Lily is not a morning person.
I fully expect this to be as true twenty years from now as it is at this moment, when she is four years old and apt to act at any random time of the day like someone who has been rudely shaken awake before the sun is up because that is what four year olds do.
I know Lily is not a morning person partly because she has absolutely nothing to complain about on the mornings I wake her up except for the fact that I am waking her up. And yet complain she does.
Last fall, as I was carefully constructing a plan for getting us out of the house and to kindergarten a full hour-and-a-half earlier than we’d managed to saunter forth when both kids were in preschool, one major plan of attack was to get Lily dressed myself. She was three-and-a-half at the time, about as reliable in her willingness to get dressed when I asked her to as a fifteen-year-old Dodge Plymouth is apt to start up reliably on a cold day, and mind bogglingly slow even when she did choose to acquiesce to my wishes. One of the ways three-year-olds exercise their independence, I’ve noticed, is by constructing elaborate fantasies around the simplest of tasks, necessitating consultation with at least two or three princesses and an otherwise little seen insistence on perfection that, in the case of getting dressed, often means starting all over just as I have convinced myself I will not lose my mind waiting after all.
So I’d gently awaken my new kindergartener, bring him the clothes he’d picked out the night before, and then coax Lily awake with the promise of getting dressed with Jake on his bed. It seemed to work just fine, since Jake was way into showing off his superior kindergartener skills, like getting himself dressed while his little sister needed Mommy’s help.
Then winter hit and somehow I found myself offering to assist Jake in acquiring the new skill of getting himself dressed under the covers, which meant leaving Lily snug in her bed until Jake was shuffling out of his room in skinny jeans, his faded neon orange monster truck shirt, and hair sticking up in the back where he’d sweated into his pillow. Somehow, well before spring arrived, we had given up on Jake’s acquisition of the skill, and become comfortable with the fact that I was the only one dressing my now six-year-old son every morning.
Lest you judge me, rest assured that he can, when necessary, dress himself and that the remaining days are few before he screams at me to get out of his room in the morning rather than cuddling against me as I pull on his socks. There are, I fear, many, many more days remaining before Lily can find a single good reason to get out of her warm bed and dress herself on her own. And often I don’t mind this prospect at all.
There are the mornings she rolls toward me and snuggles her sleep-creased head in my lap, reaches up to wrap her arms around my neck, her soft cheek against my lips, the half-awake smell of her in my nostrils. I reach for her impossibly lengthening legs to pull on tights, sit her still sagging body up in my lap to pull on her dress, and then she stands up to model for me, her hair a woven rug of curls that will require a spray of water and a lot of patient Mommy minutes to untangle.
Other mornings she surprises me as I’m brushing my teeth and I pick her up with her full body arranged along mine and carry her either to her bed to read books or to mine to cuddle into my pillow until I’ve roused Jake and sent him on his way. Getting her dressed is a little bit easier on these days, though I still have to contend with covers and the need to sharpen my tactile skills rather than relying on the simple sense of sight.
But sometimes it’s Monday and she hasn’t had a nap all weekend and on Sunday she went down the bouncy slide at a neighborhood festival about 60 times before running a kids fun run in the park, sitting on an auditorium floor for two hours mesmerized by the elementary school production of The Rockin’ Tale of Snow White, walking home with her best friend and playing for an hour after the show, taking a bath, and getting three books at bedtime with Daddy and Jake because Mommy was out drinking wine and yukking it up at a “PTO meeting.” In other words, sometimes she’s tired and cranky.
I’ve got what I think is a pretty firm handle on how to deal with Lily’s special brand of push/pull anger and neediness, even when amplified by insufficient sleep and intense annoyance at being awakened. At least, I thought so this morning.
“I want to sleep,” she growled at me soon after the roll into my lap.
“I know.” I kissed her a bunch of times on the forehead. She has taken to doing this to me sometimes when I am trying to read the paper and I find it deeply annoying after the fifth or sixth kiss but I can’t resist continuing to do it to her. “But it’s time to get up. You don’t want to miss seeing all your friends at school.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” she moaned.
“You love school.” I was all too aware of sounding like one of those desperate, poorly scripted parents in a bad sit com where, duh, the kid doesn’t love school and it’s just a sign of how truly lame his mother is that she says he does. Only Lily really does. I may be lame, but it’s still true.
“I don’t love school.” She took on that set expression that means Lily. Will. Not. Back. Down. I learned about this expression when she was about seven months old and kept me up for so long in the middle of the night that I finally put her in my bed but refused to cuddle her and waited for her to cry herself to sleep. She didn’t. “I don’t want to go to school,” she added.
“Fine,” I said snappishly. I corrected to cool, calm, and collected. “You can stay home, but Daddy won’t be here and Jake will be at school with his friends and I’ll be working and I’m not staying home from yoga class with you.” Really, I did say this.
“You’re mean,” she responded. This is her usual response when I calmly explain how the world is instead of accommodating her.
“No I’m not,” I answered, still calm. Whenever I say this, I feel very certain it’s true. Now that I look back I’m not as sure.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter much what I say at this point in what has become a several-times-a-day conversation—whether about getting up in the morning or going to bed at night or eating dinner or any other impasse reached when she wants me to do something for her and I’m not feeling properly appreciated. I dig in my heels until I get a “please” or “thank you” or just sweet cooperation and she says, “You’re mean,” and digs in her heels until one of us starts crying.
In this case it was her, though thankfully she didn’t have the energy to work up that high-pitched, forced, totally fake wail that has become her four-year-old mode of “crying,” especially when she has been climbing on top of her brother and his fingernail barely nicks her cheek when he manages to slither out from under her and she starts screaming, “Ow, ow, ow, OW!”
Quiet though they were, the tears remained as I carried her limp weight downstairs, set her in her chair at the dining room table, and plopped the pancakes Mike made her on her placemat. Ten minutes later, dishwasher emptied, backpacks packed, Jake’s hair sprayed with water so he could brush the sweat-spikes out of it, Lily was still curled up on her chair, pancakes uneaten.
I can’t fully remember the conversation that ensued, though I do know it ended with me leaving her alone and figuring her dad could take her to school because I was kind of done.
I often think I’m kind of done. Certainly not with Lily, but with her moods, her stubbornness, the piercing emotions that accompany most four-year-old girls I know. Until she quietly eats her pancakes and says, “I’m sorry, Mommy. I want a hug.” And I marvel at the neat, sincere ability of small children to apologize. When does it get so hard?
I hugged my girl a lot between that moment and the one when I left her at school carefully cutting out a picture of a white cake topped with purple flowers from the front of this month’s Martha Stewart Living. There was no remorse in my hugs, as there once tended to be, no desire to make up for my own shortcomings as a mother. I was just loving who she was, right down to being not a morning person.
I’ve learned, in true yoga fashion, that this is who Lily is. I can work with it or against it, I can learn from it or not, but I will never change her. Likewise, I am learning more and more about who I am. I can be patient, I can be grumpy and tired, and I can sometimes even be cruel. I can work with these qualities, learn not to feed them, manage to work around them. I won’t change, but how I live my life and how I treat others will.
Best of all, Lily and I will be our best and our worst selves with each other. Because we love each other too deeply to do anything but love our worst selves as much as our best ones. No question that’s really, really easy for me because even Lily’s worst self is incredibly beautiful and full of growling deep love and a whole lot of smarts and the kind of sincerity that makes you really believe her when she apologizes.
No question, either, that she’s got the harder end of this deal, loving me at my worst. But she does, and even if she won’t always admit it she always will. And if Lily loves me at my worst, surely I’m worth the effort to love myself at my worst too.
YogaMamaMe 