The Middle Years

It’s 8:00 at night and my seven-year-old son wanders into the room.

“Hi Mommy, what are you doing?” he asks. He’s wearing pajama shorts and no shirt, but he does have a fuzzy blue blanket wrapped around his narrow shoulders. I think it was last summer when he began to eschew sleep shirts, opting only for sleep bottoms like my husband. I usually sneak into his bedroom to check on him before I go to sleep and cover him up again with the blankets he’s tossed off.

“Oh,” Caden continued, not waiting for my reply, “You’re ordering something. It’s a book! Can I get a book? Let’s see: first name, last name, address, email, payment information…”

Because he can read now, of course. There’s no more hiding things in words from him or his twin sister, no more assuming that a combination of letters is coded in and of itself. I can no longer spell out I-C-E C-R-E-A-M over their heads to my husband. (Really, they’d pick that one up right away.)

The blanket around his bare shoulders. The 8:00 pm still-awake wandering. The reading.

We’re entering the middle years.

The middle years are interesting, at least where we are, on the cusp of them with two seven-year-olds and a five-year-old. They’ve gained a piece of independence. They can be trusted to knock on friends’ doors in the neighborhood without supervision. The older two can be left home alone for short periods of time while I’m still somewhat nearby, like down the street at the park with their younger brother. They can make toast and pour their own bowls of cereal and grab their own snacks from the pantry.

Read more about entering these middle-aged years over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

What Self-Care Isn't

Self-care.

Could there be a buzzier, more millennial mom catch-phrase than that? Honestly, I roll my eyes a little at myself just typing it.

Not at what it entails: I am here for all the self-care. It’s important to know what fills us up, whether a book, a movie, or the now synonymous with self-care pampering that is a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I applaud the fact that women are stepping up to say they are no longer interested in being martyrs, but in the care of ourselves as entire people with emotions and thoughts and physical and mental well-being to think about. I don’t want to go back to the time before self-care was part of our collective consciousness.

No, I’m rolling my eyes at how ubiquitous the phrase has become. It’s been co-opted by capitalism as virtually every other post in my Instagram feed tries to sell me everything from skin serums to beach towels to smoothies all under the umbrella of “self-care.” (Okay, but I did buy the skin serum, though.)

But what makes me roll my eyes most of all is when I see things labeled as self-care that just…aren’t.

A few years ago, an influencer I followed posted a photo of herself at a doctor’s appointment. In the caption, she discussed how she’d finally made a doctor’s appointment to get something checked out that she should have been seen for a long time ago. How she got a babysitter and that was self-care. How she was so proud of taking this step in self-care. And ended with a rejoinder to her fellow moms to make their own doctor’s appointments that day for the sake of their own self-care. (Really, the post was littered with “self-care.”)

It was then that my brain exploded.

Because hear me out: taking yourself to the doctor for something that should be medically checked out by a professional is not self-care. It’s just what you should do.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective

Scream Day

Does anyone else feel like they could walk out to their backyard…

…or lock themselves in the bathroom…

…or drive around alone in the car…

…or shove their face into a pillow…

…and let out one long, loud, visceral scream?

If so, you’re not alone. I’ll join you. And it’s not just me: the idea of screaming out the entirety of our frustration, bewilderment, pain, and anger from the past year has become so popular there’s been a push in the United Kingdom to set aside an official holiday: Scream Day.

According to the official Scream Day website, “Scream Day was created to bring awareness to the benefits of screaming.” I went down my own Internet rabbit hole to research those benefits, which are primarily related to the way screaming helps our bodies release intense emotions. Similar to our body’s need to complete the stress cycle—through exercise, deep breathing, crying, and more—screaming can help complete the emotional response to events in our lives. 

Psychotherapist Zoë Aston sums it up on the Scream Day site by saying, “Screaming creates a chemical reaction that is similar to the one you get when you exercise—you get a dopamine hit and some endorphins going.”

While I don’t remember everything I learned once upon a time about brain chemistry, I do know dopamine and endorphins are exactly the kind of chemicals I want flowing through my body. And those are probably the exact chemicals we’ve been missing out on far too much over the past year.

The New York Times also caught on to this idea earlier this year, creating their own Primal Scream line, especially for moms. Women were invited to call in to record their own primal screams, to rage, vent, and let it all out. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as a good vent in a safe space to clear the emotional room in my brain.

Read more about Scream Day over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

The Course of a Week

“Do less. We can focus on 50-70% of the stuff we did before the crisis hit.”

This statement was included in an email I received last March about self-care. I saved these words and came across them again recently. My immediate thought was, Oh, please let that be true eleven whole months later.

Even though we’ve been at home (always at home, forever at home), it’s not exactly like we’re staycationing over here. My capacity feels eternally diminished. There are entire days I could scream over the mundane, when I don’t want to make another meal, deal with another fluctuating emotion, step over another LEGO on the floor, or sit for another virtual meeting.

While 50-70% felt impossible during the early days of the pandemic, when the news cycle never stopped with updates on COVID-19 and restrictions and school announcements and all the things, it still doesn’t always feel like we’ve moved past it all. Let’s be honest: sometimes 50-70% still feels like altogether too much. 

On the heels of my first thought came this one: If 50-70% still feels impossible, why do I also feel as though I never stop moving?

+++++

My kids recently went back to school in-person. I’m not used to it yet. We spent 40-plus weeks together and the reality that they’re back to their regularly scheduled programming has yet to sink in. I’m still distracted, unaccustomed to these uninterrupted blocks of time to complete my work.

Until recently, multitasking was less a lifestyle choice, but a necessity. I’d turned it into an art. Not like Renaissance art, with precise lines and a defined one-point perspective, but sloppy, splatter-y, fling-paint-at-the-canvas kind of art. Y’know how Jackson Pollock paintings often have cigarette butts embedded in them? That’s what my multi-tasking felt like: a canvas that’s been flung with paint and embedded with ashes.

Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Not For Me

A few years ago, after a scroll through Instagram, I decided I was going to become a gardener. Or at least I was going to plant some things and weed them and water them and that would (probably) make me a gardener.

Never mind that I don’t care much about plants. Never mind that my thumb is definitely brown. Never mind that I don’t even have a houseplant to my name. (If a 30-something woman in the suburbs doesn’t own a houseplant, does she even exist?) Never mind the few times we’d subscribed to CSA boxes and I low-key hated it because I am a Meal Planner to the nth degree and getting a random box of food every week threw me in all the ways. (Especially when the box was filled with zucchini which is The Worst Vegetable Ever.)

Never mind all of that.

It’s going to be fun for the kids! I thought. They’ll learn things! It’s science!

My aunt had given me some old planters which were sitting in our garage, collecting dust and spider webs. I hauled them out, hosed them down, and dragged the kids to the nursery a couple of miles down the road. Two three-year-olds and a one-year-old and me, who had not much more of an idea of what I was doing than they did. We wandered up and down the aisles as I loaded our cart with carrots and onions, broccoli and basil. I remembered potting soil after I was in the checkout line, then stood in front of the bags wondering both how much I needed and if I could lift them. Then back to the checkout line where the one-year-old started to fuss over being trapped in a cart and how boring this all was.

An hour and well over $100 later, I loaded up the minivan with children and seedlings and hauled them home.

Read more about my gardening mishaps over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.