Letters to a Parent

Here’s a postcard from parenthood sent in by a reader in England, complete with a postcard image from her neck of the woods.  Thanks, Lindsay!

How do you US parents cope with your kids not wearing school uniforms? I think one of the best inventions ever was the school uniform. Jessica (age 12) has just had a whole week of non-uniform activities at school. Oh the planning it took to sort out 5 outfits she was happy with complete with matching shoes and bags. Jessica however hates the school uniform and would gladly wear non-uniform every day. Two things I have learnt this week:
 
1) make sure my daughter doesn’t have her mobile (cell) phone on silent when I pick her up from school in the middle of a thunder storm (she was waiting a long time for me to ring)
2) the need to explain the difference between gorillas and guerillas as when listening to the news she thought some people had been abducted by gorillas!!

 
We are so jealous of you over there as our summer holidays don’t start for another 2 weeks.

Best wishes,

Lindsay in northern England

Letters to a Parent has taken a little break for the last month or so.  Summer’s in the air (finally!), we’re outside more than we’re in, and my thinking brain has taken a holiday.

Maybe you know what this feels like?

In honor of summertime, for the next couple of months you are invited to post Postcards from Parenthood (rather than the more lengthy and maybe more daunting Letters to a Parent).  Just a few lines telegraphing an experience, a thought, a morsel from your parenting life.  Send in one or dozens, you decide. Haiku form? Fine.  Only two lines? That’s fine, too.  (To submit,  send to basic.annie@gmail.com).  The regular Letters to a Parent will resume in the fall.

Here’s mine for today:

Went to the pond today.  At the end, we couldn’t find Lauren anywhere. She’s 14, so I knew she was probably fine but after looking in the parking lot, around the beach, asking strangers…I was a combination of lividly angry and worried sick.  We finally found her, sitting at the foot of a tree, talking on her cell phone.  The relief quickly made room for 100% anger, all out of proportion for her mistake of being oblivious to our search and worry.  Note to self: next time take a breath and give her some credit.  It’ll save a perfectly lovely summer day.

p.s. Later we went for ice cream and laughed at the antics of the puppy. I’m grateful for the elasticity of parent/child love–that we can each stretch it to its limit sometimes but find a way back.  Wish you were here!

I have spent countless days in hospitals: Someone checks you in, you fill out papers, they take copies, you wait. Someone else rolls your son in a wheelchair down the wide corridor, past the grand piano where elderly volunteers play “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” or “Five Foot Two” or “Amazing Grace,” up the elevator to a private room on the sixth floor where you’ve been before. You follow behind, making small talk and smiling, packing the necessary equipment – cell phone, laptop and an unread book – you will need to stay occupied while you wait. And wait. You wait for blood tests and x-rays and doctor visits while you play with your cell phone downloading worthless ring tones and pictures of purple mountains you will never look at again. You watch the black shadows move down the concrete walls on the buildings outside the window. You rub your son’s palm with your index finger, the way you did when he was a baby. You try to read, but your eyes blur. You fill up the room with balloons from the gift shop, because no one even knows that your son is in the hospital, again, and no one sends balloons or stops by or calls. So you fill in the space.

It’s May, 2004. My son, Zeke, is in the hospital this time for a heart transplant evaluation. I try to act confident and cheerful and ask appropriate, intelligent questions of the doctors and social workers from the transplant team or the nurses who visit Zeke’s room unannounced, twenty-four hours a day. When a doctor says he will be in to see you in the morning, it may be noon, or it may be evening, or it may be tomorrow morning, or he may have come while you stepped out for ten minutes to bring up a tray of tomato soup and iceberg lettuce from the basement cafeteria and you missed him but no matter because he will be back tomorrow, or maybe not, and the nurse will contact him, or maybe not. And then, after two heart catheterizations because one is not good enough, they finally have some results to share and a treatment plan and the results are all bad and they have no plan because there are no real options and they tell you your son has “a year-and-a-half to two years to live” unless he has a heart transplant.

Blood work reveals he has Hepatitis C (this is a new thing!) no doubt from past blood transfusions, probably cirrhosis of the liver from the Hepatitis, and his lung functions are extremely poor (you knew that) and consequently he may not be a candidate for a transplant and the transplant team quits visiting; they will change his medications and send you home – and discuss him in conference next week and let you know. And they tell you that he has “reached the normal life span of a child with a heart condition like this” and they tell you again that there are really no good options and his pacemaker is not working right and his mitral valve is leaking but they are not certain it would be worth the risk to open his chest again to fix those minor problems.

I sit and smile at the doctors with my lips closed and I purse my lips wisely and nod my head and laugh a lot and I try to find something to be hopeful for because Zeke is sitting in the room with me and I need to always act brave and optimistic for him because I am still the mother and he still leans on me, a lot. I squeeze my eyes and don’t let one little teeny drip escape because I know there are gallons more where those come from and I have learned after countless hours curled up on bathroom floors sobbing: There is no such thing as a good cry.

I was twenty-four when Zeke was born. Young and naïve about everything, but who knew about birth defects? When people asked if I was hoping for a boy or a girl I replied, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s healthy.” That was in 1978, prior to testing to determine the sex or complications before a baby was born. Zeke had his first heart surgery at three days old.

He was a “blue baby,” doctors said, born with a missing ventricle: a three-chambered, scrambled heart. Tricuspid Atresia, the official diagnosis, means the tricuspid valve never opened and consequently the lower right chamber never formed. Mike and I stared at the cardiologist who gave us the diagnosis. “So this is serious?” I asked wide-eyed. “Very serious,” he said.

A five-pound, ten-ounce infant. The surgeon operated on Zeke under a microscope. They didn’t have a corrective procedure for Zeke’s defect so the team of surgeons created a shunt; they re-routed the main artery to the right arm into the lungs to provide more oxygen to the blood. The cardiologist came out mid-procedure and told Mike and me they didn’t expect Zeke to survive. I folded my arms across my chest and looked at the floor. The vessel they were trying to sew into was “like wet tissue paper” as the doctor described it, and would collapse if they attempted to suture it. “We’re standing around meditating,” he said.

I locked myself into the waiting room bathroom and did my own meditating – forehead flattened into the mirror, my hands stripping milk from my swollen breasts into the porcelain sink, the antiseptic soap smell making me nauseous. My legs buckled and I slumped to the linoleum floor, head held on my knees, sobbing in silent gasps, praying – no, demanding – that my baby survive. “I want this baby,” I told God. “Please, please, please, please, please,” like a child begging for candy at the grocery store.

Eight hours later a nurse ushered Mike and me into the neo-natal intensive care unit. “Scrub your hands to your elbows for a minute,” she told us softly, then led us to a tiny, naked infant, arms and legs outstretched and strapped to a table, warming lights blaring over his head. The baby was crying but not making a sound – a breathing tube was stuffed down his throat. “My God,” I thought at first glance, “that’s somebody’s baby.”

We ate and slept at the hospital. At night we spread out a thin piece of foam on the waiting room floor and buried ourselves in the white cotton blanket the nurses provided. In the morning we rolled up our meager bedding and wadded it into a closet.

Four weeks later we walked out the hospital door, Zeke cradled in my arms. We took the first picture of his sleeping face swaddled in a blue flannel blanket. If Zeke was a cat, he had lost his first life. The morning we finally emerged from the hospital, fall met us at the door. The air was blue and crisp, the sumac brilliant orange and yellow, red maples glowed gold in the sun; what a welcome to the land of the living. I took off my shoes and let the dew-covered grass cushion my feet. I have rarely felt more alive.

{Continued from last week’s essay}

Because of the Hepatitis C diagnosis and subsequent cirrhosis doctors later agreed to evaluate him for a heart/liver transplant, quite rare, but several have been successfully completed around the country. Doctors wanted to do some lung studies first, before sending him to Seattle for a heart/liver evaluation. The doctors discovered his lung functions were extremely poor, possibly due to fibroid tumors, probably from anti-fibrillation drugs: he would need a heart/liver/lung transplant. Although multiple organ transplantation has been successful, the three big guns have been transplanted only once before.

After six months of waiting for results and decisions, a letter from Mayo Clinic arrived stating the “constellation of his anatomy” was in too great a state of disarray and he was pronounced a non-viable candidate. The sand in the hourglass draining, Mike and I began measuring time as though a bomb were set to detonate at the end of the two-year death sentence. We never told Zeke about the letter from Mayo. We told him only that the doctors said “not now” on the transplantation. Doctors agreed to respect our decision.

The two-year death sentence ended. The hourglass emptied. Zeke didn’t die. He is twenty-nine and has out-lived everyone’s best guesses. Sallow-skinned, arms and legs thin as kindling, eyes sunk, bloated belly, multiple chest incisions, ankles deeply scarred from ulcerations due to poor circulation, a tiny scar on his small left index finger from a paint-scraper I dropped on him while scraping porch windows from a ladder when he was three, short, dark-haired going bald at the peak from twisting his fingers in his hair, wisps of hair trying to be a beard, a Polish pickle nose, eyebrows ramping over the bridge, sweet, gentle, soft-spoken, with an IQ equivalent to Forrest Gump, Zeke lives alone with his cat, Tigger, in a low-income apartment in Kalispell, Montana.

He lives alone by choice. After high school he spent a year at a Bible College, living on campus, then moved back to Kalispell and into his own apartment. He had a good job for four years after college as a video-editor for a TV station, until he grew too sick and missed too much work. Now, he wakes about noon every day, sometimes showers, sometimes not, and opens up his lap-tap to connect with his only “friends” – his internet circle. In the past two years he has been scammed by Nigerian sleaze-balls professing true love and the desire to have his babies if only Zeke would send them money for a ticket to come to the U.S. to live with him till eternity. His current “girlfriend” lives in Florida, ten years his senior, has five children that have all been taken away from her by the state, is on welfare, married, living with an abusive husband and his cousin and four children in a two-bedroom trailer.

About three in the afternoon Zeke might drag his disheveled self out of bed for a hot dog with gobs of mustard and mayonnaise and an ice glass full of Gatorade or lemon tea. He leaves the dirty plate on the kitchen counter or the tiny red coffee table in the living room. He might turn on Dr. Phil or a professional wrestling DVD, maybe play a Wii racing game, eat frozen pizza for dinner, instant-message some more. Days I can coax him out of the apartment for a trip to Best Buy or Target or Walmart are scarce. He doesn’t have much energy to get out of his hovel.

I gather his dirty clothes once a week and haul them to my house. He has a housekeeper that wades in once a week and scrubs the toilet, washes dishes, freshens the cat litter, changes the bed sheets, hangs up new bathroom towels and pushes a vacuum. Every month or so I scour, trying to be respectful of his space but filling a personal need to keep him clean. I defrost the freezer, suck out the corners of the rooms layered with cat hair, shampoo the couch and recliner chair, shove furniture around to vacuum, dust, destroy moldy sub-sandwiches left half eaten in his fridge, wash windows, hang scented air fresheners. He prefers canned chicken soup to my homemade variety, frozen lasagna to home baked, bottled spaghetti sauce to slow-simmered fresh tomatoes and spices and meatballs. He likes Kraft mac and cheese, apples on occasion, cottage cheese, melted cheddar on bagels.

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I spend days stuck in grief berating myself for my worries, my wasting of time staring out windows drawing imaginary lines with my index finger on teak table tops, trying to find hope in the face of hopelessness, trying to stay useful. Making-believe life has happy endings, trying to make a life.

I am in Zeke’s apartment for the afternoon. The two of us are watching Charlotte’s Web, sipping sodas; he is laying on the couch, his feet in my lap, socks off, home from his twenty-third or forty-eighth, I can’t remember, paracentisis procedure this morning at the local hospital where they drew off seven liters of fluid from his one-hundred-and-twenty pound frame. It is eighty degrees in his apartment and he is wrapped in a down comforter. I am rubbing his feet and ankles with peppermint cream, massaging the soles, the toes, his hands locked behind his head, his head tilted sideways watching the new flat screen TV Mike and I bought him for his birthday. Tigger is sprawled on his belly kneading his sweatshirt with clawless paws, a great white grin spreads across Zeke’s face as Charlotte writes magic words in her web to save Wilbur’s life: “Some pig.” I smile at Zeke, so grateful to have this chance to rub his feet, memorizing this moment.

Yesterday he asked if there was any information yet from his doctor about transplant options. “No, not yet,” I said. “The doctors obviously don’t think you are sick enough to be listed and isn’t that great?” He lifted his eyebrows, smiled his lips-closed grin and gave a little shrug as I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and gave him a gentle squeeze, dropped my head and silently thanked God for this day, begging for another.

Susan Jostrom holds a MFA in creative non-fiction and has published in local Montana journals and the online journal, hotmetalbridge.org. She has completed a memoir about her son’s illness that is still seeking a publisher, and is dragging her feet to get back to her unfinished novel. She currently resides in Seattle and Montana. She lives and loves living on a houseboat in Seattle but writes her best work from her 1918 cabin in Whitefish, Montana. Her husband of thirty-three years lives with her, and their son, Zeke, has recently moved in with them. You can reach her at suejostrom@mac.com.

1. After you leave the hospital, in the middle of the night, when the baby won’t sleep…it’s all you. (And your husband, of course, if you’ve got a good one.) But the point is, from now on, when that little face looks around for food, comfort, nurturing…you are the one. And it’s a humbling, beautifully terrifying prospect.

We’ve loved our daughter since the day she was born, but because she came to us in a different way, I’ll never forget this experience:

When she was almost three months old I went to a luncheon. Many of the women there wanted to see and hold her, and she was getting passed around quite a bit. I don’t know if something happened or if she was just getting tired of all the passing, but she began to cry and look around. Finally she found me and her eyes locked on mine; she smiled through her tears as if to say: “Mommy, I found you! Save me!” All I could think of at that moment, was “Oh my gosh, she’s looking for me!” It was an emotional experience for me for obvious reasons. She knew I was her mother. And when she saw me, she knew she would be okay.

(First lesson: you are The One.)

2. Surviving the sleep deprivation.
There were many, many years of no sleep. I really began to wonder if there would be permanent consequences to my constant state of sleepiness. When I look back on the worst of it, I don’t know how I functioned as well as I did. If you’ve been through it, you know it is a tiredness that you feel in your bones. But I did it. And my children survived my groggy crankiness. {And as for the permanent damage, I only twitch and drool a little bit now and then…just kidding, sort of.}

(Second lesson: you can do anything. You are a mother.)

3. Things are always better when seen through a child’s eyes:

Snow,

Swings,

Mud,

Christmas,

Disneyland…

I’ll never forget when we took the kids to Disneyland; the first time with all five of them. The oldest was 10 and the baby, 10 months. We got there at night, and we had a multi-day ticket, so we went for the hour or so before the park closed. We were just in time for the big parade. There we were, squished in with all the other hundreds of parents and children who happened to be on that one little corner of the street. I was stressed and frazzled from trying to maneuver our double stroller through the crowds; and I was crazy from trying to keep my extremely active and curious 5- and 6-year-olds from climbing up trees and railings and lamp posts, and from inadvertently wandering away.

But when the music started, and the characters began to leap and dance and sing their way down the street, the children were magically transfixed. I saw the delight and wonder in their eyes. And I stood there witnessing it. In the middle of all those other crazy parents. With tears streaming down my face at the sheer joy of the moment.

(Third lesson: childhood is magical. And for a few short years in between my own childhood and motherhood, I had forgotten for a moment.)

4. Natural consequences are better than forced ones.
One time when our oldest son was about three and a half, we had our first real experience with this one. (It took many other “bonks on our heads” to learn the lesson, but this was the first one that sticks out in my mind.)

It was the fourth of July. We had spent the entire day with several of our good friends; lots of activities and fun. At the end of the day, everyone was at our house for a barbecue before we went off to see the fireworks. My son had misbehaved several times that day with the same behavior and we were becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with him. I’m embarrassed to say what it was, because he was after all, only three–but being the oldest, unavoidably, the parenting “guinea pig.” Just before dinner, he had done it again, and I uttered those fateful words: “If you do it one more time, you are not going to go see the fireworks tonight.”

Even as I said it, I had dim warning bells going off in my brain. “Bad idea, bad idea, don’t do it, what are you saying?!” But it was too late. Already out there on the table: stop or no fireworks. And because I was young and determined to be worth my salt as a mother, I enforced it. And we all watched as our friends left to go see the fireworks. All of us sad. All of us “punished.” None of us learning the intended lesson.

(Fourth lesson: don’t threaten things you don’t want to enforce. Don’t punish yourself.)

5. Time.
A truly strange phenomenon. When you’re young it takes things
f-o-r-e-v-e-r to happen. But when you get old, like me, it’s stuck on hyper-speed. I think maybe it’s because I had my middle three children at such close intervals, that basically they were all in the same stages at the same time. If they had been spread out a little more, maybe it wouldn’t seem like time is such a runaway train that I can never catch. Maybe. But maybe not. I feel like these last three years have gone by in a flash. Three years ago, I had three little boys. And now, that part of their lives is gone. They give me strange looks when I “forget” how old they are and suggest things that only “little kids” would like. It makes me sad. With all the craziness of life, I feel like I missed some of it.

(Fifth lesson: Be in the moment and enjoy the little things. And make note of it. Because when you blink, it will be gone.)

6. Let them grow up.
Boy this one is fully charged with all sorts of emotions.
Happiness, sadness, anxiety, impatience, fear, doubt, pride, laughter, tears…..
(and those are just my emotions.)

You want them to grow up, but you don’t…. but you really do. And it doesn’t really even matter what you want, because they have to anyway. And you have to let them learn hard lessons, and you have to teach them how to deal with different situations, and you have to get them all ready (or as ready as you possibly can) to be a grown-up. But you have to do it in a way so as not to take away any of the magic of their childhood, while still gently urging them onward in their journey so they don’t stay too long in the land of make-believe. It’s a terribly tricky task. {and I hope, I hope, I’m doing okay.}

(Sixth lesson: you have to help them be grown-up people. Because they will anyway, whether you like it or not. And it will make it so much better if you actually like these grown-up people when all is said and done.)

7. Labor doesn’t end in the hospital.
Any mother knows this. It’s just a big brilliant burst of labor there. A little foreshadowing of this life you’ve now signed on for. The work just never ends. Once you think you’ve conquered a problem, a new one springs a leak. So it’s ever onward, tweaking, brainstorming, a little enforcing, teaching, leading, kissing, hugging, scolding, laughing, playing, talking, loving….
And that all gets mixed in with the laundry, dishes, meal preparation, cleaning, driving, sick-watch, bathrooms, tutoring, dusting (oh, who’s kidding who, that one never gets done…) anyway, you get the picture. It’s hard work. And lots of it.

But in the end, it’s all worth it. And I wouldn’t trade any of the hard, for not having had the privilege of being a mother. It’s the very best part of my life. I only have one go-around in this life, and I’m glad and grateful that I get to spend it like this.

(Lesson 7: motherhood is hard and beautiful. And it’s all worth it. Every bit.)

Jenny lives on the east coast with her husband and five terrific kids. Her children say: “she cooks good food, and takes too many pictures.” She likes to eat food that other people cook (preferably, people in restaurants), take pictures, write, shop, spend time with family and to be on vacation. She can be reached at jenny.mom2five@gmail.com.

If you give a mom a minute (while the three older kids are at school/preschool and the two younger ones are napping)…she will try to transfer a load from the washer to the dryer.

But according to her new 12-step laundry program, all clean laundry that comes out of the dryer must be put away IMMEDIATELY. Otherwise, it will never get put away. She tries to hang up the white church shirts and then she realizes all hangers in the house are in use…so she goes into the two-year-old’s closet to retrieve hangers.

While looking through the closet she realizes he has outgrown most of his clothing. She cleans out his closet (in order to get the hangers) and makes a pile of give away clothes. Since she is clearing out the closet, she might as well clean out his drawers, also. She now has a BIG pile of clothing to donate…so she heads to the kitchen to get a garbage bag for all the clothes…as she gets a garbage bag, she see the kitchen garbage is overflowing…..for once she has her shoes on and no one to follow her outside…so she takes out the garbage.

While walking down the front walk, she has to duck under the overgrown palm tree. This reminds her that several visitors have had to duck, as well. So she opens up the garage, gets out the electric hedger and clips off the offending palm fronds. She then notices that the lantana and bougainvillea are also encroaching the sidewalk, so she trims those, too.

While trimming, she remembers the 10 o’ clock news report of a burglar in the area who hides in shrubbery. She then takes the hedgers to all shrubs…including ones that have never been trimmed before. Once finished, she remembers her husband is not a big fan of her landscaping skills (maybe because it reminds him of bad haircuts she has given him in the past).

So she gets out the rake to clear away the evidence…an hour later she finally makes it back into the house and changes out of her sweaty, stinking clothes and tries to put them into the washer…but it is full of a load that needs to go into the dryer…a dryer that is full of a load that needs to be hung up/put away.

Carla lives in a suburb outside of Phoenix, is mother to five great kids, and loves to learn new things. You can find her at her blog Six Beez or reach her at carla2822@cox.net.

This entry isn’t really a letter but is actually a poem by the wonderful Billy Collins. Happy Mother’s Day!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

~Billy Collins, from his collection The Trouble with Poetry

I had my first baby. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. Labor was a piece of cake compared to trying to nurse and trying to have the baby gain weight and trying to take a shower and trying to sleep and trying to be a wife and trying to eat and trying to be happy that this little gift was here forever and I was in charge. My mom never told me this part!

But we survived. I would look at her darling face and forget the pain. And I had another. Oh how grand boys are! The perfectly pristine life of my first darling baby forever changed. She was introduced to PBS. I could nurse the baby and rest. I could take a shower and clean the new baby. I could fix dinner while the baby was sleeping. I could go to the bathroom alone.

We were happy and I would look at my two perfect babies and forget the chaos. And I had another. She was darling and quiet and perfect. Baby number two was introduced to PBS and I survived. But, my voice rose and life for number one and two changed. Their quietness became louder. They were introduced to time out. They had to learn it was not okay to bite the baby. We do not hit in our house. It was never okay to leave the house alone. We do not run down the street and around the block, ignoring mom yelling to come back now!

We played and took walks and loved life and I would look at my three precious babies and forgive the naughtiness. And I had another. Baby number four took us all by surprise. He ate and slept and ate and grew and grew and ran and ran and hasn’t stopped. Babies one, two and three have taken to taking care of baby four. He needs 5 people watching out for him. He needs to not be naked before he goes outside. He needs a snack now before he dies. He needs his hand held before he falls and cuts his eye wide open requiring 6 stitches. He needs to laugh and swing and take walks. He needs to be loved by all.

His world will never change.

I’ve remembered it all now. I won’t forget and have another.

…but I wish I could…

Jayne Thomas lives in Charleston, SC with 4 babies that keep getting bigger and bigger. She tries to remember what time swim practice is and why she walked upstairs. She can be reached at jaynecas@yahoo.com.

I was chatting with my darling neighbor who has 3 tiny kiddos, is pregnant with her 4th, and in the middle of tearing up and remodeling her home. She’s feeling a wee bit stressed.

Soon tears were flowing and she said, “But I shouldn’t complain. You’ve got twice as much going on as me and you are always so pulled together.”

Ha! Me? Pulled together?

I told her: “I sincerely and honestly apologize if I’ve ever given you that impression. I would never want anyone to think that about me.”

As the mother of five wild boys and one crazy little princess, I am not trying to create any illusion of perfection. 10 days out of 10 I have moments where I simply CAN’T HANDLE life. And I also have really great happy moments 10 days out of 10. I choose to believe that’s a normal part of motherhood.

My friend Missy told me a story of hiking with her dad when she was 8 years old. The hike was easy and fun for the first few miles, but as the elevation increased and Missy’s energy wore down she struggled for breath and fought to keep up with her father. Convinced that something was truly wrong with her body she called to her dad, “I can’t do it. You go on. I’ll wait here.”

Her father stopped, sat her down and gently explained, “You’re OK. We’re higher on the mountain now and the air is thinner. You have to take deep breaths and I need to slow down and walk slowly with you. You’re going to make it. You’re going to be fine. This is normal.”

For Missy, those words made all the difference—there wasn’t anything wrong with her; it’s normal to struggle when you are not getting enough oxygen.

And I guess that’s my message to all my fellow mothers. None of us are getting enough oxygen. Every mother I know, whether she has 10 kids or 1, is pouring every bit of her energy into the bottomless pit of motherhood. It’s meant to be hard. This is normal.

I don’t ever anticipate being the pulled-together super-mom. I don’t want to be. Forgetting a birthday party or serving cereal for dinner is fine with me. If I ever get too organized I may not have time to sit and hold my Gabriel while he tells me about last night’s dream or I may not be willing to leave the beds unmade and go on a walk with a friend. Inadequate, imperfect, scatterbrained, messy—it all makes me a better mother.

I should stop here but I won’t. My cute neighbor said she tried to explain her stress to her mother but her mother’s reply was, “You have no idea how lucky you are. There are so many people in the world with bigger problems than yours.”

I beg to differ. My friend is a nurse in a child abuse unit; she served an 18-month service mission in Guatemala. She is acutely aware of the problems in the world and often expresses her profound gratitude for her husband, home, and children. Just talking about her blessings throws her into guilty worries that she isn’t grateful enough.

But taking care of 3 small people, growing a new one in your belly and picking out tile for the kitchen are exhausting, oxygen-depleting tasks. Not life threatening, but exhausting. It’s OK to be frustrated, it’s OK to be overwhelmed. This is normal.

Michelle Lehnardt never folds laundry and her car is a mess. She runs through the streets of Salt Lake City, UT, takes lots of photos, plays Uno with her 5 fabulous boys and buys way too many dresses for the little princess. Her husband is the most romantic man in the world because he does all the Costco shopping AND hauls it into the house (sorry to make you jealous girls). She writes at Scenes from the Wild.

Dear Daughter,

At the time I am writing this, you are a still a teen yourself. When you finally read it, you may be a mother with a teen of your own. It will be like a picture from your past that will bring perspective for that time.

Have you felt the joy and the fear of nurturing a new life? Your new life awed me. Still, your innocence scared me; I was afraid I would mess you up.

Despite my fears, you learned to stand, supported by my nurturing. Eventually you began to walk, and so did I. We both grew confident—me in teaching, you in learning. I feared again when you started to run, until I saw that you were following my lead. Each new experience has taught us together in this way.

Now, you are a teen. Everyone says it will all be different. It is, and it should be, but not in a negative way, as they imply.

The difference I sensed is that you’re in the midst of growing up to be responsible. It is just a short time—probably before you or I are even ready—until you leave our home. When Dad and I talked to you about this, I hoped it sounded like we were expressing our trust in you.

I was really relinquishing my control.

You see, handing you responsibility was the stressor point that caused me to falter as a mother. When it didn’t feel like you had received the assignment or knowledge that I was giving, I would become frustrated, anxious, and impatient. I may have been delegating responsibility to you, but I was not trusting that you had received it. Many times I would ask myself, “Have I fully communicated so that she will succeed in this task?”

Then I finally understood that the vital communication tool I use myself is one that I have also taught you to use. If God can communicate your needs to me, can He not communicate them to you?

After that conversation together, it was time to rearrange the spaces in our home, literally and figuratively. My desk has always been at the center of wherever you and your siblings spent the most time. At first that was your playroom. Then it became your learning center with projects and stories. It moved on to be your homework zone. Now, my desk is in a separate room. You will still need me close, but further away so you may practice on your own without my constant supervision.

Remember when I taught you to make pancakes? We did it together a few times. Then I left the kitchen so you could work without my little corrections. You still came to me when you had questions about how hot to heat the griddle or how much batter to use. Being a teenager will be like that. As you use your own initiative to grow, I know you will still come to me, and we will connect through conversation.

I love how you have rearranged, cleaned and organized your room, too. You made it your own because the desire to do so was yours. You also shared your feelings that you have found a way to be more aware of God’s help and encouragement. You seem enlivened by the endeavor to create your present and your future on what you are learning in your heart. I know you are feeling your own sense of responsibility, and you are listening. The conversion of your room is only the symbolic evidence of a greater change in you.

Recognizing this in you brings a greater change in me. Now, I am learning to trust God, that He will guide you, too, as He has guided me to see what changes were necessary. Thank you for being patient with me while I learned the trust part of parenting.

Teresa Hirst lives in Minnesota with her husband and three children. In addition to loving her family with good food and conversation, she likes reading, writing, and Finding What Inspires at http://www.tjhirst.com, where you can connect with her.