Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (19 page)
Read Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
The committee members were still looking at me. Feeling guilty, I almost changed my mind to say, “Okay, I’ll do it.” But I didn’t. Because my reason for saying no is important. On Thursday evenings, we watch the fish eat.
Cheryl Kirking
On a Saturday morning a few years back, I made a difficult and irreversible decision. My daughter was at the piano, galloping through
Unchained Melody
. My son was polishing the hallway mirrors, eager to earn a few extra dollars for a new CD. I couldn’t decide if it was the warm mug of coffee cupped in my hands—brewed just right for a change—or the sense of harmony that seemed out of character in a house that had become a war zone as of late, but I realized how crucial it is that a home be a peaceful place away from the turmoil of work and school. And, in those moments, a startling thought welled up in me. I suddenly realized that little by little, I was jeopardizing the greatest source of safety my children can possess: the home that my husband and I have provided for them.
A safe home has little to do with physical elements, even though we judge other people’s homes by the craftsmanship of the woodwork or the quality of the drapes. I’m referring to the “atmosphere” of a home—or maybe “soul” is the definitive word. I recall one weekend years ago, visiting a college friend’s elaborate home. I was so impressed that each bedroom had its own bathroom with the thickest, most luxurious towels. Yet that detail seemed marred by the chilling silence that existed between her parents—a silence so loud that I still recall it vividly. I also remember a rather ramshackle house on the outskirts of my hometown. The lady who lived there was a seamstress, a kind woman who listened with eyes that smiled through peculiar blue-rimmed glasses. Whenever my mother took me for a fitting, I was never quite ready to leave. One evening when I went to pick up a dress, she and her husband, Eddie, with the oil-field grime scrubbed from his skin, sat at the table with their kids. They were eating peach cobbler, laughing loudly and playing Yahtzee, and on that evening, their home, with its worn furniture and framed paint-by-number artwork, was clearly one of the finest.
Uncontrollable hardships may plague a home’s well-being: the loss of a job, a serious illness or even death. But it’s the circumstances many of us encounter on a day-today basis that often wear us down and more often contribute to the breakup of a home. I know many couples just like my husband and myself. Once upon a time each other’s company charmed us. Our infatuation with each other seemed to cast a rosy glow over the fact that we could barely make ends meet as we struggled to balance part-time jobs with our college classes. Our furniture was the cast offs our relatives were glad to unload, we guarded the thermostat with a frugal eye, and tomato soup was a common meal staple. Yet the two of us created a mansion out of our passion. We graduated, found our niche in the working world, bought our first house, and when our children came along, we were even more enchanted with the cozy feeling their wide-eyed wonder contributed to our home. Long walks with the stroller, Dr. Seuss, dancing for fireflies in the warm twilight—we were happy.
But somehow twenty years passed and neither my husband nor I could account for the past five. Our jobs demanded more of our time, and our passion for each other slipped away so gradually I scarcely noticed. Our children grew older and fought more so we bought a house twice as big where we were soon spending our time in four remote corners: my husband with his work or evening TV, I with my nose in a pile of bills, my daughter’s ear glued to the telephone, and my son, depending on his moods, lost in the world of alternative music or ESPN. When my husband and I did talk, it was to argue about how to discipline adolescent angst, or whose turn it was to take out the garbage. What happened to the long walks, “Sam I Am” and the fireflies?
On that Saturday morning months ago, I faced a reality I had been denying. Something I never imagined could happen to me, had happened. I grew dependent on the attention of anotherman. Despite his graying hair, he’s uncannily like the strong-willed but sensitive guy who charmed me almost two decades ago. Our friendship sparkled because we’d never raised headstrong children, never lived together during hay-fever season, and never woken up to each other’s foul breath or puffy eyes. We had never experienced any of the tribulations,minor or major,which test and shape a relationship. In the months that followed, visits with him had grown more intense and drew me farther away from my husband, the other anchor in our children’s home. In fact, I had actually begun to imagine life without the man I had promised to love until my last breath.
And so, in one of the saddest and most awkward moments of my life, I told my friend that I could no longer see him. I ended a friendship with a person who had begun to matter very much to me. As I struggled to abandon my feelings for him and embrace the logic of closing the door, the days which followed were filled with a frightening revelation: somehow, unthinkingly, when half of marriages end in divorce, I had threatened our home with the most common reason: a lack of commitment. I had pursued a selfish desire to the point that I could no longer distinguish between right and wrong. I had been entrusted with a loyal husband and two remarkable children, yet I risked their well-being with every moment I spent in this other person’s company.
After my decision, there was a wave of emptiness that continually washed through me as I moved through each day. I felt it when I laid awake next to my husband who snored peacefully at three in the morning. It came again at work when my mind drifted away from the pile of paperwork in front of me or the discussion at a meeting. It welled up once more as I sat on the front porch with the evening paper and my two kids fought over the basketball in the driveway. Gradually, though, that feeling has been replaced with a sense of relief that, despite my temporary insanity, my family is safe. But a thousand “I’m sorries” will never take away the sting of remorse I feel nearly every time I look in my husband’s eyes and they smile back at me. While the passion we first had doesn’t always seem as strong, passion is meaningless compared with the qualities he possesses. I hadn’t a clue how much I would come to value his integrity, his work ethic or his devotion to our children. It wasn’t until I was confronted with the fear of losing the world that he and I had created together, that I recognized the pricelessness of his friendship.
So tonight, on an unusually warm evening for this time of year, my husband has agreed to join me for a walk. As I study the sky from the window by my desk, I see that there must be a thousand stars tonight, all sparkling like fireflies.
Sarah Benson
G
ive what you have. It may be better than you
think.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
After I discovered that the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers.
Most of their useful survival tips were too insignificant for the pediatric “experts” to bother with, but for those of us stationed on the front lines, they saved countless lives. I remember trying to talk with my friend Joan one afternoon while my older son fussed in his playpen, flinging his toys overboard and then wailing loudly. Undoubtedly recognizing the homicidal glint in my eye as I got up for the fiftieth time, Joan asked if I had a roll of cellophane tape. I immediately thought she was going to tape his mouth shut—a thought that had begun forming darkly in my own mind—but instead, she gently wrapped it, sticky side out, around his fingers on both hands. For the next half hour, he was totally absorbed, testing the tactile surface on his shirt, nose, hair, toes.
“Where did you learn this stuff?” I asked Joan, who possessed a wealth of small but effective techniques for preventing child abuse.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess after five kids, I think like one: ‘What would be fun?’”
I also relied on my friends whenever I needed a sanity check. One year, I’d completely lost my bearings, trying to follow potty-training instructions from a psychiatric expert who guaranteed success in three days. I was stuck on step one, which stated without an atom of irony: “Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Joan asked one day. At the rate we were going, I confessed, my younger son would be ten years old and still in diapers.
Joan laughed, deeply familiar with “the guilties.” Mothers breathe guilt on the job every day, like germs in the air. She recommended I accept stubbornness as a fact of childhood. (“Powerlessness corrupts,” she often said.) She then taught me a game using toilet paper rolls: Darren found it so amusing, he practically moved into the bathroom— and mastered another level of civilization.
Every time I told Joan what a terrific mother she was, she would respond with the story of a “bad-mother” day. She told me about waking up once in the middle of the night, foggy-brained, unable to remember putting her two-year-old to bed. She got up and was horrified to find the baby’s crib empty. Racing frantically through the house, she finally found Patty in the kitchen, sound asleep in her high chair. “At least I’d strapped her in,” Joan said.
Nobody’s perfect, we knew, but mothers are somehow expected to exceed all human limits. This ideal is especially preposterous since mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, no sick days.
Given the punishing rules—and the contemptuous labels for any mom who breaks them—mothers are reluctant to admit having bad days. We all have them, of course, a secret that only makes us feel more guilty. But once my friends and I started telling the truth, we couldn’t stop.
One mother admitted leaving the grocery store without her kids—“I just forgot them. They were in frozen foods, eating Eskimo Pies.”
Most of our bad-mother stories didn’t look so awful in retrospect: some, however, looked much worse. Every one of my friends had a bad-mother day somewhere in her history she wished she could forget—but couldn’t.
But however painful or compromising the reality of motherhood, we preferred it to the national game of “Let’s Pretend,” the fantasy in which we are all supposed to pass for perfect mothers in perfect families.
Once I’d given birth to my sons, there were no guarantees. That first burst of love expanded over the next two decades, along with the growing realization that I could not possess them for long, keep them safe, insure their happy lives. Joy/pain . . . joy/pain . . . the heartbeat of motherhood.
Mary Kay Blakely
Dear Santa,
Here are my Christmas wishes:
I’d like a pair of legs that don’t ache after a day of chasing kids (in any color, except purple, which I already have) and arms that don’t flap in the breeze, but are strong enough to carry a screaming toddler out of the candy aisle in the grocery store. I’d also like a waist, since I lost mine somewhere in the seventh month of my last pregnancy.
If you’re hauling big-ticket items this year, I’d like a car with fingerprint resistant windows and a radio that only plays adult music, a television that doesn’t broadcast any programs containing talking animals, and a refrigerator with a secret compartment behind the crisper where I can hide to talk on the phone.
On the practical side, I could use a talking daughter doll that says, “Yes, Mommy,” to boost my parental confidence, along with one potty-trained toddler, two kids who don’t fight, and three pairs of jeans that zip all the way up without the use of power tools.
I could also use a recording of Tibetan monks chanting, “Don’t eat in the living room,” and “Take your hands off your brother,” because my voice seems to be out of my children’s hearing range and can only be heard by the dog. But please, don’t forgo the Play-Doh Travel Pack, the hottest stocking stuffer this year for mothers of preschoolers. It comes in three fluorescent colors guaranteed to crumble on any carpet and make the in-laws’ house seem just like home.
If it’s too late to find any of these products, I’d settle for enough time to brush my teeth and comb my hair in the same morning, or the luxury of eating food warmer than room temperature without it being served in a Styrofoam container.
If you don’t mind, I could also use a few Christmas miracles to brighten the holiday season. Would it be too much trouble to declare ketchup a vegetable? It will clear my conscience immensely. It would be helpful if you could coerce my children to help around the house without demanding payment as if they were the bosses of an organized crime family, or if my toddler didn’t look so cute sneaking downstairs to eat contraband ice cream in his pajamas at midnight.
Well, Santa, the buzzer on the dryer is going off, and I’ve got to run. Have a safe trip, and remember to leave your wet boots by the chimney and come in and dry off by the fire so you don’t catch cold. Help yourself to cookies on the table, but don’t eat too many or leave crumbs on the carpet.
Always,
Mom
P.S. One more thing, Santa, you can cancel all my requests if you can keep my children young enough to believe in you.
Debbie Farmer
off the mark by Mark Parisi
