A few housekeeping changes...

Trying to jump all the way into the 21st Century here...

-- You can now reach the blog through its own domain name, www.theelmowallpaper.com. Still working on how to "follow" me, whatever that means.

-- My email account is now listed in my profile. It's elmowallpapermama@gmail.com. I'm still figuring out, uh, how to check my email account. Coming soon: mama@theelmowallpaper.com

Lots to tell but I literally just stepped home from a weekend (without kids!) in the Northeast, and the kids are already trying to kill each other just to make me feel especially glad to be home.

The third child

Today, Aidan asks for input on a very personal question: whether or not to have a third child, and if so, when to have the third child. She enumerated some of the questions and doubts in her and her husband's head about adding a third. Those questions were all too familiar.

My first two children came quickly and not necessarily in the time frame I expected. Though we carefully, naively planned and plotted Firstborn's conception and birth (slotted conveniently after I was in one wedding but a little more than a month or so before I was in two more), C. was conceived just a year after Firstborn's birth. It had been a turbulent, crazy hard year for us as first-time parents of a colicky, headstrong child, and I was nowhere near ready to be pregnant again. In fact, I had not been certain I ever WANTED to be pregnant again. I was on the mini-pill, by the way, when we conceived C. And breastfeeding. A lot. And co-sleeping. So... yes, it can happen to you.

In any case, I never expected to have two children before I turned 30, and I found myself a befuddled mess right about the time I had a three-month-old and a just-turned two-year-old. What the hell just happened? I asked myself. I was torn between feeling like i had been rushed through all my pregnancy/childbirth experiences and feeling like NO WAY ARE YOU CRAZY could I handle another child.

So we debated. And waited. And muddled through a few tumultuous years. I lost all my baby weight; I raced in a triathlon. I bought new bras. I got C. into preschool and had two days a week, 9 AM to 1:30 PM, to my glorious self.

I still felt like we were missing a piece.

I wasn't at all sure, though. I worried. The world, in many ways, is made for a family of four, not five. One hotel room is really not enough; you need a suite or two adjoining rooms. Three carseats or booster configurations are difficult to fit in your average car. Five plane tickets are significantly more expensive than four. Three college tuitions are significantly more expensive than two. One taxi cab is perhaps not enough. Restaurant booths are often too small. When Kids Eat Free, it's usually one free kid meal to each paying adult. Four bedroom houses, though technically big enough for a family of five, can sometimes be a squeeze when it comes to providing study areas and enough room for a big enough dinner table or a guest bedroom.

I worried that we could provide just about anything for two children, but maybe not three children. I worried that a third child could have health issues, or that the pregnancy could create health issues for me -- a mother of two children already. I just worried.

Then, the summer before we conceived Baby B., I went to the wedding of two dear friends. He was the middle of two brothers, she the youngest of five children. At the wedding, I watched, tears springing like crazy, while the brothers toasted the groom. I felt the love, the camaraderie, of a gaggle of brothers now sending each other off into adulthood. I stared at my friend, the beautiful bride, and realized that had her parents not gone for crazy number five, she wouldn't be here, the star of a show full of love and happiness. I wanted that for my kids, if I could achieve it: I wanted my children flanked by siblings as they went off into the world.

In the end, we took a leap. As with so many things in parenthood and in life, this was a leap of faith. We had to believe it would work out. We didn't want any regrets.

The third child has been the best decision we ever made.

You can argue all sorts of things. Trust me, I have heard them. Odd numbers. "Trying for a girl?" Someone is always left out. The parents are outnumbered. That just isn't how it worked for us. In fact, the bottom line is that it worked for us.

The truth is, we had been outnumbered by Firstborn alone. We are no more outnumbered by three than we were by him alone. We were already working 100% on parenting him -- adding #2 and #3 added very little to that effort in the grand scheme.

The three-child dynamic has been better than the two-child dynamic. Whether because of personalities or spacing or gender or whatever, our first two fight a lot. Firstborn is, well, a firstborn -- strong-willed, a bit of an egomaniac, focused forward. C. is Firstborn's biggest fan, but Firstborn wants not much to do with C. unless C. is acting completely submissively and being a good little minion. Otherwise, all heck breaks loose. But adding in the baby has done wonders. Baby B., ever the good little Leo, worships no one. He seeks no one's approval. But he's a fun, willing, eager little brother, and he is the brother C. desperately yearns for and needs. So now, with three, sometimes it is the bigger boys doing things while the littlest is being a toddler. Sometimes it is the younger two teaming up while the oldest acts like an oldest. And often we shower a little extra attention on C. to make up for the Marcia, Marcia, Marcia middle-child syndrome. But all in all, it really has worked better than when the two oldest only had each other, one on one, all the time.

The baby calmed down our household a lot too. A baby softens you, and it also softens children. A baby who needs to nap necessitates staying home a bit more, turning down the non-essential activities that would otherwise keep you running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Your pace is less frantic, more on baby time.

Baby B. has, in many ways, been a baby of indulgence for me. It felt indulgent to have a third in a world when many of my friends struggle to have a first. It felt extravagant to plan and thoughtfully add a third child in a time of economic down-turn and uncertainty. It feels luxurious to crawl into bed some night and have three long-limbed, gangly, loud boys to cuddle. But it is so right.

Some nights, I actually get teary wondering how I could have ever lived without this third child in my life. What if I had never known? What if my boys didn't have their caboose? When he runs through the house, yelling, "BROTHERS!" it just seems as if we dodged a bullet when we took that leap. Makes you want to take a leap more often.

I loved hearing your feedback on the Life After Yes post and what you are saying yes to more often in your life. If you commented on that post and you don't have a copy of the book yet, leave me a comment with your email address ( I won't publish it!) and I'll send you a copy. I can't choose!

Life After YES

Today I am going to brag on my friend Aidan. I'm not sure how Aidan found me, but she did, and I am ever so glad.

It's is a big day in Aidan's life: her first novel, Life After Yes, hits bookshelves everywhere. I'm so proud of her, but even more than that, I'm so inspired by her. Aidan, like me, is an Ivy League-educated mother who began and ended a first career (hers in BigLaw). But unlike me, she immediately dove head first into an alternate pursuit -- writing -- and today, her efforts pay off. She is a published author. As she says in her blog post today, she refused to listen to the NOs -- she let herself say YES -- and look what we can do when we set our minds to it and follow through, y'all.

What NOs have you been listening to lately? Isn't it time we all say YES to what we can do with ourselves, with our talents, with our lives?

As for the novel itself, well, I was given the chance to read it last week. Aidan does not disappoint. I knew she was a wordsmith from her blog, but Life After Yes exceeded my expectations. Aidan's characters are deep and flawed and beautiful in their imperfections; her settings are nuanced and shaded and bloom in technicolor through her writing. That she is a native Manhattanite comes through loud and clear, and the love with which she writes about post-9/11 New York City is evident in both the characters and her descriptions.

Where Aidan really shines is in her drawings of relationships and in her subtle questions about those relationships -- about how we dance with the people in our lives emotionally: mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and their sons, romantic partners, exes, best friends. Life After Yes depicts a world in which people are neither good nor bad, but many shades of gray, on many different levels. She writes about forgiveness and blame, doubts and assurances, joy and grief. She writes about life. That she so clearly lives it with vigor and thought comes through not only in her blog, but in her novel.

Life After Yes is available on Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Aidan, you should be so proud of yourself. Thank you -- you push me to push myself.

Leave a comment today and tell me what you can say yes to in your own life that will push you closer to your dreams. My favorite comment will receive a copy of Life After Yes from me -- I was more organized than usual and managed to order an extra!

And so I conclude my entries in Momalom's Five for Ten Challenge. It's been fun! Thank you, Jen and Sarah, for the opportunity and the topics!

Lust and Other Stories

Well, my good friend over at Mommy Wants a Drink has thrown down the gauntlet, so I suppose I can't write a blog post about lusting for guacamole or Edward Cullen, huh?

When I saw the topic "Lust," I knew I was going to have a problem because all I can think about when I see that word is my senior thesis from college. I wrote my thesis on the emergence of the American adolescent female protagonist in literature, television, and culture, and my three primary source materials were the short-but-brilliant television series My So-Called Life, a short story by Joyce Carol Oates entitled "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and the short story "Lust," by Susan Minot, from her collection Lust and Other Stories.

At my alma mater, every graduating senior writes a senior thesis, not just honor graduates. It's a time-honored tradition and requirement, a mark of pride and a source of much angst for students. What we didn't know when we began our journey, especially our senior year, was how personal our theses would be. The senior thesis is not just another paper, in my experience; it's a little piece of our personal puzzles -- puzzles we work on and figure out and pensively ponder in the year before we leave the literal ivory tower and set out into the New World.

This was my senior thesis for me. I started it just wanting desperately to write about Angela from MSCL, and then determining that the female adolescent protagonist was a relatively new phenomenon in literature and culture, and then wondering how that voice differed from such male adolescent icons as Holden Caulfield or Tom Sawyer. I studied the language, the tone, the inflections in each story, and one thing stood out above the rest: the sex act, for the female adolescent protagonist, equated with death, with invisibility, with loss.

I struggled with that when I was 21. I was still, at that age, figuring out what the sex act meant for me. The child of a prudish mother and a distant father, I was a very late bloomer sexually and I found the entire thing to be an enigma and an embarrassment. In many ways, it did seem like a death to me -- the moment I surrendered myself to a boy in that way, I felt, I would become just like everyone else. I would lose who I was, because who I was would be completely different. I was a girl on a college campus, objectified, observed, and judged. The sex act was a matrix I was not completely equipped to control for myself. I wanted it, but I feared it.

Thus, lust was a feeling that made me feel completely out of control in both good ways and bad. Sometimes I wanted to feel invisible, to feel like I was on the edge. It was a drug for me, someone who has never done an actual drug other than caffeine or alcohol (although sometimes admittedly in copious and imprudent amounts). Lust, and with it, me, was tamed over time with the aid of motherhood, domesticity, stress, and the birth control pill.

At the age of 35, lust does more often describe my desire for frozen yogurt or guacamole or Guinness or Michael Vartan than my desire for sex. I am not even sure I qualify to write about lust in terms of sex anymore. Is this forever? I sure hope not. I hear about women catching their second sexual winds. I would like to be one of them. All my parts still work, after all. Why not? At this point, I am a mother, a daughter, a wife, a sister... but I am a pathetic excuse for a sexual creature. Without lust, I feel (ironically) invisible. My boobs have been utilitarian objects for eight years now, my abdomen a deflated, sad shell that once held life in more ways than one. But I am not dead, I am not lost. A little lust would be more than welcome any time now.

Memory... a little late.

I'm a day late on my Five for Ten Challenge entry on "Memory" for Momalom. Did I mention End of the School Year madness? Fortunately, my madness has included some lovely dates with mama friends for cocktails, chips and dip, and musings on what is always a crazy little existence in our corners of suburbia. I have been having fun. So while I didn't make my "Memory" entry on time, I was making memories... and that counts.

Memory, for me, is inextricably intertwined with music. I have soundtracks for seasons in my life. You'll sometimes see me list my current playlists on my blog or talk about concerts that move me. Music is very important to me, and hearing a song often sends me back, instantly, to a moment in my life, emotions and all. Clothing often works the same way -- is that an excuse for a slight clothing hoarding issue? I hope so.

I was thinking about this last night on my drive home from a date with mamas. We went to an art showing -- a very cool local collage artist named Derek Gores, check him out -- and then walked to a Key West-y restaurant for apps and drinks in the outdoor garden. Surrounded by white lights, aided by a night breeze and fans, we revealed a little of hearts and our stories to each other.

On the drive home, I played the radio loud -- a luxury for me reserved only for car trips that do not include my children. I sang songs from my college and just-post-college years, and my mind scrolled through the memories, the emotions, the song lyrics that come as easily today as they did back then.

A long, long time ago... I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.

My first week on my college campus, the Forrest Gump soundtrack boomed out of every dorm window. We were out on our own, independent, adults... and listening to the music of our parents. On my freshman camping trip, we sang while we hiked. I learned all the words to "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "American Pie." Suddenly, those lyrics and that time period spoke to me more than the grungy early-'90s pop fare of high school. Freshman year of college is, after all, much brighter and happier and green than "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was much more about finding love behind the football stadium and learning about the wonders of rollneck wool sweaters and figuring out the difference between a hoagie and a hero. I remember sitting in a window seat high in a courtyard, looking out warped panes of gothic glass windows and giggling when a Canadian freshman played "Life is a Highway" on top volume every single night at a certain time. Life was a highway then -- with an open horizon line.

How long till my soul gets it right?

College meant arch sings, with the moon behind them, sitting on cold stone and looking out on a scene that generations before us had looked on exactly the same way. We were on study breaks or on our way out to the clubs to connect with each other, but the arch sings were a way to connect to the past and the present, to the timelessness of our campus and our emotions and experiences.

I remember heartache, the discovery of the object of my affection and my roommate together. I can't make you love me if you don't. My heartbreak inspired an entire mix tape -- a mix tape that could have depressed the most optimistic of Pollyannas -- filled with Annie Lennox and REM and yes, Bonnie Raitt. I distinctly remember many a run on the river towpath, my feet angrily beating out the beat to Alanis' "You Oughtta Know" and Better Than Ezra's "Porcelain."

But music also lent a soundtrack to my more successful romances, big and small. Senior year in college, I bonded with a certain boy over the song "Big Empty," our mutual favorite song. Time to take her home her dizzy head is conscience-laden. Big-Head Todd and the Monsters belonged to another boy. It's bittersweet, more sweet than bitter, bitter than sweet. Funny enough, Husband became The Boy of the end of my senior year, but I have no anthem for him from that time. He instead blended into the sweet anthology of the last days of college, serenaded by the Fugees, Bruce Springsteen, No Doubt, the Smashing Pumpkin, and Dave Matthews.

A long December, and there's reason to believe maybe this year could be better than the last.

After college, working in New York City, my family starting to fall apart at home and depression setting in with the winter, my anthem became the Counting Crows' "A Long December." I was working for Letterman that year, and I was able to see them perform live in the studio twice. I remember so many moments from that year, but seeing the Crows, Stone Temple Pilots, Beck, and John Cougar Mellencamp on the show that year stand out in my mind. How lucky I was.

My first few years in L.A. were sad. My family was in turmoil. I cried on my way to work in my car and I cried all the way home every night. I listened to a few albums from beginning to end, songs on repeat: Ben Folds Five and the Cowboy Junkies and the Indigo Girls' "Watershed."

Up on the watershed, standing at the fork in the road You can stand there and agonize Till your agony's your heaviest load You'll never fly as the crow flies, get used to a country mile When you're learning to face the path at your pace Every choice is worth your while.

It's still one of my favorite songs ever, one of the songs etched on my heart, even though it no longer holds the pain and lights the darker corners of my head. It was a turning point in my life when I found that song, and every time I hear it, I am back in my car on the 101, heading towards work in Burbank and crying as hard as I could to get it out before I reached the office. I was 24 years old and as lost as I could be.

In the years since, the music of my life has grown happier again. Bert and Ernie sang me through the first year of Firstborn's life, and since then I have been able to rediscover my mojo through my music: the Black-Eyed Peas and Keane and Coldplay and Pink and the Killers and Gwen Stefani, who I feel I grew up with from girlhood to motherhood. There is a reason I began this blog with the words of Brandi Carlile's "The Story": music still crystallizes my feelings and my emotions and gives my life color.

There's a reassurance to having my memories enrobed in music: music never leaves. Music doesn't end. My freshman year in college has faded away from my memory -- I have snapshots left, and who knows how much longer they will find a place to live in my crowded head. But I have the music, logged and catalogued in mix tapes and playlists and surprising me on a Pandora selection once in a while.

I live so far from the lights of L.A. and so far from the sidewalks of New York City, but a song can take me back there -- to the smell of pretzels on the street and the boardwalks of Venice Beach. It's magic. And more and more, I need that magic to give me a glimpse of the parts of who I am that I don't get to visit on a daily basis, buried as I am under the trappings of adulthood and motherhood. My car radio plays either Dora or NPR, my Ipod has been replaced by an iPhone that rarely gets used as a music device. But one good mix tape later, I am twenty years old with the big, fat world laid out at my feet like a carpet.

Happiness

Like Lindsey, I find the topic of "happiness" to be very daunting. For one thing, it's not a subject I embrace all the time. I suffer from a long-standing wanderlust syndrome -- I'm rarely ever happy where I am. I am mostly always dreaming of being somewhere else. It's not good.

For the past almost seven years, I have been living back where I grew up, within two miles of the home where my parents still live and the bedroom where I would flip through picture books of California and tell anyone who would listen that as soon as I could manage it, I would be living there. I miss California. Every day. For a long time, happiness was not possible here because happiness was only there.

For a long time, Husband and I couldn't really accept that this is where we live. I wanted to live pretty much anywhere else. This was a mistake. We couldn't grow old here. We couldn't raise our children here. We don't call this our home. We're not from here. I identified myself as a Californian, even though I was born and raised... right here.

When I stumbled across my house in a real estate listing in November, we were not looking to move. We especially weren't looking to move here. We still hadn't really planted our feet in the soil and made a decision to stay -- a decision to be happy here.

But this house spoke to us. It had everything we could want, now and later. It was in the right general area, with the right back yard and the right number of bedrooms. It had window seats and bedroom windows that looked out into treetops. Suddenly, I could see myself here. I could see balls tossed in the air and children swimming in the pool. I could see feet skipping down the stairs and birthday parties on the patio. I saw happiness here.

We took a big leap to buy this house. We floated a few mortgages. Fingers crossed, by this summer, we should only have this one mortgage to bear, and then I will officially feel like we are here. We made a decision. Then I am going to start working on a new worldview -- one from this corner, and not the West Coast. One that focuses on a home here and travels -- vacations! -- elsewhere. I am pretty confident that this home is finally where I will be able to focus on the happiness that has flitted and flown just beyond my fingertips for years.

A little bit of that happiness? See above. A baby, now a toddler, merrily jumping into the pool with his brothers after school on a random Tuesday afternoon.

We're finally home, and home is where my happiness is at last.

[I'm participating in Momalom's Five for Ten Challenge. Many fabulous other bloggers are writing on the same prompts, and it's amazing to see the breadth and the width each subject has when put into such interesting hands. Click on over to Momalom and explore -- you won't regret it!]

Courage

I'm taking a leap and participating in Momalom's Five for Ten Challenge this year. It's definitely a challenge for me -- May is one of the craziest times of the year, what with the whole appreciating teachers business, how-many-activities-and-events-can-we-cram-into-the-last-four-weeks-of-school disease, and the end of team sports (baseball, I am looking at you). But I'm excited about reading everyone's entries and I'm excited for the challenge of writing with more frequency. It will be good for me! Besides, I hear there will be chips and dip. I'm a sucker for chips and dip.

As I already mentioned, May is a crazy month. The end of the school year is such an emotionally turbulent time to begin with, but as a mom, it's also laden with deadlines and demands and schedules. Even more than usual. I find myself wanting to cry one minute and scream the next, then sit down and wax nostalgic over a picture from September. Yep. Crazy.

Last Wednesday, I dropped my basket. That's Southern-speak for "lost my ever-lovin' mind," also known as "lost my shit." (Light bulbs just went on all over the Northeast). Specifically, I dropped my basket with Firstborn.

I love Firstborn. Love him with a ferocity that is both grand and fragile as glass. Sometimes, that love just shatters into a million pieces of shards that stick right into my heart and make me feel like my head is exploding. He was my colicky baby, my only tantrum-prone toddler, a child who has defied and challenged me his entire existence. He's the most like me (dammit) and he's the most maddening, complex puzzle I have ever faced. I love him, I fear him, I am in awe of him. It's quite a motherhood emotional cocktail.

So last Wednesday, he pushed my every button. It amazes me that even now, in May, my children can act as if I just came up with this whole "you have to get ready for school" business on a spontaneous whim. Like, I will remind them to go brush their teeth, and I am received with a primitive wail, a drop to the knees, and a "whyyyyyyyyy do we have to brush our teeeeeeeeth?!" as if we haven't done it, oh, I don't know, for years now. They forget to pick up their backpacks, they "forget" to eat their breakfast until the minute we need to walk out the door (at which time they declare themselves "starving" and whinge about how they might fall over from hunger if they must take a step more), and they always forget their socks and shoes. It's like Groundhog Day every day -- they never seem better prepared for the process than they were the day before.

Firstborn adds a layer of attitude to that selective ignorance, and he gives it to me liberally. He ignores me, he backtalks me, he leads the others like Lost Boys into the Land of Naughtiness. Wednesday was unremarkable in that it was checkered with me having to remind them many times to do each and every step of the morning process, but for whatever reason, I was stressed and at the end of my fuse even more than usual. When I finally herded all three boys upstairs for the dreaded Brushing of the Teeth, Firstborn ushered Baby B. aside and started urging him to throw toys down the stairs instead of following me for his brushing.

Well, that did it. We've had maybe four thousand speeches in this household about the stairs: Don't Play on the Stairs, Don't Throw Things Down the Stairs, Don't Show Your Little Brother Anything Having to Do with Standing at the Top of the Stairs. It's a common theme, as I am pretty sure we are due for at least one tumble-down-the-stairs incident any time now. When Firstborn started chucking random toys down gleefully and encouraged his littlest brother to follow suit, well, he chucked my basket down the stairs too.

I screamed at him. I never, ever thought I would scream at my children. I certainly never thought, when I slept for sixteen weeks in a La-Z-Boy using my nipples as pacifiers for a wailing and inconsolable baby because I loved him just that desperately much, that I would find myself holding that same baby by his pointy, gangly shoulder blades and scream at him for minutes on end. "What have I told you about the stairs?!" I screeched, even in the moment wondering when I became Mommie Dearest. He just laughed nervously back, refusing to show me any real fear or remorse, never answering my question. I screamed until I couldn't scream anymore, and we picked ourselves up, both exhausted, and walked to the car and left for school.

I was a broken woman.

The boys had school chapel that day. C., the Kindergartner, wants me to come to chapel every week so he can sit with me and Baby B. But Baby B. was unusually feisty, and I was worried we wouldn't make it through the ceremony without a scene. I asked C. if I could just drop him off this one day. He started to cry. I decided to walk over and give Firstborn a hug where he sat with his class in the pews, just in case I had to leave in a hurry mid-service. When I did, his teacher caught my eye. "We had a rough morning," I whispered. She pulled me aside. "I have to tell you," she said under her breath, "he must save it for you. He's always perfectly behaved in class. He'll just sit and read at his desk with chaos going on around him."

I know she meant this to make me feel better, but instead, it just unhooked the latch to the dam. I burst into tears, standing right there in the middle of the church, my toddler hurtling his small body over the tops of the pews, my six-year-old looking around for me anxiously. Other parents glanced over and caught my wet eyes. I couldn't stop crying. I just looked at his teacher with a wan smile and said, "He's just... hard on me. I just don't know how to parent him sometimes."

My turmoil that morning was not about teeth-brushing or hurling toys down the stairs. It was about the pile-on of the whole motherhood thing -- the combination of feeling like nothing I say is ever catalogued or imbued with any substance, that I never feel like my children are safe, that life is about me constantly running lists in my head (will they have more cavities? are their uniform shirts clean? is the homework done? will they eat the lunches I made? will they fall down the stairs when I am not looking? will I step on a toy on my way down the stairs and trip and drop the toddler? will we be late... again?) and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I keep wondering when I will feel like I get to be on the same team as my children, when I don't have to be Pain in the Neck, Nagging Mom. When I get to drop the title of Fun Sponge of the Universe. When I get to lay this weight down, just for a minute. Because it is heavy.

Every day, I never, ever feel like I did it perfectly. Or even close. I wonder how much I am screwing them up. And how much better could I be doing as a mother. And on a day when I break and scream at my seven-year-old firstborn, I see just how very much I can screw up, how much damage I can do. On that morning, I knew for sure I was a failure. It almost felt liberating.

After chapel, a friend of mine -- another mom -- texted me. "Are you okay?" it said. She's a mom with her own baggage -- a diagnosed oppositional teenage son. A middle son with academic problems. A youngest son who spends half his days in the principal's office. I called her. I cried. We agreed: this motherhood thing? Not for sissies.

And that's the truth. Being a mother takes a hell of a lot of courage. That doesn't seem right, because it's not like pre-mama me said, "I am going to be really brave and... have a baby!" I had no idea. I blindly (some would say stupidly) walked into motherhood, thinking I was doing something indulgent, almost selfish. And some days are selfish and indulgent. But every day takes courage, whether I knew it or not when I signed on: I have three pieces of my beating heart walking around outside my body -- three little guys who could break my heart into a thousand, trillion pieces at the drop of a hat -- and nothing is guaranteed. Every day is an adventure, and some days -- last Wednesday for sure -- are bonafide FAILS. They hurt themselves, they are hurt by others, they could hurt someone else, they are out and about in a world I don't trust. They might grow up and break my heart over and over, as teenagers and beyond. It doesn't matter how dedicatedly I do this mother thing, how hard I work, how much sweat and blood and tears I divulge; I cannot control them, I cannot control their fates. All I can control is how much I love them and how much I show it.

So many mothers are going through so many tragic, heartbreaking journeys right this very moment. They are facing health issues of their own, or their spouse's, or their children's. They are worrying about money, about social issues, about grades. Their courage is worn right on their faces. But it doesn't matter if we are going through something monumental or something mundane. Motherhood takes courage. It's so. stupid. hard. Some days it takes courage just to throw my leg over the side of the bed and climb out, and I am not dealing with any of those special hurdles -- just the run-of-the-mill, vanilla, everyday hurdles. Some days, I just fail, and the worst part is, I know those days will happen. I know it. And I have to do it anyway.

It's so stupid hard. But it's all that matters. Don't fool yourselves -- we mothers, we're made of strong stuff. Strong, imperfect stuff. I hope that will be enough.