Mom is Just a Nickname

And I find this very frustrating.

I’ve been a stay at home mom for the better part of ten years. It’s my JOB to keep the house in order and to care for the kids. I’ve tried creating my own routines, based on what I do anyway but with tweaks here and there to make them more efficient. I’ve tried using things like Flylady, which is supposed to give a person some shape to the days.  None of these seem to help.

I’d like a routine for a few reasons.  First of all, I get so tired of looking at my messy house.  Granted, it’s not as messy now as it has been in the past.  We’ve done better with keeping up with it since moving to this house.  But it’s never as nice as I’d like it, unless I’ve just busted my butt for a day or two to make it shine.  That quickly fades, though, no matter my good intentions.

I read about other families whose children happily fall in line with an orderly day.  They get up, they make their beds, they get dressed, they eat breakfast….etc. Everything falls into place.  This is not what happens in my house.  There are days (as there have been this week) that we simply don’t get our acts together and get dressed until late in the day.  Ok, so if you go to work (or school) each day, that may seem like such a luxury.  I know Toph often says he envies us our ability to take it slow.  I’d rather get up and moving and feel like I’ve accomplished something in a day.

Obviously, something is holding me back.  Some inner something is overriding my desire to have a clean house and to have productive days.  Is it laziness?  Is it boredom?  Is it some chemical imbalance in my head?  Is it a lack of purpose?  On any given day I’ll answer yes to every one of those. I don’t know what causes it.  I wish I did because then maybe I could get my act together for longer than a couple of weeks.

Sometimes I just get so sick of being me.  Sick of not being able to stick to something for any length of time.

This is what Sesame Street had to say today, in a song performed by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. I normally like that pair. I think that in a scene too filled with fake and cloying, they tend to come off as real. I usually like Sesame Street too. I think it’s incredible how fresh and clever their skits can be even after years of processing the same information into bits and bytes the kids can relate to.

Today, though, the song I heard made me rather angry. “I’m not patient because I’m patient. I’m not kind because I’m kind. I scratch your back nice and long because I know that you’ll do the same for me. Take your turn, take it nice and long, because I know when you’re done, I’ll get a really long turn too.” That is not verbatim, but it’s close.

I object to teaching my children to be nice to others so that others will be nice to my children. Giving to others to see what comes back to me is not how I live my life and it’s not what I want my children to learn. I teach my children to be nice, to be patient, to be kind, to be generous, to be loving because it makes them feel good to treat others so nicely. I want them to learn to be giving people because of how it makes them feel, because it’s far better to put good out in the world than bad, because being all of those things (kind, loving, generous, respectful, patient, and nice) is the way we should all act towards one another.

I do not want them to be any of those things because they will receive something for it. We cannot expect external rewards for good actions. The rewards must come from within. Any external reinforcement for good behavior should just be a bonus.

So, I object to a song aimed at children, aired on Sesame Street, which tells my child to be kind so that others will be kind to him. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is a fine sentiment in some circumstances, but that expectation of reciprocity should not form the lifelong behavior patterns of anyone. I can only see that leading to a feeling of entitlement: “Well, I did x,y,z for you. Shouldn’t you do a,b,c for me? Shouldn’t you reward me?” No, that’s not how the world works, that’s not the lesson I want my kids to learn.

This rant has been brought to you by the letter N and the number 8.

Almost two years ago, we moved to Florida. It wasn’t the first time I’d lived in the Sunshine State. In actuality, I’m a native Floridian. My parents did most of their growing up in Florida, and I spent my first 8 years or so here.

Still, when I moved back, I started having headaches. In the small town we lived in before, they were more frequent and often more painful. I saw a doctor and ruled out any odd disease or illness. It seems I’m stuck with Migraines which are aggravated by allergies and hormones. (Man, I just love hormones. *roll eyes*)

I bring up the subject because I had another one on Sunday which carried over into Monday. I’m so discouraged by how my house looks after two days of me being out of it. (Well, ok, three…I didn’t do any housework over the weekend!)

Seriously, I spent all of last week working on the house, making it nice and clean so that I wouldn’t have to stare at a yucky house on my anniversary weekend. Now, it’s gross again and I have to start all over again? What a bummer.

My sleep-less nights lately can mostly be attributed to poor X. He’s fighting a cold right now. Several times a night I wake up to the sound of him crawling into bed beside me, coughing his lungs up. There are few sounds in the world as grating to me as the sound of constant coughing. I try not to get irritated by it, especially when it’s my kids hacking, but really it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.

Then another of my least favorite sounds follows during the day, when it becomes obvious that X didn’t get enough sleep either: Every thing that comes out of his mouth is a whine. It doesn’t matter what he’s trying to say, he seems to have forgetten how to speak without that high pitched tone in his voice.

So, after spending most of November and December getting hooked on coffee, spending January and most of February in withdrawal, I’m once more turning to the coffee-press. Maybe if I get some caffeine in my system I’ll be able to function above ‘zombie’. Right now, I feel more like I could fall over and sleep, no matter what I’m doing.

How do you cope when your sleep has been interrupted and crummy?

It’s so easy to waste a day in my world. I’ve literally been in front of the computer for hours today, but I have nothing much to show for it except an artificially inflated boost in my blog’s visitors. Why artificial? Because none of these visitors stays very long, no one takes the time to see what I write about. Most of these visitors stay a second and then run away again. On to bigger and better things.

I should have been cleaning my house, writing, or even interacting more with my child. The very least I should have done today was to get dressed. I’m ashamed to admit that it is 5pm EST and I am still in my pajamas.

Somewhere in the midst of all of my mouse clicking and monitor staring, I have managed to do several loads of laundry and the dishes. I also took a few timeouts to build a helicopter, a service station and a dune buggy out of blocks with X. My calendar has been updated and I have done research on Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten. X has managed to dismantle a couch, plant afore-mentioned blocks all over the living room floor, play a CD multiple times on fastforward speed (which makes it sound like the Chipmunks are singing), and scatter costumes all over the living room floor (to water the planted blocks?). He keeps himself busy. I imagine I’m in for a battle when I tell him it’s time to clean up the mess he’s made.

This is the kind of day I was thinking of when I wrote a few days ago that I mostly manage to just ‘exist’ not to ‘live’. I waste hours and hours doing nothing productive, nothing that contributes to my health or wellbeing. At the end of the day, I look back and realize the many other ways I could have spent the day and I feel bad. What was I thinking? Perhaps more importantly, why wasn’t I thinking?