Mean Mommy

Memoir of a terrible morning

For today’s column, I’m sharing an excerpt from my memoir, a story that was originally published on Mamalode a decade ago. This memory still sparks so many painful feelings, and it also makes me feel so grateful for how far I’ve come in terms of understanding and accepting who I am. I revisited this piece today in light of our new Mother Plus Podcast series, affectionately dubbed, “a 5-part series for moms who think they suck.” In our first episode, we discuss the thing that have always made us feel like failures, and all these memories of awful elementary school mornings came flooding back. I’m writing it as I incorporate one of the “parts” I discovered in my system while working with IFS therapy. The basic idea is that all of us have “parts” —procrastinator, inner critic, basketbase, daydreamer, etc—and these parts arise to protect us at different times, especially during crises. In this excerpt, I am describing the Octopus, a part of my system that sprang to action when I felt flustered and overwhelmed. Here’s one of my Best of the Worst.

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Mean Mommy

The Octopus came nearly every morning, showed up often in the car, and made appearances during chaotic daily transitions. She took me over during moments when I felt I was simply in over my head, inadequate, frazzled, not enough for what the situation required: the minivan marathons when I was stretching myself too thin on a self-sabotaging scavenger hunt as I raced across town to pick up one child, drop her off, take another to therapy, run to the grocery store. Juggling, managing, failing, exploding, self-flagellating. The cycle felt miserable. 

I felt her the most acutely after my second child was born and I had even more to handle than my system was built for. The morning rush to school and work was the time of day when my maternal ineptitude manifested in all its frenetic glory, frequently highlighted by misplaced items, sibling squabbles, poor personal hygiene efforts, and undeniable tardiness. Worse yet, sometimes they turned me into Mean Mommy.

Mean Mommy was boiling under the surface one winter morning as I prepared to get my first grader to the bus stop then drive my one-year-old to daycare and myself to work. With fifteen minutes remaining before it was time to leave for school and work, we couldn’t find my six-year-old’s lunchbox. Or her coat. I inwardly scolded myself for not having them ready the night before, and frantically attempted to locate her sister’s shoes. As the kids waited patiently, I did the post-loading sprint of shame back into the house twice to retrieve several essential items (my iPhone and coffee mug; it would have been pointless to carry on without them.) To my horror, the last few scrambles put us further off the mark than I had realized, and we were dangerously close to the bus arrival time. 

As we reached the end of the street, I watched in slow-motion an event I had not witnessed before: the school bus pulling away from the stop. And true to my Mother of the Year status, I uttered the following sentence: “We just missed the fucking bus!” Yes, my two children were in the car. It got worse. I began to shout, choking back tears, about how I “couldn’t have any more mornings like this!” and how I may have been “sick of not being able to find shit all the time!” I was on a roll. My six-year-old’s eyes were wide. She knew this was serious.

I was fuming as we drove away from my toddler’s childcare center, and my daughter was in tears, worrying about whether she would be late for school. I snapped at her, having hit my limit, and was rewarded by the karmic misfortune of driving over a cumbersome cluster of branches in the road. The unpleasant scraping noise under the van informed me we were dragging it. Letting loose with an expletive, I sighed loudly and stomped out of the car to free the unwieldy bunch from the undercarriage. 

“Shut up,” I yelled at the small dog who was yapping frantically at the crazy woman entering his territory. Yes, I was an unhinged asshole who shouted at dachshunds. Reentering the car to the soundtrack of my daughter’s crying, I realized I had to get it together. “Izzy,” I began, “you need to stop freaking out.” I had an out of body experience as I watched the words float out of my mouth. The glaring hypocrisy smacked me in the face, but it was too late to take my duplicitous words back. 

As we pulled up to school, I was horrified to see the icing on the cake of my maternal failure—flocks of children were entering the building. In their pajamas. Because it was pajama day at school. Was my child wearing pajamas? Or course not. I wanted to rewind the morning and end up back in bed. Or fast forward the whole day and end up back in bed. Either one. 

Sighing heavily, I attempted to soothe my daughter and make peace before she headed into school. There wasn’t much else I could do to salvage the emotional train wreck of our day’s beginning. I made sure to give her a hug and kiss, usually a taboo exchange in the ill-named “Hug and Go” lane at school, and sent her on her way with a reminder that I loved her. Tomorrow I would do better.

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Narrator: Spoiler alert! She did not do better tomorrow! Or the day after that! When I told my seventeen-year-old that I was including that story in my book, she said, “I remember that day so vividly. I felt like the worst kid ever.” I replied, “I felt like the worst mom ever.”

People! This work we do, the therapy, the soul-searching, the curiosity—it helps us tune into each other more acutely; it breaks generational patterns. I had no idea my daughter carried that moment as a “Core Memory,” a marking of her failure. And she had no idea that was my narrative either. As I dug into my own childhood while writing this book, it was profund to see it come full circle as I identified one of my parts while my daughter shared her own unique perspective of that day. It was pretty mind-blowing.

I carried these feelings of guilt and shame for years; to be honest, I still struggle to set it down. As I have come to terms with some of the things about motherhood I suck at, I’ve also been trying to tap into my strengths.

In our second episode of our podcast series, we celebrate some of the strengths we have as ADHD moms. You can listen here:

XOXO,
Steph