Day #36: Lazy Mom
It was another really nice day today but hard to get myself to get outside with the kids even. I haven't worn anything more substantial than my slippers in 2 days and I took a long nap with Max late this afternoon. Spent a lot of time today playing useless games on my phone and listening to Harry Potter on audiobook. I feel really guilty about it but am trying not to...I can't be Julie the Cruise Director and make every day a grand adventure, I just haven't got it in me.
I've been thinking a lot about my own mom since I wrote yesterday. She was in a lot of ways a person from a different time. This was the 1980s and while I will not say this was the first generation of the working mom, because statements like that show a lot of ignorance and privilege, I think for a suburban neighborhood like the one I grew up in my childhood or the childhoods of kids five or ten years older than me would have been the first time more of us had working moms than at home moms. I was part of a generation of latchkey kids but I wasn't one. My mom left the work force when my sister was born and while she volunteered like a crazy person and had some side gigs here and there (including some housecleaning and the year and a half she had the world's most awful jury duty 2 days every other week,) she didn't go back to work in a real way until I was 15 and she started teaching preschool.
It would have been normal for my grandmothers to bake bread for their families once a week but when my mom did it in the 1980s she was the only one I knew. Nobody's mom baked bread. The occasional cookies, of course, birthday cakes, for sure, but bread? When I was about 9 she stopped doing it, figuring that no one really appreciated it, and we were all quite surprised....where did the good bread go? After that it was an only on occasion thing but there were still almost always homebaked something....peanut butter bars and banana bread and her famous zuchinni bread that I've almost cracked the code on. I have her recipe notebook but I'm learning most of the recipes require tweaks that didn't get written down.
As a stay at home mom of small children myself now, I have no idea how she did it. She's a lot to live up to, really, but I have to remember the memory of her is just that, a memory. Memories by definiion aren't real or thorough, they are just whatever your mind has decided is worth saving from a time period. It is really easy when someone dies young and you can't ask them later what it was really like to remember an idealized version and I know I've done that for her. If she was doing all that baking when I was a child there must have been times when she had to send me away to do something else, couldn't play with me all the time. You simply can't answer every whim of a small child when you are elbows deep in bread dough. I know, because I've been elbows deep in bread dough three days in a row now.
For the people of my faith, this is the holiest of weeks. In fact, Passover began last night so we are not the only faith having some of our most sacred days. Today is Maundy Thursday, the date we commemorate the new commandment of Christ, to love one another. This isn't a religious blog and that statement is the only religion I will throw out, I will only say this: forgiveness is big in my faith and it's an easy word to throw around but an incredibly difficult thing to do. And one of the things that is the hardest is to forgive yourself.
Every day we go through this, in fact every day of motherhood, although this brings everything under a giant magnifying glass, I feel like I fail. I don't give them enough attention, I give them too much, I don't teach anything, I put too much pressure on them to do school, I am too harsh with my words, I don't pay enough attention to them. And yet every day James has told me I'm the best mom. Maybe once in awhile I should believe him. If I think back I know my mom spoke harshly to me too at times but it's not the memory my brain holds.
I hope to release the podcast James and I are producing sometime this weekend. It's not much...the two of us talk about Magic School Bus episodes, it's incredibly silly...but I hope the recordings of the two of us just sitting there talking, just for a few minutes, will be something small I can hold onto....a reminder that whatever I did or didn't do we spent the time together and we laughed and loved each other.
Today I'm grateful for James, Harry Potter audiobooks, sunshine, naps, the smell of bread dough rising, comfy slippers, good books, healthy family, and love.
I've been thinking a lot about my own mom since I wrote yesterday. She was in a lot of ways a person from a different time. This was the 1980s and while I will not say this was the first generation of the working mom, because statements like that show a lot of ignorance and privilege, I think for a suburban neighborhood like the one I grew up in my childhood or the childhoods of kids five or ten years older than me would have been the first time more of us had working moms than at home moms. I was part of a generation of latchkey kids but I wasn't one. My mom left the work force when my sister was born and while she volunteered like a crazy person and had some side gigs here and there (including some housecleaning and the year and a half she had the world's most awful jury duty 2 days every other week,) she didn't go back to work in a real way until I was 15 and she started teaching preschool.
It would have been normal for my grandmothers to bake bread for their families once a week but when my mom did it in the 1980s she was the only one I knew. Nobody's mom baked bread. The occasional cookies, of course, birthday cakes, for sure, but bread? When I was about 9 she stopped doing it, figuring that no one really appreciated it, and we were all quite surprised....where did the good bread go? After that it was an only on occasion thing but there were still almost always homebaked something....peanut butter bars and banana bread and her famous zuchinni bread that I've almost cracked the code on. I have her recipe notebook but I'm learning most of the recipes require tweaks that didn't get written down.
As a stay at home mom of small children myself now, I have no idea how she did it. She's a lot to live up to, really, but I have to remember the memory of her is just that, a memory. Memories by definiion aren't real or thorough, they are just whatever your mind has decided is worth saving from a time period. It is really easy when someone dies young and you can't ask them later what it was really like to remember an idealized version and I know I've done that for her. If she was doing all that baking when I was a child there must have been times when she had to send me away to do something else, couldn't play with me all the time. You simply can't answer every whim of a small child when you are elbows deep in bread dough. I know, because I've been elbows deep in bread dough three days in a row now.
For the people of my faith, this is the holiest of weeks. In fact, Passover began last night so we are not the only faith having some of our most sacred days. Today is Maundy Thursday, the date we commemorate the new commandment of Christ, to love one another. This isn't a religious blog and that statement is the only religion I will throw out, I will only say this: forgiveness is big in my faith and it's an easy word to throw around but an incredibly difficult thing to do. And one of the things that is the hardest is to forgive yourself.
Every day we go through this, in fact every day of motherhood, although this brings everything under a giant magnifying glass, I feel like I fail. I don't give them enough attention, I give them too much, I don't teach anything, I put too much pressure on them to do school, I am too harsh with my words, I don't pay enough attention to them. And yet every day James has told me I'm the best mom. Maybe once in awhile I should believe him. If I think back I know my mom spoke harshly to me too at times but it's not the memory my brain holds.
I hope to release the podcast James and I are producing sometime this weekend. It's not much...the two of us talk about Magic School Bus episodes, it's incredibly silly...but I hope the recordings of the two of us just sitting there talking, just for a few minutes, will be something small I can hold onto....a reminder that whatever I did or didn't do we spent the time together and we laughed and loved each other.
Today I'm grateful for James, Harry Potter audiobooks, sunshine, naps, the smell of bread dough rising, comfy slippers, good books, healthy family, and love.
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