The Other, Less Glamorous, BMW

Last week featured a series of Bad Mom Days.

You can read that any way you want, because each possible interpretation is fitting. Add the implied, invisible hyphen after “mom.” Bad mom-days. A handful of this mom’s days that were gross. Not horrific, not painfully painful. Just bad, a succession of ill-timed events, poorly planned meals, grumpy kids, and a stinky dog who seemed to need to urinate more than ever before . . . these combined to make yucky days.

If you placed periods between the words, as is a writers’ trend these days, you’d get “Bad. Mom. Days.” You can practically smell the exasperation, the fatigue.

Should you throw in a hyphen to magically create a modifier, voila!: you’d get “Bad-Mom Days.” This would imply that I was, during any number of more than one 24-hour period, a bad mom. Okay. I’ll give you that. In hindsight, I could see that last week, I was not doing my best work.

So, take five to seven Bad Mom Days. If you toss in not just a tired Mom but a sick Mom (sprinkled with a dash of Multiple Field Trip Volunteer Obligations and a steaming side of Dad’s Out of Town), well, then, you have the perfect recipe for the Bad Mom WEEK (BMW), a true masterpiece.

Bad days, bad weeks, are not altogether uncommon. But what stood out as being so grody to the max about last week was my kids’ roles in perpetuating the grodiness to the maximus. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got two great kids. Anyone who knows my girls knows that certain adjectives come to mind when describing them: funny, kind, creative, compassionate. They are also, how shall I say?, 10 and 11. And anyone who has any familiarity with 10 and 11 year olds knows that other colorful adjectives can occasionally come to mind: sassy, independent, annoying, lazy . . . I could go on, but I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

Last week was one of those rare weeks when I needed kindness and compassion beyond the level my daughters are developmentally capable of giving me. Could they drive to the store to get my antibiotics? No. Would they say, “Dearest mother, should I make you a warm compress while my homemade casserole is in the oven?” Not a chance. They did what they could, when they could, and it wasn’t their fault I had an overcommitted wacky week to begin with.

Throughout BMW, I found myself facing the profound truths that my daughters are actually growing up, turning more toward their own interests, and, perhaps the harshest reality, becoming more and more honest with their feelings. At more than one point during the week, I found myself actually questioning: Do my own children even like me? 

Snippets from one day went a little something like this:

Scene: Three Lynch women reading in den.

Me: [flipping pages of the new book I’m reading] Wow! I really love my book.

Girl 1: [silence]

Girl 2: [silence, flipping own page of own book]

Me: Yep, sure do like it.

Girl 1: [annoyed silence]

Girl 2: [annoyed silence, punctuated with a side of aggravated shuffling]

Me:  Um. Does anyone have a pen I can borrow?

[Cue both girls exiting room in search of silence]

Wednesday featured getting my hair highlighted for the first time since its rebirth after chemo. My hairdresser, Sarah, the angel, did my hair twice (the first time around was way too subtle for me, and I was really itching to get rid of the unusual shade of steel). I had therefore spent almost five hours at the salon. I raced back home in time for the bus to meet me with its blinking lights.

Upon greeting my younger daughter, I gave her a hug and then treated her to a little flirtatious, look-at-me-notice-anything-different-about-me dance. Not taking the hint, I asked, "Notice anything?" She looked me up and down, up and down, frowning in the sharp sunlight. “Nah,” she told me, as a way to end the conversation (and, more than likely, the dance).

“I got my hair highlighted!” I practically giggled as I skipped after her.

“It looks exactly the same,” she said, melting the grin off my face as she continued walking home.

Did she know the weight of that highlighting session? Did she realize that I had been waiting almost two years to make myself look at least a little like the ME I used to know? No. She’s 10. But still. 

Ouch.

At 3:30 that same day, I picked my older daughter up from the bus stop. In the car on the way to her allergy shots, I made conversation about school. She was stressed about not having a field trip partner. I was feeling sad for her, so I tried in vain to think of ways to find a field trip partner. This went back and forth and back and forth until, finally, she shut me up good: “Mom. Stop. You don’t understand.”

Ouch.

How couldn't she know that her not having a field trip partner kills me? Why is she so mad at me all the time?

Why hasn’t she noticed my hair?

The week went on in much the same way. Me, waking up, thinking to myself, the sun’ll come out today! One of them walking down the stairs, saying, by way of greeting, “Where’s breakfast?” and my reproach turning me into the bad guy. Me, asking one of the girls to help me set the table for dinner and getting the response, “I’m not finished with this yet.” There I am, the bad guy . . . again.

What I'm finding is that our relationships are changing. There are new boundaries here, here in a time and place when my girls no longer follow me around from room to room, wanting to know what I’m doing, telling me that I look pretty with my new lipstick on, and asking if they can brush my hair. I remember the sounds of their socks slipping across the floor as they scattered to find me when I would walk in the door; can still hear them screaming, “Mama!” as they run in for their hugs. Things change, and I have to learn to take their affection in the doses they are comfortable giving me, I guess.

It’s going to take me time to learn to navigate these new waters. And to not be hurt by my fellow sailors, who are learning to navigate, too.

I’ll never forget one of my first Bad Mom Days. I was about 30 months pregnant and had faced a long, long day with my older little girl, Kylie. She was only 17 months old and all day had fought sleep, cried, made messes all over the house, and generally didn’t realize that I was pregnant and tired. In a rare moment of insight, I decided to take her out of the house, get us both out of the toxic environment we were in, and treat her to her very first vanilla ice cream cone.

We got the cone at Ukrop’s. As I ordered, my little blonde girl waited, holding onto my leg and trying to peek into the compartment that held all the magical flavors of this food I was introducing her to. With the cone in one hand and her baby fingers in the other, I waddled over to a table, handed her the treat, and carefully lifted her into the chair. 

I can see her now, little legs resting on the chair, forming an L shape with her tennis shoes barely hanging off the edge of the seat. She held on to the cone with two hands, staring at it, smiling, with her blue eyes open wide. “Go on,” I urged her, telling her to lick it carefully. She did, and she looked at me with amazement, as if to say, “Can you BELIEVE this?!” She giggled and licked and giggled and licked.

To my left, a beautiful black woman was staring at us, smiling from the same place in her heart from which I write this now. She was witnessing a mother and her child, sharing a moment, and just then, I saw what she saw: love. Not the tears or the frustration or the dirty diapers or the exhaustion. Just the love. I smiled at the woman, and she smiled back at me and said, simply, “So cute.”

Kylie noticed someone else was in the supermarket at that moment and stopped to look at the woman who had just spoken. Kylie seemed to give her a nod, as she smiled and showed her her ice cream cone. My heart felt like it would explode, and right then, Kylie spoke directly to the woman in her baby-talk, clearly uttering the phrase I have never forgotten:

“Hi, Oprah!”

I thought of this memory--the one that still makes me cry and makes me laugh--last week, in the middle of Bad Mom Week. Ten years later, and I feel clueless some of the time. I still get my feelings hurt because my children have the audacity to be themselves and not be able to figure out my every whim and wish. I’ll learn to be patient, and I’ll try to figure them out even as they’re trying to figure themselves out. And, when a Bad Mom Day devolves into a Bad Mom Week, I’ll be the grown-up and do whatever I can to get us out of the rut.

Me and my babies: old hair, same sweet girls.

Like an ice cream cone for dinner. Which is exactly what we did last week, right there smack-dab in the middle of Bad Mom Week. Things have seemed a lot better ever since.