Destined for Greatness

A colleague of mine recently said to me without irony, “I think that you think you are destined for greatness.” He didn’t say this as a compliment. It felt more like a zinger – an accusation along the lines of 'who the heck do you think you are, Missy, wanting so much more out of life? Isn’t this Popsicle stand good enough for you?'

Wanting to keep the peace, I bit my lip and said almost nothing. But the snarky words have been gnawing at me. Shouldn’t we all feel destined for greatness or at least want to do great things with our lives? The fact is, what motivates me are fears of failure more than the belief that my fate will be fabulous. And as it turns out, fear is a fantastic motivator. But because this comment on my character came during Women’s History Month, the few weeks set aside each year to recognize the tremendous accomplishments American women have made, I found my colleague’s statement not only condescending but ironic.

The bittersweet truth is that at one point many of us women did feel destined for Big Things. We were the “Sesame Street” and “Free to Be You and Me” generation who were told to aim high and dream large and anything was possible, even if you were as awkward as Big Bird. But as the reality and routines of life crash around us each day, it’s easy for us moms to feel that our dreams have been aborted, interrupted or at the very least deferred. Kids, mortgages and the utter exhaustion and chaos of managing the two have a way of sidetracking and dashing lots of dreams, which is perhaps why we moms need to be reminded, not belittled, about our potential for greatness.

Maybe this is why I am totally infatuated with Michelle Obama and how she is redefining the role of First Lady, sculpted arms and all. While Americans are furious with Wall Street and the greedy bums who are getting bonuses at a time when there are apparently more unemployed people in America than the entire population of Pennsylvania, there is some sunny news coming from the Beltway – coming from our nation’s First Mom – the person with no doubt, the greatest gig in Washington right now.

Today, Michelle Obama and a bunch of D.C. fifth graders started digging an organic garden on the White House lawn. Growing green produce in the backyard of the White House may be less politically charged than printing Greenbacks and organic Arugula will not exactly kick start our battered economy, but it does make for a tasty salad with a peppery kick. But hey, this is symbolism. So while our Commander-in-Chief keeps reminding us that it’s time for Americans to roll up their sleeves and dig deep – sacrifices need to be made – digging in the dirt and planting organic berries actually seems to be on message, and a heck of a lot more fun than dealing with AIG.

And, yesterday, in honor of Women’s History Month, our First Mom – our nation’s head cheerleader – spoke at a local high school and invited more than 100 high school girls to the White House for dinner. The message was simple, inspiring and very 1970s – yes, you can be anything you want to be.

“Someone in your school thought you had a lot of potential,” the First Lady said to students from Southeast Washington’s Anacostia High School, a school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in D.C. “I didn’t want to talk to kids who had already arrived; I wanted to talk to kids who are pushing to get to the next place.”

I get the feeling that Michelle Obama never believed it was her destiny to live in the White House, but I bet her husband believed he was destined for greatness or at least, like me and other neurotic high achievers, was either motivated by a great fear of failure or had something to prove to his father.

But as the First Lady reminded me this week, we can’t stop dreaming and trying to make a difference. We must each keep striving for greatness, not just for ourselves, but to show our children that yes, anything is possible.

Mommy Knows Best?

One of the things I’ve always struggled with since becoming a mom is wondering if I’m doing it right. It all started at 3 a.m. after my son was born and I roamed the hospital corridors with a screaming, famished, newborn who was angrily attached to my nipple and clearly didn’t understand why his mother’s breasts were still empty. “Where’s my milk? Feed me already, damnit!” he made clear in his primal screams to me. He hadn’t been in this world more than 12 hours and I already felt like a failure because I couldn’t satiate him. Throughout my pregnancy, I had been intent on exclusively breast feeding and feared the horrors of “nipple confusion” that had been drilled into me at Lamaze. My instructor made me feel like feeding a newborn formula was the lethal equivalent to shooting them up with Crack Cocaine. So I starved my baby for the first few days thinking that I was doing the right thing.

When baby #2 came exactly two years later, I insisted that I have an emergency bottle of formula at my side. “Yes, I’m nursing but my kid needs to eat,” I confidently told the militant maternity nurses who looked scornfully at my Similac and made multiple threats that my nursing wouldn’t take. But I ignored them. After nine months of successfully nursing #1, I felt like I had a Ph.D. in the ability of the breast and was confident that my dual feeding method would work until my milk came in.

But as the cliché goes, the bigger they get, the bigger the problems. And these days, I constantly feel like I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. We know it takes a village to raise a child, particularly a complicated kid. So I have spent years consulting at great length and great fees my fellow villagers, particularly the doctors among my tribe. But ultimately, I’ve found that the buck stops with mom. Like my first night in the hospital, those BIG decisions seem to fall squarely on me. Not to completely diss my husband, but he looks to me to lead on the kid stuff.

A year ago, I decided to medicate my son for ADHD. I imagine many of you are cringing, especially if you adhere to the Tom Cruise philosophy that all of these disorders are just a bunch of hogwash or that ADHD is the most over diagnosed, over medicated, over hyped condition that has given an excuse for scores of lazy and neurotic parents to dope their kids to their detriment or to no real benefit. I get it because at one time I also thought that ADHD was just a flimsy diagnosis to label today’s ants-in-the-pants kids. But when it’s your kid who is facing a smorgasbord of fuzzy, hard-to-put-your-finger on issues without clear diagnoses, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and just want solutions.

Am I insecure about how I handling all of this? Absolutely. If your child has asthma, you give them an inhaler. If they have lice, you call in the nitpicker and de-lice your home. But if your kid has a complicated cocktail of various issues, what do you do?

I am one of those got-to-feel-it women who rely on my gut for almost all of my decisions from whom to marry to what color to paint my house. So while my maternal instincts often give me direction such as, Fruit Loops are not for dinner, you must wear a helmet to ski, and you cannot, for any reason, punch your sister, making medical and psychological decisions makes me tense, insecure and yes, defensive. Do I send my seven-year-old to therapy as some suggest or wait until he’s older and can handle it? Do I force him into yoga as a holistic remedy or jack him up on Omega-3 vitamins, as the Internet would recommend? What do I share with his school? My friends? My family? One thing that I’ve realized is once you put your kid on meds, you face judgment everywhere.

At a recent meeting with my son’s teacher, who happens to be wonderful, I was surprised by how shocked and slightly horrified she was that I was medicating her student. I immediately went into defensive mode explaining in probably too much detail how we thoroughly arrived at this remedy after consulting every expert I could meet with in the tri-state area. And still she seemed wary.

For those of us in this precarious place of trying our darndest to make sense of our kids and their needs, we can often feel that we’re steering a ship without a map, a compass or a day in nautical school. Who am I to make these decisions? I know that I am not alone and have outsourced as much professional advice as I can, but ultimately in the blurry world that is child psychology much is left to the parents to decide how to deal.

“Am I doing the right thing?” I constantly ask myself. And then I hear my friend Lauren’s words ringing in my ears, “you’re taking action and you’re doing the best that you can.” And sometimes that’s all a mom can do.