Me to Mark: “Honey, I read an article today that said that parents of three children are more stressed than parents of two or four kids. I think we should have another baby.”
Mark: *looks at me like I’ve lost my mind*
Me: “….or, I suppose we could kill one of the ones we already have.”
Mark: “Pick one.”
Me: “MAAARRRKKKKK!”……….So, that’s a ‘no,’ right?
“Well, at least you have your husband to help you.” It is a phrase that has been uttered to me by single moms on more than one occasion. I smile politely. Nod my head sympathetically. “It must be really tough to never get a break,” I reply. But, what I really want to say is, “No, actually, I don’t really have my husband to help me. Not as often as you would think, anyway. I am a married single parent.”
Being a married single parent means that, even though you are married and live in the same household, only one of you has the vast majority of the parenting responsibility. Unlike a truly single parent, though, you have to consider someone else’s opinion in all you do. Now, I’m not talking about being married to a pig-headed, Neanderthal who thinks that everything to do with the children and the home are the woman’s responsibility (though, there could be a touch of that). No, I’m talking about being married to someone who is hardly ever home.
Take my home for an example. My husband works a lot of hours. He has his own business and he teaches at a local university. Most of the classes he teaches, and he usually teaches 3 classes each semester, are evening classes. He also teaches classes on-line. All of this means that he isn’t home very often. When he is, he is usually working. I am proud of my husband for all of his efforts to support our family. He is good at what he does and he enjoys it, but it doesn’t leave much time for the family thing.
Friends and relatives who have spouses who travel for work or are in the military often tell me the same story. They feel like single parents even though they are married because most, if not all, of the parenting responsibilities fall to them.
In some ways, I think our truly single parent counterparts are better off than we are. For one thing, they don’t get their every parenting move questioned by the absent parent. When my husband is home, it is a constant barge of “Why are you letting them eat in the living room?”, “Do you know he just dropped some crumbs on the floor?”, “Are you going to have them get in their pajamas before they watch TV?”, “He didn’t eat all of his dinner. Are you sure you want to give him that fruit?” I often marvel that I am able to keep the kids alive everyday without his guidance.
Single parents are also able to complain about how hard their circumstances are and most people will be sympathetic. If I complain, I sound downright ungrateful. I mean, he’s out working…for the family.
Probably the toughest part about being a married single parent is feeling like you are a single parent. The earliest months of the year are the busiest for my husband. He is usually working 7 days-a-week. The boys and I do everything by ourselves. When we are out, I will see other families together and wish we were out as a family as well. I wonder if the kids miss him, too.
When my boys were little, I offered them lengthy explanations about everything. I especially felt the need to explain why they shouldn’t do something. A lot has changed in the past few years. I have become a mom of few words. Mostly words like don’t, stop, shut, and no!
I’m not sure if I have gotten tired of my own voice or if it is the realization that my kids don’t hear past my first word. Either way, I find myself using fewer and fewer words when I talk to them – especially when I am yelling.
I have memories of long ago, hearing my voice calmly and sweetly say, “Boys, Mommy’s head hurts like when you get a boo-boo and it hurts. Well, Mommy’s head feels like it has a boo-boo. I would really appreciate it if you could try to be quiet.” I might get a momentary reprieve but eventually, the volume would again rise.
Soon I heard myself simply saying, “Aaron and Nic, could you please be quiet. Mommy has a headache.” Which became, “Could you please be quiet.”. Which devolved to “Be quiet!” and finally just “Quiet!”
Likewise, I used to offer up long explanations of why they should stop certain behaviors. I had read the books. You know, the ones that say your children are more likely to comply if you calmly explain to them why a behavior is not acceptable and put it in terms they understand. So, I did. “Nic, it is not okay to call your brother a fart head. If you keep calling your brother names, he won’t want to play with you. Then, you would have to play all by yourself. He also might start to call you names back. I don’t think that will make you happy, will it? So, let’s not call each other names because it hurts people’s feelings.”
Apparently, name calling makes children happier than I thought it would. I soon gave up trying to get them to stop. Now, when I walk in on Aaron sitting on Nic’s head and yelling, “Did you smell that one? Who’s the fart head now?” The only words I have are “Stop! Don’t! Mom ANGRY!”
While, I am sure I must sound like a grunting Neanderthal to anyone who is not my children, I know that they understand. It seems the decrease in my verbal communication has ramped up my non-verbal communication. I am finding that a stern, “DON’T!” together with an it would really feel good to hit something look, communicates much more effectively than all the words I have ever used.
So, these days when my boys hear a “DON’T!”, “NO!”, “SHUT!” (I skip the up because who has the time?), “STOP!” and then look into my eyes, they know I mean business. The best part is, I don’t have to hear myself talk.
Lately, I am really missing my babies. I love my boys, but they are kids now, not babies or toddlers or even preschoolers. They are growing, school-aged boys. They are no longer my babies. They are kids.
I thought I would be the last person to ever lament the end of the baby days. When the boys were newborns, I couldn’t wait for them to be 3 or 4 months-old so they might sleep through the night. When they were babies, I couldn’t wait for them to be toddlers so I didn’t have to carry them all the time and they could start telling me what they needed. When they were toddlers, I couldn’t wait for them to go to school so I could have some time without anyone hanging on me.
My mother used to tell me not to wish the time away. My friend, Annette, used to tell me to enjoy it because it would be over before I knew it. 
“You don’t want them to grow up too quickly,” people would say. “Remember, little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” All I knew was that I wanted some sleep and some space. I was such a fool!
Everyone was right. I miss how cute the boys were, how everyday was a new discovery, how they adored me. I had no idea how much easier it was to have little ones. There are so many things that seemed like a hassle back then that I would love to be able to do with the kids now. Only, now, those things would probably be considered child abuse, for example:
Strapping them in. Sure, when the kids were little getting ready to go anywhere was a big task. I mean, I had to strap them into car seats. Going to the store meant getting out the shopping cart cover, strapping one into the cart seat while the other was hoisted into the actual cart or strapped into a germ infested little “car” at the front. Any other trip, involved hoisting the two seat stroller out of the trunk and then strapping the boys in one at a time. A royal pain in the po-po, as my mother-in-law would say.
Still, as much of a hassle as that was, it beats going anywhere with the boys now. Now, I have to wait for them to get into the car. Or, worse, they get in the car before I am ready to go. That usually results in someone poking, hitting, or sitting on someone else while they are waiting for me. Which then results in me screaming at the boys until Aaron tells me, “If you don’t wants to fight in the car, Mom, you shouldn’t keep us waiting.”
Then, of course, there is the window opening. And closing. And opening. And closing. Until, I finally lock the windows, which then starts the whining. Occasionally, there is even the door opening…while the car is moving…on the highway.
Once we get to the store, or wherever we are going, we start the negotiating. Where will we go first? How long will we stay there? Why do I get more time to buy food than they do to look at toys? On, and on, it goes through the entire time we are out. What used to be 20 minutes of extra time strapping my babies in and out of car seats, carts and strollers has turned into 40 minutes of looking at things we aren’t going to buy and hearing about how that wasn’t enough time or arguments about why I should have made a purchase.
There is no question in my mind that toting around toddlers was simpler than dragging around kids. I wonder if it is too late to try to get them back into a stroller?
Locking them down. Once you become a mother, taking a shower or going to the bathroom become major challenges. Someone always needs something from you but, eventually, you have to take care of yourself. When the boys were little, because somewhere between the time when I was a toddler and when I became a mother playpens seem to have been outlawed, I used a corral to keep them someplace safe while I showered. Sometimes, I would put it in one of their rooms or the my bedroom. Sometimes it was in the living room where they would be watching Barney. (Don’t judge me. I needed a shower. Really, I was starting to smell.)
I was able to relax knowing that the boys wouldn’t crawl, roll or cruise off to a part of the house where they might get hurt while I showered. As they got older, the corral went away and we used gates to block the stairs or the kitchen when I need to step away for a moment. The boys never seemed to mind and I felt better.
These days, when I take a shower or use the bathroom, I can hear the fighting start, or the jumping on the bed, or the throwing things down the stairs. Sometimes, if I forget to lock the door to the bedroom, the boys will take turns coming in and standing outside the bathroom door to report on each other. I spend most of my time in the shower trying to determine if that scream I just heard would require a trip to the emergency room or a loss of computer privileges or both.
I wish it was as easy to keep Nic and Aaron separated, and safe, as it was when they were little. I have thought about putting latches on their bedroom doors that lock from the outside or maybe investing in two large cages like a zoo would transport a tiger in. At least, then I could keep them separated so I could shower in peace. Somehow, I think child protective services would frown on either option.
Limiting their access to, well, everything. Before the boys went to school, it was easy to expose them only to what I wanted them to see or hear. We listened to music all the time…classical, Barney, Sesame Street, Hap Palmer, Mr. Ray, Steve Songs, Tom Chapin…the list goes on and on. What we never listened to was the radio, not even in the car.
The boys didn’t watch network TV. They never saw a TV commercial until they were in grade school. My boys had no idea who SpongeBob, Spiderman or the Mario Brothers even were.
We ate healthy meals and fruits and vegetables for snacks. Cookies, cake and ice cream were occasional treats but they never ate candy. They never complained. Meals were never a hassle. We enjoyed meals together. We sang and laughed.
All that has changed now that I have grade-schoolers. Whatever music they don’t hear at school, they hear about from their classmates. The first time Aaron regaled me with his best song and dance routine to “I’m Sexy and I Know It”, I decided I better start listening to Top 40 again. I was in for a surprise when I realized how relaxed the standards had become for music on the radio.
Of course, the TV isn’t much better. Even if the boys are pretty good about sticking to the shows we let them watch, the commercials for the ones we don’t still sneak in.
And, forget about food. My boys have become picky. For Aaron, the unhealthier something is the more he likes it. Little by little, I have broken down and given them the hot dogs, and fish sticks and boxed mac and cheese that I once prided myself on having never made for them. Oh, and candy? That ship sailed when they starting handing out Skittles as a reward in preschool.
I miss the days of sitting at that table while the boys ate happily and I would sing them silly songs. These days, they hum profanity laced ditties that degrade women while complaining about having chicken, again, and asking if they can go watch TV or use the computer. If only I could move us all into an underground bunker where we could be safe from all the things in the world that are making them grow up too fast.
Maybe, missing my babies is about more than missing the sweet little faces and warm cuddles. I think it is about realizing that I am nearing that point were I no longer have control. I can’t keep my babies safe anymore. I have to trust them and the world. It is the scariest thing I will ever have to do. So, for just a little while longer, I think I will stare at their photos and remember when the world was only me and them.
In celebration of Mother’s Day, Books Make a Difference is exploring how blogs have become a part of the modern-day mommy experience. Meagan Frank, Senior Writer at Books Make a Difference, kindly invited Jenny and me to share how being a blogger has made a difference in our own experience as a mom. For some reason, Meagan thought we might actually have something insightful to say. I’m not sure if she’s right but we’ll give it a try.
Jenny and I bonded as friends by sharing stories about all of our apparent failures as moms. It’s not so much that we thought we were doing a bad job, but our kids did…
and celebrity moms did…and our neighbors did…our kids’ teachers did…and, well as best as we could tell, society in general did. It seems we always did too much or too little of whatever parenting task at which we were trying to succeed.
The thing was, talking about our parenting insecurities made us both feel better. More importantly, it made us laugh. One day, I suggested we should make greeting cards for moms. Jenny suggested we do a blog. I had heard of blogs but had never actually read one. Jenny was so exited about the idea, and was a regular blog reader, that she got a head start. I was excited about the idea of a blog but didn’t really want to add one more thing to my life that I could fail at.
I started reading blogs and about blogs. Suddenly, I realized, people can make money blogging! So, I decided to give it a try. Turns out, people make money blogging mostly when they write about products or host ads. Jenny and I didn’t want to do either of those things. We tried ads for a while but we felt it took away from what we really wanted to do: Share funny, and sometimes poignant, stories about what motherhood is really like. Instead of earning money, I soon found the blog gave me something better. Blogging gave me back my sanity.
As a stay-at-home-mom, I felt detached from the person I used to be. Blogging became a way to talk about my frustrations and my challenges. Most importantly, it made me start to look at parenting differently. Blogging made me start seeing all the funny things that happen in our lives, even at some of the most difficult moments. For the times when I couldn’t find the funny, we added a “Things that keep us up at night” page.
When someone reads one of our posts and takes the time to write a comment, you know that you have connected with them. Sometimes, the comment is how they could relate to your story. Sometimes, people tell you about what a difficult time they are having as parents and how your post helped them feel not so all alone.
Whether it is a comment on our site or a “like” on our Facebook page, knowing that your experience resonates with other parents is comforting. For me, realizing that other moms felt just as uncertain about how well they were doing at this parenting thing made me feel a little less crazy. I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised, because, after all, misery does love company.
This post was written for the “Books Make a Difference” bloghop.
You know those websites you go to when you want an answer to a parenting question? Yeah, well, clearly this site isn’t one of them. Most of the time, the only thing Marie and I are certain of is that we don’t know what we’re doing. Motherhood is fraught with self-doubt and we have advanced degrees in uncertainty. So, although we can’t offer any answers we can provide stories about our own experiences as moms. And we have found that sometimes that is enough to make a lasting connection.
When we created our blog Marie and I decided that we wanted to be as open about our experiences of motherhood as possible. Toward this end, we made part of our purpose to acknowledge the dark moments of parenting that often remain unspoken. In other words, we put the unsayable into words. For example, Marie wrote a post called “Today I Hate My Kids and I’m OK with That.” It has, by far, been our most widely read post and hundreds of readers have come to our blog by googling some variation of the phrase “I hate my kids.” The feelings that Marie talks about in this posts clearly resonate with readers. When moms acknowledge these thoughts and feelings with one another it becomes a shared experience which helps normalize and destigmatize their feelings. It can be so comforting to learn that you are not the only one who didn’t instantly fall in love with your baby after birth; suffered from intrusive images of throwing your newborn out of the window; had post-partum depression; etc. (and these are just examples from my own life).
Our blog isn’t all about the tough stuff, though. We also include stories of the humor we find in parenting our kids with observations of the ridiculous, bizarre, and laughable. Acknowledging the funny stuff is just as important as airing the “bad” things about parenting. Finding humor in even the most frustrating circumstances (e.g. when your kids are having a ridiculous fight during a long car trip) can help moms get over the rough spots. Years ago I read most of Erma Bombeck’s books about parenting because she is screamingly funny. She prefaced one book (I can’t remember which one) with a story about a letter she had received from a reader. In the letter a woman had written that maybe if she had known that she could laugh at the things her kids did then she wouldn’t be where she was—in prison for killing her children. Marie and I find plenty to laugh about in our day-to-day lives, and we like to share. Particularly if it is juvenile, potentially offensive, or just really inappropriate.
Although parenting can feel very lonely at times, we really do share the journey. What we are all experiencing as mothers is in many ways very similar. Sharing our stories in a compassionate and honest way can be immensely reassuring to someone else who is having a tough time. We are all ambivalent to some degree about our parenting decisions and behavior. It doesn’t help that there really is no true way to gauge the ”correctness” of our parenting. So, in lieu of offering any parental advice or advocating for any particular childrearing method, we’ll just continue to write about our own mothering foibles and give our kids fodder for their future therapists to discuss. You can come visit our page anytime for some reassurance, or a chuckle, or to share your own stories. Just don’t ask us any parenting questions. Unless you trust the woman whose parenting decisions allow her kids to do this:
If you do ask us any questions we will refer them to our most trusted resource: the Magic 8-Ball.
Sign in my son’s gymnastics class
From across the room you can only read the large print words at the top.
So, the kids and I just finished building a trebuchet and we’re now working on a ballista. Because, SIEGE WEAPONS!!!
This is our trebuchet. We store it with the swinging arm in the “UP” position so that I no one accidentally deploys it and gets hurt. It is only about 12 inches tall from base to support bar at the top around which the swing arm moves. This weapon is capable of defeating vast hordes of lego troops.
And THIS is the ballista that we’re still working on. It will be about 2 feet high and 3 feet long. Able to defeat at least 12
- inch action hero armies.
When the ballista is done it will look something like this:
Better Judgment: “Um, do you really think it’s a good idea to build weapons with your kids?”
Me: “Why? What’s the worst that can happen?”
Better Judgment: “How about something requiring this?”
Me: “Oh, I never let the kids play with them without supervision.”
Better Judgment: “I wasn’t talking about the kids.”
Oh, yeah…
So, during our trip to Niagara Falls we went to this fantastic bird sanctuary which also had turtles because, bird sanctuary. Anyway, in one of the rooms where they kept reptiles and the bigger birds we came across this scene:
Turtle porn. Which I captured on camera and brought to you. You’re welcome.
Occasionally, I am suddenly reminded that my kids have not completely lost their innocence. Like this time.
My oldest son had crouched down to better witness the proceedings. When Kelly wondered aloud what the turtles were doing, David opined that the one on top “just wanted to go for a piggyback ride.”
Giddyup
Ok, so we just got home last night from a trip to Ontario to see Niagara Falls (which was way cool). Anyway, there was a note taped to our door from a lady in the neighborhood asking if we were missing a rooster. Apparently, she had found one. Although how she caught it (or why) I’ll never know. She left her number and asked us to call her. So I called her the next morning and told her that we were not missing a rooster, but perhaps one of our other neighbors who raises chickens was missing his. I offered to call him because I knew him.
Me: (on the phone) “Hi (neighbor). I got a call from a lady who found a rooster and is looking for the owner. Are you missing yours?”
Neighbor: “Nope. Actually, I just have chickens, no rooster.”
Me (surprised): “You don’t have a cock?”
Neighbor: *stunned silence followed by embarrassed laughter*
Me: *realizing with mounting horror what I just said*
And that is why I must now move out of town and change my name.