I’m not a big watcher of Reality TV. However, I don’t live in a mud hut on an isolated mountaintop, so I am aware of the madness that is Survivor.
And I laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. You want to see a survival story? Come to to a house with young children. Maybe multiple children. Maybe where both parents work. Oh, and toss in a few pets. I’ll show you some survival. I’d like to see some of those wimps survive a week in our shoes.
They think foraging for berries and eating bugs is hard? I have one child who lives on carpet fuzz and dog kibble with the occasional Lego for variety. There is no nutritional value to Legos, but they do seem to fill her up for awhile. As her mother, it’s my responsibility to discourage that sort of thing but sometimes I just appreciate the roughage she gets from them and move on.
Think not having hot running water is a challenge? Fight with a 9-year-old about why proper hygiene is important and how boys won’t ever want to kiss h in a few years if she doesn’t start taking showers. At least on some remote island, one has a good excuse for being filthy. There isn’t an animal on that island that is as persistent in getting its way as my middle child. She’s relentless.
And if you think sleeping on a straw mat is tough, try sleeping with a crackling, static-y baby monitor next to your ear for years on end. Add in a cosleeping toddler, being woken a few times a night to go on a pacifier hunt so you can plug up the baby, oh, and then toss in a few toddler night terrors each week (I’d welcome an animal of prey over those scary things). I’m sure after all that you’d be thinking that the straw mat on the ground of a remote island is a REM sleep paradise!
How do you know if you are in Mommy Survival Mode? Take this quiz:
1. If you catch your baby eating out of the dog food bowl, do you:
a. Say “Ewwww” and move her away from it.
b. Put the bowl up where she cannot reach.
c. Let her continue, call it “lunch” and finish folding the load of laundry.
2. If your toddler wants to watch the Dora the Explorer marathon on, do you:
a. Agree to 30 minutes max and then engage her in making a design on construction paper using uncooked pasta and glue.
b. Agree to a 1 hour max and then take her to the park so she forgets.
c. Let her watch it all day so you can rest and then tell your friends she spent the day learning a second language.
3. If your child catches a nasty cold do you:
a. Make homemade chicken noodle soup and spoon feed him lovingly.
b. Run to the store for ginger ale and popsicles on the way home from the doctor’s office.
c. Secretly rejoice that the cold medicine will knock him on his ass and you’ll get to have a little happy-nap, too.
4. When the subject of co-sleeping comes up, do you:
a. Drone on and on about security and closeness and the value of the family bed.
b. Quote statistics about how your child is safer by sleeping next to you and synchronizing her breathing patterns to yours.
c. State that you’d be willing to let your child sleep on the median of Highway I-44 if it meant just a few more minutes of sleep for yourself.
5. When undertaking a necessary outing to the grocery store, do you:
a. Dress baby up in those cute and expensive adorable outfits hanging in the closet.
b. Make sure to grab some of those colorful Linkadoo toys for her to play with in the shopping cart.
c. Put a bib on to cover up the stained Onesie and let her bring a 9 volt alkaline battery to chew on and keep her quiet.
If your answer was C to 3 or more of these, you might be in mommy survival mode, too.
A few more clues you may be a potential Mommy Survivor Candidate:
• If it smells, you Fabreeze it, even if it is 3 ½ years old, wiggly, and protests.
• You clean your entire house with baby wipes. In fact, at this point in time, you think baby wipes are the single most useful thing ever invented.
• While others may think you use that baby sling to keep a close bond to your infant, you know that you use it so no one can see that the baby is always wearing pajamas, and not very clean ones, at that.
• You pretend the reason you are an avid breast feeder is because of the nutritional superiority and bonding opportunity, but in fact you made your decision solely on the benefit of being able to sleep while feeding the baby.
• When the naked baby pooped on the floor and you ran her to the bathroom to wash her up, you were secretly glad upon returning that the dog was eating the poop – one less thing for you to clean up.
• When reading a bedtime story, you skip pages when the toddler isn’t looking. When the toddler gets old enough to be wise to the page skipping trick, you start just skipping words and sentences on the page. When the child is on to you for this one, you tell her “I think the time has come for you to read quietly to yourself in bed at night.”
• You secretly fantasize about a divorce just for the benefit of having every other weekend to yourself (I can see the custody battle: You take ‘em. No, YOU take ‘em. No, they like YOU better. But you are their mother. Talk about an ugly custody fight!).
• No one is allowed to come to your house without at least 20 minutes notice, but you’d prefer a 1-week notice period. And even then they aren’t allowed to look in any closets or under any beds. And they can never ever open the laundry room door!
• The exercise equipment you invested in makes for a GREAT place to hang clothes. You use the treadmill for stuff-to-go-to-the-dry-cleaners and you use the stationary bike for stuff-to-hang-up-in-the-closet-someday.
The good news is that we do, eventually, come out of survivor mode. We get to sleep in. We get to make wonderful meals that take hours to prepare. We are able to get dressed with clothing from hangers in closets rather than living out of a laundry basket. We might have date nights again and perhaps even weekend getaways. We will have clean houses and we will exercise regularly and we will relax on the weekends.
Until that day, I will continue to survive as best I can. I will write my mental grocery list while having sex with my husband. I will consider an afternoon of swimming as a swell substitute for baths for my children. I will drop to my knees and thank whatever god or goddess is out there for giving us cable TV with 27 channels dedicated to children’s programming. And I will capture, in words and pictures, the sheer, unbridled wonderment of these precious years because lord knows I won’t be able to remember it all later.
When it gets particularly stressful, though, I do try to get them all to vote me off the island. I think a mud hut on an isolated mountaintop sounds heavenly. I think if I yell loud enough, if I cry hard enough, if I recede into my little mommy shell, maybe they’ll vote me off. Fortunately, my clan will have none of it – they seem resigned to being stuck with me.
What can I say? The tribe has spoken.
My husband came rushing into the family room. “What happened? Is everyone OK”