Insecurity | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Insecurity

Emotional Flambé Days

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

Mothering a three-year-old is not quite as easy as, say, demolishing a brick house with my forehead.

“Natalie,” I explain. “You need to blow your nose. It will help you breathe!”
She shoots me a look of petulant exasperation. “But I don’t WANT to breathe!” Huff.

She’s developed her own brand of logic that runs headlong against mine like a sumo wrestler, ridiculous but unmovable. It wouldn’t be so bad, this earnest illogic, except for the flammable emotions spilling out during each encounter. Tears gush. Drama overflows. Three-year-old PMS sinks its fangs into every other moment, gnaws, flings, thrashes, and leaves it in a mangled heap on the floor.

“Natalie?” I mumble through half-open eyes. “I’m not ready to get up yet. Why don’t you go play with your toys for a while?”
“Noooooo!” she wails, melting into a pool of little-girl despair. “Nooo, I don’t want to! I CAN’T! All my toys are BROKEN!”

I know very well how mothers and daughters can push each other’s buttons. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of female intuition, and shared blood tends to amplify shared grievances. I really do know. I just thought I had another ten years or so before we’d be slumped under the covers, crying from different sides of the same frustration. I thought that these young years would stay light and happy, that I would be the fun playmate-mom and she would be the cheerful Stepford-daughter.

“Why are you crying?” I ask.
“Because I don’t want to sleeeeeeeeep,” she wails from beneath her covers.
“Well, you need sleep so you can be happy tomorrow.” (Again with the logic.)
“B-b-b-b-but,” she sobs, “I AMMMMMMM happy!”

I cringe every time I use the words “need” or “have to,” proof that I consider her opinions inferior to mine. (Even if her opinions are that she should have chocolate ice cream for dinner and stay up all night watching “Toy Story” and balancing glass plates on her sister’s head, they’re still valid. They’re still an honest and valuable expression of her desires, even if they’re wrong. Right?) I worry that she’s developing too slowly because I haven’t been reading with her, playing with her, teaching her enough. (She should know Italian better by now, not to mention be fully potty-trained… Or, at the very least, be able to read at a second-grade level like our friend’s daughter of the same age. Right?) I sink under the guilt of days when I’m too tired or too “down” to give her the attention she craves. (I should be able to put on a brave front for her sake. Right?)

“Natalie?” I sigh. “I have a headache and need you to be quiet for now.”
“But!” she shrieks. “But don’t you wanna hear my song? My really, really, really long song? Listen! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE! MAYONNAISE!”

Of course I don’t see the humor until later, when I’m detailing the hardships of my day to Dan (“…and then my head literally exploded into little bits all over the rug because she wouldn’t stop singing about mayonnaise”), and he doubles over laughing. I wonder some days if my parenting skills have expired, if I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life as a sour-milk mom. I gravitate toward hopeful theories too, when I’m in less-pessimistic moods, like she’s just going through a stage or I’m still medically classified as a post-partum mess. (And this too shall pass.) Who knows? Maybe all that matters is that I still love her enough to hurt over our battleground relationship, and that when she starts school in September, I will look back on these emotional flambé days with nostalgia.

Right?

28Feb

Up Yours

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

I’ve never been afraid of a blank page. It’s really more like a mirror to me, a place to sit and breathe and shed the daily lint collected in my mind… then look deep into the clearness of my reflection and write what I see. This has been my daily ritual for months now — tucking the girls in for their naps, relishing an after-lunch espresso and “Scrubs” with Dan, and then settling into that quiet part of my heart where words happen. Coffee-stained clarity.

I’ve stayed away from blank pages the last few days, though, quite suddenly caught in a tangle of insecurity. Maybe it’s my old journal entries that I pulled out over the weekend–my teenage patheticness slamming into me like an anvil. Maybe it’s the remark from a friend that made me feel guilty for being so self-absorbed. Maybe it’s the six or seven hours of sleep each night when my body actually needs fourteen.

I’m back on my computer this afternoon, tentatively, and only because when I listed my reasons for not writing anymore (I’m pathetic, I have nothing valuable to say, and no one wants to hear more about me anyway), Dan simply said, “I do.”* Well actually, that’s not the only reason. It was just the catalyst. The other reason is my daughters. I want them to be able to read my thoughts, years from now, and understand who their mom was, is. I think if I had gotten that opportunity with my mother, many unfortunate circumstances would have turned out differently. I intend never to take communication with my precious girls for granted, and I see writing about myself now as one way to protect our futures.

So. Up yours, insecurity! And even though I now want to apologize for saying “up yours,” I won’t, because confidence is valuable. Believing in my own motivations is valuable. Even embracing my inner pathetic teenager is valuable.** (Yes, yes it is.) So stay tuned, because my blank-page, espresso-scented séances are far from over.

*No, I won’t share him with you.

**At least in the sense that you will soon get to read VERY DRAMATIC excerpts from my fourteen-year-old tragic love saga, as chronicled in no less than five journals. Look for Mortification Mondays, coming to a blog near you!

27Nov

Thief, Ogre, Janitor = Mom

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

It’s hard to relax when you’re a thief, stealing a few minutes for music and uninterrupted breath in your sunny corner studio. Even though all your offspring are contentedly sleeping in the other room, you coach your guilt along–I should really be cleaning or editing or studying or cooking or saving the world–as though, without the guilt, you will disappear.

You dig farther into the reserve, tonguing your 9 a.m. frustration like a mouth sore. I wasn’t going to be a yelling mom. I wasn’t going to use the TV as a babysitter. I was going to smile constantly at my children, be accessible, stimulate their creativity, enjoy every minute with them. It’s worse, even, because you used to be a Good Mother™. Now, you’re mostly ogre, and the monster is coming out in your little girl, and you have no idea which prompted the other.

You don’t mean to change the subject, but there are no solutions in sight–only dusty windowsills and dirty coffee mugs. Your serotonin levels plummet under the weight of so many unfinished tasks. The physical laws of the universe dictate that housecleaning is never finished–not when people move and breathe and inhabit said house–but universal truths are no match for your dissatisfaction at uncompleted projects. You’re a terrible janitor for the same reason you’re a stellar one.

You wish you didn’t think of yourself as a janitor; no one embraces that label. Plus, it’s an overly dramatic and negative interpretation of your role as mom. It also shows a horrid mix-up in priorities; when did janitor replace playmate and teacher? And how could something as mundane and fundamentally imperfect as a house take precedence over your own children?

You swish around the guilt in your head, vaguely wondering how much of your brain it has taken over. You wonder how different your days would be if you hadn’t grown up believing that guilt was Godliness. You wonder how you can keep it from spreading like a toxic stain over your family. If only it could just be scrubbed from your persona… How did I get stuck with myself? My personality traits, my memories, my vast inadequacies? I know how to skin emus, play Chinese flute, write iambic pentameter, pronounce words in Zulu, and teach babies to sleep through the night but not how to make myself work right.

You grimace at how self-centric your thoughts have become. You don’t know if sharing your foibles with the world at large is helpful or entertaining or hideously presumptuous, and you run through the disclaimers: I still love my family. This is just a stage, compounded by a lot of major life changes. And it’s not actually that bad; I’m just a pessimist. But you know that the disclaimers will only sound fabricated, in a “she doth protest too much” way, and presumptuous or not, un-disclaimed honesty has value.

You swallow several times, write “Stop overanalyzing!” on a to-do list, and sit down to play puppies with your two-year-old daughter. The dirty dishes–and the guilt–can wait for a while.

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