She flies through the air with the greatest of ease, that Daring Young Mom on her flying trapeze. At least she tries to make it look easy. Kathryn Thompson has been a daring young mom since she gave birth to her first child at age 24. She’s since added two more to the family circus and although she’s several years older, she still claims the title of “Young Mom” with pride. After completing a bachelors degree in Film and English and a working for a couple of years as a librarian, she's joined the ranks of women who are loving their new careers as stay-at-home moms and reaching out to each other for support and friendship.
DYM has spent a good portion of her life saying, "Go tell Mom," or "Mom can fix it." Now she is the mom. That's quite a lot of responsibility for someone who still feels like a kid on the inside.
DYM lives in the Seattle area with her computer-genius husband and three smallish people who want her to stop typing, feed them marshmallows, and play Candy Land all day, fictitiously named Laylee (born ’03), Magoo (born ’05), and Wanda (born ’09).
My kids are still pretty young – one, five and seven. As much as we have some drama, disobedience, and disagreements, our lives are fairly simple. At church I work with teenage girls and they make me thankful every day that my kids and I have some time to grow into the kinds of problems the teenagers and their parents need to worry about right now.
While their parents are encouraging them to stay away from drugs and avoid other life-destroying mistakes, I’m still working on teaching my kids a few basic skills. Here are some examples:
1. Do not scream before you barf. Barfing and the ensuing cleanup are annoying enough. If you yell and holler leading up to the incident, your parents will have no empathy left when you need it most. I would also add that if you feel the need to heave, you are welcome to do it in the toilet and tell me about it after. You don’t need to stand at the foot of my bed, in the middle of the living room carpet or at the dinner table, scream, announce the impending avalanche and then let loose. You can let loose in a contained space and then fill me in on the details.
There’s a line in the movie Date Night where Tina Fey talks about how shocked her kids are each night that they have to put their pajamas on and get ready for bed, as though they don’t have to do it every. single. night. Dan and I laughed so hard when we heard that because our kids are exactly the same.
Each night no matter how long they’ve been alive, no matter how many times we’ve done the identical bedtime routine, they still find it amazingly odd and annoying that we expect them to go change into pajamas. They roll their eyes and beg for mercy. Often they ask if they can just sleep in their clothes, mud-caked jeans, slug-slimed socks, whatever.
We were so excited to see you return this fall. You’d been gone for so long and we'd missed your action, your excitement and the regularity you added to our schedule. We were double stoked this year because we had two kids who would become involved with you. We thought this year would be way easier because I was not 20 months pregnant.
When we got your schedule, we were pleased to see that Laylee and Magoo had no conflicting games or practices. Laylee would always enjoy you Mondays and Wednesdays while Magoo would be yours Tuesdays and Thursdays. Laylee would catch up with you in one town, Magoo in another.
I really hope mothers are graded on effort alone because my execution and completion have been lacking for the past two years or so.
I have the best intentions. I volunteer for things. I sign the kids up for activities they will love. I say yes to party invitations and offer to bring food. I buy fabric to make elaborate Halloween costumes. I intend to acknowledge my friends’ birthdays. I write huge portions of novels. And then terrible catastrophes happen like one of the kids gets hungry and I remember I have to make meals for my family or we run out of underwear and it occurs to me that Wanda still refuses to wash her own laundry. Then it all comes tumbling down.
It’s a good thing kids are sweet and beautiful no matter what their current physical state because I find it nearly impossible to keep mine looking put together all/any of the time. I’m not a high maintenance person myself, not overly concerned with primping like a prom queen every time I leave the house but I do want my kids to look like they have parents who know the basics of cleanliness and personal hygiene.
From Laylee’s hair to Wanda’s filth-encrusted clothing to Magoo’s terminal milk mustache, my children make it their goal in life to look like their mother doesn’t care enough to bathe them or launder their clothes.
It’s mostly, not all, but mostly about me. I’ll be honest. I find that there are some areas of parenting where I’m selfish, where I care more about looking like a good mom than being a good mom. Will my kids suffer in any way if I let go and allow them to be filthy? Probably not.
Magoo informed me this afternoon that he wants me to change his name to J. J. I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen Lost or the new Star Trek movie so I assumed Mr. Abrams had nothing to do with this choice. I was right.
“There’s a boy in my class named J. J. and he’s my friend. His name is just J. and J. Isn’t that cool?”
“Yeah. That’s pretty cool.”
“It’s so cool. He’s my friend but he has way more friends than me. He hangs out with like 4 guys every day on the playground. I want to change my name to J. J.”
The first day of school I made steel cut oats with cinnamon, soaked with care the night before. The second day we had toast with jam. The third day it was cold cereal. We are now on week three and oh how far we’ve fallen.
On Tuesday morning I slept in. This was related to the fact that Monday night I stayed up late and early Tuesday morning Wanda woke up screaming to nurse so she could crawl around on our bed with my breast in her mouth while moving in and out of Downward-Facing Dog. I can’t remember what was so important that I stayed up late Monday night. The memory lapse is probably due to sleep deprivation. Anyway, we were running late.
Sometimes when I plan to nurse Wanda, I say, “I’m gonna go milk the baby.” This sounds odd, which is why I say it because I enjoy saying weird things and then laughing at my own jokes, especially when I’m home alone with the kids all day and there are no other adults to converse with. If a stupid joke is told in a stay-at-home-mom’s house and there’s no other adult around to hear it, is it still unfunny?
If you think about “milking” in terms of giving someone milk, as in, “beer me” meaning to give someone a beer, then the reference makes perfect sense. If you think about “milking” strictly from a dairy farming perspective then I guess I’m the one being milked. Either way, I like saying it and I like doing it.
Have you ever been on the outside of a mom clique? I have. Sitting in the waiting room of a class my daughter was taking a few years ago, I found myself surrounded by other moms but feeling completely alone. The other women with children in the class all seemed to know each other. They volunteered together. Their husbands were friends. They shopped together, played together, worked out together and hung out on weekends.
Now this question’s a little harder. Have you ever been part of a mom clique that excluded someone else? I have. But this is harder to pinpoint because when you’re part of the clique, you’re so comfortable and self-absorbed that you often don’t even realize what you’re doing.
There seems to be a lot of crying going on around my house lately. Most of it comes from the kids but I’ll admit that I’m not immune from shedding a few tears from time to time. Once I get started it’s sometimes hard to stop. There are several things that make us cry and each one of us is unique.
As Wanda approaches her first birthday, I find myself concerned about her emotional stability. She really does cry WAY more than the rest of us. Sometimes she is such a baby.
