Dear Mami,

You’re in England and I’m far away, but I’m thinking of you.

Thank you for:

* Always telling me you loved me, even when you hated my black nails and Adam-Ant-inspired hairstyle

* Insisting that school came above all else

* Making great Sunday brunches

* Teaching me about being generous, fun-loving and social

* Being there for me when I became a wife and mother

* Loving my kids more than I ever would have dreamed possible

* Tolerating my messy house

* Not giving up on making suggestions, even when they’re not often acted upon

* Being unabashedly yourself

* Dealing with Papa (ha! ha!)

* Saying sowsse in stead of south

* Having an open-door policy

* Grabbing the knife from the thief in Spain and teaching me what a strong woman is made of!

Do you know there’s a war going on between mom-camps, and it’s not between working and stay-at-home mothers? It’s between Beta, or Slacker Moms, and Alpha moms.

Man, sometimes these Mommy Wars are exhausting!

Parents have such a big job, and there’s so much at stake, it’s natural that we second guess ourselves. Confidence and genuine happiness is a real gift in mothering, because our kids can sense it. That’s why we wanted to write this book, When Mom’s Happy, Everyone’s Happy, full of real life anecdotes from moms all throughout the US, sharing their stories about how they found their own way through the maze of mothering.

The moms who are best off are the ones who feel in touch with their instincts. They feel confident that they’re doing things their way, and don’t look to others for answers. When we lose touch with how WE want to parent, we forget that we have choices to make. It’s easy to start feeling pressure to do things a certain way. I think Alpha moms feel that sense of competition and pressure all the time, but if they can handle it, fine. For me, personally, it’s all about knowing what I think is important and not getting caught up in the details.

It’s no secret that women lean heavily on their friends, especially their girlfriends, in order to stay sane. When we just can’t take it anymore – the kids are driving us nuts, our husband doesn’t get it, our boss is being difficult – it’s our friends we turn to. In a 2004 Time Poll, 63% of women said they talk to friends or family in order to improve their mood. Women want and need to be heard. Try going online and searching for mothers groups: If you type in “blogs about mothers,” you’ll get 15 million sites!

“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love,” Elie Wiesel, Writer and Holocaust survivor

When they’re stressed, women release the hormone oxytocin, according to Dr. Laura Cousin Klein, Assistant Professor of Bio-behavioral Health at Penn State University. This hormone encourages them to “tend and befriend” rather than reacting as men do, by “fight or flight.”

It’s simple really: it’s written in women’s genetic codes that they turn towards family and friends when they’re under pressure. Finding community makes us feel more powerful. Connecting with friends re-sets our inner equilibrium.

How many times have you spent a chaotic weekend afternoon with your family when your home is a disaster zone, kids are fighting, and chores need to get done but are being ignored by everyone? It’s about all you can do to gather up your brood and head over to a friend’s place for dinner. You’ve barely said a word to your husband all day and your nerves are frayed.

But… as soon as you walk through the door, your friend gives you a hug and a glass of wine, the kids run off to play, you sit down, and ahhhhh….. you start to relax. Before you know it, you’re laughing at yourself, and your friends are sharing their own war stories. Suddenly your husband looks human to you again, and you’re back to being comfortable in your own skin.

And, once again, you ask yourself: where would I be without my friends?

OK, it’s something we all deal with when we get married and have kids: our sex drive changes but our husband’s doesn’t. Is sex really so important to a marriage? Aren’t there other ways to stay connected?

What do we do about making sure we’re not just bringing up our kids side by side, sharing the same house, bed, food, but not really sharing our lives. Our inner lives. Does it matter?

As a teenager, I remember the parents of my friends started getting divorced. I wondered how it was possible for a man and a woman to stay together for such a long time — decades — and THEN decide they’d had it with each other. Now as I approach my 18th wedding anniversary, I understand much better. At this point in a marriage, a lot of people have given up trying to understand and connect with each other. They’re too tired.

So what do we need to do to make sure this doesn’t happen to us? One solution: massage oil.

Don’t laugh, I’m being serious…!

So… we’ve been talking about “living in the moment.” We’d like to know what that means to you. Is it something you aspire to?

But here’s the $1,000,000 question: what do you do when living in the moment sucks?

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
William James, philosopher

What do you make of that, you old monkey mind*? Doesn’t just thinking that make you feel more calm?

I think if all of us multi-tasking mothers out there said that little mantra to ourselves every morning as we prepared to launch into our action-packed days, we’d be so much easier on ourselves. It can be a real challenge to get our hyperactive inner critic to shut up sometimes. Does a day go by where you don’t feel as though you’ve failed at something, and you tell yourself what a mess you are?

Let’s hear what your mantras are… what do you tell yourself when you need a boost?

* see last week’s post

I’m reading a book that’s got me thinking about the “monkey mind.”  I’m convinced I have one.  (I don’t know what happened to the normal Katrin mind
- it was in this skull of mine right up until I had kids, but that’s another story, I guess).

I’m about half way through “Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, enjoying her hilarious depictions of trying to meditate.  It reminds me of when I first did yoga and could barely resist bursting into laughter at the grunts, smells and excruciating boredom I was enduring.  I now LOVE yoga, so I guess that teaches me not to make snap judgments.

Sorry, I digress.

In her book, Gilbert talks about being burdened with “thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.”
(Now, she’s borrowed this term from Buddhists, but that is some great
writing!)  And then she says: “You are, after all, what you think.  Your emotions are slaves to your thoughts, and you are slave to your emotions.”

Aha!  For me, this connects directly to how I relate to my kids.  How often do I catch myself reacting to them in some way that their actions do not warrant, just because I am (pick one): tired; bored; worried; enervated.  I may snap or judge or say no, when if only I were able to step back for a second and stop those damn monkey thoughts from getting tangled up in the branches I might behave quite differently.

So, my resolution after reading this is to calm that hyper mental activity and try to focus my thoughts on the here and now when I am with my children.

Disentangle thoughts from emotions.  Stop being a slave to the emotions.

How can I do this?  By giving myself a break every now and then.  Giving that monkey mind a nice little nap.  I think it will make me a better mother.

We either want to be perfect moms, or we deride perfect moms. But we only deride them because we secretly want to be perfect too.

Do we? Do we really want to be perfect?

Some people (like me) value quirkiness over perfection. Doesn’t real perfection lack passion, spontaneity, uniqueness?
Here’s two definitions of quirky:

1. A peculiarity of behavior; an idiosyncrasy: “Every man had his own quirks and twists”Harriet Beecher Stowe.

2. An unpredictable or unaccountable act or event; a vagary: quirk of fate.The word itself even sounds cool.

So when my kindergartner wore five summer dresses layered on top of one another in the middle of winter and her great aunt said she looked like a Hungarian bag lady, I was actually flattered. I thought, yeah, I’m learning! I’m learning to let go!

Anyone glad it’s Monday?

A co-worker of mine (married with no kids) just stopped in my office and asked what I did this weekend… my reply was simple, “lots of kid stuff.” She prodded a bit more and so I started to tell her all the things we did: hockey practice for my son, swim team for my daughter. Kids friends in and out of the house throughout the weekend. On Saturday night, my husband and I squeezed in a quick dinner, between sets of a musical my daughters are in.

“That’s kind of what you do when you have kids,” I added when I saw her face.

What I neglected mention was all the other stuff I did: broke up fights about the clothing, cleaned up the messy house, answered the phone about 20 times for everyone else but me, negotiated with my husband about his own plans and the plans for the kids, and finally passed out at 9 o’clock last night, lying on the floor of my daughter’s bedroom!

Then I asked her about her weekend…

She had Chinese take out and a watched a movie with her husband on Friday night. On Saturday, she went to a salon to get her hair done, spent some time shopping and then had lunch with a friend. Saturday night, she and her husband met another couple at a new restaurant in the city (she asked me if I’d heard of it… of course, I had not…) and on Sunday she did a bit of laundry, picked up around the apartment and went to visit her in-laws for dinner.

Sound civilized?

In many ways, weekends are harder than the week days. I remember dropping the kids at pre-school and saying to another mom, TGIM—Thank God It’s Monday!

One of my favorite cartoons shows a huge statue of a frumpy-looking woman, carrying a briefcase, in the middle of a park. On the marble slab underneath, it says:

DORIS K. ELSTON

Brain Surgeon * Professional

Model * Artist * Lawyer

plus

MOTHER OF FOUR

It sums up so neatly the quandary of the modern mother (with a nice sense of humor so we don’t take ourselves too seriously). We do so much, we try so hard, and we yearn for recognition — for that sense that the world sees and appreciates our efforts.

Every now and then I’ll spend some time cataloging all the hats I have worn that particular day. Cook, cleaner, therapist, cheerleader, driver, picker-upper-of-junk, teacher, writer, accountant, volunteer, appliance repairwoman, task-master, hoochy mama… it’s quite impressive. I think we should all make a point of recognizing that even if we don’t always succeed at achieving the “perfection” we may dream of, we do a whole helluva lot.

Robin Toner’s front page New York Times article today talks about how in the past female politicians have had to downplay their feminine, motherly sides and emphasize their power and toughness. Not any more. With women rising up the male-dominated ranks of politics — both here in the U.S and in Europe — there’s an acceptance that they are truly multi-faceted beings, and that this is an impressive trait. Yes, they can be loving, soft and kind. And yes, they can be decisive, ambitious and influential.

Mothers wear many hats, and they wear them well!