The Reality of Control Issues in Motherhood
In preparing for my impending death, I'm pushing the boundaries of what is controllable. Please learn from my delusions.
The stretched-for-time carnival continues in the Freeland household this week.
My newsletter/essay writing time was interrupted when my children found the Caga Tiós in their stroller in the garage. For the uninitiated, this is the equivalent of a four year old finding Santa Claus dead (or maybe just very drunk) in her stroller in February. I spent the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening consoling my daughters. We are going to need a lot of therapy, which my husband is glad to pay for, since he’s the one who thought the stroller would a safe place to store the magical logs that were supposed to be living in the mountains until Christmas.
Alas, instead of a literary masterpiece, you get the twisted interworking of an anxious mother’s mind today.
My white blood cell count was very low when I had my labs done last month. Everything else looked normal, so my doctor told me to have them redrawn at my convenience. Convenience is an interesting word choice.
I have a child with food sensitives, so I can’t even get prepared foods from the grocery store, let alone the kind of ease that comes from a drive-thru. As if cooking two to five times a day were not enough, I (with a great deal of help from my mother) am homeschooling my children. I don’t know what I thought homeschooling would be like with two four-year-olds, but I was unprepared. (If that’s not the slogan for motherhood, I don’t know what is.)
My daughters’ neurons are firing at the speed of Mercury. (The planet, not the metal.) The urge to practice writing the latest letter in their repertoire comes on like a flash flood. If left unsupervised, they are liable to practice writing M, or a, or r, or g, or o, or t, on the couch. (Not to give away which twin is more likely to commit such a crime, but it’s Margot.) If I look away for a moment, the best case scenario is wall art. The worst case scenario is definitely a house fire.
I call my mom or show up at her house every 15 minutes to two house. I plead with her to give me the secret mothering. She cooked, and cleaned, and educated us. She took me to church, and piano class, and Irish step dancing class. In my mind, my mother did it all, and she seemed to have done it gracefully. (She has since given me the BTS, and it’s nice to know my children will probably not remember the reality of these beautiful and brutal years.)
I cry a lot, and I have stacks of books, and papers, and sticky notes everywhere—most of which I never refer back to, even though everything would run a lot more smoothly if I did. When my husband doesn’t do bedtime, or breakfast, or baths the way I do them, I take the responsibility back. And if you’re widening your eyes and balking at my control issues, rest assured I know it’s unsustainable. I know I’m not doing my children nor my husband any favors by being the sole provider of sustenance and structure. I have this thing where I get older, but just never wiser; so here I am a month after my physical and I have not yet gone for the follow up bloodwork.
This is, in part, because it has not been convenient to go. Going to the grocery store and learning to sew bedsheets that don’t budge when my daughters toss and turn at night takes precedence over my low white blood cell count. I would love to tell you I would have gone already if it were more convenient. Who would not love a mobile lab that would do bloodwork in your driveway while your children ride their scooters? But more inconvenient than going to get my bloodwork would be finding out that my abnormal bloodwork is a symptom of something serious.
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