DotMoms

All sugared up

By Chris

I have a stash of candy that I keep in a bowl high up in the kitchen cabinets. I use the candy to pay bribe positively reinforce the children for doing chores. It is a good system. It is amazing what they are willing to do for a small Tootsie Roll.

Before I had children I planned to be a non-coercive parent. I had lots of plans for the kind of parent that I would be, and more importantly would not be. Funny how that works, isn't it? 

I feel like most days I just muddle along, making it all up as I go, hoping with fingers crossed that I don't make any grave mistakes at motherhood. Gone are my illusions,  now I am more comfortable being a benevolent dictator.

I keep the bowl of candy high up in the cabinet not so much to keep it out of the reach of the children as it is to keep it out of my reach. It is far to easy to eat a 10-pound bag of candy in a day or two without even realizing it. Not that I would know that from personal experience.

One day last week I heard my 6-year-old in the kitchen say to his 4-year-old sidekick, "Let's get sugared up and act really bad!"

I walked into the kitchen to investigate and caught them both standing on top of the counter, the 6-year-old poised to scale the wall cabinets like a ladder.

"What are you doing?" I asked, putting on my "mad face," which evidently only looks mad to me.

"We were getting you some candy as a treat for being such a great Mommy." Cue dimples and batting eyelashes.

I was faced with a choice. Do I call them on the lie and reprimand them, or do I play along? I decided on the latter.

"What a great idea, thanks!" I said. I took down the bowl, picked out a piece, and replaced the bowl back in its spot. They watched me with huge unbelieving eyes; their dreams of a sugar high dashed before their very eyes. I made elaborate "mmmmm" noises as I ate it.

Then I froze in place and looked at them with my eyes wide. "Oh no!" I screamed, "I am all sugared up and going to act really bad!"

And with that I ran around the kitchen table several times, waving my arms over my head, and screaming like a wild banshee. In short acting the way my children often do.  My children laughed and my 6-year-old wisely asked, "You heard us talking in here, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did. Next time you want something you should ask me; don't sneak behind my back. Climbing on the cabinets is dangerous. What would happen if you grabbed the bowl and fell with it onto the ground?"

"I'd get really hurt?"

"Yes, but more importantly, you would drop all that yummy candy all over the floor," I exclaimed.

Then I commenced running around the kitchen table one more time and ran out of the room. As I left I heard one of them say, "She is such a silly Mommy."

And I laughed. Despite all my failed plans and never materialized good intentions, I think I am muddling along just fine.

Chris is a writer, artist, wife of one, mother of seven, and coffee drinker extraordinaire. 

Post-partum depression, nine months later

By Chris

I'll be the first to admit it. When I read about the impending Tom-Kat baby, my first thought was, "Ha, I hope she gets post-partum depression. Maybe then the Tom half will get a clue." But as quickly as I had that thought, I repented.

I don't wish PPD on anyone.

I have had seven pregnancies and given birth to seven children. I never had any serious post-partum depression with the first six pregnancies, I had no reason to think the seventh would be any different. But it was. I was depressed, overwhelmed, and angry. I couldn't sleep, convinced that something would happen to my son. When I did fall asleep I would wake up panicked that he was dead and I would have to rouse him. I wished I could disappear. Well meaning people told me to get away, but they couldn't see that my children were my lifeline. It was beyond depression and into despair.

I wrote many things during that time that I never published anywhere. I was recently reading some of things I wrote and came across the following, which I think sums up the feelings better than I could ever do now. I have resisted to the urge to go back and edit it and clean it up; for better or worse, here it is.

There are good days, and then there are others.
The fog surrounds me
and I can't seem to catch my breath or see clearly through it.
Enveloped.

The times when I am reading a story out loud
and my voice wanders off
finally my 6-year-old reaches up and touches my face.
I can feel him willing me to look at him
and when I do he smiles.
"I love you, Mommy."

And I have to remember to smile back.

We go outside and feel the warm sunshine on our shoulders
the heat on the back of our necks
We pick blueberries off of our bushes
So many blueberries this year
a rebirth, of something, I hope.

We gorge ourselves
until we feel that sick sweet sticky feeling in the pits of our stomach.
It's the taste of melancholy.
I put down the bucket and stretch out on the grass
On my back, arms straight out,
the crucified martyr.
The children run around the bushes
Around and around
Screams mixed with laughter
"Look at me, Mommy!"

I close my eyes and am taken back 30 years
the smells of sunscreen, berries, and freshly-cut grass evoke memories
of days like this day,
only without the profound sadness.
A place when time stretched before me as an eternity
And I could be anything I wanted,
even happy.

I open my eyes and I am here.
From this day on
Will blueberries always taste like tears?

A small sticky mouth kisses me
and tiny purple stained hands grab my face and pull it close.
pulling me out of myself.
"Mama," the voice says.

And I have to remember to smile.

So much to be thankful for
Why can't it be enough?

Chris is an artist, writer, wife, and mother of seven children. Nine months after the birth of her seventh child, she no longer has to remind herself to smile.

What's in a name?

By Chris

When I got married 11 years ago I was faced with the dilemma of what to do about my name. Do I change it, keep it, or hyphenate it?

My last couple of years of college and grad school I worked as a nanny for a pair of psychiatrists. The mother had opted to keep her last name, while her children had the name of her husband. She said she had done it to prevent the crazy people from the mental hospital where she worked from tracking her down in her private life. (Actually, she was much more gracious in the way she worded it, but that was the essence of what she meant.) However, she said she regretted it somewhat, that it was annoying to have to explain herself all the time and explain to people that she was indeed the mother of her children.

Remembering  this, I opted for the hyphen. At that point in my life I was still planning on going to law school and figured I would use my maiden name in my professional life.

Well, I never did have that "professional" life.

I have found the hyphen to be cumbersome in everyday life. Usually I will just go by my husband's name. Does it matter if I tell the librarian at story time that my name is different from my children's? Do I need to tell the person who answers the phone where I order pizza that my name is anything different? Also the names don't flow well together, mine being a generic white bread sort of name and my husband's an Italian vowel-laden one. But it is still my name, lurking in the background, like a comfortable old shoe, a shred of my pre-mom identity.

Recently, my husband ordered checks. In our 11-year marriage I think I have ordered checks once. I did it from one of those bulk discount places and we had enough checks to last probably forever. But then we moved.

It didn't bother me to continue using the misaddressed checks since I never changed the address on my driver's license. See? Procrastination does pay off.

My husband decided to order checks with our new address. When they came in the mail, I realized my husband had used his last name for both of us. To say I was mad is probably an understatement.

He thought my reaction was a bit over the top and really didn't get it. Truth be told, neither do I. Does it matter? 

I have friends who have changed their names completely, some that kept their names, some whose entire family hyphenates, and one whose husband changed his name (although not many men are that highly evolved). In spite of all the choices, most of them have questioned the decision they made at some point.

Did you change your name? And are you happy with your decision?   

Chris is a writer, artist, wife of one, mother of seven, and coffee drinker extraordinaire. 

Hope in a box

By Chris

I drag large Rubbermaid bins down from our attic. Bin after bin after bin filled with tangible reminders of my babies and children. I sift through the clothing, smiling to myself at the memories that some of the clothing evoke.

I hold up small onesies and marvel that any of my children were ever that small. I pause long enough to bring a baby blanket up to my face. I close my eyes and can almost smell the scent of my newborn babies lingering in the fabric.

I fold the blanket and place it back into the bin. I close the lid and add the bin to the growing pile stacked by my front door. The next time the bin is opened, it won't be by me. It will be by another mother who will wrap the blanket around her baby.

Wednesday morning we are heading to a local fire station that will be driving the goods down to a small shelter in Texas that has taken in families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

My children want to be a part of this, also. They go through their possessions to decide what they want to send. They watched some of the news coverage, enough to see the flooding. But when the news reporting turned to looting, rapes and murders, I turned it off and sent them on their way to play. Natural disasters are enough for them to handle now. There will be plenty of time for them to learn that people aren't always kind to each other.

My children are having a difficult time trying to decide what to part with, everything is too special, and yet not special enough. I know exactly how they feel.

I survey the bins. So much stuff we have. Too much really. I don't know what else to do. I could give everything away and it still wouldn't seem like enough. It is almost an embarrassment to have so much in the face of such a tragedy.

A few minutes later my 6-year-old son came up behind me.

"Mom," he said, "I know what I want to give."

I turned to look at him. My heart jumped up to my throat and I couldn't speak. The tears spilled down my face.

"I bet some of the kids don't know how to swim, Mommy. They might need some help."

In his outstretched arm was his life vest.

I couldn't do anything but cry. In his innocence is profound wisdom. They may not need literal life vests, but they need the rest of us to hold them up, keep them above water, and give them hope until they have solid ground beneath them.

So I will go and cast out my lifeline, mother to mother.

Chris is an artist, writer, and the mother to seven children. When she isn't hiding play money in her bra, she works on renovating her 100-year-old New England home.

Playing board games

By Chris

When Anna Quindlen wrote in her Newsweek column that maybe she had three children in the first place so she wouldn't ever have to play board games, mothers everywhere stood up and cheered. At least I hope I wasn't the only one jumping up and down, happy to have found a kindred spirit who thinks board games are something to suffer through rather than enjoy.

The truth is I hate board games with a passion that I don't feel about many other things. I would rather do anything -- short of gouging my eyes out with a butter knife --than play board games. I will play them occasionally because my kids like them and they like me to play with them. Oh, and there is that ever looming presence called mommy guilt. I don't want my children growing up and complaining that I never played games with them. I figure they already have enough legitimate fodder for their future therapist's couch.

Recently I had one of those rare guilt occasions, and I played a game of Monopoly with my 9- and 10-year-old sons. They have been asking me for a while to play it with them, a long, long while truth be told, and I had run out of excuses.

However, I have a confession to make. I, Chris, mother, somewhat upstanding citizen, and role model for impressionable young children, am a cheater.

I always tell myself that this time will be different. This time I will play by the rules and not take advantage of my trusting children. This time I will try to enjoy the game no matter how long it drags on. No matter how many times I have to feign excitement or disappointment over a roll of the dice. No matter how many times I have to put the pieces back on the board after they are knocked off by the rolling dice, because my children seem to think that is part of the game. This time I will be excited to crawl under the furniture to read the dice after one of my children toss them off the table and insist that the dice must be read where they stop.

But every time at about the one-hour mark I feel my blood pressure rising. I feel trapped by the game that feels as though it will never come to a natural end, and so I inevitably begin to cheat. It starts off simple enough. "No, I don't think I want to buy Boardwalk," I'll say. "Oh look I have landed on your block again and I think I owe you all the money I have left!" I'll try next.  But they are smart, those kids of mine, and honest, quick to correct me.

When no one is looking I put some of money back into the "bank." I discreetly stuff some bills under the area rug. I have even considered eating some of the paper money in sheer desperation.

When the game finally ended, my sons walked away and I overheard one of them say, "Can you believe that we always beat Mom? We are so much better than her at Monopoly."

And the other one, who is currently being written out of my will, replied, "And she is so old too, we really must be good."

Well, what do you know, I am building positive self-esteem. At least now I have one less reason to feel guilty.

Chris is an artist, writer, and the mother to seven children. When she isn't hiding play money in her bra, she works on renovating her 100-year-old New England home.

Last, but not least

By Chris

Being the youngest in a large family means many things. It means you get an experienced mother who has already practiced and perfected many of her parenting techniques -- a mother who isn't quick to worry, who has learned to trust her own instincts over the advice of so-called experts. It means you get older siblings who love to make you giggle and cater to your every whim. It means infant cereal will never pass your lips, that your first solid food will be Fruit Loops you find under the kitchen table, forever spoiling you from eating Cheerios.

It means you won't learn all the noises that barnyard animals make before you learn how to make fart noises with your armpit. It means you will probably be singing along to Coldplay, rather than Barney. And you'll learn that the best way to get everyone's attention is to do something funny, at least in our house.

It also means you have a completely empty baby book.

My seventh child will soon be eight months old. I see his pristine baby book sitting on the bookshelf alongside all the others and am filled with guilt.

With my firstborn, I meticulously filled in his baby book, and was very upset that there were not enough pages for me to painstakingly document his first few months. Where was I supposed to write all the cute things he did, like burp, spit up, and blink his eyes?

Things got progressively worse in the baby book department with each subsequent child.

I may not remember the exact date and time that milestones occured, but at least I remember them. I find that it doesn't really matter much to me anymore that I document everything that happens as much as it matters that I live fully in the moment. I remember with absolute clarity the first time my youngest son smiled. I remember how all six of his older siblings gathered around and tried in earnest to make him smile again. I remember feeling complete and total joy for that one moment, a small reprieve before the next wave of post-partum depression crashed over my head. But don't ask me the date it happened, I'd have to guess.

Not because my younger children aren't as precious, they are. It's just that now I am busier. Do you have any idea how much laundry I have to do every week? Or the amount of food preparation I have to do every day? I haven't yet been able to convince my children that we should have one day per week of naked fasting.

I'm an avid photographer, so all of their babyhoods have been amply chronicled on film. Thankfully, this gives me one less thing to feel guilty about. But I have boxes of photographs that have never been put into albums. I keep saying that someday I'll get around to it. I will, maybe. But if I don't, well my children can just fight over the boxes when I die and put the pictures into albums themselves.

In all the baby books there is a space that says, What do you hope for your child?

I never answered it in any of the books because I could never find words to encompass it all. But I have been thinking about it lately and I am going to go back and fill the identical answer in all of them:

"I hope that one day you will sit around a holiday dinner table with all your siblings and you will look around the room and feel that you were lucky to have a life where you were loved so deeply by so many. I hope you will understand that I gave you the best gift I knew how to give: the gift of siblings. I hope it's enough.

"Oh, there is a box of photographs in the attic. Last one there is a rotten egg."

Chris is an artist, a writer, and a mother to seven children. In her spare time she works on renovating her 100-year-old New England home.