Tag Archives: motherhood

Hypocrisy

Posted on August 29, 2012 | 8 comments

I think the quality of a person’s parenting is in direct proportion to the degree of hypocrisy they embrace. This is more true the more colorful a life you have lived.

I have had a colorful life. I’m a colorful gal. Literally. I have nine tattoos only two of which are smaller than a salad plate.

Today after school Em was plastering temporary tattoos all over herself.

“Emily! Seriously. That is enough. Stop before you look like a crazy person.”

They say imitation is the hugest form of flattery.

If this is true – hypocrites make great parents and imitation is high praise – than my daughter adores me. And I am an incredibly good mother.

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The not so Simple…

Posted on August 26, 2012 | 16 comments

Yesterday was a SuperMom day. I went to bed in a freshly painted bedroom. I had two happy children. MQD and I squabbled in the morning but as per usual the conversation we had following was productive. I felt good.

The feeling carried over to this morning. I had coffee with Amy. The kids were good. I bought a mitre box and started a new project. I am framing out the mirror in our bathroom before I paint.  I scheduled a post for this afternoon about how perfect the last day of the Summer with your family can be.

I considered posting about my bedroom makeover but I feared it would sound like I was blowing sunshine up my own ass to compensate. For what? I didn’t know. But I worry when my posts tend towards the “Look at me!! Everything is peachy!!” too awful much.

So if you read and make clucking sounds and think “Damn, that chick must be so full of shit. No one is that happy” then pour yourself a drink!! Kick back!! This post is for you.

Lucy will not stop crying. Neither can I. I cut a perfect rectangle of molding to frame out the mirror in our bathroom. But the glue won’t hold and neither will the tape that is supposed to hold it until it is glued. I painted around the perimeter of the mirror with the color I have chosen for the bathroom and I am not sure I don’t hate it.

I want to open a bottle of wine and drink the whole damn thing but I can’t because somehow I managed to totally forget to buy anything to pack for Emily’s lunch tomorrow. And before you think “what the hell, can’t MQD go to the store?” he already offered but I’m such a control freak I want to go myself. God forbid I don’t pick out my own cheese sticks.

I called my mother when the third piece of molding from the mirror fell in to the paint and what came out of my mouth between the sobbing was not  “oh damn my mirror project looks like shit.”

It’s more embarrassing than that.

I don’t want to be home all alone with Lucy.

I love her with all of my heart. I want to feed her and sleep beside her. I want to console her when she is cuttng teeth. I want to see her take her first steps.

But I don’t necessarily want to hear the song that fucking singing glow worm makes again. I am not really that in to playing with stacking cups. Or putting the tupperware back in the cabinet 87 times a day.

With Emily home I had a plan. Get up. Exercise. Do a project. Eat lunch. Pool. Shower. Dad’s home. Dinner. All the while I am with my big girl. The girl that makes me laugh like no other. It was like a sleepover all day, for weeks on end with my favorite pal.

And I’m a little bit scared of the new routine. Wake up. Make breakfast. Kiss Em and Mike goodbye. Nurse Lucy. Change Lucy. Rock Lucy. Play with Lucy. Repeat ad infinitum until the bus gets here and my sidekick returns.

Who’s going to laugh with me?

I can certainly take care of a baby by myself. I’m not afraid to do that. But I’m a little afraid I’ll be bored. To be honest I’m a lot afraid of being bored.

You can save the well meaning advice about mommy and me activities, all the friends I’ll make, volunteering in Emily’s classroom, the walks in the fall leaves, how quickly the time will pass. Or the snarky comments about how I’m getting exactly what I’d wished for. Because I know all of this.

But right now I’m going to pout. It’s the last day of Summer vacation. Since the second day of break I’ve joked that I didn’t know what I was going to do when Em went back to school.

Well the joke’s on me. Turns out I wasn’t kidding. I’m gonna miss the hell out of that kid.

In the time it took to write this on my phone I have stopped crying. So has Lucy. I don’t give a good god damn if the molding holds on the mirror. I sent MQD a text “Get pizza for dinner.” I am sitting here.

My house  looks like this.

I have a tendency towards being a Perfectionist in the Mom category. Pizza for dinner and a blown up house and a half-ass DIY project do not Perfection make. I am gonna call this Progress.  Nobody likes a Perfectionist.

Fuck it. MQD can go to the grocery store. This is Progress, right? No one likes a control freak. Just one glass of wine. One big glass.

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Posted in Bad Mood, Family, Parenting

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The Time Machine

Posted on August 23, 2012 | 6 comments

There is an exhibit, an installation, a magic space machine at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham.  It is upstairs  as soon as you get off the elevator.  If there were 20somethings in wrinkled tuxedo shirts offering  plastic glasses of cheap wine I would feel like I had been transported back in time to an art opening at the Muscarelle Museum on campus.   Only I would be wearing black thigh highs and combat boots and chasing boys.

Instead I am wearing a baby.  And chasing six year olds.  This afternoon I watched the “sand” made by shadows in the projected light pile up on my body.  I watched for longer than I have ever watched before.  I have stood in the path of these lights at least a dozen times and never did I see myself like I did today .


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My hand on her head.  Her body jutting out from my lower abdomen.  I stood like this for months before I ever got to hold her.  She is asleep.  I can hear her breathing.  We are exactly the same temperature.  She can smell me.

Almost a year ago now I took this picture below.  I wish I’d had the sense to include the rest of me.  I remember snapping more than a few, I couldn’t seem to get an angle that didn’t make me look like the back end of a truck.  Funny the things I worried about.

My pregnancy, Lucy’s beginnings are more than documented, both here and privately.  I imagine I could make a flipbook if I lined up every bathroom belly shot I took.  But it is not enough to just look at these old pictures.  I won’t ever have her back so close again.
My big girl will be in the first grade in three days.  After dinner tonight she climbed in my lap and I pressed my face in to the nape of her neck.  Her fresh, back to school hair cut gives me free access.  I inhaled her.  She is still there.  My first baby.

My little one, I can still hold her close.  I can still breathe her in while she sleeps.  Today as I watched the “sand” pile up on her as she slept against my chest I knew that I would come back again to this exact same spot.  I would take another picture.  First I will see the shadows pile on her back  as she crawls.  Then I will see the shadows pile on her head and her feet as she walks.

And one day we will get off the elevator and I will walk towards the light and she will not follow me.  Instead she will head towards another exhibit, hot on the heels of the big kids.  And I will chase her.  And I will pick her up and smell her and she will be my baby again for a moment.

 

 

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Posted in Family, Parenting, Pregnancy

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Where’s Waldo?

Posted on August 19, 2012 | 9 comments

There might be fifty shades of Grey but there are only four shades of Kelly.

1. Being hilarious
2. Laughing about hilarious I just was
3. Trying to pull it together and get a grip on my aforementioned hilarity
4. Reenacting my hilarity for my own amusement
I was in the middle of step four when the unsuspecting woman walked in to the bathroom to see my husband in his bowtie snapping pictures on his phone.  Flustered she said quickly something to the effect of  ”I can come back later!”
Excitedly we tried to explain that my dress matched the wallpaper.  It was a photo op we could not pass up.  She walked past us and entered a stall as I tried to excuse our behavior “We have a seven month old!  We haven’t left our house in a year!”
But we did last night.  And we had fun.  And both kids lived to tell the tale.  We should try it again.  In a few months.  No need to rush in to anything.
We are now accepting social invitations for the holiday season. With advance notice I will dress to match the wallpaper in your bathroom.  Your guests will have a chance to play live action Where’s Waldo?  Now that is a good time.  Take my word for it.

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Posted in Nonsense, Parenting

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Missing it

Posted on August 15, 2012 | 18 comments

There is  hard stuff. The conversations that sneak in between the giggling in bed at night.

He rose up on his forearm and said “I’d have one more if you wanted.” He was watching her sleep, her teeny body taking up half of our king size bed.

My throat got itchy and my nose started tingling. I needed to not cry. I’ve thought this through not just with my heart and my hormones but with my head.

I don’t want to struggle. We are making it now. MQD and me and the girls. And I’m home. Where I know I belong. I don’t want to push Lucy to grow up faster. I want her to have what Emily had, her mom all to herself for years to come.

“I know.” And he kept watching her. “She’s just growing so fast.”

I took his hand in mine. “Another baby would grow up, too. And we can’t just keep having more.”

And he smiled. Looked at me. Took his eyes off of her for a moment. “Sure we could.”

This morning as he left for work I walked to the door and kissed him. Like I did when he would leave my apartment years ago. “Thank you for talking to me. Just because I don’t want more babies doesn’t mean I don’t cry several times a day over how fast this one is growing. There is absolutely nothing like loving a baby. I just want to be present for the one that we have.”

He kissed me back.

She is sleeping in my lap and I have my hand curled around the back of her head. Her bald little head. And I let the tears roll down my face. She has five long hairs right now. In just a couple of years she will get a hair cut and those sweet wispy baby hairs will be gone. Those hairs I soaked in tears, the hair she smeared with avocado.

I let myself cry for a few and then I stopped and took a breath. Emily always says “I wish Lucy could talk to us” or “I wish Lucy could walk” and I tell her “I don’t! I’m not wishing away our baby!! We won’t get it back!”

I think and talk a lot about how much it means to me to be present. To be here so I don’t miss it. But it’s not just wishing it away I need to be wary of. I can’t let myself get consumed with how fast they’re growing up. While I am weeping over the haircut my six month old will have in two years? I’m missing right now.

It’s so hard. To feel every second. In order to be fully present I like to hold on. But if I hold on too tight before I realize it I’m holding on to the past. And these damn kids, their present turns in to ancient history in seconds.

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Posted in Bad Mood, Family, Parenting, Pregnancy

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Polishing a turd

Posted on July 12, 2012 | 12 comments

I have a weakness for talking animal movies. Babe. Dr Dolittle. Beverly Hills Chihuahua (that might be the most embarrassing thing I have admitted here.) I suppose I watched either too much or not enough Mr. Ed as a kid.

Emily has inherited this love of mine. Together we were watching Racing Stripes, a plucky little film about a zebra named Stripes that thinks he is a race horse and the young girl that believes in him!

I was doing situps while watching this fine film and entertaining Lucy as she lolled about on the floor.

“You’ve been training Stripes haven’t you?” said the TV.

I started to laugh. Why yes, yes, I have, how kind of you to notice. I have been training Stripes. If by training Stripes you mean trying to embrace my wicked stretch marks and do something about the dangly skin they occupy. Progress has been slow. I know, I know, it took nine months to stretch the skin it will take at least that long for it to tighten up. But the greater truth? I have never exactly had anything resembling abdominal muscles. I’m not aiming for a six pack. I don’t expect to be able to sit down and not have pudge. I am 36. I have two kids. And I love beer, wine and peanut M&Ms. But it would be nice if my stomach didn’t hang over my jeans while I was standing up. That is a realistic goal, no?

And this friends, is how you polish a turd. Urban Dictionary defines turd polishing as “The act of trying to make something hopelessly weak and unattractive appear strong and appealing. An impossible process that usually results in a larger, uglier turd.”

I beg to differ. I think you can polish a turd.

Exhibit A: The Turd

Note the stretch marks, the muffin top and the beloved elastic waist maternity jeans. I know I should retire them. But they are so damn tasty, those jeans. And they love me so. It is my hope that in writing this I will shame myself in to letting them join their friends in the giant box of maternity clothes in my attic.

Exhibit B: The Bright & Shiny Turd

Lucy shall henceforth be named The Turd Polisher. It’s really all about your point of view. As she approaches six month’s old in July I am reminded that I will have ninety days to make good on the old “It took nine months to gain it, it will take nine months to lose it” rule.

I took the first picture yesterday. I was going to write about my progress towards accepting my post-second baby body. Yesterday, in my maternity jeans and feeling hard on myself I didn’t feel like I had made much progress at all.

This morning as I dressed to go for a jog Emily said “You know you could just wear that bra, it is like a running bra, so it is okay to not wear a shirt.” And I looked in the mirror with Lucy on my hip and I thought maybe she was on to something.

I think I am gonna ditch those jeans. And I am getting dangerously close to being the lady at the pool with all the tattoos that pees in the shower and wears a bikini even when she probably shouldn’t. If you can’t tone it, tan it.

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Posted in Exercise, Nonsense, Parenting, Pregnancy

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First Love

Posted on June 18, 2012 | 5 comments

When you fall in love for the first time you think that you are the only person that has ever felt this way.  Your dreams are filled with thoughts of this person and they occupy your heart in every moment of every hour.  You can’t breathe without them and you believe that your life will cease to exist without this person.20120618-182402.jpg

You don’t ever imagine loving someone else.

Emily was my first love.

If you are very lucky you can hold on to your first love and never let them go.  Keep them in your heart and let them show you how to love another.

I am so damn lucky that I get to hold on to my first love and keep her in my arms!  I was silly to think that loving my children would be like loving a seventeen  year old boy.  That somehow I’d have to fall out of love a little to fall in love again.  Or that falling in love for the second time would make the first less special.

I fall more in love with my second love every day.  I can laugh at the foolish girl that was scared that she couldn’t possibly love two children.  I love them both to pieces. I can’t imagine having one without the other.  My big girl showed me how to do it. And this little one?  She just makes it so damn easy with her cheesy grin.

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My girls… they are both silly.  They are both so sweet.  They both give kisses that are to die for.  They both make my eyes tear up when they put their little hands on the sides of my face.  They are both my girls.  And I love them.  Both.

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Posted in Family, Parenting

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Goals

Posted on June 13, 2012 | 13 comments

I’m big on setting goals. Measurable goals. For as much as I pick on MQD and the SCIENCE (imagine I said science with jazz hands and a hint of feigned terror in my voice) I love a good graph.

When I decided I was ready to hop back on the fitness train I returned to Couch to 5K. Couch to 5K is a training program designed to take you from the couch (no way! Me? the couch? I didn’t gain almost sixty pounds with this pregnancy at the gym!) to running a solid thirty minutes without stopping in nine weeks. I have a tendency to overexert myself. A training program is necessary to keep me from deciding to try and run six miles after three leisurely strolls around the block has me thinking I am in tip top shape.

The trouble with the Couch to 5K? It ends. After nine weeks where do I go from there? Without the magical iPhone telling me to Run (which is laughable as my jogging speed has been known to be slower than my walking speed, but whatever!) I am lost.

But something crazy has happened to me. I remember when Em was teeny. She wasn’t big on napping. I decided training for the OBX Marathon was a good idea. The jogging stroller was my idea of a vacation. Every day, no matter what else happened, I had an hour on Bay Drive. If you go to the Outer Banks and you have never driven down Bay Drive and admired the homes and the sunset and the sound side living you are missing out. (Oh, how I miss you, long, deliciously flat Bay Drive…) It is happening again.

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And then I did it again, every day for the next FIVE days!! I am keeping it up. I am motivated not only by the health benefits and the uninterrupted Me time, I admit. The number on the scale has me a little freaked out. I haven’t ever said that number out loud here. I showed you my stretchmarks, but that number? It is like pooping in front of someone. I don’t do that.

But I am done hiding. I weighed 226 the day before Lucy was born. I’d hit an all time ten year low of 167 before we got married. I weigh a lot, and I am okay with that. I have size 10.5 feet and D cups, they come with a price.

I avoided the scale immediately after Lucy was born. I know my tendency to get antsy about my weight and I knew I needed to be eating well and frequently in order to establish and maintain a milk supply those crucial first six weeks.

My six week post partum visit greeted me with a 197. What the shit? I’d had a baby six weeks ago!! I was horrified. I hit the ground running, literally.

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And then shortly after I hit the ground, I hit the store.  I wrote about my new shoes.  But I haven’t mentioned my new found love of the running skirt.  It makes me feel like a cheerleader.  I never was a cheerleader but I imagine this is what it felt like.  “Hey you, my ass is almost showing but it is all in the name of sports!!  Check me out! But don’t talk shit, I’m an athlete, bitches!”  Did I say that out loud?  So help me, I am wearing day glow running skirts and I don’t even know who the hell I am anymore.

This morning I downloaded the “Bridge to 10K” app.  I need to keep going. I have to keep going.  It might take me longer than the six weeks it suggests.  But I’ll get there.  And if you look at the screenshot on the right, in the top corner, it’s a graph!!  A GRAPH!  I am as happy as a pig in shit.  Or a middle aged, 184 pound mom of two in a hot pink running skirt.  And let me tell you from my experience, that is pretty happy.

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The one where we buried the placenta…

Posted on June 11, 2012 | 8 comments

My husband is a scientist. He labels everything. He once asked me if we could talk about keeping the refrigerator more organized. He volunteered to make labels. Dairy. Vegetables. Condiments. We had only just moved in together so I bit a hole in my lip and smiled and said “if you’d like to take on that project I will try really hard to put things back.”

It was never mentioned again.

That having been said there is  no placenta shelf in our freezer. Just a ziplock bag with the tell tale biohazard bag inside crammed in the back of the freezer.

For four months and nineteen days. Lucy is four months and twenty one days old. The nurse practitioner that stopped at our house to see us when Lucy was two says old brought it to us. We left it on the counter when we headed home four hours after Lucy’s birth.

Some people leave their purse. Or their cell phone charger. We forgot our placenta.

I was lucky. I did not experience post-partum depression after Emily was born. So I elected not to dehydrate and encapsulate my placenta. But I liked the idea of doing something with it.

Different cultures do different things. We decided we would bury it under a plant or shrub (I can’t bring myself to say bush, although the comedic possibility is enticing.)

We decided to plant a gardenia. When we were picking out flowers for our wedding we considered gardenias. I imagine opening my front door next spring and smelling them for the first time of the season. Lucy will be walking by then.

Emily chose a hydrangea for her plant. I am hopeful that our soil will produce blue flowers as that was what helped her make up her mind. The September birth stone is the sapphire and she favors the blue sapphire. Not to be confused with her mother’s favorite gin, Bombay Blue Sapphire.

I’ve said it before. I am smitten with my husband. Married a little over fourteen months and he still makes me smile. He hollers up to me as I stand on the deck out of the rain “get a picture! You’ll never see your home again, Lucy!!”

I hope our plants survive. But the benefit of being a mom the second time around? Our kids will make it. Of this much I am certain.

Word to the Wise: “call before you dig” is no joke. We spent our first weekday of summer without cable television or the Internet. MQD wisely elected to not put the plants or the placenta in the hole until after the cable guy came lest he accidentally dig it back up.

It meant we put our plants in during a gentle rain shower on Monday evening instead of on Sunday afternoon. And MQD looks totally hot in wet blue jeans and a tshirt, I mean… our plants were well hydrated and the rain had some kind of poetic symbolism and…. Yeah.

Lucy and I supervised.  And Emily?  Well, the cable guy came about thirty minutes before MQD got home from work.  She established that a placenta looks like a brain and then she decided she’d had enough.  There was tv to watch.  It’s Summertime.

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Posted in Family, Parenting, Pregnancy

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Focus

Posted on June 9, 2012 | 2 comments

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It is said that mothers have eyes in the backs of their heads. I wish I had a second set in front. Mine have been working overtime.

My big girl had a bang up week. Last day of school on Friday and a soccer trophy the night before that. I put my constant surveillance of “the baby” on hold for the week. My big girl was getting bigger by the minute and I didn’t want to miss it. Friday morning before she left for school I said “grab your backpack, baby” and she said for the very first time “I’m not a baby.”

I’m glad I was watching this week. I sat on the steps with a cup of coffee in my hands watching her head down the driveway to the bus stop on Thursday morning. I don’t know what made me sit down and watch her. But I’m glad I did.

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Emily’s graduation was Wednesday morning. Soccer game on Thursday. Last day of school on Friday. I don’t think I took my eyes off of her for 72 hours. It is like she was made of bamboo. She was growing up. And I could see it.

Friday morning I sat down on the back deck and had a cup of coffee and a chit chat with Lucy. Maybe it was just the shorts. But I don’t think so. She grew, too. While I wasn’t looking. Dammit.

I need to get these two on a schedule. Because they can’t keep growing at the same time. I’m gonna miss something.

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