Two aspects of this post over at Bitch PhD (see below) really appeal to me. First, I like to know that other parents can also feel that deep, pit of the stomach dread at the thought of uninterrupted days alone with their children. And I mean alone, not those days when you have kindergarten or mother dates, because even with exhaustion, parenting in parallel with another mother and her good company is easy peasy. Relatively speaking.
Really, it cannot be articulated in enough ways, motherhood is hard. I’m not even talking about those melt down moments, I’m just talking about the grinding day-to-day tedium, the monotony, the isolation.
And also, I like the description in that post of those unexpected moments when you find the zen of parenting. Suddenly it is all coming together, suddenly you’re just enjoying the hell out of your kid; you’ve found the rhythm, the speed of it all, you’ve let go of the world for a time and mothering is fun. Of course, the minute you get all smug about having found the zen of parenthood, it is lost, which is why I will only allude to having found a bit of zen this morning on my deck with Cormac.
From here.
I dreaded the summer for all the aforementioned transition aspects, but also because I would be doing it mostly without childcare. Just me and the little girl, packing up the house, moving to a new one (Mr V has precious few vacation days), transitioning to a new town, on our own, for 6 weeks before school started.
I have never been very good at spending long periods of time without parenting help. Not having Mr V here every night to help with dinner, with bedtime is its own challenge, but the long days in a new place without playdate partners, without babysitters, without family and with two sets of anxieties – one 4 yrs old, one 31 yrs old – daunted me to the point of nausea. Partly, I do not enjoy playing with my kid for long stretches. She is interesting as a human, she says funny interesting things, she is smart, but she plays boring games. And I can only fake it for so long. But the bigger part was knowing she would need a lot of comfort, a lot of stability from her caretaker, and being terrified that I didn’t have it in me to take care of both of us.
I can really relate to this. I have access to childcare 3 days a week. Those are the days I really look forward to. The other days scare me a little. And now that my 2nd child is one year old it’s just that much harder.
But then I find the flow. And those moments somehow sustain me, at least for a little while.
‘she is smart, but she plays boring games’
This! I am so very bored by my own child – wonderful as she is – so much of the time that I often feel ashamed and deficient. Lovely to hear someone else say it ‘aloud’.
It is comforting to hear mommies feel this way because we all know most daddies do at some point or most points! If my wife would admit it things might be easier. I can tell how she feels when I come home from work at the end of the day but she always says…THINGS ARE GREAT.
Thanks for sharing
BTW- We have 3 kids 6 years old and younger….
thanks so much for sharing this, and for all the links to your other wonderful posts on these topics that i hadn’t read.
yes yes yes. it is so very uplifting and reassuring and blissful to have those moments, and so very daunting when they are sometimes few and far between. we were just coming out of a very rocky transition time, with those uplifting and reassuring moments making their appearance a little more frequently, when all the schools, including my little monster’s preschool, were shut down for over a month because of swine flu!
we survived, but i can’t say that i feel great about my patience or creativity or energy levels on the difficult days…
Yes, yes, yes.
omg, yes.
i was just today thinking about the challenge of being ‘present’ for my baby. nothing delights him more than spending endless time with me. just plain old me. and while his big brown eyes and irresistable giggles can melt me like no other, sometimes i yearn to finish that post, or read that article, or …
and also, yes, finding zen is like holding water, or sand, in your hands, within reach, but hard to hold onto, capture.