Here’ s my new idea for a charitable organization:

Mamans Sans Frontieres

or, for the French Impaired,

Mothers Without Borders.

Note:  Mom.  This is not about you.  I promise.  Mostly.

My children are reaching the ages where I have begun to PUSH THEIR BUTTONS.  And, as we all know from being children of our own mothers, nobody pushes buttons like a mother can push buttons because the mothers PROGRAMMED those buttons in the first place.

I’ve had days where I felt like the elevator control panel Will Ferrell abuses so joyfully in Elf.




And now, through the miracle of childbirth, my children can, too!

I worry more about my son than I do my daughter.  Something having to do with first born, my age when they were born, the fact that my daughter was a “climber” from infancy…she hurts herself now and I’m sort of like, “eh.” 

But as so many mothers my age are, I’m…prepare for lingo here…enmeshed in my children’s lives more than my own mother (and those of her generation) was.  I recognize the difference, and I see how, in many ways, they did it better, but I don’t see how to make a change.  I can’t suddenly re-orient my whole motherhood schema so that my degree of emotional involvement in my kids’ school days is less than it is any more than I can undo the babygear and furniture market that exploded into the maternal consciousness and reached deep into our wallets in the late 90′s.   

I really appreciated this column by Judith Warner.  Like her, intellectually I know where the boundaries are, but emotionally, I have blithely trampled right on through them before I’ve even blinked, let alone thought about what I was doing.

So, my little ones.  I’m sorry that I’m pushing your buttons.  I could say that it’s the fault of the culture of motherhood into which you were born, and that wouldn’t be inaccurate.  Especially since the culture of motherhood, in any generation, will always lead us to trespass over borders of our own making.  But the real reason is that it’s because we love you so so so much.


Advent 19 Parenting Flashback:  Just who is pushing whose buttons around here, anyway??