Many moms experience spans when they feel as though they are being physically or emotionally worn away. Perhaps their resources ebb because moms both facilitate the important dates on their families’ calendars and work to elicit, from their families, just what those lists of events ought to be.
Perhaps Moms’ resources recede because Moms who remember their daughters’ forthcoming exams, their sons’ melted laundry, and their toddlers’ leftover bread crumbs, as well as remember to update all of their children’s health preparations against those witchy brews that get served up alongside of children’s sugary treats (especially when such treats are offered by “suspicious storybook dwellers”), not only move through their years unthanked, but almost always also progress uncompensated. Those hours, which female parents spend reminding their charges to scrub the ring around the bathtub or to change the cats’ litter box, never get set in a ledger, punched into a time clock or otherwise recorded. Moms receive no reward and only rarely are moms beholden for acknowledgements of their efforts.
Add to those losses the fact that clear of moms’ handiness with time management and with domestic engineering, moms tend to manifest other aptitudes, moreover. Those other abilities, however, often get short shrift. Accordingly, even the fair weather-minded moms get grouchy.
Moms were never meant to constantly acquiesce to dénouements of their professional ambitions or to predictably yield their time among bubble baths in order to run one more trip to the grocery store, iron one more shirt, or otherwise satisfy one more family member’s whim. Moms were meant to make themselves their first priority, too.
As for me, I find that I begin to enforce limits on the amount and on nature of requests, to which I will kowtow, when I begin to feel as though no amount of antacid, chemical or herbal in nature, will be sufficient to balance the cost, to my person, incurred for attending another community picnic, school event, or family free-for-all at an amusement park. Although other women may argue that my setting limits on my giving to others, at this point in my family’s life, is a bit belated, at present, it’s the best I can do.
Earlier, there were spans when including myself on my list of important persons felt impossible. When I was first Blessed with wee ones, for instance, I struggled to honor parents and in-laws simultaneously with conjuring up sufficient energies to nurse a baby or two and to chase a toddler. At such junctures, it seemed more than unrealistic for me to set aside resources, regularly, for my personal use. During that earlier era, I measured my happiness per whether or not I was able to make time for a daily shower and per whether or not I could find nutritious leftovers in my freezer.
I remember, as well, the years during which the kids were a bit older and I had returned to teaching on a part-time basis. Although, I could count on showers and on food, I still had to “make do.” Showers were often cold water affairs taken after everyone else was clean and the bathroom floor was soggy. Lunches were not the leisure of chicken breast and green beans eaten in my university’s faculty dining room, but my hasty assemblage of meals constructed from my children’s leftover apple slices and carrot sticks, all of which were tucked into paper bags I knew would be crumbled in the cutlery drawer. Plus, such meals were usually collected mere moments after I discovered a run in my pantyhose, but less than three minutes before I had to get onto the highway in order to avoid morning rush hour. I had no amazing fabulisms or even humdrum sugar plums dancing in my head. During those years, kids’ leftovers and ruined tights constituted my “best” efforts at self-care.
Today, however, my life is not governed by babies or even by elementary-aged children. No more do I transport children to afterschool activities or to playmates’ homes. I am no longer the chief cook or bottle washer in our home, either. My teens are in high school or are occupying life in phases beyond. They have learned to withstand the disappointments that result from Mom not agreeing to splinter her time among sales racks, which could sate their sartorial “voids,” and party stores, where they could hunt, endlessly, for the exact shade of lupine-embossed mask that their friends own. My kids are now at the stage where they have free time, pocket money and knowledge of the city buses. I insist they rely on their own resourcefulness.
In addition, I no longer spend hours driving round trip to work. Currently, I commute from my kitchen, where I can refill my mug with herbal tea as often as I like, and work at a keyboard, which is conveniently located in an office on the other side of my kitchen’s wall. These days, rarely do I give up weekends or holidays to grade term papers, to prepare for presentations at academic conferences or to contemplate footnotes that are mysterious to all but a handful of scholars. Instead, I pound out stories, poetry and essays and even collate the occasional book. My schedule suits my needs, not the demands put upon me by other persons.
My former reasons for being sated with dregs no longer hold. It is up to me not to respond to my resounding cell phone or to my frequently bleating laptop. I must erect, for myself, an electromagnetic wall between myself and my answering machine. Gone are the days when I could linger, a toddler in each hand, in a hardware store, admiring all manners of lawnmowers, chainsaws, and light fixtures or letting my fingers walk over the variegated textures of the dog collars. These days, if I fail to habitually satisfy my needs, I have only myself to blame.
What’s more, I’ve learned that saying “no” is not the same as becoming rigidly intolerant of familial requirements. Building protective fences around my finite personal resources is not the same as waving off my family’s precious infrastructure. It’s nearly impossible for a mom to abruptly disregard those persons dearest to her. Further, it’s outlandish to believe that any person would suddenly abandon the intimate network she worked to construct and to maintain for years or even decades. More accurately, my reinforcement of my personal borders is a behavior grounded in self-respect and is a means for me to model the necessity of self-preservation.
Yet, shifting is not easy. Recently, when I was entirely flattened from life’s particulars and, as a result, acted “all contrary and defensive” by insisting that our family “run away” for an entire day to a local hotel, which would provided us with meals and entertainments and which would provide me with uninterrupted sleep, rather than have the family count on me to supply one more festival worth of goods, the kids got angry. Familial discretionary funds were meant for “pocket prizes,” such as miniature pencil erasers, hair clips, bandanas and nail lacquer, not for recharging Mom, they responded. We had our minivacation, anyway.
Children need to be reminded that Mom gets a respite from cleaning, cooking, answering the door and folding the sheets. Mom’s reward ought not only to be time “given” over by her family for her to blossom professionally, but also time given over to her for self-renewal, whether the family literally or figuratively goes along with mom on such lifetime excursions or not.
My teens are learning. The alternatives scare them; they’ve witnessed other women in our community, dedicated primary caregivers and wives, flee from their families, sometimes permanently, all too quickly. In my offsprings’ adolescent brains, it remains “cheaper” for Mom to meet some of her needs, too.
