So I was noticing that Maggie was @ing some people on Twitter. And I noticed some had 'mom' in their name.
And I was thinking about how I don't identify myself as a mom. It seems weird to me that I am a mom. I've been a mom for awhile now and every once in a while I think "I am a Mom. Me? A mom?"
The funny thing is that I love kids. I am crazy about kids. I grew up taking care of lots of kids in my family and I adored them. I could juggle a passel of kids single-handedly, I was a very adept caretaker of children in my youth.
But this somehow did not translate into my being able to be a mom and own it.
I had PPD but that's just because I have such a problem with D. The kid itself was never an aspect in the PPD.
I did struggle with whether to have a kid. I thought it would interfere with my novel-reading. And it did, big time. (I'm kidding here. There were many other things that gave me pause. It's just that I am this shallow.)
After I had a kid, I developed several seemingly contradictory views. One is that having kids is not the big hairy deal people make it out to be. You manage. I wish I'd known about the whole 'managing' thing earlier, I swear I would have gotten pregnant out of wedlock and had more.
I could have brought more humans into the world and been a mediocre parent to more creatures! But it would have been fun for me. And for them--my kid has fun, most of the time. She's having fun now. That's all I can tell you. God knows how it will all turn out but her life is fun, most of the time.
I wanted lots but I got secondary infertility and had miscarriages and such.
At the same time, I always think of myself as a highly incompetent, unknowledgable mother. I always think the other mothers know what they are doing but I have no idea. So I think this is why I don't identify myself as a mom. Because it somehow feels like you have to earn that and somehow I feel like only partially a mom.
I think I tend to do this with everything, actually. I never think I'm competent at my job or good at the things I do. I imagine some paragon of whatever role I'm trying to fill. The paragon eyes my inept bumblings with disgust and annoyance.
I even dreamed about the Paragon a few times. He wore a red cloak in one dream. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. (I thought this was simply a mark of his opposition to me.)
But then sometimes I think: Well, I do the mom thing OK. The real place I fall down is that I'm crazy. There isn't so much I can do about that. My kid knows it too. I was trying to give her some space to talk about it and just explaining that I freak out, it's kind of my way, it doesn't mean anything. Then I'm better. It has nothing to do with her. It's just how I've been, for as long as I can remember.
But of course, now she's all about how I freak out and likes to name this as one of my mom-deficiencies.
For a while, she was annoyed that I didn't dress better, wear lipstick and high heeled shoes. I'm not sure where that came from.
Sometimes I see her and realize I don't let her watch any TV on school days and I'm giving her organic strawberries for her after school snack and she's listening to a record of Peter and the Wolf and I think 'well, OK, isn't that how it's supposed to be? I'm doing the good mom thing!" But then I remember how there's dried rice on the rug that's been there for several weeks and about 20 other failings on my part.
Anyway, the records are my one mom creative mom breakthrough. She's got to hear stories ALL THE TIME. But I run out of stories. I rack my brain. Every once in a while, I accidentally tell her about something completely inappropriate, like the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Because I'd just run out of stories. I've done every Greek myth, every Bible story, every movie, even episodes of Star Trek. Talking about Montezuma and Cortez immediately prompted questions about what a conquest was and DID THEY KILL THE CHILDREN?
Oops.
So I have one mom tip. I have no other mom tips. My kid's out of control, probably. I don't know. She isn't super child. She's not reading Beowulf in kindergarten. She doesn't have gigantic snarls in her hair anymore--but that's just because I cut off most of her hair.
My one mom tip is: http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/ for the car. Hours of child-tainment.
And records. There are many kids' records floating around thrift stores. All the libraries in America got rid of their kids' records collection. SO DEPRESSING. But some of them are out there. I want to weep about the ones in landfills. No one copied them. No one made MP3s out of them. Hundreds of Caldecott winner books put into electronic form to entertain my child for at least the next 8 years.
In the Wall Street Journal there was a story about adult books that kids might like and now I'm combing the internet for these on tape. Here's the list:
--Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
--Kipling, Kim
--Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
--Yann Martel, Life of Pi
--Charles Portis, True Grit
--Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
--David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
--Tony Earley, Jim The Boy
--Rose Tremain, The Way I found Her
--Matthew Kneale, When We Were Romans
The author of the piece points out that one issue for writers, is that when a book features a young protagonist the book gets marked as youth fiction forever. This apparently happened to 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'
But I can't imagine anything better than writing books for kids. Why would writing books for adults be a better thing? Who is a more appreciative audience? Whose life might be impacted to a great degree?
Those books above are too old for her now, I think. I'm just thinking ahead to the pre-teen years and how to get out of storytelling in the car. One book she loved was Black Beauty. Except now she's going around speaking in a fake English accent like the narrator of Black Beauty. She's either going to become Meryl Streep or one of those weird people who quotes all the lines from 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail.'
Recent Comments