Maternally Challenged

Some #%%(()!#%$^! Days Are Just Like That

Bad day. I get up and the pollen hits me like a dump truck; I'm lightheaded and dizzy and I feel like my head is encased in a great big bale of cotton wool. Get the youngest off to school, come back home and inform oldest I'm going to bed. Two hours (TWO HOURS!) later I awake. OHMIGOD it's late.

The house is a wreck but that'll have to wait; it's been a week since I've seen the inside of my office. But the brain won't work. It. Will. Not. Work. I tear up the chapter I've been working on and discover I have no earthly idea of what I'm saying, how to say it, or what I need to find out in order to have a prayer of having anything worth saying in the future. If you are in the writing trade you know this; if not, take my word: this is hell. In the midst of which a migraine starts.

Before I know it, it's time to pick up the youngest, which I do, and we do some shopping and all the time we are in the car she is telling me how lonely she is at school and how hard she is finding it to make friends. If you are a mom, you know this; if not, take my word: this is hell. Do I intervene? What would intervention be, anyway? What can I do to make her happy/happier? Is that my job, even? What would a good parent do?.....and so on. In everything I think, for the rest of the day, there's this undercurrent of worry. I just don't know what to do. I ache to see her so unhappy. And every time my thoughts wander off to something else, this problem pulls me back to it. I am like a terrier with a bone he can't let go of.

We get home to a house which is, oddly, still a wreck, and the oldest drags in, and I put a frozen pizza in the over (because the hubster is gone this week, and it's 95 degrees out for some ungodly reason, in APRIL, and I am not cooking in this heat) and this frozen pizza tastes like the sole of a cheap dollar-store flipflop. I paid $7 for gluten-free, rubberized cardboard. Lovely. I go looking for the youngest to call her to dinner, such as it is, and find her totally conked out on the sofa. She started a new medication today and it's making her so, so sleepy. I let her be, because it's time now to take the oldest to softball practice--except that one schedule says practice is at Park A and my computer schedule says Park B, and we end up using up about $7 of gas and never finding the *%&(#! practice. Come home to a house which is STILL a wreck.

At which point I say TO HELL WITH IT and sit down to watch TV with my girls, and then I send them to bed, and now the day is over. Good riddance.

Listening To The Morons

It's a mark of how mindlessly polarized political discourse in this country has become that quite a while back, one of my kids asked from the back seat, "Mom, what is a liberal?"--and my mind went blank. My first response: "Well, it's not a dirty word, whatever you may have heard."

But then I was stumped. "Liberals care about people, honey, and conservatives only care about money." Won't do, any more than "Conservatives care about their country, honey, while liberals only care about their own selfish personal rights." Even my own brain had gotten stupid, and I hadn't even been watching Glenn Beck. I finally gave her some kind of half-assed answer, but I wasn't happy with being that unprepared. And I realized that I have been so busy taking aim at the Other Side's arguments, like I was Annie Oakley at a skeet shoot, that I haven't given nearly enough thought to why I think the way I do. Everything is either/or these days that I feel like some kid in a dysfunctional family which can never handle the tiniest crisis without a lot of screaming and sulking and pointless drama. 

So here's what I've been doing: I've got my car radio programmed to a right-wing religiously affiliated station, the kind that in the past I've avoided like a case of Ebola. I hit that button from time to time, just to hear what they're saying out there in right-wing land. And I've actually learned some things. This station has a call-in program on in the afternoons for people with personal problems, and they give pretty good advice. I haven't heard a thing on abortion that I agree with, but I'm understanding better why it seems to pop up in the news so constantly: there's a whole cadre of conservative fund-raisers out there who make a living by shoehorning this issue into every conceivable debate; if it weren't for getting people riled up on abortion, they'd have to go out and actually get a J-O-B. (And just for the record, I've never met a soul who is actually in favor of abortion.) I've gained some perspective on things I heard in my childhood. I've listened to preachers long enough to realize that, if you can get past the way they're saying it, what they're saying can often be boiled down into common-sense positions on the value of family life and community and personal responsibility. In short, I have slowly come to start hearing people instead of caricatures.

Sometimes I do say, "Oh, for Chrissake! What a moron!" and switch it off, but it doesn't happen as often as you'd think. I still don't agree with most of what I hear. But at least I'm hearing it, and not mocking it or yelling back at it. Now, if only the Other Side would do that for me...