My girl says she wants me to write a handbook on tricks of the trade in raising kids. She’s a brand new 15, right between “You know everything” and “No….wait….I know everything”, depending on the day, hormone levels and how much sleep she’s had. She is the last of my six pack of kids and challenges me more than all the rest combined. I think it’s because I’m tireder. It can’t be because she’s smarter. Can it? Nevertheless, she has not yet raised six people to young adulthood and lived to tell about it. So, I win.
I dipped my toe into the pool of motherhood at the age of 30, a late start which I more than made up for by having three more children by the time I reached 36. To complete the tapestry, I have a son and a daughter adopted from Korea and China respectively. As an only child myself, this was like creating my own party-in-a-box; the kind where the motto is “Whatever You Say Can, and Will, Be Repeated in Sunday School!” That’s my first tip. Whatever personal puffed up pride you had when you bought this parenthood t shirt, loose it now before the little natives take it from your balled up fists. Learn to relax in the knowledge that you don’t have to be perfect to love them well.
Let me remind you that any answers you thought you had in your smug pre-kid days were settled on before you entered the land. You had no idea what you were talking about, no matter how many times you read the brochures! You realize that fairly early on. For instance, one of my “rules”, made while I was pregnant with my first, was that I would not have Legos in my home. I refused to have them left scattered everywhere, where I would step on them in the middle of the night. The middle of the night, you say? Yes. Because that’s when you will be awake for the next several years…..stepping on Legos. I think I can still see the faint imprint of a Lego man face on the bottom of my aging foot. Learn to laugh, rather than cringe, when things don’t look like you pictured.
I worked in a clothing store in my young life and actually used to write on the calendar what I wore each day just to see how many days I could go and not wear the same outfit twice. Seriously? That was my goal? After my third child was born, I joined a wonderful group called MOPS, Mothers of Pre Schoolers. They met once a month. You could drop your kids off in one room for fun activities and go to the mom’s room for ladylike snacks and interesting speakers, etc. One particular winter morning, I was running late, having had the added task of bundling up the troops for the weather. We got to the meeting just as it began and I hurriedly dropped the kids off in their room. As I walked into the mom’s room, the speaker already having begun, I headed toward an empty seat, unbuttoning my coat as I went. Just before I took my coat off, I looked down to discover I STILL HAD MY PAJAMAS ON. Two things there to take away from this; coats cover a multitude of “sins”, from pajamas to spit up and, you won’t be needing a calendar to keep track of your outfits anymore because you will be thankful to have anything on other than your pajamas. Learn to not take yourself so seriously and how to accessorize your pj’s.
I enjoyed letting the kids participate in helping me cook as much as was age appropriate. I baked a lot and kept a huge tub of flour in the kitchen. One morning we were baking pies and I was letting my two oldest measure out the ingredients and using the opportunity to talk about the difference in the sizes of cup, half cup, etc. I was so proud of my homeschool moment and decided to go get the camera in the next room to document our progress. I walked back into the kitchen only to find my kids standing in the tub of flour and pouring it on each others’ heads. At the sight of me, they both stopped in mid action and blinked through flour covered eyelashes like two little snowmen looking into the barrel of a lighter. No one moved. No one spoke. Until…..I burst out laughing and snapped a picture. After the container of flour was thrown out, the pies made and the kids put in the bathtub, I realized a memory had been made that day and it would find it’s way into the stories they told their own kids. Learn to watch for those memory making moments, sometimes disguised as interruptions and wasted flour.
My fifth child, Solomon, came along, adopted from Korea and already” pre-grown” for me to the ripe old age of 14 months when we got him. I was used to spinning several plates at a time by this point, and was beginning to feel like mama superior. One day I was talking on the phone, distracted from what was going on around me. Assuming the kids were playing outside in the sandbox, I turned and almost tripped over Solomon, who was lying in a prone position, gnawing at a hardened cheerio he’d found hardened onto the floor like a fossil. “For this we adopted you, son?!”, I thought to myself. I sighed, and kneeled to pick him up and find him something proper to eat. He toddled happily off and I laughed at myself. Learn to do that; to laugh the loudest and the longest at yourself. To give yourself a break.
If I could do it all over again, I would. Every chicken pock I put baking soda on, every juice glass I poured and then mopped up off the floor, every sentence I read several times over in any book I tried to read when the kids were awake, every failure I felt when I laid in my bed at the end of the day and looked up at the ceiling and talked to God. This is what I know. Whenever you feel like you aren’t doing it right…..or enough…..or too much……know that you love your kid. Know that from the bottom of your lego imprinted feet to the top of your messed up hair that you don’t have time to fix just so. And laugh, and take pictures and savor it like it’s the last piece of chocolate in the box. Because someday you can finish that book you never got to read, and your pajamas will be waiting for you in the drawer after you get home. Your floors won’t be covered in flour. Your hair will look good most of the time. And you will know that you did the best you could. And you can smile at the days behind you.