This week, I mowed the lawn with Nicholas in the Snugli. This wasn’t some heroic case of overachieving, or even a desire to get some exercise—though it was definitely great exercise. It’s just that we’re trying to paint the kitchen this weekend (along with several other big projects), and the lawn desperately needed cutting…and Nicholas would not sit in his bouncy seat while I did it.
My neighbor laughed at me. “You’re Supermom!” she said.
This is not the first time I’ve been called that. But I don’t feel like a super mom.
Lately I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with myself. It’s been coming on gradually, its development slowed by the return of music to the creative wellspring. But I’m a mother first, writer second, so I have to choose between music and prose. Where one blossoms, the other atrophies. Even my blogging feels stale and uninspired, which bugs me right down to the heart of things. I feel like the Queen of half-@$$ lately.
I mowed the lawn carrying the baby, but only the front and sides, and Christian had to finish it after work.
I planted strawberries and herbs, but they’re overgrown with thyme and oregano flowers…not to mention crab grass. Reclaiming the garden has been on my to-do list for three weeks.
I keep the laundry clean, but it never gets put away before the next round, so we live with a pile of clean, unfolded clothes at the top of the stairs at all times, and I often change diapers out of the hallway. (We use cloth diapers.)
I sweep the kitchen a couple times a week, but as Julianna throws food on the floor at every meal, this is woefully inadequate.
Christian and I co-direct the parish contemporary group, but I’m always pulling it together on the fly, because I never take time to plan. This summer we’ve had such spotty attendance that I can’t help feeling responsible. Why would people commit to something if the director can’t even make an appropriate commitment?
We bought a Cricut as an early birthday present, but after two weeks, I have yet to break the seal on the box!
But let’s not get carried away by the little stuff.
I’m toilet training Julianna, but it’s such a hassle with two other kids that I usually only get her on one extra time every day, so she has no reason to hold it; she never knows if I’m going to give her an opportunity to go or not.
I take the kids to the woods, set up play dates, keep Julianna’s therapy schedule straight, explore options for schooling for her, set limits on TV, read to them as much as I possibly can, cook with them, and take them on outings to keep the schedule fresh. But I hardly ever play with Julianna; I tell Alex “no” more than I tell him “yes;” and more often than not, I spend nursing times reading or checking email, anything but focusing on my baby.
I try not to compare my kids to others’, but when Alex’s playmate comes when called and obeys his mother quietly without a single sassy word, I just want to throw my hands up in the air. It must be at least partly my fault that my son argues with me over EVERYTHING—that he has to be shouted at five times before he even hears the instruction I’m issuing—that he breaks everything and then tries to blame me for it. He blows my mind with the things he comes up with to do to toys. And siblings. If I say it once a day, I say it ten times: “Why would you even DO that?”
I try to tell myself that young childhood will be gone before I know it—to keep my eyes on the big picture, the reason why we’ve chosen to have children as close together as we have. But even my mother—housewife, farmwife, stay-at-home mom-turned state representative—thinks I’m taking on too much. A few weeks ago I said, “I have some news,” and her reaction was, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
Christian says that everybody’s attention is splintered too many directions—that no one gets to focus the way they want to. But I can’t help thinking this isn’t the way life was meant to be. I can’t help thinking that there is a solution out there, if I was only good enough to find it.
But then, I suppose, I really would be a Supermom.
Kathleen M. Basi 