I come home from the optometrist with dilated eyes, and decide to blow up 40 balloons. It seemed like a reasonable choice at the time. Five, what an entirely massive number to me. A towering monument of times gone by, balloons seem right.
An arch of them to be precise, I want to be that mom. The one who has a big to-do for everything important, who decorates and makes things lovely. I want to be the magic maker, but my eyeballs wish I would stop. "A balloon festival!" My small girl shrieks, it is her last day being four.
"This is the best day ever!" Thea declares, and I decide I can handle the popped blood vessels in my face. I fill 'em up and fling them into the living room as fast as I can.
Balloon Festival
Suddenly, I'm not just trying to act like everything is fine. It actually is, my home is full of laughter, my children delighted by this simple thing. I stop scrubbing and priming and hoping somehow, I can wipe the counters right into perfect motherhood.
I slow down and breathe once my task is finished, leaving my arbitrary worry that I won't complete a balloon arch in time somewhere near my garbage can.
And yeah, I will cry again an hour later because some part of me can't handle this. A birthday, such a big birthday. I'm a whimpering mess when no one is looking, and I let myself be one.
Shadow work? Yeah, I dig into it. I've learned to accept the harder parts of myself over the years. Recognize where my feelings come from, what parts of me my pain lives in.
So much of that seems to be validating myself for being a never-ending crybaby. Self-love, neat! It also means recognizing that I want to have a balloon festival too. That I'll never run out of reasons to be anxious unless it's by choice. Recenter and roll in the balloons.
I don't have to be everything. I feel as if I do so often however, probably because my own mother did more drugs than parenting of me as a child. She preferred a slap to speaking about issues, and always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.
She'd blow smoke into my face while yelling, what a combo! I knew as soon as I laid eyes on Thea that I had to be the total antithesis of that. I never wanted my kid to feel how I did. I wanted to be a parent like my dad, who had me 99% of the year. He always had a fun educational activity, a silly remark or noise while we played. My dad was magic in a way I didn't understand until now.
He made a choice each and every day to be that way. To stay bright and fun. I had no idea how many struggles my dad had until I was much older. He seemed invincible.
"Mommy, you're so brave."
The words came as a shock to me when Thea spoke them out of left field a few weeks back.
I am?
I am. I feel brave when I think on it.
As much as I worry I won't do things right, that my health makes me less of a parent, that I am fundamentally lacking in the right traits... My kids think the opposite. All I have to do is try. Why do I keep deciding that isn't enough?
Some good friends of mine call me out on this. Oddly enough, most are on Hive. Dear souls who I'm convinced God sent me. They remind me how ridiculous my expectations of myself are.
I haven't been posting in part because my vision is garbage. 20/20 garbage to be exact. YEAH, in typical Grindan fashion I have some rare disease called VSS that makes my field of vision filled with weird and varied spots. Backlit anything seems to really annoy my eyes lately.
Why do I say it's typical? I seem to collect the suckers, that's why. I think I have... 7 rare diseases now? Overachiever, I know. Save some for everyone else, greedy body, we have enough diseases at home!
Is this as funny to anyone else? It should be, my humor is sincere. When all else fails, I will choose to laugh. It has always been a satisfying choice.
Laughing at myself for the second reason I haven't been posting is important too. I have very little writing time, and I spend it typing stories I hate. Everything I write is stupid, and no one can tell me otherwise.
Except my friends do anyways. They encourage me to share personal stories, to free write, to "Just post the damn thing!"
They also understand when I don't, help me in the ways they can. I think everyone will be mad if I am absent, but they aren't as far as I know.
Do you just like to be anxious? It's a question I ask myself a lot, and there is a ton of love hidden in it.
My dad always said, "Don't take yourself too seriously, no one else does." I think I've mentioned that on Hive before, but it bears referencing again. I am a WAY over-serious person. I think things to death, revive them, and start again. This does not create happiness.
After the rush of smacking the balloons around, running through them, and rolling on the floor with them has worn off, Thea selects a favorite. "Little Nonner!" She names it, although at first, I heard 'little goner'.
This golden fella gets the royal treatment, its placed in a basket which becomes it's crib. "Shhhhh," Thea urges, "I just got the baby to sleep!" huh, I wonder where she's heard that.
I watch how much she finds in this inflated piece of plastic, the possibilities to her are endless.
I felt that way once, I remember in this moment. I knew I could figure out how to fly off into the sky with my beach towel, if I could just jump the right way. I was going to build a robot with a broom, some boxes, and a fitted sheet... Why did this part of me die after childhood?
Logic, sure. Yes, except that pure logic only has so many uses. An open mind is the winning factor in my experience, and a sense of wonder gives that a foundation to stand on.
I try to live in the world my children see whenever possible. It's medicinal, and it makes me remember what matters.
When we ate dinner, Little Nonner sat with us. Thea made sure he had his favorite, one egg! Yum.
A perfect last day of four, although I'd prefer 365 more. Some insane part of me wishes my kids would stay small forever. I don't care that I don't get to sleep, that my limbs are sore or my patience thin at times...
It's such an easy trade off, even when I feel that I struggle to find 'me' time. I do, we all do. You lose part of your identity as a parent, especially if you are a stay-at-home one.
Shadow work reappears in my mind because I know embracing that I don't love being a mom 100% of the time is important.
I try to be so positive, but that falters if you don't deal with the negative I think... It's okay that I feel overwhelmed a lot, I hold myself in it. I give those thoughts room to play out. I hear myself, which was a weird thing to learn to do. And then I change the circumstances.
Maybe that's going outside, running a bubble bath for them to soak in, or blowing up 40 balloons without rushing to make them into some fantastic creation.
Wouldn't you know that was such a great thing, because making a balloon arch is a nightmare!
Not bad, eh? If I had an Instagram account, I'd have so much street cred with the crafty moms right now! Of course, with hanging the arch being my last act of the night, I went to bed feeling pretty flipping awesome.
I had to laugh when I woke up to the dang thing on the floor. "Don't take yourself too seriously..." Yep.
It didn't even matter, because a few moments later the birthday girl woke up. Pancakes got cooking, presents were opened, and we took a long walk before her party.
"I'm fiiiiiiiiive!!"
It's bittersweet writing about it now, almost 10 days later. It was a beautiful day filled with loved ones and delicious food. I make Thea a homemade strawberry cake every year for her birthday, but this year she wanted an ice cream cake. I found a strawberry one for her, but it felt... hard.
The silly pains of being a mom. Our biggest job is to raise aware people who can make their own choices confidently... and then they start doing it. OOOOF! Right in the feels.
She humored me with so many photos though, which is rare for her. It felt like a gift from the universe, now I can remember this day forever. Thea was born at 9am knowing exactly what she wanted, and I watch all the ways that has developed. She is direct and bold, unafraid in so many situations that should be too big for her.
Thea is adventurous, her dinner request was sushi. What 5-year-old eats sushi? I suppose the big sister of the 1.5-year-old who does as well.
"You're teaching your brother a lot of interesting things!" My dad remarks, my mother-in-law chuckling with me when Thea sighs in response.
"YEAH, he's sticky."
She has no idea why none of us understand this response, but luckily her cousin does, and they giggle to some inside joke.
After we eat, I watch the girls play with the colorful paper from gifts, throwing it into the air with shrieks of joy. I think of how I wrapped most of the ones from my husband and I in reusable materials due to my desire to reduce waste...
This waste wasn't wasted one bit! Although the pictures are blurry, I'm happy that I managed to get a few decent action shots. The attempt made me remember when I used to do actual photography, taking my camera out and about to take careful shots of nature.
When the day was over, and things went calm, Thea climbed onto my lap. "I can't believe you're five now." I whispered into her golden blond hair. My eyes teared up with the words, and I cursed myself for it, but only for a moment.
My tiny person was curled up on me, and it felt so good to hold on to her, to this time in our life. For the 1000th time that day, I accepted that crying was allowed. "It's okay mom," My sharp lady says, noting the crack in my voice. "I'm still a kid, you know?" She's blindingly, brilliantly right.
A few days later, my husband went in for a vasectomy. We've talked it through for over a year, the decision has been solid for months. Yet, the whole week before I couldn't stop feeling that I wanted to have another baby. This desperate feeling that it's all coming to an end, if I don't have one more soon...
This week I spent a lot of time mulling over that feeling, and the mountain of others listed here. I thought about how I stress so much about how things will go, or the passage of time, that I forget to be present here and now.
I don't want another child, I'm too old. Not age wise, but in my soul. I want to recapture the past, and you don't make a human just to do that. I'm anxious that my daughter is growing up, because I fear she will experience bad things.
It's wonderful to be needed, it hurts that it will change. However, I have to trust that she knows how to make good choices. She is resilient. I have to trust that my feelings are natural, and stop trying to adjust around them. And when all that feels impossible, I have to sit with the boiling anxiety in my chest, accept it as part of me. Duality is life, and five is just fine.
All photos in this blog are my own, taken with a cell phone camera.
