Mother’s Day was a nice combination of my husband spoiling me in the morning (our daughter is off the hook for several more years, although she did say “Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy”) and me meeting my obligation to my mother in the afternoon/early evening. Since cheese enchiladas figured prominently, everyone was a winner.
Mother’s Day is a great opportunity to be filled with the love of your children, or with seething resentment that shoots you down a rage spiral, depending on your relationship with them. My Child-Free by choice friends enjoyed their diaper and tantrum-free days, while my mommy friends waxed poetic on Facebook about the ways their kids made them feel special.
I don’t really like holidays, except for the part where we don’t work. Mother’s Day is no different. Sure, it’s nice. But Sundays are always nice. No work. On regular Sundays, you don’t have to wait so long to get a table for brunch. My mother is all about holidays. She LOVES them. She has very specific ideas about how they should be spent and celebrated. I share almost none of those ideas.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve thought a lot about family. I don’t write about my family much. My family of origin, that is. Recently, I started writing about them almost exclusively, but not on my blog. Not anywhere for public consumption. Someday, when my parents have shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to their reward, I’ll bust out those files. It’s not that I have a lot of horrible stuff to say about them. It’s just that I want them to be totally and utterly unable to defend themselves.
There isn’t much family harmony, and there never has been. I’m not sure there ever will be, and I’m fine with that. I’m married now, and I have made my own family.
I’ve written and deleted a paragraph many times now. When I try to write about family for a public forum, the words don’t flow like usual. In private, I can cover ten pages of my notebook and not even notice the time going by. It’s complex.
Can you be yourself with your family of origin? Your original scenario people? I can’t. Not completely. I don’t wear my patchouli lotion. I love patchouli lotion. I realize that I’m virtually alone in this love. Well, me and homeless hippies in Berkeley. You rarely see a dreadlock where you don’t say to yourself, “That dreadlock is going to smell like patchouli (and that hippie is going to ask me for spare change).”
I’m rambling the way I do when I only have a few stolen moments. Odie is giving V her bath, finally. The kid was so caked in dirt and sticky stuff, I was starting to worry that her day care teachers were going to say something. I’ve become too pregnant to bathe her. Leaning over the tub is a virtual impossibility. Odie doesn’t like to do it, and I don’t like to nag him. He comes home every day, struggles to deal with the stress of his job, cleans the kitchen, throws in a load of laundry, makes himself dinner, and then relaxes with his computer game. At bedtime, he helps read her books and makes sure that I always have a full glass of water and a handful of Tums. It’s not like he’s “slacking.” Bugging him to give V a bath (which she ALSO doesn’t want to do) isn’t high on my list. Besides, can’t you overclean children? Doesn’t it destroy all the healthy bacteria they’re supposed to be covered with or something?
Usually, the conversation goes like this:
Me: Any chance you’ll give V a bath tonight?
Odie: Hey, V, do you want to have a bath?
V: No. I don’t wanna bath.
Odie: She doesn’t want one.
Me: (silently to myself) Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Tonight, though, she ASKED for a bath. And not a moment too soon. Her face was actually brown. I thought day care had taken her tanning.
My thoughts are random, unfocused, and hurried. I’m still processing the Mother’s Day family feelings. I’m counting down the days of my school year (26!) and the days of my pregnancy (who knows?!). I’m worrying again about my 1:53 Down Syndrome screening result. It works out to about 2%. The perinatologist who does my ultrasounds says that for every 100 babies he sees with DS, 2 look normal, so he misses the diagnosis. Those are his personal statistics. Sometimes, when I’m really stressing, I wonder why I didn’t have the damn amnio? The risk seemed unnecessary at the time. We’ll know soon enough, one way or another. My dad said that whenever he gets excited about the new grandchild, he remembers “those two bullets that are floating around out there.”
I feel guilty worrying about it and hoping that Pringles doesn’t have it. It seems petty and disrespectful to the moms I know who feel blessed by their special needs children. But a friend of mine just spent Mother’s Day in the hospital with her month old infant with DS who had pneumonia, and I couldn’t help but hope that won’t be me.
As one reader/commenter so bitchily put it a while back, I probably wouldn’t handle it well.
When I was pregnant with V, I couldn’t wait until she was born, so I could stop worrying constantly. I still giggle at that naive thought. I don’t know about when life begins, but I do know that worry starts at conception.
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
Saturday morning musings
Potential is a bullshit word. No one knows what anyone’s “potential” is, nor if they are working up to it or falling short of it. I hear this at work all the time. “He isn’t working up to his potential.” How do you know?
I once had a student who I thought could be doing much better in my class. He was getting a solid C+. He sometimes got Bs on assignments, but he often didn’t turn things in. He knew exactly how much work to do so that he would always pass his classes with a comfortable margin, and he did no more. So, when I had the inevitable, “I think you could be a B student” conversation with him, he smirked that teachers have been telling him that his whole life.
“‘I’m not working up to my potential’ is all I’ve ever heard, since kindergarten.”
“Really? Since kindergarten?” I went on to tell him that with such overwhelming evidence (11 years of school), I had to concede that he was in fact a C student, and I was wrong about him.
I didn’t mean this to be cruel. He had always received the ego boost of “You could do better, but you choose to just do ‘good enough’.” I thought maybe for once hearing someone say, “Oh, maybe you are just average! That’s okay, most people are! Welcome to the middle” would be a welcome difference.
Last I heard, he went to a respectable middle-of-the-road college and continues to do completely mediocre work with average results. Twelve years of teachers telling him he had the “potential” to do better didn’t make a dent.
Conversely, I read a forum post recently where a woman proudly reported that her 7th grade daughter with Down Syndrome was getting a B average in mainstream classes. She had been told by the daughter’s previous school that the child had reached her academic potential and couldn’t do any better.
And she rightfully told them to suck it. No one knew what her child’s potential is. And no one can know this for any child. It is something that can never be predicted nor measured. I have seen hundreds of “brilliant” and “normal” children over the years accomplish completely underwhelming things. Like graduating from high school with a 2.0 average. I have seen students come here from other countries in 9th grade knowing little to no English enter Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, USC, UCLA, and other schools a mere 4-6 years later. And I’ve seen everything in between.
Potential is a word we use to excuse failure and mediocrity, or to limit people from trying to achieve something greater.
I have the “potential” to be a size 4, but outside of getting cancer, it will never happen. As usual in life, I fall back on the wisdom of “Star Wars” (the original trilogy and NEVER the sacrilegious “prequels”)
“Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
And p.s. to the commenter who knows who she is. I did NOT spell it wrong. Look it up.
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