Laughter and Motherhood

One day this week, my kids and I ran out of the house with score cards to rate my neighbor's lawn mowing performance. My daughter gave the lady a perfect ten. My son, for reasons he could not really articulate, gave her a five, and I gave her a nine (a point off for bad attitude, I said). She turned off the mower as we stood giggling in the grass and flagging our cards. My neighbor rolled her eyes and shook her head at us, but this is my way of keeping the mood light around the house.

I am often much like my own mother was in her childrearing years. She was very serious, very intense, and all business. And while I certainly appreciate her strictness as a parent myself now, what she wasn't was funny or goofy. But I can see why. She had a full emotional plate in those years: difficulties with siblings, caring for terminally ill and elderly relatives, my father's consuming career, her own dedication to graduate school, and then the working of two jobs to put my sister and I in high school and college while she created a name for herself. She raised us without family dropping in regularly to ease the burdens created by small children. My mother was hell-bent to give us the childhood she didn't have because her own holds sad and uncomfortable memories. In her earnestness to provide such stability for us, my mom's sense of humor was not a frequently seen trait. One could never associate her with slap-stick comedy. I often catch myself in long ruts of intensity with my children, remember her as a younger woman doing the same, and I will stop to take a mandatory silly break. It's the way I breathe, and I do this not just for my children and I, but for my mom, even though she is miles away. These moments of humor are episodes I will recount with her later so she can love and laugh with us.

I adore my mother. She has a wonderful laugh, and now that she isn't cracking the whip on my sister and I for fighting and creating general mayheim, I get to hear it all the time. I certainly don't think my childhood was wounded by my mother's towing the line in her straight-laced and straight-faced manner. In fact, my mother was exceptional at providing a myriad of things I haven't seen many other parents give their children in that generation or the ones since: a love of classical music and the visual arts; lessons on how to live within a budget, when and how to build credit, and how to pay off credit cards; the sacrifice of things she wanted so children can have comforts (but not luxuries); how graduation from school is not the end of your education, but the beginning; how and why to adhere to a difficult career choice for the sake of family; and that God sees everything we do. She taught us how to remake, rebuild, rehab, recraft, save, and reuse common items from clothes to pantry goods in order to stretch a dollar and be resourceful.

My mother was magic: she kissed booboos and had a cool hand and soothing voice whenever I was sick. She sewed our toys, our clothes, and crafted ornaments out of almost nothing for Christmas gifts (I still have the full set of papier mache ones she made when I was little. Very retro and I love them.) My mom gave us a fingerpaint set we could use in the laundry room of my first childhood home. She baked our birthday cakes, created fanciful Christmases in the leanest of years, and provided herself as a second mother to girlfriends of mine whose own mothers could be bitter or selfish with their own children. My mom taught me how to love. That she did all of this without cracking jokes much is pretty amazing.

I often tell my step-daughters that I am aware of my being "un-fun" and irritable around my own little ones. I have tried very hard to improve that aspect of household life. Perhaps, like my mother, I take childrearing so seriously that I have a hard time seeing the humor in the chaos as it is unfolding (after the chaos though, everything is funny). I have difficulty laughing at myself and have never taken teasing well, therefore, my teasing others is a rare indulgence. But I know who I am, and my mother knew who she was and what she wanted for us.

This year, I received a slightly suggestive and off-color email joke about the new airport x-ray scanners. You've likely seen these images of a female skeleton in provocative poses. What made the email so shockingly funny was that it was from my mom. Kudos to you, Mom. Keep up the good work.

Mommyhood and Madness

Today, I overslept by ten minutes. I had hit snooze on the Blackberry—or so I thought. Turns out I dismissed the alarm entirely. Stumbling down the stairs to check on children was my first obstacle of the day. My husband had already risen before them and was supervising their morning routine. I should have stayed upstairs with my coffee and readied myself first.


“Little people!” I called. “Breakfast!”

“I don’t want breakfast. I want to eat breakfast at school,” said the oldest.

“Cereal!” shouted the little guy.

“Mommy, can I have almond milk?” asked the oldest.

“Mommy, I want cereal. This kind!” stated the little one again, waving an empty box at me.

“Mommy, can I have medicine for my throat?”

“Mommy, there is no peanut butter.”

“Mommy, did you pack my lunch?”

“Mommy, can I have almond milk now?”

“Mommy, I don’t want the vitamin with the hippo on it.”

“Mommy—“

“That’s it!” I cried out, overwhelmed by the barrage of mommy demands, “I am changing my name! What should I change it to?”

“Avatar!” answered my boy.

After sorting through what was available for breakfast (we have cruised through groceries this week), and with my husband snickering at me in the kitchen, we somehow managed to pull it together, and get to the bus stop on time. But at the bus stop, I noticed my daughter was wearing crotch-length shorts. No, I was not the one that bought these for her.

“Baby girl! Those shorts are against dress code!”

“They won’t care!” she said in reference to the school faculty.

“Really? Well, when I have to interrupt my work to get you from school and bring you home to change, I will care very much, and be extremely unhappy about whatever citation you get for breaking rules.”

“Mo-om!” she sighed.

“Let’s go,” I said. Marching us home, we missed the bus, but the point was made clear long before she is old enough to try to sneak out of the house in a belly-bearing shirt. Minutes later, shorts changed for a longer version, we drove to school, negotiated the uncertainty of the drop-off car lane, and then I headed to my son’s preschool. I had been smug oh-too-soon about making the two schools on time despite the set-back of a wardrobe change and the morning mommy dance in the kitchen. As soon as I pulled up, my little son made the announcement I fear the most:

“Mommy, I’m hungry.” (I thought my name was Avatar now.)

“What!? What happened to your breakfast?”

“I did not like the toast. I fed it to the dog. I’m hungry.”

This is not a child that can forego a meal. When hungry, he becomes hyperactive and disruptive. I walked him into his school cafeteria for the public school breakfast, provided instructions to both child and cafeteria worker to skip milk today (it does not help him absorb iron), and hugged and kissed my tiny man.

“I’m tired,” he said. Oh, no. This is a danger sign. This means a virus is heading our way. So as I sit here, supposedly editing 34,000 words for a client many states away, I keep wondering when the phone will ring with the fact that Tiny Man barfed or developed fever. I planned a day stacked with work and have an overwhelming feeling that the list will remain uncrossed today.

So, in the meantime, I’ll plug away. In only a few hours, the non-stop call of “Mommy” will rise again. Oh, wait, just call me Avatar.

Love and Mothers

I had meant to post this on Mother's Day, but I was traveling. In fact, my mother was with me, having just helped to support me through something awful. This blog is for her.

One night, my husband and I lay beside each other in conjugal bliss with a book of Rumi’s poetry between us. We were discussing love and how to describe it. We each had been thinking about the bonds of love between parent and child in addition to that holy bond between spouses. How does one truly articulate love? Difficult to define and express, efforts have been made for love to be explained, questioned, pondered, answered, and spoken through the written and verbal word, through acts of physical intimacy, demonstrated in gestures of sacrifice and service, painted, photographed, sculpted, and even shouted from the couch on Oprah. But really, in the quiet moments at this writer’s desk, what is love and how can I really tell someone exactly how and how much I love? I cannot pour it into a glass and measure it. I cannot buy it. I cannot put it in a box, gift it, and say: Here is this love. All of it.


Lately, I have thought in particular about my mother. I want her to know how I feel about her. It is impossible to capture precisely, this love. Simply said, it is too big, too profound. In a recent and beautiful letter, my mom described the loss of several friends and her gratitude to still be alive and well and sharing her life with us: her daughters, my dad, her friends. I was moved to tears both reading her lovely words and penning more back to her. My love for her runs as intensely as romantic impulse, deeply as protective instinct, and joyfully as the wagging tail of a happy dog. I so love her. Does she know how? I think she does, in her own way of words and gestures, because we are both mothers.

My mother made sure my childhood would be as free from pain as possible. Having been unprotected from certain hardships, she sacrificed aspects of her adulthood to guarantee my own secure entry into the grown up realm. For the painful end of my first marriage, she sometimes blames herself for the reasons parents do—if only she had said, if only she had showed me, if only she had prevented this from happening. She considers my children her own and thinks about them constantly. She sets quiet examples of incredible work and success. I think she is the first woman in both my maternal and paternal families to earn a master’s degree, and to do what she does for a living. She made it possible for me to get my own degrees by setting that example. When my babies were born, she was there. She bundled them and stayed up all night with those precious newborns so my then-husband and I could sleep. When holidays came, she sacrificed her own time so we would not have far to travel with children. She came to us.

On my recent visit home, my parents showed me baby pictures that had survived Katrina. Because of so much lost, these photos were a particular jewel. I only had one image of myself as a baby—until now. The best image in this newfound collection, the most touching, was my mother sleeping beside me. I was less than six months old. Curled toward her, my forehead pressed to her breast, she cupped my body in the bend of her own. Light from the window poured in—clean, pale, ethereal, soft. The stillness in the photo, the very peace of the shared nap could be felt nearly 37 years later. It is the most beautiful picture of my mother I have ever seen. The preciousness of that photo spoke volumes of love, past and present. It is just a glimpse though, of the sacrifice made, the words spoken, the tenderness exchanged.

There is no love like mother-love. It is a cycle repeated timelessly, endlessly within one relationship, and passed down to other generations. I can only truly honor her love by living well, loving my own children, and when the time comes to care for her in old age, accepting the responsibility with grace and gratitude.

Love to you always, Mom. Love.