Category Archives: For Mothers

Exposed by Proximity

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Children scare me. Even my own children. I do not like this, and admit it reluctantly. Children make noises at the wrong times, go where they shouldn’t in the blink of an eye, and express emotions with their bodies. In a word, they are unpredictable. 

The most likely culprit for my fear and discomfort is a desire to feel safe by being in control. This is also something I don’t want to admit. Isn’t it better to go with the flow? Not to mention that control is largely an illusion anyway. And Jesus not only loved children; He suggested we emulate them.

But that doesn’t help me with in-the-trenches moments with kids. I can’t ever find the one right answer I’m looking for. Should a kid have snacks or eat only at mealtimes? If I give someone else’s kid dessert, or put on a TV show, will that be the end of life as we know it? If two toddlers fight, and both hurt each other, do we call it even and move on, or should they be punished or lectured? How do I know in what moments to expect my children to toe the line, and in what moments to suspend expectations and get ice cream? And don’t even start on the pros and cons of vaccines. 

No matter the age of a child, my response to them could affect them for the rest of their lifetime. I am not okay with this. Will I be the one who offers grace or wisdom or a listening ear that gives permission for a child to like themselves? Or will I give advice at the wrong time, be lenient when the consequences are life threatening, or give peanut butter crackers to the kindergartner with a severe peanut allergy and get locked up for murder?

The stakes are too high. Somebody please lower them. Tell me I don’t have influence, I’m not culpable, my instincts can never go wrong. But no, once more I must make peace with uncertainty. I must receive the truth that I will both harm and help my children and other children. Sometimes I will hurt and another will heal. Sometimes I will heal what another has hurt. And some hurts won’t be healed. 

No matter the stakes, I am not superhuman. I will break what needs to be held together, and I will clamp down on what needs to be released. Damn, I hate that. 

Then again, maybe the children in my life are my greatest ally in accepting my humanness. I doubt the fear will go away. But maybe it could prompt a mantra: I am in this moment, with this child, and we are both getting to know ourselves. There’s something sacred under the scary feeling, a gift of mutual vulnerability that exists here where I am exposed.

Mothers Are Stalkers

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Every mother is a stalker—stealthy as a fox, or loud and proud as a heckler. 

She may try on other hats—friend, playmate, shopping buddy, or cook. But she will always return to the well-worn stalker cap. 

No one knows exactly why. Perhaps all those years of sleep deprivation affected her brain. Or maybe her partner has become boring and she needs to trail someone interesting. Or her dream of being a paparazzo never panned out and she’s done repressing her hunger for juicy stories.

Could it be revenge—on her own mother, or on her child—for needing her when she didn’t want to be needed? Is it fear, masquerading as care? Control masquerading as curiosity? Perhaps sheer boredom is the culprit. 

Or it could be force of habit—one that began while watching an infant’s chest rise and fall, then following a toddler through play structures, teaching a child how to use a toothbrush, then how to handle a kitchen knife. A long stint as chauffeur cements the habit, and by the time a kid has wheels of their own, stalking is like a nervous mother-twitch that can’t be medicated.

Whatever the case, mothers are stalkers, and children are their prey. They follow, but never shoot. They scribble notes and report to their partner in bed at night. They buy new camo when the old is detected, and they keep on stalking even when the tap-tap of their walkers is a dead giveaway.

And, depending on your religious beliefs, upon death they have the best of all—that birds-eye view they always wanted, the ability to hover without being detected, and maybe even a direct line to put in a few suggestions to God about how their child’s life should go.

The Red Circle

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A perfect dark-red, circular spot on the beige carpet. I reached down and touched it, first with a finger and then my thumb, pressing lightly. Sure enough, something wet and red thinly coated my fingers. It had to be blood. But where did it come from?

“There’s blood on the carpet,” I announced to my mother. We had just spent 40 minutes getting her from the dining table to the couch—a distance of about 12 feet. She was certain I couldn’t help her stand up, that my dad had to be there for her to move. My parents recently relocated, and dad was at the old house cleaning out the garage. They would sign closing documents that afternoon for the sale of the house. I came to be with my mother, whose mobility and cognitive ability had declined rapidly over the past few months.

Back at the dining table, I’d held out my arms to help her stand, but she made no attempt to respond. I moved the walker in front of her and held it steady so she could pull herself up, but still she didn’t move. Then she wanted to get down to the floor and crawl. She instructed me to bring some towels to soften the floor. I spread a thick blanket, doubled over, between her dining chair and the edge of the living room carpet. She leaned forward and tried to rest a hand on the floor, but lost her nerve. At her insistence, we called my dad. He said yes, I could move her. Again, I held out my arms—no response. I brought the walker over—she tried holding it in different ways but never got to the standing-up part. She tried again to get to the floor with similar results—her hesitant hand reached low.

I kept offering to help her stand, as that seemed to me the best option, but she said she didn’t want to hurt me. She is several inches taller than me, but only a few pounds heavier. I had helped her stand and walk many times before. Perhaps her reticence resulted from a recent fall, although I wasn’t there at the time of her fall. She asked who else could help her and named an acquaintance who had visited a couple days before. When she determined that I was, indeed, the only available person to move her, she asked for my dad again and cried. An hour earlier she had announced, “This afternoon I’m scheduled to have a nervous breakdown.” I was beginning to agree.

My mother insisted that she could not stand up with her feet on the smooth floor of the dining room, but only on the carpet. In response, I grabbed the front legs of the wooden chair she occupied and pulled it to the edge of the carpet. Now we had less than six feet to go. I held out my arms again, instructing her to hold onto my biceps as I held her elbows. I planted my knees against her right leg and pulled her up—sort of. She doesn’t straighten up all the way when she stands. I put my arm around her back to keep her from sinking back down, and pulled the walker in front of her.

A one-inch scooch, a six-inch step, a rapid little shuffle. She leaned forward on her toes, her center of gravity moving precariously in front of her as her heels came off the floor. I lifted her foot so she could move it forward. Then again the other foot. Then a step on her own. Then a one-inch scooch. Somehow she got her back turned to the couch and sank down onto the cushions. However, she wanted to lie, and would need to be closer to one end of the couch to make room for her legs to stretch out. Rather than attempt convincing her to stand again, I grabbed her blue jeans on each side of her hips and heaved her slowly across the couch. I lifted her feet onto the couch, then blue-jean-heaved her a little more until her hips rested perpendicular to the back of the couch. A large array of pillows served as a back rest. I spread a fluffy white blanket over her.

“I haven’t brushed my teeth in three days.” She seemed worried about looking well-kept for the house signing, although I had no idea how long it really had been since she last brushed. I poked around in the bathroom drawers and cupboards until I found floss, toothpaste, and toothbrush. She couldn’t floss. I tore off a piece of waxed floss, wound the ends around my fingers, and started with the teeth that were easiest to reach. After flossing most of her teeth, I handed her the toothbrush, which she had instructed me to wet, but not apply toothpaste. She proceeded with brushing on her own. When she finished, she asked me to take a picture of her shiny clean smile and text it to my dad.

It was at this point I noticed the red spot on the carpet. What could have produced a clean drop of blood? My mother suggested I check her knee, which I did—but given that she had jeans on, it couldn’t have dripped blood unless she had a gushing wound that soaked her pants in blood. We checked her elbows too—had she bumped into something and not realized it? No, no signs of blood on my mother. “I’m on my period,” I confessed, “but I don’t understand how I could have dripped blood on the floor like that.” As we discussed the possibilities, she concluded that my menstrual bleeding was the mostly likely culprit.

I wetted a paper towel in the kitchen and went to work on the red spot. Much to my relief, it came out of the carpet with minimal scrubbing. I had no interest in staining carpet at my parents’ house—the very same parents who kept cream-colored carpet in near-perfect condition for 20 years while farming and raising two kids. I knew better than to soil it.

As I turned, my mother noticed blood on my shorts. Another piece of the puzzle. I hastened to the restroom and found that indeed there was blood on my shorts. They were loose, pink-purple shorts made of sweat-pant material. As I cleaned them the best I could without actually taking them off and washing them, I realized what must have happened. When I sat on the edge of the couch to floss my mom’s teeth, I must have leaned into such a position that my underwear and pad weren’t fully in place. Hence, a few drops of blood had fallen onto my shorts, and from there one of them dripped to the carpet.

I have this idea that at 40 years of age, period “accidents” should be a thing of the past. It’s not like I’m new at this bleeding-out-of-my-vagina thing. But there I was, cleaning blood from various surfaces. My mother was unconcerned, a conversational ally as we pieced together what had happened. How strange that in the afternoon’s events, simply standing up would be infinitely more stressful than blood on the carpet.

Oddly, when it was all over, I primarily felt gratitude. It’s awkward to be a fully functional person around a not-fully-functional person. It feels weird that I can floss my teeth and walk where I want to, and my mother can’t. I’m never quite certain what to offer in terms of help, and since her mobility and cognitive ability are a little different each time I visit—sometimes more and sometimes less—it’s a moment-by-moment game. Not the kind of game I’m good at.

This blood on the floor was a gift. An opportunity for me to be vulnerable, to need help solving a problem, to have an awkward dysfunction of sorts. It allowed our roles to feel just a bit more “normal” for a few minutes—she the mother, I the child. I miss that.

A Mother’s Mundane Conundrum

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“You’re just making me do it!” my daughter says with a surprising amount of conviction. “You just decided I have to do it.” She’s not wrong. Nothing will happen if she doesn’t clean her room. No one cares about it except me. I feel called out as an unnecessarily controlling parent, just as I do each time one of my daughters confronts me with these sentiments.

It seems I have arbitrarily decided most of the content of their lives. I require showers, food other than fruit and juice, feeding pets, getting out of the house for school—with clothes, lunch, piano books, shoes appropriate for PE, and a sweater. Would anything dire happen if all those things were left undone? No. One or both daughters could go to school late, in PJ’s, without a lunch, wearing the wrong shoes, and sweaterless. In fact, she could probably do that for a week before anything interesting or significant took place in response to her choices.

I dislike this feeling that I am the only reason she does most of what she does. And I don’t like it when she confronts me about it. I don’t know what to say. I agree with her. Most expectations really are arbitrary—for adults as well as kids.

There are plenty of things I could say that I don’t want to say. I could say, “Someday you’ll have a job,” but that has no meaning whatsoever to a nine-year-old. Or, “You have to learn to do things now so I’m not still reminding you when you’re thirty,” but is there any real danger of that? Or, “I’ll be embarrassed if you go to school in pajamas,” but do I really want to teach my kids to make decisions based on my embarrassment? Or, “Nasty things will start growing in your room if you don’t clean it,” —okay, maybe a month from now, so is that really motivation to tidy it up today? Or, “I’m your mom and I get to decide what you need,” except that I don’t think anyone should decide another person’s needs for them. You get the idea.

So here I am with nothing to say, a truthful human being looking me in the face, questioning my demands—and why are they demands? Perhaps because requests and suggestions haven’t worked, or because my emotions are now fueling this high-octane—but nevertheless mundane—occurance.

“You’re right,” I say. “I can’t actually make your body and your arms and legs do anything. But I can remind you there will be no screen time until chores are done. And if you don’t do chores today I might give you an extra cleaning job tomorrow.” This comes out sounding a tad desperate, and something like a threat—not exactly what I was going for. But you do what you have to do.

Motherhood seems to be a mix of desperation and compassion, empathy and threats, logic and insanity. Is that what childhood feels like too?

She whimpers. She complains it’s not fair. But eventually she trudges to her room and starts picking up clothes off the floor. My heart rate returns to normal as I breathe a sigh of relief. With any luck, I’ll have at least five minutes before this conversation repeats itself with my other daughter. Meanwhile, I whimper and complain internally as I return to a pyramid of dirty dishes. I guess we’re not wholly different.

How to Be a Mother

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Breathe. And not just
during the contractions.
You must be well-oxygenated
to care for another human being.

Give up. And not just
once. Keep at it.
You must release your grasp
before your muscles cramp.

Laugh. And not just
when it’s funny.
You must include sadness and shock
and exhaustion in your mirth.

Tell the truth. And not just
to yourself.
You must tell the other moms,
and listen to their tellings.

Accept your new self. And not just
the nurturing and brave parts.
You must accept the anger,
the desperation, the invisibility.

And remember to breathe.

Two New Holes

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Shortly after my May birthday last spring, I acquired two new holes in my body. I had my ears pierced.

One aspect of the conservative Christianity I grew up in is an aversion to body piercings. And tattoos, lipstick, and clothing that reveals feminine curves. When I left home as a I teen, I bought a padded bra, colored my hair with a box of dye from Walmart, and called it good for my rebellion. As a young adult I said I didn’t want to pierce my ears or get a tattoo because I have a low pain tolerance. Also, I faint for vaccinations, blood draws, and if I hit my knee or elbow too hard. (I fainted at the dentist once, and I fainted when I went to the college clinic to get a wart removed from my foot. The nurse sent me to Walmart to buy the kind of wart remover you paint on yourself.)

Why this sudden body piercing urge, you might ask, as I’m nearing the age of 40?

Last year, my nine-year-old daughter Kyli decided she wanted to get her ears pierced. “Why don’t you have your ears pierced, Mom?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t like pain.”

“Well, if you really wanted them pierced you would do it,” she countered.

Point taken. So I thought about it. I hoped quiet reflection might reveal something profound, but my reasons were a grab-bag—it hurts, most of my friends don’t wear earrings, it feels weird to do it now that I’m middle-aged, it seems unnatural to poke a hole in my body (morality aside), my parents won’t like it, and so on. Like I said, random, blah, blah, blah.

So I decided to give it a shot, get my ears pierced with Kyli, and see if I like wearing earrings. Rather than take the lead because of lived experience—my usual role as mother—I had the same questions, concerns and curiosities as Kyli. We’d be figuring this one out together.

We waited for the school year to finish since the kids attend a Christian school that doesn’t allow earrings (or colored nail polish—go figure). Kyli wanted to get earrings the moment school let out, so we made appointments at Ulta Beauty for 1pm on May 31st—one hour after school dismissal on the last day of the school year. We snagged Kyli’s bestie, got a bite to eat, and drove to the salon. Inside, past the rows of creams and powders and scents, we found a plump young lady ready to pierce our ears.

I signed the thing they handed me—a waiver?—while Kyli picked out studs. Her bestie pinched her arm hard to show her how much it would hurt. The plump lady drew dots on Kyli’s earlobes, asked us to examine them and approve the placement, then inserted a stud in a white hand-gun. Punch!—right ear done. Kyli’s eyes were wide, a combination of curiosity and alarm, as she took in the experience and tried to categorize it. Painful? Scary? No big deal? Before she could settle an answer, punch!—left ear done.

For the next minute, Kyli’s hands hovered around her ears, her instinct to squeeze them through the discomfort, at odds with her determination not to touch. I watched, ready to comfort. But I wasn’t needed. Bestie dragged her around the store, applying makeup until Kyli’s face was caked with several shades of foundation and blush and her fears forgotten.

Meanwhile, I warned the employee holding the ear-piercing gun that I’m a fainter. Judging by her look of alarm, I guessed she didn’t have a lot of experience with people fainting—either that or she had a memorably bad experience. “I’ll know if I’m going to faint, and I’ll tell you,” I assured her. She proceeded to draw dots on my ears, punch, punch, voilà! Little silver hearts rested on my earlobes. During those thirty seconds, I felt the same wide-eyed, uncertain curiosity Kyli’s face had conveyed, but when it was all over, decided the pain wasn’t worth mentioning. We took pictures, documenting this mother-daughter experience trying something new together.

All summer we cleaned around our earrings, front and back—twice a day at first, then less often. We cleaned them after showers, after swimming, after getting dirty in the yard. We twisted them around in the holes as we had been instructed, and left them in 24/7.

At first, earrings were more unnerving than I expected. It felt wrong to intentionally punch a hole in my body and take special care of it to keep it that way. Usually when I cut through my skin and flesh, I tend it carefully to facilitate healing. This was different. Also, for the first month or two, I felt slightly anxious about having something attached to my body that I couldn’t take off. When I went to bed and took off my watch and glasses, I wanted to put the earrings on my nightstand too. I wanted to take them out so my body could be just my body. During the night, I tried different positions with my pillow to put the least pressure on my earlobes.

After the prescribed six weeks, I hesitated to remove my earrings since they still oozed or bled occasionally. Kyli, tired of waiting to wear a favorite pair of earrings, took out the original studs and sported cute, sparkly flowers for a day. This joyous occasion deteriorated when I couldn’t find the right hole to get the original studs back in her ear. I had erroneously thought a hole was a hole, but the tip of the earring took it’s own course through the fleshy part of Kyli’s earlobe and came out the back in a different place!

Blood, tears, and parental concern and confusion ensued. We survived this try-to-find-the-right-hole circus two or three times over the next week, and eventually Kyli’s left ear was so unhappy she let it heal shut. When school began again in August, she wore a tiny clear stud in her right ear—which still oozed and bled sometimes. She didn’t want to remove that one, but also refused to get her left ear pierced again. We were deadlocked in pirate mode.

The first pair of earrings I bought came from a rock-and-mineral shop in a falling-apart historic building we stumbled across during a bathroom break on a road trip. They’re tiger’s-eye stones. I nearly passed out when I first put them in, but after lying on the bathroom floor and breathing deeply for a minute—usually an effective method to maintain consciousness—I returned to normal.

At this point, I’ve probably had as much fun buying earrings as wearing them. For more than six months, I didn’t leave my earrings out any longer than an hour—the holes still appeared tenuous. Either the original studs or one of my half-dozen new pairs of earrings stayed in my ears at all times. At last, a month or two ago, I slept truly naked for the first time. It felt good as good as I imagined.

In a few months, it will be a year since we pierced our ears. During that time, Kyli’s right ear developed big scabs and pus came out when I cleaned it, over and over, so a few weeks ago she took out the clear stud. It’s healing now, and she’s done with earrings for the time being. Meanwhile, I’m growing into the fun of it. My sister gave me a beautiful pair of iridescent hummingbird earrings for Christmas. Michael gave me a pair of book earrings for Valentines Day—I’d been looking and found surprisingly few options, and these are adorable tiny blue books with real pages. I wore them to the library this week, and felt that same satisfaction I get when my bra and underwear match—a covert sense of matching.

So, friend, if you’re forty-ish and thinking about earrings, here’s what I’ve learned: It’s a small adventure, and hey, maybe that’s what makes it fun. These years lean low on adventure—outside of parenting. And come to think of it, this adventure was tangentially brought to me by parenting—two new holes, the result of a question from my daughter.

How about you—any new holes in your life? Or body?

In Five or Six Hours the House Will Be Quiet

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I’m not okay. This is how I know it’s time to write.

I’m sitting in the kids’ room by the fire I lit for them—my attempt to dote on them since they stayed home from school today.

Sore throat again this morning—it has been almost daily for weeks with my younger daughter, Kyli. The older one, Kayt, said probably nothing is wrong with her but she doesn’t want to go to school. Middle school “friendship” has been sucking the life out of her. I can’t help but wonder if her chronic exhaustion and headaches are as much social as they are physical.

I shone a flashlight down two throats this morning. Kyli’s looked red, and Kayt’s had a weird white blob that dr. google says is a tonsil stone. Never heard of those before.

By the time I sit down to write, it’s midafternoon. Homework time downstairs has devolved. My stomach clenches in response to unharmonious sounds, insufficiently diminished by their travel up the stairs to my ears.

Now Kayt has come upstairs to whine and writhe. Technically she came up to say Kyli is bugging her and won’t stop. Since I made clear arrangements for Kyli to come upstairs if they weren’t enjoying sitting together, I feel a gallon of frustration and a drop of empathy. So I tell her to send Kyli upstairs, and that’s why she’s begging, moaning, and asking unanswerable questions in a nails-on-chalkboard tone of voice. She has a weird thing about not being alone.

At 7:15 this morning, when I usually would have been seeing the girls off to the bus, instead I set up appointments at the urgent care center. This change in schedule involved calling the bus driver and texting, let’s see,—their teacher, my yoga instructor, my husband, and several people I had plans with later in the day.

Did I mention the power outage? Just got yet another automated call from the power company. I have an outage that should be restored by 4:30pm, says the message. The power has already been back on for half an hour, and it’s currently 3:30. Not to mention just a few minutes ago I received an automated call informing me that the outage was caused by wildlife (read “squirrel”), and my power had been restored.

I think I’ve received five automated calls, including one that announced an outage had been reported in my area and a truck had been dispatched. Yes, I’m aware. I reported the outage when an explosive BANG and corresponding flash of light outside the dining room window resulted in all powered devices in our home going blank.

My husband is in Denver for work.

My sister is home with a sick kid as well.

My younger daughter made a “fun cutting station” on the floor in her room, where folks can experience the satisfaction of cutting various materials—like blue yarn (now in pieces all over the floor), tiny foam squares, a rubber armband (okay, that actually is super satisfying), and a plastic packing sleeve.

On the kitchen counter downstairs is a bowl of homemade slime that looks like a hot-pink pile of animal intestines. The dining table is covered with rubber stamps and paper, ink pads and embossing supplies, dirty dishes, purple slime, saltines, and homework.

Finally. I breathe. Here’s a moment of peace. Kyli is taking a break from homework, so I allow Kayt to study upstairs with me.

Kyli is quietly making a creature out of air-dry clay (a substance which already covers a significant portion of the bathroom counter due to a previous creative session this morning).

I don’t like the multiplying messes.

Sibling snarkyness nauseates me.

Most of my day has born no resemblance to the Wednesday I thought would unfold when I opened my eyes this morning.

But I ran on the treadmill and took a shower this morning, and in an unplanned burst of self-care I even dried and straightened my hair, and put in earrings. I’m sitting here by the fire, cat on the hearth, journaling. I did a marvelous breathing meditation from The Artist’s Rule, and I laughed with my girls.

After our visit to urgent care, we went to school and picked up homework (the current quarter ends in two days and there is a small state of panic about grades). Then we filled the car with gas for “real low cheap”* at the station near the school, stopped at Walmart for grocery pickup, and came home for the whole slime-making, lunch-eating, power-outage bonanza, followed by the Sibling Homework Crisis of 2024.

So I’m not okay.

But also I am.

Because it’s okay to not be okay.

And I’m grateful my kids don’t have strep, and … this just in: Kyli is cutting a stick of gum into pieces, holding the scissors above her mouth so each piece drops in … back to gratitude—for the fire warming my feet, for furry and purry kitties, for a relatively small pile of dishes in the kitchen sink. I haven’t yelled at my kids, and I have listened to them. I’m going out with girlfriends this evening.

And—bless Mother God—in five or six hours we’ll (fingers crossed) be tucked in bed and the house will. be. quiet.

*If you want to acquaint yourself with the phrase “real low cheap,” watch this.

Reasons for Self-Hatred

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“Many unhealthy behaviors begin as necessary coping mechanisms.”

I hear various versions of this sentiment repeatedly from therapists and psychologists. What may be a harmful habit today, they say, served us well in a previous season of life. I get how this applies to people-pleasing, secret-keeping, anger-stuffing, and high-performing. I’m less sure how it applies to self-hatred which, at first, sounds universally useless to me.

But maybe it did begin somewhere useful. Maybe my self-hatred sprouted when I couldn’t stop big feelings during infancy and toddlerhood, feelings that overwhelmed both me and the people around me. Flooded with emotion and its unwieldy side effects, what could I do but show my disagreement with the outburst by hating myself?

I buried self-hatred under the more acceptable coping behaviors of performing and pleasing. But whenever I couldn’t perform and please—when I showed up in the world in a way I didn’t like—self-hatred jumped out of the trunk to take the steering wheel.

There were more scenarios than I realized, as self-hatred tried every position in the car, from back-seat driver to navigation system, snack hoarder to complainer. Further exploration reveals at least a dozen ways self-hatred has served me:

  • It keeps me small, and being small keeps me from being seen, because being seen is risky.
  • It beats “them” to it. If I can make myself feel bad sooner and more than you can make me feel bad, I’m not vulnerable to you.
  • An excuse to be sad. When I don’t know why I feel depressed, loathing myself makes it seem legitimate … OR maybe I’m sad because I hate myself. Either way, it’s a handy excuse.
  • A layer of protection between you and my pain, and between myself and my pain. During the years of parenting my preschool daughters, hating that I was exhausted, angry, and shut down seemed easier than admitting I felt lonely, empty, scared, and inadequate.
  • A way to belong. When my mom got frustrated with herself, she often said, “I’m such an idiot.” I could fit in at home by thinking and speaking poorly of myself. And the church taught me not to toot my own horn. Apparently it’s not spiritually sound to think well of myself (leave that to God, I guess?), so self-hatred is also a way to fit in spiritually.
  • Keeps me from being perceived as naive as Pollyanna.
  • Protects me from trying to do things I’ll fail at.
  • A way of responding to failure—it spares me the time and energy of taking responsibility. (ouch)
  • A shortcut. It’s faster to process, “I did that because I’m bad,” than it is to process, “I did that because I’m human and humans get depleted and defeated sometimes, and what is depleting or defeating me right now?”
  • A form of power. When I had infants, I “couldn’t” be angry with them. In order to feel some control (power) over my anger, I directed it toward myself.
  • A way to remain in “relationship” with the unwanted parts of myself, even though the relationship is toxic.
  • It proves my loyalty to certain ideals. It allows me to act outside of my standards without confusing myself or anyone else by condoning the behavior. So self-hatred proves I have morals (even if I don’t live them out).

This all sounds so ridiculous.

And familiar.

All of a sudden, it sounds like a lazy way out, but it makes so much sense, and I feel sad, but grateful that I can see it, and profoundly grateful that other options are available to me. I don’t need to dislike myself to belong with people, and certainly not to belong with God. So maybe I can give it a break.

Go ahead, sit down and make your own list. It might be time to break up with one of your coping mechanisms.

Moms Don’t Know

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Moms Don’t Know

A mom doesn’t know
if nursing her baby
will be bliss or misery.
She doesn’t know how many weeks,
months, or years will pass before
she sleeps one whole night.
She doesn’t know if the bedtime boundary
is for the kid, or for her own sanity, or
who will be scarred by it 15 years from now.

Is crawling “early” a good sign?
Is learning to talk “late” a bad sign?
Is she spoiling with too many snacks,
or not offering enough?
Is it best to let the siblings fight it out
or to coach them through conflict?

Has she said “no” too little, or too much?
Does letting her daughter spend the night
at a friend’s house foster healthy independence,
or increase the likelihood of sexual abuse?
Does curating books and movies and music
benefit her kids or teach them to be
afraid of the world?

Moms don’t know
how their prayers will be answered,
their cooking remembered,
their mistakes retold.
They don’t know about the people
their grown child will feed and teach and hold,
or the nights he or she will go to bed early
because they know how to stop and rest.
Moms don’t know the impact
their love will have after they’re gone.
Moms just don’t know.

Toothpaste

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Toothpaste

Blessed are You,
Lord our God,
Queen of the Universe,
for chocolate chips
melted into a couch cushion,
bandaids on the shower wall,
and toothpaste. so. much. toothpaste—
crusted onto the tube,
smeared on the bathroom counter,
cemented to sinks and walls.

Blessed are You
for Cheerios on the kitchen floor
crushed into powder,
coat wet and dirty
from a night in the back yard,
sandal forever lost
in the mud of Anthony Lake,
chip crumbs in the bunk bed.

Blessed are You,
Lord our God,
Queen of the Universe,
for candle wax dripped
down the cupboard door,
Q-tips cut into pieces,
gum saved on the dining table “for later.”

Two young humans dwell here
who create often and live large.
May they always have
permission to be messy and alive,
and enough money for toothpaste.