This utter madness

Yesterday I was at the grocery store with C when I saw the cover of this week's Newsweek. An article entitled "The Myth of the Perfect Mother" caught my eye. As the cashier scanned it he said that I was the second mom that morning looking at that article. So I took it home and read it, and the related article by Anna Quindlen. I felt like the author had pegged my life perfectly.

Some memorable lines:

"...until one day, when my daughter was about four, I realized that I had turned into a human television set, so filled with 24-hour children's programming that I had no thoughts left of my own."

”Once my daughters began school, I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves—and their sanity—to motherhood...Who—like myself—appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic."

"Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts."

The author's recommendations for solving these problems are good ones. I would love to see some of them put into place. But I am practical enough to know that the chances of any of those great ideas making it into real policy changes are very low. If you're not a mom, you probably don't care all that much, even though you should.

And then the author suggests that to start changes in our own lives we "take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let's spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be." And I read this and then sit there stumped because I do not have that luxury. I have a child on the autism spectrum, a child with special needs. I not only can't fire the OT, I wouldn't want to. I am trying to come up with ways to give Q more intervention, not less. And I feel pulled in about a million different directions.

Anna Quindlen's great follow up essay makes me want to nod my head in agreement, though I know how screwed up I am when parts of it make me gasp with her honesty. When she admits that she didn't take her kids to weekly sports because she would rather be reading at home, I had to stop myself from going into that judging mode. That mode where mothers spend so much time trying to prove that their children and their mothering is so much better than anyone else's. Which just goes to hide the fact that I wish I could be that honest. I feel incredible amounts of guilt when I try to do something for myself at what I feel is the expense of my children. Blog when I could be playing with my kids? I couldn't do that. Clean and do laundry yes, but time just for me, no.

So I read all this and go, "Yes, I agree and I want something (anything!) to change!" But what? Quindlen ends her article by saying "A good time is what they remember long after toddler programs and art projects are over. The rest is just scheduling." Sure, for my daughter I agree. She needs to learn how to play for herself. I don't feel guilty about sending her to preschool next year. She'll love it and I will love a small (6 hour a week) break. Left alone for a short time she will play by herself or read a book and most of the time, I am perfectly happy to have her do this. But Q is a different story. For Q too much time left to himself is time he spends in an autistic wonderland re-enacting videos and doing self stimulatory behaviors.

Early intervention experts recommend that any kid on the autism spectrum spend 15-25 hours a week in therapeutic intervention. Q attends school 12 1/2 hours a week and then another 2 hours of private therapy. And the rest is left up to me. I'd say it is left up to me and DH but DH, though I love him dearly, is a workaholic so devoted to his calling that he has little time for anything else. Intervention with Q is low on his list. And I understand that in a way. I wish I had the same choice to make. But I don't. I don't feel like I have any choices to make at all.

Recently I made a decision to apply to seminary part time next year to start towards a Master of Divinity degree. It is something that I have wanted to do for a long time but because of various fears and obstacles, I have put it off. I am applying because I need to find myself again and I need to figure out how I can be something else than the cook, cleaner, and babysitter. But I am not optimistic that somehow this will make my life easier. I imagine it will make it much harder and any time that I need to do things for myself or my schooling will be hard to come by. Already I am trying to spend time some Sunday afternoons with the youth group in my church. This means DH watches the kids when Sunday afternoons is usually DH's work time. So his work gets pushed back and it impacts the whole rest of the week as he scrambles to make it up. Which impacts me as I struggle to do without his help while he works. It is a vicious cycle that seems to never end.

I cannot truly put into words how frustrated and tired and helpless I feel. I sit here with tears streaming down my face unable to see a way out of this utter madness. I love my kids. God do I love them. And I love being a mom. I love spending time with them and snuggling with them and watching them grow up. But I need a break, a way to make this work that doesn't involve me going insane. I just can't see it.