A Working Mama's Whine

What came first? The (working) mom or the messy house?

I'm really trying to find balance in my homemaking role, and it's hard. I work full time, and my son works his little diaper-clad butt off each day in school (he uses up SO much energy just doing daily things, let alone his multiple therapy sessions). When we get home, it's time for dinner and then a few hours of together time. For me, this time is best spent with my child because I don't see him during the day.

But I'm tired. He's tired. We both just want to hang.

Sure, we go to the park or take a bike ride. We play outside. We work on colors or shapes. At least once a week we head over to the botanical gardens or a much cooler park. But the honest truth is that my son really just wants my complete attention while he winds down. This can be while watching his music show or while he is playing with kitchen utensils or walking backwards a la Michael Jackson. But the key is that he wants my attention.

I know my 2.5 year old should be more independent than he is. He's not crippled by needing me, but he certainly is attention-spoiled and would like to keep it that way. I like spending time with him, I like being wanted and needed.

But I don't like the fact that I can't easily even think about fold a load of laundry or do the dishes or mop the floor until after 8:30 pm.

Because I'll be honest, after working all day and being a bit on the lazy side, at that point I am not feeling it.

Being a working mama is hard. Not to say being a stay at home mom isn't just as hard, but being a mother in general seems to be a challenging position. However, from my working mom position, I try to spend all the limited time I have with my boy doing things that will be good for him and good for us. I'm trying very hard to make our time together more and more substantial now that he is getting older and more aware. Appa travels during the week, so it's not like I can tag team with anyone. It's all up to moi.

Once he goes to bed, I want MY time. I need my time to stay sane. To surf the web and connect with friends, to write and read, to do adoption paperwork, to veg. The last thing I want to do with my time is clean late at night, so I usually don't.

But shocker, no one else does it for me.

Having a messy house does weird things to my head. In the summer we can get out in the evening so I can pretend there isn't a large family of dust bunnies living in our corners and something sticky underneath my table. We all have clean underwear somewhere....right?

I'm actually hiring someone to do some light cleaning for us a couple times a month, but I need to get better about figuring out a way to convince Little Bug to play nicely long enough for me to do some housekeeping things during a time when I am actually motivated to do so.

I don't want to be supermom (well, I actually would love that), but I do want to get better about balancing all the aspects of motherhood and homemaker that I have taken on in our home. My poor husband works his butt off, and I feel horrible when he comes home after a long week to loads of dirty laundry and dishes...even though his son and wife are happy. I'd like to feel a bit more balanced.

How? No idea. That's why this was a whine......

Planting a Memory

Sometimes I just have days I want to preserve in my memory. Days that maybe are not super special, but just feel lovely and worth remembering.

Like last night, when I strapped my 2.5 year old (who is the size of a small kindergartner) onto my back with the Erg* and inadvertently stumbled into a concert at the botanical gardens. I don't want to forget the way he rested his head contently on my back as we waited in line for our food, or the way he ate his whole cup of applesauce with a spoon, or how he clapped during each pause in the music.

I don't want to forget how we made our first trip into the "train garden." How he spent nearly an hour chasing trains in every direction, nearly gobsmacked at the fantasy land we had entered. How he almost lost his voice from lovingly cooing "choo choo" repeatedly for an hour....barely taking a breath. How he proclaimed "bye, choo choo" and blew a kiss to each train we walked by on our way out.

I don't want to forget the way it felt to hike back to our car, the weather absolute perfection, and the way his soft little hands felt lovingly holding my arms as handles while he rode on my back.

I don't want to forget that just a few hours earlier, I was in a heavy gray dress and heels, preparing for an uneventful and boring night at home. How one little spur of the moment decision and a pair of shorts could change the direction of our evening so entirely and give me the gift of a wonderful night with my favorite boy.

Precious

Tonight as Little Bug was laying in bed, I gave him a sippy cup of water. It was a new sippy cup from a birthday gift bag...red with trucks and tire tracks and such. Typical boy clip art.

Little Bug must have spied the new red color because he popped up and immediately held the cup away from his mouth, inspecting it with a single-minded intensity that surprised me.

One second
Two seconds
Three seconds

I was preparing for my son to growl "my preciousssssss" when he looked up at me and simply said "choo choo." Then it was back to staring at the new cup with reverent admiration.

The little things in life are sometimes the most preciousssssssssss.

Lucky

Some days, like today, I am blown away by how lucky I am. I don't feel like I am any more deserving and can't seem to riddle out the source of my good fortune, but MAN, all the "bad" things in my life seem to pale in comparison to all the amazing things my family has going on.

A Bittersweet Dawn

My younger son's first birthday has dawned over him in Korea. Although it's not technically his birthday here, there, where HE is, it is very much his birthday. According to his report he is probably already up and accepting birthday well wishes from his adoring foster family.

I never expected to be with him on his birthday, so I don't feel a profound sense of heartbreak. I'm glad he is with a loving family. I'm glad he'll get a proper Tol as opposed to the bizarre one we threw for Little Bug. Am I sad to be missing this important milestone in his life...yes, but it's not because I feel like he is lacking in anything today.

Any sadness I feel is just for my own selfish wishes (and make no mistake, when the clock struck 12 am in Korea, I spontaneously cried, much to Appa's confusion). Even in my own selfishness, I know I am lucky. A friend is in Korea right now, and in a wonderful twist of fate/luck/generosity, she and her husband are going to meet Little Bro today...on his birthday. Tomorrow, when it is technically his birthday here, we'll have pictures of the birthday boy himself. It will be like we were there with him. Space and time is funny when it can bend like that.

But the soothing relief of the promise of new pictures reminded me of the one woman who is also crying today, and how she is not going to be comforted by new pictures or promises of birthdays to come.

It's hard to feel bad for myself when I think of Little Bro's birth mother. Even though I won't be with him, he'll be able to cuddle into my arms as I one day tell him about the Korean feast we had in his honor, about the birthday cake we ordered, the candle we blew out and the song we sang. We'll be able to prove to him how much we loved him. We'll show him pictures of his Tol and tell him the story of his Toljabee and his meeting with our friends. He'll see the proof of his foster family's love for him.

His birth mother won't get the chance to prove her observance of this day, and THAT absence breaks my heart. I feel like I don't have a right to be sad for my loss when I think of hers.

I know she loves him, and I know she is thinking about him today, praying for him, hoping for him, wondering about him. I am sure she and her family are doing something to commemorate his birthday. I am sure she is dying to know what he is doing today, wearing today, eating today, receiving today, etc. I can't fix that for her, and it makes my heart so sad.

When Little Bug turned 2 I wrote

Today we are celebrating our son's birthday. The day that he came into the world and changed both our lives forever. We might never meet, but on this day, more than any other day, we are so much more than a "birth mother" and an "adoptive mother."

I feel this again today on Little Bro's birthday, but in a more acute away. I feel my sadness and loss at missing this moment in his life, and I know that it must be a 100 times worse for her...and something she will endure year after year. It has clarified further for me that I will never be able to fully understand or do justice to the love and selflessness and bravery my sons' birth mothers exhibited when they made the choice they made. I wish that today I could somehow give her what joy I have.

All I can do is hold Little Bro tight and remind him in the midst of pictures of celebrations from a far and Tol tables and birthday cakes that there is another family who is not pictured, but not forgotten and still celebrating.

And my birthday promise to her, omma to mama: I will personally make sure the pictures my friend is sending today will eventually be in his file for her to one day have if she so chooses. I want nothing more than to share those special glimpses into the day we both missed with her.

Click

I take a lot of pictures. It's a FAIL month if my web album has less than 100 pictures of my child. Yet, for all the pictures I take, sometimes it's the ones I don't take that stick in my mind.

Like the picture I mentally snapped this morning when Little Bug woke up in our bed and was overjoyed to find Appa there (after a week away). Little Bug sat up and used his insistent little toddler hands to roll Appa over onto his back. He then mounted Appa and began to play horse...a very vigorous ride.

On a full bladder, that was not the wake up Appa was looking for.

As I took pity on my husband and tried to lure my child off him, Little Bug stilled his ride, stretched his baby body out over Appa's chest, and laid his head against his heart, a little smile playing on his lips as he listened to his daddy's heart beat.

Click.

Cuddle Down

I love my baby, yes I do. But he was a freaking monster tonight.

Granted, he is getting over being sick and had a really bad night last night and back-to-back therapy sessions today, so he had a right to be fed up, but by the time we dialed up Appa for our nightly video chat, I was about ready to lock myself in a padded room. When we signed off, I had a moment of panic and actually whined out loud "don't leave me alone with him......."

With an hour until bedtime looming in front of us (or rather, looming in front of me since Little Bug's head was spinning too much for him to notice anything looming), I knew that the night could end one of two ways: either we love on each other or we don't.

I picked door A, and we cuddled in to watch one episode of Classical Baby and his latest favorite music video (a Scholastic book animated version of Wheels on the Bus) on repeat no less than 7 times. By the time his eyes got droopy and he started to yawn, we were tangled up in each other in a really warm cuddle.

An hour earlier, I would have scoffed at the notion that I was going to be sad to put him to bed, but amazingly, that hour of cuddle time was exactly what I needed to rekindle that spark of disappointment I feel every time I have to say good night to him.