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.
I was attending C’s 9 month well check recently when the doctor asked me how the family was doing, throwing in the stock “4 boys… I don’t know how you do it” remark.
“I don’t know either,” I laughed, thinking longingly about my iced coffee waiting in the car.
“Do you think you’ll keep going? Or are you done?”
This question should not be vexing to my mental state. It comes up constantly, particularly when you seem to be on a steady once-every-other-year cadence of child production. For me, it’s often “will you keep going till you get a girl?” which irritates me for other reasons. But the fundamental curiosity — when are you going to stop expanding your family? — creates a quiet storm inside my head that rumbles around intermittently for the next few days that follow.
On the one hand, I answer “yes, we’re done.”
We have been in a state of endless accrual of stuff for the past 7 years. We have all the standard seasonal supplies (bikes, clothes, snow gear) to fit a boy at any stage of development up to 7 years old. We have diaper pads, baby baths, bouncers, swings, exersaucers, walkers, bottles, bibs, drying racks, sippies, plasticware, baby gates, drawer locks. With the exception of truly superfluous items or massive toy purges, we have effectively been unable to offload anything since J was born. We have a small boat of an SUV to accommodate our family size and the 4 x car seats, we have 2 boys sharing a room already, and we have a daycare bill that will equate to a significant raise in our monthly income when we get to stop paying it.
We are running a constant time deficit, and while we are more than comfortable letting standards slide with respect to things one might wish but not mandate (walk through the kitchen without coating one’s socks with a thin layer of Wheaties crumbs, for instance), we are already – with just one child in extracurricular activities – finding ourselves dividing children and tasks just to get things done.
For 7 years, we have not had a meal without cutting several people’s food into appropriately sized chunks such that they are not life-threatening choking hazards. We have not sat on our backyard patio without being spatially aware of where the youngest was and begging him to stop wandering into the street in search of the neighborhood playground. We have not left the house without a diaper bag or water bottles or snack packs or sunscreen or spare clothes. The mental management has left me so deeply resource challenged that I find myself making conscious determinations about things like “I need to be okay with a less-than-stellar performance review at work or I am going to burn out,” or “I will have to coast on the momentum of my relationships until I have time to be a good friend again,” or “I can only have fun once per week.”
And here’s the real talk: Dave and I had always talked about “3 with the option of 4,” and now we have 4 healthy, beautiful, boisterous boys. The notion of not pushing one’s luck comes to mind when considering not only another baby, but another pregnancy & VBAC delivery (at least, attempted by way of always delivering before someone would schedule you for an actual C-section) for me. And now, of course, of an age to be considered a geriatric mother!
I’m ready to move onto the next life stage. I’m ready to clear some shelf space, and worry less about a child accidentally putting himself in mortal peril by virtue of trying to eat a Lego, and for Pete’s sake put these 4 able bodied boys to work on some serious yard and home chores. I am busy. I am tired. But I am also so deeply, deeply happy.
So, yes, I say, “we’re done.” But I have yet to have that be a complete sentence. Rather, I am always compelled to offer additional context: “…but it’s still hard to say it out loud.”
There are a few reasons I believe I struggle with knowing I’m done.
The first is, simply, when you’ve created 4 wonderful children, with traits you recognize in yourself or your spouse but also some that are absolutely foreign, and you see them develop and change and become these little people that you are so privileged to know, it’s like you get the first read of the most extensive, exciting, page-turning novel and witness a story unfolding for the first time. How could you not want more of these people? It’s a slippery slope, I know, but to imagine not knowing C because we hadn’t gone for “the option of 4” is now a really sad contemplation. This train of thought falls apart quickly given the cost of pregnancy and birth to the mother (fun fact! The #1 cause of death for women ages 15 – 19 globally is childbirth!), but it still sparks a seed of greed in my brain… more of these lovely little monsters? Yes, please.
Then there’s the notion of “lasts” that would haunt me if I let them. I have become strangely emotional over bizarre “last first” milestones with C. Not just the obvious ones: the last first time he rolled over, or slept straight through the night, or moved from the bassinet into his own nursery… No, I’ve become highly attuned to the lesser known last firsts: the last first gummy smile before he cut a tooth, the last first stinky diaper after I added purees to his formerly exclusive breast milk diet, and the last first time he sat in the actual tub for his bath – and not only didn’t slip at all, but splashed so aggressively that his bath-mate, A, whined for maternal intervention.
Ultimately, and honestly, the root issue may be a result of the human’s frontal lobes being significantly newer than the limbic system. Maybe I am logically on board with being done for all the reasons above, but my animal instincts object & tell me to continue procreating. For better or worse, I do not live one of these unexamined lives that Socrates alluded to, so I am thrust into a state of contemplation when I detect this type of internal conflict.
Two comments that massively comfort me during those mental isolated thunderstorms:
- Dave said sincerely when I agonized about this one time: “you’ve physically and mentally given a lot of yourself to this for the past many years. It’s enough. It’s okay to turn the page and start the next chapter.”
- My mom told me, after I disclosed our considerations around – ahem – most effectively managing our family plan, and shared that I was concerned about doing anything “permanent” while I was still emotional about things: “then don’t do permanent. Take the temporary fix and come back to cross that bridge later.”
I guess it all comes down to this: motherhood is a paradox – especially in the weeds of the stage with young children. You are constantly busy, but simultaneously bored. You are lonely, but wish everyone would stop touching you so you could just have a moment to yourself. You are intensely terrified that you will make a mistake, but also feel more functional and capable and strong than you ever have in your life. I remember vividly the first day that I brought J home and watched him napping in his bassinet, with some version of clinical insomnia about to set in for me. I thought “what have I done?” and “this is so amazing; we should have done this sooner” in the very same breath.
It makes sense then, I suppose, that deciding that you are done can be equally paradoxical.
All this to say, we are done. But it is still hard to say it out loud.
Growing up in the shadow of the “Motor City,” there’s a lot of talk about cars. People come from multi-generational “[Ford/GM/Chrysler] Families,” and often have allegiances that run deep enough that you park your import vehicle brands in the street (and ideally out of sight) when Grandpa is coming over. We even frame our corporate meeting “ice breakers” in terms of cars: your first car, your favorite car, your dream car.
Recently, in a large group setting, the question was: if you were a car, what kind of car would you be? Most people answered with iconic vehicles, known for being fast, or rugged, or cool.
My answer to the group: a 2012 Ford Escape.
My rationale:
- Ford is a deeply American brand, with its World HQ based in Dearborn, MI. I am a deeply American girl, born, raised, and established soundly in Michigan towns that no one outside of the state would know the names of.
- The Escape is a well-rounded, functional SUV, small enough to zip around parking lots but large enough to carry a load; it’s marketed predominantly to women. I am feminine in that I am… you know, a female, but otherwise consider myself also very well-rounded and highly-functional in terms of physical stature and capability.
- I specifically chose the 2012 model year because, while I very much like the look of the 2012 Escape, it is a far cry from current anymore. Similarly, I am – forever, and without fail – a far cry from current. I average 5 years behind any trend, as evinced by my belated entry into podcasts, excited usage of emojis long after they were old news, and delayed reaction to any fashion swings such that by the time I notice a trend, it is assuredly on its way out.
I’m curious to know: what kind of car would you be?
