The Project - Day 15

This was not a stellar day for motherhood. My failures were compounded by the thought that my son is now old enough to start remembering his horrible childhood and the thought makes me want to crawl under the covers for a week. I realized how much up until now I’d been relying on the amnesia of babyhood. I told myself, as long as he feels loved and cared for, the little mistakes, they’ll all vanish in the wind. While its true I think that a bedrock of love and care goes a long way, we are now entering the age of the grudge. The kid has a memory and he’s not afraid to use it against me.

His increasing verbal skills aren’t helping any either. Whereas before he might have given me a clingy hug before I left home to work, now I get a full monologue. “Mommy, I don’t want you to go. If you go and leave me here I will be so sad. May I please go to work with you? I am big enough to go to work Mommy! Please stay and give me a snuggle for five more minutes.”  I mean, really, how do you resist that? Ridiculous.

So, I’m exhausted from hours of singing and extra rehearsal tonight, a long day with a nap-striker and mentally shot from filling out job applications and sending out my resume yet again. All I wanted was my little pick me up kiss when I got home and the dude was sacked out snoring his head off, just like his father. I had to settle for lugging him into his own bed and giving him a kiss on the head. I even tried to wake him up accidentally on purpose but no go. All that fussing for mom during the day apparently wore him out for dad’s turn. Great.

Beyond my son’s blooming ability to mentally stockpile my actual deficiencies, he’s now started to add his own creations with the aid of his not inconsiderable imagination. While “mommy, you got mad and you YELLED at me!” makes me die a little inside, I wasn’t sure quite what to do when he assured both his teachers at school and his father that the paper cut on his hand was where “mommy cut me with a knife and a fork.” Um, WHAT? Yes, I regularly slice into my child’s hand, why do you ask? My only thought is that perhaps we had a discussion about safely using utensils (the boy tends to treat them like construction toys) and somehow this became attached to a particularly visible boo-boo? No clue really. I just tried not to giggle and said “I don’t think so, usually I just eat my food with a knife and fork, not your hand.” At this he looked at me very seriously and shook his head as if despairing of my mendacity. “You DID mama, you cut me with a knife.” I’m just praying that CPS doesn’t show up at my door. If nothing else, they could indict me for massive amounts of undone laundry.

I’m looking for the humor in all this but the truth is, it does concern me. My son is getting older and I want to have energy for him, to be organized, for him to be proud of his mama. My memory-free grace period is running out and the clock on his future memoirs has already started to tick. I have made some appointments with various health professionals this month and next in an effort to approach the physical deficiencies at hand. I’m hoping that part of this writing project will develop into some kind of focus and discipline for the mental and spiritual side of the equation. We’ll see.