Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson
“If there’s one profession that can fill you with pride and joy one minute and then make you feel like a total Jerk-Nugget the next, it’s motherhood. It’s okay though, because another moment is on its way in which you will feel righteous anger, over-tear-filled-whelming LERVE, or complete bafflement.
No emotion is off the table for parents. We’re very much like humans in that way.”
My daughter Laylee – with an “e” – is mighty flowery in her language and I love to read it. She was asked to write a paragraph about her reaction to her experience studying electricity. To my pallet, it tastes a bit like Anne Shirley with just a pinch of Dickens. It goes like this:
My reactions to this electricity unit had no imperious direction. In fact, they were quite decidedly mixed. At first I was panting with eagerness to begin. That feeling continued in our hands-on activities, more excitement welling up til I nearly burst. Unfortunately, my enjoyment diminished slightly when we sat down to informational videos and reading logs, only to be replenished at the next experiment. I think the assignment with the most controversial moods was the electric house, as you might’ve suspected. Again, I started out thrilled with such a weighty project, only to feel that weight a burden instead of a boon; a huge amount of stress. As I proceeded, straining to complete my wiring in the space of a day, I alternated between surprise, triumph, and despair as my lights flickered and died, then wavered back to life. With all this, I’m not really sure of my reaction to it, but I learned a lot and either way am glad we did it.
When she says the electrical work took “the space of a day”, she is serious, like a WHOLE day and her mood ranged from excitement to boredom to full-on meltdown. I’m not sure if she stopped for lunch. She went solid from morning until night.
The house turned out cool. She wired a four room doll house with lights, but instead of using conventional lighting, she chose to light the house with paper flames to look like it had been set on fire. My little verbose pyromaniac. Like mother, like daughter.
Wanda was sick. She’d been hacking up a lung for days and I’d kept her home from school and other activities. One morning she woke up coughing nigh unto death and barfed all over her bed. It was a lovely way to wake up.
Laylee shakes my arm.
“Mom.”
“Mom.”
“Hey Mom. Wanda barfed.”
It isn’t stomach flu, just a coughing fit and what she chuffs up is a glob of Tylenol and other globs of other things that, frankly I’m glad are no longer in her lungs.
She is fine the rest of the day. I give her a bottle of watered-down Gatorade, call it “sick soda” and plunk her in front of the TV. She barely coughs at all and her fever becomes non-existent.
The thing is, I have Christmas packages to mail and I’m running out of time. So, that afternoon, I tell her to grab her sick soda, pack up the car and head to the post office.
First thing she does – show every person in the line her sick soda, explain why it is called sick soda and that she only gets to drink it when she’s REALLY REALLY ill. Everyone steps back a half step as she makes her rounds gleefully.
“Come here, Wanda. No one needs to hear about that.”
“But I’m really, really super sick,” she says as I casually clamp my hand over her mouth, drawing her into a tight hug-like hold.
She stays quiet just long enough for us to get to the front of the line, the center of attention, before she begins singing a freestyle composition.
“I am so sick, so so so sick. When I woke up this morning, I barfed and barfed and barfed and barfed and—“
I am a deer in headlights, a criminal in one of those giant floodlights, a mom with a four-year-old with a super adorable, super big mouth.
Everyone is staring and not in a commiserating sort of way. Their looks are more along the lines of, What kind of mother brings her daughter full of Ebola virus to the post office on one of the busiest days of the year?
This kind.
I give a nervous laugh. “Wanda, they don’t need to know all the details.”
The looks get even more disgruntled. “So now you’re going to stop her from sharing her truth?” they seem to say and I don’t blame them. This all looks very bad for me.
I’ve got 4 packages up on the counter. Wanda’s song continues.
“And I barfed and I barfed so bad that I barfed up my Tylenol and I barfed up all my green stuff…”
“She’s really not that sick,” I say to the room. “It’s not the stomach flu. She just coughed so hard she threw up a little.”
The words sound astoundingly unhelpful as they fall from my mouth. Um. Shut up.
I decide that the best course of action is to get the packages mailed and get out of there as soon as possible with as little eye contact as possible.
“And after I barfed and barfed and barfed, I was so sick and so SICK! So my mom said, ‘Let’s go to the post office!’”
That’s exactly how it was. Whenever one of my kids is sick, I think, She is so sick! I know! I should take her to the post office! And I hope she performs a song about it.
The song lasted until the last package was stamped and tossed in the bin and I sheepishly grabbed Wanda’s hand and hurried her out of the building.
I was already laughing as I got to the car. I was the only one, but I hope that as they got home and did not come down with The Plague of Green Goo and Barfed Tylenol Doom, they wondered for just a second if maybe I wasn’t the worst mother ever. Maybe Wanda just had mad lyrical skills.
Wanda is my best buddy. We’re together all day. When she smiles, I smile. When she cries, I sometimes comfort her. When I cry, she does not notice.
Wanda spends a lot of time writing lately. She writes her name (not actually Wanda) and her “impossible name,” a version of her name with about 20 other random letters scattered about. She recently learned to write “HELLO!”
Her “O”s are disconcertingly small. I find messages like this all over the house:
HELL.! -Wanda
Um. Hell. to you too!
Whenever anything good happens to Wanda, like having her name picked out of the singing-time bucket at church to be a special helper, she fiercely yells, “YESSS! I KNEW it!”
The direct translation of “I KNEW IT!” is “I had absolutely no idea that would happen but I’m really glad it did.”
“Someone just left a giant pink chocolate statue of Spiderman on the front porch for you!”
“YES!! I KNEW IT!”
“Laylee and Magoo have dropped out of school and will spend all the rest of their days feeding you Cheez-its and watching Diego with you.”
“YES!! I KNEW IT!”
“The whole world is now clothing optional.”
“YES!! I KNEW IT!”
She is fierce about everything, especially her style. All of her clothes are ninja clothes. If the pants aren’t jeans, they are ninja pants. If the skirt is worn by Wanda, it is a ninja skirt. Any item of clothing can be a ninja item if she deigns to put it on.
Wanda has pretend friends. Currently they are named MinLin and Federica.
Her hair is knots. Always.
Her eyebrows are acrobatic in their expressive abilities.
When you give her a gift, even if it’s something she didn’t know existed, she always says, “OH! It’s what I always wanted!” and clasps her hands together in front of her face.
She swims fiercely and is WAY too confident in her abilities. She is fast and extremely buoyant and refuses to use her arms most of the time. She is to Michael Phelps what a person who runs with their arms hanging down flat against their sides is to Hussein Bolt.
She runs like a cartoon character, lifting up one leg behind her and balancing with super hero running arms for a couple of seconds before taking off.
Wanda has learned from her brother that kissing is SICK and not in a “phat sick” kind of way. It is super gross. So, like Magoo, whenever Dan and I kiss, she says, “I didn’t see that,” even if she was looking directly at us when the saliva was exchanged.
The other night, Dan kissed me at dinner mostly just to torture Magoo, and Wanda said, “I don’t want to EVER see that again.” She then paused for half a second and said, “Do it again!” so that she could get her eyes closed tightly the second time around and say, “I didn’t see that!”
Wanda is super excited about tomorrow and often asks questions like the following:
“After I go to sleep and then wake up, will it be tomorrow?”
“Yes! I knew it!”
“Are we gonna have tomorrow AFTER ta-DAY?!”
“YES!! I KNEW IT!”
Earlier this week I kept her home from preschool because she had a cough. So two days later she asked to go to school and I told her I wasn’t sure if she was well enough yet. She said, “You let me go to school one time when I was a little bit sick and I’m just a little bit sick and if I cough, I will cover it… LIKE THIS!” She then threw her arm up with her elbow clamped to her mouth and her eyes bugging out of her head, like Dracula covering his fangs with his cape.
The eyes were a question.
The answer was yes.
Yes, Four Wanda. If you cover your mouth… LIKE THIS, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
If there’s something good about to happen to my family, chances are solid, like, around 95%, that my kids know nothing about it. They’re going along in their daily lives and BAM! Disneyland or KAPOW! Ice cream sundaes. I try to always catch them off guard. Always. Why all the secrecy?
Do I love surprises?
Yes.
Do I also not want to see the looks on my kids’ faces if I tell them something seriously rad is gonna go down and then, after weeks of anticipation, Disneyland runs out of batteries or all the ice cream goes on strike?
Yes.
So I keep their expectations low and then shock them with awesomeness. But, I’ve run into a problem with this line of thinking. I’ve noticed recently that I’ve started to set low expectations for life, for the world, for the people I love.
Too often I find myself assuming the worst, stressing out because I’m sure something bad is going to happen and then feeling mild relief when the ceiling doesn’t cave in.
This is a sucky way to live.
So, I’ve decided to start managing my expectations a different way. I want to see what will happen if I expect everything to be amazing.
I gave this a try recently and it was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.
It was a crazy day. The kids left for school at 8am and we ran from school to activity to activity, not getting them back home until after what sane people would consider bedtime.
Our bathroom fan had been broken for a few weeks and “It’s past time to fix it,” said the mildew. I bought a fan over a week earlier, looked up instructions on YouTube, investigated the attic, and then gave up, sure the job would be a nightmare. I have a huge fear of attics. They have rats. And itchy insulation. And spiders. And dark mysterious corners. And the possibility of crashing through the sheetrock if you take one wrong step.
But if I was in a new training mode to expect everything to go well, to expect great things, then why not go for it?
I decided that I would install the fan triumphantly and it would be my greatest YouTube School of HandyWomanry coup. I gathered all the necessary tools, got Wanda set up playing in the room below the opening, hauled some huge boards up the ladder to give me a more stable work surface, and flipped the circuit breakers.
And then I dropped the ceiling panel on the ground and broke off a big chunk. I persisted. I expected to be successful. And then I found that the people who installed the original fans were idiots and that the joists in my attic were too small and the fan hole was in the wrong place and the wiring was crazy and there was no humanly possible way for me to do the repair.
So I left all the tools in the attic, vacuumed the chunks of drywall and insulation from the floor, washed the cobwebs and insulation from my hair and body and closed up shop for the day. But, we were one hour and a ton of information closer to fixing the problem, and I didn’t stress about it, and I was so proud of myself for trying, only possible because I expected the best and went through with a plan.
Then I needed to kill an hour while Laylee was at ballet so I took the kids to Costco, as usual, but I decided beforehand that we were going to have the most fun ever. And guess what? We did.
That night we planned to attend a church meeting that I wasn’t jazzed about, so I decided to get jazzed about it, to assume it would be fun and informational and a great experience for me and the kids. And guess what? It was pretty awesome.
Previously, I had no real interest in the subject matter, but they made it come alive in an engaging way. Old men singing campfire songs and people launching rockets and riding a zipline in the conference center where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings. Need I say more?
I would rather spend my entire life expecting to be delighted, only to be disappointed every once in a while, than live in a constant state of impending doom, only to be periodically surprised by goodness.
My goodness to doom ratio needs to grow much higher than it currently is. I think it takes practice, but it’s a fun skill to spend time cultivating.
Magoo says, “Mom?”
I think, “I wonder what amazing thing he’s going to tell me. Let me prepare to soak up his cuteness,” instead of my usual, “What’s wrong NOW?!”
Dan says, “I have something to tell you when I get home.”
I think, “Oooo. I love surprises,” instead of, “Did he lose his job, or did he get laid off? Where will live? How long will the Macaroni supplies hold?”
What do you expect from your life?
I spend about 95% of my life anticipating what will happen, expecting things to happen, and maybe 3% having things actually happen. 2% of my life is spent sleeping. So, if I am expecting sadness and doom, then I will be spending about 95% of my life living in a place of fear and anxiety and 3% or less experiencing joy. I say 3% or less because maybe a fraction of one percent of the things that happen in my life are actually doom-filled things. Most of my experiences are really good.
But, if I decide to expect joy, friendship, love, and fun, then I’ll spend the majority of my life dwelling in that place. And, oops, every once in a while unexpected doom will descend and I’ll deal with it.
Zombie Apocalypse on the horizon? Surprise me. I’ll store munitions and jello just in case, but I’ll assume I’ll never have to use them and, in the meantime, I’ll be looking for fluffy bunnies and marshmallow peeps to come moaning down the street. They’re much more fun to contemplate.