Well, this hit home.

Lindsey at A Design So Vast posted an essay by Anne Lamott today that hit me square in the bullseye. Lamott is an amazing writer and even more amazing teacher, and I had the privilege of seeing her speak at UCLA once. Even better, I was the guest of one of my own personal heroes, Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life). It was kind of the perfect moment.

In this essay, Lamott talks about the value of time, and how we tend to put things off, feeling like we cannot cram our biggest and best aspirations into the multi-tasked, overscheduled days of our current lives. Boy, does she have me pegged.

I can't seem to find me in my days anymore. This blog was an attempt at that, and it does help, but the truth is, as I told a friend recently, even this blog is not what I would like it to be. I would like to say I take more than ten or fifteen minutes to write a post, that I edit and polish each one before I hit "publish." Instead, I ramble off the thoughts packed in my head as fast I can, hope I make some semblance of sense, and run off to put out the next household fire. I told my friend I equate my current blogging and writing to my current shaving technique: shave as much as I can, as fast as I can, focusing on the parts people are most likely to see. Some day, I would like to be able to shave my whole leg, with lotion and all, and feel like I did the entire job. Same goes for my writing.

But Lamott reminds me that I do squander an awful lot of time in my day -- browsing the Internet, texting, reading Facebook. In some ways, I would argue that those activities nurture my friendships in some fashion and that they can be valuable, but probably not in the volume I entertain now. I'm not even as fully present for my children as I wish to be, and what is the point of "staying at home with my children" if I am not really here?

The difference between me and Lamott, honestly, is that while she advocates dropping the time at the gym in favor of finding time for creative outlets, I am still trying to cram in the gym time to begin with so I can lose my baby weight once and for all. While she advocates slacking on the house cleaning, I still haven't found a way to effectively do it. I am in no danger whatsoever of lying on a death bed and wishing I hadn't worked so hard on my body or cleaned my house so much. Right now, I would just lie there and think about how now I truly had NO chance of EVER unpacking all the boxes in the house.

Still, her message is received loud and clear. The time is now. The time is there. I need to grab it and do, not dither and squander. This wealth will not last forever.

Summer reading

Summer is definitely here. We have hot, hot days, smoldering nights, gnats, and the smell of chlorine radiating from our collective pores. I vacillate between loving the flexibility and the lack of homework and panicking over the expanses of time in which I must entertain my children.

Last weekend, Firstborn turned eight years old. He is a full-fledged kid -- not a small child anymore. He has impossibly long legs and arms, a mop of sandy-colored hair that is rarely brushed and is sticky from too much chlorine and not enough shampoo and conditioner. The backs of his calves are tanned. He continues to both crack us up and terrify us with his wry words, his precocious insights, and his quick mind. With him, I am always afraid I am not living up to my mothering potential. He feels like a live grenade in my hands (in more ways than one). It was literally yesterday that he made me a mother, and every single day he reinvents the mother he made.

For him, I will always and forever be a first-time mother.

He loves his Nintendo DSi, but he can lose it for months and not bother to look for it. He's reading old school Hardy Boys novels and Andrew Clements' books. I waited to read the Harry Potter series with him, and he might agree to it soon. I hope. I am thinking about reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to him soon -- I think he might enjoy them.

He aspires to be a marine biologist and to work at Sea World with dolphins (as long as he doesn't try out killer whales -- ahem -- I will be happy). He's just as happy to hang with girl friends as he is with boys, and this makes my heart glad. He is not afraid of anything, whether it is the tallest, steepest slide at the water park or a scary movie or a high dive. He runs when I warn him to walk, but when he slips and falls, he acknowledges his blame. He thinks Fanta is the best thing in the world and his favorite dessert is a chocolate covered frozen banana. He swims to the deepest end of the wave pool despite the heart attacks it gives me. He's hot-headed, stubborn, and something of an egomaniac, but he loves his friends and he is good for his teachers and he goes to bed without an argument. He scares me, he befuddles me, but he also creates awe in me every.single.day. I love that kid.

As for me, I am carrying my credit cards in a waterproof box emblazoned with the name of a theme park these days. Does that pretty much say it all? The box even has a lanyard so I can wear it around my neck. I feel super sophisticated whipping that baby out when I have to pay for something. However, I am also at some sort of water venue -- a theme park, a spring, the beach -- every other day, so it doesn't make sense to keep moving my cards from my wallet to the waterproof box.

I am also reading a lot, and it feels great. For several months this spring, I didn't read a lot. My brain was just too overloaded. I started reading again at the beach early this summer, and I realize again how good it is for my soul. One of the books I read, Little Bee by Chris Cleave, I cannot recommend enough. It is heavy. It is sad. It is a lot to process. But it is an excellent novel, written beautifully, and I thoroughly loved reading it. It left me with a lingering melancholy for sure, but somehow, I feel like a better person after reading this book. I feel like it made me feel things and think things that surprised me. It made me question and doubt and pause. I love it when a book can do that. It's been a long time since I have dog-eared pages of a book to save favorite quotes. Let me share a few with you:

... I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

Nkiruka loved music and now I saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

This is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.

I won't explain the quotes or even discuss the plot of Little Bee, because the way the story is told and the way it unfolds is unusual, jarring, and perfect. It leaves you sweating in the most intricate, tragic, beautiful way. Just read it.

I also just finished The Writing on My Forehead, by Nafisa Haji. I also loved this book, but in a much different way. This book, to me, was all about learning to appreciate and understand and integrate family and family history into our lives, whether we want to or not. It was about how inextricably linked we are to the people in our lives, good, bad, and ugly. The portrayal of family relationships in all their complex, delicate glory really spoke to me at this point in my life, sandwiched as I am between young children and aging parents and even more aging grandparents. It's also not a book that will leave you with sunshine and rainbows coming out your ears, but it's a lovely book and well worth a read.

Not literature, but just as wonderful in its own way, was Toy Story 3 this afternoon with my children. Toy Story has been one of my favorite movies in the Disney/Pixar stable -- luckily, since my children have pretty much worn through the DVDs over the past eight years and my house is veritably populated with a zillion forms of Buzz Lightyears and Woody dolls. I went in this afternoon warned that the story might make me cry, and I was probably ripe for the picking after several days of heat, water, and exhaustion. Predictably, I cried. Okay, maybe even bawled just a little. The site of the barren room of a college-bound Andy sent me into a bit of a shudder. These toys aren't just Andy's to me -- they are my own children's too. I'm not ready for the thought of outgrown dinosaurs and Buzz Lightyear dolls yet. Not ready at all. That Firstborn is much more interested in books, games, and computers than he is actual toys these days definitely played a part in my sniffling behind the safety of my 3-D glasses. I could almost feel my heels digging into the floor of the theater as I tried to slow down this ridiculous pace of childhood. Beside me, Firstborn giggled and folded his foal-like knees into his chest and maybe -- just maybe -- wiped a tear of his own away at the end.

And so we see the end of June, and ahead of us only sun, water, beach, and endless heat. Glad I have my waterproof box.

Re-post: Get in the Picture

I'm incredibly un-tech savvy and I am still working on trying to make my blog easier to search, but it seems a friend was looking for this. It's a good reminder for me and a good reminder for us all as we start our summer vacations. So tonight, a re-post:

Recently, a mommy friend (and an amazing photographer) remarked that she never takes pictures of herself or allows others to take them. She just can't stand to see herself in pictures, even though she is gorgeous. She's not that unusual -- I know that most mamas, yours truly included, avoid the camera most of the time.

It seems logical. We're sporting mama bodies and we're not as young as we used to be. We don't -- ahem -- usually have time to, uh, blow dry our hair, apply make-up, perhaps even bathe (ducking). The kids are so much cuter than we are; better to take their picture. And often Daddy is there, and he's not around as much as the mama is (not stereotyping, just saying that is the case in my local circle of friends! I am all for working mamas!). Daddy and kids pictures are cute and endearing. And if you are like me, then Mama is also a far superior photographer to Daddy or anyone else and if it's gonna be done right, as usual, Mama has to do it.

But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons need to see how young and beautiful and THERE their mamas were. Our daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves -- women, mamas, people living LIVES. Avoiding the camera because we don't like to see our own picture? How can that be okay?

Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen. People, including my children, don't see the way I make sure my kids' favorite stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don't know how I walk the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them. They don't know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little hospital bracelets in boxes in their rooms. They don't see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am doing an okay job, if they are okay in their schools, where we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their birthdays. I'm up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and eating cookies and milk and I hunt the local Targets for requests at birthdays and Christmas. They don't see any of that.

Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right here beside them. Me, the woman who gave them birth, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair. Me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star boobs and spraying strangers in the face and leaking through her shirts over and over again. Me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the parent reader or planning the class Christmas party. Me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (eye infection, croup, rotavirus).

I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won't be here, and I don't know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now, but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother. When I look at pictures of my own mother, I don't look at cellulite or hair debacles. I just see her -- her kind eyes, her open-mouthed, joyful smile, her familiar clothes. That's the mother I remember. My mother's body is the vessel that carries all the memories of my childhood. I loved that her stomach was soft, her skin freckled, her fingers long. She's my mama.

So when all is said and done, if I can't do it for myself, I want to do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are. I want to be in the picture.

Better

I had a bad night last night. I write, and I write about my bad nights, in part because putting it on even virtual paper helps me process my feelings and work through them, and in part because sometimes I think we as women are made to feel like we cannot talk about negative feelings unless we are justifying our frustrations or talking about how we can "change it around." I'm not Miss Mary Sunshine all the time (as Husband somewhere snorts and thinks, uh, or even most of the time!) and I am not going to tie up every dark cloud with a rainbow or a bow here. You get the good and the bad. I like to think I do write about both, but at times I am sure I go heavy on the bad day posts, since they take more processing. In any case, I hope you can roll with me. Heavy days happen.

I want to thank you guys for all your kind comments, and to tell you that I do know I am not alone. I know other people feel the way I do, and that's why I want to put it out there. Motherhood can be a lonely job in our own houses, and that's why I think the Internet is such a miraculous virtual Red Tent. I love crawling inside my Red Tent on my hands and knees and finding you all there.

Today, by the way, was much, much better. I spent it at a water park with my two youngest, and we had a good day full of funnel fries and water slides. When Firstborn came home, he had stories of a wonderful day at camp, and he played trains with his younger brothers and everyone miraculously was able to get along for a few hours. It ebbs and it flows, this daily life. Today it flowed.

Heavy

Tonight I am feeling heavy.

As I wrote earlier this week, I am struggling a bit with the onset of summer. I was so looking forward to it, and I can't say I am not enjoying the lack of school with its deadlines and homework and expectations. I am happy to have my children home for a lot of the day.

I just wish I was enjoying my children more.

Well, that last sentence will surely win me Mother of the Year, yes?

Today:

-- I found the two-year-old in the pool, fully clothed and diapered, with no swim float, sitting on the "shelf" in the deep end of our pool. He had gone out to the patio without me hearing the door chime somehow and had popped himself through the pool fence somehow, and there he was. Lost about fifteen years off my life when I figured that out. Luckily, he recently taught himself how to swim a bit, but certainly not well enough to be in the deep end alone. Vigilance, vigilance, vigilance. I am something of a water safety crazy person, and it still happened to me. I watch the children like a hawk and I have several safeguards in place (thus the door chime and the pool fence) and he still got past me while I unloaded the dryer.

-- My older child is at camp this week. I feel terrible admitting it, but when I drop him off in the morning, the car is instantly more peaceful. My younger two get along so beautifully, and the car trip back is silent as they agreeably watch Curious George on the DVD player and calmly share toys. When he arrived home this afternoon, all hell broke loose, just as instantly. Within minutes, he and my middle son were fighting. I had to break them up when I realized they had somehow retrieved the bocce balls from the garage and were hurling them at each other in the pool. My middle son ended up with a bruised forehead and Firstborn is now wielding a bleeding gumline and a bruised chin. Do you know how much bocce balls weigh?

-- My children, despite my many attempts to stop them, managed to knock over a drink on my bedside table during a game of "throw the Webkinz all over Mama's bedroom." My three new books on my nightstand -- Falling Leaves, Sarah's Key, and Little Bee -- were drenched. My bedroom in my new house is wonderful, with an office area built in to it. But that is where the desktop is, and everyone in the house congregates in my bedroom all.the.time. I am thinking of painting it bright azalea pink and hanging lace from the ceilings to ward off the men and boys and claim some space as my own.

A mama friend brought Firstborn home from camp today, and she had never seen my house. As I walked her through, I realized how ashamed I am. I have a beautiful house, and I am truly blessed. But the house is a wreck. Things are out of control. The clutter, the clothes, the DIRT generated by three little boys and a largely absent husband are overtaking my house and my mind and my life. I feel like I can never catch up. I joke and call our house a "working farm," but it's more than that. It's a stable.

In the meantime, I feel HEAVY, not just in spirit, but in body. I am ashamed of myself. My body seems to be a manifestation of how out of control I feel in my life and in my household. I can barely keep my children alive, I can barely fit into my clothes, my house is a shambles. I'm just so heavy. I feel alone.

This isn't what I thought this would be like.

Ten Parenting Bummers, Early Summer Edition

Just because they are on my mind...

1. Poop in swim diapers. 'Nuff said.

2. Playmobil or Lego sets that are put together exactly once before their million tiny pieces scatter to the four winds and guaranteed end up right under your bed where your feet are likely to find them in the middle of the night.

3. Night terrors. The kid will go back to sleep and won't remember it in the morning, but the ball of adrenaline stuck in your throat after the blood-curdling, middle-of-the-night screams will not so easily fade.

4. Wet towels.

5. Wet sheets.

6. Grocery shopping with all of your children. Your bored, schedule-less children.

7. Potty training.

8. Pursuant to #7, specifically teaching a child to wipe his or her own bum. Successfully. Which usually occurs way after the potty-training itself. Like, years after.

9. Wipes that dry out.

10. Those dang plastic straw wrappers from juice or milk boxes that get EVERYWHERE -- everywhere! -- and are hard to pick up with my toes! I curse you, person who invented straw wrappers. You suck!

Are we having fun yet?

I'm in what I think I shall call an Early Summer Funk.

School has only been out for a week. My kids were let loose on Friday, May 28, and I had the luxury of spending the first several days of their summer vacation tucked safely in the Northeast, a whole plane ride away, celebrating my college reunion with Husband alone. I came home with a full cup -- high spirits, a brimming heart, a rejuvenated soul.

Tomorrow it will be a week that we have been home. The week has been full of whining, complaining, fighting children. In one short week, my spirit has been broken. Snapped in two. It's not as if the week has not had its moments, either. We spent two days at a water park. We've been to two birthday parties and one ice cream party. I had a night out with the ladies to see Sex and the City 2. Every day has had at least one dip in the pool involved for the boys.

And yet. My kids are miserable together. One water park trip included a full-blown fit from Firstborn after I punished him for hitting C. in the gut and bringing him to tears. We sat in a dolphin-viewing cave while my mom took C. on a slide alone. Firstborn bit, kicked, hit, scratched, and -- my favorite -- intentionally blew his snot on me while I held his arm so that he couldn't bolt in anger. Strangers stared. A theme park worker shook her head. We were those people. Meanwhile, the two year old happily stood in front of the aquarium, pointing out dolphins and squealing.

Tonight, four of us (sans Baby B., who has taken to early evening naps and 3 AM wake ups) sat at the dinner table discussing Firstborn's imminent birthday celebration. This year (finally) he has decided to forego the traditional blow-out party (thank you thank you thank you) and instead has invited three of his very best buddies to spend the night at the beach. C. said something about being there too, and Firstborn cavalierly informed him that no, he wasn't invited.

C.'s face crumpled and he burst into a bawling mess.

This is a parenting dilemma I am unsure about, probably due in some part to the fact that I am not close with my own younger brother and never enjoyed him when we were children. I understand C. is not Firstborn's friend. I understand Firstborn thinks he hates C. But I cannot let Firstborn snub his younger brother. I cannot. C. doesn't have to sleep in the same room with the four boys -- he will happily sleep with me instead -- but to leave him out would be cruel.

It makes me so sad to see Firstborn treat C. the way he does. My heart breaks with C.'s. I cannot make them be friends, and lord knows it never worked when my mother tried to force me and my brother into friendship. But they are just almost eight and six years old. They are 21 months apart. They share so much. I have tried everything to help ease their close proximity and their competition. They have their own rooms, their own things, different sports, different interests. They get individual attention and their own birthday parties and their own toys.

Why is there no room for C. in Firstborn's life? In his heart?

And more importantly, how am I ever going to survive the next ten weeks with the brawling gang of boys I have on my hands? And is there an antidote for spoiled brattiness? Help?

For Katie Granju

A commenter asked me the other day why I was dreading the age of twelve. I wasn't really sure how to articulate my fears until later that day, when I read the news: Katie Allison Granju, author and renowned blogger, lost her eldest son, Henry, after a drug deal gone awry left him in the hospital for over a month with brain swellings.

When Henry was thirteen, Katie wrote a piece for Andrea Buchanan's collection of essays entitled It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons. In that piece, she wrote:

I hope that the years we spent together in the warm cocoon of his early childhood offered him some immunization against the slings and arrows of adolescence. I hope that the slips of the hand that I’ve made in unearthing the man he is becoming haven’t banged him up or scarred him too terribly. Mostly, I hope he will continue to talk to me and tell me or show me what I can do—or not do—to support and guide him in finding his own way. Really, I think that’s increasingly all that’s left for a mother of a teenage boy to do.

It's exactly the words I might use to write about my own Firstborn when he reaches thirteen. It is, as she notes, kind of all any mother of a teenage boy can do, right?

Just a short year later, Henry came to Katie and told her, through tears, that he had smoked pot. Though shell-shocked, she decided not to make a big deal of it, considering it the normal experimentation of a teenager. Unfortunately, that is not the way things went for Henry. He went on to try harder drugs and ended up an addict as a teenager, and though he completed rehab, he was using again just months afterward.

A month ago, he was found unconscious and beaten, a victim of a physical assault and an overdose. And now he is gone.

If you visit Katie's site, your heart will break open in two. It's impossible for it to remain intact. Because Katie has posted pictures of a beautiful, beautiful boy on the verge of manhood and tons of pictures documenting his life, his childhood, and his relationship with his siblings. As I have written before, anytime a child dies, I think mothers grieve in unison. That mother's child is my child. Because that mother -- a mother who wrote a book on attachment parenting, for crying out loud! A mother who so obviously tried to do the right things, who loved her child fiercely! -- she couldn't save her son. We are reminded of how very, very, very powerless we are. It scares the living daylights out of me.

So tonight, I write for Katie Allison Granju, and I say: Katie, I grieve with you. I grieve the loss of your beautiful boy. I grieve the loss of naive ignorance that made me think, at some point, that if I breastfed on demand or read enough picture books or tucked them in every night or worked as Room Mom I could somehow vaccinate myself or my child from this kind of terrible turn of events. We're all vulnerable. Terribly, horribly, mortifyingly vulnerable.

And that is why I dread the age of twelve.

Parenting Realization #438762:

Telling a child that "eating this will make you big and strong!" really, really, really doesn't convince the child to eat said food.

The Threenager

Three is my least favorite age.

Everyone always talks about the "Terrible Twos." I never had an issue with two-year-olds. Sure, two-year-olds can be irrational, or impulsive, or indignant. For the most part, though, they just seem seem like babies, extended into slightly longer bodies. I could forgive their tantrums because they didn't have much control over their communication yet. I could understand their impulsive behavior because they couldn't control it yet.

At three, they can. And they choose not to. So much worse.

Baby B., yes, the child I adore and the best decision we ever made, will be three in August. The transformation to threenager, however, has already begun. It's both heartbreaking and completely annoying.

My sweet mama's boy not hits me when I deny him a desired object. He yells, "You're going into TIME-OUT, Mama!" He bolts in parking lots and doesn't even flinch when I use the primitive Mama Bear Voice to stop him. He doesn't want to sit in a stroller but can't walk like a civilized person. He's still in Nap Purgatory and wakes up at odd hours and fights naps and bedtimes. He draws on the walls and the furniture even though he can repeat to me that we "only draw on paper." He sneaks food and tosses water bottles back at my face in anger because they are not juice. The oppositional defiance is strong in this one. He is crossing to the Dark Side.

I look forward to the age of five when the transition out of Threenagerhood is complete once again. Five is a wonderful age. And only seven years away from 12, the next milestone I dread.