Five year olds are a new experience for me. Five year olds aren’t toddlers or preschoolers. We can still call them our babies, but they aren’t babies anymore. Five year olds are kids. Not quite big kids yet but definitely biggish kids.
For the last few months I feel like I’ve been stumbling in the dark a bit with Magoo. I wasn’t quite sure how to be a mom to a biggish kid.
With the little ones it’s easy. I cuddle them, and I tickle them. We sing songs. They sit on my lap while I read them books. A lot of what they need from me is my physical presence, my touch. They just need me to be there with them. Fully.
And then there’s Magoo. We still obviously read together every day, but now it’s more her reading to me, and it’s pretty much just one set time because she doesn’t read books that can be read in one minute here, two minutes there increments. She likes listening to music with me, but she’s pretty much past the “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” phase, and I surely can’t get her above my head to do “The Grand Old Duke of York.” She cuddles but not nearly as often.
And so I would say for the last six months or so, I’ve been struggling to try to figure out how to be her mom. What do I do? What should we do together? How do I make sure she isn’t getting left behind because her little sisters need so much of me? How do I make sure that she understands that her needs are just as important even if they are different?
And then I stopped thinking and I let her teach me.
She asked me a couple of months ago to teach her how to crochet. I’ve started to. It’s slow (sloooooooow) going. But we will sit on the couch, her with her yarn and hook, and me with mine. I don’t actually get to use mine because I’m spending the whole time helping her, but she gets so excited. She likes to tell people how she crochets like her mom.
And she has this exercise program at school. She has to exercise thirty minutes a day for twenty or thirty some days to win a free pass to a local water park. And so we have started to do it together. It’s too ridiculously cold to exercise outside, so we dance some days, and most days we pick an exercise video from YouTube to do together. The second she wakes up, she starts talking about exercising and how we do it because it is so important.
She hears me talk about God, and she responds when I ask her what she thinks Jesus would want her to do. She sees me sing at church and listen to the priest. And she does the same. She sings when I sing. She opens the book when I open the book. She says things like, “We are nice to people because that’s what Jesus wants us to do.”
And I watched these things and I listened to the things that came out of her mouth, and I finally started to understand that this is what she needs — she needs an “us.” She needs someone to look up to. She needs someone to show her what womanhood is all about. She needs to hear the words, but more than that, she needs to see it lived.
And my goodness is that a concept to get my mind around.
We are big fans of Dr Phil around here. (Don’t judge. Okay, you can judge because I probably would too.) He always says that the greatest influence in a child’s life is the same sex parent. The first time I heard that, I almost had to reach for the wine… or the Xanax. Because I have three little girls, and they have me to teach them how to be a woman. I am their main example. And so much rides on that.
I started to think about that and overanalyze it as I tend to, and I realized that I don’t know how to teach them how to be a woman because there are so many different ways to be a woman in today’s world. And so then I finally came to understand that the best that I can do for any of the three of them is to teach them how to be themselves, and I can only do that by being the best I can be myself.
I think as moms we often feel so guilty about doing things for ourselves. Even going for a walk around the block by myself makes me feel guilty. But the more I think about it, perhaps the way we can be the best mom is to be the best person we can be. And that means taking care of all of the aspects of ourselves and working on all of those aspects that matter most to us.
To be a mom, to me, has come to mean being a person first. It means taking care of my needs so they can learn that theirs are important. It means taking care of others’ needs, so they learn that we weren’t put here for ourselves. It’s about putting God in the center of our home, so they can learn what the meaning of it all is. It’s about living and being and breathing and moving in every way that matters most to us so they can see what this whole life is about.
They are going to watch everything. They will watch their peers and their teachers and the people on television and the people in the magazines. But luckily, from the very beginning, the people that matter the most are inside the four walls of their home. And while that can be terrifying, it is also incredibly motivating and powerful.
And each night, when we pray over the dinner table, I silently close my eyes and imagine my arms reached out over all three of them, and I silently pray that I can do right by them and that I can be who they most need me to be.
“When you thought I wasn’t looking”
Mary Rita Schilke Korazan
“When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I saw you hang my first painting on the refrigerator,
and I wanted to paint another one.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I saw you feed a stray cat,
and I thought it was good to be kind to animals.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I saw you make my favorite cake for me,
and I knew that little things are special things.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I heard you say a prayer,
and I believed that there was a God to talk to.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I felt you kiss me goodnight,
and I felt loved.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I saw tears come from your eyes,
and I learned that sometimes things hurt,
but it’s alright to cry.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I saw that you cared,
and I wanted to be everything that I could be.
When you thought I wasn’t looking,
I looked….
and I wanted to say thanks for all the things
I saw when you thought I wasn’t looking.”
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