“Thank you for all plants and animals, especially elephants and rabbits,” my younger kid said, finishing his grace for dinner. Most of us had already eaten half of our food, but no matter. Saying thank you, showing gratitude, was the important part, whenever it was.
I’ve long worked to practice gratitude, but recently it’s felt more and more like a radical act.
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With a small voice from the backseat saying “I’m hungry!” I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had forgotten snacks – once again. “Sorry honey, you’re going to have to wait until we get home,” I responded to my younger son.
This is far from an uncommon occurrence. When I read memes like “Moms know where everything is!” or “A Mom always has what her kids need,” I feel a similar pit in my stomach, combined with a queasy jealousy. “Well, that will never be me,” I think to myself. When my kids were babies, we had a diaper bag designed for dads to carry. They had a checklist on the inside pouch and the last item was “the baby.” I know that was supposed to be a joke at dads’ expense, but some days, it felt appropriate to me. My husband isn’t much better either. Both of us are neurodivergent in ways that come with executive function challenges like forgetting details, getting distracted, or misplacing items.
But along our executive dysfunction-riddled journey in parenthood, I’ve come to realize there are some advantages to our kids for having parents like us.
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“Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call
Wanted to sail upon your waters since I was three feet tall
You’ve seen it all, you’ve seen it all…”
The music flowed through the old wooden building, past and around me on the faded navy couch. Across from me was the singer, the leader of the climate hope and grief retreat I was attending. In his jeans and flannel shirt, strumming a dark wood acoustic guitar, the lyrics seemed very apropos for the occasion. “I wonder who this song is by,” I wondered. Such a beautiful song. With the line “I am a pirate,” I thought, “Ah, I bet that’s Jimmy Buffet.” A quick Google confirmed my suspicions.
I smiled, considering the strange and moving subtle presence Jimmy Buffet has been throughout my life.
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“Oh come on!” I yelled with genuine frustration in my voice as my mini-golf ball rolled millimeters past the hole. And yet I was smiling only a few moments later. That would have never happened even a few years ago. I credit my kids for this life lesson.
I’ve never been a particularly good loser. I hate wasting time and losing feels a whole lot like wasting time to me. In board games like Settlers of Caatan or Monopoly where you realize early on if you are going to lose badly and then just have to wait for it to happen, I get antsy and anxious. When playing word and puzzle games, I feel like I’m “supposed” to be good at them and then just feel dumb when I lose. It’s just generally unpleasant for everyone involved.
But I started to get a different perspective on losing while watching my kids play video games.
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Digging a tiny hole to transplant my peppers, I smiled as the soil crumbled in my hands. It was dark, moist soil, the result of years of adding organic matter (straw, compost, and leaves) to the heavy clay in our yard. While I care for my plants by watering and weeding them, the soil is probably the most important part of my garden’s success. There’s nothing you can do to force a plant to grow, but there are lots of ways we can create an environment that nurtures them. The same goes for people and situations as well.
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The sky was dark and smattered with stars. The Big Dipper shone out, bright and prominent. I stood on the campground road, looking up, my mouth partly open as if I was about to say something but then stopped in surprise. I watched the sky for a few minutes and then walked up the road to our campsite, my flashlight off. I gazed upwards every few moments, trying to cement the sight into my memory.
As I reached the campsite, my kids were getting ready to walk to the bathroom. “Keep your flashlight off!” I recommended. “You’ll see the stars so much better.” They hesitated, then turned them off, trusting me and the desire to see that beauty themselves.
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“The seasons go round and round / the painted ponies go up and down / on the carousel of time….” I crooned softly to myself, looking out my back porch. Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game echoed in my head, one of the few guaranteed to make me choke up. For those not familiar, it’s about a child growing up, with each verse describing a different stage of childhood.
In the past, I heard it and was sad about the child growing up. How terrible to have to leave each of those ages behind, especially as that child’s parent?
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Looking in the mirror, I saw someone looking back at me who was both terribly familiar and foreign. For one, she had green skin in comparison to my normal pale visage. I noticed a spot that was a bit light and dabbed on a bit more green makeup. There – finished. Save the red hair and the cartoon skinniness, I was the image of Poison Ivy from the Harley Quinn animated show.
On the lawful to chaotic and good to bad morality scale, I am solidly in the lawful good zone. I was obsessive about rules as a kid to the point I would correct other kids regularly. (That made me very popular.) While I’ve shed much of that slavish devotion, I hate breaking rules for no good reason and hold myself to high moral standards.
So why was I cosplaying a chaotic supervillain at a comic book convention?
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Before kids are old enough to really believe in God (or choose to not believe in God), they believe in their parents. Having taken care of them since they were babies, small children look up to their parents as all-knowing, all-powerful beings that can fix anything. And then, one day, they stop.
My kids are both around the ages – 8 and 10 – where they start losing serious faith in parents as masters of the universe. So when I saw This American Life was doing an episode on that subject called Parents Are People, I was intrigued.
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“Why are you on your phone – again?” my younger son asked with an edge of whine in his voice from the bathtub.
I felt a pang of guilt. I should be paying attention to him – right? My undivided, unquestioned attention.
But wait. I had given him a ton of attention earlier that day. We had played a board gamebefore dinner. I had just played a game of 20 Questions with him focusing on Dungeons and Dragons monsters while he was in the bath. No, I shouldn’t feel guilty. I needed that break.
“Because my brain needs a break. I find being a good listener takes a lot of energy. Reading gives my brain a rest. So I’m just reading on my phone for a little while,” I responded.
He grumbled and started telling me something anyway, but at least I tried.
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