I Will Laugh With My Kids Today: A Promise to Myself

Have we forgotten how to live in the present?

School reopens in a few weeks — for some next week, for others much later. By September, all the kids will be in school. I know many moms are looking forward to it. Believe it or not, many kids are looking forward to it too.

The words I say most: "Hurry up"

Rachel Macy Stafford's essay "The Day I Stopped Saying 'Hurry Up'" almost brought tears to my eyes. She wrote about always hurrying her child — her most-spoken words were "hurry up" rather than "I love you." Her mornings started with "we're going to miss everything if you don't hurry up" and most likely ended the same way. She changed her ways because she realized she had to slow down for herself and her daughter — she had to start enjoying life. She was done being a bully who kept pushing her munchkin to speed things up.

The disciplinarian hat

In my opinion, at least 90% of moms could be accused of similar traits. Walk into a restaurant or a park during the summer holidays and you'll most likely hear some mother telling her kid: "we need to go home now," "this is not acceptable at all," "c'mon, eat your food fast" — and countless "NO"s. I'm not belittling mothers here. I am one, and I confess: I utter these sentences daily, multiple times. I feel sorry afterwards, but I'm always trying to discipline them, and in the process I fail to hear them. I fail to live life with them. I try to make them better for their future — but I'm losing the present.

The other day I heard about the "summer slide" research on the radio. Johns Hopkins sociologists Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle followed Baltimore students from first grade and found that children in poor neighborhoods learned at the same rate as middle-class students during the school year — but fell much further behind during the summer, while more affluent children enrolled in camps and lessons kept gaining. When I heard this, I almost cringed — because I am neither rich nor poor, I'm middle class like millions of others, and I didn't think my kids were spending enough time studying.

So yes, I immediately put on my preacher-and-disciplinarian hat and started telling my elementary-school kids how they should study more and submit their Kumon sheets on time. And when my 6-year-old rebelled against Kumon's boring, repetitive teaching, I stopped listening and told him: "You need to work hard, otherwise all your friends will be ahead of you. Quit complaining — the world rewards those who work harder!"

Slow motion

But today, after reading Stafford's essay, I thought: maybe I need to slow down too. I need to slow down to live today — understand them, hear them, like them, even if their Kumon sheets are yet to be complete. Because today might get lost in just trying to prepare for the future.

I don't know what is right or wrong. "Mother knows best" is not at all true — the moms I know are always struggling with their decisions.

But today, I am going to live life in slow motion — hopefully till school begins!