Shiny, happy, smudgy-faced baby, all jacked up on Disney’s Animal Kingdom safari. Kinda hard to be angsty and sad, looking at that face. This is, I suppose, the function and purpose of angels.

*More shiny happy faces can be found over at Happy Face Central.

**And also here, where maple syrup and skateboards collided to create an alternate parallel Tennessean universe of awesome.

***Not here, though, because it’s a discussion about parenting and judgment and nasty things like spanking, and I might have been called “disgusting” in the comments, so. Fill up on angel faces at the other links first, maybe.

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/angels-with-dirty-faces/feed/ 0 http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/princesses-never-give-up/ http://herbadmother.com/2010/03/princesses-never-give-up/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:40:27 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1712 This past weekend was a weekend filled with tremendous, heart-busting joy. It was also one of the most personally disappointing weekends of my entire life. My head is spinning a little from the existential contradiction that this represents.

I took the brood to Disney World, and one of the objectives of the trip was, of course, to have a good time, and having a good time at Disney World is not a particularly difficult thing to do, what with the spinning teacups and fireworks and pirates and flying carpets and pixie dust and all, and so to say that we – and more importantly, our coterie of pixie-loving badgers – had fun is to understate things dramatically. But having fun was not the only objective of the trip, nor even the primary objective of the trip. The primary objective of the trip (which saw us drive from Toronto to Florida in a vehicle provided by GM Canada) was me tackling the Disney Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, as the first race in my year-long quest to run 100 miles for Tanner. I’ve been training since last year to do this run and all the other runs – runs that will cover a total distance, I hope, of 100 miles – to follow. I had my tiara and tutu packed and ready.

I never got the chance to wear them.

The night before the race I had a series of dizzy spells, the last resulting in a nasty fall while carrying Emilia – herself a little broken from falling on the monorail off-ramp – across the resort grounds. I wasn’t badly hurt by the fall – just sore knees and neck – but the fact that I’d been dizzy enough for black spots to distort my vision and skew my balance and send me careening to the ground, child in arms, was enough to sound the warning bells. “You’re not running,” Katie said, as she helped me back to the room. “I will stop you.”

So. I did not run the Disney Princess Half-Marathon.

In hindsight, I can speculate that my dizzy spells and my fall and my consequent failure to run was due to a lot of things that were more or less beyond my control. Doing a week-long long-distance road trip with small children who do not sleep prior to running a half-marathon is, perhaps, something that I could have controlled – simply by not doing it – but then we wouldn’t have had our adventure, and who’s to say that it was the seven nights without sleep that brought me down? It also might have been the Florida sun, or the food (Mickey-shaped waffles have been proven to cause light-headedness in tutu-clad lab rats), or the fact that I’m only about a month past a bout of pneumonia and have bad lungs and ignored all of that when I resumed training a few weeks ago and didn’t pay any of that any mind while carrying a 35 lb toddler through the Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center under the decidedly un-Canadian sun for two days. It could have been due to a lot of things, most of which were almost certainly my fault.

Which is why I’m having a hard time clinging to the joy from this weekend. The smalls had a deliciously wonderful time, chasing Space Rangers and splashing down mountains and racing race cars and goggling at pixies zipping through the sky, and their joy was contagious but still: we were supposed to do all this – we were supposed to be pursuing joy and chasing pixies and princesses – for Tanner. I was supposed to do this for Tanner. And I f*cked it up before I even got started.

It’s kind of hard to not hate myself for that.

(I ordinarily close comments for this kind of post, because I hate being sucked into the temptation to seek reassurance and back-pats from the Internets for my own twisted issues, but you know what? This shit sucks so bad that it is taking all of my limited self-restraint to not out-and-out beg everyone, everywhere, to tell me that I am not, in fact, all total fail and a disappointment to humanity. So. If you feel like telling me that I don’t suck, I will totally take that. Please excuse my neediness.)

Mr. Jasper, being assisted in the luge by his sister Miss Emilia, at the home of Mrs. Fussypants.*

*This is how we road trip. On skateboards. Etc.

**Actually, we’re in a Traverse, courtesy of GM Canada. But still.

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

It’s courageous because it represents an overcoming of a terrible grief, a grief that comes at you like a baton to the knees and the gut and the mind and the heart. It’s not a defeat of such grief – there is no defeat of such grief – but it is – it represents – a willingness and an ability to power through that grief and to keep moving, keep persevering, keep living, in spite of that grief. And more than that, perhaps: to take that grief and let it move through you in a way that carries you forward, to feel its battering force and take that force and bend it to your will and make it dance, to dance with it, to take the lead and turn the struggle into something beautiful.

I would like to do that. But I still feel, more often than not, that the grief is moving me, leading me, directing our steps. We’re dancing, I know, and it’s not always terrible (that is one grief’s secrets: that it is sometimes welcomed, that it is sometimes embraced, because the grieving soul does, sometimes, just want to give in, to fall back into the deep curve of those arms and yield to the bending and the tipping and to just let its fingers graze the floor as it sways and drops) but it is not controlled, I am not controlling it, I am just being led, and I wish, sometimes, that I were not.

Jeannie Rochette will have her moments, I know; moments in which she will no longer feel in control, when she will not be able to stand, let alone skate, because this kind of pain – no matter what anyone says – is terrible, terrible, beyond measure. But she will always have this moment of triumph, this overcoming, this demonstration of the force of life and love in the face of death. For that she should be proud. To that we should all aspire.

I do.

I say this because I know. I know because, I have had short hair. As a child, even:

That’s me, age two and a half. Just a little bit younger than Shiloh Pitt-Jolie, and with a slightly shorter and slightly dodgier haircut. (Parents didn’t worry about their daughters having mullets in the seventies, I’m just sayin’.) And I’m pretty sure that, notwithstanding the short, bemulleted hairdo, I was a girl. I also wore pants a lot, but you know what? STILL A GIRL.

So the idea that anyone – anyone – gives even a passing thought to the claim that because three year old Shiloh Pitt-Jolie has short hair she has or is developing gender identity issues kinda makes my head explode, which is inconvenient, because the sparks from my exploding – non-longhaired! – head might cause my pants – non-skirtlike pants! – to combust.

I know. It’s confusing. Also, so stupid that I can hardly believe that I felt compelled to address it, but there you go. I AM COMPLICATED. It’s because I had short hair as a child, obviously.

(I dare you to post your best tomboy picture – you, or your daughter. If you do, leave the link over at the Bad Moms Don’t Give A Shit About The Length Of Their Daughters’ Hair post at the Bad Moms Club. I totally want to see it.)

(And yes, I know that there’s something vaguely ironic about the fact that I am championing haircuts for girls just days after flipping out over haircuts for boys, but that had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with OH GOD MY BABY IS GROWING UP SAVE ME. In any case, as I told you: I am complicated. And it all, clearly, goes back to the hair.)

(Oh, and, because I know that you are totally wondering, and if you’re not, you should be: yes, there is a resemblance.)

For the longest time, I couldn’t open it. I’m not sure why. The reasons that I gave myself – that reading others’ evaluations of my child would be awkward and challenging; that the report card was a symbol of school and so a symbol of her moving ever further into a life of her own, a life apart from mine; that I just couldn’t bear to see anything other than the highest praise for my child – were not, in themselves, convincing. They just landed in my psyche and fell limp, like drained water balloons, or banana peels, or something else more figuratively appropriate that I can’t think of right now. I was anxious for all of these reasons, and for none of them, and for a thousand other reasons that I probably wouldn’t understand until sometime around her high school graduation, and as I sifted through these known and unknown and entirely inscrutable reasons for my anxiety, I thought, this is the problem. This. This worry. Not the reasons for the worry. The worry itself.

Here, I realized, is one more set of things to worry about. How is she doing in school? What do her teachers think of her? What does she think of them? Is she thriving? Is she not? What words will be used in her evaluations? What will the words mean? Emilia is working to use her conflict-negotiation skills independently… Emilia uses oral measurement tools correctly… Emilia actively enjoys playing Submarine and is proud of her navigational abilities… Emilia loves to collect data from her peers and explain to the class what this data represents (wait, what?) (Years of graduate training in critical textual analysis and I’m stymied by a junior kindergarten report card. Is my daughter a Black Ops Naval Intelligence Officer in training, or is she just good at math and challenged by conflict? Also, what are ‘oral measurement tools’ and should I be worried?) One more set of things to worry about, one more reason to stock up on Ativan. When does this all end? Does it ever end? Will I be fretting over her tenure review when she’s thirty and teaching International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Goverment?

Motherhood, for me, has been a complicated mixture of anxiety and joy. The joy, obviously, outweighs the anxiety – by volumes it outweighs the anxiety – but the anxiety is always, always there, lurking in the dark corners and bursting into the light when I least expect it, casting shadows, imposing a chill. Emilia’s junior kindergarten report card – the first report card of years and years of report cards – was a reminder that there are anxieties awaiting me that I haven’t even yet thought about, anxieties that lurk in shadowy corners that I’m not even yet aware of. That I’m not prepared for these worries me – but to devote my energies to seeking them out in advance just fosters a different kind of anxiety, and so I find myself caught in a cycle of worrying about worrying and worrying about worrying about worrying, and you can see how this could be a problem.

I don’t want this to be problem. I want to just get her report card and snicker a little over her teacher’s observation that Emilia is quick to raise her hand and eager to share ideas and ask questions but sometimes needs to be reminded to let her peers ask questions, too and not be so quick to sweat the small stuff and to remember that, really, it is all small stuff, so long as we’ve always got the joy.

And we do have the joy. Also, data-collection.

How do you fight the impulse to obsess over small worries? Do you obsess – even a little – over the small worries? Or is this just me? You can tell me if I’m crazy. I kind of already know.

(IS a report card a small worry? It’s not, is it? It’s HUGE, isn’t it? IT IS. See, I’m totally not crazy. I am ALERT. I know a your-kid-is-so-totally-going-to-be-a-Mossad-agent warning when I see one. SO THERE.)

(I am so freaking doomed.)

(Photoshop narrative contrived by Jenny; random badness embodied by – from left to right – Karen, me, Laura, Jenny, Jyl, Rachael, and Alison, who took me down immediately after this photo was taken. Sarcastic spirit fingers, apparently, do not frighten her.)

]]> http://herbadmother.com/2010/02/my-blog-went-to-houston-and-all-it-brought-back-was-this-stupid-photoshop-tableau/feed/ 0 http://herbadmother.com/2010/02/what-to-expect-when-youre-not-going-to-be-expecting/ http://herbadmother.com/2010/02/what-to-expect-when-youre-not-going-to-be-expecting/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:34:49 +0000 Her Bad Mother http://herbadmother.com/?p=1669 So I wrote this post over at BlogHer. It’s kind of heavy, but also, I think, kind of extraordinary (that is, the subject of the post is extraordinary, not my writing) and I’d love to know what you think. Not least because it comes up in a week during which some people are saying hateful things on the same subject, and talking about actions and ideas that counter hate is, really, the best defense against such hate, so. I think that it’s worth reading, and well worth discussing, and even if you disagree with the whole enterprise, well, at least we could all join hands and agree that compassion is good, no matter what? I’d like that.

Then Air Canada messed up my flight connections, and I deflated a little. Then they lost my beautiful red shoes – along with the rest of my luggage – and I deflated some more.

Then I got home and Jasper started struggling to breath and had to be rushed to the hospital – again, again - and my husband raced off with him while I curled up with the girl and my heart was punctured in so many places that I didn’t so much deflate as collapse in a tattered mess and Houston and Mom 2.0 and all the glitter and rainbows and bacon-wrapped-shrimp taco awesome of that space receded utterly and – this is, of course, entirely predictable and fully banal – I felt scared and alone and I cried.

I knew that everyone was still there, of course: this is the magic of our community, that we are always there, that there are always virtual hands at the ready to catch us when we stumble. But there are, still, moments when virtual hands are not quite enough – when they feel like spectres, shadows of the real thing – and one’s consciousness of that – one’s sense-memory of holding real hands and the betterness of that – overwhelms and one is overcome by the deep, deep need for the warmth of real flesh and one wishes for actual touch and the remoteness of that wish provokes a sadness that echoes deep in one’s heart.

(I’m not ready to write – I do not, right now, want to write – about the ugh and the oof and the shake-fists-at-heaven do-not-wantiness  that are provoked by one’s child undergoing recurrent episodes of struggling to breath. Jasper was able to come home this morning, and the immediate danger is passed, so the fear is less intense, but I feel so beaten down by it, this fear of breathlessness, and I am tired and I just want to spend a few hours telling my self that it’s all okay and not that bad and what were we worrying about anyway, even if that might involve some lying, so.)