This Whole Motherhood Thing

There are times when being a Mommy is super, crazy fun. They are, I won't lie...pretty select times. Mostly its just a thing...like being a homeowner or being a wife or being a student. Not bad, not amazing...but decent. And sometimes it makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a spoon but that's for another time. Sometimes...there are real, genuine moments of idyllic happiness.

From time to time I wish I felt like motherhood was almost always moving and wonderful but it isn't, at least for me. Sometimes, I wade through Mommy-guilt about that fact. I think maybe "good moms" are the ones who always rave about adoring their children. Maybe even good moms are the ones who pretend they're perma-thrilled with their role. But then, I have a real penchant for honesty. I'd rather even my children know the truth. Being a mommy is really hard, its scary, its exhausting and its heartbreaking. Its not my most favorite thing in life. Its also very personal, and delicious and peppered with some of my most exhilarating feelings of success. I had no idea teaching someone to read would feel like climbing Mount Everest or that I would actually weep over the strenuousness of potty training. I am genuinely ridiculously proud of myself and the child when I cross the finish line on some Mommy-goal like that!!!!

Although mothering has been really feeding and exciting it also feels like a business I am a little loathe to make "my life" even though I am home full-time and admittedly not really a classic career person. Its a sticky business to make the care, feeding and emergence of a tiny handful of fully sentient and self-aware humans your life-work. I want to support them and encourage them and teach them but on some level I kind of want them to wear that label themselves, not me. I try not to encourage myself to "own" them and their development and instead to do all I can to enable them and to make myself my own life-work. I think there's a lovely, deeply personal, delicate piece to being a mother, there's also a lot of room for mismanagement, obsession, and forgetting who you are as a person and your responsibility to continue growing. And that's my soapbox for the morning. Happy Thursday!

City Affection

We were in NYC this weekend, down for a day-jaunt to show Lockbox the sights. So much to see and so much to try to explain. I rambled off and stuttered up a few times when I was trying to specify why New York hits me between the eyes. Lots of it is ubiquitous to any city...energy, cultural diversity, great food, art, sheer beauty. But there are so many little, funny things that are just New York although some of them are hard to describe. 

 The ubiquitous yellow cab. The way pedestrians brazenly and energetically jaywalk anytime and anywhere they please. The rows of stalls in china town with bright heaps of produce side-by-side with the booths selling cheap scarves and knock-off watches. The way people push through almost unfeelingly to cram into a subway car or elevator but also wink at little kids on the sly and help carry strollers up and down subway steps without being asked.

The way cheap black umbrellas accumulate in the gutters after a sudden, gusty rain like a batch of fallen blossoms. The smell of the over-sugared, roasted almonds in the sidewalk carts on a winter day. The glitter that lingers in the street dust the week or two after Chinese New Year. The ultra-chichi ladies with their glamly costumed mini-dogs and the completely wacky, raggy bums in the parks.

 So many, many things....some of them things that sound odd and some obvious but all of them important in some small way.

The first few times I was in the city I didn't like it at all. I felt swept under by the volume, the dirt, the sheer over-done grit of it all and couldn't enjoy it. It was like that the more than once, I'd guess about the first three or four times. New York slyly grew on me when I wasn't looking, the real clincher was when I spent a day walking all over the city with A's cousin, a life-long New Yorker who showed me the city she loved. The affection she felt came shining through and suddenly I could see it too, irreversibly, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles and I wondered why I couldn't see it all along.

So much fun to feel like I own a tiny piece of this city emotionally and to now be able to take my sister along on a tour of what makes me smile here. I hope she understands a little bit of what I'm sharing when I tell her how it feels that ride the Staten Island Ferry in the heat of a July day or stroll the Union Square Farmer's Market and buy rooftop honey from beekeepers living the golden urban life above this pavement. Its a good world, and a strange adventure but one I feel really lucky to be living. 

Farm Therapy

I firmly believe that a farm day, even in darkest winter, is good for the soul. When we feel low or when things seem stressful or when winter has just been too long...we head for a farm get a little pick-me-up. Farms and farmers have a vibrant steadiness about them, a sense that even though the rest of the world may be doldrums and grey there are still energies and happenings inside the privacy of the barn. 

We saw a mama sheep, tucked into a warm indoor stall with plenty of hay....just waiting to lamb. We'll have to check and see if she has one lamb or twins the next time we're up. The boys were pretty happy just to be lifted over the half door of her stall and peek at her expectantly. We poked around a little more the way you do in barns, dodge sparrows flying in and out the doors heading for the rafters, climb the ladder to the haymow and then come back down backwards, open the feed bins and peer in at the big mounds of grain pellets. All good things.

We bought milk, piled on a few cartons of eggs, took an apple each for snacking, we oggled yogurt (and I promised myself I'd make some) and I talked them out of chocolate milk. We noticed a pile of freshly washed spiles in the dairy, read a brochure about the expensive and select maple syrup program they're running and smugly remembered our time up north at my parents house tapping trees with Big Grandpa. 

And after paying for our goods we wandered off through the snow and mud puddles to explore the door of the open greenhouse. So lovely. Greenhouses, farms, Panera Bread. My survival techniques. I think we need to hit up another one sometime very soon. There is something so very healing about the green and alive. I worked in a greenhouse for a little while and even thought I largely did just grunt work, I LOVED it. I still think about that business sometimes and wonder if they are still running. Going to "work" in the middle of January and spending all day trimming blooming geraniums and watering seedlings is a wonderful way to spend your time.