Chopped Liver

(or, Patriarchy Sucks*)

One of my greatest character flaws is that I need positive reinforcement; I want people to like me. I'd love to be one of those people who confidently marches through life, satisfied entirely by some internal force…no one else's approval necessary, and in fact able to shed disapproval like raindrops off of gortex. I don't actually know any of those people, but I know that most people in my life are much more gortex than I am. I am 100% cotton; I absorb absolutely everything and in bad weather, I am not very warm.

Quinn can't talk yet so I really have no idea how she feels about me. But, sometimes I get hints—like the other day when I went to pick her up from her babysitter. I practically ran from my car to the front door because I was so friggin' excited to see her. Maury (the babysitter) carried Quinn to me so I wouldn't have to take my boots off. And, as she handed her over, Quinn started to cry. She actually leaned away from me and reached for Maury. I made a joke, of course, in hopes that I wouldn't start to cry too. Maury was kind enough to insist it wasn't as it appeared, my baby preferring her over me, but we both knew it was.

Quinn responds in this preferential way to Sam too. I'll be busily taking care of some need she has—in the middle of the night or at the end of a long day at school—feeding her, bathing her, or changing a diaper, and she'll be all business, like I'm the hired help. But, as soon as Sam walks into the room, her whole face lights up. She smiles and her eyes get bright with joy.

I get basically nothing in the way of positive reinforcement. I have to do all kinds of stupid antics to even get a smile out of her. There is no "Thank you, Mom, for growing me inside your own body for nine months, and for sustaining my life for the past six with what you've produced from your own…thank you for knowing instinctively when I'm on my face and need you to flip me back over, or knowing that I'm crying because I'm cold, or wet, or my toes are being jammed into these pajamas that are too small." And, you know, I don't even really need any of that…at least not yet…but a voluntary smile would be nice now and then. Or at least she might consider not crying when I show up to bring her home.

But she loves Sam...without the antics and despite the fact that I think I am usually more tuned in to her needs than he is. Sam  will walk over to me, with Quinn in his arms, and ask, "should I change her?" This stuns me. "Sniff her butt," I'll say, and that's me being polite, because what I'm really thinking is, "How the flock do I know? You're the one holding her!" And as he walks away, I'll be thinking, "What a moron."

So, okay, I'll admit, maybe the lack of positive reinforcement from Quinn is the price I pay for being overly critical and needy. Maybe she is trying to scold me for being so mean; I am convinced she knows things, that she has fully developed adult thoughts in that little noggin of hers. Maybe that's why she will only smile at Sam. Maybe she's trying to say, "Stop being such a bitch, Mom; he's trying."

That would be fine if there was some way for me to get my tank filled up now and then…some way she could show me that I’m doing something right, or that in the broader world I could get some credit for all this work. In the absence of these things, I cling to mostly irrelevant data, like how much she weighs. I rejoiced proudly at the doctor's office this week when we were told that Quinn had moved from the 13th percentile in weight to the 18th (like it even matters). She now weighs 14 lbs 6 oz, thanks largely to my breastfeeding efforts because she's not taking to the formula quite as I hoped she would, and she'd rather spray the kitchen with the butternut squash I grew for her than eat it. (It pains me still to recall those hot summer days, faithfully bending over my gargantuan belly to pull weeds from the squash bed). She also enjoys spitting the homemade applesauce in my face, more than she enjoys swallowing it. But, she's growing! And as the doctor measured the circumference of her head, she said with a congratulatory smile, "Wow, Sam, she really is your Mini-Me." Would someone please take this invisibility cloak off of me!?!

If it sounds like I'm calling Whine-1-1, well, I suppose I am. Because Quinn doesn't look anything like me. And she doesn't have my name. Even though I'm doing all this work, she's a Jackson, and she looks like one too. And furthermore, she worships her father and treats me like the lunch lady...well, maybe worse than that because at my school, just about everyone thanks the lunch lady (and the lunch man) after every meal.

What gets me too is that I think back to my own childhood and see similarities...not in the distribution of genes necessarily (I am a near look alike to my mother), but in the distribution of adoration. I'm tempted to somehow blame my dad for this weakness of character that makes me crave people's approval; I grew up craving his and, like Quinn, he didn't give it up easily. Here's the ridiculous part: I still seek his approval, even though I'm 39 and no longer need to earn an allowance or get his permission.

I grew up believing I would marry my dad when I got older…I was little, so this seemed normal. I worshipped him. He was funny—always the guy who could put people at ease, make people laugh. He made silly faces. And he made quiet jokes in church that made my sister and me laugh out loud. Our mother would give us the look—the cut it out! behave yourselves! look—and my dad would frown in mock agreement, and that would make us laugh even more. I never had any idea what was happening in church, but I knew my dad's every move. Everything my dad did was funny, and cool. And I always preferred to be doing the things he did than those my mom did. I wanted to mow the lawn. I wanted to stack firewood. I wanted to build stuff in his workshop with him, and use his power tools.

My dad traveled a lot for work when I was young, and I missed him, a lot. On a couple of occasions, to make up for his frequent absences, we had Kerry Days and Amy Days. I don't know if this was his idea or my mom's, but I can tell you, these days were seriously awesome and he got full credit! From morning until evening, he was all mine. I have vague memories of going out to breakfast at Perkins, of walking around the mall, of him buying me some Snoopy stuff, and even of having dinner out (probably pizza) at the far end of those long, indulgent days. But, even better is the fact that in the midst of these vague memories, I have very vivid memories of my dad taking me roller skating…at the roller rink…with disco lights and a bunch of kids my age in corduroys and rainbow stripped leg warmers. Well, maybe I was the only one in leg warmers; that's possible. The important thing is that my dad was there with me. And he roller-skated too.

What I've never stopped to think about before is the possibility that my mom might have influenced the idea for Kerry Day. Even if she didn't, she facilitated it by entertaining my sister on those days, and taking care of everything that needed to be done at home. I never thought about those things...those many, many things. When I think back to my youth, I think of missing my dad when he was away, and of following him around when he was home. I think about sitting in the family room with him on fall Sundays to watch football, not because I liked watching football, because I didn't, but just because I liked being with him. 

Don't get me wrong, I loved my mom. Especially when I was a teenager and I needed her to help me process things. She really was my best friend and best role model. But, I didn't really appreciate the amount of work she did. The amount of behind-the-scenes, keeping-things-running work. I remember that she was always in a bad mood on the day that she spread the bills out on the kitchen table with her calculator and the checkbook; she hated paying the bills, but she did it. Our pantry was always full, clothes were always clean, and we had a hot family dinner every single night…and I could get all Energizer Bunny on you right now and keep going and going and going...but I'll just try to get to the point:

My mom gave her love freely, constantly, and tirelessly, and yet I craved the attention of my dad. I'm glad she at least lived long enough to know I eventually appreciated her in the full way that I should have all along. But I wonder what sustained her all those years when I thought her presence was a given and her efforts were invisible. 

Maybe she took some solace in what was visible.

FYI: This week marked the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day. If your mom is still within earshot...give her a call and tell her she is awesome...especially if you look just like your dad. 

*Full Disclosure: Sam was willing to give Quinn my last name. I agreed to Jackson. (It must've been the hormones).

Fireflies

It's just before 5 am and I've been up for an hour. I feel as energized as I've been in recent months, having had, for the first time since November, six hours of relatively uninterrupted sleep. Quinn slept incredibly well for the first 3.5 months of her life, but once it was time for me to go back to work, she started waking up two or three times each night instead of one. Last night, before putting her to bed, we gave her rice cereal for the first time…seems to have done the job. I won't get into how frustrating the mixed messages are about breastfeeding…in part because this is not about that, and in part because this little motion activated firefly, that hangs above her play mat which is right in front of me, just started its little tune and light show and, well, it's not moving…someone is trying to tell me to get to the point.

The reason I woke up this morning was a dream, not the baby. I dreamt that I got a phone call from someone at the hospital. They wanted to speak to my mother who, in this dream, was sleeping in the other room. She has, of course, been "sleeping in the other room" for many years now, but periodically I have these dreams where it seems very normal that she is here. In this dream she was sleeping and I didn't want to wake her up, so I asked what the person on the phone wanted. It was a woman's voice and she told me that my grandmother, my mother's mother, had had an accident in the hospital and she'd lost a lot of blood. She suggested my mom might want to get down there right away, and she connected me to a man who gave me instructions about how to get into the hospital after hours. In my dream it was also the middle of the night. When I hung up, I woke up. And I laid there in my own bed trying to decide whether or not I should wake my mom, until eventually I realized I wasn't going to be able to do that.

I shifted gears and realized Quinn had not woken me up for a 1 am feeding, and I thought about the trouble she's been having taking bottles with her babysitter, and I decided to get up and pump so she'd have a fresh bottle later today rather than a frozen one. Once I made all kinds of noise doing that, she was awake, so I fed her and changed her before putting her back to bed. When I got back into bed myself, I realized, sadly, that Darth Vader had once again replaced my husband, I thought more about my dream, and I knew I would not get back to sleep.

So, here I am, typing next to the woodstove as the fire gets going, wondering about my grandmother, and thinking about the fact that I don't believe in god and I don't believe in heaven. I imagine most people on the planet are really just fertilizer when they go and that's a perfectly noble end if you ask me. But even though I've never believed in heaven, I've also never been able to believe that my mother's spirit, magnificent as it was, could simply just cease to exist. I've often sensed that her energy is still out there in the world.

That's not to say that I always feel her with me; I don't. But I do have these dreams, often at critical times in my life, when she shows up. She is still beautiful. And she is usually smiling. She never speaks, but the messages of the dreams are always clear. So, as the house starts to heat up and I make my coffee this morning, and the sun eventually starts to shine on the distant horizon, visible thanks to Sam's determined tree cutting efforts this past summer, I'll be wondering if my grandmother has finally died—she's been trying to, I think, for years—and waiting for it to be late enough to call my sister and find out. And even if she hasn't died, the dream has me thinking about her, and about my mom, and about the fact that most of my stories are, and really always have been, about mothers and daughters.

Good Thing I Like Pie

In the winter of 2007-2008, I planned a wedding, got married, and built a house. I wasn't alone in these projects, obviously, but I was fully involved. The following winter, I threw a lot of parties, hosted a lot of dinners, skied a lot of loops with friends and drank a lot of champagne. Last winter, I grew a baby.

She's here now. Her name is Quinn. And that makes me a mother. So now, in the winter of 2011, this is my project: figuring out how to be someone's mom.

In the beginning, when she first arrived, I practiced just saying the words. When we were alone, usually when I was changing her diaper and she was lying on the changing pad looking up at me, I would say, "Hello. I am your mom. I am your mother," stretching out the words to listen to the way they sounded as I said them. They sounded foreign. And I felt like a fake. I have often felt this way in my life…like someone pretending to be something, hoping the real people won't notice and discover my embarrassing secret: I am not really this person. I am really someone less than this person. This time around, it's the mother of all secrets…sorry for the pun, but what better use of it, right?

Once I started to feel a little more comfortable introducing myself to Quinn, the next phase was to see if she'd accept me…to see how comfortable she was having me be her mom. So I would slip around the corner into her room and look over the edge of her crib to meet her glance. As her eyes adjusted to the new object that was my face, I would ask her, "Are you my baby?" And then I'd wait nervously for her to decide.

I respected the fact that she would take her time, as if she was trying to weigh the pros and cons and make a wise choice. And I'm grateful that each time, after a relatively brief pause, she would answer with a full body muscle spasm—arms and legs reaching up and then slamming back down all at once—and a big squinty-eyed, open-mouthed smile. I took all that to be a yes.

So far, she hasn't rejected me. But, that's the phase I'm in now…wondering how to be the kind of mom she won't reject. I had a great role model for 21 years. I think my own mother was flawless—literally. I try hard to think of a weakness, just to prove she was human. I think back to the times we fought, or the times I thought I hated her, or the time I ran away for an afternoon. Each of those times, I was the idiot. I can't think of a single time she failed me, or let me down, or disappointed me. She was my idol and my best friend. And, as a teenage girl, that made me a bit weird, and I didn't even care.

But here's the problem: I'm worried that I can't possibly live up to her. The thing about role models is that they're on a different level. So here I am, in my "mom" shoes and sometimes I can't make them move. It's like I'm standing here in a vast open space and I'm looking down at a pair of yellow wingtips or something, marveling over how strange they look, and then looking around at how much ground I have to cover.

I actually wore yellow wingtips in high school. It was the eighties. And my mom let me. I think she even encouraged me to, but maybe that was because she secretly thought I looked hilarious. At the time, I thought they were very cool. Now, they are a source of great joy for my little sister Amy who loves telling people that I wore yellow wingtips. Amy was the kind of sister who would stand behind a locked screen door laughing when you had wet your corduroys at the neighbors' house playing hide-and-seek because you didn't want to lose, even though you were in the fourth grade.

I was stuck standing still then too…I had good intentions (or at least I thought I did): to win the game. I had an intense desire to win, I always do. I had the resolve. The patience to stick it out for the long haul. I just didn't have the bladder. And that's what I worry about. What weakness will surface in my efforts to be a good mom? What challenges will render me immobile, and ill-equipped?

Recently someone at work asked me how Quinn was doing with her babysitter. "Great," I said, "her babysitter is a much better mom than I'll ever be." The person I was speaking with knows the babysitter too; she teaches part-time at our school. She tried to reassure me, "She's just a different kind of mom." Yeah, I thought, the kind that says "Oooh! I hear some noise in your britches!" while I'm the kind of mom who says, "Man! Your butt stinks! Now I have to change your friggin diaper again!"

I'm almost certain my own mother died without ever dropping the F-bomb. And while I feel a little sorry that she didn't get to experience the joy, the humor, the power of that word, I am also humbled by her unfaltering class, her good judgment, and her restraint. She managed to express exuberance, and be funny, and wield unfathomable power over me without ever using that word…she was more intelligent and more creative. She had artistry as a mother.

I've got yellow wingtips, wet corduroys and a mouth like my Uncle Rey who really was a trucker. I'm screwed. Quinn is going to grow up with the smell of my fear! She is going to laugh at me from behind that locked door. It all comes rushing back…all the former awkwardness in my life, all the fear of failure and loss. It's all wrapped up into this one thing: "I am your mother. Are you my baby?"

Some day maybe I'll feel confident, or sentimental, and I'll write about the way Quinn's face relaxes and her eyes close when I stroke her forehead, the way my mom would do for me when I put my head in her lap. Of course, thinking back to that also makes me think of the times when I thought I needed to be comforted and my mom would smile at me lovingly and then let her hand drop onto my forehead with a thud and say, "Oh, honey! What's the matter?" and then she'd laugh at me…and in doing so she'd force me to laugh at myself.

So, here I am, trying to laugh at myself…That same little sister, who locked me out when I desperately needed to get in, also once told me, "You can't control what hasn't happened yet." This may be obvious to most people, but for anyone who has the kind of control issues I've had, you'll understand how this could be a revelation. Amy has always been wiser than I, despite being four years younger. And I think back to that bit of wisdom all the time, I can't control what hasn't happened yet. And this time, it's for real. Quinn will be the biggest test of my life. The marriage is holding together, getting a little better most days. The house works; it is warm and pretty and people always tell me they feel good when they're in it. And the baby I grew, well, she's amazing…she's healthy and beautiful and I could tell from the first day she showed up that she has the power to see right into my soul.

So now the only thing left to work on is me…everything else is done. And even though I'm trying not to control what hasn't happened yet, and I'm trying not to get so caught up in my desire to "win" this one that I end up embarrassing myself, I do wish my mom could be here to help me figure it all out…to convince me that my shoes will get me where I need to go…and that I don't look too weird wearing them.