The Day I Became A Mom

Fourteen years ago today, I became a mother. I was more than a tad freaked out. I was about to have a crash course in Nature and find out just where babies come from and my cooter and I were terrified. I went to bed more than one night that year rubbing my pregnant belly and wishing I had paid better attention in my grade nine sex education classes instead of doodling hearts and flowers on my binder.

Eventually my daughter clawed her way to freedom and my cooter and my life have never been the same. She came out looking like an angry little man, shaking her fist at the world and howling about terrible invisible injustices. Not much has changed since then, except she no longer looks like a man.

I didn't know what to expect when I discovered I was to be a mother for the first time. I hadn't spent much time around babies and I was barely out of diapers myself, just twenty years old. When the nurse placed her in my arms for the first time I remember looking at my baby's plump pink fist and her chubby little cheeks and wondering just what in the hell was I supposed to do now?

I've spent much of the last fourteen years wondering the same thing, over and over again.

Fric is independent, rebellious, joyful and full of laughter. It's really quite annoying first thing in the morning to be honest, before I've had any morning coffee and woken up. She is just. like. me.

My mother hasn't stopped laughing at me since she was born.

My child humbles me with her grace and dignity and amazes me with her strength and compassion. This totally makes up for her unique ability to make me twitch like I'm being electrocuted.

Life with her is filled with a laughter, love and the odd impulse to want to staple her eyelids shut when she rolls her eyes at me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Happy 14th birthday, Fric. I still don't know what to expect as you grow up, but I do know that no matter how much you love blue eyeshadow and bad boy bands, my love for you will never end.

Please don't grow up too fast kid. You're starting to make me feel old.

Love,

Mom.

Back To School Sighs

I'm dreading next week. All of my children will be in school, all day, every day, leaving me home alone with the dogs as I wait for the sounds of the school bus to return them home.

Five days a week, I'll be by myself, having no one to boss around or cuddle with during the day. I'm going to have to wash my own dishes.

I'd be more upset about this, but I'm oddly excited to see Jumbster enter grade school.

Since Bug never made it to elementary school this is big stuff for me. I get to relive all the grade school glory of field trips, Christmas concerts and recess all over again.

There is nothing quite like sitting through a grade school pageant to make one realize they should have used birth control all those years ago how precious children really are.

My children (well, two out of three as Jumby's oblivious to his new fate and only interested in blowing bubbles in the dog's water dish) are ridiculously excited to get back into the daily grind of bouncing around the back of a rickety old yellow school bus and terrorizing under-paid public school teachers alongside their feral friends.

I'm trying not to take this personally. I keep telling myself it's because they miss their friends that they want to hurry back to school and not because they are tired of being my personal servants. I mean, what child doesn't live for catering to the every whim and desire of their mother? Doesn't every child enjoy manual labour? It's not like they haven't been rewarded. I clearly remember letting them have the loose change they found in the dryer as they were doing my laundry a few weeks back.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end and I'm going to have to learn how to drag my own arse off the couch to get food if I don't want to starve to death. That soda won't pour itself into it's own cup after all.

Still, in a bid to show my children that I'm not at all bitter about the prospect of having to make my own lunch and let the dogs out, all by myself, I decided it was probably time to take them shopping to for appropriate supplies.

Okay, so it was more like the kids nagged me to death about getting off my duff and fulfilling my parental responsibilities by buying them binders and crap until I about lost my darned mind to the incessant whining and broke down and took them shopping, but I like the way I write it better. Reality is a drag. It's much sparklier up here inside my head.

School shopping. It's worse than going Christmas shopping on December 24 at the local Toys R Us. It's a mad house where ever you go. These parents with their lists, fighting for the last 99 cent calculator on special. It's all elbows and angry looks. I know, because I'm generally the one scowling and tossing the elbows. I can't figure out why my children anticipate it with such glee.

(Here's where I block out the mental memories of rolling around in new packages of paper and pens as a small child myself. I refuse to acknowledge the geekery I submitted to as a kid.)

I suppose I wouldn't mind shopping for basic school supplies if my children actually used what I bought them instead of lending, losing or forgetting half of what I just paid an arm and a leg for only months ago. I've quickly come to realize that the reason the lists the schools give parents is so large is because you aren't buying for just your children, you are supplying half the kids in your child's class. Except no one ever  seems to lends your child anything, thus reducing your cost expenditures.

I'm bitter and cheap. It's a charming combination.

Just when I put the last pack of loose leaf paper in our cart and headed for the never ending check out line, my children reminded me we weren't done.

"What do you mean we aren't finished? I've got everything on the list. In triplicate!" I huffed as I pushed the cart whose front wheel refused to moved. (Because the shopping excursion is never complete without grabbing the faulty buggy.)

"We need clothes! Shoes! A new lunch kit!" They cried in tandem as Jumby bounced back and forth in his wheel chair, delighted by the chaos surrounding him.

"You have all of those things! I bought them last year!" I moaned.

"Um, Mom? We've grown," my son, who is now nose to nose with me, reminded me.

Darn them children and their good health. I did a quick mental stock of the clothes I've seen on the children recently and mental images of jeans with holes in them, pants that no longer reach the tops of ankles and shirts so tight that only a cracked out stripper would want to wear flooded into my head.

"Well craptastic."

So new clothing was a necessity, one which I vaguely remembered putting off, telling myself I'd buy when school rolled around. Well that bus is here now, honking it's horn and I could no longer avoid it.

If I was a normal person, one who enjoyed leaving my house and going shopping, I'm sure I wouldn't have this problem. My children wouldn't need an entire new wardrobe because I'd have bought for them around the calendar. But as it was, my children looked like ragamuffins whose parents were too poor to properly attire them.

There is nothing quite like tugging three children, one who happily gnaws on his wheelchair and tries to head bunt every display case he sees, clothing shopping. A week before school starts. Alongside every other frazzled mother in the province.

I probably should have just stabbed myself in the eye with a shoe horn, it would have been more pleasurable.

First there was the shoe fight. Frac refuses to wear anything other than sneakers. White sneakers. The thought of a loafer or anything made out of leather in the shape of a dress shoe apparently is the equivalent of asking him to disrobe and streak naked through his gymnasium. "Only losers wear loafers, Mooooom!" he whined as I thrust yet another pair of very nice, expensive  yet unacceptable looking shoes in his direction.

Eventually, I broke down and just bought the kid sneakers. Again. But only after threatening to not buy any shoes for him at all and make him go to school wearing only cardboard duct taped to his socks.

He was unfazed by this threat, as he knows I'd rather die than see my child wear anything but a loafer.

Fric was slightly easier to shod. Other than having to wrestle one Lucite stripper heel from her after another and having to explain why three inch heels are neither appropriate or practical for daily use, she was game for almost anything. She's a shoe whore like her mother. Praise Allah.

As for Jumby? Well, he was just happy to have a new shoe to stick in his mouth and chew on. He was totally my favourite child at that moment.

Then came the clothing battle. My son wants to dress like a homeless man in baggy clothes while my daughter is intent on dressing in such a fashion to show off her curves and give her father a heart attack.

I just kept checking the price tags attached to everything and muttering how it would just be easier and far more creative to send them to school in bejeweled garbage bags. We'd be trend setters. And they'd always be prepared for rain. My children would just ignore my murmured rants and carry on examining what ever was the most expensive piece of clothing they could find.

But by far and away the hardest part of the day, (besides the actual moment of realizing I'd completely broken my budget and I'd have to send them scavenging for food for the next week in order to pay for everything) was realizing how much my children have grown up. How little time I actually have left with them to take them shopping. There is a finite amount of times I can yell "Booby Holders!" while waving a bra in the underwear section just to watch my children's faces go flame red and die from parental-induced mortification.

Pretty soon Fric and Frac won't want to shop with me, and I won't have any jurisdiction of what they wear. They're well on their way to independence.

I don't know which bums me out more. The fact I just blew a small fortune on shoes and clothes that they'll outgrow in mere months; the thought of all the school supplies my children will have lost before the month of September even ends or the fact there will soon come a time I'm going to have to do my own manual labour instead of schlepping it on my kids and calling it 'chores'.

That's a milestone I'm just not ready to face.

Crap. I'm far too lazy for my children to be in such a hurry to grow up.

Friendship and Failure

I used to think being a parent was fairly easy. Sure the whole 'there are living human beings dependent on me keeping them safe, healthy and alive' thing could be a little overwhelming, especially when I was responsible for this task mostly myself, but for the most part, it wasn't too hard to toss a handful of Cheerios at my hungry badgers and bark at them to look both ways before crossing the road.

Lately it seems the parenting stakes have raised and I'm completely unprepared for the new rules of this gig. Not only do I have to keep them safe and alive but now I'm responsible for keeping them out of the clink and out of the back seat of some bozo's car so that I'm not saddled with raising babies that belong to my babies.

Now that my children are teens, more than ever I'm responsible for setting the example of responsible humanity. I'm supposed to be modeling wise choices because in a few years these kids of mine will be on their own with nothing but the memories of the examples I have set to keep them from wearing an ankle monitor or begging for food stamps to feed their illegitimate children.

Parenting has always been about setting a good example and modeling wise choices but in the earlier years that usually just meant explaining why we don't stuff Lego pieces up our noses and why we put the milk jug back into the fridge so the milk won't spoil.

Now that my kids are almost adults it means teaching them how to avoid the pitfalls of peer pressure and how to succeed in a world that will largely unappreciate them. The weight of this grown up blanket can smother the best intentions every parent has, because not only do I have to set these examples, but I have to explain them as well. I can't just get away with telling them "Because I'm your Mother and I said so."

I tried that but my children actually expect rational and logical thought processes to back up my reasoning.

This is what you get from spending over a decade of trying to teach them to think for themselves, dammit.

Not all of this is complicated as I tend to be a by the book, law-abiding citizen and my children happen to be quite intelligent (they get that from their father, thank heavens.) They model their behaviour after me and since I'm not a pill popping, booze swilling crack whore who has a predilection for grand theft auto or shoplifting, most of my work is fairly easy.

While I'm not (overly) worried about the obvious pitfalls of parenting, I am extremely concerned about the more subtle perils of ushering these children into adulthood.

More specifically, I'm worried about modeling social behaviours for my daughter as of late. Fric is a mini-me. Not only does she look like me, but she is a pint sized newer model of Tanis. It's scary how similar our thought processes are and how our emotions run parallel to one another.

(Frac on the other hand is an entirely foreign beast, but that's a post for another day.)

While Fric kicks academic arse, excels at athletics and has impeccable fashion sense (she so does not get that from her yoga pant, cowboy hat wearing mother), much like me she is having trouble with her peer group.

While a lot of her social woes stem purely from the joys of puberty and aren't anything to be terribly concerned over, I wonder how much I'm to blame for her friendship woes. I haven't exactly set the bar all that high in the area of modeling healthy friendship choices.

Female friendships have always been a beast I've never been able to tame, even from a young age. I'm not terribly shy but I'm not exactly gregarious either. I tend to hold my affection close to my heart and I'm slow to let people into my world. I'm a loner by choice, one who prefers one solid friend than a network of friendly acquaintances.

To complicate matters, I bear vicious scars on my heart from female friendships gone wrong, which makes me more hesitant to seek out my own set of girlfriends. While Fric may witness my many phone calls to my bff, she seldom sees me interact with females I'm not related to.

The one true friend of mine my daughter actually interacted with and loved herself combusted in a spectacular fashion several years ago for reasons I myself don't understand or know and culminated in our family losing a child we were in the process of adopting when this woman knowingly filed a false allegation against me. The allegation was resolved, my name was cleared but the child was lost to our family.

It's been extremely challenging to swallow my bitterness about this black hole in my life and not bash this woman my children loved. But when Fric and Frac demanded an explanation of why my friend did this to all of us, words have continued to fail me. How can I explain such a betrayal to my children, when years later I'm still in the dark myself?

Now that my daughter is facing her own unique set of friendship challenges she is looking at me to give her answers. The only real answer I have is women tend to be a bunch of feral b!tches and I'm fairly certain my husband would muzzle me forever if I ever breathed that out loud to my daughter.

Instead, I shrug my shoulders and give her permission to talk endlessly about her friendship woes to me in hopes that perhaps I can find clues to both our problems. So far, I'm still sticking with the feral b!tch theory.

Conversely, my husband and my son have had the same set of friends since the moment they could whip their pickles out and pee on the grass by themselves and they never seem to suffer from any of the backbiting that seems so inherent to females. Does having a penis make one oblivious to jealousy and insecurity? Or are boys just more laid back when it comes to their friends?

I don't want Fric to suffer the same wounds I've experienced with other women and I don't want to prejudice her with my spectacular history of friendship failures. I want her to be tolerant and accepting of all different type of personalities but how do I model that when for the most part I am standing in my yard, shaking my cane and yelling at everyone to get the hell off my lawn?

How do I teach her it's okay to forgive others for their transgressions without teaching her to be a doormat, when I myself struggle with both issues?

I feel completely unprepared to teach my daughter these life lessons when I'm still learning them myself.

Its times like these I envy boys and their friendships. It would be much easier if I could just slap my friends on the back as we stood side by side, peeing in the bushes.