Motherscope LLC | San Diego, CA motherscope.com Cover Illustration by Alexandra Harvey | Mothershaped The Mom Salon logo by Samantha Acker | Gemini Designs Copyright © 2021 by Motherscope LLC and the individual contributors. All rights reserved. Leonard, Jackie (editor) The Mom Salon | September 2021 The Mom Salon features the writings of Motherscope’s 2021 Contributors, appearing in rotation from Mar. 2021 through Feb. 2022: Kate Bailey, Eunice Brownlee, Kelsey Cichoski, Heather Cleaves, Laci Hoyt, Micah Klassen, Shanthy Milne, Alyssa Nutile, Holly Ruskin, Kaitlin Solimine, Colleen Tirtirian, Megan Vos, Melaina Williams
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In This Month’s Mom Salon: Alyssa Nutile | A Summer Full of Guilt and Glory
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Megan Vos | I Miss the Disney Princess Phase
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Holly Ruskin | moles //.
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Melaina Williams | Just One More Day and Other Poems
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A Summer Full of Guilt and Glory By Alyssa Nutile On a warm and breezy Saturday morning, we sit in the grass, me with a coffee mug in one hand and the other holding my little boy loosely. “What do you see?” I ask my five-year-old son, gazing out from the top of our backyard hill. I’m trying to foster his skills of stillness and observation. “Nothing,” he says, sounding bored. I am also trying to foster those same skills in myself, punching down feelings of hypocritical irritation that he is not yet interested in a process I haven’t even mastered for myself. “I’ll go first. I see the big lake. And I think I see some little boats out there today too.” He sits up a little bit and cranes his neck. “OH! I see them, Mom! Little white specks! I don’t know if they are that little. It’s a big lake. They might be big boats, Mom.” Now he’s hooked. Vehicles of any kind are pretty much guaranteed to pique his interest. We spend the next ten minutes just looking and noticing. A big fly on a yellow flower. His sister’s feet as she wiggles in her sling chair. The mushrooms growing under our pine tree. For a few minutes, we are just observing. Just being. It’s completely lovely. I assume this is the relaxing feeling people are referring to when they talk about meditation. That’s never a thing that I’ve been good at, so I wouldn’t know. My daughter starts to fuss in her chair down on her porch. “Let’s go, bud. I have to get G.”
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“No! I love talking. Just five more minutes.” Then he’ll ask for another five minutes. And then five more after that. He would sit here all day with me if I let him. I want to let him, but while he is one of the most important people in my life, he is not the only one. His sister is high on the list too, and right now, she is hungry. Only two, she is not capable of waiting for her snacks or capable of getting them for herself. “No, H. I can’t. I have to feed your sister.” She needs me more in this moment, and I have to go. On these weekends, I will say “No, H” or “Not now, kiddo” or “I can’t. I have to do this first” because I have to load the dishwasher and play with his sister and walk the dog (and write this essay). I’ll also acquiesce as much as possible. I’ll sword fight, even though I’m worried about getting hit with a stick. I’ll put on music I don’t like, because it’s his favorite. I’ll race cars and I’ll build towers and I’ll watch him jump off the couch 300 times, feeling grateful that he wants to jump on the floor and not me. But I feel a pang of guilt anyway, as I get up and walk down the hill without him. All our time together never feels like it makes up for all the “no”s. Wait. Hold on. Cue record scratch. Reader, this is supposed to be an essay about our joyous summer together before my sweet son starts kindergarten in the fall. And yet it only took fifteen minutes of free-writing for my ever-simmering guilt complex to surface. “Why?!” you ask. “How could you possibly feel guilty?” you may say as your knee-jerk reaction. If you’re a Millennial mom though (or dad, as I acknowledge that this is not a problem felt solely by one gender), I assume you’re intimately familiar with the concept. It’s almost inescapable. On another day, I might have tried to pretend that this guilt thing is not a regular problem for me. But today, not even a third of the way through this essay, it has already devolved into a reflection on why I felt guilty having to cut short a fun summer moment with my son. So, I might as well accept the reality of my situation. “Parenting experts” love to talk about this dilemma. They even have a
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