Tales of a Square Peg

Huh?

“What did you say?”  She said it again.  I picked up my jaw off the floor and flashed back to the first time I said a …um…chosen word in my mom's presence.  Before I continue, you’ve got to understand that my mom was “old school,”  in fact, she’d be 84 on her next birthday.  Hers was the generation where you didn’t sit down and do mini-psychotherapy to find out why your 6-year-old just cussed like a sailor.  You simply spanked her little bottom, and she never said the word again – even if she didn’t know why saying the word was wrong in the first place.  Which is what happened with me.  But I knew I wanted to do things differently with GG.

“Who have you heard say that word?”  Heaven knows that Jamie and I aren’t halo-heads or anything, but strong language is something that just doesn’t happen around our house.  In fact, I was 30 years old before I ever heard my own dad swear.   Anyway, back to GG the Sailor.  “I heard it from my Surf’s Up movie.”  Great.  Not only did I take her to see that movie, but bought her the DVD too…So we had yet another “talk.”   We talked about how she may hear people saying words like that, but it doesn’t mean that she should use them; how she’s got so many words in her vocabulary that she doesn’t have to come up with dirty words to explain herself; how saying dirty words can get her in trouble at school or even cause her to lose friends.  And whole bunch of other stuff that took about 10 minutes to go through, as well as a “time out” and an apology to me.

Really…didn’t I just have “the talk” about alcohol with her the other day?  Great…and now we’ve moved onto swearing.  Guess I better buy a book about the “Birds & the Bees”…that’ll probably be the topic of tomorrow’s “talk” at the rate we’re going.

Anybody have suggestions for some "cover the gray" hair coloring?

I think I'm gonna need it.

“Now….are you crying because it’s that time of the month, or uh…..”  That was my Beloved's response to me crying over a working-mother dilemma I was facing. 

Bottom line is this: there was a last-minute work thing that got scheduled smack-dab in the middle of GG’s first big-kid speaking role at school.  “She’ll be fine.  You know she’s got it memorized, she’ll do great.  I’ll be there.  I’ll videotape it."  That was my husband's very logical reasoning. Jamie’s not clueless – far from it.  My job’s been cranking up lately and he’s really been Dad AND Mom lately, so I should have been thankful.  But instead, I was ripped up in shreds.  So no – the tears weren’t because of “that time of the month,” these were bona fide Working-Mom Tears.  He looked at me helplessly as I forced out an "Okay."  Realizing his logical logic was useless to his teary wife, he said “You need to talk to Amy about this.”  He meant BFF Amy.  We’ve been friends since we were five and he knew she’d talk some sense into me.

But he forgot BFF Amy is also a mom…with THREE kids.  BFF Amy and I talked about it…and like a Mom, she advised…”Yeah, that’s hard… she’ll have other stuff, but she’s only going to have her first time doing something like this once...and you can't get that back.”  Later, I talked to BFF Becky – she’s my sister-in-law and GG’s Godmother.  Back when her 20-something-year-old was GG’s age, she was a working mom too.  After a lot of tears on my part and lots of hugs on BFF Becky’s part, she offered “Maybe you just have to stand up and tell ‘em that your daughter comes first.”  But at the same time, she also understood the work obligation “But if you have to be at work, you tell me – and I’ll be there.  I know it won't be like you being there, but I’m her Godmother. That’s what I’m here for, honey.”  Makes me tear up now just writing about it.

Anyway, that’s what I love about my Mom-BFFs…they get it.  They put up with every conversation being about the crisis at hand, even if it means having a week-long conversation about the same thing.  They get the push-pull of working and mothering, and they’ve got the common sense to say when it’s time to push back.  They put up with Working-Mom Tears….and they never, EVER ask if the tears are there because it’s “that time of the month.”