Be the best mom I can be

and it backfired. Ah well.

Motherhood is a cruel trick of betrayal. You have this little baby and it takes over your life, wakes you up all night long, nurses nonstop, requires constant attention, feeding, changing. It gets sick occasionally, and it’s so draining taking care of the tiny ailing thing that you instantly get sick yourself, but you still don’t get a break. The nursing, the changing, the cuddling must go on and on.

Eventually the baby grows up some, and she becomes a little more independent, if independence means playing by herself for five minutes while you stick dishes in the dishwasher. She gets cute and charming, while simultaneously changing the type of trouble she causes. She sleeps through the night most of the time now, but she also unwinds entire rolls of toilet paper into the toilet the second you turn your back to put some laundry in the washer. She paints the floor with peanut butter and jelly. She learns to climb stepstools and draws squigglies all over your antiques and objets d’art that you thought she couldn’t reach. She’s destructive and unapologetically temperamental, but she’s also still cuddly and cute and charming. It balances out.

And the years go by. She learns to play with others, follows most of the rules most of the time, starts school. She learns things, makes friends, tells you about her day, refuses to wear anything but dresses, and then once you’ve filled her closet with dresses, she refuses to wear anything but jeans. You start to breathe easier, because she’s becoming a wonderful little person: smart, funny, adorable, creative, energetic. You’ve created life, and you see that you are doing a good job.

But then. Oh, then. Something happens, a result of some cursed combination of hormones, peer influence, and free will. Suddenly your baby is a preteen, and you are reeling. Weren’t things supposed to be easy until she became a teenager? How can things be so difficult when she’s only eleven? You realize, at the end of each week, that every conversation you’ve had with her for the last several days has set her to eye rolling and making humphy noises, and that most of your dialogues have exploded in tears, screeches and door slamming.

And suddenly it hits you that you aren’t going back. This is it, this is motherhood now. It feels like you’ve been sleeping blissfully for the last several years, and you didn’t even realize how blissful things were. After all, it wasn’t always easy. There were difficulties with friends, teachers, homework, maybe her father and her stepmother too if you have a tattered and discarded marriage behind you as I do. But it wasn’t like this, not this hair-trigger hysteria.

You try to remember: why did I have kids again? I love kids, I thought it would be fun teaching them things, I thought I’d be a good mother. But only once you’ve been expelled into the land of the preteen and teenagers can you see the big picture, the horrible practical joke that has been played on you. You give birth to a tiny creature that you love, more and more every day, and you pour so much of your love, your time, your energy, yourself into mothering, that your identity becomes more and more tied up in mothering. Maybe you’re also still a lawyer, or an accountant, or a teacher. But gradually, inevitably, you start to realize that everything you do is infused with mothering in a way that it is not, cannot be, infused with being a reference librarian or a doctor. You make decisions, usually without even realizing what you are doing, based on what is best for your kids and their well-being, sometimes not even considering your own desires until later. You buy a new outfit for your daughter to wear to a party, realizing only later that you have nothing to wear, and when you realize it, you don’t even much care.

Then all at once, she rejects your every advance. The new outfit you bought for her is an embarrassment, because it looks so 90’s. Your opinions about hair, homework, and boys are met at first with a patronizing sort of patience, and, as months go by, with open hostility. Other than this hostility, she is mysteriously closed to you, acting in ways she is unable or unwilling to explain, lying and acting in secret without compunction.

And the most you can hope for is that, in about six to eight years, you will be able to become friends. Maybe you’ll talk on the phone once or twice a week, or have lunch on Sundays if she lives close by. For now, it is nothing but death, the death of a relationship you didn’t realize you’d relied on so much, a relationship whose end has taken you completely by surprise, more than the death of any love affair ever could. The little girl who used to draw pictures of you, who always wanted you when her knee or her feelings got scraped, who brought you half-wilted dandelions in her excited grubby fist is gone. She is doing exactly what she is supposed to do by leaving all that behind. By leaving you behind.

And you, Mother, are doing exactly what you are supposed to do: grieving alone, trying to find out who you are going to be now, laughing if you can at the way you worried so much about the pain of childbirth, but gave not a thought to the intensely crushing pain of a child growing up. It seemed so far away then.

that “the best mom I can be” is still a pretty crappy mom. My preteen, who will be 12 next month, has been so challenging lately. And I say “challenging” only because I’m trying to at least sound like a good mom right now.

I’ve been trying to hard to listen, sympathize, avoid advice unless asked or unless it’s a health/safety issue (like when recently she talked about getting a tan this summer). There are boy issues, there are sometimes friend issues, and there are academic issues (in that she hates math and struggles with it, even though she’s in the advanced math course). I listen and sympathize and give feedback when asked.

And still, it seems every conversation ends with, at best, her rolling her eyes and saying “whatever” or something similar, and, at worst, her crying and screaming and running to close herself in her room with a slammed door.

I know this is all typical, probably unremarkable behavior, but it feels rotten. I feel like I’m trying very hard to be a good mom, not only to her but also to my other two, and all of this is seriously draining my energy and my happiness. I’m starting to wonder if I ever should’ve had kids, especially since I know that this is only the beginning of a lot of difficult years. I mean, Ramona will turn 18 in 2023.

What have I done?

And more importantly, how in the hell am I going to get through this?

has resisted naps for the last three days. Yesterday the only nap she took was in Patrick’s arms during A’s winter concert. By 6 pm she was a mess.

She’s way too tired to be giving up naps. I don’t know if she’s teething or what—she says her teeth don’t hurt, but she does seem to have some coming in, so maybe she’s misinterpreting my question about teeth hurting. Plus, yesterday, the hinges on her bedroom door suddenly became creaky. I had her down and asleep once, and then the hinges woke her up.

Today I’m going to oil the hinges, give her some tylenol before nap time, and try not to freak out if she still doesn’t nap.

11. (Inspired by SoCal’s writing) My children don’t belong to me. They are really just on loan to me. I can advise, protect, help, discipline, and guide, but that’s all. Even those things I can do are somewhat limited. (Thanks, SoCal!)

what to do about my 8 y.o., Audrey. She is such a challenging child, and I feel completely at a loss with her. She is (and has always been, this isn’t a new development) argumentative and defiant. She doesn’t care whether it’s me, her teacher, her principal, or an adult she doesn’t know well (like another teacher at her school), she will argue and refuse to follow directions. That’s her first response to being told to do anything.

When she does do something, she drags it out. She has spent two hours doing her after-dinner clean-up duties. We live a block (literally) from her school, and it takes her 20-25 minutes to get home in the afternoons.

Time-outs don’t bother her. She’s a daydreamer, and would just as soon sit in time-out and daydream as do anything else. I don’t believe in corporal punishment so I won’t do that.

The only thing that seems to work at all is having her write lines. I try to phrase them positively (i.e., “I will do what my parents and step-parents tell me to do”). But yesterday I gave her lines to write, and she dragged it out so that she spent the entire afternoon and evening, until bedtime, writing lines and doing her homework. The only other things she did were eat dinner and take a shower.

And then this morning, she talked back, refused to follow directions, screeched at me, and otherwise violated the rules I’d had her write lines about yesterday.

Her father and I separated and started divorce proceedings when she was almost four. This behavior preceeded that, but maybe the divorce has made things worse—I don’t know. I do know that she plays the two homes off each other. Her older sister did that for awhile but quickly learned that doing so was more harmful than good. I don’t know whether Audrey is learning that. Her other household seems to fall for that type of thing pretty often, and that has increased tension between the households as well as giving her positive reinforcement for that behavior.

Audrey is highly intelligent, reading at a high school level, and very logical and rational. She is in fact excellent at arguing, and it’s genuinely difficult to avoid getting pulled into an argument with her.

So I’m trying to figure out what to do. Her teacher last year was something of a marine corps type and that worked great for Audrey. I was afraid at first that it would just make her used to getting into trouble and she’d get worse. Instead, her behavior last year was so much better, at home and at school. This year she has a touchy-feely teacher who goes out of her way to avoid embarrassing anyone. This teacher would’ve been a great fit for Meredith, but I think Audrey needs a teacher with a mean streak.

Previous years (K4, K5, 1st grade) when she had less mean teachers, the teachers grew to dislike her and got fed up with dealing with her. The guidance counselor tried to help (we had Audrey sign a behavior contract with the teacher, g.c., and both parents, e.g.) but really nothing worked until she had the really strict teacher last year.

I’m starting to feel like the weeks are all full of arguing and line-writing, and it’s frustrating and depressing. I just don’t know what to do with this kid . . . .

1. I love my children more than anything, and nothing will ever change that.

2. I am human and will make mistakes, but I will always try to do my best as a mother.

3. The best interest of my children will always be my highest priority in anything I do or any decision I make.

4. I will do my best to support my children even if I don’t agree with what they are doing, as long as what they are doing is not unhealthy or unsafe.

5. I will do my best to protect my children from anything I believe to be unhealthy or unsafe.

6. I support my children’s right to make their own decisions and their own mistakes, and as they get older, I will try to increasingly allow them to do that unless they ask me for advice.

7. I will do my best to model for my children what I believe to be right.

8. You can’t change people, except for yourself. Don’t try to change others. And especially don’t base any plans for your future on the assumption that you’ll be able to change another person.

9. Having a job you love may not always be possible at every point in your life. But having a job you hate will kill your soul.

10. Do the right thing, regardless of whether anyone else will ever know, and regardless of whether you expect consequences. Honor the person you know yourself to be.

(To be continued . . .)

with this one right now. My two older daughters’ other household is presenting certain challenges that make it hard for me to think about anything else.

I love my children more than anything in the world. Sometimes that makes life very, very difficult.

I’m hoping the paints are as washable as the package claims. :-)

We released the butterflies a couple days ago.