The Writing Mamas Daily Blog
Each day on the Writing Mamas Daily Blog, a different member will write about mothering.If you're a mom then you've said these words, you've made these observations and you've lived these situations - 24/7.
And for that, you are a goddess.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Thanksgiving to Holiday Memories
My irritation grew as the girls lost interest in helping halfway through peeling the apples. Determined to be thankful for my family and friends, though, I tried not to sweat the small stuff.
Thanksgiving morning brought major sweating -- and shivering. The flu had struck. I was too weak to crawl out of bed, much less roast a turkey and conjure up gravy, mashed potatoes, and green beans, piping hot and on the table at the same magical moment.
My favorite holiday would have to proceed without me.
My husband and daughters sprang into action. Never were green beans trimmed and potatoes peeled with such enthusiasm!
The clatter of utensils and easy cooperation drifted up the stairs. Were these the same kids who could barely put a used glass in the dishwasher or the husband whose culinary talents began and ended with spaghetti sauce?
The table was strewn with the post-feast wreckage of crumbs and spilled salt. Grease-stained, mismatched napkins flopped helter-skelter, their toilet paper tube rings askew nearby. One lone napkin stood crisply at the head of the table, still encircled by gaily painted cardboard.
“Mommy (we miss you),” read the hand-drawn place card.
I gave thanks.
By Lorrie Goldin
Labels: Flu, gravy, green beans, Lorrie Goldin, mashed potatoes, mommy, Thanksgiving
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Tuesday, April 07, 2009
The Teased Gene Passed Painfully Down
It was the terrible “T” word.
“I didn’t like school today, Mommy. A girl in my class teased me.” Miranda looked up at me with clear blue eyes, a slight ripple in her forehead indicating a thoughtful frown line would be engraved there someday. It looked like that day was coming sooner than I thought was possible.
I gripped the kitchen counter, resisting the impulse to grab Miranda’s sweater and say, “Who was that bitch? I’ll kill her for you.” Instead, I quietly and calmly asked, “What did she say?”
“She didn’t want to play with me. I asked her and she said, 'No.' It hurt my feelings.”
“Did you tell her?” I asked, trying to understand why some worthless lump of a child wouldn’t want to play with my sparkling, beautiful baby.
"No. She’d just be meaner to me if I told her. Can I have a cookie now, Mommy? Can I watch Pokemon?”
Miranda’s attention span had allowed her to move on. Unlike me, who gave her a cookie, turned on Pokemon, returned to the kitchen, and began crying as memories of childhood meanness paraded in my head.
“Georgie, porgie, pudden and pie. You want to kiss this guy?” I was walking along the playground’s edge as Robert danced in front of me, just out of reach of my leg. I knew better than to respond. To respond invited more taunting. I just kept walking.
“Hey George, did you come from the jungle, do you swing from trees?” My name was full of teasing possibilities that both genders of my classmates loved to use.
“Mommy, mommy? Pokemon’s over now. What’s for dinner?” The angelic voice called me back across the vastness of time.
I kept walking. Though the terrain had been rough at times, it had brought me here to a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter.
“Honey, if someone keeps teasing you, let’s talk to the teacher about it.”
I gripped the kitchen counter, resisting the impulse to grab Miranda’s sweater and say, “Who was that bitch? I’ll kill her for you.” Instead, I quietly and calmly asked, “What did she say?”
“She didn’t want to play with me. I asked her and she said, 'No.' It hurt my feelings.”
“Did you tell her?” I asked, trying to understand why some worthless lump of a child wouldn’t want to play with my sparkling, beautiful baby.
"No. She’d just be meaner to me if I told her. Can I have a cookie now, Mommy? Can I watch Pokemon?”
Miranda’s attention span had allowed her to move on. Unlike me, who gave her a cookie, turned on Pokemon, returned to the kitchen, and began crying as memories of childhood meanness paraded in my head.
“Georgie, porgie, pudden and pie. You want to kiss this guy?” I was walking along the playground’s edge as Robert danced in front of me, just out of reach of my leg. I knew better than to respond. To respond invited more taunting. I just kept walking.
“Hey George, did you come from the jungle, do you swing from trees?” My name was full of teasing possibilities that both genders of my classmates loved to use.
“Mommy, mommy? Pokemon’s over now. What’s for dinner?” The angelic voice called me back across the vastness of time.
I kept walking. Though the terrain had been rough at times, it had brought me here to a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter.
“Honey, if someone keeps teasing you, let’s talk to the teacher about it.”
“Okay,” Miranda said. “But what’s for dinner?”
By Georgie Dennison
By Georgie Dennison
Labels: classmates, cookies, Georgie Dennison, mean girl, mommy, Pokemon, teacher, teasing
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Four
My daughter had a bruising day yesterday. From the moment she woke up, her emotions were overheated, misread, and dragged her behind them like a freight train.
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar Stumble This Post
Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.
I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.
Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.
And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.
So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:
“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.
When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.
I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.
To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.
Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”
Then just tears.
I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.
I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.
It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.
By Avvy Mar
Labels: daddy, four-years old, guilt, mommy, tantrums, tears
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