March, 2006
I try not to let my competitive nature enter into our married life. But sometimes it gets the better of me. Lately I’ve been feeling a little miffed that the kids seem to enjoy being around Mike more than me. Some of it is my own fault – I tend to set us up as Nazi Mom and Daddy Claus.
For years, I have been the keeper of the chore charts, monitoring the lists of homework, nagging about picking up clothes, getting the cups into the dishwasher, practicing the piano, putting toys away. I felt like a mother dog constantly nipping at the heels of her pups to get them to do things. And we all know what mother dogs are called. Daddy was the one that would take them to play tennis, soccer, golf; the one who would go skiing or bike riding on a moment’s notice.
Don’t get me wrong – I love it that Daddy is their hero, that they dropped everything to jump into his arms when he came home from work. It’s just I want to be the “fun one” too. I was bellyaching about this to my friend who doubles as one of my parenting mentors. “Doing all of the mundane parts of mothering are no fun,” she commiserated. “It’s when you get to knock their socks off, that’s when it’s fun!” I knew what she meant. I spent the day before St. Patrick’s Day doing all of the laundry and ironing so that my kids could have their green uniform shirts to wear. Not one thank you. Having clean clothes doesn’t knock a single sock off. And if it did, I’d just have another one to wash.
My friend proceeded to tell me about how she goes into sock-blowing territory. She has a daughter, a romantic like my Anna. Whenever my friend gets roses from her husband, after they die, she removes the petals from the flowers. Then she draws a hot bath, surrounds it with candles, gets a CD player going with soft beautiful music and floats the petals on top of the water. She blindfolds her daughter and leads her into the bathroom, where she leaves her to bathe in reverie. She also told me about their midnight tea parties under the stars with the same daughter. (That’d be a tough one for me since my bedtime is 8:00.)
Within a week, Anna had a tough day. (There are a lot of those in junior high.) Nothing had gone right “all week” at school: fights with friends, difficult homework assignments, and gross lunches. You name, it happened. It was a Sunday and she was bummed. Fresh with my friend’s idea, I flew into action. Unfortunately, my husband hadn’t given me any roses lately, so I sent him out to our yard to scour for a few off-season blooms. Not too many. Off to my mom’s yard and then to the golf course’s rose garden. Finally we had a couple of fistfuls of petals. Rather than music, I went for Pride and Prejudice, one of Anna’s favorites, then I lit the candles and went to blindfold my daughter. She melted. And I loved it.
Unfortunately, if one does this a lot, kids begin to expect it. Birthdays provide a prime example. With Abby and Anna, a simple homemade birthday cake always sufficed. And when I realized that they preferred the frosting over the cake, a 50-cent box mix worked well. Then after EIE were born, the kids began noticing other birthday cakes – the store bought, fancy ones with figurines on top. It didn’t help when my sister took a cake decorating class and started making masterpieces. So I started dressing mine up a bit. We had figurines and for a couple of years, those plastic bathtub toys stuck in the frosting delighted all. I’d make blue frosting with a few white dot-stars and have Buzz Lightyear “flying” thru space. A nine-by-thirteen cake with green frosting made a pasture where a plastic fence could hold up Woody and Jessie and a horse or two. Plastic princesses floated in purple frosted “ballrooms”. Once when a cake fell apart, I cut a colorful border off a gift bag and placed it around the round cake, shoving crumbs in to fill it up then coated it with frosting. They thought it looked pretty fancy with that border.
Another time, one requested a Barbie cake. No little Barbie figurines, so I just bought a new Barbie as part of her gift and stuck her knee deep in the cake. This worked for the “My Little Pony” cake as well. An army guy perched on a camouflaged frosted cake did OK too. The Minnie Mouse cake required a little cutting and rearranging of pieces. Cement-like frosting held it together until the photo could be taken – proof that Mom cared. Another year we did the Barbie-in-a-bundt-cake thing where the cake is made to look like her dress. I had to make an extra batch of frosting to get Barbie to stay standing upright. This year the order was put in for a round cake with light blue sides and dark blue frosting making stalactite and stalagmite formations on the sides. I started at six in the morning. I tried. It kind of resembled the picture she had drawn. But then I put the cake cover on the plate and messed it all up.
Last year, I heard about a volcano cake. I searched online and at last found out how to make it. Earth-toned frosting covered the dome and plastic moss and trees added accents. Oreo cookie crumbs made the old lava and tiny plastic dinosaurs decorated the outside. But it was the dry ice “smoke” and real blasting lava that sent me into the annals of Cool Motherhood.
Every kid needs to know they are special and I love it when I have the energy and creativity to let them know it. So, yeah, most of the time I am Nazi Mom. But every now and then, look out. I’m going to knock one my babies’ socks off.
And then I’ll wash it.
Like a rock,
The Submissive Despot
Amy
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