The World’s Biggest Snowball

By Beck

I got another big shipment of books this afternoon, mostly parenting or crafts with kids or family activities type books, and was quickly overwhelmed with the desire to curl up someplace quiet and read for several days, which reminded me of a friend’s joke: “Go away! Mama’s readin’ her parentin’ magazine.”

I love being a mother. I love being a stay-at-home mother. I even love being a “homemaker” – but I often find myself wishing, rather desperately, that it was still 1950 and I could send my kids outside for the afternoon and go in the house, which would be quiet and cool and tidy. I don’t think it was actually safer in 1950, but there was more blithe ignorance, which seems, from my perspective nearly 60 years away, to be preferable to my anxious, fear-filled hovering. Fearful, of course, that not only will something bad happen to the little goobers but also that I might miss out on some necessary developmental stage, that I might let something slip and then KABOOM, they’re 12 year old heroin addicts.

You know, if I took the afternoon off to read or something.

There’s a weird streak of narcissism in all of this anxiety, I think, that what I’m doing is so VITAL and so CONSTANTLY NECESSARY that if I let go of my constant hovering, they’ll blow up like little neglected bombs. I think raising my children well is the most important thing I could do, do NOT get me wrong, but I do think that the cult of fanatical motherhood has not served mothers – or children – well. Do they need me constantly attending to their every need, making sure that they never experience a moment of boredom or have a whim that goes unmet? Probably not.

My older children told me today about an adventure that they had back in the winter. The Girl’s class suddenly decided to start rolling one massive snowball, and as a group they were pushing this HUGE snowball around until the rest of the school started joining in, and finally the whole school – all 90 of them – were pushing this gigantic snowball around, until it was as tall as the roof (or so the kids told me) of the school.

“And then what happened?” I asked, curious. They shrugged.

“Recess was over,” they said. “We went inside.” And I was left with the rather pleasant image of the whole school of them – the nearly adult-sized 13 year olds, right down to the wee baby-sized four year olds – pushing this gigantic snowball as a group, just for fun. They did this on their own with no suggestions from me and that it also didn’t even occur to them to tell me about it until now, eight months later. It’s not 1950, and there will always be things to worry about, but meanwhile, my kids have this one perfect winter memory in the middle of our cranky, rainy summer, and I can maybe relax and sit down with a book for a while.

Beck also blogs at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.