The Good, the Bad and the Rock Wall

When I look back on this blog, I notice that I go through bouts of non-posting. I have not felt interesting this month, so I have not felt inspired to write. I am also too tired to be introspective and witty. The third, final and probably most true excuse is that I got an iPad for my birthday. It is my precious. It is with me almost always, and you cannot blog from it. Then y’all started asking for new blogs, and I felt selfish and indulgent for being so focused on my precious.

At night I put my iPad in my face and read all my favorite blogs. One of them, Momastery, posted recently about the honest challenges of not enjoying motherhood, and I have really been mulling that over this month. I have been given this abundant blessing in the form of wee Allbritton brothers to love and raise, and oh my, we love each other. But every ounce – every. single. ounce. – of that blessing is met with an equal amount of challenge. There are no freebies here.

Do these look like the faces of evil easy?

We’ve got Jake, who is a boy so full of love I think that his need to give affection could only be satiated were he able to crawl inside you and love you from the inside out. He has to hug all of us, even Murphy, before he leaves the room. He is so smart, so interesting, so loyal and when he gets some height on him, the little girls are going to lose their minds. I know this. He’s also got ADHD, major anxiety and some Asperger traits, so he’s a little odd. And he loses control of his emotions and reacts disproportionately and there’s only so much leeway you’ll get at the Catholic school before they send you home on a mandatory three-day break. Challenge.

I do not know what kind of parents this kid has who let him leave the house without fixing his hair.

My Landen sees the world in black and white. Meals and desserts. Hot or cold. Bedtime or awake time. Football month or baseball month. It will not be long before he starts to realize and worse, have a reaction to, how odd his older brother is. Landen comes on strong, runs at you at full speed, screaming, mouth open, eyes wide and just when you panic thinking he’s going to hit you and knock you flat on your back, he stops short and hugs you so hard around the neck you see stars. He does this to us. I’ve seen him greet his friends this way. Murphy has yelped. Landen has high confidence and he is almost always confident that you are wrong and he is right and he cannot wait to tell you why. Challenge.

This is as close to skateboarding as this kid is allowed to get.

They can remember to buckle their seatbelt when they get in the car but “forget” they are not supposed to touch each other, make noises or play catch in the backseat. They can remember to wash their hands after they use the bathroom but “forget” to flush the toilet. They remember to put their plates in the sink but “forget” to close their mouths when they chew. Every single day they come in the door, they yell for me like they’ve come home to an empty house, not a parent on the phone working upstairs in her office. They feed the cat but “forget” to fill her water bowl. They spray their whole entire head with the water bottle but only comb the right, leaving water droplets dangling from matted strands of bedhead on the front, left and back. Challenge.

Recently we spent a bit at a big park on a Saturday afternoon and the boys each paid $5 of their hard-earned money to try their luck at the rock wall. Both of them love to climb, and they are fairly successful in trees. Both of them got about five feet up on their first tries, not being able to see the easiest notch or nub on the wall to grab on to and having their fingers cramp already. They wanted to un-harness and go watch the skateboarders, but Corey and I insisted that they nut up and try again.

You would think that at less than sixty pounds, Jake could just scoot on up the rock wall. This boy is a thinker, and he conducts a full assessment of his surroundings before deciding what hand or foot to move. This will serve him well later, but on the rock wall it means he holds on to one spot and makes his feet and hands mighty tired. Not sustainable. The second try on the rock wall, he made it about eight feet before getting stuck and flustered and dropping off.

Landen made it a little bit higher than Jake did, but he's carrying a good twenty pounds more than Jake is, so it takes much more energy for him to get hoisted up to the next spot. Both of them said the words "quit" and "too hard" in the same sentence, and Corey and I got prickly about it. We always strongly advise against quitting, and we might push and pressure our kids to finish more than other parents might. We gave the spiel about everything being hard, that nothing worth doing is easy and that everything you stick with and see through is rewarding. When their fingers are burning holding on to the wall, we cannot react punitively when they quit, but we can lead them to the knowledge that finishing feels way better than quitting does. And hope that they learn how to push themselves, even if it is to finish something they never want to do again.

So here I find myself on my own proverbial rock wall. I have less money. I get less sleep. I find myself saying the same things over again, making the same corrections to manners and behaviors day after day. To be honest, I'm not sure that these pre-tween ages are a very pretty color on me. I feel older. I'm certain I look like I'm struggling. They probably call me the Kracken when I'm not within earshot. I can see in their faces they wonder what happened to the version of me that was fun. And really, it would be so lovely to just stop working so hard at this, to stop being the Insistence of What's Right all the time, to stop trying force tiny people with partly-developed brains to trust in concepts they cannot make sense of at their ages. I would certainly like me better if I got to declare this - the mothering of pre-tweenagers - to be too hard and just dropped on off this wall.

The peaceful, clean-slate attitude I clutch in a death-grip when I climb the stairs to wake them up is dealt a defeating blow every morning when we argue about who is wearing which style uniform shirt or what sleeve length is appropriate for what temperature. Or whether or not someone has to pee. Or when I open their closet and see the disaster that was shoved in there upon instruction to clean their room the night before. Our pantry is never stocked with the correct item for breakfast, even though I buy what they request. Inevitably one of us is no longer on speaking terms by the time we load the car to drive to school.

It's okay. This 8-12 age range is not my favorite. I do not have to like it to do it well and make something of it. I approach every day with the fervor I would anything I want to turn out successful in the end. Not with much patience, but with much love and with an abundance of hope that in ten years there will be a sign or a verbal affirmation that this approach was the right one and that daughters-in-law will benefit from these boys being raised by the Kracken.  

I also know that I am going to outlive the Big Guy and if I am going to spend my twilight years with any amount of dignity and comfort, I have to be someone they will want to still be around when they are older.

My boys are good boys. They have the DNA and part-raising of a very, very kind mother with a great big, light-filled heart. They have the quick wit and smarts of their dad. And they have me, stable, routine and determined to give them an ordinary life amidst extra-unordinary circumstances. I know they will grow up to be good men, good fathers, good husbands and that they will never end up on a therapist's couch complaining that they never knew they were loved.

But y'all, I have no earthly clue what state I'll be in when these good grown men get here.