A Mother’s Day Lesson
When my son was one, he used to drag his “Type and Speak” toy over to the couch and sit next to me. Chubby fingers ran over the red buttons as the letters appeared yellow on a black screen. He was pretending to type like mommy. Every time he did it, joy swelled in my heart. He was too young to know that his mommy was trying to do something hard. But still, he saw me.
We still spent time together playing air show or watching cartoons each morning. But just before lunch, I would grab my laptop, and he would pick up his typing toy. Side by side, we sat in the living room “writing” for an hour. His tiny face full of love and support, smiling back at me, got me through my debut novel one couch-session at a time. It was pure magic.
I have always paid attention to the types of shows my kids watch. When they were small, we banned Pepper Pig because George was always yelling “No!” at his parents and the rest of family constantly made fun of Daddy Pig. It wasn’t the environment I wanted my kids to mimic, so it had to go. Fast-forward eight years.
It was Mother’s Day this year when I realized something must be wrong. My son’s gift to me was a list of all the things I am to him, and all of the things he loves about me. Somehow, he was able to make almost every line include something about me working too much. Bad words lodged themselves in my throat. I didn’t say them. I couldn’t say anything at first. The growing burn in my throat from the lodged-in-place words soon spread to my chest. Well, this sucks, I thought.
I work from home as a writer and freelance editor and my entire schedule revolves around sports practices and school hours. During the Quarantine I would get up at 4:45 am just to have time to work before helping my son get through his insane third-grade workload. Even under normal circumstances, I stop working by 4:30 pm every day, and then I make dinner and talk to my kids about their days. When they have appointments or they’re sick, I make gaps in my schedule or take the day off. I don’t work on weekends. When the kids were little, I worked part time if at all.
The list just didn’t make sense. This was how my son was portraying me? And on Mother’s Day of all days. I took five deep breaths, then I thought for a moment. I remembered something my son had said to me a few months before.
It was the shows. I should have been more careful. YouTube shows like Ryan’s World teach kids that all parents should do all day is sit around and entertain their children. My son had mentioned it several times. I decided to sit down and catch up on a few of the kids’ new favorites, and sure enough, the same theme was prevalent: Parents should drop whatever they’re doing to entertain their kids, even if that means their personal well-being and jobs are neglected. Popular media is encouraging my kids to grow up narcissists, and now I need to ban shows yet again.
How could I know that those same pudgy fingers that imitated my typing would one day use the remote to choose media that told him I was doing it all wrong because everything I did wasn’t solely about him? It felt like a betrayal. The magic was gone because I hadn’t guarded it closely enough.
There is a point in every parent’s life when they realize that being a parent isn’t a job. There’s no check list of protocols or mandates that go beyond the basics of food and shelter. Being a parent is all about relationships.
I’ve learned that part of being a mom is to teach my kids that the world doesn’t bend to their individual wills and desires. And part of being a human is that I need to set boundaries. Parents who work deal with a lot of guilt, constantly. It’s hard to say, “No, it’s fine for me to have this thing I have that’s just for me, that fills me with joy and makes me feel like an individual again.” But it’s necessary.
Not just for me, but for my son, because someday he might be a father, and he needs to understand that both he and his spouse are people who still need individual aspirations and boundaries, too: Pepper Pig and Ryan’s World be damned.
