBGYN (for you who don’t know, that’s a baby doctor/vagina doctor all rolled into one). Well, not my real OB, but the one on call. MY doctor happened to be out of town on vacation (and oddly enough returned from vacation three years later the day before my son was born). She wanted me to know that I’d have to come to the hospital as soon as possible to be induced as my protein levels were out-of-control and too high for the health of the baby.
I was super annoyed because 1) I had to work the next day and 2) I wasn’t ready for the baby yet (I still had two weeks!) and 3) I hadn’t had lunch yet, much less dinner.
I was NOT ready for this kid. But, like any other mom-to-be who suddenly goes into labor, I found myself realizing that the end was indeed in sight and I needed to get my butt in gear and get to the hospital. No time to do anything other than grab an overnight bag for me and the baby and a carseat and off I went to the hospital. I debated on grabbing some food to go on my way in but I remembered that it’s recommended you don’t eat just before going into labor. Tell that to all the women who have a wonderful meal just before the first labor pangs… they don’t seem to complain much.
Well anyway, off to the hospital I go since it was SO urgent to get there. I got checked in, wheeled in to a nice little room, and was told to wait for the doctor.
That’s when I realized how hungry I was since it was about 6:00. Nope, nothing to eat said the nurse.
Then I got a case of heartburn so bad I thought I could spit fire. I BEGGED for some relief and the nurse reluctantly brought me a small dixie cup of what tasted like Sprite syrup with battery acid mixed in (it burned going down!). Hungry, heartburn-ridden and developing a headache, I realized in my misery that I was definitely not looking forward to having a giant baby head squeezed out of my nether-regions.
Not to worry. Apparently the doctor didn’t want me to deliver the baby until the next morning anyway, (see how urgent my case was?). She had mercy on my nerves and authorized a horse-sized hospital-strength (read: coma inducing) sleeping pill. I took it with some nice water (which unfortunately did not cure the fire that roared in my esophagus). It must have been around 12:30 or so. I was looking forward to a nice rest.
She also authorized another medication: a little, erm, insert pill thingie that would induce labor. Not to worry she said, again. It would take all night to kick in so that I’d have a slow, easy start to labor in the morning after a nice night’s sleep from the sleeping pill.
Tucked in, lights turned down, I turned on the TV. A League of Their Own was on. The last thing I remember was Tom Hanks speaking one of my favorite movie lines “There’s no crying in baseball!” before I drifted off to sleep.
Only to awake about 30 seconds later to find that holy ^%($ I am not feeling so good in my girl areas and what the hell my water broke. Zzzzz. Wait, what is happening? Holy hell I’m in FREAKING zzzzzzzzzzzzz. I’m in FREAKING labor y’all! ZZzzzzz
Have you ever tried to complete a task while dozing off? You know, nodding off at work while typing? Stuff like that? Well can you imagine the same sort of dozing off while getting ready to have a baby!?!??!?!
I don’t remember much from that night except everyone being incredibly amazed that I went into labor and popped out my firstborn in a record 45 minutes start-to-finish. My then-husband kept drinking cup after cup of coffee to stay awake but was struggling too (only to find out that the hospital was 7th day Adventist and didn’t serve caffeinated drinks).
I vaguely remember seeing that little round baby face with teeny tiny red lips and thinking “she looks like my grandfather” and hoping that maybe she was really a he if she was going to look like a boy.
And I remember the new nurse on duty turning up my oxygen and asking me to repeat my name and birthday and other information because she didn’t realize my narcoleptic behavior was caused by a sleeping pill but thought I was drifting in and out of consciousness from the strain of labor.
Not.
I may have mumbled out my daughters name before completely passing out. It wasn’t until early the next morning that I was awoken by a new nurse drawing blood – as if I had any left.
When they brought me my little bundle of joy, I was ecstatic to discover she did not look at all like a man, and I called my parents who lived so far away so they could hear their first grandchild cry.
And now, 11-years later, I find I am still sleep-deprived, narcoleptic and trying to accomplish tasks feeling as such. I still get heartburn and headaches and will never leave the house hungry.
And, 11-years later, I look at my daughter and see how beautiful and lovely she is, looking like a little miniature version of me and my mom all mixed into one, with a little bit of my grandfather in there somewhere, too.
It may not have been a tale worthy of A Baby Story, more like Birth: FAILS instead. But for that little package of joy that I received that day, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
Not even a nap.
“You’re not like other women I know” he said. “You’re different. You’re smart, you’re beautiful. I find myself very attracted to you. You’re the only one I’ve ever thought about this way.” He said this while flipping that damned holster button. And then he walked away.
I was speechless. Never had I been so attracted to a man in my LIFE and had him reciprocate like that. I was certain he was out of my league. Even the most clever and witty phrase I could come up with was junk compared to his. My most brilliant IQ score would pale in comparison to his if he took the test blindfolded.
He’d call me on our days off and we’d chat and laugh and talk about everything and anything. He’d flirt, but just enough to let me know he had an attraction, but never crossed a line to make me feel uncomfortable.
One day, he brought me a Dove ice-cream bar while I was working. It was a treat, a surprise, and it made me feel like he was okay with other people know we talked.
But other people were *not* okay that we talked. One Richard to be exact. He’d become one of my really good friends that I trusted, enough to where he had a key to my apartment. He took advantage of this and one day he went into my house and read all of the emails that Curtis and I had exchanged.
He approached me, yelling at me for not telling him I had a boyfriend (say what?!). He said he thought HE was my boyfriend. He said he was going to go to the Captain to let him know I was in a relationship with Curtis and that we shouldn’t be on the same shifts.
To my surprise, he even confronted Curtis outside of the PD one day. They had a pretty intense discussion according to Curtis who told me what had happened. He said this to me: “[Richard] said he was going to tell the Captain that we’ve been seeing each other. He also said he would be willing to fight with me for you. I told him I would fight just as hard.”
Doesn’t this sound like it’s from a book?
Then Curtis asked me to meet him to chat for a few minutes. I did. He told me that he’d been contemplating ending his relationship with his current girlfriend, and that he wanted to be with me. But there was a problem: Richard had told him that we’d been seeing each other for months, that we were very serious and that we were going to move in together. I was incensed, angry, mad. He said we should make an effort to not speak to each other for a few days to see what Richard was going to do, to see how the department would respond.
The next day Richard and I both worked together. We were in a hallway and I was so angry that he was saying things to the Captain, lying to Curtis about our relationship. We stepped into a small side-room so nobody could overhear our conversation but at some point a Sergeant did, and he called us out saying we were stupid for having this discussion at work and that he’d have to let the Captain know.
It was such a mess. My heart hurt so bad every night, knowing I could have been with Curtis, knowing I should never have trusted Richard as much as I did, that maybe if I’d realized he wanted more of our relationship or thought more of our relationship than I did. I was so, so mad at him. I’d had enough drama at the PD and I did NOT need this to top it all off.
Sure enough, the rumor mill started up and the politicking began. I was told I was not permitted to work shifts with or speak to either Curtis OR Richard, that my permanent file would have a note on it about the situation and about my stirring up the situation with Richard at work and pulling him into what could have been a domestic at work. I was even strongly encouraged NOT to speak to either off duty as well. I was so mad. I didn’t even get to tell my side of the story.
I didn’t see or talk to Curtis much after that. One day he was on a call and a lady went crazy after he arrested her and was putting her into his vehicle. From what I remember, she started kicking at him and broke a few ribs. I was so upset when I heard he was hurt. I just wanted to be sure he was okay and tell him that I’d quit the PD if I had to, just so we could be together.
I made him some brownies and brought them in to the PD (which everyone else ate, I don’t remember if he ever got any!) I hoped things would soon blow over and maybe we could revisit our relationship, but it never happened.
I had to quit my job a few weeks later. Curtis called me once to ask if I was okay. He said he was going to quit soon as well because what of what happened and how it was handled.
Years later I heard Curtis was in a coma. I cried and prayed for days and days and days that he’d come out of it. If anyone deserved it, it was Curtis.
He did come out of it. He married his long-time girlfriend and made a life together. I moved on in my own life, but never did I find a guy who made me feel like Curtis did. Every now and then I’d dream about him, that we were together. The feelings that would stick with me the whole next day and my heart would hurt and I’d wish things were different.
My heart hurts just as much today, only more so. Curtis died a week ago. He’s gone. All that was brilliant and wonderful is gone from this world. He impacted many people.
I hear his funeral was perfect for someone of his caliber. I wish I could have been there. However, I can barely look at the photos from his memorial page on the web. It hurts an awful lot. Knowing I could have been with him, maybe his life would have been different, or maybe it would have had the same awful outcome.
Either way, I hope he is at peace and resting well.
URTOO: U R the only one.