Wait, What is this Feeling I'm Having?

Could it be? It is... it's worry. Where did this come from? And why do I have it? Last week I was calm and a bit zen about the whole upcoming kindergarten experience.

And now I'm worrying. What if my kid is a behavioral problem? What if he is below average in the classroom? I swear I don't have any more energy left to deal with trying to inspire a "me-crazed" five year old.

Yes, I know I registered him for kindergarten today, which is probably why I'm all a mess. His teacher for next year is Ms. Dramado. He was kind of whatever about the whole thing until he said to me that he was sad he didn't get Mrs. White because she had two kitchens in her room when they took the tour. And I figured if that's what he was qualifying as his must-have priority list for kindergarten, I think he's going to be horrified to learn that he's not a little boy any more. That kindergartners get in trouble for rough housing and yelling.

I went over some of the rules from the handbook that came in my registration packet. The one he was most concerned about was not being able to wear hats in the classroom. "Well, I guess I can dress up and just leave my fireman hat at home."

Shit. It reminds me of when I was 8 and I spent the whole night before third grade up worrying that I was going to do something stupid and get detention (because you couldn't get a detention before third grade). I worried about it for weeks.

I explained that he couldn't dress up in costume and go to kindergarten, except around, maybe, Halloween. My son was not amused with this discovery.

He's placed in a room where I think we only know one other child. He's an old friend from Next Generation, so that will work fine. To be truthful, I was a little afraid that if he and all of his best buddies ended up in the same class, it would be a lot of rough and tumble and figuring out that they were in school and not on a play date. But he had friends like Special K's boys who were in different classrooms at Next Gen and he was always happy to see them in the building and on the playground. I don't think it will be any different here.

Right now he's in the bathtub. I'm putting him to bed by 8:30, the estimated school bedtime. And I'll wake him up at 6:30 a.m., the estimated school wake up time. We're going to aim for this every weekday night until school starts.

Tomorrow, I won't have time to think about it. After I drop him off at sports camp at 7:30 a.m., I'm working out for an hour I'll pick up the book drop books, and then head into MMO to start going through my room. KTDID is going to come over and help. We're going to move things around, and I'm going to try to figure some things out that I'll need. Then I'll pick X-man up and get him some lunch and then drop him off at Little Gym Under the Sea camp so that he can have fun there, while I'm mowing my 3' high weeds and trying to some outside yard maintenance. It was so pretty before the three week-long heatwaves and now, I'm the saddest yard on the block. Sigh.

On Wednesday, X-man and I are headed to the pool. He's excited. He showed me in St. John that he can swim (via doggie paddle and underwater) across the width of the pools (around 12 feet). Yeah, there's no freestyle yet, but he can do it. So he's going to give the yellow slide a go at Sholem.

And here I thought that was going to be our biggest challenge this summer? As it turns out, I'm the one that's a wreck and he's just -- normal.

Running on Empty

It is 2-something-o'clock in the a.m. right now. I've just spent four hours staring at the Internet avoiding using my brain. Sure, there were some word games on Facebook in there. Sure, I read the newspaper... but I mean, it was avoidance. I didn't want to read about political polls or shootings in town. 

But mostly what I didn't want to do was read other people's blogs and find out how fascinating and wonderful their lives are, when mine currently seems very -- stand still-ish.

My friends in town use our blogs to catch up. It's kind of funny for a group of women who see each other more often than any of us usually see our spouses. 

Libbygirl had her baby on July 31. Lightning McColin's little brother is a spitting image of him. He eats and sleeps well. It was sweet to meet him and hold him this week. 

But it also made me think a lot about the last 2.5 years. Half of me wanted to get a little ribbon for just surviving. The other half mourned a bit because I became very conscious that I was crossing a line I never wanted to cross when I became a mother.

That is to say, I never wanted to become a bitter mom. The one with much older children that stands next to you forewarning you of all the ways your sweet infant baby will one day hate you. The one that tells you how outside of work and motherhood she doesn't have a life. That by the time she gets it back, she'll be old and gray and her unappreciative children will never call her. 

When I had a newborn, I found a lot of solace in other newborn moms. We had the same wide-eyed deer caught in headlight looks. We hadn't slept. We hadn't showered. We hadn't eaten. Our babies couldn't turn over. They had no teeth. And you could spend hours, days, weeks just staring at your kid. 

Then as my baby began to really move and interact with is world, I was fascinated by his exploration. Pushing buttons on the dishwasher was a huge achievement. He used a fork. He opened a door. He built with Mega Blocks. He pulled a string toy across the floor. 

Then he got to 18 months and the molars starting coming in. We're just now finishing with the last of his teeth, and as they came in and the speech started really flowing -- my child explored and punished others (mostly me) through biting. 

Now I realize my son will be 2.5 in September. He's no longer a baby. Besides the diapers, any infant aspect of him has disappeared. He's his own little man. He hugs and jumps and skips. He doesn't want to share his toys. His mood swings challenge me in every way. But for the first time, I find myself being angry with my child when we have bad days, when his behavior is out of hand. 

I never had that anger before. Until he was 2, he could do anything and I had this endless patience with him. That was before he decided I was the mortal enemy when I did things like force him to stay out of the street or put away a toy he threw or not allow him to have ice cream for breakfast. And I know I'm being a good mom by doing all those things. I know I'm being a better mom for sticking to my guns. 

But it feels like there's this huge separation there now. Like I've staked my claim and he's staked his, and we'll never get back to where we were. 

I see that kind of separation in a lot of families. There's this giant gap that exists. And it's not that they don't care, but it's just that there's so much shit in the gap that it's hard to ever really find a common ground that's strong enough to start all over again. It's a weird crazy tangle.

All I know, is that I don't want it to happen to X-man and I. I wonder if we've been provided enough of a map of what to do -- by learning what not to do or by learning what's not normal -- at any stage or age of a child's life. 

For example: You don't tell people that when you found out that you were pregnant you wanted to walk in front of a bus, because your kid will somehow be told that some day and boy, isn't that a great therapy conversation? 

You don't have your 12-year-old sit down next to you and tell the child if they weren't around you'd kill yourself, again, more therapy fodder.  

You don't just show up for honor society and plays and other public events where people "see" you "parenting" and yet in reality you're completely disconnected from your kids' lives to the point where they feel they look after themselves. 

You don't insult your kids' career choices. 

You don't say bad things about the people they date or marry. 

You don't criticize their parenting. 

You don't tell them bad crap about the other parent. 

You don't talk about sex as being dirty. 

You don't shame them. 

You don't guilt them. 

You don't neglect them. 

You don't make up some kind of alternate reality where you tell them things in their lives didn't happen because you're happier denying any proof that your kid endured any pain on your watch. 

You don't criticize your kids' weight. 

You don't get to get angry with your kids for thinking for themselves, even if they choose to think differently from you. 

You don't force feed religion to someone who is reluctant.

These kinds of lessons go on and on...

I know we're going to continue to make mistakes, lots and lots and lots of them. The big thing I've learned from becoming a parent is that you do your best. It's all you can do. It's all any parent can do, even parents that do the things mentioned above.

But then again, there's Yoda telling me how it is when my best isn't good enough no matter how hard I work, no matter how many bruises I have, or how much my son, after he hits me, hugs and kisses me to try to make things better. 

I get frustrated with his natural, 2-year-old ways. I get angry with him when he hurts others. 

It still has me up at now 3-something-o'clock at night. 

Fear.

I'm going to go sleep with my child and hug his Bob the Builder. And tomorrow, while the gap is still small enough... I'm going to start shoveling some of that crap out of there. And I'm going to start building the world's biggest, strongest cantilever. Not so much to smother, but enough to keep my eye on things and hope that I can do a better job.

Psych out

Have you ever done something a million times and thought nothing of it and then you have to do this regular, every day thing with someone you don't want to and suddenly all these reasons why you shouldn't do that thing you've always done overwhelm your brain?

I'm having one of those moments. 

You know, like you go out to dinner all the time, but then you go with someone you love -- but who turns out to be a former wait staff person and goes all uber-critical on your server to her face to the point where you're sure there's poison or spit or worse in your food?

Have you ever been forced to go bra shopping with your grandmother, who has very different ideas (and lots of them) of the kinds of underwear a "good girl" buys?

Or you go to a Weight Watchers meeting where someone joins because she can't lose that last 5 lbs of her size 4 body without a little help, while you're still staring down the 50 lbs you have to go to weigh 50 lbs more than she does? It's not that she's not perfectly nice, but um, at that point you're overwhelmed in your neuroses and want her to reach her lifetime goal and go away. 

Or maybe, you and the rest of the herd of fat people at WW will turn on her ... MacTroll has to have a bottle of Chianti around here somewhere. Mmm, how many points would that be. I'm pretty sure even though they have a possum meat count in the guide, they didn't take the time to figure out "skinny girl."

Anyone whose been reading knows I have a lot going on this month... and that I'm scheduled down to the hour pretty much until August 18. In dealing with that, all my good habits of this summer have gone completely out the window, and I don't seem to have the time and energy right now to crawl back on the wagon (Screw the damn horse).

Seriously, I'm craving cherry limeade, butter tarts and quick food solutions that I don't make myself. I stopped walking after my vacation and it feels like months since I've gone on one rather than a little over a week. The weather is not cooperating for outdoor time. And I really, really want to blow my budget and go buy my kid a cart full of toys at Toys R Us for retail therapy, since the food therapy doesn't seem to be working out so well. 

But I just need to get through it and get over my neuroses... 

The Freedom to Stand Still

Once upon a time I blogged on LiveJournal. Then I went to Xanga in 2005, since it seemed to be the only way to communicate with my mother. 

Xanga eventually went down the tubes when I established my Facebook account in fall of 2006. 

I don't think what I have to say is going to be any different than most of the other C-U area blogs I read (Carrie, Mrs. Chicken, LBOTP, Rayne, Just a Mom, Soy is the New Black, etc., you rock). 

But what I do realize is that certain parts of my brain and thought processes are getting bottled to the point of no return. When I think of this period of my life, my memories are going to be entirely made up of those I'm making with my 2-year-old son. I love all of the stuff we do together, but at the same time, I want him to grow up knowing that his mother has a sense of who she is outside of being a mother. And in that aspect, I'm failing in new and huge ways every day. 

For example, last fall, I finally decided what I wanted to do as a career, since working 60-plus hours a week as a PR/media person while being married to MacTroll, OS X superhero for the 21st century, doesn't exactly work when you have a child. It's the reason we moved away from the big city where we both had pretty demanding careers five years ago. 

Anyway, I applied to the the mega large university's graduate program to do Early Childhood Education. I picked it because when I called around to find out about the programs in the area, the person I talked to went on and on pressing the point that if admitted to the program I couldn't work because it was a full-time, day-time program. 

In response, I gave notice at my part-time job, wrote the six pages of essays, nagged my references,  studied my ass off for the GRE, took the Illinois teaching BASIC test and started saving money for tuition for fall of 2008. 

When I got my acceptance letter I was jubilant. Then I met with my mentors who handed me the list of required classes I needed to take. When I got my computer access to start working on my registration last week, I can't tell you how surprised I was that the full-time, day-time program I had chosen that works with traditional childcare hours required me to take evening classes three nights a week. 

Since Mighty MacTroll doesn't have a set schedule for saving the IT world, I was screwed. The university employee who told me about the program was shocked when I sent her the list of courses and the night-time requirements. She started to get into it with scheduling. Then she sent me to a faculty with some kind of authority... who basically told me that maybe I should defer and in a year my life could work with the schedule (for example: maybe I'll get divorced and he'll take the kid?) or I should conveniently transfer from the program I wanted to be in, to a program I didn't want to be in so I could have more daytime options. 

So, today I asked to withdraw entirely from the program. I just don't have from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. free every day to let the sucky large university set my schedule for me. And as the only parent with consistency right now, I'm not about to get gipped of 2 years of my only child's early years for educational snobbery. Seriously... 

Of course, I might have gotten a bit disappointed and depressed about it enough to schedule a beach vacation in Wisconsin for September with the money I saved. Sure, it's no Virgin Islands, but I'm a girl on a budget with a son who likes sand and a dog who likes water. Plus, MacTroll can still be on the grid with DSL versus on dial up from a mail station on St. John. 

To put my whining into perspective though, I have two friends going through divorce. My mom lost one of her students after he suffered an asthma attack at age 16. A friend with a fetus in utero (although she's due any moment now) with enlarged ventricles, sooo... boo hoo hoo, Looseyfur doesn't get to get a freaking second master's degree. 

That said, anyone have any ideas on what the hell I should do with my time while I'm taking some classes at Parkland part-time and figuring out an online program that might better suit my needs? I'm not a girl who sits still very well. On the other hand, my life is still dictated by my spouse's work schedule and my son.