It’s So Girly

Recently, a quote from Chloe came up on my Timehop. It was probably almost 10 years old; she had said, on a particularly beautiful spring morning, “Mom, it’s so girly out today.”

That’s stuck with me over the past few weeks. There is nothing inherently wrong with being feminine.  Honestly, it’s our birthright, and we should own it. 

I grew up one of two daughters in a family full of boys. My dad will be the first to tell you— so this isn’t me calling him out— that my sister and I kind of fell by the wayside while he busied himself being the father of sons. The only reason I can say that without bitterness, or baggage, or what have you, is because my dad has worked his butt off to become a daughter dad in my adulthood, and it shows. In his life, and in mine. 

Growing up, I wished I was in the cool guy group. The cool guy group got my dad’s investment. I didn’t embrace my girly-ness because I didn’t know that my inherent femininity has so much value. Kingdoms have risen and fallen because of women. I didn’t know that back then. 

There’s good news— aside from my learning to love who I am— slowly but surely, the girls in my family are overtaking the dudes. Besides my two girls, I have SIX nieces (one on the way, due in October-- I just found out that my brother's new baby is a girl, and her name is Charlotte, Charlie for short!)... as opposed to the only two second generation boys. TAKE THAT. On my husband’s side of the family, there are nine grandkids. Only three of them are girls. 

Bear with me, I’m circling back around. Gals, there’s a reason we have songs declaring we run the world. Obviously we don’t literally run the world, but we have so much power and influence. 

And even more than that, becoming the mother of daughters, and the aunt of six nieces, I’m consistently reminded of one of my favorite passages in the Bible, Titus 2, instructing the older women to mother and mentor the younger women. I’m paraphrasing here, but it says older women are to teach “what is good” to younger women. It doesn’t give an age qualification. If you are older than any woman, young woman, girl, child— guess what? You can mother them. You can mentor a fellow woman. Nothing has brought that home to me more than living a life surrounded by girls from the age of 15 to the age of 6 days old, to roughly 6 months in utero: I can mother and mentor and strengthen and empower and cheer on and trail blaze and love and love and love.

It probably seems disgustingly narcissistic to quote myself, but several years ago I was able to go on a U.S. ministry trip, and towards the end, my group met with a few older women. I’ll never forget how struck I was, how small I felt, being surrounded by those women who had lived and loved longer than and farther than I had even looked ahead. The words I wrote regarding that meeting have been circling in my head for weeks. So right now, I’m reposting those passages for myself, for you, but most of all for my girls (all seven of them, daughters and nieces combined). 

“There are days when I think I won't make it. But then I see women like you... Your adventures, your faith, your survival, your hospitality, your tender care of your husbands, the way you've raised your children in Christ, your hunger and determination to seek out the word of God, your miracles.... You've made it. You've made it. You're making it. You're running your race, and you're winning. You're winning it. And for women like me, who are miles behind you in the race, you're an inspiration. If you're winning, I can win. I can do it. So thank you. Thank you." I looked at each woman, thanking her in turn, my throat swelling tight with awe and love. This, then, is the great cloud of witnesses referred to in Hebrews. How can I not run the race set before me? How can I grow weary in doing good? With these mighty women of faith cheering me on, women who have wrestled against the odds and won, women who have blazed new trails and didn't burn in the blazing of them ...... I'll run ahead for the joy set before me. The joy set before all of us. I'll run for the women who have run the path in front of me, clearing the thorns away and smoothing the ruts. I'll run for the women and girls behind me, whose cloud of witnesses I'll be a part of. Oh, I'll cheer them on, I'll cup my hands and scream their names, "You can do it! You're making it, darling! You can win, you can win, you can win!" 

Oh, we can win. Don't give up. Don't stop running. We can win.”

Chloe. Atleigh. Cassie. Hannah. Darcie. Isla. Banks. Charlotte. I promise you with my entire soul, with every corner of my mama’s heart, to be a part of your cloud of witnesses, cheering you on at every single turn. And if you turn in the wrong direction, I’ll love and love you and love you, gently grasp you by the shoulders to help you find your way again, and to help you lead the way with the rest of the women who have blazed the trail before you. Be brave, darlings. You are so strong. You are so worthy. You are filled to the brim with fire and with ferocity. You will thrive. You will grow in grace and godliness. And if you find a younger gal to love and lead and blaze a path for, don’t hesitate. You got this, babes. You are surrounded by so many women with so many stories and so much wisdom. You are a freaking trailblazer. Lead the way. We'll follow, and our love and overwhelming pride will be ever at your backs and surrounding you on all sides. 

YOU CAN WIN.

#momfail

One day, when Atleigh was a toddler, I noticed minuscule slices across several of her fingers, a little larger than paper cuts. I realized a few minutes later that she had waddled into the bathroom and grabbed my razor off of the tub. I started making sure I kept my razor on the side of the tub closest to the wall after that. 

Chloe was invited to a birthday party when she was about 7 or 8. She told me beforehand that her head itched— we were dog-sitting at the time and one of the dogs liked to sleep up on her pillow— I told her she was fine, brought her to her friend’s house, and discovered, upon helping her out of the car, that her head was covered in fleas. 

Ashton has an inch long scar hiding under his mop of hair, from the time he jumped off of his grandma’s couch and straight into the wooden molding around her fireplace and ended up with three stitches... While I was in the kitchen, probably doing something pointless like eating mashed potatoes or flipping through a Christmas catalog. Possibly both.

We use the hashtag #momfail as a joke, with the little things we’re comfortable sharing. The things we know people will identify and sympathize with (although the flea debacle is a stretch for me. I still cringe about that one).

Here’s something I’m discovering every new day with my kids as they morph into teens: #momfail is no joke. It isn’t forgetting to pack your kids’ lunch; it isn’t telling them they’re fine and to walk it off, only to discover later that they’ve broken a bone, it isn’t missing a teacher’s note about late homework, or leaving them in the kitchen only to find out they've eaten a quarter of a block of cheese. #momfail is a lot more damaging— to your kids and to you. 

I fail on a daily basis. An hourly one, sometimes. I fail hard and I fail ugly, and my kids suffer the consequences. I’m the PMSing mom who told my PMSing daughter, straight to her face, “Not today, Satan!”, leaving both of us to infer whether I was calling HER Satan, or saying she was possessed by Satan, or just speaking to Satan as a generality (the jury is still out on that). 

I’m the mom who got into a shouting match with her son, a shouting match so brutal that it left him locked in his room with a pillow over his head, and me locked in the bathroom with a bottle of wine.

I’m the mom who struggles daily, and loses the struggle almost just as much, to parent a child with adjustment disorder and anxiety, lacking patience and empathy and understanding.

These aren’t things you’ll see anyone posting with the cute little hashtag, #momfail. These are things we'll hide, things we’ll cry about in bed at night after everyone else is asleep, the things that rip us apart and make us question who we are, what we’re doing, and how much the therapy bill is going to cost one day. 

Which, as usual, is why I’m writing about it. I’m saying “us” and “we”, when I really mean to say, loud and clear, “ME”. 

Mea culpa. 

My kids are everyday still learning how to be humans. They’re walking a field of landmines, trying to navigate heads suddenly full of grown up thoughts attached to young, changing bodies, friends and enemies and frenemies pressuring them, tripping them up and pushing them down and pulling them sideways; they’re being raised in a bubble culture that preaches unconditional acceptance— unless someone disagrees with you, in which case they’re backward and close-minded and hateful. They live in a world full of confusion and chaos.

And my kids are everyday living with a mom who fails, a mom who is walking through a field of landmines with these growing humans. Sometimes she’s too far ahead, expecting them to catch up too quickly. Sometimes she lags behind, holding them back because she doesn’t understand or can’t follow the steps they take; sometimes she’s right on top of them, smothering them. Very, very rarely is she walking beside them, understanding them, advising them, finding that balance between compassion and coaching. 

Sometimes she accidentally writes a whole paragraph in the third person. 

Every new day I need grace. Every. Single. Day. And if I need room to fail, if I want and need and pray for redemption every day, after 35 years of learning to be a human, how much more do my kids need it— my kids who just woke up one day feeling like aliens in their own bodies, thinking alien thoughts and hearing alien words from all the other aliens around them? 

In the end— and in the beginning, the middle, and every moment in between, our kids raise us as much as we raise them. More, even. Who we are as parents- which, for most of us, becomes the cornerstone of our entire identity, because once you’re a parent, you’re a parent until you die- is so intrinsically tied into who our kids themselves are. Their personalities shape our parenting. They mold us even more than we mold them. So doesn’t it stand to reason that when our kids turn into these alien beings, we become a little alien, too? Everything we learned as parents of young kids is turned on its head as soon as those hormones kick in. We’re not raising kids anymore: we’re mentoring young adults. Whole families, entire households, shudder with the growing pains of one single human; or in my case, three humans. All at once. At the same time. Together. Just in case you were wondering.

In truth, failure, even a watered down #momfail, isn’t really an option. It isn’t even a Thing. Fierce love and forgiveness- for our kids and for ourselves- is our only path, our ONLY Thing. Keep failing, keep learning, keep fighting, keep moving forward. Landmines and all.

The Teenage Years

When Ashton was an infant, he had reflux to a horrifying degree. I’m talking so much puke that there would be a reverse silhouette (I guess that would just be an outline?) of my body on the wall when he burped over my shoulder. I carried full sized bath towels and multiple changes of clothing for both of us at all times.

One night, when he was about 10 days old, I couldn’t get him to stop crying. All night, I nursed him, rocked him, bounced him, patted him, and still he cried. I ended up lying on the couch, shirtless, Ashton nestled in the crook of my arm, skin to skin, with him screaming relentlessly against my chest. I sobbed with him, finally half shouting, “What do you want from me?? I’m not even wearing a ****ing shirt!!!” 

In that moment, I thought to myself, “It can’t possibly get worse than this.”

When I brought a newborn Chloe home from the hospital, Ashton had managed to contract double pink eye in the two days I was gone. Try telling a 2 year old that he can’t come in contact with Mommy or the new baby, all while trying to nurse said baby, and recover from giving birth, and comfort the 2 year old who feels miserable— at my ground zero as a mother of two. 

I told myself, “It can’t get harder than it is now.”

When Atleigh was born in a home that we had outgrown before we’d even moved in, to a family that was taken completely by surprise by baby number three, I suddenly had more children than I had hands. Those early months are a haze, punctuated by sleepless nights, an ER worthy bout of strep, and trying (and often failing) to figure out those dang sling carriers with the double rings, because baby number three could not stand to be set down, could not handle not being in the middle of everything that was going on at all times, and nine years later still has the most chronic case of FOMO I’ve ever seen. She would only ever let me face her outward where she could see everything. 

I said to myself, “I couldn’t be any more exhausted than I am with three kids under four. It’s all downhill coasting from here.”

And for several years, it was. We found a rhythm, I learned to not take myself seriously, and we carried on. 

Until about three years ago. When Ashton hit the preteen years. A year later, Chloe joined him across that line in the sand, the line that divides them against me and leaves me wringing my hands, a hairsbreadth away from the babies I nursed and coddled and cuddled, knowing that I can’t cross that line no matter how much I want to. 

And all of my metaphorical shoulder rubs and head petting, telling myself it couldn’t get worse than the infant and toddler years, were a cruel cosmic joke that came back to mock me everyday. 

Nothing— nothing— could have prepared me for the teenage years. So many mothers told me it would get easier: the toddler years wouldn’t last forever. They were right. Those years don’t last forever. But most days I’d pay good money to go back to those sleepless nights and the potty training and the fermented juice cups under the couch and the trying to keep them from accidental grievous injury everyday of their little lives. 

Being a mom of infants and toddlers is exhausting. Don’t get me wrong. I honor all you moms who are in the trenches I’ve clawed my way out of. But it’s a physical exhaustion. We’re tired. All the time. ALL the time. We’d give our kingdom for a full night’s sleep; we’d settle for a nap. 

Being the mom of two teenagers and a tween is exhausting on a level I never could have comprehended in those years I was sleep deprived, begging for reprieve. I’m exhausted in a way that no mother who has been in my shoes could have prepared me for. It’s a mental exhaustion, as opposed to physical exhaustion, and I’d take waking up four times a night with an infant over this almost any day.

It’s bone deep. It’s soul deep. It bows your head and hunches your shoulders and it turns you inside out with worry and weariness. It exposes all those ugly, weak spots in you, and it leaves you raw and shivering and wondering how, how, HOW, could that obnoxious, cheeky, clever little angel I hugged mere years ago turn into this. Could somehow embody all the worst parts of me, bleed it out, and shove it right back in my face? How? When? Why?

Nothing has made me weaker, nothing has made me question who I am as a person, and Who God thinks He is, like raising a bunch of teens. 

I’m tired, y’all. I’m so tired. I’m tired of being pushed against at every turn, argued with and questioned and huffed at. No amount of discipline sticks, no amount of reasoning gets through their thick heads— seriously, do their skulls get thicker when they hit twelve?? I may as well be trying to communicate with a cinder block, and honestly I’d probably get through to that more easily than I can to my kids. 

A thousand nights of sleeping clean through, a car sans car seats, a recycling bin full of sippy cups and lids, a wasteland of a living room (and bedroom, and kitchen, and bathroom) strewn from wall to wall with Matchbox cars and Barbies and sandals and Carter’s pajamas, all the toddler tantrums in Christendom were not enough to prepare me for the mental and emotional wasteland that I’m in now. The constant battle of wills. The role reversal, going from toddlers tugging on my shirt to beg for my attention— craving it, needing it, prizing it— to me knocking on a bedroom door, craving, needing, prizing one scrap of insight into their days, into their world. Any tears of physical exhaustion that I wept a dozen years ago have long since been eclipsed by the tears of mental weariness that I keep hidden, that I cry in the bathroom where they can’t see, that roll down my temples some nights after they’re asleep and it’s just me, me, me and my memories of those obnoxious angels that used to be mine. 

But don’t despair, Mamas. 

One: We are surrounded by a great and mighty cloud of witnesses, of mamas, parents who have gone before, who have walked and staggered and crawled through the minefield, the wasteland of being a mother to humans straddling the dimensions between childhood and adulthood. 

Two: Speaking of no comparison— that first gassy smile from your newborn, that first babbled “mamamamama” pales— pales— in comparison to a genuine smile from your teen, a voluntary, albeit mumbled, “love you” from a creature who, lets face it, at this age doesn’t love a whole lot. In those moments when you feel like if you have to face one more day of these brass heavens they build against you, you might just vomit from the sheer stress of it, if something doesn’t give soon— those are the moments when they look at you, really look at you, and smile. And those smiles, sneaking out from the corners of their faces where the baby still lurks, hidden and angular.... somedays, the sun rises and sets on those smiles. 

Three: There is a camaraderie with my teens that I treasure above most things; that I store up in my heart for those days when the brass heavens bruise me and make me feel broken, and that keep me tiptoeing through the minefield, knowing, knowing, KNOWING, that this is just a season. This won’t last forever. And someday... someday my babies will be back, but better than ever, because they’ve made it through their own personal teenage minefields, and I’ve been waiting for them on the other side; holding my hands out to them the way I did when they took their first steps, cheering them on, calling out warnings and encouragement, believing they can do it and will be the stronger for it. 

Take heart, parents of teens. We’ll be stronger too. 

Hurricane Hormone

I finally got around to taking Ashton's 12th birthday photos earlier this week. What with him being sick on his actual birthday, then the hubbub of the holidays, I'm pretty proud that I got them done at all. I managed to get both of the girls' sessions done, but I haven't blogged either of them. You see? Motherhood is just a constant balance of choosing which child will get neglected today. (Kidding! I'm kidding.... Mostly.)

Ashton... Where do I begin? I've been kind of whining a lot lately about my battles with my preteen. Ashton has always been old for his age. To tell the truth, his "teenage angst" began several years ago. At least, that's what I thought. Nothing could have prepared me for the hurricane of hormones that now resides in my precious baby boy's bedroom. Most days, I feel like I'm just caught and pulled along in the powerful gale that is my pubescent boy. Most days, I'm just clutching my hair in bewilderment, trying to keep whatever shreds of sanity I have left after the toddler years inside my exhausted brain. Most days, I have emotional crying jags more than he does. Because, just like with every emotion he experiences since the moment he entered this world, I am right there with him, feeling them, hating them, loving them. One of the potential downsides of being an empathetic INFP personality, I suppose. So this crazy roller coaster he rides everyday has me strapped in right beside him. 

Is it hard? 

Yes. 

Is it exhausting and overwhelming?

Absolutely. 

Would I trade it back for those sleepless nights, diaper changes, and temper tantrums?

Eh.... Yes. Sometimes. A lot of times, okay??

But, this is where we are now. This is the season we're in, and I'm here to love him fierce, to hug him hard in the moments he'll let me, and to respect him with personal space in the moments he won't. I'm here to mirror the type of adult he can become, on the other side of this godawful maelstrom he's caught in right now. 

And, you know, it isn't all bad- I know I make it sound like it is. But we still have laughter, and smiles, and dance parties (although he'll swear up and down that he hates to dance. Even when I catch him at it every time I turn around). We still have our reading time, and movie time, and just plain talking time. In some ways, I'm enjoying him even more, enjoying this little sneak peek into the relationship we can have as he grows older. And every once in awhile, he'll look at me with those crinkled blue eyes, and I'll see my baby boy looking at me all over again. Those moments make all the others seem so small. Those moments more than repay me for all the others. Those moments are the ones I'll hang on to.

{{Here are a few shots from Ashton's 12th birthday photo session. It's mostly a lot of sarcastic smirking, exasperated glaring, and stone-faced staring. But on reviewing them while editing, I decided not to try and redo the whole shoot. After all, I'm a huge proponent of being honest, of showing your messy life. And pictures of a happy go lucky 12 year old Ashton, more likely than not, would not be a true representation of where he is right now. One day, I'll be able to show him these pictures and say, "Remember when you were 12, and thought that everything was awful all the time? No? Oh. Well I just so happen to have some photos right here..."}}