Letting Go

I wrote this some time ago and never published it:

Letting go. I need to work on that. I think I've improved over the years as a mom but it is still a weakness for me. Letting go of what exactly? Control. I've always had the hardest time giving up control when it comes to my kids. One of the areas it has been the hardest is in the kitchen. One of my excuses is I don't have a huge kitchen so it's just easier to do it myself. And it really is a bad excuse because I hosted two cooking classes last year with Isabella and her friends and I had five extra people in the kitchen with me and we managed to make it work.

Sunday the girls found this recipe in a magazine and wanted to try it out since we just happened to have all the ingredients on hand. It was for banana split ice cream sandwiches. We were making to cookie part and I told the kids to put spoonfuls of the dough evenly spaced on the cookie sheet. All of a sudden I'm feeling very tense and I'm having a flashback to this episode of the PBS cartoon Arthur that I saw with the kids when they were little. If you haven't watched Arthur (and maybe they do it differently now, I don't even know if they still are making new episodes of that show, my kids never watch it anymore-stupid satellite discouraging my kids from watching PBS) they had this thing between cartoons where they would show real kids doing things. This particular episode showed kids at a blind school making cookies. I remember watching that and as they were tapping the dough off of their spoons onto the cookie sheet the best they could- but of course it wasn't that neat because they couldn't see what they were doing- I felt very tense just watching them do that and that is the feeling I had watching the kids put the dough on the cookie sheet, especially Noah. I know it's wrong, a bit of a sickness even. What will happen if the cookies don't turn out perfect? Nothing, that's what. And I'm not anywhere close to being the worlds greatest baker and I'm too impatient to make things really pretty so I don't know why I care how the kids do it.

I do things on my own timeline. When the girls were younger I picked the next days clothes out for them every night before they went to bed. This went on later into the elementary years than it really needed to. They could have been doing it themselves. But they do just fine now (and learned how to match their clothes, you never saw my kids wearing ridiculous mismatched combinations, not that that really matters in the scheme of things). I'm lightening up a little as they get older. As I get older. I think it was all a defense mechanism since you often feel like you have very little control over your life when you have young kids. That's also why they almost ALWAYS listened to my music in the car, not preschooler music. But they are growing up. They are capable of much and it's my job to help them discover what they can do. This year I will work on that.