No Time By Design
On the insanities of modern mothering
Last week Olive told me she was feeling mad because she feels disconnected from me — despite the fact that I’m the one to drive her to school, pick her up, plan and host the play dates, attend various school meeting and school functions, oversee the one hour of night patching sessions we do for her amblyopia treatment, call her doctor about her reoccurring stomach pains and forget daily to put a dentist appointment on the calendar. Somewhere I’m also remembering to remind myself that Halloween is around the corner and we still haven’t nailed down a costume and I’d love to get a pumpkin out on the stoop again this year and maybe even carve it. It’s no wonder she doesn’t feel close to me because I’m so damn preoccupied. But the mind fuck of it is that I’m preoccupied with being a mom!
At first she was so mad she wouldn’t even tell me it was me. She was just protesting bedtime with a serious vengeance.
“I NEED to go in your room,” she yelled, while I held the door closed.
“That is a boundary” I said, because in our house there has to be one place I can go and close the door when I need to.
And then she yelled “you keep telling me what to do.”
By now I’ve read about demand avoidance being a sign of stress so I got down really close and said “I think that you’re feeling stressed about something but I don’t know what.”
We talked about being hungry and whether her room felt scary because Harry Potter and his various white male obsessions are in the mix now and somehow I made it to the kitchen to cut up some fruit and got settled on the couch for a chat when really I wanted to go into my room and close the door and watch something.
“Can you think of the person,” I asked her before I knew that she was feeling like she missed ME, “who you feel like you need more from?”
[So, yeah, I was blaming this on her dad]. And she nodded.
“Can you remember a time when you did feel close to that person?”
Yes again.
“Can you feel that closeness in your heart?”
Another nod. And then a direct look in the eye when she said ‘the person is you.”
The time she was remembering was when we watched Beauty And The Beast together. I’m just going to say that THIS movie encapsulates ALL my most fucked up gender fantasies and also I love Chip the teacup and his Angela Lansbury mom teapot like they were family of my own.
Here’s the thing about being a parent. Everything they tell you that you think you’re not going to fuck up you definitely will fuck up. It’s no wonder we keep ourselves so busy with it all. Somewhere in the insanity of the preoccupation with all the child related things I do know that it’s not the right order; that I’m putting the outsides before the insides and that it doesn’t feel right. But the pressures are incredibly hard to separate from and they all seem to be not only important but also urgent. The school bathrooms, for instance, need to be cleaned more frequently and some kids, Olive included, are afraid to go in them and so instead they are holding their pee all day long. Someone has to say something about this and yet none of the parents know quiet how to voice it. Things that seem like they are a given are not guaranteed. Like school on a Monday for instance when it’s actually a holiday you’ve meant for weeks to plan something for that.
When things get like this — and it’s only October! - there seems to be no choice but to give up my hour long dance class or drop out of my bi-weekly two hour writing group or just not to click the poll for the cooking book club I was somehow bold enough to sign up for dispute having zero chops in the kitchen.
Removing myself from my own life does nobody any good and yet where else will the time from come from?
I really did not have a solution for Olive: I think I told her the truth. That when I send her to school there doesn’t seem to be enough time for us to enjoy each other and yet school has been the place she’s found friends and it’s good to have friends. I know homeschoolers are not impressed by this aspect of the educational system and say that the homeschooling community offers plenty of socialization but I just don’t even know. I was kind of homeschooled for a while and knowing there’s a whole world out there that runs by some rules that you don’t understand has not been a great life long strategy.
It can be pretty depressing to be signed up for something that doesn’t make sense in perpetuity. So can living with laundry on the floor unfolded for days.
Since she and I had this convo I stopped doing everything that wasn’t essential but also included dance class on the list of essentials. Each day there seems to be more and more that falls through the cracks.
There was a phone call I made to my partner about a week ago where I said I know I’m not being the best mom but I don’t think I can do anything about that unless I get more help. Then my request disappeared into the atmosphere like the thin wispy edge of smoke; almost visible at first against the blackness of night and then poof, gone completely like a magic trick.
It’s incredible, said my smart friend Celeste, that so many of us are dealing with exactly the same thing in isolation. I responded with the same old phrase that is beginning to become less soothing the more I say it: “It’s by design.”