It Takes a Village
Angela Firman
Suzie wrote another blog post. It lands in my inbox every Saturday morning. The subject line tells me she invented more math learning games, and would you look at that? There is a bonus coloring page. Why haven’t I unsubscribed from this garbage yet?
I click to open it.
Suzie, wearing her yellow cardigan with the pearl buttons fastened to the top, is pictured bear-hugging her four boys, all under the age of six. They’re sporting matching navy fedoras, their yellow accessories bringing the look together: a pocket square, argyle socks, a bowtie, suspenders. Suzie’s cheery message highlights this week’s activities she promises are both educational and entertaining. Look how her boys are beaming in their button-down shirts as they cut out shapes and draw in their journals. Isn’t it adorable how the youngest one has no idea what they’re working on but is happy just the same? Looks like she cut their hair again. Didn’t it look freshly cut last week?
By the time I reach Suzie’s signoff my head aches. Don’t worry, Suzie assures me, you can do these DIY projects with hardly any prep. She’s been so kind to do most of the work for me. I start to make a mental list of all the supplies I need to gather: scissors, an ace of hearts playing card, a two-inch strip of tin foil, the bottom of a cereal box, and two empty jam jars. I am not sure when we are going to squeeze in these activities during the virtual school day thrust upon us by the global pandemic, but Suzie can do it and she has twice as many kids as I do.
I have never met Suzie. I found her blog last spring when I was desperately searching for something to fill the hours my kids were supposed to be learning with something besides more screen time. Elmo’s sweet laugh was starting to sound like a cackle. When the Superintendent first closed the schools, it was intended to last for six weeks: an eternity. It took weeks before I overcame the fierce denial paralyzing me, and I admitted I was slated to be in my house with only my children for company for the foreseeable future. I reluctantly became their teacher and forced them to complete the too-easy math problems and read the plotless stories sent by the school. When a return to normalcy was delayed two more times in the following weeks, my conscience demanded that I begin to supplement the worksheets the district slapped together and called an education.
Enter Suzie, and her limitless supply of scrupulous homeschool curricula. How does she do it? And it’s not just Suzie. My friend from college posted a picture of her family posing at their shared work-from-home desks, beaming at the new arrangement. A mom in the PTA hasn’t missed a single weekly bulletin informing us of her next fundraiser; her persistent emails reminding us that a global pandemic didn’t slow down the market for wrapping paper. My old co-worker, a mother of three, managed to pick up a quarantine hobby. She showered us with visions of her KonMari bathroom closets, each shelf designated for a different color towel, all masterfully folded like the floor-to-ceiling towel wall in the home section of JCPenney. I can comfortably say I feel inadequate next to these women. That’s obvious. Who wouldn’t? It’s less easy to admit what I primarily feel: I don’t like this full-time mom role.
Suzie would never say that.
From the moment I wake up I am responding to the needs of others, usually at the expense of my own needs. It isn’t hard work; I’ve had far more stressful and challenging days as an assistant principal. Anyone can pour a bowl of cereal, vacuum a rug, stack blocks, or count to ten. But not just anyone can feel content doing such menial, thankless work, day-in and day-out with no end in sight.
I read Suzie’s stupid e-mail every week because in my head, I am just like her. I can do what she does. Whether I want to do it doesn’t enter my mind. Being the best mom possible is paramount, and I’ve subscribed to her vision of what it looks like to succeed. I used to celebrate mini-parenting victories regularly; now there’s nothing to celebrate. During the pandemic, when the amount of time I spent parenting went up, the opportunity for screwing it up went up with it. I’m spread too thin to do anything well. Where I used to plan my own daily version of a Suzie activity, now I consider a day to be productive if I can get both kids fully dressed. It’s not that I am too busy to keep track of it all; it’s that I’m doing it all.
After a few days trapped inside my house, attempting to simultaneously feed, educate, and entertain my kids, I understood people are being quite literal when they say it takes a village to raise a child. Before the pandemic I would have listed grandparents as the only others in our village, but quarantine opened my eyes to its true expanse. Their very absence revealed themselves, and I was lost without them.
I used to have a convenient arrangement going with my kids’ schools taking the bulk of the responsibility during the day, and then I’d do nights and weekends. Quite often I’d call in subs during my hours; both Grandmas insisted. I enlisted other kids to help too. After school, either the neighbor kids or the random kids at the playground took a turn, and on a typical Saturday the children’s librarian would share duty with the piano teacher. This left me a decent chunk of time with the kids on my own, and I daresay, I was doing a good job of it. I was patient, calm, imaginative, and did I say patient? Yes, that’s the one that made all the difference.
I haven’t unsubscribed from Suzie’s list because it’s nice to know that if I needed it, I could always fall back on Math with Noodles or Cat Pencil Can. I have found, though, that even at my most desperate, my motherly instinct is not to get fancy; when my kids whine that they’re bored for the eighth time in an hour, grabbing a deck of cards transports us to a game of Go Fish. As my time as full-time mom wears on, it bothers me less that my quarantine days look messier than Suzie’s. We may not have a can dressed like a feline for our school supplies, but the giggles coming from the fort behind the couch tell me that is not a problem. The gold star on the math test on the refrigerator tells me it is also okay that we haven’t used Penne to count to 100.
I may not post pictures to news feeds as often as others, but I am still presenting myself to the world, selecting what others see. I have a less polished version of life than Suzie; my daughter in pajamas, hair and teeth unbrushed, calling her teacher from a frantically cleared spot at the dining room table, but it is a filtered view, nonetheless. I too can hide the sandwich crusts, toothpaste globs, and after-school meltdowns outside the frame. It is unrealistic to think Suzie is any different. It is not hard to imagine what disarray lurks outside the margins of her idyllic photos. She lives with five boys; there is no way the bathroom floor isn’t speckled with pee. For all I know, she hires a cleaning service to tend to the dishes in the sink. It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that she may even have a drinking problem.
Regardless of what she keeps out of view of the world, Suzie has taught me a vital lesson. When we compare ourselves to the best glimpses of others, we diminish our own successes. We are incapable of succeeding when we aim for perfection, or in the case of social media, the illusion of perfection. Suzie projects an image of a perfect life by zooming in on the giggles during a tickle fight, the proud grins following a difficult math problem, and the hugs just before bedtime. And it is these images that keep me coming back to her posts, but it’s not for the reason she thinks. Being attuned to milestones and dedicated to making memories, without a thought to the messiness of life is a surefire path to happiness. Suzie’s pictures serve as a reminder to focus on these things in my own life rather than on the ways I don’t measure up to others, and for that I’ll continue to subscribe.
Angela Firman
Angela is a former educator, now full-time mom, living with her best friend and their hilarious, sometimes demanding, roommates aged 4 and 7. While she has always enjoyed writing, after being diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer at the age of 33 it has become something of a lifeline. Since then, she has not put her pen down, finding she has much to share about the realities of being diagnosed young. The heavy subject-matter has not stifled her sense of humor, however. In fact, she has delighted in employing heavy sarcasm to cope with parenting during a global pandemic. Her writing has been published in Wildfire Magazine and Open Minds Quarterly.