Tag Archives: mother

A Few Thoughts On Rejection

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For those of you who had the balls to go audition for Listen To Your Mother, you rock. To those of you who made it, congratulations.

To those of you who didn’t – hello, my sisters.

I have seen friends celebrate and I have seen friends react to not being chosen. Of course it’s natural to be upset. In addition to pouring our souls out through words, we then got up in front of others and *gasp* read those words aloud.

The challenge in being rejected is to not take it personally. But.. but… those are my words, you’re thinking! I READ THEM. HOW IS THIS NOT PERSONAL???

Think of it this way – you plan to sew a gorgeous quilt. You need fabric first, right? So you go to a local fabric store with hundreds of choices. You spend hours sorting through the fabric, comparing them to each other and analyzing the appearance of each scrap in the final design. You can’t possibly use every single scrap of fabric in the quilt and end up with the appearance you want, right?

That’s what the people in charge of LTYM are doing – they are creating a quilt of words and they can’t possibly use all the words they hear or read during the audition phase. So they are forced to make a final selection after browsing the most amazing “fabrics” they have to choose from. In doing so, they work to find pieces which fall into a specific pattern, pieces which will work together for the show they envision. So, you see, it isn’t about you at all. It’s all about their job to select the best pieces for the design they see before them.

I went into auditioning this year with the mindset that I wouldn’t be chosen. But if I did that, then why bother auditioning?

Because standing in front of people, reading words I wrote, scares the ever-loving crap out of me. It is beyond my comfort zone. I don’t even read my blog posts to myself after I write them if that gives you any indication of how much I dislike reading my words. I struggle to accept the compliment of “hey, you’re a really great writer!” to be completely honest.

I am genuinely happy for those who made it into LTYM shows this year. It is an honor to be chosen and it takes courage to get up in front of such large audiences and read personal stories. To those who with me in not being chosen – you are still just as awesome as you were the moment before you took a shaky deep breath and stepped inside that audition room (or connected via G+ Hangout or Skype). No one gets to tell you any different. It takes guts to do that and even more guts to cope with rejection.

Below is the piece I read on Sunday morning for my audition. I like it, they laughed, everyone who has read it has told me it rocks. But it just didn’t fit into the show for whatever reason. I’m okay with that because you know what? I’m writing way more this year than I was last year and with each audition, I’m getting better at it. Sure, it’s nice to have acknowledgements and acceptance from others but in reality the only opinion which matters of yourself is your own.

Enjoy reading my audition piece!

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It’s a strange balance, this juxtaposition of womanhood and motherhood.

If we falter even the slightest, it’s as if someone yanked the worst possible Jenga block out of our intricately formed tower and we’re left hoping we’re as brilliant as Raymond Babbit, able to immediately calculate what’s fallen down as well as how to fix it.

As mothers, we are expected to heal everything, know everything, cook everything, be everything. I don’t know everything, I can’t heal everything, I am not everything, but I am able to cook almost everything. Except insects because that’s just gross.

When I was a little girl, I shoved stuffed animals under my shirt in the sunroom of our family cottage over on the Jersey Shore. I’d unceremoniously yank them out after a few minutes (which back then, felt like an eternity), giving birth to my “children.”

Stuffed animals made the best children in the world. They didn’t cry, they didn’t poop, they didn’t throw up….seriously. They were awesome. Plus, how on earth could you be sad whilst cuddling an adorable fuzzy teddy bear?

Fast forward about 20 years or so and there I was, in a hospital in rural South Carolina, about to give birth. It was a bit more complicated than yanking a stuffed animal from under my Mickey Mouse shirt – this time, I was screaming, pushing, and praying the epidural would magically start working on the side of my body engulfed in enough pain to convince me it was on fire.

Then, after 14 or so hours of labor, she arrived. In true Jersey Girl fashion, my oldest slid from the womb giving the doctor the finger on my behalf. I didn’t know what to do with her. She wasn’t soft and fuzzy. She was wet, naked, kicking, and screaming. The advice from the nurse about breastfeeding? Make sure you get the entire areola in her mouth – you know, the brown part. (Gee, thanks!)

I sought help at 12 weeks postpartum for depression only to be told “Hey! You don’t have PPD because at four weeks postpartum, your hormones slid magically back into place! But wait, there’s more…you’ve won a visit with our in-house therapist who will keep rescheduling!”

Swell.

We moved back to be closer to his family and I toughed it out without professional help. Then we got pregnant with our second.

Second time around saw me through over forty hours of labor. Delivery was fast once I pushed. But then, she was diagnosed with a cleft palate and I lost my mind. Medication at 10 days, hospitalization at 56 days, enlightenment shortly thereafter.

I didn’t have to suffer. I didn’t have to struggle. I had forgotten to mother the most important person in my life…me.

Self-care is not selfish, it is selfless. If you attempt to pour a glass of water from an empty pitcher, it is impossible. The same goes for self-care. If you attempt to care for others while not filling yourself, you will give nothing.

My third child was born after a quick and relatively simple labor. I didn’t have any issues after his birth as I did what I needed to in order to take care of myself first. I took care of my little guy and his sisters, but I managed my own well-being at the same time instead of just theirs.

I mothered all of us.

That, my friends, that is the key to mothering. It isn’t in balancing. It isn’t in being the Martha Stewart at the bake sale. It isn’t in knowing how to solve every single issue that may or may not crop up. It isn’t in being the Joneses on the street or even in being the Mom who lets her kid do whatever he or she wants.

The key to mothering is mothering EVERYONE in your family the best you can, yourself included. You are the nucleus of the family, the center of their worlds, and they are yours. Embrace this. Cherish this. Nourish this. In the process, however, remember to take impeccable care of yourself for without this important step, all of this may suddenly disappear into a dark vortex and suddenly, you won’t be in Kansas any more.

Remember Dorothy’s mantra? There’s no place like home. Only in real life, a mother’s ruby slippers are self-care and you absolutely must remember  to click them together….often.

My Postpartum Voice of the Week badge

Postpartum Voice of the Week: The Monster Within

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Every so often, I read a blog post which takes me right back into the darkness. Right back into the days spent in the middle of the vortex with the Wicked Witch flying right past my window.

This is one of those posts.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time ruminating or introducing the post.

I will say that if you’re vulnerable, you may want to avoid it. There’s a lot of showing instead of telling, raw honesty, and power in this post.

It’s why this post by Kimberly at Reflections of Now is my pick for Postpartum Voice of the Week.

Go. Read. Love.

Far from perfect

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Tousled whisper thin golden hair fell softly around my face as I pulled a stuffed animal from beneath a toddler-sized shirt. Cradling the stuffed creature delicately in my arms, I leaned down to whisper a promise:

“I’m your Mommy. I’ll love you forever. You’ll see.”

In toddler years? Forever lasts two minutes. If that. I repeated this action over and over again as a child. Motherhood, you see, was my dream. My aspiration. My definition of self.

20 something years later, I grew three real babies over the course of four years under an assortment of plus-sized maternity shirts.

I learned birthing a baby was nowhere near as easy as yanking a stuffed animal from beneath a shirt. It was hard work. It hurt. It was traumatizing. And that love? It’s not always there immediately. Sometimes, it’s confusion. Frustration. Anger. Doubt. Guilt. Apologies. Tears. Overwhelming sense of failure. Depression. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Anxiety. Post-Traumatic Mood Disorder.

In short, birth and the aftermath is MESSY.

You can’t turn your back on the aftermath. There’s a creature there requiring attention when you want to sleep. Needing to nurse or feed when all you want to do is cry. Wanting to play when you want to sit. Asking questions when you long for silence. There’s this intrusion on your life, this thing to which you may not know how to relate.

What do you do?

Some rush forward, headlong into the fray, successfully.

Then there are those of us who hate those who rush headlong into the fray successfully. Because we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We’re frozen by fear. Frozen by anticipated judgment of our decisions. Frozen by the potential for failure. The potential of screwing up our kids. Frozen by selfishness. By not knowing what to do – by not wanting to be a parent. By the loss of ourselves. The loss of our lives. Failing to integrate our lives with the needs of this new intrusion, this tiny helpless being imposed upon us. We retreat. We fall back and wonder what’s wrong with us. We wonder why we’re flawed.

But are we flawed? Is there really something wrong with us deep down? Should we be afraid of these “flaws” or should we embrace them?

Yes, there are parents who suffer from Mental Disorders after the birth of a child. I know, I was one of them after the birth of both my daughters. I apologized to my first daughter when she was 7 days old for not knowing how to talk to her. As if she had already memorized Merriam Webster’s entire dictionary, Mother Goose, and Hans Christian Anderson. I refused to leave the house unless I had to because EVERYONE judged me with just a glance. (They didn’t, but inside my fishbowl head, they absolutely did.) I cried. I screamed. Horrible thoughts zoomed in and out of my head.

But I learned.

When my second daughter arrived, we recognized symptoms sooner. Help arrived quicker. Yes, I was hospitalized but it was necessary. I recovered much faster despite the additional complications of her special needs and NICU stay. I started to heal.

Then her brother dropped in as a surprise. I quickly worked on advocacy and care for myself. I was the complication, not the baby. Already experienced in advocacy for others, advocacy for self came naturally. My doctor worked with me, not against me. He treated me as a trusted partner instead of a subordinate. I developed a Postpartum Plan for myself. Handed it to my everyone involved in my life and in my care. I thrived and had a successful Postpartum experience until three months after his birth when all hell broke loose in another area of my life. But because of my careful planning with my postpartum experience, thankfully, I had everything in place I needed in order to deal with this dam break.

I still failed with the hell which slid my way after his birth though, because instead of diving in to advocate for my own care, I waited for someone to dive in and help me. I didn’t ask for help. I waited. Like a fool. I focused on daily living while I waited. Only the necessary – just enough to get by. I buried my issues with the situation at hand and moved forward without dealing with it. I failed to reach for my scalpel and explore the problem. I didn’t dig around to figure out the landscape. So it festered until it exploded, my marriage along with it.

Instead of accepting responsibility for this explosion, I shifted it to everyone else when in reality, I failed to deal with the issues appropriately. Yes, the source rooted elsewhere, but my failure to deal with the aftermath appropriately is ultimately what caused the explosion. No one is responsible for my actions but myself.

Life is messy. It’s not some neatly wrapped package to be displayed in a store window during the holidays like a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s more like a Jackson Pollock piece in progress. Somewhere, eventually, someone will think it’s fabulous and want to buy it. But most will simply see the mess instead of the passionate art deep within.

Bernard Baruch once stated, “The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.” Life is art if you just let go of expectations, of definitions, and learn to LIVE instead of satiate the constant needs of others. Selfish? Yes. But ultimately selfless. How? By letting go and living for YOU, you give more of yourself. You learn what brings you passion, you learn your flaws, you recognize them as beautiful, you recognize that yes, even your weakness is beautiful and not something to be hidden away.

For a very long time, I’ve wrapped my problems in wrapping paper, placed them gently and neatly on a shelf inside my head, then walked away. It worked until the room overflowed and the door burst open, dust, paper, and all my issues flying every which way. I’m sitting in the middle of my brain these days, cleaning house. Step by step. Inch by inch. Face to face with issues I thought I dealt with ages ago.

I don’t know who I am completely these days. I’m not sure where I’m going in life.

But I do know one thing – that room in my head? The one with the shelves? Won’t be rebuilt.

Instead, I’ll be grabbing my scalpels and digging around in my messes in the hopes of understanding them before moving on. Yes, it will be chaotic and unrefined. But it will be resplendent imperfection.

I’m far from perfect. I will make mistakes. I will fail. But I will learn from those mistakes and failures. And that? Makes my life the most beautiful piece of art I will ever have the honour of witnessing.

Go.

Thrive.

Be messy,  imperfect, and blissful.

Make your life Art.

There’s no other way to live.