Callie had been starting with that little whine that babies adopt to alert mothers and sisters that their new crawling tricks have them wedged behind the furniture. But the whining had stopped–rather suddenly, it seemed in retrospect.

“Thanks, Cassie. You are such a big help,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “How did you manage that?”

“I got her a beer.”

Sure enough, Callie was still wedged behind the table, but now she was happily gumming the cold smooth side of a Newcastle (unopened, fortunately enough.)

Because I hope that Cassie went for the beer in the fridge because she imagined how good it would feel on her teething sister’s sore gums–and not because she deems it some sort of panacea, the whole thing got me laughing (after I took away the beer, of course.) Then it got me thinking about which of my friends would laugh about this story along with me. And which would sort of disapprove.

I guess that groups my mommy friends into two camps: one camp that can overhear me saying to my kids, “Please don’t lick the carpet,” and they don’t say a word (or better yet, they laugh). And the other camp, which thinks that’s pretty gross.

For me, if a toddler gets out of a car, and she has a lollipop stuck to her bottom, I know, instantly, that her mom is a friend. And the opposite is true, too. If you’ve got any number of kids under the age of four and your car doesn’t occasionally stink, you probably make me a little nervous.

In all of our efforts to prove our own Supermom skills, let’s remember that it’s sometimes rather endearing when we’re not. To remember that may be to regain a lot of energy and a lot of time.

This was one of those relatively rare – but still very real – days as a stay-at-home mom in which I feared the best I could do would be to fake a smile and turn my back, when necessary, to count to ten.

It was on this particular day that the girls and I were heading to a distant store to pick out just the right Christmas gift for someone. My 3-year-old was passing the time by speaking every thought that occurred to her. At this particular moment, those thoughts revolved around the time of day.

“If you get up early enough, it’s night,” she announced.

“Callie gets earbubble,” (that would be “irritable”) “right before her nap.”

“Daddy comes home when it gets dark.”

I answered yes to all of these things, only half-listening. Then, making a distracted attempt at conversation, I asked her, “What’s your favorite time of the day?”

Silence.

“What did you ask me, mommy?”

I repeated the question. “What’s your favorite time of the day?”

Silence again.

I looked in the rear view mirror. Her blank stare told me she thought my question was absurd. After a time, she answered:

“This one.”

Now Cassie does enjoy a good long car ride, so I asked her the question again as she was getting ready for bed that night:

“Cassie, what’s your favorite time of day?”

The answer was the same: “This one.”

Ah. This one. And so should it be for me. How I wish it were. How I wish I could recognize the peace and joy in every single moment with my kids.
You see, my daughter is better than me at something I long to be good at. It’s what Richard Foster, author of Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, calls the Prayer of the Ordinary.

“We are Praying the Ordinary,” he writes, “when we see God in the ordinary experiences of life. Can we find meaning in the crayon marks on the wall made by the kids? Are they somehow the finger of God writing on the wall of our hearts?” In the same chapter, he writes: “It is in the everyday and the commonplace that we learn patience, acceptance, and contentment.”

That, I’m sure, is true. Particularly that patience part.

My fear is that, like everyone with adult children tells me, the time will go too quickly, I fear that I’ll wish for it back, even those mealtimes interrupted by the whisper “Mommy, I pooped.” Even those whines for another Go-gurt. Even the stray Legos I nail with my bare feet. I fear that I’ll soon pine for all the time I’ve ever wished away.

And yet, though I’m infinitely conscious of trying to freeze those moments -the good and the bad – in my memory for some distant future, it’s hard. It’s hard to see Foster’s crayon marks on the wall as anything but crayon marks. Crayon marks that I will have to scrub.

I’m experiencing a crayon mark of sorts right now. As I jot notes for this column at the kitchen table, my 3-year old is sitting on my lap, trying to push my pen along the page with her Three Little Pigs book. She has just dragged her grape lollipop through my hair and wiped her nose on my sleeve. “Mommy, make your pen go ALL the way along the page,” she orders, scooting it along and making my thoughts an illegible mess of ink.

For a moment, I have an unbecoming and out-of-the-blue urge to chuck her beloved book across the room.

And it is precisely times like these when I need to indeed see the crayon marks as something left by the finger of God. To feel a sense of reverence for my every moment of my life as a mom. To once again find meaning and glory in my daughter’s cherubic yet filthy face.

But for this, I need some kind of tool, some trick for the heat of the moment. A trick to bring myself back in an instant to the kind of mother I long to be, the kind of mother I sometimes know myself to be, and the kind of mother I want my daughters to remember me to be.

At this moment, I have a little talk with myself. Cassie and I end up tucking our feet under a blanket on the couch and reading the very book that I wanted to hurl. And I enjoy it. I always do if can just sink into the moment and remember what a little miracle I have here on my lap.

Perhaps that tool, then, is surrender.

Or maybe it’s distraction. The same trick that all moms learn when their youngest is about 18 months old. When Cassie was that age, and she’d get angry and frustrated, distraction worked wonders. When she was 2 ½, distraction worked wonders on MY anger and frustration. Sometimes, the best tool for me is to change my scenery…to get my mind on something else.

Perhaps that tool is compassion. Compassion for our children and a conscious understanding of what they must be feeling at certain times in their precious and sometimes bewildering lives.
And compassion to ourselves, which we can show by not over-scheduling our lives to the point where it’s impossible to get down on the floor and play for 20 minutes, if that’s what it takes. Or to call your own mommy just to chat for 20 minutes, if that’s what it takes.

Perhaps that tool lies in the realization that our lives are long and full and that there will be plenty of time to do what we need to do when we no longer have little ones pulling on our pant legs.

Perhaps it is the tool of single-tasking. So we don’t feel distracted all the time. This is the tool that involves downshifting out of overdrive, because it’s in overdrive that we talk too much, eat too much, think too much. Enjoy too little.

Perhaps it is the tool of shifting your awareness. A conscious committing to memory of the ripe physical sensations of motherhood: The feel of your baby’s marvelous, heavy head on your chest. The smell of Cheerios on her breath. This is how we bring ourselves back–gently–to the gifts that are under our fingers and, oftentimes, directly underfoot.

Perhaps it is the tool of solitude. So that, by enjoying the pursuit of something, solo, we may return to them renewed–and without resentment.

Perhaps it is the tool of being honest and talking it out with other moms. It helps me to remember that we’re all in this together. Most days we are genuinely loving it. Some days we are genuinely faking it, just as generations of good moms before us have done.

There is a certain solace in this story told by my mother-in-law, whose three children would describe an ideal, involved, committed, and very loving mother. There were days, she says, when her face hurt at the end of the day from smiling. A clear and present sign that her smile was, for days at a time, forced.

But her kids didn’t know. With grace, neither will mine. And tomorrow will be a different kind of a day, with new tools to look upon those crayon marks with the reverence they deserve.

“Cassie, have you seen my keys?”

“Yes, I’ve seen them.” My three-year-old is lying on the couch with her feet straight up in the air, tapping her boots together.

“Where did you see them?”

“They are right to the left of behind.”

Huh? I try again, this time lowering my voice: “Where are my keys, honey? I don’t want to be late.”

She gets up. Aah, she has come to identify the subtle but effective mommy-is-serious voice.

She picks up a ballpoint pen from the table and hands it to me. “Here are your keys, Mommy,” she manages to say before collapsing in hysterics.

She looks up, still laughing. (I’m not.) “Oh, now that was a silly joke, Mommy,” she laughs some more. “That was a pen. Not your ke-e-e-e-eys.” She pulls her sister under the table with her. They are both giggling.

Ten minutes later, I had found my keys (where I, not she, had put them), and got on with the business of loading the baby in her car seat, finding the preschooler’s coat, mittens, and gloves, and stashing them into the appropriate places for later. For the older one, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a “monkey juice,” so named for the orangutan that used to grace the Tang pouches. For the younger one, crackers, cantaloupe, and a juice sippee cup. And I’ve finally remembered our library books.

Apparently, hurrying is antithetical to a preschooler’s very nature. On her way to the car, she stops to hide on the deck. Then she makes a pit stop into her playhouse.

Then she pauses to tell me that potatoes don’t have blood, but that she does. As Cassie stands in the driveway reliving yesterday’s paper cut and the ensuing Barbie Band-Aid, I resist the urge to check my watch.

It is then that I have to remind myself that my sense of urgency is, today, self-serving. I’m a busy mom, but I work hard to keep my days with the kids “business free.” And today, we are going to a simple playgroup. At this playgroup, we all drop in and out. No one is watching the clock to see when we arrive. And no one in particular is waiting for us.

I realize, all at once, that my self-created melodrama is strangely comforting to me. Then I wonder, at this time, what I’m modeling to my kids. Because we can’t simultaneously be frazzled and calm. We can’t simultaneously be agitated and attentive. We can’t simultaneously be fragmented and mindful.

I should be taking a cue from the child and not the other way around. And so I give myself a gentle reminder of the reasons we have consciously chosen a slower pace for our family. How nourishing it can be to give a child – and her parents – time to contemplate. Time to allow the day to play out on its own. Time to accomplish things one slow activity at a time.

We have just hit the highway when Cassie clamors from her car seat: “Mommy! We forgot to play the ‘Three Little Pigs’!” She gasps in mock horror, leaving me to wonder where she got her sense of drama.

“We’ll play when we get home,” I say. “We’ll have plenty of time.”

And so we do.

Thank goodness for the sharp memory of my husband, who sometimes finds it wise to remind me about those things.

Callie is six-weeks old now, which means she has reached that magical age when the doctors okay her (and her mommy) to fully participate in life. But there are these struggles that keep popping up…struggles that I had somehow forgotten about in the two years between babies, and I have to rely on my husband’s remarkable memory once again to let me know that these were the same issues that popped up after the first baby. Then they buried themselves deep in some dark hole somewhere only to re-emerge now that we are settling in with daughter number two.

They are issues common to many couples with young children and they revolve mostly around finances and the sharing of responsibilities. At bottom, they may just be a sign that I’m bored enough to want to pick a fight for the sheer drama of the experience. Because I now recall some of these struggles that you all report and I seem to have forgotten. It’s the tedium of playing with the playdough and vacuuming up the playdough and finding playdough in my bedsheets.

It’s the lack of control that pervades my days. It’s the attempt to get up four hours before the rest of my family because in this warped world of early motherhood, work time counts as “me time,” and hearing my toddler’s footsteps on the landing as she makes the long climb to my office. I’m glad she takes the steps one-foot-at-a-time because it affords me the time to sweep away my initial reaction, which may involve the words, “Can’t you give mommy a few moments of peace after all the sacrifices she makes…” and somehow dissolves into an empathetic smile, a long hug, and a tuck-in to the mattress I’ve moved into my office for this very scenario, which usually happens about half-past four.

It’s times like these when I struggle to recall how I finally reclaimed the power and the control over my life after my first child. After a little searching, I remember. After a long while, I snatched at all the control I could, and I let the rest go.

I surrendered to it after realizing that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t control when the little ones will wake or when they’ll want to eat or when they’ll poop (though I can be reasonably sure the latter two will happen right as we’re heading into the car to go somewhere), but I can control the way I deal with it. I can control my energy level by controlling what I eat and how much I exercise I get. I can even control a few things in my work life.

After the first baby, I reclaimed my power by joining a gym with good childcare and started a home business. This time, I kickbox during naptime and write and write and write during the wee hours.

Through it all, I repeat to myself (as though it were a mantra) that these choices are mine. I chose the nursing pads by insisting on breastfeeding. I chose the crazy work hours by insisting on staying home with my girls. And if I get forget, my husband will remind me of that, too.