Hi there!
Here’s a sweet mini-VLOG for today on what our busy blended family does to stay connected with one another.
If you have other tips and tricks to add, please share in the comments below, I’m always open to trying out your ideas.
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So Called Mom
Says who? Are any of these researchers actual parents? Could there really ever be such a thing as a parenting expert? And could we get any more counterintuitive than intentionally letting kids fail?
For me, part of the allure in deciding to become a mom is that I would be adored by someone, from day one. I would give birth and transform into this picturesque, prize-winning, nurturing body that instinctively wouldn’t—couldn’t—allow her offspring to fall flat on their darling faces.
Caring for my kids is second nature. Fly from the nest on your own time, kiddo. No rush! Even though sometimes I worry that I’m not teaching them anything, but to have a fear of leaving my side. This is also likely why my kids can’t do certain things like tie their shoes at an early age, or do laundry at 16—because I simply forgot to stop babying them. It didn’t even dawn on me to stop. My reflexes are stuck on a loop of “mother knows best,” and it’s kind of a hot mess now that I think of my oldest four kiddos leaving this over-stuffed nest soon.
There are so many ways to let them fail, but I’m quickly learning that broken bones is the easy part. It’s what separates an accident from an intentional lesson. And of course there’s the damage you maybe can’t see – like their development. Here’s a couple of examples.
The first is a simple one with clearcut learning results – failure done right: Last week, Pascal, my new skateboarding aficionado, announced she was ready to drop into the bowl by herself without my assist. In a rare personal moment of “letting go,” I watched her drop in with a rush self-confidence. She sailed through the air, and promptly lost her board. She landed first on her hip, and then on her face. Before I could catch my breath, she was up on her feet instantly—shocked and hopping up and down and limping while holding back tears. She looked around the park, at all the older skater guys to make sure none of them saw her.
And somehow I found the right answer, “Because skateboarding can be as shitty as math. You only get better by getting it wrong.”
HA! Wise words, but I’m sure this one hurt me more than it hurt her. I know this is true, because I’m still cringing about it, while she’s dropped back into that same bowl at least 15 times since.
But as hard as this was for me, it was actually one of the easier examples. You’d think I would have learned as much as Pascal.
Example Two: Jake, my 17-year-old. Somehow the idea of “letting him fail” translates in my mind into letting him down. That’s because his upbringing has been different from Pascal’s. He has experienced divorce twice, early childhood abandonment (His birth dad din’t raise him and Pippin is his second step-dad). Feel my guilt yet?
So with Jake, I tend to walk around with a safety net and a huge roll of emotional bubble wrap at the ready.Whenever he goes through something even slightly difficult, I want to fly to his rescue—and I usually do (in a tutu and heels of course, just so it looks extra impressive).
While I understand this is probably rule #1 in the book of resilience, I have a hard time watching Jake, or any of my kids for that matter, struggle. It’s like throwing your babies in a pool and trusting they won’t drown. As a result, I’ve come to wonder if the real issue is in watching them fail, or the unbearable fear of that failure backfiring on them. What if a So-Called Life Lesson turns into trauma? What if that one time I was really needed, was the one time I wasn’t there, because I wanted them to fail? What if they blame me?
I struggle mightily with this concept of failure. For me and for them. It makes me feel like a screwup, like I skipped over entire chapters in that rule book. I feel unsupportive and cruel. As though most of the time, I have the answer or solution, and they don’t, yet here I am working hard just to refuse help.
In fact, I’m terrible at it. This is especially hard when you are a parent in a blended family—it means you co-parent; some of your kids don’t stay with you all of the time. It’s not just Jake, it’s Phoenix, Milla and M.J. Are the other parents teaching failure? I have no way of knowing what any of it looks like, and it can be scary to think I might be the bad guy.
And yet I know that failing is a necessary skill. It is the only way we learn resilience – all of us. How to get back on a skateboard and face that fearful drop that completely owned you, or working harder to understand why you flunked your math test—or working harder to understand why you flunked the mom test. It’s when you really learn what it means to be human, and what imperfection feels like. Failure is not just for teaching life lessons to the kids, it’s also for the moms—when we don’t say the right things or laugh when we shouldn’t. Or just aren’t there when we should have been.
As hard as it is, I am trying little by little to let my kids fail. Sometimes I just quit doing things for them, cold turkey— like making beds, folding laundry, picking up dirty dishes, or keeping track of their library books. Things they have grown used to my doing. Mom things. I stop with no warning, knowing they’re not going to like it. I see it as basically pulling the plug to their life line, to see if they can breathe on their own. And for awhile, all I can do is watch them gasp for air. And when it doesn’t work out—and it usually doesn’t—I dive in and save them.
In any case, they need to begin to wrap their heads around the experience of “where did I go wrong and what do I do now?” So I keep staying in the game, because it is also a valuable lesson for me, as I learn to do the impossible: let them go.
Predictably Yours,
So Called Mom
Next Post: Teenage Love & Pheromones
Those days, my kids would get home and have to begin homework right away or they would be doomed. And by they, I really mean me. There were days they did homework straight through dinner, straight through the weekend, in the car, and in their beds. I once watched MJ fall asleep with a pencil in her hand, mid-sentence. I have even kept them home from school before, just so they could finish projects for school. homeschool
What kind of example was this teaching them? To work day and night and never take time to explore who they were? Their school left no room for them to follow their passion or explore being an individual in a big family. I saw them growing up too fast. I saw them overworked and really, really unhappy.
When I made the decision to homeschool, I imagined my kids becoming instant geniuses in knitted hats (made with their own talented hands of course). Their little creations would become so bloggable that we would become a global inspiration to other families. My imagination ran wild with this.
Because of this decision, I also could see us going off grid— as though the house would become an experiment in and of itself—we’d learn everything there is to know about solar panels, passive heating and compost toilets. My lesson books were going to be impressive.
All of this would happen in my heels and tutus, because let’s not forget about the importance of style. The kids would learn instruments and how to sing together and meditate. Dinners would be wholesome and I’d finally have the endless hours of togetherness I wanted. We would be a solid family. The kids would be confident and different, by choice.
They became the weirdos that didn’t go to school. No matter how awkward it was, I kept going and for a couple of years it worked. Like kind of how a compost toilet would’ve worked I guess: Some days were better than others, but most of the time I was still troubleshooting, knee deep in my own shit.
He got the urge to become “normal” and insisted on going back to school. I think he actually just wanted to gawk at teenage girls like any other 16 year old. MJ applied and got into an arts-based middle school over the summer while Pascal formed a posse of girls from the neighborhood and wanted to give elementary school a shot. Earth was the last one remaining—though it was mostly our call to keep her in another year. Milla and Phoenix have yet to experience homeschooling. Milla thinks she wants to learn from me for high school, but I know this will change over summer. Phoenix, I have no say. I’m only the other mom. And of course that baby, Leopold, will always be homeschooled. Even though he isn’t a kindergartener yet, doesn’t mean I haven’t already started with him. Homeschool
Not long after returning to our standard “six kids at five different schools” model, only one of them has returned to homeschooling: Pascal. Mostly because that kid has so much extra curricular life, it has taken over what would normally be considered important: school. I just feel like when you’re a kid with talent and a lot of heart, you should be allowed to lean into your passion and develop it. It’s only habit that we moms put school first. What about French and Swedish lessons? What about Accordion? What about Skateboarding? Are those things not worth their full attention?
Last week MJ wrote me a letter asking to be homeschooled again. It was really sweet and made me cry a tiny bit. I can’t decide if it’s because all of Pascal’s new learning materials just arrived or if she truly misses it. Or misses me. I know I miss her. I miss all of them—I even miss the kids I haven’t taught at home—yet.
With Love,
So Called Mom
Up Next: Why So Many Kids
Since we have seven kids with vastly different ages, I always have to temper my conversations to some kind of age appropriateness. This is difficult because their ages are always changing. I recently read about what I’m supposed to be doing on the pamphlets that my pediatrician sends me away with. One of the big no no’s from our family doctor is that apparently I should’ve been helping them communicate better and make friends. I mean, it’s not like we don’t have any kids in the house for them to get to know! There are 4 teenagers, two tweens and Leopold. Surely there’s someone to befriend. I say we get a pass on that rule. Still though, every age group is different and, as they get older, it gets harder to talk.
When I talk to my teenagers, I feel like I’m playing ping pong—with a baseball bat.I’m so “not doing it right.” I’m so “embarrassing.” I’m so not even sure anything I’ve said makes it into their ears because of the damn headphones. Those things have become so discreet, but also so huge. I suppose it depends on the day—whether they feel like wearing the headphones that are as big as a billboard or the ones that double as Q-Tips. Plus, these days, they are basically fused to the kids heads, no matter how big or small they are. I think I’d like it more if it was music and not videos. Or videos about video games. Or videos of people we don’t know playing video games.
And I’m the one who’s not fascinating?
Let’s take dinner last week. One of my four daughters, Milla, was able to make it through an entire meal with them on, without me knowing it. Her phone was on her lap and when she laughed, I thought it was because of something I said. Sneaky.
Since we homeschool many of the kids, I obviously can’t ask what they did at school. Instead I spend our daytime together being a tyrant over their education. So this gets annoying. To all of us. My daughter Earth has learned not to approach me directly after I’ve had my coffee. I’m all over her with schedules, to-do lists, extra credit and electives. She was only wondering if we had more milk.
The tweens are a little more easygoing AND still think Im fabulous. It’s easier to talk, because I still have their attention. I can still take them out and just about buy their love. I know that’s probably not in those doctor pamphlets but hey, when your kids get older, you try anything for together time.
Leopold, the baby (OK…. he’s 5, but he’s MY baby), is still a dream to talk to. I am his everything. We talk about explosions and boogers. Dinosaurs and my pretty hair. He is the only kid who is following my footsteps in ballet, for real this time. Everyone else has dropped out.
This is done best at the dinner table. Seven years ago, I became convinced I was losing touch with my children….and I was. So I began a nightly family ritual at the dinner table “What I Liked About Today and What I Didn’t Like About Today,” designed to get the kids talking—to Pippin and me and to each other. (Even though the teens have retitled it What Sucked and What’s Awesome) You get the idea.
“What I liked about today is that I learned how to ride switch to fakie on my new board. What I didn’t like about today was that I fell and hurt my shoulder.”
“What I liked about today was that we all got to say goodbye to the turtle. What I didn’t like was that we had to put him to sleep because the dog ate him.”
“Whats awesome about today is that I’m finally going to a normal school. What sucks is that I’ve been stuck in the basement in front of a computer so long, that I don’t know how to talk to other kids anymore.”
“What I liked about today is this dinner. What I didn’t like is that the dog just farted. You guys smell that?”
There is a lot of talking over one another. I have spent almost a decade getting everyone to listen while others are talking. It doesn’t work. It is chaotic and overwhelming. But the point is, they are talking. Even if, by the end of it all, we can’t hear each other speak and it doesn’t look like how I want it to, I can still feel like I’m a part of it all. And with any luck, those headphones are somewhere else for an hour.
Good Talk,
So Called Mom
Next Post: To Homeschool…Or Not.
When we become mothers, it feels like it is this monstrous thing that steps into your shoes, without your being ready, and takes up ALL THE SPACE. Like, toes crammed to the end; and all you can do is watch your precious Manolos split at the seams as you drift farther away from what you once were, into the abyss of “just a mom”. When this happens, you can forget about your career, forget about being creative, forget about your friends and forget about yourself: Both who you were and who you wanted to be. Because you are now officially one thing and one thing only: A mom. Right? Women first.
But if you think this here woman has given it all up just to be that one thing, you’re highly mistaken. I have already shaken my fists at the sky over this. Motherhood should not be the decision we make that wipes out our hopes and dreams. It is not the Hurricane Katrina of choices. Becoming a mom doesn’t need to devastate the rest of you. But when you have that first kid, I swear, the rest of the world knows it. Just look at your mail: Cosmopolitan and Vogue traded itself for Martha Stewart and Parenting. You also started getting Land’s End catalogues without ordering them, didn’t you? We don’t need to be polite about this. Mom’s only look like the Virgin Mary because we allow ourselves to. Motherhood doesn’t mean trading in your sexiness for a closet full of sweater sets and necklaces made of pasta. I confess I have a few of those necklaces in my jewelry box, but I do feel like feeding them to the dog from time to time, just to get a piece of myself back.
I specifically remember my first experience of becoming “Just a mom” after I had my first batch of kids early. I was 22 when I had Jake, 24 with Milla and 26 with MJ. Timely, I know.
I recall being in a bar shortly after popping those three kids out, toasting with a few girlfriends, some who were new moms, others who were not. A guy (I wouldn’t dare refer to him as a man) approached me and asked to buy me a drink. I let him. We were talking and he was getting pretty serious, so I did what any mom would do…and talk to a guy in a bar about kids.
I nodded.
He snatched the drink from my hand.
“You should be home. Why are you even out?”
I felt like a birthday candle being doused with a pan of water. And it has resonated with me for decades.
I un-became a dancer. I un-became a dreamer, a creative and unstoppable female with big ideas. I un-became everything I knew to be truly me. I was no longer a pretty girl with fresh young breasts in the fruit section at the grocery store, hip with her eco-conscious canvas bag. I was the basket case in sweats chasing my toddlers down the cereal aisle, with REAL grocery bags—under my eyes. I drove a brand new minivan with vanity plates: 1 GR8 MOM and accepted this as my destiny.
I was also on my second marriage. And it wasn’t holding my attention, no matter how hard I tried to play the part. For a few more years, I wore the sweater sets and the pasta necklaces and pretended it was everything I wanted. Pretended that was the real me. I was always biting my tongue off at PTA meetings and kids birthday parties, careful to not be myself too much. Because the real me, wasn’t very mom-like at all. The real me jumped off the roof of a houseboat naked at a party. The real me did shots and stayed out late with my girlfriends, dancing to Missy Elliot on repeat until we fell asleep in the living room. The real me wore funky clothes and slept in and binge watched shows that I now could only live vicariously through. Sex in the City. The Sopranos. Desperate Housewives. Even Friends. I took dance lessons back then. I was serious about it. I was good enough to be on stage in a tutu, the lead. Now I was just wearing tutus to run errands, just to make myself feel better.
“I will always be there for you.” I whispered to Jake, tiny and trembling in my arms. I repeated the same thing to each kid on the day they were born. But it was years before I realized that my interpretation of what it meant to “be there” for them did not mean putting myself last, giving up on who I was, or trading my self worth for theirs. I realized that I greatly limited my philosophy as a mom. That there could NEVER EVER be any cross over with who I was and being a mom. That if there was a license to parenthood, that mine would get revoked.
Then I met my third husband, after fleeing New York and moving across the country to Portland, Oregon—truly a place where the wild things are! His name was Pippin, like the musical, and it instantly called a part of me out that I was sure I buried long ago. The dancer, the singer, the stage act in me was set free through his name alone and he went along with it. Our second date was at a playground with the kids. BOTH his and mine. We had five kids under the age of six, running around us like a solar system and it all just felt right. Chaotic, messy, and right.
He loved the ME that he met— I was a whack job; completely off the rails. But only because I was working hard at re-establishing myself as a woman first, and a mom second. I think he was greatly worried at the beginning. But he stepped into the role anyway and filled those shoes like no other. And there was still plenty of room for more. More more more. More me, more him, more kids. And we did have more kids; two to be exact. Even with everyone looking down their noses at us. We were called “irresponsible.” He never said no to me. He was the first person who made me feel like I should really be myself. It was like the sky opened up and said, “Yes. Shave your head. Rent that Porsche. Dance in the street. Let them all watch you.” And I would turn to Pippin who would smile back at me and have this “Well what are we waiting for?” look on his face. He was the perfect mirror and he reflected a life that I was searching for. And now we’ve been together for ten years. And it still feels like we just met. Women first.
Its a shout out to all the ladies: single, married, divorced, remarried—to step moms, biological moms, adoptive moms and everything in between. It’s a call for us to return to our hopes and dreams. Do you recall what you dreamed of when you wanted to be a mother or wife? Was it perching on your child’s shoulder when they did homework? Was it soccer on Tuesdays and Thursdays, games on Saturdays all over the county? Was it late nights of science projects that are more your projects than his/hers? Was it throwing your life away to live it through your child? I say no to all the above. Women first.
This So Called Mom is making an intentional call out to other women. Within these words, you’ll find me raising a glass to those of us thinking about motherhood for the first time, those of us expecting, and those of us who already have our hands full. When we become mothers, it seems like everything else fades to black. Everything that once filled your life: Your friends, the fun —or the way you had fun, the odd hours, the choice—all of it goes away because our culture asks us to become that one thing: A mom and that’s defined in one way.
When did we surrender being physically fit and wear ONLY yoga pants because they’re stretchy (Not to mention UGG boots in any color, which my husband calls birth control)? Or pretend to enjoy ourselves in bed with our husbands when we would rather be scrolling on our phones? When was the last time you laughed so hard you almost peed your pants or did something JUST for you, to get on with your wild self? Women first.
Welcome,
So Called Mom.
Next Post: Do it Like a Grown Up