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“I had a rough day, Mama.”

27 Wednesday Feb 2013

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Today when I picked Miles up from preschool, I was told by his teachers that he wasn’t feeling well and showed me the digital thermometer readout of 101.6. Great, I thought, and let out a big sigh. He was splotchy and tired looking with tiny tears in his eyes. He hadn’t eaten his snack and only half of his lunch. Very unusual for my big eater. As I walked him to the door with his school bag dragging on the floor, I promised that we could go home and I’d make him feel all better soon. That’s a mothers job, right?

He kept his head down as we walked to the car and just kept saying my name like he wanted to tell me something, but didn’t know how. When we finally reached the sidewalk next to our car he told me that boy 1 and boy 2 (names omitted for obvious reasons) hit him. He was crying then. He said that when he was feeling sick and laying down on the carpet, the 2 boys had kicked him and hit him, saying that they wouldn’t play with him anymore. He said that his foot hurt from where they had kicked his foot. “Why? Why did they say that Mama?”. I was crying then, “I don’t know, honey.” I kissed his warm head, held his round little cheeks in my hand and told him that he was very much loved.

Driving home, I tried to explain that sometimes kids do mean things to each other and it doesn’t make them bad kids. I tried to remind him of the times he’d been mean to his little brother or his friend because they weren’t doing things the way he wanted them to. I told him that no matter what a couple of kids do or say, he is a good boy that is loved and cherished by many. I also tried desperately not to turn the car around and hunt down boy 1 and boy 2 and their parents. I’m proud of myself for driving all the way home instead of going postal on some unsuspecting 4 1/2 year olds. After sitting quietly for a while he said, ” I had a rough day, Mama.”

It is of course terrible when bullying happens to your child. It breaks my heart that I wasn’t there to protect him and scare the bejeezes out of those boys. I know how it feels to be bullied. For me, it didn’t happen until middle school. Maybe I was lucky. Maybe the kids are getting meaner earlier. Whatever the case, I’m so proud of him for telling me and trusting that I would help. Even if the help was hugs, kisses and loving words. The bullies were dealt with by the teachers when it happened, so I guess there’s no need for me to make a big fuss with the parents at this point. If it happens again though, boy 1 and boy 2 better watch their backs!

No Bullying sign - School in Racine, Wisconsin

No Bullying sign – School in Racine, Wisconsin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One day, everything just changes.

21 Thursday Jun 2012

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I returned home Tuesday after 8 days in upstate NY with my children, family and friends. Kofi stayed in NJ working and doing some home improvement. It was only a little over a week away, but so much changed in that short time.

Juniper is walking almost exclusively, eating mostly bite sized food instead of mashed, making word-like sounds and completely stopped nursing. The last one is the most stunning change for me.

He went from nursing 4 or 5 times a day to 2 times and then to not at all in a matter of 6 days. He just stopped wanting it. I’m not sure if it was all the activity with so many other people, or that he just started a new phase. Whatever it was, it was very abrupt and disorienting for me. One morning I sat down to nurse him and he just looked at it, looked at me and pushed it away. I tried a couple more times, but he would have none of it. Luckily we had plenty of organic milk in the fridge and his sippy cup for water.

I know I should feel relieved at my new found freedom. I’m no longer tied down by a feeding schedule or burdened with toting a pump and bottles around when away from him. There is some relief in there somewhere. There is mostly shock and sadness. I’m mourning his babyhood, I think. He seems more like a little man now instead of a baby. Wobbling, verbalizing and drinking from a cup, not snuggling up in my arms for a drink. My back will be happier for sure. Breastfeeding has taken a huge toll on my back over the years. Holding my children in one position while they drink for extended amounts of time has made me hunch even when I’m not holding them.

I’ll definitely need to increase the amount of exercise I do every week, since my free -all you can eat while breastfeeding- pass has now expired. My appetite definitely hasn’t changed, so I’m going to have to work out more if I don’t want to gain back a ton of weight. It’s going to take more than just 2 or 3 long walks a week to keep me slim. I’m thinking yoga and possibly some dance parties with the kids might work. Since Juni is walking, I may be running more than usual too.

Anyway, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I can see now that I really need to appreciate every little step along the way, because one day, everything just changes.

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Global Writing Revolution

15 Tuesday May 2012

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Although I find it extremely difficult to keep up with all the daily blogs that my peers are rolling out, I have recently been thinking just how amazing all these women writers are. Actually that’s not true. I guess I really find it amazing that now, all of these amazing women have a way to be heard. Not until the past few years has it been so easy to find each other and share stories, advice, sorrow, excitement, love, dreams, ambition, recipes, fashion and desperately sought after information that helps us feel connected. Connected to other women going through the same things we are or went through years ago and can now offer guidance.

One of my girlfriends asked me why it is that I don’t talk that much about myself and my feelings one on one, but seem to have no trouble opening up when I write. I didn’t have any one solid answer then, but after mulling it over for a week or so, I think I have a better grasp on it. It’s much easier to purge my emotions to the keyboard because I don’t need to make eye contact with anyone or face judgement. It’s the coward’s way out I suppose, but still it’s true for me. Also, I write for myself as a therapy. When the day, week or whatever gets to be too much, I just mentally release it all to my computer and I don’t have to worry about it tuning me out because I’ve complained about the same thing over and over again. Which, let’s face it, we all do sometimes. Lastly, I get to edit what I write. Sadly, we can’t take back the words that we speak. They are just out there hanging in the air and have to deal with the consequences. Again, the cowards way out. It would be wonderful if I was courageous enough to speak my mind and emotions whenever I felt it, but not wanting to offend rules over that desire.

So, back to the original concept of this post. The internet has given us all a way to be closer to people we would have never known existed otherwise. A woman in London, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Alaska, New York, Boston, Germany, New Jersey… All connected by our need to be heard and more importantly, understood. Maybe we want some fresh feedback. Maybe we just want to feel like our feelings matter and that our likes and dislikes are shared by other women. Maybe we want to be the ones guiding our sisters through their tough times.

Whatever the reason that this global writing revolution started, I’m glad for it. I’m glad for all of the women that light up my computer screen, put knew meals on my table, teach me, inspire me and help me feel more connected everyday.

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Gracefully

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

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I sincerely believe that women are far better off embracing the years they’ve lived, rather than pretending that they’ve never happened. We’ve all seen countless photos of older female (and sometimes barely out of their twenties) celebrities that have altered their bodies to look younger. More times than not, they end up looking nothing like their former selves. Sadly, there are those that have completely sacrificed beauty to the knife and have come out looking somewhat alien.

Last year I was taking an afternoon to myself, reading magazines and sipping coffee at Borders. I was fulfilling my guilty pleasure of losing myself in a fashion magazine. I believe it was the Vogue age issue. So of course they had models in their 20′s, 30′s, 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and possibly even their 70′s. I came across this photo of a gorgeous woman that seemed ageless to me. A lovely face framed by long silver hair, wearing a simple, yet chic outfit. Yes, I realize that all the photos were airbrushed. Even so, there was something radiant about this woman. She didn’t cut her hair short, like many women do when their hair turns grey. She seemed so confident and comfortable in her skin. I snapped a picture of the page to remind myself of the way I hoped to feel when I reached her age, what ever that age was.

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Tiny Reflection

02 Friday Mar 2012

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Today I’ve started to wake up to the fact that all I need to do to teach myself patience, is to closely observe my little boy. His utter lack of patience is a result of watching my reactions to his behavior every day. He is so very much like me, mainly because he spends nearly every moment with me. He has witnessed my short temper, heard my yells of frustration and learned that if you want to get your point across, you need to be loud. I don’t think that I’m a bad mother. I just think that after taking the natural birth class to learn how to get through the pain of labor, I should have taken a class on zen parenting.

Seeing Miles repeatedly lose his cool to the point of tears while playing with his friend today, has pushed me to help him deal with the stress of not always winning an argument. I told him to breathe and try not getting so upset. To try talking about why you’re upset instead of yelling and crying. It seemed to calm him down at least for the moment. Every time I stopped to calm him down, it reinforced the coping technique for me too. It’s sad knowing that he has learned this reaction from me, but good to know that if I change my behavior it may improve his ability to deal with stressful situations.

It’s amazing how much our children learn from us, just by watching and listening. It can be scary knowing that we are their first and most important role models. That in itself can be incredibly stressful. So for today, I’m trying to remember to breathe deeply and to talk about what’s bothering me instead of yelling. This won’t be easy for me, but I’ve gt to try.

Wellness through singing…

22 Thursday Sep 2011

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For those that don’t know, I’m a classically trained vocalist that never took my singing to the professional level because I was too busy finding myself. Yow, that sentence kicks me in the gut a little, but the truth hurts sometimes. I had the talent (or so I was told), but never had the drive to make things happen. I was too young and too hungry for social interactions to get to my 8 am Music Theory class or practice my conducting assignments (p.s. I looked like an untrained monkey flapping its arms). Besides I was going to be a singer, not a teacher. So who cared, right? Well, my professors didn’t care if I was there or not, but my parents sure did. After my second year of mediocre grades and a slew of incompletes, they pulled the plug on my music school career. I continued taking vocal lessons for a year or so, but finally stopped all together due to lack of money and having no idea where I was going with it.

Over the years, through my twenties and my first marriage, I lost track of how much singing meant to me. I forgot how it made me feel and how it freed me up inside. Some people find it through exercise, talking or drugs. My freedom comes from singing. As loud as I can. Driving in the car, blasting whatever song I’m feeling at the moment. Windows rolled up, so it’s all I can hear. All I can feel. For a long time, that’s the only singing I did. Car, shower…yada yada yada. After meeting Kofi (second and last husband), the glimmer of hope shined on my little musical heart. Being a musician himself he encouraged me to record a few songs with him for my friend’s wedding gift and my mom’s birthday. It was…glorious. Standing in his small recording studio/bedroom, singing to his instrumentals was dream like. It felt so right. It made me feel closer to him and closer to myself. All that anger that I’d been holding on to from my first marriage started to fall away piece by piece. Oh we had such plans! We wanted to record an album of covers, then one of originals. A non-traditional Christmas album done our way. The dreams went on. They turned out to be just that, dreams. We put them off and off and off… then we had Miles. Yeah well it takes much more dedicated musicians than ourselves to get into the studio on a regular basis with a baby in the mix. So we let it slide indefinitely.

For some odd reason, now that we are on baby number two, the music has bullied its way back into my life. Thanks to a friend, I started singing with the Raritan Valley Community Chorus while I was pregnant with Juniper. I wasn’t really sure if I could continue after he was born, but here it is three and a half months later and I’m making it work. From there I was offered a spot in the Riverside Quartet as the new alto. A professional quartet! It’s not Broadway, but it’s filling me up inside.

Being a full-time stay at home mother can be (and is) overwhelming. The tears, tantrums and tribulations drain me like nothing ever has. I’m assured by my peers that my children are lovely and well-behaved (in public anyway), but that doesn’t make the tough days any easier to get through. Up until now, I was able to find some solace in quiet activities like cooking and crochet, but it wasn’t the cleansing that my spirit needed. I guess my voice needed to be heard again. It had been wasting it’s time on yelling, pleading and correcting and forgot how to be happy. It’s now slowly relearning how to be pretty again. It’ll take some time to get my voice back in shape, but I’m willing to put in the time. I need this.

A side note: After a particularly grueling rehearsal, I find my stomach muscles feeling tighter as if I’ve been doing some crunches. So, if I can get a flatter tummy out of singing too, what’s not to love?

Fighting past the isolation

04 Wednesday May 2011

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When I first had Miles, I encountered the strongest feelings of happiness and love that I’d ever known. I felt like, here he is, my little companion in life. Within a month we had bonded tightly and even though I was in the throes of depression and angst from my struggle with breastfeeding, I still had a full heart. My life however, felt empty. The friends and people at work that I had come to rely on for socialization had all but disappeared from my life (some circumstantially and some by choice). Kofi and my family remained steadfast and my rock to cling to when the feeling of loneliness took over. It was the knowledge that everyone else in my circle had something else to do during the day and couldn’t just take a day off or even an hour away from work to entertain me that made me feel stranded. Of course I could go out with Miles and walk or shop or what have you, but it was still just this little non-verbal being and me. No real conversations or mature dialogue. You just can’t get that with an infant.

By the time Kofi got home at night, all I wanted to do was talk. Talk about ANYTHING. Sometimes I got what I needed from our conversations, sometimes I didn’t. Through no fault of his own, Kofi just couldn’t always be what was missing in my life. A girlfriend. Someone to talk silly fashion talk to. Someone that could really understand what I was feeling. I needed some estrogen in my life and there was none in sight! After a while things started to change and I was able to connect with some women that were new mothers and even further down the road, made some female friends that were not mothers. It took me what seems like forever to regain my life to a certain degree and to create a new social circle for myself. I have a few good female friends that are relatively local. I’ve started singing in a community choir and I’ve been able to revisit some hobbies that have always brought me happiness.

There is a fear that the new baby (due in 4 weeks) will again lead me into a dark cave of solitude, but hopefully if it does, I’ll be able to lead myself out fairly quickly. I know that I’m going to be exhausted and stressed out. I know that breastfeeding will consume my time again, not to mention trying to keep up with a 2  1/2-year-old at the same time. I know that it will be very easy to slip back into bad habits and forget the simple joys in life, like taking time for myself. But still, if I did it once I’m hopeful that I can do it again.

It’s come to my attention recently that stay at home mothers are not the only ones that suffer from feelings of isolation. A dear girlfriend of mine that is single has felt at times that because the majority of her close female friends are married with kids, she has been put on the back burner by the people she cares the most about. She feels that their families come first and she comes second, third or not at all. While she admits that of course family should come first, it doesn’t make her feel any less left out. We married parents sometimes feel like people should just deal with it if we cancel plans because little Timmy needs extra help with homework or someone at home has the sniffles. We take it for granted that a hip single gal will find something way more interesting to do with her time than hang out with the old boring couple anyway. Not always true and no matter what the circumstance, we all still have hurt feelings when plans are dropped without warning.

Yes,  I decided to stay home and raise my kids for a multitude of reasons. I still find myself looking forward to the day when I can get back to work. I’m still the independent hard-working sassy pants I always was. Kids haven’t changed that in me. She decided to focus on a career and has worked hard to get where she is. Still, she finds herself looking forward to the day that she meets her settle down man and starts her own family. Being a hard-working sassy pants hasn’t changed that in her. In order to avoid the isolation from setting in, we need to recognize that we are all the same on a basic level and our need for contact with our sisters is real. What ever it is that we spend our days doing, we function better as woman when we can connect with each other when we need it the most.

Update from Sicky Magee.

02 Wednesday Mar 2011

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I’ve got a beast of a cold. I thought it was getting better, but my annoying head cold that consisted of a stuffy/runny nose and watery eyes has now added a raspy cough to the mix. Yay me. Miles has the same cold, but his progressed much faster than mine. He went straight to the cough as soon as the stuffiness and runny nose came to town.

I’ve added a lot more vitamin C to our diets and been trying to limit our milk intake to try to cut down on the yucky gunk that has been taking over our bodies. Kofi has remained immune luckily. Everyone at his work is sick too. He says it sounds like a hospital in there. He’s hardly ever sick and when he is it only lasts a day or two. LUCKY!

So today I made some chicken broth from some bones that I had in the freezer and a pitcher of fresh lemonade. I figured some soup and some nice tasting liquids could only help matters. I tried to coax Miles out for a walk since it was going to be a warmer day today, but he really insisted that he wasn’t up to it. Poor guy. Tomorrow is suppose to be cold again, so probably no outing then either. All I can do is open a window now and then to try to get some fresh air into the joint and hope it clears out some of the germs. It doesn’t help that he keeps putting EVERYTHING in his mouth. If he didn’t already have all of his teeth I’d say he was teething. But he just keeps shoving toys in there and then I get to disinfect them all when he’s done with them. Again, yay me!

The pregnancy is going very well so far, a small bout of sciatica and a couple colds aside. Since this will most likely be my last, I’m trying my best to enjoy all of the ups and downs that come with being “with child”. I’ve only got two months and change to go. It’s hard to believe. It seems like I just took the pregnancy test not so long ago. Still no name picked out, but his room is starting to look like a babies room instead of the office/guest room that it has been since we moved in. Crib and changing table in place. Across from them, a dresser purchased from antique store. Glider, ready to glide. Pretty soon there is going to be another little person in the house.

It’s strange but I’m having a hard time remembering what it was like having a newborn to care for. I’m sure that it’ll all come back to me, but right now it’s a little scary to think about. Thank goodness Miles is able to do a lot of things for himself now. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have twins and trying to keep two babies fed, cleaned and sleeping at the same time. I know that I could handle it if I had to, but I’m glad that I don’t.

Before Miles was born, I had crocheted him a receiving blanket and hat. I had wanted to do the same for this baby, but I just haven’t been motivated enough to make it happen. I still have a couple of months to try to get it done. We’ll see. He may end up in all hand me downs and nothing new that’s just for him. I was the seventh child in my family, so I’m sure that I didn’t have any new things for a long time either. As a result, I started working when I was 14 so that I could buy the things that I wanted so I wouldn’t have to ask my parents for a lot. I learned financial responsibility from a young age because of it. Does that mean that hand me downs create kids/people better able handle their money? Maybe, but it probably means that I’m tired and sick and need to stop writing now.

That’s all from Sicky Magee.

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