It’s Not Easy Being A Mom

I think I’m a good mother. A great mother, in fact. But I’ve had my moments. Not negligent moments, mind you, like I’ve never left my three kids – when they were under the age of five – home alone (with only the cats to babysit) so I could go out “partying” with the “girlzzz” (though I may have wanted to a few times). I’ve never hit anybody with a hammer (heaven forbid) or even a straw broom.

I will admit however to hanging up a few snowsuits really hard, and to “dropping” apples into the crisper rather than “setting” them in there. I was the one who paid the price for that when the kids refused to eat them after because they were bruised – isn’t that always the way? And more than once, I’ve folded laundry with such irritability that my fingers ended up slightly chafed from me pressing down so hard along the creases of the fabric.

No, I’ve never done “lines of coke” in the bathroom between the cake and presents at a birthday party, nor have I told the kids that they were “worthless pieces of shit” no matter how “are you kidding me with that attitude” difficult they were, but I have taken an entire Nintendo system (with games) to the thrift store out of spite. (It had been a long and frustrating six months, if I recall – kids go through some “we will fight over every single thing” phases, you know.) You could argue the disposal of a video game system to be a “good” mother moment. My children didn’t see it that way. Neither did my husband.

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Why Does It Seem Like Everyone In My Family Has OCD?

A few people in my family (including myself) claim to have OCD. And they/we probably do. Nobody has been officially tested, and nobody’s seen a doctor about it. Sure, we’ve all done the “do you have to check that the stove has been turned off five times before going to bed/do you have to eat ALL the peas on your plate because you don’t want one to feel left out/do you worry that you might accidentally shop lift one day when clearly you wouldn’t because you don’t think that shop lifting is a socially acceptable thing to do” online quizzes, and the answer was yes, bloody hell, yes.

A few of us (well, one of us) can’t even eat his supper and would rather starve “if there are tomatoes, or tomato sauce, or pieces of tomato skin (that’s the worst), or the suggestion of tomato products anywhere around, on, or in the near vicinity of his dinner plates, the stove, or the kitchen counter in general” and he’s not two years old. He’s twenty-four. To him, tomatoes are like the devil and should be banned from this planet, apparently. Ah, good old first world problems.

Yes, we are all a little neurotic around here, and sometimes – just sometimes – we like to give that neuroticism a name, so we label ourselves OCD, and it makes us feel better; it makes us feel like we are NOT alone, like other people do and think crazy shit as well.

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Mothers Who Worry Too Much

Currently, we are dog-sitting my younger son’s crazy little pup, Wolfie Junior. OK sorry, he’s not crazy per se; he’s just really busy and needy and he bites feet and faces and eats paper and glass and slippers and everything he shouldn’t, but from what I’ve heard is pretty normal for dogs, but which also (according to my son) is MY fault. He’s not like that at home apparently. Sure. 

Now, you have to understand, I am not used to dogs – having to constantly tell them to leave these things alone and to STOP sticking their nose in my underwear. Jesus, cats don’t need that reminder. Nor am I used to letting animals suffer needlessly in crates if I can help it. And this dog does NOT like his crate. So like the softy that I am, I’ve just been either staying home with him, or making my daughter or husband do the same, or taking him everywhere I go. Yeah, he’s being totally spoiled.

Anyway yesterday, I had to go with my daughter to the bank to pick up a form that she needed for school. She wasn’t sure what to ask for, so I agreed to go with her. Of course, having the dog complicated things.

In no uncertain terms, she said, “You ARE coming in with me. I’m not interested in looking like an idiot because I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Young people and their pride – sheesh.

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Don’t Ever Take Life For Granted

Coming home from the mall the other day in the car, I went to stop at an intersection and I hit a patch of black ice, which then caused me to slide right out into oncoming traffic. It was a few seconds of pandemonium, with me jamming on the brakes hard, and frantically (and pathetically, as my husband would say because he’d know what to do – obviously) waving my hands in the air, and my daughter yelling, “Mom, mom, mom, what the fuck? Are you trying to kill us?”

Clearly, I wasn’t. I’m not a maniac. I was just trying to drive home so she could start making supper, probably to next tell me that we’d forgotten a “key” ingredient, which I’d have to go back to the store to get anyway, because you cannot change the Chez Tess scheduled menu, nor can you make any sort of substitutions, even if it’s something like replacing white flour with whole wheat flour, which in my opinion, would be the better choice, but for her, would be the end of the goddamn world. Silly me.

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Is Mother’s Intuition Real?

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t claim to know the things they know. But I am a mother, and when it comes to my children, I believe I have a “sixth” sense. I’m pretty good at recognizing when they are really sick or really hurt – and not just suffering from a pathetically simple, “no you don’t need Penicillin or Demerol or Xanax (as if)” head cold, and not just throwing up because they are hung over even though they deny it, and not just needing to stay home from school because they “have a test today and didn’t study for it”, and not just “distressingly hobbling about because they twisted an ankle playing soccer and now it’s broken, but when I ask them if they want Chinese food, they magically run across the room”. OK, so my husband could help me with that last one. He’s an orthopaedic surgeon.

All mothers have this otherworldly “kinesthesia”, this “ability to know things, don’t ask how” – at least, most of us do. It’s part of our biology, our scientific, rudimentary, plasmic, constitutional, nuclear, basil (is that a spice?) make-up. Like knowing to check the doors at night to see if anyone has locked them – they haven’t. Like knowing when NOT to ask my daughter about her schoolwork/to help clean the house/to be nice to her brothers so she doesn’t bite my head off (she’s pre-period, duh!) – as smart as he is, that’s a skill that my husband does NOT possess. Like knowing to bring snacks on a two-hour car ride (even when the kids are adults), because low blood sugar means low blood sugar no matter how old you are, and it can turn a perfectly normal boy/young man into a monster, so it’s best to be prepared.

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