"I'm bored!"
It's not just the mantra of 7-year-olds during summer vacation.
Sometimes a 34-year-old working mom of two falls finds herself saying
it. Like me, for instance. Like today, for instance.
It's not that I don't have things to do. I have plenty. I have things to
write, things to edit, things to fact-check AND edit, toys to rummage
through for the donation pile, laundry to do, dinner to cook, dogs to
bathe, kids to parent. I have seven years' worth of pictures that need
to get put in rough chronological order in a photo album I haven't yet
procured. My house could stand another vacuuming, even though I did that
this morning. I could scrub the baseboards, for the love of God.
But!
I don't want to. I'd rather just sit here while these things don't get done and think about how bored I am.
And I wonder how much of it is real boredom (if I were really bored, one
might argue, any one of those things listed above would cure me of it
but quick) and how much is that dreaded rut that people sometimes fall
into, when days beget days beget days that all start to bleed into one
another. Get up. Make breakfast. Drink coffee. Clean kitchen. Work. Do
toddler things. Work. Make lunch. Beg toddler to eat lunch. Work. Work.
Prep dinner. Eat dinner. Watch TV while working. Wait for bedtime.
Well, you get the idea. Sometimes I want something crazy to happen. A
ghost sighting, maybe, or to win the lottery. Even finding a lost dog
would up the interest quotient of the average day. Maybe I'll hold a
seance, drive to Georgia to buy some scratch-off tickets, or roam the
neighborhood looking for collarless dogs. We make our own luck, they
say.
Maybe it's just insecurity about mentioning "The Rut," which I think is
sort of a taboo topic, but I can hear people telling me to appreciate
what I've got, to live in the moment, to find beauty in the small
things. Shush, you. I DO. But I have to believe that I'm not the
only person in the world who has a good life and gets bored with it
every now and then. And for some reason the antsiness is at its worst on
Sunday afternoons. (What IS it with Sunday afternoons, anyway?)
This week Alex goes back to school, Katherine starts Mother's Day Out,
and I have about fifteen thousand things to do. I'm betting this time
next week, I'll be missing my rut. Maybe between now and then, I'll win
the lottery. Or see a ghost.
***
WARNING: I've made a halfhearted pledge to blog at least once a week for the rest of the year. I don't know how I'll fare with that, but I feel it's my duty to warn you that the topics might wear a little thin. Or be boring. Not unlike when one WRITES ABOUT BEING BORED.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Interest is relative
Parents know their children as the unique creatures they are, beautiful
and charming and intelligent to all kinds of dubious extremes. But to
suddenly and completely come to acknowledge your children as interesting beings, that's a whole new level of appreciation.
Alex saw a couple of meteors last night in the "shower," which, for us, consisted of three and a half sightings, the half being something that might have been a small meteor but was in all likelihood a small plane. Today, he started a meteor collection from rocks he found in the yard that, according to him, "are not the kind of rocks we have around here, and I rinsed them off in Katherine's water table and they didn't dissolve, so they're not just regular sand rocks, don't you think they're probably pieces of meteor?"
Why, yes. Yes I do. I do because one St. Patrick's Day the nice old man who lived behind us sent his granddaughter and me on a fool's errand looking for four-leaf clovers, and when we couldn't find any we tore one leaf of the three-leaf clovers in half to make a fourth leaf and showed him those, and then suddenly a leprechaun started leaving little surprises - like dollar bills! - around the house and yard that our good luck charms had supposedly conjured.
So yes, Alex, those could be meteors. In fact, if it makes your childhood a tad more interesting, they probably are.
Tomorrow we're going to a water park, and I'm silently dreading it. But he read his requisite number of pages in the library's summer reading program, got his free pass, and we're by-golly going. I will galumph around in a bathing suit all the livelong day and probably get sunburned and dodge screaming kids and let Alex splash me with geysers and ride behind him through claustrophobia-inducing tubes because it's his last week of summer break ever when he's 7 and I want him to have FUN. And I guess there's a chance that I might, too. I kind of like the kid.
Katherine, whom I also like but who is plucking away relentlessly at my last nerve tonight is in bed playing with her toy computer. It's barking repeatedly. It's past 9 p.m. She's 2. She should be asleep. Lately that has not been as easy as it used to be. She stands in her crib bellowing for me at the top of her lungs, then when I go in (as I inevitably do), she demands something, sometimes something weird. Sheep, socks, Mommy's book, mac and cheese, flowers, Alex, my phone, or one of the three songs I have it in my limited range to sing: Rock-a-bye Baby, the Elmo song, and the ABCs. I guess I could conceivably add Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to the repertoire because it's the same tune as the alphabet song, but I only just now considered that.
She's funny, that one. She can be bought with Dora fruit snacks. She hates it when Alex sits next to me. She has four dances: the Princess Dance, arms flung out spinning in circles; the Smarty-Pants Dance, little feet stomping, spinning in circles; the Katherine Dance, wild gesticulations, spinning in circles; and Mickey Mouse's own Hot-Dog Dance, arms flailing, no circles. She puts things down for naps, covering them with a blanket and giving gentle night-night kisses. Not just baby dolls and stuffed animals, but the remote control, her sippy cup, my feet. The first thing she says when we go in to get her out of her crib in the mornings is "I had good nap."
I feel like I have to keep a record of these things, because they change so quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I was bemoaning her slower-than-Alex speech development and marveling over her sleep patterns. It wasn't that long ago that Alex had baby-fine blond hair and toddled through the kitchen in the middle of the night sucking on butter and hiding carrots under his pillow. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of being parents was just that - an idea, albeit a scary and alien one.
And here we are, a second grader and a 2-year-old under our belts and still finding humor in the everyday. They play chess and he gives her pieces to click together so she'll feel like she's playing, too. We cuddle on the couch and make fun of Sprout shows. She whines and whines and then turns on a grin so dazzling, tiny bunny teeth gleaming, that you forget she's been driving you up the wall all day long and scoop her up into a big squishy hug.
I think I'm ready for school to start, but I have found a kind of deep, quiet, sometimes elusive satisfaction in these summer days that I didn't expect. Alex won't always make me heartbreakingly earnest presents of moon rocks and origami hearts. Katherine won't always beg to be picked up and exert her tree-frog embrace when I finally relent. They're fleeting, these times, and precious.
Tomorrow I'll likely be less sappy and more prone to rushing and entertaining small annoyances. That is if I survive the water park unscathed. But tonight I'm just happy for the blessings of my imperfect little family. If only amongst ourselves, we're an interesting bunch.
Alex saw a couple of meteors last night in the "shower," which, for us, consisted of three and a half sightings, the half being something that might have been a small meteor but was in all likelihood a small plane. Today, he started a meteor collection from rocks he found in the yard that, according to him, "are not the kind of rocks we have around here, and I rinsed them off in Katherine's water table and they didn't dissolve, so they're not just regular sand rocks, don't you think they're probably pieces of meteor?"
Why, yes. Yes I do. I do because one St. Patrick's Day the nice old man who lived behind us sent his granddaughter and me on a fool's errand looking for four-leaf clovers, and when we couldn't find any we tore one leaf of the three-leaf clovers in half to make a fourth leaf and showed him those, and then suddenly a leprechaun started leaving little surprises - like dollar bills! - around the house and yard that our good luck charms had supposedly conjured.
So yes, Alex, those could be meteors. In fact, if it makes your childhood a tad more interesting, they probably are.
Tomorrow we're going to a water park, and I'm silently dreading it. But he read his requisite number of pages in the library's summer reading program, got his free pass, and we're by-golly going. I will galumph around in a bathing suit all the livelong day and probably get sunburned and dodge screaming kids and let Alex splash me with geysers and ride behind him through claustrophobia-inducing tubes because it's his last week of summer break ever when he's 7 and I want him to have FUN. And I guess there's a chance that I might, too. I kind of like the kid.
Katherine, whom I also like but who is plucking away relentlessly at my last nerve tonight is in bed playing with her toy computer. It's barking repeatedly. It's past 9 p.m. She's 2. She should be asleep. Lately that has not been as easy as it used to be. She stands in her crib bellowing for me at the top of her lungs, then when I go in (as I inevitably do), she demands something, sometimes something weird. Sheep, socks, Mommy's book, mac and cheese, flowers, Alex, my phone, or one of the three songs I have it in my limited range to sing: Rock-a-bye Baby, the Elmo song, and the ABCs. I guess I could conceivably add Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to the repertoire because it's the same tune as the alphabet song, but I only just now considered that.
She's funny, that one. She can be bought with Dora fruit snacks. She hates it when Alex sits next to me. She has four dances: the Princess Dance, arms flung out spinning in circles; the Smarty-Pants Dance, little feet stomping, spinning in circles; the Katherine Dance, wild gesticulations, spinning in circles; and Mickey Mouse's own Hot-Dog Dance, arms flailing, no circles. She puts things down for naps, covering them with a blanket and giving gentle night-night kisses. Not just baby dolls and stuffed animals, but the remote control, her sippy cup, my feet. The first thing she says when we go in to get her out of her crib in the mornings is "I had good nap."
I feel like I have to keep a record of these things, because they change so quickly. It wasn't that long ago that I was bemoaning her slower-than-Alex speech development and marveling over her sleep patterns. It wasn't that long ago that Alex had baby-fine blond hair and toddled through the kitchen in the middle of the night sucking on butter and hiding carrots under his pillow. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of being parents was just that - an idea, albeit a scary and alien one.
And here we are, a second grader and a 2-year-old under our belts and still finding humor in the everyday. They play chess and he gives her pieces to click together so she'll feel like she's playing, too. We cuddle on the couch and make fun of Sprout shows. She whines and whines and then turns on a grin so dazzling, tiny bunny teeth gleaming, that you forget she's been driving you up the wall all day long and scoop her up into a big squishy hug.
I think I'm ready for school to start, but I have found a kind of deep, quiet, sometimes elusive satisfaction in these summer days that I didn't expect. Alex won't always make me heartbreakingly earnest presents of moon rocks and origami hearts. Katherine won't always beg to be picked up and exert her tree-frog embrace when I finally relent. They're fleeting, these times, and precious.
Tomorrow I'll likely be less sappy and more prone to rushing and entertaining small annoyances. That is if I survive the water park unscathed. But tonight I'm just happy for the blessings of my imperfect little family. If only amongst ourselves, we're an interesting bunch.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Disappointment
Disappointment. It's something we know from the time we know anything,
and something that never gets any easier. Not even when you know that
people are fallible, plans fall through, things break, failure is
inevitable, mistakes are numerous. We can't always get what we want,
what we think we need. It's a part of life, they say, but does it
matter? That doesn't help the heart accept it.
Maybe the worst is disappointment in people. I've been told that I have a tendency to put people on pedestals, and then I'm always, always surprised when they fall from them. The obvious solution is to stop doing that. I'm trying. People are people. People, each in their own way and to varying degrees, sometimes just suck. And I know I'm one of them. I make plans and cancel them, I break the occasional promise, I've been known to tell a lie or two, and not just of the little white variety. I worry that I'm not always good at being a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend. I worry that there are shortcomings I haven't even noticed yet. That I may sometimes be the source of someone's disappointment.
Because tonight I'm disappointed. Specifics aside, it's something that I know will pass in its own time. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe before bedtime. These things are fleeting, more often than not. I hope it is this time.
And if it's not, if it takes longer than I believe it should to shake it off and move on and forgive and forget, then I hope it serves some grander purpose. Maybe to make me stronger, less gullible, less likely to construct those questionably engineered pedestals in the first place. A girl can hope.
Maybe the worst is disappointment in people. I've been told that I have a tendency to put people on pedestals, and then I'm always, always surprised when they fall from them. The obvious solution is to stop doing that. I'm trying. People are people. People, each in their own way and to varying degrees, sometimes just suck. And I know I'm one of them. I make plans and cancel them, I break the occasional promise, I've been known to tell a lie or two, and not just of the little white variety. I worry that I'm not always good at being a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend. I worry that there are shortcomings I haven't even noticed yet. That I may sometimes be the source of someone's disappointment.
Because tonight I'm disappointed. Specifics aside, it's something that I know will pass in its own time. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe before bedtime. These things are fleeting, more often than not. I hope it is this time.
And if it's not, if it takes longer than I believe it should to shake it off and move on and forgive and forget, then I hope it serves some grander purpose. Maybe to make me stronger, less gullible, less likely to construct those questionably engineered pedestals in the first place. A girl can hope.
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