The Supermom Complex

I’ve heard of this concept my whole life, about the mom who can do it all; have an amazing career, raise multiple fantastic well behaved children, and have dinner on the table every night.  Or at least, that’s the simplified cliche version of the modern Supermom.  Simply put, it boils down to one woman trying to be everything to everybody in her life, while still maintaining a career.  Most moms I know work very hard to accomplish this on as many fronts as possible as it feels nowadays that there’s an expectation that we should all strive to be the Supermom.

On my mother’s chat group I read about a mom who’s 5 year old daughter had a cancerous brain tumor removed and lost most of her mobility and other motor skills.  Plus she’s just finished a large helping of radiation and chemo to wipe out any traces of the tumor.  This poor mother is lamenting about how she’s letting her daughter watch TV too much and in general giving in to her every whim.  Meanwhile the mom is beating herself up about not working on her therapies as much as she feels she should be, and how when she gets frustrated she finds herself yelling at her daughter and then feels horribly guilty about that.  I mean, holy shnikes.  This woman is going through a lot and is probably stretched very thin, physically and emotionally, she just needs to do whatever it takes to get herself and her family through it.  She needs to stop holding herself accountable for the things she isn’t doing, or isn’t doing “correctly” and instead know that she is doing so much for her daughter and her family.  Just getting through it all has to be more than anyone can possibly handle and one day soon she’ll be on the other side of all of this and it will be a distant but painful memory and constant reminder of how far they’ve come.

Ha.  I should probably just accept my own advice (wink, wink), but I’m not the only one who’s holding me accountable and we’re working with a deadline here people.  It all started Friday when we went for our check-up with Aleck’s upper extremities doctor at Shriner’s hospital. As part of the check-up they need to check on his range of motion, meaning, they need to bend his elbows.  Now we’ve found Aleck’s elbows.  They are there, and we’ve been stretching them out very nicely for a while now.  He even has some active range of motion there, though not a ton.  But if someone else wants to bend them they need Aleck’s permission to do so.  I have to sing to him, “Where is Thumpkin” is our song of choice, and slowly work his hands toward his mouth.  It was no difference in Shriner’s.  They got an 80 degree bend out of both of them which isn’t bad.  But what we want is 120 to be able to feed himself.  The idea here being that he probably won’t have the active range to 120, but he can use something, like the side of a table, to get that hand all the way to his mouth.  The OT put the fear of Jesus in me and told me that those elbows of his can lock up by 12 months of age if his muscles choose to, so we need to really be on the elbow bending twice as much as before.   She adjusted his splints so they have a larger bend in them and increased their wearing to 6 hours a day.  Do you know how long Aleck is awake during a day?  Nine and a half hours, on average.  So that gives us 3 hours a day when he doesn’t have to be in them.  Take out bath, waking up and waiting for me, dressing, and times when I can actually do therapies with him that work on bending but can only be done when he’s not in the splints…yeah.  OK.  He’s been a total champ about it except that in the 90 something heat he’s turning into puddles in his car seat.  His Early Intervention OT is making him new ones of a lighter, perforated plastic so he won’t leak out of my car door.  But 6 hours is really not doable, we’ve been making it to 5 and I really think that’s OK.  It’s already making a difference and he’s feeling much looser there, even using those bows to hit the high notes on his piano.

On Tuesday we went to Children’s to see his hip/foot doctor to talk more about his progress and the surgery.  Top of my list to discuss is Aleck’s knees. How come they are still so stiff?   At Shriner’s the doctor thought that his lower body wasn’t badly affected by the Arthrogryposis, he’s the one who said that Aleck should be able to walk without any assistance.  But lately his knees haven’t been getting any better and if we want him to walk, he’s going to need to bend them in order to make that happen.  At the appointment on Tuesday the doctor clocked the bend in his knees at 90 degrees but we need to be, again, at 120.  I asked him if we could splints or something and he said that stretching is the best way to get there right now.  I’ve been working with him on stretching every morning for most of his life but he doesn’t cooperate when I do a lot of the therapies for bending his knees.  He insists on controlling those legs, only bending and straightening to his liking, not mine.  This becomes very discouraging very quickly and I end up moving on to another acitivity since there’s never a shortage of therapies to be done during our days.  I brought all of this information back to my PT and we’ve kicked knee bending into high gear, trying to figure out ways to get Aleck to cooperate with yet another body movement that comes naturally to most babies.

What makes the knees in particular even more of a level one importance is that in two months, those knees are going to be stuck in a cast, his right one for sure, for 6-8 weeks.  Just as there is a deadline to get those elbows bending, there’s an even faster approaching deadline to get those knees bending as much as possible.  My girlfriend yesterday asked me if this was the calm before the storm, the two months before his surgery.  I told her, it’s the storm before the storm and just thinking about it makes me exhausted.  On regular days I seem to be able to work in two to three therapy sessions of our own, mornings being the best time for both of us.  But regular days are few and far between as we’ve now added a 5th member to our Early Intervention Team, a feeding specialist / speech pathologist.  Now I have 2 people who come once a week, one person who comes twice a week and two people who come every other week.  Our schedule has become so hectic and complicated that I absolutely had to get a new phone, and the priority was a perfect sync to my calendar since I can’t afford to miss anything that’s going on.  This makes playdates very difficult, taking classes an impossibility (not that I really want to take any baby classes with Aleck.  I know I’m not up to being in a room with a whole bunch of babies who don’t have the types of stuggles we do), and a social life just silly.  On top of it all, June has been my busiest month yet averaging 3 shoots a week since the last week of May.  It looks like it’s slowing down a lot for July which will be nice since it’ll give me more time to focus on Aleck’s progress.

Shooting, though, has become my “me” time and I welcome every shoot.  I find myself so much more relaxed when I’m shooting now than I ever used to be.  That could be because I was pregnant and shooting a ton for the last two years (I honestly don’t know how I did my Groupon pregnant in 90 degree heat), or it could be that compared to the stresses at home, covering events and setting up family portraits is literally a walk in the park.  Of course the thought crosses my mind that if I wasn’t shooting I could be focusing more on Aleck, I could be keeping up this blog better, putting up pictures and videos, cooking more, getting my nails done which I haven’t done since March, getting a desperately needed haircut, meeting friends with their babies for lunch or coffee, and even working out.  There are currently three brand new DVDs sitting on my TV for me to use to get workouts in while Aleck is napping.  But when Aleck is napping I’m sitting right here, editing, retouching, estimating, invoicing, and emailing.  At the end of everyday I just want to collapse in bed with a book, rather, an Ebook on my phone (love, love, love), and am still catching up with the shows I enjoy during the year but I’m so far behind and it all just feels like a total waste of time.  After an hour of TV watching I usually feel like I could have been doing something else more productive, work, email, cleaning, cooking, and making baby food since I’ve been making most of Aleck’s food since he started on solids.  Then I beat myself up internally and go to bed.

I too am suffering from the Supermom complex.  I am literally trying to do everything for everyone and right now there’s no end in sight.   In this way I’m just like a lot of mom’s out there with healthy babies running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  However, my “to-do” list can reap very frightening results if I don’t get through it everyday.  So what if the laundry isn’t done on time, or I have nothing ready for dinner when Craig comes home (I never have dinner even planned when Craig comes home), and I’m slow on my thank you notes, or the sheets aren’t changed on the bed in time, or the car is overdue for service, or there is a box of stuff sitting on my porch that needs to go down to the garbage for the last 3 weeks, or my storage locker needs to be reorganized so we can get more stuff in there as Aleck outgrows his clothes and his swing.  None of these items will determine Aleck’s future.  But getting those splints on, doing his therapeutic exercises, bending his knees, bending his elbows, getting him to sit up on his own, working on his feeding issues, these have serious long term affects and right now the responsibility of Aleck’s mobility rests solely on my already heavily laden shoulders, and I see why the mom from my chat group is fixating on what she isn’t doing, we both have children who’s future depends on what we do right now and how much we do it.  Yeah, I should go easier on myself.  Yeah, I should trust that instinctually I will do what needs to get done for the benefit of my baby.  Yeah, I should take some time for myself, lose some weight, get my nails done, but now’s not the time for any of that.  Time is my enemy and we are racing against the clock to get as much movement and flexion out of Aleck as possible in the next two months.  Being Aleck’s Supermom is currently my only option so I need to find a phone booth, spin in a glorious circle, grab my Wonder Woman mug and fill it with a copious amount of coffee because I’m going to need the energy.