grading on a curve.

I'm pretty sure Spring has arrived in New England.  Despite the fact that I had to walk through three feet of snow to remove the Christmas wreath from my front door this past weekend I am going to believe the calendar and the increasingly mild temps.  You may be wondering why I waited until it is almost St. Patrick's Day to remove my holiday wreath.  It's not laziness, it's because I literally couldn't access my front door until now.  The snow was that deep.  

For those of you who haven't spent the last two months in the tundra that is New Hampshire, allow me to illustrate my point with a couple of images:

my commute

 My kids outside "getting some fresh air" (for 17 minutes before the frost bite sets in).

Getting my holiday decor down in a timely fashion isn't the only thing I'm finding challenging this month.  I'm just going to be honest and say that the entire month of March (to date) has felt like the SAT's of parenting for me.  If I have been a student in the fine art of parenting for the last eight years, then the month of March has undoubtedly been the big test.  And truthfully, at times, I've felt as though I'm failing.

There have been instances I was certain I said the wrong thing at that critical "teachable moment".  Situations where I wanted to protect my kids from an illness, or an insult, or themselves for that matter...and I couldn't.  Times when I blamed myself for working full time, for my genetics, for my overly sensitive nature and for feeling everything so much - so much that they can feel it too.  

I've always said that having kids is like someone holding up a mirror to show you everything there is to know about yourself.  The thing I'm starting to realize is that sometimes you can see straight through that glass - and you can see everything there is to know about yourself in them...standing right there on the other side.  

And sometimes, well, you just wish you could pluck that part of yourself (that pesky part that has always given you trouble) right out of them and put it back where it belongs.  Back inside yourself.

But you can't.  So you just have to help them instead.

As luck would have it, life has handed me (as life so often does) just the right voice at just the right time.  I stumbled across a book that I just can't put down (well, sometimes I have to put it down because I'm busy holding a nebulizer) called How To Catch a Frog: And Other Stories of Family, Love, Dysfunction, Survival and DIY  by Heather Ross.

check it out on amazon here.

Without ruining it for you, I'll just say this is Heather's memoir about life with her twin sister and their eccentric single mother in the rural Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.  The three of them inhabited a number of barely-livable structures on a piece of family owned land throughout her childhood and were often cold, hungry, or both.

Heather recounts a number of childhood memories throughout the book with such perfect detail you can't help but feel like you are right there beside her - in that little brook with the waterfall, swimming next to her with no bathing suit on.  Her stories are hysterical, and real, and touching - I highly recommend this as your beach read of Summer 2015.

The part that has struck me over and over throughout the book however, is not her crazy upbringing or the success she has made of her life despite those early challenges.  But rather, it is the way she remembers her mother in so many ways and in such different lights.  

There are pages where she describes her mother as almost neglectful.  Chain smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking beer from a can and never having anything but peanut butter out of the jar available for breakfast.  Her Mom also had a charming habit of intentionally running animals over with her car for food - she and her sister were no stranger to road kill turkey dinner.  

Just when you have decided her mother was clearly a parenting failure and unfit to be raising two small girls Heather will describe how she would look out the cabin window on freezing cold days to see her skinny mother chopping wood for their fire in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans.  She will remember how the other women in their small town loved to judge her mom...but she knew deep down they were just jealous of her beauty, her bravery, and her independent spirit.

She toggles back and forth throughout the book between admiring her mother's strength and seeing her "shortcomings" as facts, not complaints.  She also recognizes how much her mother's alternative parenting methods contributed to her development and future success.  A portion of the online review reads:

"When, as a twenty-something, Heather complained to her mother about a long list of things she had missed out on and that had compromised her chance of ever leading a “normal” life (immunizations, a healthy respect for authority), her mother waved a hand and replied, “Well, you should thank me, because you have a lot of good stories instead.”

And good stories she has.  Heather's words have been proof to me that this parenting thing is not a pass/fail situation.  We keep trying and we keep learning and we use that knowledge to hopefully do better next time.  I love this Maya Angelou quote:

I am going to stay in the game.  I'm going to keep fighting the good fight for them the best and only way I know how.  I'm going to stay present and engaged and strong in hopes that one day they will remember back to these years, and see all the different parts of me in all different lights - some admittedly brighter than others.  

Mostly though, I just hope they remember how hard I tried.  And when the big parenting test of adulthood finally arrives for them...I hope they grade me on a curve.  

Stay strong ladies, you're doing great.  xo - juli