Again With the Lists

Things not included in The Handbook for Parents that should have been:

To avoid completely peanut butter coated faces, cut the sandwich into quarters.

Always have a supply of batteries on hand to combat the creepy evil toy sound of drained batteries.

White grape juice and apple juice are much less noticeable stains than grape juice and fruit punch.

Infant carriers are great beds for babies who are stuffed up.

Fingerprints will continue to magically reappear until all your children are away at college. Don’t bother.

Laundry doesn’t wash its self, nor does it walk its self into closets and dressers. Trust me, I’ve been waiting for a while.

Your child’s cuteness will be directly proportionate to the amount of trouble they are trying to get out of.

Hair spray takes out ink stains.

Magic erasers are a gift from God.

Be prepared to repeat everything you say for the rest of eternity.

The amount of gray hair on your head may very well be proportionately related to the amount of trouble your child is trying to get out of.

Dressers don’t have to be perfectly neat. What matters is the clothing made it there and you didn’t have to do it.

If you have a child who likes to vacuum, go ahead and hand it over daily. Eventually he will get to the spots he missed the day before.

There doesn’t have to be music for you to do a happy dance with your children.

There will be days when you’d rather have the dentist scrape plaque off your teeth than hear the word mom again.

Forget the terrible twos. There’s an attitude that begins between 5 ½ and 6 that may not (as I’m beginning to fear) go away until they hit twenty something.

Do you have any pointers that should have been included in The Handbook for Parents that I might have missed?

Wonder Woman

It was every parent’s nightmare. It was her nightmare, too. She was pregnant at 14 years old. She waited to tell her parents. She waited until she couldn’t hide it from them any longer. She was showing and it would be all too obvious very soon. She knew deep in her heart she might be a great disappointment to her parents.

She finally chose to face the music and tell her parents. Against their wishes, she made the decision to keep the baby. By the time the baby was born, she would be 15, and he would be 16. And she would step up to the plate and be a mom- way too early, much too soon. She would change diapers and soothe the late night crying and bathe and care for a baby when she should be worrying about who to date, what lip gloss to wear, and how she did on her math test. Her decision meant she would have to drop out of school and get a job. She wasn’t even old enough to drive yet. But somehow she knew she had to be old enough to be a mother.

Her parents wanted them to get married. His parents said there was no way they would force children into marriage, and that if or when a marriage happened between their two children, it would be a decision they would make themselves, not their parents. There were lots of tears and lots of disappointment for a childhood lost, but when it came down to baby’s arrival day, all the parents would be as supportive as they possibly could be.

He stood by her and soon they had a little girl. All of the sudden their tumultuous teenage years were splattered with dirty diapers and spit up. They had to grow up faster than any child should. She had to face the responsibility of raising a child while still growing up and learning herself. He had to do the same, and it was a struggle for them both.

She could have passed off the responsibility to someone else. She could have let her parents raise the baby, or his parents, for that little girl quickly worked her way into the whole family’s heart. However, she had this stubborn determination to make it work and be independent no matter how difficult the road may be. So she worked as hard as she could, earning next to nothing to try and make ends meet. Having not finished high school, she didn’t make much money.

She stayed in the relationship which was on-again-off-again like most teenage relationships are. One minute totally in love, the next totally in hate. There were arguments and tears, but there was beauty and laughter mixed in too.

When he got accepted into the Marines, she followed him to California. Things soon became more difficult as she realized she was pregnant again. Her own mother passed away around her 18th birthday, leaving her 6 months pregnant and grieving fiercely. And then they made the decision to marry. At 18 she married the father of her soon to be two little girls.

Things continued down the same path with the two of them trying to be as grown up as possible in a difficult world of parenting, living hand to mouth, and often wondering where the money to pay rent would appear from. They both tried their best to raise two little girls the only way they knew how- to learn as they went along.

One day no one had planned on, he was in a car accident. It seemed he would be OK, but there was internal bleeding that no one knew was there. He passed away, leaving her 20 years old and grieving the loss of her husband, with two daughters to raise on her own.

And so she did. She did the best she could, sometimes just living each day from start to finish and nothing beyond. She made mistakes but she did a lot of things right. She missed a lot of moments from their childhood due to working hard to support herself and her girls. She went back to night school and got her high school diploma. She missed school plays and track meets. She missed lazy summer days and volunteering in the classrooms on holidays. But she sacrificed all of that out of pure love for her little girls.

And with a lot of prayer, hard work and perseverance, she now has two grown daughters with 5 beautiful grandchildren between them. That's a lifetime of accomplishment for not being 50 yet.

She is my mother. I am her oldest daughter, and can not tell you how proud I am of her. Not everyone would have made the decision she chose to make, or stepped up to the parenting plate at such a young age. I know that her decision is not the right one for everyone. Being a teenage parent is not glamorous. Being a parent at any age is the most challenging and long term job a person can undertake. She had so many curve balls thrown at her early on she could have easily thrown her hands in the air, and screamed “I give up.” But she didn’t, and that makes me unique and grateful for a childhood and life I might not have had at all, or might have had with a completely different family.

My grandparents (his parents) once told me that they believe all things happen for a reason. The great disappointment of him having children so young turned into one of the greatest blessings of their life. They realized after his death at 21 years of age that my sister and I were meant to be. I think of this often, as well as the best advice I’ve ever received from my mother. She once told me the following:

“God will not give you more than you can handle. Put your faith in him, and no matter how dark things seem for you, and even though you don’t know how, you will make it through with his help.”

I have watched through example how my mother has lived her life according to this advice. As a parent, she tried her best and loved us both unconditionally and that’s all I could have asked for. That makes her my Wonder Woman.

**This post was created with the intention of entering July's Write-Away Contest hosted by Scribbit, one of the blogs on my daily read list. It was a fun process, whether I win or not, and I will definately enter again.

Oh. Oh My. I've Become My Mother.

I never expected this. It was the ultimate no-no to me as a 13 year old girl, and even as I grew to realize my mother knew considerably more than I previously thought, it remained on my huh-uh never list for my visions of the future. Even after marriage, children, and being close with her for the last 15 or more years, it’s still something I’ve tried to avoid. I firmly believe that as women we can love our mothers tremendously and whole heartedly. We can want to be like them. But somewhere down in our little inner psyche a little voice whispers to us as a constant reminder that we do not want to BECOME them.

It may start innocent enough. A little nose wipe with your sleeve here, a spit bath there, and then way out of left field comes using the kitchen rag to wipe a messy face (something I swore at 8 I would never do even under utmost forms of torture).

And then one day I’m going about my business blogging about one of my most embarrassing moments. Then I discover that my sweet mother has taken the time to leave me a nice lengthy comment, and WHAMMO it hits me. I am more like my mom than I previously thought. In fact, I may very well have become her. It’s left me chuckling all morning.

Mom’s comment brought back a memory I’d almost forgotten about. Smoochie attended pre-k classes at our local elementary school for a period of time. The bus would pick him up and drop him off in front of our house. I loved it because there’s something heart tugging about such a little boy trying to get on and off a big bus.

One afternoon in the middle of winter the bus dropped him off in front of our house. My son was bundled to the utmost. Big fluffy coat, check. Snowpants, check. Hood, hat, and scarf wrapped snugly, check. He resembled a 3ft tall Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

We always use our back door at our house that leads into our kitchen. Smoochie got off the bus and took off running as fast as his little legs would move for the back door, which was inside our fenced in yard.

As I watched everything unfold, my mind and my mouth were on two different pages. They were completely out of sync.

My mind went about a mile a minute. Slow down little boy, the ground is wet and slippery. Hey, our gate is closed you need to slow down. He’s gonna stop and wait for me. Slow down slow down slow down, stoooooooop!

My mouth had a total short circuit. Nothing came out, and I watched the events unfold before me in silence.

His scarf was wrapped too high upon his face, and he could not see our chain link fence quickly approaching through the brutal winter air on the other side of it. He was running blind, much like a fluffy little human bowling ball. He’s never been a very fast runner, but I do completely think he set personal speed records on this afternoon.

Fwaaack! He hit our chain link fence at full speed and bounced off it like he’d taken a running leap at a vertical trampoline. He wound up about 3 feet away on his back and stunned into total silence. His winter gear cushioned the fall, and for a moment the only sound was the tingalingaling of the chain link percussion.

And then there was laughter. I laughed so hard my tonsils froze. I fell to my knees and couldn’t breathe. Through my tears I tried to help him up and make sure he was ok, but it took a few minutes for me to compose myself enough to get us into the house. I unbundled Smoochie and made him a nice hot lunch- while chuckling of course. And then I ran to the phone to call my mom and tell her what happened through more laughter and tears- because I knew of all people she would appreciate my story the most.

I guess if becoming my mother brings years worth of tears from laughter, there could be worse fates in life. Unless you ask a 13 year old girl.