Category: The Hard Stuff

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After my 8 billionth sleepless night, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and implement one of my less robust business ideas: Rent a Toddler.

Need an excuse to justify your age inappropriate love of trick-or- treating? Consider Rent a Toddler.

Need an exercise regimen that ensures that you never ever get to sit down ever again? Rent a Toddler has the workout for you.

Want someone to decorate your walls with permanent marker and peanut butter (or the occasional sundry body excretion)? Tired of all the predictable emotions and long for the company of someone who will melt your heart with love and cuddles one second, only to have you debating whether you should call animal control or a priest after you give them the wrong color popsicle? Or maybe you’re tired of sitting by and wondering what it’s like to be awoken every two hours with a round house kick to your jugular.

Wonder no more- Rent a Toddler has your solution to all these challenges and more!

F̶o̶r̶ ̶l̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶g̶y̶m̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶ FREE, available to g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶m̶e̶s̶ ANYONE WHO’LL TAKE HIM FOR A FEW HOURS, you too can have a toddler.

Call today!
Right Now!
Please?!?!

**Legal disclaimer:  if you have Tiffany stemware, expensive furniture, dry clean only clothes, a vibrant love or social life, ambition of any kind, or any desire to cling to your sanity, Rent a Toddler may not be for you.

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While I’ll be the first to admit that I can be a control freak of a mother, there’s actually a lot of things that may bother other moms that I just couldn’t care less about. I celebrate kid-inspired mismatched outfits and random sock pairings. I think it’s great when they push all the buttons in the elevator, cause you know, adventure. Spic and span my house is not. Being able to play every sport and instrument; never going to happen.

But there is one behavior that I just cannot abide in my children: self-imposed limitations.

There is one expression that I simply will not allow my children to say, and unfortunately it’s one that I hear a lot at this stage of development. “I can’t do it”. “I can’t do it”, a phrase that comes with floppy limbs and high pitches and is usually expressed as if auditioning for a Victorian Melodrama. My kneejerk response is always the same “In this house we say ‘I CAN do it, I just need a little help’ “. And then I work with the floppy protagonist on doing it together (even if I’m doing 90% of the work- 10% still counts as not getting off the hook).

Richard Bach so sagely wrote, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they are yours.” I explain to the boys that if they tell themselves they cannot do something, they surely can’t.

And why am I so uptight about this? After all, it’s definitely easier to just do something for them than to have this perpetual conversation and to assist them with the task at hand for the zillionth time. In part it was because I was raised with the same empowered ethos, with a mother who sold encyclopedias and handed me the relevant volume and a cursory “look in up” whenever I asked her any question at all (back in the pedagogical dark ages before Google gave us light). A family of Montessorians who believed in executive function and child empowerment. But I will tell you flat out where it does not come from- my own conquering of self-limitations. No way, Jose. Quite the contrary.

On a good day, I can tell you without hesitation that my insistence that my children reframe their capabilities from the spirit of defeat to the spirit of possibility is that I am trying really hard to demobilize my own self-limitation and I don’t want them to struggle like I have. That I have spent a lot of years arguing for my limitation a if it were the air I breathed. We teach what we want to learn, after all, and my poor children are my captive guinea pigs for continual brain tattooing of all the lessons that I’m trying to learn myself. The truth is, I beat back a steady stream of “I can’ts” in my own mind every day. “I can’t do that. I’m too old”. “I can’t do that, I’m too inexperienced” “I can’t do that, it didn’t work when I tried” “I can’t do that, it’s all been done before” Etc ad nasuem. The melodrama in my own mind has been quite something.

I can’t for the life of me remember who said this first (and here even Google AND World Book fail me- if you know the attribute, kindly credit it in comments below), but I remember exactly where I was when I first heard: “You Were Born Into A Mansion. Why Do you Insist on Living in One Room”. This idea that expansion and abundance is our birthright, yet we shutter ourselves into a very small experience through our own self-imposed limitations.

Surely, you’ve heard of the experiment of the tank of goldfish that was divided in two by a glass partition for several months, keeping the goldfish relegated to only a portion of the expansive tank. After several months, the glass was removed, but the goldfish never attempted to swim beyond the past barrier, prisoners by their own past conditioning. And these are creatures with like a five second memory, where every day is truly a new one. Imagine what we’re all up against, us with our lives of perpetual slings and arrows. It’s no wonder why we all stay cramped up in a tiny room in our own potential mansions. It’s no wonder we tell ourselves there is no other alternative than the comfort of our own self-enforced limitations.

But I want my kids to have better. I want them to be better defended against the sea of CAN’TS, both internal and external. At the very least, I want them to at least have the defense of a mantra that their unreasonable and unyielding mother drilled into their pudding heads. “I CAN do it, I just need a little help”. So when life starts presenting them bigger obstacles than spreading peanut butter on crumbly bread or pulling off a tight jacket, they will at least have a moment to consider the possibility of their own potential in the situation. That they might feel comfortable looking for help to get to the next step rather than throwing in the towel altogether (as I myself have done so many times).

And at the very least, maybe just maybe it will give me less work to do, too.

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This morning I sat alone in tears, suddenly overcome with so much sadness with all the hard things happening in the world. There was so much to grieve in an aching world, I barely knew where to start. So much ugliness, fear, hatred, exploitation and harming one another. There are so  many things that I can’t yet talk to you boys about in your littleness and precious innocence, and sometimes I get so scared about what lies ahead for you. In fact, the sadness and the fear are sometimes so great that I can’t even look at it directly, for fear it might consume me.

Like most people, I want to be able to DO something about all the awful in the world, all the hurting and suffering. And in the smallest and humblest of ways this blog is that something. Mothering you both is that something. Showing up and trying to be kind to everyone I meet is that something. These things aren’t grandiose, but it’s becoming ever more apparent that simply being kind to one another and to ourselves can be a radical rebellion.

My goal as a mother is to raise you both to be lovers of the world, to be able to connect with people across beliefs and cultures and geographies and economics. To give you the values that I was so friggin lucky to raised with by my own parents and my sister: tolerance and respect and love and peace and generosity and kindness. To raise other people up rather than tear them down. To do your best to release judgment and to love what is. To take care of one another.

And I was crying this morning not only because of grief over how those values don’t always seem apparent in the world. But I was crying over how I don’t always live them in my own life, and how I’m often awful and nasty to those I love. How I have to be reminded again and again to be kind to myself. It’s often so much easier to be loving and kind and forgiving to other people than it is to be to ourselves.

What I want you to know, my little ones, is that in order to be gentle with the world you must first be so very gentle with yourself. You must be fierce in the protection of your own heart, and be vigilant to always carve out space to nurture yourself in a world that seems to be demanding and distracting away from that nurturing instinct. As I learned so many years back in my flight attendant days- you are the most important person on the airplane. Secure those oxygen masks, guys. You’ve got to take care of yourself first before or else all your beautiful values will be for naught.

You’re calling from the other room, and I’m going to take you swimming in the ocean now, to smile and laugh and probably get irritated at you when you don’t listen or when you take too long. We’ll go about our routine. This tender part of my aching heart won’t be visible to you today- it really wants to close off altogether. But today I’m making a promise to do my very best to keep my own heart open and to love myself like crazy so I can teach you both to do the same. I promise that as long as I’m able, I’m going to hold your hands as you grow into an inevitable understanding of The Awful Things We Do To One Another, and to do everything I can to radically shape you into brave forces of love and kindness. For all of our sakes, because this world so desperately needs you to grow into love.