So here we are again in May;
Long-time Nemesis of Motherhood Sanity.
The month of last-minute science projects, and book reports, and jog-a-thons.
Year-end party sign-up sheets stapled to suggestions for appropriate teacher appreciation day gifts.
The Declaration required fewer signatures than May.
This year my girls’ school opted to also throw a few spirit days in for good measure,
like they are completely unaware that May is not at all the time for school spirit.
May is the time for Ibuprofen and weeping.
May is time for ill-packed, over-it looking school lunches that include things like whole, raw garden zucchinis because you just can’t with it anymore.
And yes,
I’ve done that.
My first grader, Paige, had her very first project due this week.
She was asked to make a collection board, and so she chose bugs.
Bugs that she refused to touch to collect, because of course.
This project was 83% her standing in various areas of our yard supposedly capturing beetles while shrieking, “I NEED HELP! I NEED HELP! I NEED HEEEEELLLLP!”
Her teacher,
whom I thought was my good friend,
had set the due date for the day after Mother’s Day, so, as you can imagine,
I spent part of that very special day trudging around the neighborhood looking for bugs to catch, and wearing what the girls cackled at and told me was “Daddy’s dog poo glove.”
There I was pulling bug exoskeletons out of cobwebs and sealing them into sandwich bags while my husband slept blissfully on the couch, free of school project requirements to sign off on.
He’s #blessed
It’s pretty ironic to me that Mother’s Day is even in May at all.
That kind of feels like a damp crumb offering.
Like putting lipstick on a pig.
I think May is out to get us.
I’ve been trying to be mindful about how I always feel in May to better prepare my heart.
Trying to practice better self-awareness.
I started therapy.
I’ve been eating better, and taking more long walks.
Today, after emerging from the belly of the hardware store where I’d been with my daughter Tessa for at least an hour searching for “invention project” materials,
I decided to head for a local salad bar for a healthy, nutrient packed lunch.
Invention Project Kerri requires quality
self-care, and increased vegetation, after all.
But,
as I stretched those salad bar tongs as far as they could stretch towards the back row of the salad bar with the side of my face pressed into the glass of the sneeze-guard for those back row cucumbers…
As I felt bitterness towards the shortness of my own arms, and the easy access to gross baby corns, while the good stuff was requiring me to be a regular at hot yoga…
As I squatted, and contorted,
and clicked the tongs in stressed-out futility,
suddenly as frantic for what lay beyond my reach as I would’ve been if I’d been solely responsible for rescuing Baby Jessica from that well in ‘87,
I saw myself.
I saw what May was doing to me yet again.
Sure, I’ll sign your things,
and help invent things, and bring the cubed watermelon places, and come up with award-winning costumes the night before, and find the index cards,
and help make a paper mâché, true-to-life replica of all of San Francisco’s Financial District if you will just GIVE ME THESE FOUR CUCUMBER SLICES FIRST BECAUSE THEY ARE VERY HYDRATING AND I WILL NEED THE HYDRATION IF I’M GOING TO FINISH THIS MONTH STRONG!
My face was still pressed into the glass while I had this mini mental breakdown.
I just stayed there for a second,
just squatting and breathing.
The guy working the salad bar awkwardly asked me if I needed another dressing container.
Sir, I cannot name all of the things that I need right now.
Good day to you!
I have several friends who I’m sure will not understand these personal May as a Mother feelings.
Most of them with much younger children.
Most of them not yet to the pre-teen angsty open-mouthed-crying-over-the-book-reports phase.
I used to handle it better, too,
but then I got tired.
So very tired.
If I could’ve thought more clearly in that moment pressed to the sneeze glass
I might have told the salad bar attendee that what I actually needed was not more ranch, but was a time-machine that could jump me to 16 days from now when summer begins.
What I need is to be done packing the lunches that I hate packing, and to move onto the part where the girls are popping in from swimming just long enough to make their own actual selves microwaved quesadillas before going right back outside.
What I need is a break from the homework pep-talks, and the fights in the morning over whose shirt that really is.
What I need is to stop having weird internal melt-downs at salad bars, and in order to have this happen,
I need May to be over.
As a matter of fact,
I’m throwing my own Spirit Day.
It’s for the end of May.
Dress in your swimsuit.
Come smelling like coconut.
The 3 part display board bonfire begins at sundown.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
