Help!

I am being held hostage by three wild and crazy children and a ridiculous summer un-schedule of beach, water parks, sleepovers, and fun. I have so many times wanted to post... but I haven't had the fifteen minutes to sit!

I'll be back as soon as possible!

Empire State of Mind

I'm going to New York. That's right. You heard me. BlogHer '10, here I come.

I'm so excited. I will have the chance to see old friends, new friends, and the city where I began life as a college graduate. It treated me well.

I'm making myself a playlist to keep me going until I get on that airplane BY MYSELF for a weekend sans both kids and a husband!

Here's what I have so far. Suggestions?

Empire State of Mind, natch. (Jay-Z)
Nothin' on You (B.o.B.)
Sex on Fire (Kings of Leon)
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (Paul Simon -- it reminds me of being 20 years old and living in the city).
Elevation (U2)
Human (The Killers)

Fill out my playlist, please. What songs remind YOU of NYC, and why?

Since we are throwing around labels...

Earlier this week, a friend posted a very interesting article on Facebook about parenting from New York Magazine entitled "All Joy and No Fun," and I thought about blogging about it. It's a six-pager (and so worth the full read), but the gist is that parents are, statistically, unhappy -- especially parents of young children and teenagers. The article attempts to analyze why parents ostensibly "hate parenting."

One hypothesis is that it isn't children that suck, it's parenting that actually sucks: the daily grind and minutiae of child maintenance and nurturing that, really, wouldn't be appealing to anyone: care, feeding, dressing, and the inevitable haranguing that one must do to accomplish such feats. My friends and I often joke that we cannot believe our children expect us to feed them AGAIN -- we just fed them mere hours ago (sometimes minutes). But seriously, while most of us dreamed of having children when we grew up, did we really dream about the less fun aspects? The myriad diaper changes, the unpredictable and sometimes Chinese-water-torture-like sleep deprivation? The constant laundry?

No, we dreamed of those moments we do receive -- albeit not quite frequently enough, it seems -- of transcendental joy. The mornings in a big bed with a heap of still-sleepy, snuggling little bodies. The shared water slides. The blowing out of birthday candles. The run-and hug at school pick-ups. The last kiss at night and the first hug of the morning. That's what author Jennifer Senior is referring to when she writes an article titled "All Joy and No Fun" -- having children is an entry to a lifetime of joyful moments but far more frequent fun-sucking work, and sometimes, it makes us downright unhappy.

Then Senior dips farther in and starts to hypothesize that maybe it's the way Americans parent that makes them unhappy. She starts to delve into the competitive parenting practices of this generation of parents -- the overwhelming amount of opportunities and choices, activities and accelerations that we have access to and our anxiety about "doing it right."

I thought this article was well-written, if somewhat head-spinning. I could argue some points and I could agree with others. But the point is, I related. It was good food for thought.

Then my friend Lisa Belkin featured the article in her awesome Motherlode blog over at the New York Times online, in a post entitled "Unhappy Helicopter Parents," and my feelings completely changed.

I have read the article from start to finish three times now. Never once does Senior or any of her quotes mention the phrase "helicopter parent." Instead, she was writing about parenting in general -- parenting I relate to, as a mother of three very demanding, high energy, exhausting, and thoroughly joy-inducing children. Whether one is Lenore Skenazy or the neighborhood resident helicopter mama, children are still work. You might let your child find his way home from midtown Manhattan by himself using only a Metro card and a map, but you still have some responsibility to make sure he passes fourth grade, has clean clothes that fit him, and brushes his teeth (even if he must do such tasks himself). You are still going to be a mother, still going to have to raise that kid through his toddler years when he is unable to take off his own pants to sit on the potty, still need to wake up in the middle of the night when he barfs all over his bed. No one gets an exemption.

I read Lisa's introduction, and although I didn't understand why helicopter parents were the only ones being featured as "unhappy" with parenting, it wasn't until I got to the comments that my stomach started to turn.

I am kind of sick, I have to say, of people labeling parents. It seems that everyone could be doing it better. Everyone, that is, with grown children or no children at all, who are apparently either all perfect (as a result of their perfect upbringings) or hypothetically perfect and perfectly non-existent (conveniently).

I know helicopter parents. Of course I do. I could even be labeled one myself on certain subjects and in certain areas. I have my "things" that other parents would label irrational, and I am more liberal and flexible and nonchalant about other "things" on which other parents might totally perserverate. You know what? I use my judgment. Sometimes, the six and eight year olds are allowed to use public restrooms by themselves, unaccompanied. Sometimes they go with a buddy. Sometimes only with an adult. But you know what? I use judgment, and you? Can go use your own judgment with your own kid (hypothetical or otherwise) before you label me a helicopter parent. I take this job seriously, but that doesn't mean I don't have a "life" or that my kids don't.

Comment after comment told tales of the over-involved, hyperventilating mother who "claims to be best friends with her (juvenile) daughter," "contacts her child's high school or college professor or coach," or wipes her adult child's bum. I mean, seriously. These are outliers, dude. Most parents know how to balance, draw boundaries, let go, and still support and protect their children developmentally appropriately. Do we all know some whackadoos? Well, sure. Are all of them crippling their children and raising maladjusted snot-nosed brats? I doubt it. Some kids will rebel against the coddling, some won't. I am not wholly convinced genetics don't have way more to do with how kids turn out in those cases than the over coddling does.

My point is, somehow, in all this analysis of modern day parenting, we lost that parents can be protective of their children without being over-protective. It is possible. We lost that it is okay, maybe even good, to be involved in your children's lives -- and you can do it without being over-involved and living vicariously. Does this generation of parents carry a larger amount of anxiety and depression than generations before? Perhaps. Could it be because so many freaking people are criticizing our every move and we are paralyzed we are "doing it wrong" no matter HOW we do it?!

If we let our child cry, we're neglectful OR we are teaching him coping skills. If we don't, we're attachment parenting advocates OR we are helicopter-style, hysterical coddlers. If our child fails a test, we are apparently not supposed to contact the teacher to get input on how to help our child or to find out if our child is struggling overall. We are supposed to let him figure it out on his own? So... we aren't supposed to be partners in our child's education, or we are? I am so confused. Is there an official grade at which we are no longer appropriate if we get involved? I lost my rule book. Are we not supposed to follow up on signs of learning differences, disabilities, or challenges? Would that be smothering the child too much? Better to just let him sink or swim, yes? That would keep him unspoiled.

Yeah, I am frequently cranky. That is pretty evident from my blog. I am more than frequently in love with my children. I hope that is evident too. I chose to have these children, and, as one commenter on the Motherlode blog pointed out, if you pulled any given moment out of my day, I would either look: completely overwhelmed, totally with it, over-protective, way lenient, decisive, fun, sad, happy, exhausted... Parenting is not black or white. When are people going to get that? There is, as my friend Jay has said too many times for me to count, no one true path in parenting. The good news in that is that there are many ways to be a good parent. But parenting looks really, really messy most of the time, in more ways than one. What is that Biblical phrase about letting he without sin cast the first stone?

So, as you can read, I've been stewing pretty hardcore this week about the reaction to that article, an article that I thought made a lot of sense: children are pretty awesome, but the daily stuff of them? Not so sweet. As I write this, my husband struggles to get the almost-three-year-old to stay in his crib, the eight-year-old has been in three times to proclaim that I have FAILED him because I have not YET come in to produce the ICE POP that I PROMISED him. The six-year-old is rearranging all the kitchen furniture in an attempt to recreate camp's game of "musical chairs" that he won today. There's a mountain of laundry to do (as always), I have menstrual cramps (ironically), and I'm freaking exhausted. I have to wrap a birthday present for a kid party tomorrow morning and kids will scream at me about hating the smell of the Environmental Working Group-approved sunscreen I will attempt to apply to their faces. Yeah, this sucks in some moments. Do I love child-related work? No, usually I do not. Do I love the children? Hell yes.

But reactions like that in Motherlode this week make me want to scream. Because you know what makes all of this eight zillion times harder? A Judgey McJudgeypants, cranky-ass Peanut Gallery that is watching my every move. Not every parent in this modern era is a Helicopter Parent just because we care about our children. True helicopter parents are extremists and outliers. The rest of us are just normal people, however you define normal, doing the best we can. Day in and day out. Most of us chose this and are happy to do it, even if we aren't happy every second of it. If we could all treat each other, online and in person, as if we can acknowledge that most people are doing the best they can and using their judgment and their full knowledge of their own children, maybe parents would be just a little bit happier.

It would be a good experiment.

Rewind

I grew up in a community built around a natural spring. The water is about sixty degrees year-round, so the only time it is really pleasant to swim there is in the blazing heat of summer. When the sun beats down through the trees, the clear green water can be still be shocking, but it almost feels like it is cleaning out the muck in your soul and running clear through your veins.

There's a high dive, a floating raft, and a beach. There are minnows to catch in nets and buckets, herons and turtles and squirrels. When I was a child, I swam through the water to the raft. I jumped off the high dive -- not too high, but high enough to give an adrenaline rush every single time -- and I caught thousands of minnows. I learned after a few times that taking them home in plastic buckets didn't work. All you had was dead minnows just a few hours later.

And now, my children are doing it all too. In the heat of these summer days, the spring is still a common destination. We trek down to the beach, loaded with towels and sunscreen and buckets and snacks. We eat sandy crackers and sit in the sand. I catch minnows for the little ones, and they build elaborate sand mazes on the beach for the minnows to play in until they find their release back to the water. The kids still wince when they first hit the cool water, but they are soon diving in, swimming in the open water, jumping from the high dive and trying cannonballs and pencil dives.

The hours go by languidly and easily. This is what summer is supposed to be: a gang of kids, watching moms, imaginative games and construction projects, rides on rafts. The iPhone stays in the car.

The Obit

My college alumni association puts out a "weekly" alumni magazine -- except it's not so weekly sometimes in my perception. In any case, included in the content is "class notes" about what classmates are doing (good so one can stay apprised of the latest runs for Congress or whatnot) and obituaries. Those are the two sections I always check -- the notes and the obits. The notes often make me smile, since they often sport pictures of small versions of my friends dressed in college T shirts and wielding sweet, familiar smiles. The obits usually make me heave a sigh of relief -- that I don't know any of the subjects.

Yet I read the obits anyway. I find it fascinating to know where these (mostly men) came from, how they got to my alma mater and by way of what childhood. I want to know what they did afterward, how many children they had, where they lived when they grew old.

Recently, while reading the obits, I had a jarring thought: what would my obit say in the alumni magazine?

"Mama grew up in the same city her entire childhood, went to the Beloved Alma Mater where she played no sports but learned to drink and wrote for the sports page so she could meet cute guys. Afterward, she had a brief career in Hollywood in which she actually created nothing herself, but helped a lot of other people bring their creations to fruition. Then she had kids and moved to suburbia. The end."

I don't know yet exactly what I want my obit to say, but I can tell you that's not it. This is not The End. I could embellish the above with facts I believe are true, facts about how I am a good, loyal, mostly thoughtful friend, for instance. But mine would be a unique sort of obit in my alumni magazine if it was just about that.

So, I'm thinking a lot these days about my obit, about what else might fit in my little column when the time comes. What will be in yours?

Waste management

In my mothering career, I have found that there are two sets of mothers in this world: those who are in a big, fat, huge hurry to potty train, and those who are not.

I fall into the latter camp. I feel, in fact, that diapers are vastly underrated in this world. To me, it is very important to know, when it inevitably does, where the shit is going to land.

I started out Switzerland in the potty training camp, though. I just wanted to do it "on time" (oh, the most naive phrase in parenthood! "ON TIME!") and do it without killing us all. I'm not completely awesome with body fluids, but I don't mind talking about them, as you can probably gather from my blog posts. So the summer that Firstborn turned three, I decided to tackle it.

I did not carry into battle any wisdom from my mother. I cannot even discern, from what my mother remembers of my toddlerhood, if she was present for potty training. "You just did it," she shrugged. Um... yeah. I'm betting it was not quite that simple. I researched potty training and came up with a plan of attack: I would try everything.

I bought potty training videos, a potty training doll (disappointingly, not named Betsy Westy. boo.), and training underwear. I moved Firstborn out of his happy crib into a big boy bed. But no. Firstborn, who had been going potty in his little potty chair for over a year -- but only when he felt like it -- looked at me with a steady, unflinching gaze. "I like diapers," he stated. He went on to make that very clear. A week of tantrums and waste management duty convinced me that my summer birthday boy baby was simply not ready for potty training yet. He would stand next to me, talking about whatever interested him at the moment, and I would look down and see his underwear sagging almost to the floor with a huge ball of poop in it. He would stand naked on our wood floors, peeing, and not notice until I startled at the sight. He didn't want to be naked, and he didn't want to wear underwear. It was too much of a commitment, probably for us both.

So he went off to preschool and we didn't potty train until Christmas vacation, when his preschool gave us an ultimatum and I decided -- independent of this issue -- to switch Firstborn to a Montessori that absolutely required children to be potty trained.

At 42 months, Firstborn finally did potty train, but it did nearly kill us both. Ultimately, I had to just do away with all diapers and pull-ups except for bedtimes (he finally night trained at five and a half years old, in the middle of his Kindergarten year). It took about three days, but he finally realized I was dead serious and he resigned himself to a life of potty-using.

You can imagine my excitement to train C. when he hit three. I dreaded it. He was just between 37 and 38 months when I decided to give it a shot, and he, unlike his brother, had never once in his entire little life peed on a potty before, real or miniature. Yet, also unlike his brother, training him was no sweat at all. It took one trip to Target to buy his most prized toy at the time -- Star Wars figures -- and a new collection of cheap, scratchy, why-would-anyone-want-to-wear-these underwear emblazoned with Power Rangers and Yoda to get C. on board. He was game.

I took C. to the potty in the bathroom he shared with Firstborn, and I put his bare bum up on the toilet seat (since Firstborn, I had determined that I only wanted to have to train a child to use the potty once, so I chose to train him on a regular sized potty and not a potty chair). He and I both looked down expectantly between his legs. I showed him how to point his penis down so it wouldn't pull a firehose act on the bathroom. And we waited. I could see C. was getting frustrated, so I said the first thing that came into my head. "C., tell your penis to show you the pee-pee!" C., my people-pleasing child, looked down and said very seriously, "Penis, show me the pee-pee!"

Magic. Pee-pee appeared. The penis listened. We yelped and clapped and squealed, and C. picked out on of the Star Wars figures sitting prominently on the kitchen counter. And that was that: for the rest of the day, C. kept his underwear dry, even when we went to karate practice and to the gym childcare. It was amazing. Once again, it showed me just how different children are -- and how much of a difference it makes in my attitude when I know that this particular tunnel has a light at the end of it.

Now, Baby B. is turning three in mere weeks, and almost immediately afterward, he will begin his three-year-old program at his preschool. His school is notoriously stringent about potty training for three-year-olds, and I have had mild panic attacks all summer about potty training a child at exactly three years of age. I know others train earlier -- my sister-in-law, a member of the "hurry up" camp, trained my nephew the month he turned two. But my children don't tend to be ready at two, and I know I am not.

I am just as important to this process as my kids are -- that's another realization I have had. Potty training is a commitment. A child peeing in a potty is elating and ridiculously liberating, but it also comes with drawbacks: surprise accidents in the most inconvenient moments ever; the tell-tale wriggle in the carseat and the proclamation, "I need to go potty RIGHT NOW!" when you are pulling out of a parking lot with three children strapped into carseats; the required use of public restrooms, no matter how nasty. If you have until now successfully avoided knowing what your local grocery store bathroom looks like, you will now know. Target. Gas stations. Every restaurant, every fast food joint. 7-11. Lowe's. Not only will you have to use public restrooms, but your child will touch EVERYTHING in them before you can stop him. He'll lie on the floor. He'll lean on the seat to reach the flush lever. It's impossible to escape. You'll dream at night about the rare and exotic species of germ your children were exposed to in the public restrooms that day.

Potty training also involves probably my least favorite part of parenting: poop in underwear. At this point, I use the cheap stuff, I cut it off the child, and I promptly throw said underwear away, never to be seen again. My life is too short for poopy underwear.

So, as August fast approaches, that is where my mind is: how is this going to go? For the first time, I will have to potty train a child in a carpeted house. I'm skeered. This could get ugly. It could be messy. I know I should probably be rejoicing over the fact that come September we might not be buying Pampers for the first time in over eight years, but I am not. Because as I said, when the shit inevitably falls, I like to know where it is going to land. But as with everything else in this parenthood gig, I have to go put on my own big-girl underwear and deal. Wish me luck... and clean public restrooms.