“Mom!” I heard fear in my daughter’s voice as I unbuckled my middle kid. Suddenly my giggling baby was flying “wheee” toward me on a stolen tricycle across the OUAC parking lot and that’s not all, a car had to brake for him. Later I knew I should have apologized and lavishly thanked the driver for taking care. In the moment I felt too embarrassed and incompetent to even make eye contact. I snatched up the baby (unhappy to relinquish the tricycle) and held him tight.

My daughter was supposed to be holding the baby’s hand. But at six, she isn’t responsible for a one-year-old in front of a toy store. The baby brother is strong, fast and capricious. From now on, he will always be the last one removed from the car.

Why is it that I take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only mama who suffers significant lapses in parenting finesse? Wouldn’t it be better for children everywhere if I really was the only recurrently maladroit mother out there? Yet as I read “get born” facebook confessions of moms who forgot to buckle safety seats, forgot to feed a toddler, spaced the daycare pickup, or can’t remember children’s birthdays at the doctor, I know we share a bond of imperfection. My neighbor’s daughter drank cough syrup. A friend’s son choked down coins and she had to recover them from subsequent diapers.

I once arrived at a MOPS meeting and discovered in the parking lot that I had only two kids with me and my week-old newborn was still at home, sleeping in his carrier just inside the door. Can anybody I know outdo that? I HOPE NOT, but I wouldn’t doubt it. I’m tempted to scrutinize other moms when they’re having a good day, convince myself they are always full of beauty, wisdom and eternal patience, and measure myself inadequate. I begin to fantasize that they never fall from grace and there must be something seriously wrong with me, living in such blatant humanity.

Those reminders that I’m not alone help curb the tendency to indulge in a classic guilt-ridden pity party probably involving excessive chocolate or corn chips. Well that and looking in my children’s endlessly loving and forbearing faces. I really don’t expect my middle son to harbor ill feelings about the preventable tantrum scar on his eyebrow, or the fact that his bike helmet is tough to fit on his misshapen skull forever flat on one side and pointy on top because I neglected to rotate his sleeping head in his first four months of life. No, he will forgive and love me just as my daughter has after being accidentally locked in the garage for ten terrified minutes – and just as the baby brother will if he ever finds out his mama let him loose in front of traffic.

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Becoming a mother is like being dropped from a small aircraft into the ocean from 12000 feet. You prepare for it by putting on a parachute and a life jacket, but when you hold up your ticket with two pink lines, board the plane and take off, you’re struck with horrible air sickness. What were you thinking? Then the plane hits some altitude and you cruise for a while enjoying the ride. But fear strikes again as you near the point of departure. That first leap – the squeezing tightness in your belly – there’s no turning back. You get a surge of adrenaline and fear and joy and craziness. When the parachute opens you begin to enjoy the ride down. But not for long. You begin to spin, to flail, to realize how quickly the ocean is approaching, and with great pain you and the ocean collide. You take a gasp of air and hold your breath. This is it, the moment of becoming. Push through! Under the water you are rolled and swayed dizzy. Your arms find a soft object and hug it close. Finally you struggle to the surface where you realize, for the first time, that the life jacket you carefully packed along does not fit you at all but it’s just the perfect size for the seven-pound person you found there under the ocean and dragged with you up to the wave-tossed top.

And there you are, treading water in the middle of a vast sea. It’s very disorienting, the constant buffeting of the waves, endless straining, incessant protection of that precious gift you hold. But in time, as days and weeks pass, you find you are able to swim with increasing skill, guard with greater confidence, and navigate with clearer direction. Eventually your feet find solid ground and you emerge bedraggled on the shore. Gazing down again at the perfect souvenir of your skydiving adventure cradled carefully in your arms, you know it was worth it, and you will never be the same.

Happy Mother’s Day to women everywhere who have taken that leap, that drenching plunge into motherhood!

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My biggest little boy turned three last Friday! Thursday night we went to Walmart to get cake. Actually it was to get $100 worth of groceries, but to the birthday boy, it was really all about the cake. Chocolate cupcakes, to be exact, with “Cars” theme rings pressed into mounds of cheap pasty buttercream. He insisted on carrying the plastic box himself and began to query incessantly “Is it cake time?” the minute we got home.

The next morning, Jaron was knocking on our bedroom door before 7am announcing, “It’s my birthday!” We sang “Happy Birthday” in harmony as we shuffled out of bed. He asked about the cake again. So we lit up the candles and sang another round of Happy Birthday right after breakfast! (Then we had another round of lighting the candles and blowing them out so I could get better pictures. Surely I’m not the only Mama to do this?) And then, on to the main event as far as the birthday boy was concerned. Cheap pasty buttercream. He took his time licking all the rainbow-sprinkled frosting off the top of the chocolate dome, took about one bite of crumbly cake, and said he was done.

 

 

 

Time for the presents. Hearing his shrieks of glee at a toy squeezy frog and “Cars” kneepads, I regretted not having the video rolling. But I did capture his unbridled joy at unwrapping a sandbox toy, and his ear to ear grin when he realized his new underwear matched the “Cars” shirt he was wearing. I will miss these moments when he grows up!

Well we had pretty much a normal day after that, while he played incessantly with his new (used, don’t tell him) Tonka talking dump truck I got at our MOPS toy exchange. “It farted!!” he exclaimed when it made a snoring sound going into sleep mode. The next time, “It burped!” That’s a boy for ya.

That evening in lieu of a party we went to Linton Elementary’s school carnival – even better than a birthday party because it only cost $6 for game/snack tickets for him and his sister. They had a blast wandering from station to station throwing rings at pop bottles and hula hoops at stuffed animals, sword fishing over a curtain, tossing toilet paper rolls into a fake toilet, scoring soccer goals with a giant beach ball – all along bagging a prize collection of tootsie rolls, suckers, bracelets, and plastic spiders and frogs. They hopped onto numbers in the cake walk, hugged Melody’s kindergarten teacher, and munched on popcorn with tongue, teeth and lips stained blue from cotton candy.

 

But the festivities didn’t end there! That night, Jaron begged for Melody to have a sleepover in his room. They’ve never done that at home, although last fall they shared a big futon on vacation in Singapore. So I dragged Melody’s mattress off her bed and plopped it on the floor next to his. The next day Melody, roused far earlier than her norm, reported that the brother kept talking and waking her up when she was trying to fall asleep. It must have been true because they were both out of bed to use the bathroom an hour after the lights went out.

Regardless, they must have gotten enough sleep to store up some reserve energy because they showed no lack of it after lunch at KidzFit, a play area with inflatable jumping castles and slides, wii consoles, arcade games, a rock climbing wall, and a variety of other kid-friendly mischief. We had free passes earned in the Poudre Library summer reading program last year.

 

A couple of hours later we snagged Jaron en route racing (for about the hundredth time) from the exit back to the entrance of a huge inflatable obstacle course with a giant slide at the end. The grown-ups were tired! Back home, the rest of the cheap pasty buttercream smothered cupcakes disappeared and the birthday festivities officially drew to a close. Off to play with the talking dump truck again!

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