"We're all just fragile threads, but what a tapestry we make." – Jerry Ellis

Archive for the ‘family’ Category

A Silly Little Ditty Bout Grandma and Her Birds

It’s the Friday before a long weekend, and I’m finding it hard to write anything serious.  This poem is part biographical.  No the birds did not escape and come back, but my mom’s birds are mean and they do poop on everyone and dive-bomb the dogs.  Oh, and they DO sit on their feet.  Grandma’s name has been changed to protect the innocent.

 

These are NOT my mom's actual birds...there's no way they would pose like this.

These are NOT my mom’s actual birds…there’s no way they would pose like this.

 

Grandma Cecil had a lot of birds
When we would visit, you couldn’t hear our words
The birds were so loud, and sometimes they were mean
Especially the one whose feathers were green.

 The birds flapped their feathers
All around the bird cages
Grandma kept them locked up
When they flew into rages.

 They would drown out the TV
And poop on your shirt
They’d dive-bomb the dog
But he never got hurt.

 Then came the day
Grandpa left open the door
“Freedom at last-
We’re behind bars no more!”

 The birds couldn’t believe it,
Up and away they did fly,
They flew past the stars
All the way to the sky.

 They were pooped when they got there
Wanting something to snack,
But once they’d escaped,
There was no looking back.

 How they missed Grandma Cecil!
And those crazy old mutts.
They missed those fine days
When they just sat on their…uh, feet.

 God had mercy upon them.
An angel he sent
But they had to go back now
To be sorry and repent.

 To this day they still talk
‘Bout that day and the flight
But never again
Left the house out of sight.

Category:

family, home, humor, pets, poems, poetry

The End of Ordinary Summer

In truth, life is anything but ordinary while raising kids. There are ordinary seasons in life, of course, (the potty training stages, the pre-school years, the middle school years, etc.) but the seasons string together in such a way that they fool me into believing they are a seamless stretch of time. Sometimes it’s not until something new starts up that I realize that something else has ended, having gone away quietly without a formal goodbye. School is the obvious exception—each year has a definite start and end.

I have school bus-shaped picture frames for Tyler, Emily and Erin that have places for every school year’s photo. In the fall when they return to school and get their yearbook picture taken, I dutifully put in their new photo in their School Years’ frames. Right now as the school year winds down for the kids I’m once again reminded that they are growing up with another grade under their belts.

Except this summer is different. It is the last ordinary summer. Tyler’s picture frame will be full next fall.

One could argue that last summer, the first summer Tyler had his driver’s license and got his first job, was our first non-ordinary summer. After all, it was the first time that we had to consider his employment when we made our annual vacation to the lake. But to me, last summer doesn’t count. His part time job at the golf course didn’t interfere with our family’s plans, and his boss was very accommodating with letting him have time off, so it wasn’t an issue. He was still home sleeping in his bedroom almost every night, like he will be this summer. But he’s a Junior in high school now, so I know that next summer will be different. He will have graduated high school and be preparing to go to college in the fall. Thus, the end of the era and life as we now know it.

For the last fourteen years, every fall began a new school year, whether it be in pre-school, elementary, middle or high school. And while each beginning brought new friends, interests and classes, as expected, there was a continuity with kids being in school in the fall. It’s been our way of life as a family almost as long as we’ve been a family. The kids can’t remember anything else, and life PK (pre-kids) seems so very long ago it’s like it was lived by someone else.

While I don’t mean it to sound so gloomy and melancholy, it does make me stop and think—and appreciate—all this summer as a family will be. I know that I probably am a little overly sentimental about my kids growing up. I thought I’d gotten better than I used to be about it. When they were little I put off going through their closets to weed out outgrown clothing because all I could hear in my head the whole time I did was the song Puff the Magic Dragon. Those too short pants and shirts were a physically tangible sign that my babies were moving on and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I tortured myself with dwelling on that fact—masochistic, I know.

As a parent, I want my kids to grow up to be healthy and independent, so it’s rather hypocritical of me to be sad when they do exactly that. After all, if Tyler was 30 and still lived at home with us I’d be upset then, too. Ironically, Darrell and I have been encouraging him to go away somewhere for college. I lived at home when I went to college, and although I joined a sorority and enjoyed my college days, I never felt like I had the same type of college experience as my friends who went away to school. I want my son to have the opportunity to be semi-independent in the way that only being a college kid away from home allows. But that requires me to accept that he is growing up and is no longer a little kid. And I will, because I never want to hold him back from being the person he was meant to be.

Time with our kids—these short seasons—shouldn’t be taken for granted anyway, but this summer I plan to especially cherish the time we spend together as a family. It may be the last ordinary summer as we now know it, but it can also be the first summer of a new season and a new chapter in our family’s history. Long live summer!

Category:

college, family, graduation, growing up, home, kids going to college, kids growing up, letting go, motherhood, teenagers

Family Sands of Time

In the writing course I’m taking right now, we are encouraged to open ourselves to writing in genres we might not have previously considered. The lesson was on writing for the non-fiction market, which I have never given much thought to doing. I’m much better at coming up with a fictional story with made up people than actually researching a subject enough to become an expert in the field. I love stories about people, their personalities and relationships, so telling a story that happened with some creative embellishments is more my forte. But the assignment got me thinking.

Part of the assignment, if we’d even ever vaguely toyed with the idea of non-fiction, was to share what would we write about it, and what kind of marketing plan we would use for our idea. Lighthearted Dragonfly Readers who know me personally know that I grew up in a family that owned and operated a sand business on the Missouri River, so I started doing the “bubble method” technique of brainstorming to try to come up with enough ideas about sand that would sell a book. Sand alone doesn’t seem that interesting to me, but the story of how my grandfather got into the sand business is. Again, like my blog, it’s not something I could make a living with writing, but the fun I would have! I would love meeting with my uncles and cousins for lunch and recording the family history. We’re not the Busch family of Bitter Brew (thank goodness!) so this would lack the drama of a family tell-all, but what a great heirloom it could be for future generations.

My Grandpa, with only an eighth grade education, had a very good head for business. It was right after World War II and construction in St. Louis was booming. My favorite tale that I remember hearing was about how he borrowed money from my grandmother’s relative. The uncle was very suspicious of banks, so he kept all his money—cash, mind you—in cow manure piles on his property. My grandmother was embarrassed to go to the bank with the cash because it smelled, or so I’m told. From what I know about that relative, he would have his own chapter—he was really a character.

So I have yet another idea bubbling around in my brain that loves churning out ideas, but lacks the time to devote to another unpaid hobby.  (Insert sigh here.) What about you? How do you balance your love of writing or another interest with a limited amount of time and energy? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Category:

balance, family, family history, growing up, home, writing

Bonding and Doctor Who

David Tennant and Matt Smith as the Doctor

David Tennant and Matt Smith as the Doctor

 

Today I was in a blog reading mood and found myself reading a lot of Freshly Pressed material on WordPress. It’s something I only recommend if you have a chunk of time because it’s easy to get lost reading essays and articles with greatly varying topics. It always amazes me to see the polarization of thought on topics that on the surface seem non-controversial. But maybe that’s because I love reading the comments, which tend to be favored by argumentative types.

One of the blogs I was reading had an essay about how Disney, specifically their programming geared towards tweens, was ruining today’s youth. The writer discussed how her daughter started acting like a sassy Disney character and the trouble it caused. It was very well-written, and the comments ranged from the “you’re-absolutely-right” variety to “quit-letting-the-tv-babysit-your-kids” scoldings. Thankfully my kids are beyond the Disney and Nickelodeon show ages, although I have to admit I still laugh at Spongebob cartoons and I liked several of the shows my kids watched when they were younger. (Disclaimer: Some were horrible!)

My family enjoys watching television together, and thanks to Netflix, we breeze through entire seasons in a few weeks. Well, the kids do anyway—while I’m at work they watch episodes without me so I miss too many to know what’s going on after a while. We’ve had the summer of Supernatural, where we all watched Sam and Dean battle Lucifer and all sorts of other demon bad guys. Then there was Lost, where I was literally lost in a few short days because I didn’t get to see several episodes and just gave up. We all enjoy a good laugh together at the antics of Sean and Gus on Psych, Jeremy, Richard and James on Top Gear (the UK version—not the US one) and Darrell and I like getting caught up on Castle episodes. All of these series are mindless fiction, I suppose, but our family has bonded over these silly shows. It’s not a substitute for other family bonding moments, like taking the dogs for a walk in the park or sharing a meal together, but with teenagers you sometimes take what you can get. And I refuse to feel guilty about it.

Emily is in eighth grade and has come into an age where I think I drive her crazy. To be honest, sometimes that feeling is mutual. Not that we don’t get along, we do, but most of the time things I try to talk to her about she tunes out simply because they are coming from me.  Over the past year, Emily has come to love the new (2005) Doctor Who series and basically all things British. Knowing that I probably shouldn’t be wasting any more of my time watching television, I started watching Doctor Who with her, beginning with the first episode with Christopher Eccleston as Doctor Who. It began because I had wanted to see what she was spending so much time and her Amazon gift cards watching. Halfway through David Tennant’s Doctor Who (with a few Matt Smith/Karen Gillan episodes watched out of order) I’ve become a fan in no small part just because Emily loves it so much. My daughter and I have actual conversations about Dalaks, the Tardis and these creepy weeping angel statues.

Do we still have typical teenage girl/Mom arguments and attitudes? Yes, we do. We also have this neutral ground that seems to balance some of the negative. And when it’s just the two of us home for the evening, we’ll have Doctor Who marathons over chocolate chip pancakes. I love listening to her bubble over about something in an episode or some random trivia she’s found about a character. Gone is the moody teen, replaced with the carefree Emily I know is in there still underneath the stress of homework and all things middle school. In the big picture, it’s a small thing, I know. I suppose it would be great to be bonding over world peace instead of something as trivial as a television show. But for now, for just an hour or two, pass the chocolate chip pancakes and the remote. We’ve got a date with the Doctor.

 

Category:

Doctor Who, family, home, teenagers, television

The Last Lesson

Today I attended my last Girls on the Run practice as a coach. It was a fitting ending—we did the “freeze tag” lesson, which is always one of the girls’ favorite, and as Coach Missy says, “makes great memories for the girls”. Lately I’ve been thinking of how this will be my last season as a coach, and how proud I am for having been a small part of this wonderful program that helps builds character in young girls through running.

The program came to our school, Progress South Elementary, in 2009, through the efforts of Coach Gina—a mom who wanted her daughter to learn the lessons taught the in Girls on the Run curriculum. She put out the word through our Girl Scouts Neighborhood, which I am involved in, and I thought it sounded great. I’d heard of the program through a friend who was a Practice Partner at another school in our area. I replied that I was interested, though I had no prior running experience, and the next thing I knew I was the Head Coach of this team we were trying to scrape together. You needed to have eight girls for a team and somehow we managed to get eight girls by the deadline.

That first season taught me a lot—not only about running, which I learned from my wonderful Assistant Coaches that had been runners for years—but about motivating girls to do more than they thought they could. Sometimes they were reluctant to run at all, but I will never forget watching one of the girls cross the finish line at our practice 5K, red-faced and breathless, full of pride and a sense of accomplishment. In that moment, all the challenges we faced that season became worth it. I also enjoyed seeing my own daughter’s determination and confidence grow as she became a stronger runner with each practice.

The Girls on the Run program at our school has grown significantly since that first season. We now have two teams and are almost filled to capacity each season (that’s 34 girls). We have traditions and our own unique identity as a club at the school. In the St. Louis area, the Girls on the Run program has grown, too. Each season, each race, has become better organized and the processes more streamlined, from online registration and scholarships to moving the race to downtown to accommodate the larger number of race participants. There is now a Junior Coach program that both of my daughters who are no longer in elementary school have had the privilege to be a part of. What a joy it is to see something positive thrive!

I’d be remiss to not mention how much this program has made me a better person as well. Before Girls on the Run, I’d never run a 5K. I think I was just as excited as the girls that first race and I will never, ever forget it. To this day it is probably my favorite race I’ve ever run. And since then I’ve run a lot of 5Ks, 10Ks and two half marathons. I’ve had two daughters that are Girls on the Run alumna and past Junior Coaches—one who runs with me in every race she can and is looking forward to Cross Country in High School. All because I said “yes” to coaching.

A few seasons ago, I stepped down as Head Coach and handed the baton to Coach Kelly, who has five daughters that will be going through the program. She has done a phenomenal job getting our team numbers to what they are today and doing all that it takes to organize 30+ families. This last season I stepped back into the Practice Partner role from Assistant Coach. My daughters are no longer in elementary school and it is time for me to let someone else experience the joy of working with truly awesome coaches and fantastic girls.

To Coach Kelly, Coach Missy, Coach Sheri and Becky, I treasure our friendship. I admire each of you not only as runners, but as mothers and mentors to all the girls who are on our team. To all of the parents through the years, thank you for sharing your daughters with me. They have so much potential and I love seeing that in them—I know you do, too. I hope they see it themselves as well and that they will remember their Girls on the Run experience fondly—and never forget to plug into their positive cords.

So, Saturday will be my last race as a Girls on the Run Coach and I will wear my tutu proudly. We are the girls, the mighty, mighty girls—and I know they are going to continue to roar.

Category:

coaching, family, friends, Girls on the Run, running

My House Was Clean Yesterday—Sorry You Missed It

I actually have a sign in my laundry room that says that. Don’t get me wrong, I love when my house is clean and in order—I just seem to have a hard time keeping it that way. It’s not because I mind actually cleaning, either, other than there are so many more fun things to do instead.   It’s never bothered me to tackle a dirty toilet or soap-scum filled tub. What bothers me is that no matter how clean my house might be one day, the tendency is to fall back into chaotic disorder the next. Phyllis Diller was quoted as saying, “Cleaning your house while your children are growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.” Yep. Our family is a little apathetic when it comes to clutter. Or at least more tolerant of it than most.

I watched a segment on Dr. Oz he had about clutter and he pointed out the old tried and true rule, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” It sounds so simple, but I feel like my stuff needs a purgatory of some kind. I am a very visual person, and if it’s out of sight I forget about it, so I like having my stuff out where I can see it. It wouldn’t be so bad except we as a family have a lot of stuff. And, it’s usually items we use on a regular basis. (My son and all his shoes comes to mind.)

Consequently my desk has lots of writing books, cool notebooks/journals, tons of pens along with things I am not supposed to forget to do—like bills to pay and field trip permission forms to return. If I “put it away”, it’s a pretty safe bet that it will be gone forever—or at least until it’s past the time I was supposed to take care of it. I’ve tried different systems to keep it to a minimum, like having a special folder for all my ongoing projects, but then I still need to have the folder where I can see it!

But, hey, I know where my stuff is. As does everyone else who visits.

What I’ve learned is that a mess won’t go anywhere.   In fact, it seems to multiply. The kitchen island is a great example. It starts with a piece of mail I want to make sure my husband notices, so I put it on the island. He comes home, eats, doesn’t notice the mail and I forget to tell him about it. It stays on the counter and is joined by a few other “husband pile” items, like safety glasses and an odd screw I found on the kitchen floor that might be important. In the meantime, the kids notice that there’s empty, horizontal surface space on the counter and add their school papers to the mix. It’s amazing how little time it takes for the paper monster to grow.

The worst part of being tolerant of a mess is that most of the people I admire are naturally organized or admittedly OCD about cleanliness. At any given time I could drop by their homes and probably eat off their bathroom floors. They suffer from the inability to leave a mess or aren’t able to sleep knowing there are dishes in the sink that didn’t fit in the load in the dishwasher. They alphabetize their spice racks. There’s no such thing as a junk drawer. I need my junk drawer.

I like to think that my friends and family understand this about me and think it’s one of my cute, quirky characteristics. Or that dog hair dust bunnies are a new trend I’m experimenting with in my décor. Thankfully I do not have to remind them that they shouldn’t attempt eating off my bathroom floors. After all, they’d have to fight with my dogs if they did that. I have to hope that they love me anyway, even if my philosophy on housework is more Erma Bombeck than Martha Stewart.

Category:

family, home, housework

Friendships Then and Now

My friend and cousin, Kim, texted me that she wanted to have a girlfriend get together just for fun. Jeans, t-shirts wine and food. Not for any particular reason, or to be the hostess at a handbag/makeup/jewelry sales party. Just the girls hanging out and catching up.

I told her that she needed to hang out with us “old” women more, because truthfully we find any excuse to sit in jeans and t-shirts, stuff our faces and wash it all down with wine. But I understand her dilemma. Seasons of life dictate how we live our friendships.

My friendships at 42 are so much different than the ones I had at 22 and 32. (We won’t even go as far back as elementary/junior high days-whew!) At 22 I was fresh out of college, newly married and ready to dive into a career—it was an adjustment enough just to be working 40 hours a week and having a house to take care of. My college friends and I kept in touch via Christmas cards and the occasional lunch, but it was my work friends that I spent the most time with—great people, but not as deep of friendships that I’d had with the friends I grew up with.

Fast forward a decade and I’m in the throes of being the mother of young children. A stay-at-home mother of young children, and they outnumbered me. As much as I felt very blessed to be staying home with them, honestly there were times I would greet my husband before he even got in the door, talking his ear off, desperate to have a conversation beyond “magic words” and how many bites of vegetables were required to leave the table. There were a few years when I felt like he was my only lifeline to the adult world. I remember praying in the car one night that God would put more friends in my life, and crying over it because I felt like such a loser for having to pray for friends in the first place.

I did get out of the house beyond the grocery store by attending Book Club, Bible study or taking the kids on an occasional playdate with other moms. Those friends really helped me grow beyond Mommy Mode, as we bonded over things like helping each other hang curtains or paint a room in one of our houses. I still craved the days of close friendships with my girlfriends where we went places sans children and were just wiser versions of our younger selves, but I became a new kind of grown up from these friendships—and I cherish them.

Now I’m in a good place in life with my friends—probably my favorite so far. My kids are no longer solely dependent on me—I don’t need a babysitter to go anywhere. Coincidentally, a lot of the friends I’ve made in the last ten years I’ve met through my kids and their activities. My friendships with other women vary in so many ways. Some friends I see all the time, others I won’t catch up with for months at a time and yet we still connect like we always have since seventh grade. In part, I think the reason why I’m in such a good place with friendships is that I’ve gotten better at knowing myself—what kind of people are good for me, and what relationships are not. Many of my friends have fed my faith life and all of them have shaped me to who I am right now. The friendships I’ve had with women who were older than me by decades have taught me that getting older is whatever you want it to be. So, despite wishing I had the metabolism of my twenties back, I wouldn’t want to go back to that time in my life. It’s taken me this long to figure some things out!

I’m hoping Kim will have a chance to hang out with us soon. We might even forego the jeans and wear sweats while we make toasts to friendships with our wine. To old friends and new, who loved us as we once were, love us for who we are now, and will be there for us as we move towards knee surgeries and Depends undergarments. Thank you, Lord, for friends!

Category:

book club, faith, family, friends, wine lovin'

My Life as an 80s Sitcom

In the 80s, when I was the age my kids are now, families like the Huxtables, the Keatons, and even Mrs. Garrett from the Facts of Life could take any problem wrought with teenage angst and solve it in half an hour. Sometimes it took a “To Be Continued”, but yeah, they were able to talk to the kids and give all sorts of insight and advice and actually be listened to. Did I mention this was on TV and thus FICTION?

Fast forward 25 years. My life is not a sitcom. If it ever were, it’d probably be dropped after a mere three episodes for its lack of Drama. A lack of Drama is a good thing when you have two teenagers and a pre-teen. I’ve never been a fan of confrontation and conflict in real life, even when I was a sometimes dramatic teenager myself. Except when you have kids in middle and high school, Drama personified exists—like it or not. Not so much with my son Tyler, other than his lamentations over playing a bad round of golf during qualifier rounds to play Varsity. (Whole other post there!) But with middle school girls, Drama is mean and nasty, and sometimes she leaves scars.

For some reason, Drama likes to visit our home when my husband is away out of town for his job. And I am not Mrs. Keaton. I try—I really, really try to be that solid, listening ear that knows just what to say to make the girls see the big picture. That middle school is only a season of life, and sometimes friends are mean and you get to move on eventually. I tell them my experiences in middle school that were similar. I hug. I wipe tears. I share cartons of ice cream.

But it’s not enough.

Because when your kid hurts, you hurt. And you want to do battle for them. Even those times when you see how they played a role in Drama’s script. Except in this script there are no Take 5s—the tears they cry are real, and you want them to know it’s all going to be okay eventually.

If my life were an 80s sitcom, I’d come home from the gym with my leg warmers and sweatbands only to find my daughter upset about her school day. It would be something like Jenny inviting Susie, but not her, to the big party. She would confide in me, telling me how sad she is because she thought Jenny was her best friend. I’d console her and in a lightbulb moment of epiphany she’d see how Jenny was just a person who wasn’t meant to be in her life at that time, but it was okay. In the next scene she’d make an even better best friend and forget Jenny, who’d move away to live in Alaska, and it would all be okay. We’d have a good laugh and the ending credits would play. And it would all be okay.

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, life unscripted is better. It’s better because we as humans have feelings and experiences that grow us as people. These hardships, these trials really do make us stronger and teach us valuable life lessons like perseverance and loyalty. If simple words from a parent kept us from feeling emotions and living life, we’d have been cheated like two dimensional sitcom characters who get to have the ending all worked out for them.

Will my children experience heartache and sadness as they grow up? Of course. Is it sad to see someone hurt them? Yes. But guess what? It is all going to be okay. Even if it’s not all worked out in a half hour.

Category:

family

Springtime and Daffodils

My cousin, Ruth, took this picture of the daffodils by her garage. Her picture inspired this post.

My cousin, Ruth, took this picture of the daffodils by her garage. Her picture inspired this post.

When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents.  I loved spending the night at their house, sleeping in Grandpa’s undershirts (even when I brought my own PJs with me), drinking homemade milkshakes and baking fun stuff with Grandma.  Days at Grandma’s—it was always Grandma’s house and Grandpa’s car to me—were full of endless rounds of “Go Fish”, Crystal Gayle records and swinging on the homemade swing in the big maple tree in their backyard.  I’d jump rope on the back porch, roller skate in the basement and type nonsense on Grandpa’s typewriter.  It was good to be a kid at Grandma’s.  It’s true that my grandparents spoiled me, but they also loved me in a special way that no one else has ever loved me—before or since.

Since my mom is an only child, my older brother, Kevin, and I were Byron and Vivian Long’s only grandchildren.  They had grown up in a small town called Rector, Arkansas, and moved to St. Louis when they got married in 1941 so that my grandpa could get a job up here.  Grandma was a housewife.  She never learned to drive, so Grandpa took her everywhere she went.  She was reserved, a little shy even, but with us kids she completely showered us with affection.  Grandpa was one of the most selfless, genuine people I’ve ever met.  He had a silly side that always delighted me.  When our visits would come to an end, he’d do silly, waving dances for us in the driveway until the car was out of sight.  He was smart, too, and was one of those people that if you asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to, he’d find a way to look it up.  Keep in mind this was 35 years before the internet.

Grandma and Grandpa always had a small garden in their backyard.  I remember chasing away the bunnies that would eat the little yellow flowers on the cucumber plants.  One year, though, they had a rabbit Grandma called Bunnikens.  They let the grass grow long in the yard where Momma Bunny kept her nest.  Every Spring Grandma’s house would have flowers all around.  The back of the house had a huge snowball bush as tall as the house.  In the front there were always daffodils that Grandma called yellow jonquils.  They were the bright yellow ones.  I loved those flowers, and Grandma would always cut me a bunch to take home. She’d wrap up their stems in wet paper towels and put aluminum foil around them so I could take them home with me.  It felt like I was taking a little bit of Grandma’s house with me.

Years later, after my grandparents passed away, my parents and I had the task of cleaning out their house and putting it up for sale.  Grandma had died in 1996, and Grandpa lived almost ten more years, living out the last few of them with my parents in their home.  Needless to say, the landscaping in front of Grandma’s needed some attention; except in early Spring when the daffodils were in bloom the area by the front porch needed some color.  In the fall of 2005 when we listed the house, I dug up as many of the bulbs as I thought I could find a spot for at my house and replanted some tidy, boring shrubs in their place.

The bulbs stayed in a bag almost two years.  I never got around to planting them at our house, which turned out to be a blessing because we moved the next summer into a new home where I finally planted them.  Every year they pop out in front of the garage.  Today they are all covered with buds, ready to open this week.  I love seeing those daffodils come up because they don’t care if it’s a long, cold, snowy winter.  They still come up—even in snow—their yellow heads a joyous golden testimony to the inevitable Spring.

The unassuming daffodil will always be my favorite flower; its simplicity reminding me of the unconditional love of two of my all-time favorite people and a time when happiness grew in bunches by the front porch.

Grandma and Grandpa Long--still two of my favorite people who ever walked this planet!

Grandma and Grandpa Long–still two of my favorite people who ever walked this planet!

Category:

family, nature

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Being a Martyr Mom

When I got to work this morning, my boss had cut out a cartoon and had left it on my desk.  It was a Baby Blues cartoon, and began with the kid asking the mom if he and his sister could watch some TV while she cooked dinner.  The mom answers “sure” and is shown tackling laundry, childcare and dinner duty solo, all the while grumbling how she LOVES doing everything around the house all by herself.  It ends with the kid returning to his sister and letting her know, “She said ‘sure’”.

I appreciated the laugh and seeing that on Monday morning, after leaving a messy house with a to-do list a mile long, made my day.  The timing was perfect—I almost wondered if my boss had been a fly on the wall in my house at dinner last night!  The fact that it was so relatable hit me in a couple ways.  First, I can be that Martyr Mom at times, complaining about how I have to do everything, after having never asked for help.  I forget my kids (and even sometimes my husband) don’t read minds and if I want them to do something, I need to specifically instruct.  Second, I began to wonder what message, if any, I send my family as I putter about in the kitchen, closing cabinet doors a little too hard and muttering to myself.  The reality is, they probably hear what they want to—Mom’s got dinner covered, let’s play XBOX until she calls us in.

I admire Marla Cilley of Flylady fame.  She has a website, www.flylady.net, where she helps those of us with Housework Attention Deficit Disorder (my terminology) develop routines and habits for keeping an organized, tidy home.  One of the points she makes when people whine that their families don’t help them is that it’s better to lead them by example than nagging them to death.  I guess I’ve never quite been a good enough example to test that theory, but I love how she sees the complaining as being a martyr.  I’ve been around enough martyrs in my life, haven’t you?  You know the type.  They do this, that and the other and it’s so hard and nobody appreciates them and blah blah blah.  I have to put the blah blah blah in there because I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard what comes after that.  And neither do our kids.

None of us wants to be that person, yet I do think all of us have felt that way at times.  Whether or not we verbalize it depends on who we’re with and what mood we’re in.

So Martyr Mom tendencies aside, the cartoon made me think about what we Moms (and Dads) need to do to get our families more involved in the household routines.  I stayed home with the kids until my oldest was a freshman in high school.  From the time they were born, I did all the household tasks—laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc.  I considered it my full-time job and felt blessed to be home with them when they were little.  Any time I tried to develop some kind of chore system I became so frustrated I just gave up.  As they got older and I became more involved in activities outside the home (many of them revolving around the kids like coaching, leading Girl Scouts, etc.) eventually returning to work part-time, I should have been more diligent in assigning them specific things to do.  Instead, I mistakenly just believed that they were mini adults, and would see something that needed to be done and just do it for sake of cleanliness and hygiene. (They’re good kids, but not that good!)

Now don’t get me wrong, my kids will do chores when specifically asked, even if at times I have to ask more than once.  The problem is that I need to let go of the idea that they will use their observation skills to see I need help and instinctively offer to set the table.  Like the mom in the cartoon, my frustration is, in part, of my own making.

Because while nobody likes being given Mom’s To-Do List, they dislike Martyr Mom even more.

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family