We are closing in on my firstborn’s 7th birthday. All of the boys’ birthdays are an opportunity to step back and reflect with fascination and pride on the tremendous growth a child accomplishes in 12 months. But there’s something about the first. You watch your firstborn develop and change and you have never been here before. You have precedents from every stage before — set by that firstborn — but every tomorrow is brand new for both of you.
I have been a mom for many years now, but I have never been a mom to a 7 year old.
Similar to last year, a few anecdotes that describe what J is like in this, his last month of being 6 years old.
1. Great intentions. I asked J to hang up his towel after his bath this evening. I walked through my bathroom shortly thereafter and saw this (below). While the execution is sometimes lacking, this is a boy who is happy to help, eager to please, and exceptionally rational (particularly when it comes to cause-and-effect of, say, chore-and-privilege). He is still — as he’s always been — easy; easy-tempered, easy-going, and easy-to-reason-with.
2. “Easy” should not be confused with “low-energy.” I can’t embed a video file, but see below for a series of screenshots our Nest doorbell camera captured from a ~1.2 second moment in time. This is J just, you know, exiting the house. As he bursts out of the door somehow already 18 inches off the ground, the accompanying audio is of him channeling a martial-arts-style yell. He then casually trots across the lawn in the direction of the neighbors’ house. The nuttiest part is that his mind somehow has even more boundless energy, constantly whirring such that you can almost hear him processing new information contextually against things he’s learned before. He does not accept perfunctory explanations, will challenge inconsistencies in your logic, and then go on to beat you handily in a footrace.
3. On the cusp of something new. He is still so sweet, asking me to sign “I love you” as his bus pulls away — insisting I continue until they drive completely out of sight. He plays peek-a-boo with C, holds A’s hand on walks, and laughs so genuinely at O’s antics such that it feels less like a connection borne of brotherly convenience and more a true friendship. He doesn’t care if he leaves the house with comically obvious bedhead. He cries with the most heartfelt histrionics when he falls off his bike and skins his knee. He likes to imagine he’s the Flash, or Sonic the Hedgehog, or a dragon.
But he has 2 of his permanent teeth now. He was subtly trying to brag to a little girl at the playground recently that he could skip bars on the monkey bars “without even trying.” He starts statements with “yo” (as in, “yo, that ice cream is so good”) since he started watching videos on YouTube Kids of other people playing Minecraft. His legs look so long to me as he pauses getting dressed in the morning to show me how cool his new “boxers” are. He is literate!
He is growing up. I’m not sure when the switch will flip (per above: firstborn), but it can’t be long before the little boy innocence fades compared to the traits that I’ll come to associate with his identity as a bona fide young man.
Frankly, maybe we’re already there. If that’s the case, and if this is the early preview of the adult he will grow into… I feel pretty good about that.
*****
^I began drafting this post this afternoon. During the evening, the boys were in charge of cleaning their room, and J took O’s bath towel downstairs to “hang it up to dry.” Clearly I need to be more specific about what constitutes a satisfactory place to hang a towel…
C is 10.5 months old now, and I am still nursing. To be clear, I have been under-producing compared to his consumption since I returned to work, so by now we are supplementing 50% of his daily feeds with formula. But in case you haven’t already heard, there is a massive formula shortage nationwide, with 1 in 5 states tracking at 90% out-of-stock. So all these moms survived the gauntlet of having a “pandemic baby” with various waves of danger during pregnancy and Baby’s infancy, only to now face the anxiety of, you know, questioning whether Baby can physically be fed after supply chain and regulatory failings. If you’ve never heard the phrase “tough as a mother…” well, now you know.
Suffice it to say, though I considered officially weaning off nursing almost 6 weeks ago, I determined I would not further contribute to the shortage when I can still produce milk.
This very small act of solidarity with my fellow moms got me thinking about the many small but meaningful ways moms look out for each other. Here are some memorable instances in my own experience. Add to the list if you have other examples!
- A porch-dropped meal (or — real talk — baggie of assorted adult beverages and sheet face masks) when you tell your girl friends that you’re solo parenting while your spouse travels, or have a nasty illness making its way through your kids’ immune systems, or are just having a week.
- All of the priceless Mother’s Day gifts that were indeed made by your own child, but clearly crafted under the supervision and prompting of another woman in your life; someone who took her time and resources to help facilitate a magical moment for you.
- The women who smile kindly and seemingly without judgment as your sons go barreling past them at dangerous speeds, channeling their inner hedgehogs after recently viewing the Sonic movie (may or may not have happened in the last 24 hours).
- The many times that — even while “off duty” — moms are on alert for any kid’s safety. I was on a run this week and saw a woman across the street mowing the grass. A ball from a neighborhood soccer game rolled out of bounds into the street, its player close behind, as a delivery truck approached. Though the driver was alert and stopped well in advance, I saw the way she — like I — tensed up, turned her torso in the direction of the street, and visibly braced to jump into line of sight for the driver if he hadn’t started braking immediately.
- Among the most undervalued acts of solidarity: the women who walk out of the public restrooms with their hands still damp after washing, having chosen not to use the air dryer that clearly terrifies small children and otherwise results in my sons shouting in panic, cupping their hands over their ears as though someone just triggered an exceptionally localized sonic boom.
lemonade stands are
classic, but hustlers sell snacks
to an empty beach.
Is there a verb tense that both expresses something that was and also will continue to be?
This week has been/will continue to be tough.
We spent the long weekend up north and I focused on collecting happy images to hang onto starting next week. Here’s what I have so far:
- Lavender ice cream.
- The excitement of discovering a baby snapping turtle out in the yard.
- A sweet baby napping in his stroller, wind blowing his hair, while his brothers animatedly play Godzilla and King Ghidorah on the playground.
- Visiting our 93-year-old neighbors and having them dote on C.
- O asking if someone wants to “sit and watch the water” with him. Dave obliging.
- Telling knock knock jokes the entire walk home from dinner. Laughing harder as they devolve into nonsense: “knock knock.” “who’s there?” “rotten banana!” “rotten banana who?” “rotten banana teleporting into your stomach so you ate a rotten banana!!”
- An afternoon spent with friends at the beach, reconnecting with kids who we’ve known since they were in the Infant room with J at daycare almost 7 years ago.
- The older 3 boys’ first night together in their new bunks… deemed a success going down to sleep until Dave and I realized A had sneaked downstairs, taken a bag of pretzels and three bowls back up, and poured snacks for J and O while J read them Elephant and Piggie by the light of their reading lamp.
- The cleansing nature of frigid lake water.
- Another night with all of my children sleeping safely in their beds.
I am struggling.
This week I found myself crying in the car during my commute, and crying in my breaks in the Mother’s Room, and crying holding Dave’s hand in the dark before we fell asleep.
I have said hello with a smile to the teachers at daycare, and made small talk with my coworkers about weekend plans, and I let everyone merge at their convenience in traffic. I suspect that, like me, most people are just going through the motions right now, so I’m trying to be extra gentle.
But I am struggling.
After the Uvalde shooting, our superintendent sent a reminder about the many systems and procedures put in place at our schools. Our daycare ran an emergency lockdown drill the following day utilizing the advanced security tech they invested in 2 years ago. They mean to reassure us that they are doing everything in their power to protect our kids. I can’t finish reading the emails knowing the “reassuring” measures put in place in Uvalde failed.
My 6 year old’s kindergarten teacher can’t be more than 30. She tracks my son’s “whole body listening” with a “smile chart” that he is proud to show us at the end of every school day. She has poker straight blonde hair and a deceptively commanding presence. She has children of her own; her eldest son is in 1st grade. I find myself praying she would be willing to shield my son to save his life. And then I feel sick for having the thought.
My 4 year old panics under pressure. In the event that there is imminent danger and he is asked to quickly follow instructions, I have little faith he could do it. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that this – this trait that usually manifests as frustration when I ask him to hurry and finish his toast in the morning and he looks up at me and stops chewing entirely – could be a life-threatening flaw.
My 2 year old spent Thursday practicing both how to use the potty and how to behave in the event an active shooter is in the building. This sentence does not – cannot – make sense.
My 10 month old isn’t quite crawling yet and I am painfully aware that there are three windows into his classroom.
I have a moment of gratitude that some psychological coping mechanism disallows me from completing these trains of thought.
It’s not that this is about me, or my children, or the school environment exclusively, or the fact that the odds are in any one individual’s favor such that this nightmare will never become their reality. But for me, this latest act of incomprehensible violence creates an overwhelming mix of emotions, none of which feel actionable.
I feel survivor’s guilt, because my children are effectively no different than the children who died, but my children are still living and there’s no particular reason why it was Uvalde and not my own community this time. I feel dread, because other school shootings are often followed by a rash of similar threats and school shut-downs. I feel hot, ugly rage, at anyone and everyone who is willing to reject the notion of demanding improved gun control measures because of politics and grossly warped rationalizations that cause the country to stalemate on any material change while the rest of the world looks on sadly with so many of their proven policies that prevent exactly these tragedies. And I feel hopelessness, because the atrocity of the Uvalde shooting is not even a new – or record – low; we learned years ago that nowhere is safe and no part of our population is sacred and we will do nothing to address the core cause and therefore it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
I spoke with some colleagues at work who have kids that are in middle and high school. We talked about strategies for managing the message appropriately based on different age ranges. I listened closely to how they communicated with their kids. One woman’s 7th grade daughter has been seeing a therapist since the nearby Oxford High School shooting in 2021 to help her cope, and she wrung the sleeves of her sweater anxiously when she lamented to us that she can’t stop her daughter seeing the faces of the slain children on the internet and falling into a dark place again. One woman’s 9th grade son asked her, frustrated, “how do we fix this?” Not only did she not have an answer for him, but none of us in the room did, either.
This conversation was the first time that I really internalized the fact that there is no way out of this reality for my children, with 18 years ahead of us yet in the K-12 system. Right now they conduct their ALICE drills and think little more of it than they do tornado or fire drills. But one day they will learn what the trained responses are meant to protect them from. I would wear the burden of that knowledge a thousand times over if it meant they could stay ignorant forever, but they can’t, and they won’t. Just like my colleagues, I will have those conversations with my own children, and I will choose my words carefully in the hopes that my sons heed the importance of the preventative measures, but retain a sense of safety and trust at their school. I will hope upon all hopes that the worst they experience is the sad resignation of normalcy that this is a risk adults have decided they must live with but that it never reaches them.
I don’t want to give up on the possibility of change. I see the calls to action and I am so thankful for activists that carry the torch while people like me stop reading the news and cry in our closets. And I do make phone calls and write emails and donate and sign petitions and I vote. But I’ve done this all before, and so it feels like another way I am just going through the motions.
Because I think the hardest part about this – the reason why I am struggling the most – is that I have no reason to believe this will stop. It may not be my own children, but it will be someone’s children.
When I put this into writing, I desperately want to be wrong.
I am struggling.
***
I wrote this as a way to process things. I wasn’t certain I would post it given how vulnerable it makes me feel. I decided to share in order to document this heartbreaking moment of my parenting journey just as I often document the joyful moments. It will feel clunky and challenging for me to share happier moments ahead, but it would feel too callous and disingenuous to not confront the pain at all.
One of my favorite writers wrote a really moving piece on the subject here. I suggest the full read if you are emotionally up to it, particularly because it does include a few resources around ways to turn anguish into action.
We are currently potty training A, making this our 3rd go at this developmental milestone in 4 years. We aim for about 3 years old as that seems to be most reasonable for our boys understanding some bodily cause-and-effect, as well as being able to handle the mechanics of an elastic waistband. (Aside: whoever decided to put buttons on pants for sizes 2T – 3T: shame on you.)
We generally subscribe to the crash course pants-less few days to kick things off, sending a preemptive apologetic text to our neighbors for the inevitable nudity they will witness. We do a sticker chart and mini positive inducements (read: sweets) along the way, and “mega prizes” to mark milestones like 10 successful trips to the potty. It’s not perfect and we send a lot of changes of clothes to daycare during the weeks that follow, but I feel as though we’ve been generally successful in our pursuits.
That said, we picked up one invaluable parenting hack from our daycare itself, and I didn’t even realize what a gem it was until I was giving my 3-year-old nephew pointers when he was just potty trained a couple of months ago as well. Let’s call it “Pythagorean Potty Lean.”
Remember Pythagorean theorem: a^2 + b^2 = c^2? Picture the toddler boy as c^2.
Standing on a step stool facing the toilet, a toddler boy can lean forward and brace himself on the back of the raised toilet seat such that his body creates that hypotenuse length of a triangle. When he… ahem, goes, it “goes right in!” (in the words of my nephew).
There you have it. Not necessarily the most profound parenting hack, but one that will matter very much in my next few months nevertheless.
new york “never sleeps.”
but parents on vacation?
they sure as heck do.
THE “MOM HAS EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL” EDITION
Dave was traveling for business recently, so I was single-momming and – proudly – made it to all morning bus stop drops with 4 x children dressed, changed, fed, limbs attached, and on time. On the other hand, the following statements were also made during the course of the week:
*****
O, happily skipping away from the bathroom in the final minute before we need to leave for school: the toilet is clogged, Mom! So you need to tell Dad!
4 years old
*****
O, solemnly from the backseat of the car, upon hearing the total of our McDonald’s order: wow. That’s a big number.
*****
Me: *increasingly testy, raising my voice to obtain answers to repeated questions as the boys talk over each other*
J, sincerely: Mom, do you need more sleep?
6 years old
***”*
Like I said. Totally under control.
