Today, I got an F in mommyhood.
For the 12 hours that Isobel was awake, the closest to outdoors we got was when she’d stand under the window, or that time we went downstairs to our building’s lobby to check the mail for a paycheque. It didn’t come, so there was no reasoning with me that we should take off our pajamas, wash breakfast off of her face, and venture outside.
That’d be strike one for her, since she is not one easily contained, or contented, within four walls. Outside is where the magic happens, where she can accost strangers into what they think will be a cute little conversation that inevitably ends up being six minutes of their life that they glare at me to reimburse them for.
Strike two in the cosmic parenting spectrum was that I allowed her to watch enough movies today to tide her over for at least a month. If you could add up the immediately fulfilled requests for Rugrats, Dora, Diego and Blue’s Clues, tabulating them into a ratio of when she was versus wasn’t watching a show, I think it’d be a landslide-ish 21:1.
Strike three was that I put celery into the one meal that I cooked. And today, Isobel has become a celeryist, apparently, so she all but refused to eat her dinner, ending with me carving notches of that vile green root out of ground turkey. Then I ate the rest.
You see, today I woke up with the cold that she woke up with on Sunday. Today, I wanted nothing more than a hot bath, too many acetaminophens, vodka, and a day-long nap. I also wanted a cleaned up filing system. Guess which option I chose?
It really does suck, being the sole caregiver, when a cold comes. Usually, I feel miserable, am snappier than usual and more prone to putting her to bed early – which is pretty okay, since she’s usually got it, too, since I get all the good stuff directly from her. I will push myself all day long, feel worse for it, and end my day feeling like I accomplished nothing relevant, was a bad mom and made myself sicker.
Today, I chose to do nothing relevant, to do only what I felt like, and to take it extremely easy. Every food item was of an unwrap/pour/wash variety – this is one of those times when all of the fruit she eats becomes a blessing.
Except for the meat sauce that I made to go with our brown rice rotini. She took six bites of that, asking for milk instead. Whatever, kid, I’m filing.
Breakfast was exactly like every other day – gluten-free corn flakes, with sliced banana and soy milk. When she asked for more, I poured while my brow creased in annoyance at being pulled away from the book I was reading.
When I took a nap after she finished her breakfast, I didn’t feel guilty since she was safe and entertained and I was exhausted and achy. So what if her brain turns to mush? – I was raised on TV and chose books instead, every single day. Still do. She ‘reads’ herself to sleep every night. TV is not the devil around here.
When it was the middle of the day and I had piles of old tax receipts strewn around me, hanging file folders labelled with years and little ivory ones named by type, I refused to give her my Sharpie. I don’t share well when I’m in the organizing zone. But instead, she got a pile of mini-post-it notes, which she spent the better half of an hour sticking all over everything from body parts to movie cases – ‘wabewing, Mama.’
When there were old cards and papers all over the floor and she was looking like she wanted a little nudge in the entertained direction, I let her go crazy, colouring on all of my ‘portant papers.’ I did dishes and exalted in a shiny kitchen while she became a wax-covered child that proudly scribbled on old bank statements.
Today, I spent exactly bedtime and however long it took to fork-feed six de-celeryed bites with my daughter, even though she was in the same room with me the entire time. I didn’t deny her attention when she asked for it, but just like I needed a day to myself, to recharge and rest, I think that maybe she needed one to just do whatever and veg out.
Do I feel bad for that? Not at all.
Tomorrow, it will be made up for in spades. I can’t see this one day of selfishness being a major topic in her future therapy sessions. And most of all, taking today for myself in a way that didn’t cost her or me anything means that I’ve grown up a little tiny bit.
Because I can guarantee you, if you looked through my archives last year, from when I had colds? I felt like a horrible mother for even considering taking a nap while she was asleep.
Tomorrow, I’ll aim for a high B or low A, again.
I’ve always believed in luck. I’ve nearly always believed in karma. I’m a steady and hard-fast believer in kismet. I’ve rarely believed in a god, or a grand puppet-master of the heavens. I’ve always thought that whatever you put out, you got back, regardless of the medium such output and receipt involved. I’ve always seen a balance between what happens and what will – everything, in some way, even if it takes an entire lifetime, gets an equalizer. Goodness begets more goodness – though it’s not particularly owed. Evil does the same.
As far back as I can remember believing in anything, that is.
Broke? A magical cheque I was never expecting appears in the mail because the government decided to reassess my taxes from 2005 and figured out they owed me more.
Have a social thing to deal with and first and foremost in my anxious mind is exactly how bad I might look to the people who will be surrounding me? That’s when a cold will swoop in, giving me an all-over deathly glow – and virtually perfect looking skin a week after I’ve said that it’s been forever since I’ve been sick last.
Don’t have much in the fridge, a child to feed and get into bed, and know the lineups at the grocery store will be long and hellacious to an already over-stimulated kid and an already out-of-patience mom? That’s the day that Isobel announces she wants eggs for dinner – something that’s always in the fridge – and she won’t accept any other alternative.
Have a baby and start showering less? A year down the road, you’ll only need to wash your hair once a week. Try it. It’s true.
Sometimes, I see it as: shit just works out for me.
Why do I think so; am I naive for looking at the way things work out as a method to the universe’s madness? How can all of the shit and lost babies and war and poverty ever be looked at as acceptable?
It’s all about locus of control, baby.
I can hear some of the readers who’ve been around for a while, the ones who’ve sensitively questioned how I made it out of my childhood intact (trust me, intact might be too generous a word), saying, “how can she think that, after…”
But that’s where my locus of control comes in.
If I didn’t think that things would have equalled out, I wouldn’t have something to strive for. If I didn’t make choices based on what I wanted to feel, going to bed that evening, I know I’d sleep a lot less and hurt a lot more. If I didn’t find a way to choose to see a gray lining, which isn’t black, but isn’t silver, then I think all bets would be off.
Which brings me to today, in the most general sense of the word. The present.
Today, I’m capable of not looking at the past as my definer. The past doesn’t label me. I’m neither child abuse survivor, nor rape victim. I’m not bipolar by name, or anorexic. I’m no more writer or mother than I am the name on my birth certificate. I’m not my mother or father, or cousin once removed, then added back, then removed again.
I am purely me. Sure, my experiences have all amalgamated into making me a persona culminated from one billion negative experiences and 1001 positive ones, but that isn’t the label I identify with.
This weekend, attending mental health camp, I spent a lot of time thinking about labels. I’m branded as both a mommy blogger and an anti-mommy-blogger: I fit the role since I blog and have a kid, yet I’m not dove-white and prolifically writing about journeys in parenting. I can add on four different, mostly-current diagnoses to my personality – most of them considered disorders – but it doesn’t make me more someone and less myself. Which means that nothing I choose to disallow to define me does.
The article in the paper caused three reactions: one was an obvious, humbling, appreciated vote of support; second was knowledge of my mental health issues by people who hadn’t been aware of them, which brought a neighbour into my visual scope, offering help should I ever need it (which I think was his way of tiptoeingly saying, ‘hey man, if you’re a little crazy, and you need something, I’m in suite ___,’ but it was still nice); thirdly was a comment that another parent made when I wasn’t around.
This parent, a stay-at-home dad to a child Isobel’s age, brings his daughter to the same playgroup that we often frequent. I know little about him or his family, and until he presumably read the article, neither did he, mine. On Friday, Isobel went with her daycare friends to this playgroup, wherein one of my best friends was witness to his comment that Isobel is fragile. Like her mother.
My friend was shocked and nearly immediately suspected that his opinion stemmed from the article, and not his observance of Isobel. She’s anything but fragile. My girl has pushed bullies twice her size on their asses; my girl has taken header after header off of slides; she’s watched her father storm out of doors and her mother taken away in an ambulance, unresponsive.
My girl is made of shit-kicking boots and iron-strong bones. She may bruise easily, but neither her psyche, ego, nor personality does.
Now, perception of me as fragile is a tough thing to quantify. I don’t see myself as particularly strong, yet previous comments on my life and stability during certain times of it argue otherwise. I think I’m prone to wilting under stress, of shutting down feelings when they become overwhelming, of looking for the bad as a means to ascribe to a negative self-image. Those things, my ego, everything about me except my confidence in my intelligence, are as thin as gossamer.
But that doesn’t qualify buddy to call Isobel fragile.
(Of course, for all I know, he was commenting on her thin, small frame, that she literally looks breakable. Again, though, it’s not true. She’s all muscle and flexible joints, and nothing on her has been marred in all of her life excepting the scars on her knees from the days when she was a clumsy tomboy. Before the mutherfucking princess emerged.)
At first, I was a little outraged. Then I let it roll around in my head for the day and realized that if he was truly making a character judgement of Isobel based on an article he read about me, he was the one with issues. He wasn’t capable of looking past a few paragraphs based on a 30 minute phone interview, and seeing what I put out in the two hours of every day he’s seen me in the playgroup. Or especially, of seeing her as her own person, external to anything he might think he knows about me.
I say, nay. I think, I’m not going to let that feed into my own self-stigma. I won’t let that ugly the amazing love and support, physical and emotional closeness I’m gifted with from the people surrounding me (both on- and off-line). I’m bigger than that opinion. And she sure as hell is, too.
Because (and here’s where all of the first paragraph matters) truly, no one can make us anything less (or more) than we choose to be.
No one person, or entity, or government body, even, can slap a title on us and make us believe we are indebted to them for the namesake. Sure, we might be able to point a finger at someone’s description of us, but if we choose to not subscribe to it, it doesn’t really matter what they say, does it?
It might have taken me almost all of my 28 years to start living with the realization that I’m lucky to have a message to pass onto Isobel that I’m 100% confident in. We, as individuals, are only whoever we choose to be; whoever we choose to be is what we create from every step we take; every step we take might start from a place of mental health, but land on the doorstep of charity, love or encouragement.
I’m lucky, because I’m capable of seeing past all of the labels, even if I still do use them. Because I’m one of the people that got a multiple-named diagnosis from a psychiatrist and thought, “finally. Now I can move on to a better version of me.” I’ve known so many others who’ve heard ADHD, bipolar type 2, eating disorder and it becomes a relative death sentence.
I get to know that there’s more to life than fitting within a box of terminology. Just because I’m moody, doesn’t mean I should be, nor is it an excuse to be. Just because I used to drink every day, doesn’t mean I can call myself an alcoholic and continue to do act as if. Just because I really loved how cocaine slowed my brain down, doesn’t give me a right to snort lines and buy tissue in bulk to stem the nose bleeds.
I have one of the most important jobs in the world: raising an independant, confident, happy, social, smart, healthy, beautiful daughter. The first step to doing that? Is to teach her that none of those adjectives is all she is, that there’s so much about her, language hasn’t even been invented to describe it yet.
The second is to give her a blank page, to create her own dictionary.
