Sanity or Patience: choose one.
Do you ever have one of those moments where you think, "HA! I am sane!" Then you step in dog poo with your bare feet and remember it was your idea to get the puppy...?
I always thought of my folks as responsible, loving parents. A bit extreme about sticking to rules and curfews and nonsense, but at least they cared. There are times, however, that I look back on and wonder what they were thinking.I remember sitting in the living room with my mom and sister watching tv or something. My dad had gone somewhere and left my brother to finish his race car for boy scouts. Oscar, maybe a tweenager, was in the garage... by himself. Using a saw. Nobody seemed bothered by this, until the awful screeching (think Little Mermaid, Arial's birdy friend Scuttle) like someone's arm was being ripped from his torso. You can imagine the speed with which my mother ran to the garage, my sister and I following in her wake. Oh, the surprise to find him belting out lyrics to "You make me feel like a natural woman..." (Don't blame him - that song was quite catchy when you heard it every other commercial break for Lee Jeans). He was equally surprised to look up and find us staring him down. Now I look back on it and think, What the hell, Mom and Dad? I couldn't go out with that nose-ring guy on his motorcycle at 13, but you let Oscar stay in the garage with the saw after that episode? Life is so not fair sometimes.This post is part of Scary Mommy's Flashback Fridays, happening once a month now. If you have any memories to share or some old posts you love that need to brought back out of the shadows, hit up this meme. It's a lot of fun!
In honor of Monsoon's last day of the first year of preschool, I'm pulling out the post about my anxiety as he started preschool - way back in the fall (from another cyber place). You can participate in Scary Mommy's Flashback Friday by sharing your own older post that nobody read OR a real live flashback story. My baby starts preschool next week and, like most other parents, I'm sure, there's some anxiety going on... for me. After all, it's about the parents, right?
I'm sure every parent has fears and issues as their children go out into the world at various points in their lives. While most of these fears are never realized, there are always the situations that arise out of thin air without expectation - good or bad. So with all these worries about things that are possible - maybe even probable - to happen as my son enters this stage of life, do I have to, or can I help, being anxious about the things I can't even think of, too?
Trying to teach him values that he is expected to adhere to at preschool isn't so tough... until someone else enters the picture. We don't play with guns; unless you are at anyone's house who has lots of them to play with. "Poop," "pee," "butt," "fart," and other related terms are "words we can say in the bathroom;" until Daddy teaches you to sing, "There's a skeeter on my peeter knock it off..." and Grandpa makes up fun play themes like, "I'm a burp and play, you're a poop and fart [doll]." You don't even take notice when other people look different from you, until Grandma reads you "Little Sambo" and when I take you to the waterpark you point to a little boy your size with darker skin and ask me, "Where is his tiger?" We do not hit/kick/use hurtful hands at all... except when Daddy or Grandpa or Papaw or anyone else gives you boxing gloves or a pillow or a stick for a sword or a real toy sword or a play hammer or.... ahhh, the list goes on.
So will my kid be the kid who annoys the teachers with all the inappropriate behavior? Or will he cry all day, too afraid to do anything at all? Or will he have to sit apart from the other children in a straight jacket so he can't hurt them? Please don't let him be the kid who punches the teacher in the nose! (It does happen - a kid punched me in the nose the first week I worked in a classroom). Even his good qualities come into play here: what if he tries to kiss the other kids b/c he's so used to being affectionate at home? All those germs... ewwww!
Why isn't it enough that I think he's the cutest, sweetest, funniest, smartest, most charming three-year-old in the whole world? Why do I have such a hard time believing that other people will see him this way, too?
And is it normal to worry that your own child will be the one alienating others rather than worrying that he'll be alienated by others? What kind of mother am I? And should I send a list of all my concerns to his teacher so she knows that if he does behave inappropriately that I'm sorry in advance? (No, I wouldn't actually do that).
If anyone knows of any issues not mentioned in this post, please write quickly so that I have adequate time to process and develop just the right amount of anxiety before he actually starts school. Otherwise, it might be too late - he may have already proven me wrong.
Something about me you ought to know: I am a parenting book junkie. It's sad, I know, but it stems from spending two of the four years it took me to earn my associates degree (in early childhood ed) being pregnant and a new mother with a never ending supply of educational and child development material.
When I finally graduated, I started having attacks, like I needed a handbook right away: "What do I do with all this poop? Oh, isn't there a book about making him eat? Can I get a pamphlet on biting? Where is that article about the kid who picked her nose until it bled and what her mother did to make her stop it?"
All this dependence on reading for answers seems to have stripped me of some natural maternal instinct to figure out (on my own) what the heck to do with my son. It can only be compared to the way Spell-check has enabled my once word-savvy brain to disengage when I am handed a pen and paper. Why do I let this happen?
Sooo... I bring all this up because I bought another book yesterday. I was doing pretty good, it had been over a year since my last relapse. Unless you count the one I bought for my sister... Anyway, I'm going to read it, decide whether or not I agree with any of it, and discuss what I think about "ScreamFree Parenting" by Hal Edward Runkel, LMFT. (I have no idea what that stands for).
By the way, I do not - as my mother accused me of doing - take in everything I read as 'truth' and/or 'rule.' I am an intelligent person (sometimes) and I CAN think for myself, mother! And if one more person tells me I don't need to learn anything or read more books because, "Hey, this is how my parents did it and I turned out just fine," I might scream.
And for the record, no, you most often did not. But that's a topic for another post. This post is part of Flashback Fridays, hosted by Scary Mommy. If you have an old post you'd like to share (or even an old photo or memory) head over to Scary Mommy on this lovely Friday.
**Originally posted on January 5, 2009**
For the record, I did finish it, but it took forever and I never posted anything else about it. It was helpful and had very interesting points, but most of the chapters were kind of boring to read.
Scary Mommy is hosting Flashback Fridays for those old posts you love from before anyone was reading, or that cool high school haircut photo you have to share, or even an actual memory. Click her button and play along!
Hubs got a forward e-mail from one of his gross man-friends the other day (yes I've been saving this all week!) with a bunch of raunchy pictures and humorous captions. A double-take at one picture in particular made my eyes grow three sizes in half a second. Flashback!
I know that guy! No, not the actual guy in the photo, but a guy who was in this exact predicament. For an entire day. He was a boyfriend of mine. At a water park. With my family. My entire family, including aunts/uncles/cousins. Can you find him in the picture below?
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Oh hell yes, I was that hot. (Hey, it's my memory and I can remember it however I want.)
Flashback Fridays with Scary Mommy! Do you have any never-before-seen posts that you need to dust off and shove back out here? Click the button to participate.I'd like to know when the day passed that...
I stopped getting carded for buying beer. What do you mean I look "plenty old enough" you pimply teenage punk? If I have my stinkin' ID ready in hand, you'd better take the flippin time to at least pretend to look at it!
I can't get a nice haircut to feel good about myself because the teenage girl (shouldn't this child wearing a candy necklace be using blunt-end scissors?) informs me that we'll need to do a different color than I want in order to "hide those grays." Excuse me, but is it no longer acceptable to pretend they don't exist by way of NEVER mentoning them? And when I tell her I can't have layers b/c my hair is too thin - which it has ALWAYS been! - she feels some inexplicable need to tell me, "Yeah, it happens pretty often to women as they age." Goodbye!
I can't even get a facial to relax as the (again, early twenty-something) girl explains that the crap she's putting on my face stings like hell because it's burning off my wrinkles... or something. That's right. She looks at my face under the "bright light" and decides that I don't need the relaxing facial experience that my husband so thoughtfully tried to give me. No, noooo. I am in definite need of the "aging skin repair treatment." Yeah, it stings.
At least I have my figure.... except that when I went to Best Buy to get a work-out video, the kid (have manners been completely abandoned as a teachable subject?) walking around in his little blue vest feels some need to actually stop what he is doing and make sure I'm choosing the "right" work-out for my body. Have I inadvertently extended some invitation for suggestions about which part of me needs the most work? Then I remember I forgot to put on make up and haven't bothered even washing my scraggly gray hair that day and I contemplate for a split second about dumping my purse right there and throwing it over my head as I run for the exit.
Really, how OLD do you have to look for complete strangers to feel comfortable discussing it openly? So yeah, I got "colored" and I bought the take-home version of the wrinkle crap and I purchased more than one work-out video.
Now I know what that smell is when you walk into an old person's home and it just smells...old. Hair dye; burnt hair from the dye; stinging stinky wrinkle remover; burnt skin from the wrinkle remover; muscles burning from the inside out; and a whole crap-load of perfume to cover it all up. **Originally posted 12/15/08**
