Sunday Bloody Sunday

Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?

I think it may be more a tightrope than a line and Liam and I seem to walk it every weekend and fall of it about 3 o’clock on Sunday. It’s our witching hour, the trough of our weekly cycle, our low point.

I know this – I don’t like it and yet somehow I rarely seem to be able to prevent us from ending up there, which just frustrates the hell out of me because I know that it should be the exact opposite. It should be Monday morning you dread, right? Not Sunday afternoon.

For the first eight months of Liam’s life my beautiful niece Dominique lived with us – and so Sunday’s were the kind of day I’ve always believed they should be – fewer responsibilities and more time for fun and relaxation. But when she left and it became just Liam and me on the weekends, the departure of his nanny on Friday afternoon began a 50 to 60 hour stretch when it really was just him and me. I once saw another mother’s Facebook post in which she admitted that she hated the weekends and I felt the kind of horror that you do when someone has given voice to an unspeakable truth. To say that the time you spend alone with your child is not the most precious time of all seems like violating a basic tenet of good mothering. But six years in to my single parent experience I can still say that by the time we are hitting 40+hours of each other’s company – things are getting tense.

I know that much of the problem is based in my personality. I’m a loner, who lives mostly in my head and who always has a long list of things on my ‘to do’ list. I push at life – and by the weekend there usually ain’t a whole lot of energy left. Now that I think back to what weekends were like before Liam came along I can see that they were time I gave to myself. More often than not I didn’t engage with the rest of the world and many times I didn’t even venture outside for at least one whole day. It was my time to unplug, to destress, to stop. To recharge.

Any mother will tell you – you do not get to recharge when you are caring for a child. Even as he has grown and the activities have changed (they are now much more about sporting events and play dates and birthday parties) rare is the day when you can just refuse to check in and get on with it. Mommy’s never get “mental health days.” And Liam and I have an intensity to our bond that I have finally learned is unusual. I read an article recently in which a mother described her decision to have a third child in her forties and the kind of child that she had. She described so many behaviors of that little girl that had me nodding going: “Yep, yep – recognize that.” But her point was that neither of her other children had ever been like that. Her elder one commented on the state of affairs by saying “Mom – I loved you, but I never stalked you.”

Liam doesn’t just need to be with me or near me – he needs to be on me. He doesn’t just sleep in my bed, he snuggles so close he pushes me out of it – and it’s a big bed. If I am at the computer he is on my lap. Same story if I am on the couch. He begs to be carried – and he’s getting heavy now – he’s almost 6. He hugs me and kisses me and wants to be hugged and kissed in return. Repeatedly. And he talks – mostly asking questions, all of which he wants answered and many of which are both unanswerable and repetitive because my previous answers have failed to pass muster with his very acute send of logic and his excellent memory. Sometimes I feel like he is trying to capture the very breath I exhale. And it doesn’t help that I have two lap dogs that similarly believe life is not worth living if they are outside a one foot radius of me. Such unrelenting need for my attention is exhausting. At times there is just not enough of me to go around and there’s certainly no me left over for me.

Don’t however think that all this adoration translates into a desire to do anything I ask. Oh no no no no no! The flip side of wanting to control my every minute is certainly not a willingness to comply with my requests. And so often every request – get dressed for church, get in the car so we can do the grocery shopping, do your piano practice, eat your food, - is met with “I don’t want to.” It’s stated simply and unemotionally – it’s almost cute really - in the surest confidence that it is the only thing in the world that matters. “Oh nice suggestion – thanks – but I don’t want to. So I won’t and you’ll just drop it right?” Needless to say I don’t drop it and some degree of conversation, coercion, or conflict takes place to ensure that we do whatever it is that I have decided needs to be done.

By Sunday afternoon the process has usually worn me thin and when I think about why I realize it’s because of my own selfishness. I’m looking for reciprocity. I did all this for you – I stood around with all the other mothers at the birthday party for three hours in the hot sun so you could have fun. I sat in the cold at the ice rink so you could have fun. I ate at the chain restaurant with the yucky food but the great playground so you could have fun. I went swimming when I didn’t want to get my hair wet so you could have fun I’ve played chasey and board games and read stories and watched movies I’ve already seen 5,000 times when I just wanted to lie on the couch and read, so you could have fun. . I haunted the craft store yet again so you could do your latest school project and have fun doing it. I’ve picked up your toys, your clothes, and all the other detritus that just seems to fall to the floor wherever you walk again and again. I’ve cooked all your meals and sat beside you for hours to make sure you ate them. Why can’t you do something for me without me having to pull rank on you? By Sunday afternoon all I want him to do is leave me alone for an hour – but as we’ve already established, that is an impossibility.

Do you realize how insane I am to think this way? I certainly do – but I still can’t stop it, particularly on Sunday afternoons. That just seems to be when my reserves are at their lowest and during the very time when there should be few other things competing for the attention my son craves from me I find myself just wanting to disengage. I don’t like this in myself. I can still recall the number of times I asked my own mother what she would like as a gift for an upcoming celebration (birthday, Mother’s day, Christmas) and she answered “peace and quiet.” As a mother I now get what she was saying but at the time, as a child, all I heard was a clear message of “just get away from me.”(Sorry Mom.) I don’t want my son to have that memory even though I’ve felt those very words rise to my lips.

But nor do I want Liam to believe that the only thing that matters in a relationship is if he is getting what he wants. That’s to be expected in a five year old but I’ve met my share of fifty-five year olds that never seemed to grow beyond it and I’m determined not to raise another one. And so I return to my original question: Where is the line between not raising your child to be a selfish person and being one yourself?

I really don’t have an answer…. but it’s Monday morning and I’m feeling so much better already….