This is so typical of me. Start something with gusto, enthusiasm, motivation and fortitude…and boom!
The sound of silence.
They say the first step is the hardest…I disagree. I say, it’s the second step. The first step of anything great is difficult to achieve – not that this blog is great, it’s just my blog, a glorified version of my diaries growing up. With better handwriting! Oh, my penmanship was awful.
And I digress…
We set the standard of performance of our new plan, be it a diet, a book, a lifestyle change, anything, with The First Step. It can be glorious in its brave declaration, its acute planning, even its grand execution. It’s the second step that gets me. The second time around that you decide, again, without letting all those usual feelings that stop you from starting in the first place – fear, anxiety, insecurity, justification that where you are or what you are currently doing is just fine – get in the way. It proposes the idea of this new change becoming a habit, not just the beginning of change. Aren’t beginnings so romantic, like a new lover, the fresh, leathery new-car smell, new shoes?!! I get particularly excited about that one. (FYI: in all my bitching and moaning about life, I’ll have you know, Cinderella is proof: shoes can change your life 😀 Case in point: my gold sparklies.)
Hello, my name is distraction, haven’t we met? Oy.
Can you see how tough it is for me even to get through this second blog post??? It means I’ll have to do it again…and again…and perhaps even again! Think of all the thoughts that will be spewing out, the emotions that I no longer get to hang on to and cry over, the past that won’t necessarily belong just to me anymore.
Part of my struggle with getting to this second step is figuring out what I want to write about. I have had so many trigger words, thoughts, phrases, that I can’t pick just one. So I figure I’ll just have to get to them…making this a habit! Ha! How clever…
The topic for this post came to me today in a beautiful, honest and unexpectedly simple moment. I was in CVS buying sunscreen, nail polish and frisbees, thinking about how not to be too overbearing on my kids in the store. They were wild and having fun, as usual, but I always have this nagging feeling that I have to teach them something at every moment. I feel the onus is on me to teach them calm behavior in a public place, how to stay with me (I have this weird paranoia of losing them…anywhere), that the public arena is not like our house. Or something…whatever it is, I always seem to be harping on them about something! Anyway, a small wave of peace came over me when I realized that I just had to let them roll on the floor when I told them to calm down, when my son got down on the ground and said, “Look, Mama, I am calming down.” Gotta give him credit for that one 🙂 As we approached the checkout stand, the checker – an older, Asian gentleman who appeared to take every moment of his day as seriously as he cherished it – asked me this: “So, is being a Mother a privilege or a burden?” It was as if he were interviewing me on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” I chuckled a bit, as I nervously checked every 0.4 seconds to make sure they hadn’t run out the door or been nabbed by a stranger (they love to play the game where they run at the automatic sliding doors), and said, “Well, A, you read my mind. And B, a little bit of both.”
It’s so true, it’s almost cliche. I never fantasized about being a mother when I was a child, at least not enough to embed the dream in my head. I played with PJ Sparkles and had a few doll-like friends, but I don’t remember dreaming of the names of my children. Okay, well that’s not entirely true. I did start to want to name a daughter Madison when I was in junior high, but that may have been because it was the #7 most popular girl’s name in 1999. It sounded sweet, yet stable. Everything I was not. But that’s another post! The point is, I didn’t design my wedding dress, name my first five children or know anything about what being a mother really meant. Part of that I must attribute, respectfully, to the fact that my own mother, was not around…that much. She became a lawyer and moved up the ranks of a prestigious city law firm for the first 13 years of my life. She went to work when I was 4 months and quit to spend more time with me when I was 13. Formative years, Schmormative years. Oddly enough, though, both my 8th grade and Senior Year yearbook predictions (from different schools, mind you) said “in 20?? you will be: married to the owner of [insert culturally and personally appropriate business here] and have three children.” At 20, I married my high school boyfriend, whose parents own a major California business, and we have three kids.
However, when I became a mother, I was anything but prepared. My first was a surprise, we had a beautiful shotgun wedding, and moved in to our first apartment.
Three years later, twins.
I was (and am) so overwhelmed by their very existence that they are a burden that I am privileged to carry. I worry every day that I will be sending them down paths of self-destruction, self-doubt, anxiety, self-loathing even. When they tell me I make them feel sad or bad or mad (I don’t know, go ask your Dad…sorry, Dr. Seuss joke) I worry that it will penetrate their hearts so deeply and irreversibly that anything I do after that is obsolete. I have heard a single person say, ” I can hardly get myself up, fed and dressed in the morning…how do you do it with three??” And the truth is, I don’t. It’s either them or me. And believe me, there are days I skip showers or they skip brushing their teeth in the morning. The burden is knowing that I am their Mother. I am the foundation on which everything in their lives is based. I will be the reason they love or hate someone or something. I will provide years worth of thinking and overthinking what they could have done better if only I had been better. Then again, maybe that’s the burden I carry from my own mother that I don’t necessariliy have to put on them.
I sing a song to my children at night (when I am not too tapped out to skip songs altogether, which I have been known to do…prayers, too. Yikes!) that says, “I believe that God above/created you for me to love/He picked you out from all the rest/because He knew dear/I’d love you the best.” Therein lies the privilege. God picked us for each other. I don’t know why, but I know that if my only job on this Earth is to love those children, then I will be proud of that. Well, I will want to be proud of only that. I want to be so much more to them than I think I am being. I want to foster creativity and joy in them in ways that will enrich their lives, strengthen their souls and inspire them to serve God. So the question is, am I serving God? Right now, I feel as though I feed, I clothe, I hug, I kiss, I read, I pray, I bathe, I discipline, I sing, I transport…and that says nothing of the quality of any of that work. It’s not a question of whether or not they’ll need therapy, but how much it will cost me! That is my job, but should I be doing it with more light, more joy, more enthusiasm? How much is expected of me? Am I meeting God’s expectations? Will I meet my childrens’ retroactive expectations when they have their own kids and realize what I should or should not have done?
The last thing I said to the checker before I left was this, “What is that line from Spiderman? With great power comes great responsibility. Well, in the case of being a mother, I think it’s the other way around: with great responsibility comes little to no power.” Meaning God has all this planned out for us, and has placed the burden on my husband and me to grow these tiny humans. But I know they are on loan, I know they are His, really. And that’s scary and comforting. Scary because they are on His time. Comforting because I can lift them up to Him and pray that no matter what I do, that it does not affect them out of accordance with His plan.
I’ll end with a small story about my son. When he was about 4, he woke up in the morning and said, “Mama! I have to tell you about my dream! I dreamed that my chest opened up, my heart flew up to heaven and gave God and Jesus a BIG hug and kiss, because it loves them so much. And then it came back down and got right back in my chest.” If my children’s hearts can surrender to God so lovingly, then perhaps I should focus on the privilege of caring for those hearts in this lifetime.
Until next time…
xo
The Evolutionary Type 