THANKFUL FRIDAY

I just received an ad for Mothers Day gifts for dog moms and it kind of makes my brain feel itchy. I am one hundred percent a dog mom. I love Josephine so much that Michael often tells her that she’s a terrible tragedy. He says she can’t understand a word that we say and I know for a fact that she understands everything. Because Josephine and I know that he understands nothing. She’s the best most smooshy face cuddle puppy in the whole dang world and we just got in trouble with the veterinarian because I have been giving Josephine all the treats that she asks for. We’ve been put on a treat diet. The point is, I agree that I treat Josephine better than I would an actual child of mine, but giving me a Mothers Day gift feels like a bit too much.

I recognize that someone doesn’t have to actually drop a baby out of their body in order to be a mother. Motherhood comes in a beautiful kaleidoscope array of colors. Raising a human being, a good human being, is really difficult. Raising a human to be empathetic towards others, community minded, kind, generous and thoughtful is the defining reason for my choice to not have children. I just never believed that it was something I had a skill set to do. There was also a whole thing about money. Kids are expensive. Chris and I were always struggling financially. I don’t think we ever had a savings account or if we did, it held only the bare minimum to be active. Chris and I were not responsible people and sure, I know that there are plenty of irresponsible people out there raising children. I just didn’t want to be one of those people.

To be clear, I still don’t want to be one of those people.

I came across a photo of my sister-in-law and nephew in a box labeled ‘Cindy’. My mother had sorted photos into various boxes. for us. There was one for my sister, but I didn’t see one for my brother. As I sorted through my box, I came across a number of pictures that clearly should go to either of my siblings. Like my sister’s wedding photos and my nephews Eagle Scout Ceremony. This one particular photo though, made me tear up when I looked at it. It was an old Polaroid photo of my sister-in-law and nephew curled up asleep on my parents couch. They were both still dressed in their Easter clothes. My Strawberry Shortcake blanket had been draped over them. That photo said everything that there is to say about being a mother. Love, comfort, safety. All of that and more. The thing you can’t see in this photo is just how hard it is to love someone so much and then just have to let them go out into the world, living their own lives. Motherhood is hard. And it’s made harder when something unimaginable happens to the person you birthed. I’ve seen those mothers who have had to navigate the unimaginable while remaining steadfast and true and there are so many of them who do it so well. They had to have been designed for it.

Motherhood is hard and we live in a country that doesn’t support it. The current administration has slashed funding for schools and school safety, along with free meals. They’ve put a stop to funding for investigating child sexual abuse and other crimes against children. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs are now working with a greatly reduced budget. We are the only high-income country in the world that does not mandate paid maternity leave. The administration has cut funding for research regarding women’s health, particularly reproductive health. Meanwhile, this president thinks that a $5,000 incentive will encourage women to have more babies while the average cost of infant care is around $14,000 a year.

As Kristin Lawless points out, recent estimates find that mothers are working 97 hours per week in the home. If they were paid accordingly, it would amount to $115,000 per year — which includes 13.2 hours as a day care teacher, 3.9 hours as household CEO, 7.6 hours as a psychologist, 14.1 hours as a chef, 15.4 hours as a housekeeper, 6.6 hours doing laundry, 9.5 hours as a PC or Mac operator, 10.7 hours as facilities manager, 7.8 hours as a janitor, and 7.8 hours driving the family car. - Robert Reich (substack article on mothers day)

Being a mother is a full time job on top of the full time jobs most women have. Mothers are over worked and underpaid. To truly support mothers in this country is to support legislation that cares for mothers. Instead, our answer for all of this is to have a day devoted to moms where we let mom hang out in bed eating the burnt pancakes we lovingly make them. While, it may have been a well meaning holiday, Mothers Day has gone the way of many of our well intentioned holidays. We’ve commercialized the fuck out of it so now we send out ads to include as many people who will be willing to pull out their credit cards. The reminders that we need to ‘give Mom the very best’ and to ‘show her that you love her’ would be nice if they were not attached to diamonds and bouquets and other trinkets that your mom doesn’t need or want. Those reminders are also daggers for those whose mother is no longer with us.

I know this doesn’t sound like a very thankful post. It sort of went off the rails, but it needed to go off the rails. Pointing out these little bits of information on the difficulty in motherhood, makes me very grateful for a number of reasons. Mothers do whatever they need to do to ensure the survival and success of their child. My own mother raised me amongst a village of women who could fill in the nurturing gaps when she couldn’t be there to do it. So, I am particularly grateful for the whole kaleidoscopic forms of motherhood. I am grateful for a mother who can do the hard things and navigate the unimaginable times. I am grateful for the mothers in my life who have helped to shape me into the woman I am today. My way of celebrating these women is to recognize them every day, support a government that supports them, and maybe send out some words of encouragement.

Happy Mothers Day.

A CHANGE IN THE TIMELINE

The timeline for moving my mother to assisted living has been moved up. My sister is desperate to put my mom someplace where she’ll be too distracted with elderly activities to do dangerous activities. I guess there was an incident a week or so ago where my sister caught our mother standing on the kitchen cabinets, vacuuming the top cabinets. This gives me a real glimpse at my own future and the old lady that I will be because my first instinct was to shrug and say “good for her!” I had to pause and think about why this might actually be a bad or dangerous activity for my eighty three year old mother who has been prone to falls. My mom is bored. She needs stuff to do, preferably stuff that doesn’t involve electric hedge trimmers or climbing the walls.

I have to admit that I straight up panicked when my sister sent me the text that she was trying to get Mom moved by the end of October. Between work and Michael’s school schedule, October is FULL and I don’t know how I’m going to get down there to help out. My sister is all ‘you don’t need to help unless you want to help’ and I of course don’t want to help but I don’t want her to have to do this alone. I am also struggling to find an estate liquidation company that a. works in the area b. will handle smaller houses and c. call me the fuck back! I do not want to be cleaning out the same stuff I’ve already cleaned out once in the middle of winter. Or any time really. To make matters worse, any time anyone asks me how I feel about moving my mom into assisted living, I start crying. I can’t talk about it. Thursday, after my sister’s text, I got on my yoga mat and started sobbing in child’s pose. No one had asked me anything. I was just doing my practice while sobbing uncontrollably.

Nothing to see here.

I think the reason I can’t talk about my feelings on this subject is because they’re so complicated. I truly believe that the assisted living home is going to be wonderful for my mother. She will have people her own age to talk with (or at), tons of activities available to her and outside gardens to wander. She will have a community, something she hasn’t had since leaving Collinsville. On the other hand, I am worried that my mother will isolate herself and find excuses and or complaints for not joining in with her new community. I can only imagine that the feelings are similar when sending a child to their first day of school. Will they make friends? Will they be liked by others? Will they be sad the whole time? These are all the things I worry about with my mother.

Then there’s anger.

Honestly, I’ve been angry with my mother since 2013 for a number of reasons, one of them being not listening to some sound wisdom from her children to not rush to sell the old house. But she refused, was adamant that this had to happen RIGHT NOW! At the end of the day, she did what she wanted without considering the consequences or her own future. She purposefully isolated herself and she didn’t take care of her body. It’s like she gave up on life without having the gumption or follow through to truly give up on her life. Instead she takes out her frustrations of still being around on her children. We are the ones that have to sit and listen to all the ways she is unhappy, disappointed and unsatisfied. We are well aware that her unhappiness, disappointments and unsatisfaction began well before any of us were born, that we are just part of the long line of it since her birth. Knowing this does not make listening to it all any easier.

I let go of the idea and feelings that I am part of my mother’s long list of disappointments some time ago, mostly because I have no control over it. I’m not angry at being one of her many sources of unhappiness. I am angry that she never took responsibility for her own happiness. I am angry at her choice to take her life lemons and turn them into just straight up lemon juice, refusing to add sugar for a nice refreshing drink. Instead she has just marinated herself in that bitter lemon juice and I am angry at her refusal to take responsibility for her own actions and choices. And this lemon juiced soaked woman is who we are moving to assisted living. My sister confessed that she’s been having nightmares about our mother getting kicked out of the facility and I couldn’t assuage her concerns.

That’s a valid nightmare.

I suppose my tears come from worry that my mother will not be able to take advantage of her new home and will not find joy in the company of new friends. I worry that she will park herself in a chair in her room and never venture out of her room, not even trying. This thought along with no longer having a home to go back to in Oklahoma are the things that send me over the edge. My touch stone is broken and unrepairable and my mother is sitting in a room choosing misery. And the estate liquidation company will not call me back which means that we will have to deal with the contents of our mother’s house on our own.

For most of my life I have felt unprepared or trained for the task of adulting. I didn’t know how to go about buying a house or even saving money properly. There are adult things I purposefully avoided because I knew I was ill-equipped, like motherhood. I just straight up avoided the things I knew for sure no one had even bothered to mention to me, let alone teach me how to deal with. All right, there were some tasks I had to deal with because they were unavoidable. Bodies don’t cremate themselves. While I was making it up as I go, I did manage to do those very hard adult tasks. I didn’t say I was not capable. I am untrained to deal with the aging parent side of adulting.

But I’m dealing.

PANCAKE

Plate setting

7 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Plate setting"

Three times a week, in order to get more protein in my diet, I've been eating cottage cheese for breakfast with some walnuts, chia seeds and a little honey drizzled on top. It is yummy, but it is cold and started to sound really unappealing as the weather turned cold. I came across a giant box of Kodiak Power Pancake mix at Costco last month. After reading all the ingredients and nutritional facts, I found that if I used milk and egg to make my mix, I'd be getting twenty something grams of protein at breakfast and most of the carbohydrates would come from fiber. Michael did some math and said that it was way cheaper for me to eat pancakes three times a week (we're working really hard at sticking to a budget). So now, I eat two Kodiak Power cakes sprinkled with chia seeds and walnuts and topped with a banana three times a week for breakfast. 

Some of you are probably wondering how I could possibly have time in the morning to make myself pancakes. I have some super time management skills between 6:00 and 7:00AM. One hour. I've got one hour a day of super time management skills in me. The rest of my day is only mildly time managed, just enough to be productive at work. When I'm done drying my hair, I go place a pan on the stove and turn on the burner. Then I go get dressed. By the time I'm dressed with shoes on and jewelry and everything, the skillet is hot. I make up the pancake batter on Sunday. All I have to do is pour, sprinkle with chia and walnuts and flip. Pancakes are easy. That's probably why my mother made them for breakfast for us all the time. One morning as I was pouring the batter into the skillet, my two pancakes merged into a globby snowman shape. I thought of fancy pancake shapes I'd seen videos of people making on the internet. Some of them are crazy elaborate with food coloring. I do not have time in the mornings to make pancake art.

I don't know how old I was. I was small. My parents had to leave us with our friends, the Elders for some reason. It might have been the time my parents went to Tijuana or maybe it was the time Dad went to the hospital for kidney stones. Any way, Karen and David kept me for the night. When I got up the next morning, Karen made me pancakes shaped like teddy bears. It was all I talked about when Mom came to get me. I talked about it for days. “Karen makes pancakes shaped like teddy bears! Mom, did you know she could do that?! Can you believe she makes pancakes shaped like teddy bears, Mom?! That’s so neat!” A morning very soon after teddy bear pancakes, Mom called me down for breakfast. Then she placed a pancake on my plate that was shaped like an elephant. It was the most perfect pancake elephant ever. I mean, like you could see darker shaded areas around the ears and wrinkles in the nose. It was so perfect, I almost couldn’t bring myself to eat it. 

At the time, I didn’t think much about it. Mom just felt like surprising me. Now, I can imagine Mom hearing me go on and on about teddy bear pancakes and thinking that there was no way she was going to be out mothered in the pancake arena. It’s like my Mom said “I see your teddy bear pancakes, Karen, but can you make her favorite animal? BOOM!” It makes me wonder how Mom would have handled Pinterest if it had been around then. Mom was/is pretty crafty. You could draw a picture of the costume you wanted for Halloween and she could turn it into a pattern and sew it up in no time. I wanted to be Lucy Little one year and the butter lid for a giant button was all Mom’s idea. Her rubber glove finger witch noses were stellar. My Mom came up with about half of those crafty party ideas you see on Pinterest, back in the day when Mom judging was limited to just the women in your community and not the whole internet world. I can’t imagine the stress I could have added to my Mom’s daily life if I’d had access to Pinterest as a child.

It would have been a childhood of pizzas shaped like hot air balloons and cupcake elephants.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Grey

5 Likes, 2 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Grey"

I heard my mother telling the story of my birth to some poor soul at our party on Saturday. It is a story I have heard a number of times and I have heard multiple variations on the story. In this particular telling, Mom said that I would only sleep for five minutes at a time and I broke out into a rash every time the sun hit my delicate preemie baby skin. I think my parents liked telling people the story of my birth because of the three of us, mine was the most dramatic. There's alway lots of oohs and ahhhs when they disclose how much I weighed at birth. I can still see Dad holding out his hand, palm facing up, as he would tell about how my tiny body fit right there and point to his hand. Mom always mentions the beautiful bouquet of flowers that she received from a close friend who also happened to be our milkman. This time though, my mom said something I had never heard her say before. She said "They told us she probably wouldn't live."

In all the tellings of that story, it never once dawned on me that I was in any kind of danger other than just being born tiny. I did not suffer with lung issues or heart problems. I do have allergies, but not more so than any normal birth person would have. I am healthy and despite some broken bones and a tonsillectomy, I have always been healthy. So I never really thought much about my birth as more than a regular birth but just a little early. Like a month and half early. A study of 148 premature infants from 1966-75 that weighed 1000g or less found that 48 of those babies survived. That's less than a 50% survival rate. More like 32%. Not bad, but I can't imagine that hearing your doctor tell you that your baby has a 32% chance of living is all that reassuring. I've heard people say that your birth story plays a big role in defining the person you become. Je suis forte. I guess I just never really saw myself as that strong. Survivor strong. 

Did the Fates see my future and say to themselves "This girl better be strong or die now."? Probably not, but it makes a nice cartoon in my head. I can see Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos each holding my life thread, tugging it between them to see how far they can stretch it before it feels like it might snap. Maybe Clotho and Lachesis kept Atropos from snipping it with her scissors or they found the thread to be too strong to be snipped. It makes a nice visual and I am thankful that I ended up as one of the 32%. I am thankful to have a mother who is strong enough to survive a child like me. I am also thankful for the other women in my life who were part of the tribe who raised me. All of them played a hand in shaping the woman I am today.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend and a truly Thankful Friday.