Lesley with her son, Liam.
As I was saying in my last blog, trying to be Superwoman is tough. Over the next few weeks, I will share with you some examples of how I try, but fall short, every day. This week, I’ll talk about the challenge of being supermom.
Nothing changed the game more for me than my son, Liam Leslie Law. Now, at the age of four, Leslie and I are slowly starting to get the hang of this parenthood thing…kinda.
I will never forget my first ‘away’ event after the birth of Liam. It was in Georgia, and I was taking a young prelim horse and my advanced horse along with Leslie’s horses and clients’ horses. Prior to motherhood, I thought going to the events with our two dogs was a chore. Remembering the dog bowls, the kibble and the leashes was a burden, and often required leaving a note for myself on the kitchen counter the night before leaving. Little did I know that when one acquires a child you can forget the note as it is replaced by a mountain of stuff piled outside the door. Stroller, boxes of diapers, playpen, medicines, wardrobes of clothes, blankets, you name it, I would pack a virtual Target store just in case, and, needless to say, the dogs got left at home.
Liam never slept when he was a baby. He would be awake every two hours like clockwork all night. I remember well sitting up the night before cross-country and looking at the clock at 3:00 a.m. and thinking, ‘I have to do advanced cross-country in five and a half hours’ and starting to cry as I fed Liam for the fourth time that night. When I went down to cross-country warm-up, four and a half hours later, I will never forget the first time I realized that my life was no longer simply my own to lose. That was the moment I decided that I would have to become a very, very good rider to be safe for my child. Just as I was processing all this, giving myself a hard pep talk and transforming myself mentally into female GI Joe, someone’s baby started to cry loudly and, of course, my breasts started to leak like the broken soda machine at your corner store. I remember riding over to Leslie and telling him, “See if you can get that kid out of here now!” Anyhow, in short, when you are on three hours of sleep, about to set off over massive solid jumps when you haven’t competed in six months and your boobs are leaking milk all over the shop…that is when you know, life just got more complicated.
Leslie and I are well aware that our son does not have the most enviable lifestyle for a four-year-old. He attended his first horse show when he was three days old and, since then, has been at events all over the country twice a month. He has been horse shopping to Ireland and the UK more times than most adults have ever been to Europe and has attended clinics all over North America.
To make up for this, we try hard to compensate in the other direction. Liam is in a much enriched private pre-school, goes to karate classes on Monday nights, swim school four days a week in the summer, and I take him to Chuck E Cheese’s at least once a month. Yes, he does have a pony, but we let him name it Donatello after his fav Ninja Turtle, and he only rides him with guns and/or spears, so you can hardly say we are shoving dressage or jumping down his throat. Surely that makes me a good mom, right?
Yet despite my best endeavors, I crash and burn sometimes. Often when we get home on Sunday nights, from away shows, we get in well past midnight. I then get up at 6:30 a.m., feeling like the living dead so that I can have Liam to school by 8:00, so I start work at 8:30. One Monday afternoon, when I picked Liam up from school I was confused as his lunchbox was untouched. I asked the principal why Liam had not eaten his lunch and she looked at me somewhat embarrassed and said that the teacher had noticed his bread had some green spots and thus fed him school lunch instead. OH MY GOD! What do you say to that? I am not sure I have ever been so embarrassed in my entire life. Clearly, in my zombie like state I did not notice that the bread had gone off while we were away. Motherhood disaster big time. Call the social workers, I suck. Superwoman fail. Lesson learnt :always have Lunchables in your fridge for the Mondays after horse shows. Sure, the teachers then think that you are a lazy, environmentally unfriendly, economically unwise parent, but at least they don’t think you’re trailer park trash.
