This is a guest post by Juliet Martinez.
This morning my son made two colorful fingerpaintings. My daughter got up late and did her chores; then my kids and I rode bikes to the park. When we came home we had lunch and started a handmade craft project for Father’s Day. Then I read for a bit and the kids played quietly (more or less) in their room. Later we made a huge mess in the process of mixing up cookie dough with the express intention of eating it raw.
That’s a pretty Pinterest-worthy day, isn’t it?
Except that I haven’t been sleeping well so I was tired and cranky this morning. I had an unexpected allergic reaction to mango so I wasn’t able to drink the mango smoothie I had made for my breakfast. Then came the fingerpainting with all its attendant requests for more colors and the paint all over the table, chair, sink, boy. Then my daughter got up and immediately reprimanded me because we have “no food” in the house, since apparently the organic strawberry smoothie I made and put in the fridge for her didn’t count as food. She complained repeatedly about being hungry until I yelled at her to just eat the damn smoothie, at which point she admitted that she didn’t like it and wanted toast. You know, that food she can prepare herself at any time by removing bread from the fridge and dropping it into the toaster?
Then I finally ate *my* new, improved, non-mangoey breakfast. Then there was more yelling. Which I don’t think is the worst thing in the world, except that it’s telling me something. I’m frazzled. I need a break.
It’s the first week of summer vacation. And I’m being a good mommy and limiting their time in front of the TV.
Let me specify what I mean by TV. What we watch is Netflix, which is to broadcast TV as cocaine is to coca leaf tea. On broadcast TV you hope your show is on, and when it’s over, it’s over. Tough luck. But on Netflix it never ends. At any time of the day or night you can turn on Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Electric Company or Battlestar Galactica and keep watching ep after ep after ep until, well, forever.
Sometimes I think maybe we should get rid of Netflix. But then I’d lose all *my* favorite shows (BSG, Doctor Who, Bones, Sherlock, Merlin, to name a few), which my husband and I watch after the kids are in bed.
During the day I really don’t feel the need to watch a lot of TV. Maybe if I’m eating lunch alone I’ll put something on, but otherwise I like to do things. Preferably alone. But that’s not my life. I’m a home-maker. A full-time mother. A SAHM. My job is to be with my kids way more than I would normally want to be in the company of anyone at all.
And there’s my TV problem. When the TV is on I get a break from constantly being with my kids, constantly being the object of their need, the go-to-gal for all problems they need solved, the kisser of scraped knees, the bringer of food. Granted, the break is only 23 or 48 minutes long, but it’s a break I deeply appreciate and desperately need.
And I need this more than once a day, see? Because I continue to parent whenever one of my kids wakes up in the middle of the night. I am wakened around 5:30 every morning from whatever kind of crappy sleep I’ve had that night by a very boisterous three-year-old boy who exclaims with radiant joy, “It’s morning time!” before running to the bathroom, whereupon his second utterance of the day drags me out of bed: “Mommy, come and wipe my bottom!”
And it just barrels on from there. After my daughter wakes up there are arguments, surreptitious pinches, disagreements over toys neither of them has noticed for months until two seconds ago when one picked it up and started WW III. Those things happen between the sweet, peaceful sibling moments I eagerly photograph or transcribe on FB.
I just get a bit frazzled after so much togetherness. And I need a break. A long break. The kind of break that happens when I conveniently forget that my kids are mainlining Power Rangers on Netflix while I bask in the glimpse of sanity that peeks through the clouds when I am able to, say, go to the bathroom or even make a phone call without having anyone come up and tell me the entire plot of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief without leaving **anything** out.
So why not just go with it? The break from the constant demands of parents makes me happy, and as we all know, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
Because when they go all zombie in front of the TV I begin to feel guilt. I feel like they are not having Healthy Childhood Experiences like Playing Imaginatively for a long time or Being Extremely Bored. My inner critic tells me that they are not developing properly, their *brains* are not developing properly because instead of building towers of blocks and knocking them down or sloppily executing an elaborate craft that I took four days to prep, they are staring slack-jawed at Dora.
Why do I have to stress so much about it? I go back and forth on this a lot. If one or more of us gets sick, the TV is on all day. Then after a week or so of that I think, “All that screen time is very bad for them! I have to put a stop to this.” And then I get tough on crime, limiting screen time to about an hour a day until I reach the limit of my nerves and ask myself what is the purpose of my kids having Healthy Childhood Experiences if they are also having so many Angry Mommy Experiences.
And the big thing here that I feel nobody wants to say when posting self-righteous links about the evils of screen time for young kids and the evils of moms being on their phones all the time and the importance of free time and parental attention and nature, is that the huge majority of American families are, as GW Bush might say, nukyelar. Most of us live in little two-parent, two-point-five-kid units, and nobody with kids has failed to figure out that it takes more than two adults to raise even one kid, especially when they’re young. We need more help. We need more people in our lives. Trusted people. People to talk to throughout the day, people to keep an eye on the kids in the back yard while dinner gets cooked or we go for a freaking coffee with a friend. People whose different perspectives on life would enrich our kids’ childhoods way more than any edutainment programming ever could.
But most of us don’t have that. And we’re exhausted because of it. And this is what TV has become: an extended family of strangers who help parents for free (or just a few bucks a month) because we don’t have anyone else to do it.
I think that’s extremely sad. And knowing it solves nothing.
Can you relate? What are your solutions to mommy-exhaustion when you have no help available?
This post is part of the Growing From Motherhood series – read about it here.
Juliet Martinez is a freelance writer and editor who lives with her two children and husband on the Southwest Side of Chicago. She blogs about life and parenting a gifted, deaf child at Parenting Deaf and Gifted.
OMG! I totally adore your site! Wow! I do not think I could’ve articulated my feelings better! …about TV, about the inner brain struggle I have over: “everyone just S T O P! No sleep, waking up in a pee pee bed, needing mommy time,… Everything–accept I am a -1 minus one on the parenting scale yo up have….I left the link to my blog for you, if you have time that is. Just a single mom trying to do right under-budgeted, under slept, under paid, under nourished, and over worked ah…. Let me share with you what my doctor does. She works in an office with her husband. They have 3 children. They’re all young happy and vibrant. Somedays she pulls her hair out! Her best advice: place each child in their room or a safe room to play, and tell them they have ‘quiet time’ (before the yelling starts) and that’s it shut the door and walk away. If they come out, ‘I will let you know when it’s time’…it SOUNDS BAD but, its not. My daughter youngest goes BY HERSELF NOW Because SHE (under developed and all) can SEE: Mommy Needs A Time out!!!! I also use my mommy bloggers on wordpress, a loving small family place, and keep up as best I can with talks posts and encouragement from others. THEY ARE MY ONLY ‘friends’–as you fall under the same category (accept for house size & food selection) we’ve all got difficulties shout and need a friend. I also took the ‘Orange Rhino Challenge (.com) and stopped yelling. (Follow my progress on blog)
I will leave you with a saying from my 4 year old, whom does NOT do well with ‘loud’ (bcuz of my own yelling in past) “Gentle Voices Mommy” gentle voices xox thank you again
Hi Jeanine thanks so much for sharing and I’m so glad you could relate to this post, too (although it wasn’t written by me, Chelsea the main author of the blog, but my friend Juliet) 🙂 Your doctor’s advice sounds good and I will have to try that when my kids are old enough to go to a room by themselves he he. And will definitely check out your blog and the challenge – sounds interesting!!! Hope to see you again here, thanks again for sharing 🙂
I don’t think I could have said it better! I tend to forget there are other moms out there that go thru the same feelings as me. After reading this, I’m actually smiling. Thank you!
What a sweet comment, thanks Kellie 🙂 I’ll be sure the author of the post sees this.
I hear ya. I homeschool and work from home, so I’ve worked reaaaalllly hard to encourage independent play. As in mom knows where you are and what you’re generally up to, but isn’t playing tea party WITH you. My kids (now 10 and 6) really are best friends about 98% of the time (because they have no choice!), and I’m so thankful for that as it gives me a little breathing room. We do pretty much no TV until after hubby gets home in the evening (because they become beasts once the first show is over, like you mentioned). But I can tell you that when they went over to a neighbor’s for a playdate last year without me for the first time…I literally had no idea what to do with myself. As in I could think of 75 things I *wanted* to do (starting with sitting down and vegging, or vegging in the tub), but I knew I only had about an hour to do it. I think I ended up turning on music that *I* like and cleaning and cooking dinner. And looking back, my mom’s life was different than this. We had neighbors and friends down the street and kind of an open-range area on the block. We were running out the door with “I’m going over to my friend’s house!” We could go over to grandma’s house after school. It was just…different. I know my mom had more built-in breaks for us (though I acknowledge that her life was also crazy busy, just in different ways). So sometimes I feel guilty that my kids are so sneakily-coached in independent play, but then I slap myself a little bit. I’ll take whatever kind of a break I can get. We’re together 24/7/365! There is value in quantity as well as in quality, and I need to remember that. From their perspective, I am a dependable, consistent presence…answerer of questions, detangler of necklaces, driver of field trips, enforcer of schoolwork and chores, squisher of bugs…and that’s ok!
Love the theme of this post, especially the conclusion, which reminds us that it takes a village—a community—to raise a child. I’m a dad-to-be who’s been spending time volunteering as a teacher of moral and spiritual education classes for children, and that experience alone has shown me how grateful parents become when a friend shows up to take care of their kids for a while. What’s given me a lot of hope (hope that I have a chance of retaining some kind of sanity as a dad?) is living in the kind of neighbourhood where, although families are small, people know each other and trust each other enough to take care of each other. There are always children playing outside together, either in the parking lot under the watchful eyes of older siblings, or over at the neighbour’s house, with a nice, spacious, enclosed yard with just enough space to get into trouble and just enough fence to stay safe. The key, I think, is trust, which has sadly been disappearing from many neighbourhoods, as we lose the habit of reaching out to the people around us, spending time with them and getting to know them, learning to love them and trust them as friends. Regaining that habit is a matter of effort and discipline, just like going to the gym—but you could say the potential rewards are even greater.
I have thought many of these same things! We’re a military family living overseas in Germany (previously in Hawaii) so we’ve been without our family’s support the entire we’ve been raising our children, ages 3 and 1.5. It is EXHAUSTING! Very rewarding, and so fun to be able to offer them all of these cultural experiences, but we have definitely acknowledged the fact that we need a village that we just don’t have… Prayer and Netflix get us through though, and the thought that one day they will both go to school for eight hours a day! Anyways, I enjoyed the post and if you’re interested in following along on our adventures, you can check out my blog: babesindeutschland.com 🙂
Yes, yes, yes. I feel guilty too. I try to do small things like “no tv before noon”. But we still watch too much. I want to be more present and put my phone down as well. Ugh. It’s such a struggle.