Bad Mom

I'm not the best mom (or the best blogger, clearly, but that's another post). I yell sometimes. I don't always serve vegetables. I avoid combing Lady's hair because I'm tired of the screaming. On the good days, I shake my head and tell myself that I'll do better, and on the bad days, I dissolve into a puddle of self-loathing who has to convince herself that she's still worth something.

I'll be the first to admit that motherhood doesn't come naturally to me. Well, some things come naturally--I dare you to hold a screaming baby that just got pulled out of your stomach and not fall instantly in love--but before I-gots was born, I'd never changed a diaper, fawned over a newborn, or read a book to a toddler. And I'd never wanted to. I babysat as a teenager because that was what teenagers in my neighborhood did, but the one and only time I had to babysit a baby, my mom had to come over and bail me out halfway through.

Now that I have kids of my own, infants don't intimidate me--but I still won't volunteer to hold them. And even though I have kids of my own, I sometimes wonder what I was thinking. Why I prayed so hard for kids I'm so bad at taking care of. Mothers are gentle, patient creatures who always put their children's needs above their own. They're not chemically unbalanced women who occasionally wish that they could trade their children in.

And yet they are because I am.

Being a mom is the hardest thing I've ever done. Every time I turn around, someone's peeing/yelling/fighting. There are no sick days, no vacations. Even if I manage to sneak away for a few days, I spend the whole time worrying that my mom won't know how to wrestle them into the bathtub or make their sandwiches just right. But being a mom is also the most gratifying. There is no amount of money/freedom/peace and quiet that can ever compensate for two sticky hands squeezing your cheeks and a slobbery mouth whispering in your ear, "I love you, Mom."

I've never met a mom who thought she was a good mom, but then, I've never met a kid with a hard-working mom who thought she was a bad one.

It's Recommendation Week

It’s Recommendation Week here on the blog. I recently finished two great books, and Honey Bear and I discovered a new recipe that is definitely worth sharing. But we'll kick everything off with some links.

For blog surfers I’ve stumbled across a blog or two of late that I wanted to share with you. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

My Bloggish Blog Thing with Josin L. McQuein The first thing I noticed about Josin was her interesting name; the second thing I noticed was that she was winning all of the writing contests I was entering around the blogosphere:) So give her blog a look-see.

Somewhere Between Fact & Fiction with Shannon McMahon If you like my blog, you’ll probably like Shannon’s, as we share a lot of the same interests (writing, cooking, blogging--I guess that one goes without saying). Check it out.

For queriers Have you heard of Absolute Write? It’s a fantastic website, with forums on practically every topic a writer might find interesting. I especially like their Bewares and Background Checks, which allow writers to share statistics and anecdotes relating to specific agents. Want to know how long Agent A has been taking to respond to queries lately? Wondering if you’re the only one waiting to hear back from Agent B on a manuscript request? Absolute Write probably knows.

And don’t forget to register for QueryTracker. It is, in my opinion, the best online database for finding and researching agents.

For moms This past weekend, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held its annual General Conference. In addition to hearing several beautiful messages about the atonement and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I also heard this poignant message about motherhood. Enjoy:)

"I Can, Too!"

Large isn’t the first word I’d use to describe my son’s bedroom. Or the second. Or the third. You know the kind--it’s the starter-home special, the just-big-enough-to-fit-a-(small)-bed-and-maybe-a-dresser second bedroom. But Honey Bear and I are magicians, or maybe just delusional, because my son’s bedroom contains the one (small) bed, not one but two dressers, and a poofy rocker-recliner the color of warm caramel.

The rocker-recliner’s great. We found it on clearance at our local if-we-teleported-the-place-to-the-East-Coast-it-would-squish-the-entire-state-of-Rhode-Island furniture outlet, and it’s so soft and, well, rock-y. Honey Bear has visions of someday moving it to the family room (when we actually have a family room, that is), but right now, it lives in I-gots’s room, in the corner. And gets in the way.

That's what it was doing last week, at least. I-gots--that's what my son called himself up until a few days ago--wanted to play in his room, so my eight-month-old daughter and I were sitting in the chair, watching, and throwing off I-gots’s groove. A random toy had somehow slithered behind the rocker-recliner, and that, of course, was the toy he wanted to play with.

“You can’t get it right now,” I told him. “We might squish you.”

(We’re not quite as big as the furniture outlet, mind you, but then, I-gots’s not quite as big as Rhode Island.)

“I get it!” he assured me.

“No, I-gots. You can’t.”

So I-gots backed out of the tiny gap he’d been trying to squeeze through, and I thought to myself, “See what a good mother I am? And I-gots is such an obedient child.”

Well, I-gots is pretty obedient, but on that particular day, he was in more of a problem-solving mood. If he couldn’t get the toy from one side of the chair, then maybe he could get it from the other.

I realized what he was doing once he started pressing himself into the other gap, and responded accordingly.

“No, I-gots,” I repeated. “You can’t get the toy right now.”

“I get it!”

“No, honey,” I said, a little less patiently this time. “You can’t do it!”

And then I-gots reared back, in all of his two-year-old glory, and put both little hands on his hips, and exclaimed, “I can, too!”

His words--and mine, after hearing myself say them like that--stunned me. Of course he COULD do it; in fact, when I looked down at that moment, I realized that the toy was right there, a few inches in front of him, barely behind the chair at all. But hearing myself say that out loud--“You can’t do it!”--made me realize how much I never wanted to hear myself say that again.

I want to be I-gots’s cheerleader. I want to be the supporter of dreams. I always want to be able to say, “Yes, I-gots, you can.” Because even if he can’t, he has to learn that for himself. No one, especially me, should tell him otherwise.

I am Mom, after all, and that makes me, if nothing else, a believer.

I'm My Own Book Banner

That’s banner as in one who bans things, by the way. Not banner as in the long, wavy sign my high school strings across Main Street every time they put on a play…

At any rate, if you have anything even remotely to do with the publishing industry, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that this is Banned Books Week. Awesome agent Nathan Bransford’s blog post on the subject raised some interesting questions, including whether censorship is even plausible in this digital age and the fine line between suppression and discretion. I don’t have much to say about that first one, but the second inspired the opinion that follows.

First off, let me just say that, in general, I don’t support governmental censorship simply because I wonder where it would end. Would the Koran, for example, eventually be censored because it engenders terrorist sentiment? (I am not suggesting that the Koran advocates terrorism, by the way, only that those Muslims who commit acts of terror often use a misinterpretation of its teachings to justify their behavior.) Not a pleasant path to start down. Indeed, the government does not have the right to make decisions about what we and our children read--but parents do.

In fact, it goes even farther than that--parents have not only the right but the obligation to make informed choices about the media that come into their homes. And that will mean banning at least a few of those things, books included.

You may call me unenlightened. You may call me a tyrant. But there are some books (and some TV shows, movies, and music) that my children will not read, watch, or listen to. I will not allow them (or myself, for that matter) to read, watch, or listen to anything with explicit sexual content. And until they’re old enough to handle certain themes, like murder, I will restrict their access to material with that content as well

Now I know what you’re thinking: How can I possibly expect to limit such things? They’ll have friends with access; they’ll find spare internet connections; they’ll have unsupervised time. And that is absolutely true. I cannot completely remove their ability to seek out such things, to choose for themselves, and I wouldn’t want to. But I can let them know what my standard as their parent is. And I can teach them why I want them to adhere to that standard.

So the government or the schools or the American Library Association can ban or not ban books all they want. The fact of the matter is, I don’t trust their opinions, anyway. And even if I did, their actions still wouldn’t change my responsibility as a parent.