Each day as a mom is an exercise in finding balance anew. Despite how entirely balanced she was yesterday: playing with her kids, engaging the children in helping with chores and cleaning, finding time for herself, accomplishing some important todo’s, today is a new day and the potential to come completely unbalanced, to obsess over cleaning or lose the day to sitting around un-showered in pajamas, is just as great and real as it was the day before. It’s hard to gain traction as a mom in search of balance. But maybe that’s the point.
Someone told me right after Twila was born that being a mom is one of the greatest spiritual practices. I didn’t understand this at the time, but over the years it has begun to come clear. The spiritual cliché: The Journey is the Destination is a perfect illustration for motherhood.
Any mom can tell you that orienting your goals to a particular end is a losing proposition—every time. But it doesn’t stop us from still trying to accomplish specific things each and every day. ‘Today we’re going to play at the Children’s Museum,’ ‘Today we’re going to get this house clean,’ ‘Today we’re going to wash your hair before school,’ ‘Today we’re going to write those thank you notes,’ ‘Today we’re going to get in touch with grandma,’ ‘Today we’re going to stop using diapers,’ ‘Today we’re going to get a good family photo.’ And so it goes, the best laid plans often go awry. But if you’re a mother of young children, the adage should be that the best laid plans always go awry.
Just as soon as you’ve made a clear, decisive plan for the day, the kids get sick, spike a fever, figure out how to open the paint samples and destroy their carpet, refuse to put the receiver to their mouths, decide they hate writing their name, poop on the floor, or, in our case, they decided they were too tired to sit, hug each other and smile for our family photo shoot last week.
I scheduled our photo shoot a month out. I bought new outfits for the girls, new shirts for Ryan and me, got up at dawn to shower and dress the girls and myself, and blow dry my hair. I even left a few minutes to clean up the area where I thought most of the photos would be taken. Our shoot was at nine am.
Things went well for the first few minutes. Twila loves the camera and was all too happy to try new poses in new places. Jada on the other hand was already declining towards nap number one. She rubbed her eyes, wandered back and forth but was reticent to display that sunburst smile that she is famous for. She also showed very little interest in holing still or looking at the camera.
Usually Jada is very easy to photograph, she loves to smile and somehow seems to “get it” so I was thrown off by her disinterest in the process to put it mildly; frustrated would be more accurate. Highly irritated would be more accurate still. But with children the journey is the destination. Luckily the photographer was a friend who is very patient and likes my kids. So even when midway through the process Twila started getting tired and frustrated with Jada’s lack of cooperation and started showing her own frustration in a strange rebellion against the posses I suggested, refusing to take her glasses off the top of her head while posing with sunglasses and actually bursting into tears when I told her she had to choose between the glasses, our patient photographer stuck with us. I didn’t envy her job when she said our kids where easy compared to some.
When at the end to the shoot, I pulled Ryan out of our office to get a couple good family shots, Twila and Jada were absolutely finished; in every sense of the word. They were tired and fussy and crabby. Jada arched her back and squirmed to the floor each time one of us tried to pick her up and point her in the direction of the camera. Twila for some reason adopted a deeply creased brow and angry scowl that she refused to turn off. But instead of getting angry about the fact that weeks of planning, scheduling, shopping and preparing were ending in one of our family’s least photogenic moments of all time, Ryan and I just laughed.
We laughed because it was so classically comical. Planning a family photo, it seems, is tantamount to actually asking for everything to go wrong.
We let the girls go, let them run off and play with the photo props and accessories and stuff Pirate’s Booty in their mouths. We took some shots by ourselves and shook our heads at how things turn out. I’ve found that that’s all you can do when things fall apart: accept that some things are out of your control—no matter how controlling you are—and try to find the humor in the situation. There is always humor; you just have to be open to seeing it. Usually the obstacle to seeing the humor is my inability to lighten up. I often take myself too seriously and can’t laugh at the absurdity of kids crying when you’re paying someone to capture their smile, of a cup of ground cinnamon which shouldn’t have been in the car in the first place not just spilling but exploding all over every square inch of the upholstery, of a child deciding she doesn’t actually want the elaborate snack you were cajoled into making, of a wet, slippery child wanting to get immediately out of the bath she begged to have in the middle of the day. Even as I write these examples, they don’t seem all that funny. But you have to laugh.
You have to laugh because so often in life it’s a choice between laughing and crying, or laughing and shouting. And laughing is invariably the better choice. And if nothing else, that is what I’ve learned as a mom: that when you can actually embrace, right there in the moment, the inherent beauty in imperfection, in messes and mistakes, you truly can see the journey of motherhood as more valuable than accomplishing some distant achievement, or arriving at some distant destination.
And if achieving patience, and showing my kids how to laugh at themselves and see the humor and possibility in their mistakes is all I accomplish in this life, I think it will be enough.
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