A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

I used to read a magazine designed to help mothers of large families with the typical problems they faced in a day: how to get a toddler into shoes that needed to be tied while a baby crawled over spilled syrup in clean clothes and ants marched in a beeline (ha!) for the last crumb of pancake on the floor while the older two children hunted through the 600 square foot apartment for their math books…again. And, of course, this very common scenario always included an 8 month pregnant belly. The solutions to these ordinary life problems varied from “get shoes without laces” (I did that so well in southern California, my oldest daughter didn’t learn to tie her own shoes until, I kid you not, 10th grade) to never eating pancakes. Having fewer babies? Never floated as a viable option.

My life with five kids has been busy and crazy and messy and disorganized and noisy like that. I’ve noticed that people who have two kids? Their lives are busy and crazy and messy and disorganized too…at least at times. No matter how many kids you have, they fill up your world, taking it over, hijacking its order, demanding your total absorption. There’s no recipe for child-rearing that creates both control and energy. Seems that depletion is part of the gig, no matter whether you follow a schedule or live life without a clock.

I’m suddenly aware that my life has shifted gears. My youngest is turning 13 in the fall (UPDATE: this was written in ’09–she’s now in college!). When I get up at 9:00 in the morning (!), I’m the first one awake and the kitchen is shockingly tidy. I can hear the wind, birds, and cars that drive by. (I’m pretty sure I forgot what those sounded like for about a decade.) The quiet is more distracting than the TV in the background, that’s how good I got at tuning it out so I could work and be in the same room with the kids.

And yes, teens and kids who come home from college generate plenty of sound and mess and energy. But not at 9:00 a.m. And I’m not in charge of it in the same ways any more. They really will hop up and empty the whole dishwasher and then load it just because they know it would help me. They really do know how to clean toilets and tie their own shoes (in time for college) and stir fry their own vegan dinners.

In that magazine I told you about, one young mother with five kids under 7 asked for advice about how to keep the house reasonably tidy. She just wanted to know: Can a mother of five little kids have that satisfying feeling of things being put away and the film of dust and grime wiped down and the laundry folded and in drawers and the children bathed and pajama’ed…all at once, ever, while they still live at home? The answer came from a mother of eight. Her response: “It gets better.” She spent an entire column describing how well her older children helped her run the family. No advice for the mom with all little kids under 7.

I was appalled. No help whatsoever. Only, I didn’t forget her words all these years later. Because each time I got overwhelmed with the chaos of my overly full life, my mind would wander back to the best advice a mother of eight could drum up, even with time and preparation to write an article. The truth: she HAD NO ADVICE. There is no answer. If you have kids under 7 or 8, you will not have a neat house, clean clothes, bathed babies, tied shoes, ant-free kitchens, enough food in the fridge, and easy-to-find homeschool materials all at once, most days. That’s how it is. That’s what normal and routine and, dare I say it, right living look like when you’re solely in charge of nurturing, caring for and cleaning the worlds of small children.

But over time, almost imperceptibly, things do change. Eventually, you won’t be pregnant any more. You really won’t. The older kids do remember their own dental appointments (eventually). Some of them will drive cars and help you with soccer practice runs for the younger kids. One of your children will clean your whole kitchen one night just to surprise you in the morning. Their bedrooms may never match the photos in Pottery Barn’s catalog, but they will be able to do a five minute sweep of the living room before company comes and make it look presentable again.

In the meantime, what I want to say this morning in my deathly quiet house is: enjoy (play with, admire, tickle, feed, cuddle, praise, forgive) your little ones as much as you can, while you can, in spite of the exhaustion. I did, honestly, know to do that. And I don’t regret it for a moment.

In fact, today? I miss it.

Image by Clyde Robinson (cc)

Oprah featured moms on her show a couple weeks ago. The two “experts” who “wrote the book” were bubbly, sharp, blond business-type women who wore chic outfits that had never seen spit up or spaghetti sauce stains. They rallied the audience into a frenzy of confessions about motherhood which variously decried the hardships of this “first order of creation” occupations.

“I hate the fluids of babies: pee, spit up, spilt milk, snot.”

“I cried the day I drove to the car dealership to buy a mini-van.”

“There were days I wanted to ‘send them back to the hell from whence they came’.”

On and on the tales of woe pored from the mouths of devoted parents. Video clips of small kids on bikes, disastrous laundry rooms, “stuffed to the gills” cars with seats and sippy cups floated by, making one wonder why anyone would sign up for the task of mothering, let alone sustain it for decades. Moms confessed things, too, like the one who said she didn’t want to wake the sleeping baby by stopping the car for a potty break, but she needed to pee so badly, she took a Pampers diaper, stuck it between her legs and let it “go” as she drove. Yeah, I thought that was way more information than I needed to know about her, too.

There was a surprising lack of joy
represented in the discussion of mothering.

Mostly being a mom was held up as the hardest job on earth, the most demanding, the most self-sacrificing, the most misunderstood and overlooked work on the planet. A kind of shared martyrdom, underdog status united everyone and Oprah, never having mothered anyone, had to declare that indeed, they were right. Mothering equalled sainthood (which we all know implies burning at the stake and smiling through it!).

With my kids in the room, listening to the pain of childbirth and engorged breasts, the relentlessness of little voices, the demandingness of the small child’s need for food, sleep and comfort, the annihilation of a woman’s identity and sense of self, I couldn’t take it any more.

After all, far from being the hardest job in the world,
mothering has been the happiest, most satisfying,
life-giving, joyful, rewarding, fulfilling and
(dare I admit it?) easiest job I’ve ever had.

Oh sure, the hours suck, there are anguishes deeper than the ocean, there are seasons (years!) of such utter exhaustion you can’t imagine ever being rested again… but all those discomforts are easily and unequivocally overturned by my children, themselves.

I punched pause on the DVR to set the record straight:

“Being your mother has been the single greatest joy and privilege of my life: not a burden, not a perennial unrelenting source of emotional and physical agony, not the ‘hardest job in the world’, not the knee-capping blow to my ‘adult individuality’ nor has it been the thankless, under-appreciated, most overlooked profession these mothers would have you believe. In fact, my sense of personhood, identity and self-knowledge have grown more through mothering than any business I’ve started, any degree I’ve earned, any relationship I’ve pursued. I thank YOU for being the best people to ever happen to me.”

Then I spewed in bullet style the privileges and unique joys that came with mothering them (all five of them, each one popping into my life like a fresh daisy, every two years for 10 years).

Cuddling:

Being your mom means I got to have someone to cuddle non-stop for 12 years while sleeping with at least one of you at a time, nursing you, carrying you, holding you, helping you in and out of car seats, backpacking you.

Sleeping together:

There is nothing more divine than a baby who falls asleep on your chest while you fall asleep and the whole world stops while mother and tiny child become fused as one content, quiet, shared being. No meditation, yoga, prayer circle, private retreat has ever come close to providing me with the depth of peace, pleasure and abiding hope that sleeping with a baby has given me.

Playing:

Board games and hopscotch, dress-ups, face paint, finger paint, walks in the woods, trips to the zoo, picking up bugs, rolling down hills, blowing bubbles, eating too many cookies, watching Arthur on PBS, rewatching Disney movies, cards, chasing a dog in the backyard, trampoline jumping, creek splashing, snowman building, skiing, middle of the night slumber parties, bike rides, soccer in the backyard, soccer on the official fields, ultimate frisbee… What adult gets to do any of this on his or her 9-5 job? Talk about luxury!

Conversation:

Oh it starts off good – why do bubbles float? How did I get red hair? Why doesn’t Santa Claus visit Moroccans, too? But boy does it keep getting better! I’ve learned about human rights, veganism, Role Playing Games, Shakespeare, Klingon, fashion, exercise, lacrosse, birds, fantasy novels, conspiracy theories, atheism, feminism, linguistics, alternative monetary systems for world peace (serious!) and more by talking to my kids.

Mothering is the job that means:

• taking the dog and kids for a walk in the woods is on task.
• teatimes and picnics are considered achievements worth trumpeting to friends and family
• even on bad days, someone tells you “Hey, I love you Mom” and then hugs you so tightly, you believe it.

There is no comparison to the jobs I’ve had in business and writing. Sure, affirmation and personal achievement are nice… but they are nothing like the bond that comes from the devotion of loving people who live every day looking for you to see them for who they are. I’ve found that the easiest thing in the world is to love my kids. All it takes is entering into their lives on their terms and giving all I’ve got. I get it all back and more.

Yes, there have been nights where I cried myself to sleep over a non-stop crying toddler or a teenager’s emotional pain. There are times when I feel out of control and invisible and fearful for my child’s future or welfare. But the rewards of mothering so far outweigh any of its challenges, I can’t relate to the repeated refrains of “how hard I have it” simply because I chose to have five kids. Instead, I just feel perennially lucky that my lifestyle has included such richness, tenderness and connection to immortality through my children.

I think it’s time we blew the whistle.
Mothering isn’t a job. It’s a privilege.