Mommy Misdemeanors
Adventures in Messing Up
My sister-in-law is a terrific mother.
Wait—let me back up. All three of my sisters-in-law are wonderful mothers, but I’d like to share a story with you about the one who’s not named Julie and whose children are still very young. Both of my brothers married women named Julie. (So did my father, but that is a story for another day.) My sisters-in-law, the Julies, are terrific mothers. Both of them have four children and one of them is a foster mother who welcomes children into her home for days, weeks, and even months at a time. The other Julie is one of the most resilient people I know who—when faced with academic, medical, or any other challenge that presents itself to her family—grits her teeth, does her research, and labors to remove it. My brothers did very well by marrying the Julies.
But Sara, my other sister-in-law—not a Julie—is also an exceptional mother. If you knew her, you’d agree. She is married to my husband’s brother and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is deliberate about the food her three young children eat. (Organic blueberries! Cage-free eggs!) She makes outdoor play such a part of her kids’ lives that they consider their neighborhood park a second home. She gives her children clear boundaries, and she lavishes generous heaps of love on them every single day.
To make matters better—or worse if you are already overcome with jealousy over her mothering prowess, as I have been—she used cloth diapers exclusively for years, avoids paper towels and other single-use products (unlike her naughty sister-in-law going through the Taco Bell drive-through lane and shamelessly buying Pampers Mega Packs back in the day), teaches her children sign language when they are babies, and seems only mildly annoyed when the stacks of wooden puzzles in her house make sounds when slightly jostled or when the lights go down. (What’s with that, by the way?)
Recently she sent me an e-mail in which she confessed she had failed that day as a mom. My interest was piqued—really? Failed? I will include a part of that e-mail here for one very important reason; and that is, every one of us—let me stop and be perfectly clear: each and every one of us—judges ourselves too harshly, thinks we’ve failed, and holds ourselves to impossible standards, ones to which we would never, ever, ever hold another person. Even someone for whom we have little respect! Seriously. (By the way, yes of course, there are moms who truly neglect and abuse their children, and such moms aren’t ones whom I’d encourage to go easier on themselves as parents . . . but my guess is that these women aren’t perusing the “Parenting and Childcare” section of the bookstore in their spare time.)
Okay, now that we’ve cleared all that up, here is what Sara wrote:
Had a real freak-out this morning. Not at the kids, thank goodness, but in their presence. Nutty morning, and then nowhere to park. I ended up yelling at a traffic officer (through the glass, not like she could hear me) and I think it stressed the kids out a bit. Not pretty and not proud. Lessons learned.
Now I don’t mean to belittle the stress Sara was under that morning. She has three kids, ages five and younger. She is in graduate school. Her husband works long hours. And did I mention the cloth diapers and those puzzles that honk and beep or make animal noises if you so much as tiptoe past them?
Sara and I have been sisters-in-law for sixteen years. I count her as one of the people I most admire. But I wanted to say, “Shouting at a police officer through the glass? That’s nothing.” I don’t mean that she should have jumped from the car and taken all of her frustration, exhaustion, and rage out on the poor traffic cop. I also don’t mean that she wasn’t, like Uma Thurman’s character in Motherhood, half a sippy cup away from having an emotional meltdown of epic proportions. I remember how hard it is in the hands-on phase of parenting in which she and my brother-in-law reside.
As my friend Seth, the father of two very young kids, says, “They break terrorists with more sleep than this.”
No, I just mean that every good parent I know has messed up, served as a bad example to his or her children, and then thought, I am the worst mother (or father) in the world. I know I have. I don’t shrug off my own shortcomings. I hope, as much as possible, to demonstrate the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—in my parenting (Galatians 5:22 CEB). I hope to be attentive to my kids, but not to stifle them. Kind, without being saccharine-sweet. Gentle and patient, but not blasé. Devoted to my faith, but not falsely pious. You know, a healthy balance of sweet and salty, crunchy and soft. Kind of like kettle corn.
But I fail; we all do.
All of us commit misdemeanors. We lose our tempers. We look away from the baby for a moment at the precise second when he learns to roll over, and then, horrified, watch him fall from the changing table. We’ve all tucked a watercolor painting or crayon drawing deep underneath the newspaper in the recycling bin only later to learn it was her “best ever” and she was going to ask to have it framed. (Meanwhile we hear the recycling truck idling half a block away, the treasure crumpled and torn somewhere below its enormous jaws.) We’ve all done things like showing up late to a soccer game and missing his only goal of the season or misjudging a situation and punishing our child for something she didn’t do.
(Or maybe that’s just me.)
This section is going to be fun.
I solicited “Bad Mommy” stories from my friends. I won’t include identifying details for most of them because I promised I wouldn’t. But I hope that reading these anecdotes will ease my sister-in-law Sara’s conscience next time she is having an “I’m the worst mom in the world” moment, and I hope it will ease your troubled mind too.
When my son Theo was three, I broke up with American culture. We did eventually reconcile, but with new rules about the relationship. (That story follows, in chapter 6.) For now, suffice it to say that it seemed to me that every time I turned around, advertisers were trying to sell me—and, worse, my kids—not only a bunch of toys and other items that had “Planned for Obsolescence” stamped into their undersides but the notion that the more stuff we crammed into our home, the happier we would be.
As a person who’s concerned about the environment, a bit of a neat freak, and most importantly as a person of faith, I wanted to reject that message.1 And rejecting it takes work. Which one of us doesn’t enjoy paging through a Crate and Barrel holiday catalog or the momentary thrill of the UPS man running up the sidewalk to deliver a Zappos box containing her new shoes? (Let she who is without sin cast the first stone.) Still, I wanted to do what I could to raise children who wouldn’t blithely accept that whoever has the most toys in the end wins, despite the numerous times we are spoon-fed that idea by our culture.
The breakup climaxed in the moment when I yanked our television cord from the wall. I decided that in their early, impressionable years, I would limit my kids’ exposure to commercial messages. (This was in the late 1990s: pre-TiVo, Netflix streaming, and other technology that has since allowed viewers more control over what they see. Watching television back then meant sitting through commercials. Lots of them.)
I also wanted my children to have playthings that, as much as possible, weren’t mass-produced and destined for a landfill. I even requested white PVC pipe (with connectors, elbows, and rings) from my husband’s longsuffering parents for Theo’s birthday when he was in preschool. He could, you know, build with them. And then when he was done, we could use the pipes for leaks under the sink or, I don’t know, an irrigation system should we ever decide to dig one.
Did I mention I had four children in six years? I was exhausted. And yes, Seth, terror suspects in detention camps get more sleep than do the parents of young children.2 (In a related matter, did you know that the “I love you, you love me” theme song from Barney and Friends really has been used to break terrorists?3)
When Theo went to preschool, the menacing (okay, to be honest, they were wonderful) teachers were always subverting my plan to keep his mind and spirit free of junk culture. They showed cartoons on rainy days. There were Happy Meal toys in the sandbox. Everywhere we went, I felt that people were desperately working to get him hooked on the junk I was so intent on avoiding. Even the pediatrician and dentist gave out character stickers after visits. There I was, trying to be a responsible parent with our annual physicals and biannual teeth cleanings, and yet I had to deal with blaring TV screens in the waiting room.
Most of the time, I was able to guide Theo’s choice of I WENT TO THE DENTIST TODAY or I HAD MY SHOTS TODAY stickers. There were always acceptable choices—pictures of pandas or dinosaurs. But there were always branded, character stickers as well. Disney princesses. Bart Simpson. SpongeBob.
“What’s that?” Theo would ask, pointing to that starfish guy from SpongeBob SquarePants.
“No idea,” I’d say, acting disinterested and sighing as though it were the most boring and irrelevant thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.
One day, however, after a checkup at the dentist, I let my guard down. I must have been distracted for a moment by chatting with the hygienist or by keeping my younger children from escaping out the door when Theo chose his sticker from the little basket at reception.
“Look what I got! Look!” he shouted. “Pokémon!”
Pokémon, of course, is the name of the game, not the character. I believe the character was Pikachu, which is a fun word to say. But to Theo, all of the characters were simply “Pokémon.”
Pokémon. My heart fell. I was sure this was the chink that would cause the fortress I’d been building to come crumbling down. Mozart Wednesdays. Library books. Wooden toys. All my efforts, my deliberate parenting, would be gobbled up by those monsters.
It wasn’t easy being me.
If you’re thinking that I should have lightened up a bit back then, all I can say is, “Absolutely!” Or as my brother Drew and I used to say, “No duh!” But, as I mentioned before, I’d been dreaming of raising children since I was a child myself. I had been full of ideas, hope, and anxiety about being a wife and mother for so long that I wanted, more than anything, to do it right. And, um, I never did find the instruction manual in the bottom of that shipping box telling me the correct way to raise a child.
To be honest, I didn’t know much of anything about Pokémon, but what I did know was that it felt like every time I turned around, the people who marketed Pokémon were on the prowl to sell it to my kids and me. It was on toddler underwear, wristwatches, and pajamas. Even worse, one of the other moms at Theo’s preschool had told me, as we chatted in the hallway, that she believed those critics of Pokémon who said it was designed to be addictive.
“I read that some kids don’t even want to play with their friends anymore after they’re addicted,” the woman said. “And I can see that. When I tell him it’s time to stop, it’s like I’m taking away his drugs. It’s like he’s going to go into withdrawal. And every time I go to the store, he demands that I get him more trading cards.”
I found her report alarming; it strengthened my resolve.
“I wish we’d never started with it,” the mom said, shrugging. “But what are you going to do?”
I knew what I was going to do—keep that big, bad wolf out of my house, that’s what.
Fast-forward a few weeks and there was my sweet little Theo, his T-shirt and his very innocence sullied by the Pokémon sticker from the dentist. My right arm twitched. I wanted to grab it, rip it into shreds, and maybe take him to the opera or on a nature walk. Just to clear his cultural palette. But in a moment of temporary sanity, I paused.
“Oh, that’s nice, Theo,” I said.
I let it go. I was so proud of myself. It’s only a sticker, I thought. A sticker. He can go home and play with his toy knights or his chess set or his PVC pipes and then, at the end of the day, the sticker will be tossed in the hamper with the rest of the dirty clothes. I can put up with it for a few hours, can’t I?
I was proud of myself for being so sensible.
But on arriving home, my mood shifted. As the kids ate lunch, my gaze kept returning to the Pokémon sticker. It cheapened him somehow, turned my son into an advertisement for a product I didn’t even like, one that may very well have been created to keep children from interacting with other human beings! I felt my anxiety level rising.
While I cleared the lunch dishes, Theo and Ian played with their cars on the floor near the table. (The PVC pipes never got much play, to be honest. In case you were wondering, we never had cause to build an irrigation system.) At one point, as I glanced into the room, Theo grabbed Ian’s hand and roughly grabbed a toy truck his brother was holding.
“Hey, that’s mine,” he said.
Ian began to cry.
I rushed to the boys, took the tiny cement mixer and put it back into Ian’s hand, and kneeled down to talk to Theo.
“We don’t do that. You know that,” I started. “We share in our family.”
“That one’s mine,” he insisted. “Mine!”
In a flash of anger, I reached out and tore the Pokémon sticker off his shirt.
“I knew it. You see?” I sputtered. “You get this and suddenly you are ugly to your brother. Suddenly this new side comes out of you and . . . ”
As I spoke, I folded the sticker in half and then in half again. I kept on folding it tightly until it was just a tiny pie-shaped ball of paper. I then went to the kitchen garbage can and threw it out.
Theo, all of four years old, stared at me, wide-eyed.
“My Pokémon sticker,” he said, tears covering his cheeks.
Yanking the sticker off of Theo’s shirt was a “fail” for a mother who seeks to model gentleness and love to her children. The defeated look on his face and the violence with which I grabbed—and then destroyed—his sticker filled me with guilt.
Had I broken his trust forever?
Was I a control freak?
Would Pokémon be the forbidden fruit that, in later life, he somehow traded his innocence for?
When Theo was ten, I asked him if he remembered when I wrecked his sticker. He listened, amused, as I told him the story.
“Hm. Nope. I don’t remember that,” he said.
Relief washed over me, and I finally—six years after the fact—let go of the nugget of guilt I’d been holding on to ever since the moment I seized that sticker from his shirt. The way his expression went from worried to heartbroken as I folded that sticker over and over onto itself. His big hazel eyes, dripping with tears.
Theo has a wry sense of humor. He also loves to play on my gullibility, a trait I inherited from my mother who, day after day and year after year, never quite figured out when we were kids that my brother and I really didn’t see a rabbit or cardinal in the backyard every night. (Sorry, Mom!) But now I’m getting a “taste of my own medicine,” as my mother used to say. Every year or so since I told Theo about the destruction of his Pokémon sticker, my son has used the story as an opportunity to tease me. He’ll stand quietly in a room with me, looking out a window or into the middle distance.
“Theo? Honey? Are you okay?” I’ll ask.
He stands very still.
“Sweetie? What’s on your mind?”
He turns to me, and, in the most disheartened tone he can muster, says, “Oh, nothing. I’m just remembering my Pokémon sticker.”
He then, of course, bursts into laughter.
A friend of mine lives near to her kids’ elementary school. When her younger child was a baby and the elder was in afternoon kindergarten, she occasionally napped when her baby was sleeping. When she started to tell me her “bad mommy” story, she was quick to say she didn’t nap often and that it was just for a short period of time, on days when she had finished the laundry or already had dinner started. All the baby books tell us to “sleep when your child sleeps,” but have you noticed how guilty most of us feel when we take a nap? We say we “just needed to rest our eyes,” or we “snuck a nap,” when indeed we were desperate for a few moments of quiet and so tired that our eyes were closing without our being able to do anything about it.
(Nap with impunity, moms. You deserve it!)
So my friend would set the alarm on her cell phone for a half hour, fall into a deep sleep, and, once or twice, sleep right through the buzzing. It was not the alarm, but her landline ringing that eventually woke her up. (It was the school calling.) She jumped up from the sofa, grabbed the baby monitor (knowing full well that it wouldn’t have reception all the way to the school), and ran down the block to pick up her son. As she jogged along, she held the monitor to her ear, play-acting that she was listening in. Now before you call the authorities, you should know her home is in plain view of the school, and she was gone fewer than five minutes as she ran and picked up her forlorn child from the school office. But she felt, in her words, like an Epic-Fail Mom.
Was she?
I certainly don’t think so. Rested, she was likely better able to extend patience and good humor to her kids for the remainder of the day.
A friend of mine who is a single dad used to work from home. When his son was a baby, my friend’s son would play at his feet. The baby wasn’t yet walking but crawled around the floor and played with toys as my friend sat at his desk in his upstairs office, trying to get a full day’s work done despite frequent interruptions, bottle breaks, and diaper changes. During that period, his day began earlier and ended much later than a traditional workday and my friend never quite felt caught up with his job. But it was of utmost importance to him to spend time with his son, and the cost of daycare was prohibitive.
He recalls one day being lost in his work and hearing a soft knocking sound. He ignored it, thinking it was a rattle in the heating system or some other household noise. Then, after a few minutes, he looked up and was alarmed to find that the baby was no longer playing in the room with him. He ran to the stairs—a steep set—and saw that the baby gate hadn’t been latched properly. His son was at the bottom of the steps, lying on his side and playing with the laces on a pair of shoes. My friend says he never took a set of stairs in so few steps. He examined the boy, was amazed that he was unharmed, and then sat shaking for an hour as he imagined what could have happened.
The child is now eleven years old and seems to have no lasting physical or emotional impairment from his tumble down the steps. They’re durable and made to last, these kids.
“I was a bad mom this week,” my friend said, blinking away tears. “Really bad.”
She and I sat at the picnic table in her yard. Our children played on the swings and ran around us. Her three daughters had intermittently caught her up in hugs, shouted for her to watch some trick they wanted to perform, and laughed together.
Whatever she’d done, I could tell, hadn’t caused permanent damage.
“That’s hard for me to believe,” I said.
Theo, then about seven years old, came to the table and sat with us, ever interested in adult conversation.
“I was trying to get the baby down for her nap, but her sister kept waking her up. She was singing at full voice and kept stomping around upstairs. I told her to stop it, to let her sister sleep, but every time I turned around, she was back upstairs jumping around. Finally I took her by the hand and sat her down on the bottom step for a time-out. I got right in her face and growled at her, ‘Your baby sister needs her nap. How many times have I told you to be quiet?’ ”
Telling the story, my friend put her face in her hands.
“Hey, that’s not being a bad mom. You were frustrated,” I said. “I’m sure I’ve done something like that a dozen times. Haven’t I, Theo?”
He nodded.
“But then she started crying, this pathetic cry that went on and on. Her face was covered in tears,” my friend said. “I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘You sat me down too hard. That hurt my booty.’ I felt like a child abuser.”
Right then that same daughter was clamoring across the monkey bars on their play set. “Hey, Mom! Mom, Mom, Mom—look! Look at me!” she shouted.
“She seems fine now,” I said.
“I feel awful. I hadn’t even realized I’d been rough. I even checked her bottom later on to make sure she didn’t have a bruise. Thank God—she didn’t. I just couldn’t believe I’d be so rough with her.”
“You know,” Theo said, “think of all the times you didn’t do anything like that. You’re usually really gentle. I’ve seen you. What matters is most of the time.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Think of all the times you didn’t lose your temper. Think of all the times you handled things right. What matters is most of the time.”
Another woman confessed to me that, in the throes of a Mommy Temper Tantrum,* she inadvertently broke the neck of her daughter’s favorite baby doll. The mom had been tidying the house and happened to be holding the doll when her little girl spoke to her in a demanding, bratty tone. In a flash of indignation, before she even realized what she was doing, the mom hurled the doll to the ground. Looking down at it, she saw that the doll’s head was cocked strangely to the side; its neck was broken. She hadn’t even been thinking of what she was holding, just threw it down the way a person might slam a door or stomp her feet when she’s upset.
“Baby Connie?” her daughter said, her voice suddenly sounding very much like the sweet five-year-old she usually was.
“Oh, she’s fine, honey,” the mom said, concealing her shock over what she’d done. She then created a diversion, lifted the doll carefully from the floor, and held it by the back of the head to mask its injury. She apologized to her daughter for losing her temper, reminded her to speak to others with respect, and—at her first opportunity—ran out to buy an identical doll to replace Baby Connie. She quietly disposed of the doll with the broken neck, ashamed of the homicide she had committed.
More than a decade later, she still replays that moment of rage, and she regrets it.
Desecrating Theo’s sticker was just one of countless sins I’ve committed as a mother. The one that is not so very dramatic, but fills me with the most shame, is when I fail to listen and truly be present with my children. It’s the crime I most frequently commit.
I also can be crabby and unreasonable.
And don’t even ask about how our tooth fairy myth has evolved over the years to accommodate the fact that I so often forget to slip change under their pillows on the night a tooth has been lost.
“She doesn’t work on Tuesdays! I bet she’ll come tonight!”
“She must have put it over here!” And surreptitiously pulling change from my pocket and slipping it under a stuffed owl, I announce, “Look, here it is!”
Additional items on my “bad mommy” rap sheet include:
• Volunteering my children to serve as acolytes or readers at church, or—worse—to play a role in the annual Christmas pageant (“I’m fourteen years old and I’m . . . the angel Gabriel?” my son cried. “I have to wear a dress? And a gold headband?”)
• Grounding my older kids for crimes that I later discover they did not commit
• Misjudging their friends
I’ve even gone on their Facebook pages and responded to their friends’ posts. Okay, I’ve done that only once, but my son Ian sure hasn’t forgotten it. I doubt he ever will.
A boy had been posting offensive remarks about people with disabilities on Ian’s wall. (The kid thought he was being funny.) I’d seen that Ian had responded in what I thought was an appropriate way when this happened in the past, but one day when I was skimming over his page, I found another comment. I hated it being there, unchecked, tarnishing his wall like an obscene gesture.
I knew Ian wouldn’t be home for hours to respond, so, impulsively, I logged out of my Facebook account, signed in as my son, and—masquerading as Ian—wrote under the boy’s comment: “Dude, that was totally inappropriate!”
I thought I’d managed to sound exactly like my son.
When he arrived home, I confessed.
“You what? You posted on my wall? As me?”
“Um. Yes. I didn’t like what that kid wrote.”
“I don’t either, but Mom, you said ‘Dude’! And the way you use punctuation. That comma . . . I just can’t believe you did that.” He deleted my comment and posted his own, using neither the word dude nor inappropriate.
“Next time, let me handle it, okay?” Ian asked.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It felt important at the moment. Can you forgive me?”
“Yeah. Well,” he said. “Okay.”
(Oops.)
Being a mom is a big job—a momumental one, if you like mash-ups. Children are born with astonishing potential. As parents, we can create a home environment and develop relationships with our children that will stretch, ground, and prepare our children for lives of creativity, health, and love. Of course, our days as parents teem with everyday tasks related to our kids’ physical, emotional, and intellectual needs. We cut fingernails, schedule dental appointments, keep our kids in clothes and shoes that fit them, monitor their homework and academic progress, give them hugs and kisses, encourage them in their spiritual lives, teach them manners, and do their laundry.
By the way, why doesn’t anyone warn us that doing laundry will become something of a second career for us once we have kids? And, further, if they can put people on the moon and vehicles on Mars, why isn’t there a machine that completes the entire process—from washing, to drying, to folding, to stacking clothes in our kids’ drawers? (Mr. Dyson? Anyone?)
With that much, and more, on our plates, we’re bound to mess up. All the parents whose dirty little secrets I’ve shared here—including me!—are loving moms and dads, most of the time. We are patient, most of the time. We model courtesy and respect for our children, most of the time. We are attentive, most of the time.
But sometimes we mess up. None of us is perfect, but I think my son was onto something when he said that what matters is what we do most of the time.
When we’ve actually done something wrong—shocked our child by tearing up his sticker, breaking her doll’s neck, or sitting her down too hard on the steps for a time-out, we must take a breath, tell someone about it, apologize to the person we’ve wronged, and accept the grace that is always available to us from a loving God.
We have to start over, over, and over again in the funny, broken love that is family.
*Mom-ee Tem-per Tan-truhm. Part of speech: noun. Definition: fit, sudden emotion, frenzy. (Committed by, um, the maternal unit of the family.)