not a stepford mommy
I remember the gist!! I do!
I naively thought I would watch Ellen this morning. She was on in 15 minutes, so I flipped around to see what else I could watch and happened upon The Mom Show.
Good grief. Anybody ever watch that? They're pseudo mommies. Either that, or they're very real mommies, but put on this beautiful act for tv. Today they were making fancy covers for their scrap books. Apparently it's something you can do with your kids - so long as your kid is Rosie O'Donnell.
Why is it that being a mom these days entails constant playing with and entertaining your kids? Or putting them in ballet, music, swimming, sports, art classes, etc. at the tender age of 2.5? Is it really so wrong to open the backdoor and yell "everybody out" so that you can have a break from them climbing the cupboards and washing miscellaneous toys in the bathroom sink the minute you're not looking? Do we really have to play board games and do sight reading flashcards with our preschoolers all day?
Has anyone else noticed how competitive mothers seem these days?
Apparently, tossing your kids in the playroom or the backyard while not running from event to event is not going to get you the mother of the year award. And not only can you not do these things, but you have to not do them better than all the other mothers out there.
You should see the birthday parties these days. They make me feel inadequate. Scratch that. They make me laugh.
When I was a kid, my birthday parties involved whichever kids my parents friends had. And we ran around and made a mess in the bedrooms while our parents visited and smoked in the kitchen. And we took our cake and ice-cream off into the bedroom to eat so we could mash it all together and pretend it was something entirely different. If we were lucky we got to bring a candle. And light it.
Now? Birthday parties have organized games, crafts, life lessons, trips to the moon, etc. And numbers. If Sally Ann has 14 kids at her party, then Gracie Lou has 17.
17 three-year-olds. Can you imagine?
Before I continue - no offense to those of you who do some of these things. I'm sure I'm not referring to you. Because you'd never name your kid Gracie Lou.
People wonder all the time how I "manage" with three kids and one of someone else's. I don't "manage", I just do it. I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. And I cut myself some slack. My 21 month old is not potty trained, my three year old doesn't know how to read, and my almost-five year old isn't doing fractions and long division. They're in baseball, but not soccer, piano, music, art, jungle gyrating belly dancing happy feet classes, speech therapy, gymnastics, etc. And you know what? I'm okay with that, and so are they.
It's not like I don't do anything with the kids. I'll take them to the park, or the beach, or the zoo, or a friend's house from time to time, but I don't run around with them the entire time. I'll sit on a park bench and visit my husband and drink a coke. I'll lay on a beach blanket in the back yard and read a book while they swim in the pool or dig in the sandbox. They love that I'm out there with them. If they need me for something I'll be there, but I don't follow them around and hover.
You should hear them play. I don't know how they contain their imaginations in those little heads. They run all day. They make blanket forts in the living room, they dump out all their toys so they can hide in the buckets, they spend hours in the sandbox. Their bath water at the end of the day is probably dirtier than Crescent Lake. I read them bedtime stories, and dole out hugs, kisses, band aids and snacks. I put them in time-outs when they fight, bite and hair pull. I tell them to "shake it off" when they fall down in the yard.
I don't fashion my hair into ringlets in the morning, or iron my clothes. I don't care about that stuff either, and neither do they.
My kids rock, with or without brand name running shoes and yoga.
I naively thought I would watch Ellen this morning. She was on in 15 minutes, so I flipped around to see what else I could watch and happened upon The Mom Show.
Good grief. Anybody ever watch that? They're pseudo mommies. Either that, or they're very real mommies, but put on this beautiful act for tv. Today they were making fancy covers for their scrap books. Apparently it's something you can do with your kids - so long as your kid is Rosie O'Donnell.
Why is it that being a mom these days entails constant playing with and entertaining your kids? Or putting them in ballet, music, swimming, sports, art classes, etc. at the tender age of 2.5? Is it really so wrong to open the backdoor and yell "everybody out" so that you can have a break from them climbing the cupboards and washing miscellaneous toys in the bathroom sink the minute you're not looking? Do we really have to play board games and do sight reading flashcards with our preschoolers all day?
Has anyone else noticed how competitive mothers seem these days?
Apparently, tossing your kids in the playroom or the backyard while not running from event to event is not going to get you the mother of the year award. And not only can you not do these things, but you have to not do them better than all the other mothers out there.
You should see the birthday parties these days. They make me feel inadequate. Scratch that. They make me laugh.
When I was a kid, my birthday parties involved whichever kids my parents friends had. And we ran around and made a mess in the bedrooms while our parents visited and smoked in the kitchen. And we took our cake and ice-cream off into the bedroom to eat so we could mash it all together and pretend it was something entirely different. If we were lucky we got to bring a candle. And light it.
Now? Birthday parties have organized games, crafts, life lessons, trips to the moon, etc. And numbers. If Sally Ann has 14 kids at her party, then Gracie Lou has 17.
17 three-year-olds. Can you imagine?
Before I continue - no offense to those of you who do some of these things. I'm sure I'm not referring to you. Because you'd never name your kid Gracie Lou.
People wonder all the time how I "manage" with three kids and one of someone else's. I don't "manage", I just do it. I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. And I cut myself some slack. My 21 month old is not potty trained, my three year old doesn't know how to read, and my almost-five year old isn't doing fractions and long division. They're in baseball, but not soccer, piano, music, art, jungle gyrating belly dancing happy feet classes, speech therapy, gymnastics, etc. And you know what? I'm okay with that, and so are they.
It's not like I don't do anything with the kids. I'll take them to the park, or the beach, or the zoo, or a friend's house from time to time, but I don't run around with them the entire time. I'll sit on a park bench and visit my husband and drink a coke. I'll lay on a beach blanket in the back yard and read a book while they swim in the pool or dig in the sandbox. They love that I'm out there with them. If they need me for something I'll be there, but I don't follow them around and hover.
You should hear them play. I don't know how they contain their imaginations in those little heads. They run all day. They make blanket forts in the living room, they dump out all their toys so they can hide in the buckets, they spend hours in the sandbox. Their bath water at the end of the day is probably dirtier than Crescent Lake. I read them bedtime stories, and dole out hugs, kisses, band aids and snacks. I put them in time-outs when they fight, bite and hair pull. I tell them to "shake it off" when they fall down in the yard.
I don't fashion my hair into ringlets in the morning, or iron my clothes. I don't care about that stuff either, and neither do they.
My kids rock, with or without brand name running shoes and yoga.
Comments
Stepford Mom, I am not.
And kids don't WANT 24 hours of structured time. Nor do they want their mommies all the time, just like we don't want them all the time.
There are a lot of blogs I read that I had to stop reading because it was such a fakey pollyanna view of things. Sadly, some of these blogs belong to my real life friends, so I know how things REALLY are.
Like the bottle of wine they polish off each day, and the difficulties with their husbands and the fact that they have to fight their kid tooth and nail to pay attention to the activities they set up for them...