Mom's feel pain too

So Here is one of those projects I talked about completing. I started this 5 or 6 years ago. A mish mash of emotional scrawling across some pages after an argument with one of my kids, to which I took personal offence. It is a good think we are constantly growing and improving as parents. I never did give this one a title, but it was nice to get it edited and sorted into a legible piece of work.

 Why do humans feel emotion? I guess we all assume that it has a purpose, protection, self preservation, to foster togetherness and family. What purpose then does heartache, pain, sadness, humiliation and despair have for a human. When my children were young I would get angry if someone said something not so nice about them, I would defend them and protect them. I get it, I have those feelings to spur on my obligation to ensure their well being. When my children laugh my emotions tell me they are doing well. All of the signals that stir emotion in my are tightly linked as a mom, and cross referenced in my brain, it is instinct and even the most basic life forms have some kind of mothers intuition. What I don't get is the pain. Why can't we shut it out? Why does it nag at you all day? Why can it send the happiest woman into a downward spiral of deepest depression? Does anyone have the answer?

 When my nineteen year old stabs me with words like; "You have never done anything for me!" Or my sixteen year old shoots at me with steel words like, "Shoot me if I ever turn out like you!" I feel this pain in my chest, and deep in my throat, and I feel nauseated and tears well up no matter how hard I try to suppress them for the purpose of showing my assassins how to be strong women.

 This is the kind of emotion I do not understand. It serves no purpose other than a sickly feeling of failure and pain. If you don't yet know what I am trying to describe, it is somewhat like the feeling you get when you know you have cut yourself really deeply, you don't quite feel the pain yet and then you chance a peek, once you see the open gaping wound and the gushing blood, it hits you all at once. The searing pain the panic to put pressure on it, the light headedness that ensures you will lie down thus keeping all of you blood near to your heart and in your head. Even your emotions upon seeing yourself cut and bleeding has a purpose. Yet your reaction to your babies, a part of you, yet separate, your dreams your love, your whole life, cussing you out, is to curl up into a fetal position and wish you were dead.

 I have tried to think through this logically, I have tried to be reasonable about my theories. When you are attacked, your natural emotions tend to have you react defensively, strike out at your attackers, or maybe to turn and flee, but when your attacker is your own child whose blood was once mixed with your own, whose only reason for being alive is because of your nourishment, love and care. Your sole purpose for everything you do and the drive behind every bit of energy expended for the last eighteen years, how can you attack, how can you run, you must sit and wait, wait for the pain to set in such as when you know you have cut yourself.

 You hear the words, but you don't feel anything you chance a peek, allowing the reality of the words to sink in, you don't believe it could actually have happened. Then you instantly feel the pain, and the overwhelming crushing blow. What purpose has this emotion in the human mothers life? If not to make her want to lie down and die!

 Maybe none of it is real, your child is not attacking you, they are attacking their own insecurities and instability, their fears are reflected in what they say to you. If this is true, when they say, "You owe me!" Do they really mean, "I owe you so much and can't think of how I will ever repay you? But I still need to ask for more." When I hear, "You are so unfair to me and you don't understand me." Do they really mean, "I know you are trying to be fair but I messed up , I am ashamed and I just want to forget it, I don't want to admit that I failed." Does, "I can't wait to move out to get away from you." Translate into, " I hate having to depend on you at my age, but I am afraid of everything that awaits me outside in the real world." If this is true where does it come from, and why does it hurt so much?

 If emotion is a way to protect oneself and to deflect danger, what threat am I imposing on my children that makes them attack me like this? If their attacks inflict so much pain that I want to lay down and die, how am I supposed to neutralize the threat they feel. What kind of game is Mother Nature playing?

Obviously there is a purpose, probably much the same as the Australian Social Spider. This is a spider who lays a clutch of 40 eggs. The mother catches insects up to ten times her size in order to constantly give the young spiders a feast. She will eat whatever left overs there are. In the fall when insects become scarce and there is a shortage of food, the baby spiders turn on their mother, sucking blood from her joints, her energy slowly depletes and she becomes weak. At this point the baby spiders treat her like any other insect injecting her with venom and then consuming her entirely. Obviously this is not my fate, I see too many other mothers still walking around, and although many have joint pain, not one of them is missing any part of their body. 

Maybe humans may be closer related to the caecilians amphibians. These worm like creatures shun the normal method of laying eggs and walking away, (which I by the way am beginning to think is the way to go, just give birth and run, save yourself.) Any way these creatures give birth to eggs and then stick around so that when the eggs hatch the babies can crawl all over them peeling off layers of their skin to feast on. The worm like creatures live through this though, the babies don't kill the mother, they just eat her until she has almost nothing left to give, then she goes on to regroup and has more babies.

This is Mother Nature's joke on us. She gives the amphibious creature with no arms or legs some kind of natural pain killer that allows her young to abuse her and yet I with an IQ of 160, who can walk and talk and belong to the species that was blessed with opposable thumbs, must muddle through this pain. I almost think that the opposable thumbs are really not all that important if it means that I wouldn't have to feel this pain anymore. Who the heck came up with that idea anyway? Who chose me to have my kids peel away my protective layers of tough skin, without any anaesthetic?

So the mother spider does not fee a thing and dies, and the mother worm doesn't feel a thing and lives. Two different outcomes for two different animals, yet the constant in these two stories, happens to be the babies are selfish, unappreciative and inflict great life altering actions. What drives them? In these two instances it is the lack of food. In my children's instances, it is definitely no lack of food. But if their attack is some sort of hunger, what could it be? The spiders food runs out, they attack the mother... is it possible that something has run out for my children? Could they be attacking in search of another kind of nourishment? Has my support waned, have my hugs decreased? Is my child afraid of losing the safety net, just the plain simple ability to say mommy I hurt and to have me hold them and say it will be ok, instead of hear a lecture about how hard life is?

I guess maybe this is no joke, Mother nature chose the stupid creatures to be feasted upon, because their babies, just as stupid will eat and walk away, their mothers will either lay down and die or crawl away and have more babies. I with my heartache and pain, but more importantly my love and need for love, will dig deep and through my process. First anger, then accusations and blame, then analysis, but eventually it all gives way to maternal instinct. To sooth, comfort and love my baby, and to realize they are a reflection of myself. So this pain is to drive me, to ensure I strive to make amends and correct, and guidance to just plain sounding support board. It must be worth it? There must come a time when it will feel right and the balance between baby girl and grown up woman and little boy and grown man will be equalized.

Until such a time all I need do, to put things into perspective is to put my children's lives in a line across the floor, one foot for each year, a dime for each great memory and a penny for each tough time. As I see the floor glitter and sparkle with the silver of my good memories and satisfaction, as well as the very short distance that teen years and young adulthood, equals in the length of the whole life I know where my pain is going, and I understand now where the energy should go. I know what it protects and what it brings out. I know my children will be ok with me eventually , and I thank God that I don't have the ability to lay down and die.

Yummmm or maybe not.

The food in our household varies greatly. From a very basic tomatoe sauce and pasta for dinner, to occasional gourmet beautifully plated meals. I try to keep it healthy, and I try to include a good variety.

Lately, I have tried to focus more on basics and making things elaborate by using basics and not cream sauces and the like. I have been thinking about the fact that my children will be leaving my home one day and will need to know how to feed themselves, not just healthy eating, but sometimes quick and sometimes to entertain, sometimes to comfort and sometimes to regain health.

Food means so much to me. On the one hand it has always been something I have battled with. Not in your classic sense of an eating disorder, but as the one thing that I could control when I was young. It is also that thing , you know some people buy their kids things to show love, some people will always say good things no matter what to show love. I cook, and bake and experiment with food to show love. I wouldn't say I feed people to death or that I kill people with my love by feeding them. I do enjoy working hard and watching peoples faces when I hit on a recipe that lights up their eyes.

I love the feeling of seeing someone savor their food and relish the moment, or having it take them back to a different happy moment as they remember a smell or taste, texture or temperature. I love to please people with food.

My first experience doing this was probably the first time I made Christmas Dinner for my Grampa and the rest of my family. When dinner was done Grampa gave me a great compliment by putting a piece of bread on his plate and slathering it with gravy. Then the verbal compliment came and I was glowing. That was probably the first time I felt the warmth and love of good food.

Since then I have always put love into the food I make, but sometimes it has been to excess and not very healthy, so lately I have taken to being very careful what I feed my family.

I have been experimenting with different ingredients I can say from my recent experience that my family does not really like tofu. I have tried it in a couple of different recipes and it hasn't gone over well. But after recently watching Ratatouille I decided to make Remy's ratatouille and the family loved it, I served it over couscous and made the presentation lovely, and everyone gobbled it up. Well actually Sammy didn't find it to be his favorite but it was in general a success. So here is the recipe as a link Remy's Ratatouille. So Enjoy and maybe I will include some other recipes that I have made lately in another post. Maybe my Chocolate inspired marital goodies.

I know I know!

You are never going to believe me but this is the truth, the reason I have not written lately. You know how photographers always say things like you have to take a hundred photo's to get one worth keeping? Well I am viewing writing in the same way. I am writing and writing, and still waiting for that great little bit that will be worthy of other peoples time. I have not had much luck. My brain is feeling cluttered and I have some things I am working on that are so technical that I really feel creativity being squished like a poor spider in my house.
Any how. As I was hanging my head upside down over my bathtub, washing my hair this little bit came to mind. It is completely raw and unedited. This is exactly how I heard it in my head. I am now playing with the concept and hope to revise it and tweak it a bit to really engulf the feelings I felt as it played around in my head.

Do not revel in the Drama of the news.
Move far from the pain, don't make it be all there is.
A life needs to be lived.
Who's?
Out of fear and pain, illness and sadness, you, he, she, they are still alive.
Why Cry?
What will it change?
Stop Don't! Just Live, laugh, love and die.
Life is whirling. Sad when it stops.
Don't end it before it wants to be over.

Be specific.

So I have decided that it is time to recruit the kiddies to start helping around the house with the cleaning. They are all old enough.

They were all quite happy to help out when I mentioned it to them. First on the list was Victoria and Olivia, on the evening they were supposed to dust the living room, tidy all the toys, and vacuum, I handed them a can of spray furniture polish, and said, "Here is the furniture polish, use a cloth to wipe down the tables and then vacuum."

At dinner we spoke of the chores and Victoria and Olivia explained all the hard work they had done to the rest of the kids, they sprayed the couches with the furniture polish, and washed the tables with water and a cloth...

Hold on, read that last sentence again! Yup you read it right, I was not specific enough. I laughed so hard when I heard what they had done.

This is not the only time this kind of thing has happened. If you have children you know what I am talking about. You must be clear and specific when giving instructions to children.

You can't say things like, "don't make a mess!" and expect them to know that that means, paint on the floor is a mess, paper on tables is a mess, shoes by the door is a mess, coats on a chair is a mess. You have to be specific.

When one of my children said "Can I put on my bathing suit before swim class so I don't have to change at the pool?" I answered, "of course, it will save time." It was January and I was not specific enough, my child showed up at the door when it was time to go wearing a bathing suit winter coat and boots...and nothing underneath but her bathing suit. Yup I had to be more specific and say you can wear your bathing suit under your clothes not just a winter coat.

Being a parent can be hard, it can be frustrating, and exhausting, but the natural comic relief and the unconditional love more than makes up for it. 

Spring is here.

Isn't it so wonderful, new seasons! They come quietly, and you are never quite sure when it happens. You wake up one morning to a fresh snowfall or trees with fall colors, the birds singing and the sounds, oh the fantastic sounds that each season brings. Today for me was a lovely reminder of springs visit as tentative as it may be.

Seeing children craving the sun out in t-shirts and parents walking beside toddlers on tricycles. Joggers and walkers, and seniors all out like sunflowers faces pointed towards the long awaited sun. It was inspiring and lovely.

Summer is trying, winter is dying, in the in between that is spring.
Let the sun shine upon and heat your face, as winter clings with its windy embrace.
The seasons are changing and spring is young, but a season of its own.
Water is flowing once again, trickling, enticing the birds to sing.
Spring in its glory, a battlefield, between Winters Cold and Summers Heat.
Ebbs and flows of highs and lows, wet and wondrous joys do appear.
The buds, the creatures, of his divine making, an expo for all to see.
Do not lament the lovely crisp clean, of winters studious grasp,
For the spring is followed by summer and fall, and winter then will be back.
Embrace the spring and its fleeting glory, for soon it will all pass.
The way will be paved for summers hazy days, and the quiet and stillness of heat.
In newness and life, colors and sounds, with no other season does spring compete.

A little bit that has been playing on my mind all day. The sun was beating down on my face warming me and at the same time the wind played around my neck and gave me images of summer and winter fighting for a place and poor spring was sitting in the background saying "hey its my turn".

I know its nuts but that is the way my mind works and it was fun daydreaming. If nothing else it stimulated my creative juices. As rusty as they are they will never become fit if I don't exercise them. I hope you enjoy it.

Grinding teeth

Have you ever woken up one morning to find that your teeth don't come together like they used too. There is something different or unnatural about your bite. You spend all day trying to get your teeth to go the way they should, feeling slightly uncomfortable and wishing you could get it out of your mind. You obsess about it, and it nags at you and goes on and on. Then one day it is gone, you don't even remember when, or how, but things feel normal again. As a matter of fact you don't know if you got used to the new feeling, or if the slight difference in your bite went away and it is back to the way it was?

I feel like I have just done that with my life, and it happens in good ways and bad ways. I have experienced both. Sometimes, no matter what the outcome was, good or bad, my life was changing for good and it was not something I had control of.  I have like many people gone on with life sometimes living with the nagging irritable and sometimes horrifying feeling that things were never going to meet again the way I always thought they should.

Then one day I don't know when it happened, how or even why it happened, but it always does, things feel normal again.

I can't exactly say that every thing is perfect. Things happen some severe and scary and some delightful. I think that I just have a hard time sometimes adjusting to new. Even when it is wonderful it nags at me. I wonder how many people are the same. I wonder how it affects our lives, our ability to take risks, to embark on new endeavors.

If our idea of safety is so profound that little things make us feel unsafe, insecure, uneasy and unwilling to live, how does anyone accomplish anything?

I have watched some people in my family, friends and in my general circle of acquaintances who are so frightened of the unknown that they won't take steps to improve their lives, even though it will enrich and benefit them. They have nothing to lose and there is minimal risk involved and yet they still can't bring themselves to step out of their safe box as small and uncomfortable as it is. It is their box and they know what to expect.

I have also watched other people in my circle take huge risks, going out on a limb to satisfy an urge, to quiet a craving for newness, to explore things that may be perilous and dangerous or may leave them broke. They do this with excitement, and ambition, a desire for the feelings and things and experiences that are unknown. They do it without reserve, because it is their life, and they don't feel they have a box, they feel that life is a bunch of boxes that you collect and stack and when they work out then you have a cardboard castle, and when they don't work out and the castle collapses you have a bunch of cardboard boxes.

If you look at the risk taker and the person living inside the box, you can see that no matter how many times your castle falls down, you still have all the boxes the experiences that you have accumulated, to go ahead and rebuild. The person inside the box is sad, you can't build a castle from inside a cardboard box, and you can call one box a castle as much as you want but when side by side, any child would take a pile of boxes with which they can build anything they want over one cardboard box with a troll living inside it any day.

Hmmmm....I guess this post is pretty boring but just some thoughts spewing out of my head. I just don't want to ever miss a chance to collect a box for my castle.

Coming soon

So if you read my last blog go to the link that connects you to my old blog and read Flight of fancy, you will see mention of my Auntie Burt. This is my maternal grandmothers sister, my great aunt. She was a strong but not always present figure in my childhood. I loved her dearly, and looked forward to the sporadic visits. I have not seen her in many many years. I could not get a hold of her nor could my mother or my grandmother.

Well my mother was finally able to contact her. My mother called my great aunts son. They talked and got caught up and he told my mother that Auntie Burt was in a nursing home. She had been there for just under two years.

I was so excited when my mom gave me this news. I had wanted to interview my Auntie Burt about her life growing up as a part of my family research project. I didn't think I would get to far because from what I know she has never been interested in talking about the past and thinks it was better left where it is.

I had a little encouragement though when I spoke to my grandmother because I thought she felt the same and our interview was lovely and she revealed a lot about our family to me that I never knew.

My mom said that my Auntie Burt is suffering from Alzheimers though, this makes me sad, some of my most precious moments are when I am sitting with people I love and talking about good memories, and experiences from the past. I wonder if Auntie Burt would want to talk about the past now. I wonder if it would be taking advantage of her if she was willing to talk about it now, assuming that she may not remember her reasons for not wanting to talk about it before.

All of these things are going through my mind, visiting her, being there when my grandmother and mother visit with her for the first time in years, and my own selfish motives of trying to piece together a past for our family. I want to take pictures of them, lots of pictures.

That leads me to my next family project. I want to document in photos my grandmother great aunt and my mother and aunt and all of the women in our family including my daughters, grand daughter and just have a photo document of who we all are, right now. What we do, and how it makes us feel to be where we are.

This is not going to be easy. I don't want to take a bunch of photos of everyone smiling and in a group. It will be my job to capture how they feel at this point in their lives. I want to take a picture of each womans emotion. Exciting, challenging, and a very important documentation for future generations. I think I will call it "Our Faces". So stay tuned that should come up in about two months.