super pissed about the beach

My kids are super pissed at me right now.  I wouldn't let them come along to the beach for the weekend.  Just the fact that I made that statement blows my mind.  Sounds like a real first world problem, right?  But then I had a revelation about "millennials".  It baked my noodle - and pretty well done too. 

That Guy and I needed to get away- alone and together.  There are lots of reasons (Christmas shopping for our kids, mental health vacay, separation from our jobs -so that we can't be reached or called in to help, and so we can have hot monkey sex without the teenagers hearing us. Important stuff, ya'll.)  We don't feel we need to give our daughters excuses, so I said- "Nope".  When that set off the alarms and a poutfest I decided I must've failed as a parent.

How spoiled do these kids have to be to think that they have the "right" to go to the beach? Just because we CAN go they believe we all MUST go!  Well, as it turns out, they're not spoiled, just disappointed.  And pretty smart.

My knee jerk reaction is to be mad at them for being mad at me.  That's not fair; everybody gets to be mad.  

If everybody doesn't get to be mad then nobody gets to be.  In families where nobody gets to be mad feelings aren't felt and dysfunction is forced to flourish.  In those where only SOME of the members get to be mad, resentment is built, respect is impossible, and rebellion is certain and severe.

So, surfer girls DEFINITELY get to be disappointed that they didn't get to come to the beach.  It isn't just luxury; it's medicine.  The ocean is a source of healing.  If you don't believe that, you've never been.

When I was 19, I hadn't.  After my first summer of college I hopped in a pickup and headed for the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.  Having grown up in the midwest I hadn't ever been and had no idea what I was missing.  

The first time in the water I made the ridiculous statement, "It really does taste like SALT!!"  Anyone who hasn't tasted the ocean prior to adulthood will understand the intense salty saltiness cannot be duplicated with table salt.  It's it's own thing; warming and comforting and slightly disgusting at the same time.  My surfer girls don't understand my naivete of ocean salinity- they have tasted it from their very first summers.

There was another new experience during that trip.  I knew the salt water would heal cuts and sores.  I'd even worked with a Marine Biologist who'd taught me what he'd learned while working in a coastal area.  There are tips and tricks related to marine injuries and treatments of which the rest of us Landlubber medical staff were unawares.  That was the sum total of cool information about the ocean I'd been exposed to.  While it was impressive and fascinating, it wasn't experiential.  Actually seeing the ocean water heal up a cut AMAZED me.  Like, stupid about it, showing everyone what it had done in just a day or two.  Relentless jabber about salt water like it was "maaaagic".   

But it was much more than that.  The salt water seemed somehow to soothe something in me that I didn't even know needed soothing.  It might have been the waves or the sunshine or the comfort of the tides, whose rhythm I could never quite calculate.  Maybe it was the waves, whose sets I couldn't predict no matter how many times I've counted them.  Catching and riding waves still escapes me but letting them crash over me seems to work just fine to fix what's broken inside.

I come from a farming family.  We are generations of working the earth and the animals and most of us have never seen the ocean.   My kids have never worked the earth and wouldn't know a bull from a dairy cow.  Trying to explain the seasons or the birthing of a calf or the misery of detasseling corn is a waste of the breath I already can't hold long enough to wait for good sets.  Some things have to be felt; experienced.
The ocean; they know.  
They know the waves and the tides, marine life and sand in their sandwiches.  They are mermaids who recognize the sweep of the wave hitting shore with it's bubbling hiss that fades to a fizzle.  They can feel the waves and even surf them.  They have something I never had -not because they're spoiled millennials but because we were lucky enough to give them an awesome thing- beach memories.  That doesn't mean they get  a trip to the shore every time they long for fresh seafood but it doesn't either mean they're entitled or spoiled.  It means they're blessed- lucky, fortunate, and tan more of the year than not.

Monster Mom

Moms have been described as Volcanos.  Some rumble all of the time but aren't really dangerous. Some ooze lava constantly so that everyone knows to stay away.  Others lie dormant and never bother anyone until the fateful day when they finally blast and destroy everyone in the village.  I've been each of those at one time or another.  But since we are being honest here (I'm being honest, you may be hiding behind a bowl of something tasty hoping nobody sees you nodding in solidarity)- I've been worse.
I've been the monster that trampled the volcano that destroyed the village and all of the villagers.

I've been the mom no mom ever wanted to be.  I've been a horrible person in myriad ways; liar, cheat, thief, bad dancer, reckless driver, and poor tipper.  Often a bad kid -there were many parents who wished the girl with dirty blonde hair would go away for a while.  I shudder to think what the neighbors must have thought.  Even now I'm the one who never puts the trash can away properly.   I was a rotten student most years; paddled by the principal in second grade and a nightmare to my teachers and parents through high school.  But the worst of my atrocities has been in the setting of motherhood.

They say the low man always kicks the dog.  The bully on the playground is often the one who cannot control anyone or anything else, least of all himself.  The meanest person you've ever met is the one who never learned to love himself.  I've been the dog kicking mean bully sonofabitch- and more than anywhere I've been all of that in my own home.  I know I'm not the only one who does it, but that sure doesn't make me feel any better.  I've been frustrated and yelled at my kiddos.

I mean yelled.
  Like a crazy person.
Top of my lungs yelling stomping around maybe even throwing things and leaving marks on walls.  I'm not proud of it.  I'm just trying to be honest here.
I've literally yelled so hard that my throat hurt.
About stupid things.  Or I've been angry about stupid things and yelled about unimportant things.
Like spilled milk.  Yes, I have literally yelled until someone (usually me) cried over spilled milk.  All of these admissions are atrocious.  But the worst part of it is- it was only to my kids.
I never yelled at the dumbass who'd cut me off in traffic and made me miss the light that made me miss whatever had to be done on time.  The clerk who couldn't count proper change back never bore my wrath.  Worst of all, it was never my husband or friends, siblings or other family that saw the veins sticking out of my forehead and neck because anger had made an uncontrolled beast of me.
That was reserved for my children.
The very ones who should never see such terror saw their mother lose all sense of reason.  They may also then have been blamed for it in some defeating, passive aggressive, or just plain mean ugly monstrous fit of rage.  Clearly the only reasons to have committed such travesty include one or multiple reasons with varying degrees of rationality.
First; A mother does not get a gotdamned moments peace.  From the time they make that first palpable movement in the womb until...all eternity, they are either underfoot or on her mind.
Someone should warn every woman with that pang of desire to bring a bundle of joy into the world:
You will NEVER know another moment of freedom.   Ever.  There will either be one of two extremes.  The crushing presence of their ever needing, ever nagging, constant whining, black hole of want want WANT; the need for you and of you.   Worse, there is the silent abyss of distance between the one you carried within your own body that you desperately want to hold just one more moment.
Next; for some of us our children are the only human beings with whom we can be totally ourselves. Maybe it's because we form such a deep bond of honesty and trust.  Maybe it's just because we can't get away from them for most of their first two decades of life.
It may be a horrible sense of entitlement; as if we own the little masterpieces we created in our own images and have somehow earned some sort of right to treat them as we see fit.  Or we let our brutish desires play out in any convenient way they will- though we would never tolerate such lack of restraint in these little ones themselves.  I don't truly know which of the reasons allowed me to treat two human beings who least deserve it so poorly on so many occasions.  I just know they're two of my favorites.  Partly because they still speak to me.
Only they have seen the very worst of me.  Only they know just how bad I can get.

I've never been one to buy the bullshit that your parents are to blame for everything you fail at in life.
There have been too many great families turn out people who contribute nothing to the world and too many horrid human beings that somehow spawn the most generous, loving, and gracious people I have ever known.  It's doubtful either of my children will fit neatly into either of those categories neatly.  But if either of them is ever seen barking at the moon- I'm afraid I will know exactly why.