The Elmo Wallpaper

No rainbows or butterflies here

2012-02-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

You know the women who wax rhapsodic about pregnancy? The ones who talk about the wonder of life and birth and the miracle of it all and how great they feel and they never felt more like a woman and...

Yeah, that's not me. I'm the antidote to that, I think.

I know, I'm not supposed to say it. I'm supposed to just be plain grateful the entire pregnancy -- grateful that conception is easy for us, grateful for healthy babies, grateful for my own health, grateful for the whole dang process. Well, I AM grateful for all of that. I know how very lucky I am in all respects. I hope to continue to be lucky -- and grateful that with this birth, I won't have to take that kind of Russian roulette shot at everything falling into place as I hope again. Conception and birth are tricky, tricky processes, after all, and nothing is ever guaranteed.

But in the meantime, I am just not a happy pregnant person. Whether that makes me ungrateful or whatever, I cannot help. My body has done me well in that I haven't had any major health issues in my pregnancies. Even so, pregnancy is no fun affair for me. Yes, I appreciate the baby kicks and the crazy miracle of it all. I get that. But along with the baby kicks and the miracle comes...

Heartburn. Oh my GAWD, the heartburn. This pregnancy and last, it has been unbearable -- the keep me up at night kind. I am so looking forward to eating food again without the looming threat of acid reflux.

The weight gain. My body blows up like a balloon. This time, I can honestly say I have eaten like crap. I have. I haven't followed the recommended diets, I haven't adhered to any regimens. I threw up the first twenty weeks, and when I felt good enough to eat, I ate whatever the hell I wanted to in any quantity I wanted to. I have craved powdered doughnuts, Slurpees, pizza, ice cream, candy bars. I have been in no way, shape, or form healthy or careful. But I have felt like I am simply surviving, and it just is what it is. But I will have hell to pay postpartum.

The swelling. It's HOT here, and it's only going to get hotter. My fingers and feet are alreasy swelling. I hate it.

The sleeplessness and the exhaustion. I am so. tired. all. the. time. Except at night, when I could sleep. Then I can't sleep, of course. Mostly because I am like a beached whale and can't get comfortable in bed and, oh yeah, the damn heartburn.

The nerves. I am on edge. It feels so hard just to lumber through my days. When other people don't cooperate in making my days easier, I get angry. Quickly. You can imagine how that goes around here.

The clothes. I am not a cute pregnant person. I gain weight EVERYWHERE. My bras don't fit, my pants are tight, and I am not comfortable. My face is a bloated, pale mess.

The questions. I am blessed that people care, but still. Over and over and over. Yes, I'm excited. May. No, I'm not ready. No, we don't have a name. I feel large and tired.

I feel so lucky to be having another baby. I just can't wait to actually HAVE that baby and start to get my body and life back in order. I feel like I am wading through molasses. With heartburn. And sometimes, hemorrhoids.

I think my distaste for pregnancy might have something to do with my laissez-faire attitude about childbirth -- unlike most of my friends, I really don't care how I give birth or where. I like hospitals and I like epidurals. I don't mind being induced. I've been lucky to escape C-sections, especially considering the size of my babies, but if I had one, I wouldn't consider it a failure or a disappointment. I just have never had surgery before, so I would be scared of that. But the "institutional" birth doesn't bother me at all -- I'm just happy to do it and be done and yeah, I even enjoy staying in the hospital. I don't have to clean up there. I don't have to do laundry there. I order my meals. I watch TV. It's kind of awesome. I stay as long as they will let me. I know, I'm totally weird.

Anxiety

2012-01-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

Over the past year, it has become clear that my middle son, C., is carrying around a family heirloom of sorts: anxiety. Anxiety runs on both sides of the family and is something that both Husband and I have faced, to varying degrees and frequency, in our lives, so this is not surprising at all, really.

It just kind of breaks my heart.

I have written before about how we have worried about C. He is a dear, sweet, tenderhearted child. He is the one who wants to please us, mediate, make people okay. His letter to Santa this year listed the toys he wanted Santa to bring his big brother, with just an afterthought mention of what he wanted for himself, and it was signed, "Your little friend, C." My heart nearly exploded out of my chest with a mixture of pride, love, and an aching, searing jolt of pain at his vulnerability.

In so many ways, he is the child I worry about the most. He is the closet introvert who hides his social anxiety with jokes and class clownery. He is the artist who thinks his drawing stinks, the 100-pound second grader who wears a size 10-12 in boys' clothes and still needs a Pull-Up at night. He is the one who treasures little things like baking cookies with me and absolutely must be read to every single night or he cannot fall asleep.

And he is the one with the anxiety.

At the beginning of the school year, C.'s well-intentioned teacher crowded us both a little with her concern for C., who did not seem to be engaged in class and outright admitted he didn't enjoy school. She was convinced he was depressed. Not depressed, I tried to explain to her. Anxious. She did not seem to understand, listing his class clown status and his outgoing nature and how smart he is. Yes, he is smart, I confirmed, and yes, he is outgoing, but it is a mask to hide his social anxiety in a class where he knew only one child at the beginning of the school year. He just needed time to settle in, I explained.

After some rough starts, he did, and he is doing better. But he still struggles. He blows up at me if I ask him to do something he should have done already. He gets nervous if he thinks we will be late to a practice or a game. He dwells and works himself up before he starts something new -- a team or a class -- in which he might not know anyone or have an anchor.

I know a little about anxiety, but I know more about how it has affected people in my family. I have a gut feeling that my little guy is going to be dealing with anxiety his whole life. Unlike his cocky, self-assured brothers, he doubts. He worries. He isn't sure. And I can't fix it. I can get him help -- we plan on eventually starting him with someone to receive some cognitive behavioral therapy to learn better coping mechanisms, and we are trying to find ways to support him otherwise. But my feeling is, this is part of who he is, and it might always be part of who he is.

More than anything, I want to tell him all the reasons he should be just as cocky as his brothers. He's tall. He's smart. He works hard. He loves. He's a fabulous little artist. He has an amazing imagination. People like him. He's a playground leader and he uses his powers for good. He brings people together and builds other people up. He's such a good little guy. He's going to be such a wonderful big guy someday. He deserves to believe and know how wonderful he really is. And I just wish I could fix that. I wish that was in my toolbox of Mommy Powers. But it's not, really. I can do my best, and I can tell him and show him and support him and love him and give him everything I've got. But it's no guarantee of anything.

And that makes me anxious.

Get OVER it already.

2012-01-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

This week, my wonderful friend Lisa Belkin published an article written by the very funny Dawn Meehan over at Lisa's new Huffington Post blog. I would give you the name of Lisa's new HuffPo blog, but... uh... it is kind of in name limbo after the NY Times took unkindly to her calling it a similar name to her old NY Times parenting blog. Helloooo... someone didn't learn all he or she needed to learn in Kindergarten, NY TIMES.

Anyway, Dawn's article is about, unbelievably, the ridiculously belabored question of who has it "harder" -- the Stay at Home Mom (as you know, a term I recently dropped from my vocabulary) or the Working Mom?

Dawn is a talented writer and she makes me laugh. But seriously? Are we STILL talking about this? It's so... depressing. As I said in my recent post, we are all MOMS. I mean, do we have to have a winner of the Who Has It Worst question? This parenting stuff is, hands down, the hardest thing I have ever done. And I am not even talking about the crazy amounts of laundry that have to be put away, the constant dirty dishes, the cleaning of the bathrooms, the existence of pee absolutely EVERYWHERE in my life (will my house ever not smell like pee?). I'm talking about the emotional difficulty of being responsible for another little human's existence, character development, physical health and well-being, education, and, you know, FUTURE. Every single mother, no matter what her circumstance, has this burden. Some take it more seriously than others; some don't have the capacity to give it as much mental and emotional weight as others. But we all have hormones and we all gave birth or accepted a child into our hearts somehow, and when we did -- boom. HARD. NOT EASY.

You cannot shoebox a mother into a label. I have a good friend who is not working outside the home, but she is staying home with not one but TWO special needs children under the age of five. Her youngest might never really walk. She might never potty train. She might not have a normal life span. Her oldest is allergic to so many things that she cannot go to anyone's house who has ever owned a pet. She cannot come in contact with certain foods. So this mother's life at home is very isolated and very emotionally difficult. Are you going to tell me that someone else has it "harder" because she works outside the home?

I have been working from home this past year, and it definitely sucked for me. I am not great at that kind of multitasking, not great at drawing lines between working and mothering when it is all happening in the same room at the same time. That's me. Someone else might thrive on it -- it might be her lifeline. I don't care who has it harder. We're individuals, and we have individual kids with unique needs and obstacles and circumstances. Moms are married, divorced, single. They have children with special needs. They themselves might have special needs. Maybe they have spouses with special needs. We live in a sucky economy with sucky consequences for many families. Parenting is HARD -- for the rich, for the poor, for the working outside the home moms, for the moms not working outside the home. PARENTING IS HARD. That's why there there is no solution to the "who has it harder?" question. The answer is, we all do -- at any given moment, in any given situation, at any given age.

I would be a happy lady if I never saw another woman try to assert who has it "harder." Every time that sentence comes out of another woman's mouth or from another woman's keyboard, it's like some mom out there loses her wings. When will we stop trying to put stars on our bellies and start banding together? We could do so much good if we stopped arguing this question and started arguing about why we need better family policies in the American workplace, better health care, better maternity leave, better support for ALL mothers out there. It takes all of us to make up the village that needs to raise our children. Let's acknowledge that and MOVE THE HELL ON.

Resolutions for 2012:

2011-12-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

1. I will find a regular, adult, capable-of-staying-overnight sitter for my children. This will likely involve calling the local nanny agency and interviewing nannies and paying through the nose to find someone who won't end up on Dateline NBC. However, in the past year, it has become extremely apparent that my parents, who live two miles away, are not viable answers for even emergency childcare situations. I don't trust their judgment, their interest, or (most importantly) their health. I do have a regular sitter, but she has a family and a regular job, and I need a back-up. This will alleviate a lot of anxiety for me and allow me to envision future weekend trips for my anniversaries (we haven't even gone out to dinner the past two years!).

2. I'm going to get up the energy to make more food at home. This pregnancy has knocked me out. I have never before barfed until eighteen weeks. I am still taking Zofran to alleviate some debilitating nausea. But my children are going to be supersized if I don't get a handle on the situation (let's not even mention me). I do not enjoy cooking at all. I'm not particularly good at it, and then when I do it, at least one half of the residents of my household are unhappy with what I have made or chosen. It's demoralizing. But we are all going to have to suck it up before we all have to suck it in!

3. I WILL get this house in order. It might kill me. But women have died for lesser causes.

4. I will NOT allow anyone to convince me to volunteer in a classroom next school year. I love my children, but the weekly gigs absolutely kill my momentum at home. I'll be available to pinch hit or do special projects, but a regular assignment is just too much.

5. I will start one of two sure-fire million dollar ideas: either embark on an actual effective system for organizing and storing Legos (We put men on the moon, people. We can't do better than the current offerings?) and especially Lego *sets* or start my own PURELY RECREATIONAL sports league for children in my area. No pros, semi-pros, or children with biceps allowed. No fathers (or mothers) allowed to coach. Customers would pay more for third party coaches, but they would get less politics and Daddyball and ridiculousness. Families would have to sign contracts stating they are happy for their children to play, that winning *and losing* are part of playing sports, that every child should be able to get to play infield or quarterback. When they are ready for more competition, they are free to leave -- there are plenty of places to find that.I'm going to be rich, people. And my kids might actually be able to just play a game instead of having to worry that their uniforms might not get dirty all season.

6. Write more, obviously.

There are more, like getting my middle child out of nighttime pull-ups, but I will leave it at that. That's enough for now.

Happy and productive 2012, everyone!

Panic at the disco

2011-12-27T07:28:00.000-08:00

It's over. Christmas 2011, that is. All in all, it was an unlikely success, despite the Head Cold That Ate Cleveland (for me), various other assorted ailments for the little people, and the usual family shenanigans. I hope you and yours had fabulous holidays of the Hanukkah or Christmas (or Kwanzaa, Eid, Diwali... ) flavors. I, for one, am just incredibly grateful for the break in the regular programming!

But now, it's over. The decorations need to come down and, I hope, stored with some amount of organization or thought to aid in next year's effort. The kitchen needs to be restored, I hope better than I found it. But most of all...

My house is a total disaster.

I know that part of my panic is hormone, nesting related. I'm 21 weeks today, and suddenly, now that 2012 is this weekend, May seems a lot closer. Part of my panic is the fact that I spent yesterday at the home of my ultra-organized, completely anal brother and sister-in-law, where every single thing has a place and a home, they know exactly where that home is, and five minutes after gifts were opened, it was as if we had never been there. My brother's children automatically wash their hands before and after they eat, take showers of their own volition, and inspect glasses before they drink out of them. My children are staunch supporters of the five-second rule and have to be threatened to brush their teeth or observe daily hygiene.

But it is more than that. Our house is a disaster. I'm an organized person trapped underneath four completely anti-organization individuals, a dog, and two aged cats. We have too many clothes (hand-me-downs are overrated for the sheer amount of sorting and storing they require!), too many toys, too much paper, too much carpet (see: dog and two aged cats). Too. Much. Stuff. And I want it all gone, and I have no idea where to begin.

I wish we could go away for a weekend, come back, and find that some magic fairy (preferably Nate Berkus) had emptied my house of all the extra stuff, stripped the carpet and left hardwood or laminate floors -- I'm not picky, and painted the walls different colors. Oh, and finished the laundry.

For now, I am making 2012 the Year of the To-Do List. And I am hoping that once the fog of this neverending head cold lifts, I have some awesome second and third trimester energy surges to plow me through the mess.

My kids are not (always) assholes

2011-12-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

During my hiatus from the blog, I attended my fifteenth college reunion. As I have written many times before, I love my alma mater fiercely, and I adore my friends and classmates that I met there. I mean, for the most part. Ninety-nine percent of them.

While I was at my reunion this year, I was struck by how many people approached me and told me they read my Facebook status updates all the time. As I admitted below, I am not a natural Twitterhead, but I am a Facebooker. With friends spread out around the country and sometimes the world, it really keeps me in touch with tons of people I would otherwise lose in my life and it also keeps me in the loop locally with my mom friends and organizations, so I find it insanely useful. But see, the classmates approaching me at the reunion, with few exceptions, don't actually post on Facebook much if at all, yet they read all of my posts. Which left me feeling a little weird. Naked, I guess. I guess I usually assume that if people don't post on Facebook, they don't read Facebook either. Ding-dong wrong, apparently.

I bumped into one friend late one night at the reunion. She had obviously been partaking of some adult beverages, as is her prerogative. After we hugged, the first thing she said to me was, "Wow! So your kids are, like, assholes, huh?"

I was taken a bit aback. I mean, I post snippets on Facebook about my kids -- who give me plenty of fodder for Facebook status updates, as you might imagine. I try to mix in positive updates along with the sarcastic, the weary, or the downright done kind. I mean, my kids are kids. Sometimes they are sweet, sometimes they surprise me, and sometimes, yes, they are assholes. But they are kids. Kids can be assholes. I'm not one to sugarcoat my kids. I will tell you when they are amazing, when they are brilliant, when they are heartbreakingly kind and generous, and when they are douchebags. I am sure they would prepare the same reports about me if given social media accounts. We're all human beings, and we're all assholes sometimes.

But in that instant, I realized that all my friend -- a rock star doctor who travels the world -- knows about my kids are what she reads on my Facebook status updates. And all she had taken from that is that my kids are assholes. I stood there sort of in stunned silence as she went on: "I didn't really want to have kids, but your Facebook updates have totally confirmed it for me," she laughed. "No thanks!"

Luckily, she was tipsy enough that I was able to navigate away from her gracefully, but I felt shamed. It made me doubt what I write about my kids both on Facebook and here. Just for the record, my kids are not (always) assholes. My kids are kids. I love them more than anything on the face of the planet. I marvel at how freaking hard they are sometimes. I berate myself for not being good enough to them or for them. I think they are awesome.

Some locals were surprised when I showed up pregnant this fall. A few voiced that they were befuddled as to why I would have another kid when the ones I have are such a handful. They are an awesome handful. They do kick my butt all the time. ALL the time. But they are the best things in the world, too. I love my little kid gang. And I think they make each other better. One more is going to be fun. Hard as hell, but fun.

So before we move on, I just wanted to clear that up. It's been bugging me since June. And that childless rock star friend? She has since, with her husband, added two puppies to her household. I look at the (many, many) pictures on her Facebook status updates and chuckle to myself. Because puppies? Can be so much bigger assholes than kids!

Catching up

2011-12-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Husband says it is insanely boring when I write posts about why I have not been posting. So I am going to let him be the voice of my (former? long-lost?) readers and just sum it up in one sentence: too.much.life. You can relate.

The truth is, I have struggled a lot since attending BlogHer in 2010. I haven't really known where I fit in this blogging world. I felt a need to jump in, to join the fray, to tweet and market and write elsewhere and... you know, it's just not me. It's just not. I am not interested in sponsored posts, not interested in tweeting (I do love the Facebook, though, and I read OTHERS' tweets), not interested in trying to get a book deal. This little space has been mine for four years now, and I guess that's just what I need it to be. A little space.

I needed time to come to the conclusion that it is okay, that I am no less a writer or a member of this blogging world, if I am just the writer of this blog, somewhat anonymous and completely small-time. I read a lot of others' blog posts, but I comment very rarely only because I am usually on Flipbook and it is a total pain in the rear. Am I still worth reading? Well, you'll have to decide.

In the meantime:

1. I'm pregnant. Yes! Seriously! I'm halfway done, actually. I know, how could I keep it off the Interwebz for so very long with my huge mouth? I will tell you the truth: I don't really love when my favorite bloggers conceive and then their blogs become all about pregnancy and butterflies and roses and whatnot. I didn't know how to present this and also say, dude, this blog is NOT going to be all about my pregnancy. But here it is. A few common answers to common questions...

-- Yes, this was planned. We have debated for years, and if you have been reading here, you know it has been bouncing around in my brain. We finally decided to go for it.

-- No, I'm not "going for a girl." I'm not a huge gambler, especially when odds are not in my favor. I would love to have a daughter; I think that is well known. But I also think four boys would be pretty darn special too. When I was pregnant with B., I was desperate to know what his gender was. Like, manic. But this pregnancy, I am oddly at peace. I don't care. I know that sounds ridiculous given everything I have written, but I think I have finally come to the realization that what will be will be, and I am not in charge, and no matter what, it's okay. Which is good, since, you know, what will be WILL be, I am NOT in charge, and no matter what, it IS okay. Ha. Maybe I am growing up.

-- Yes, this is IT. I am crazy, but not THAT kind of crazy. And yes, for sure. Husband and I do know how to prevent these things. Ten years of baby-making and a now advanced maternal age are enough. I'm tired and I have a lot of heartburn and I'm old. This is it. The end. All she wrote. Shop's closed. And... scene.

2. I have made a decision. I will no longer call myself a Stay at Home Mother. I cannot claim this idea -- I read it on Twitter. Another mother made the statement. I can't remember her Twitter handle, which is probably like the worst breach of conduct ever, but... at least I'm honest? Anyway, as she said, we are ALL mothers. We don't call dads "Work Outside the Home Dads." I'm over the labels. I am a Mother. Period. I also now like to fancy myself a Writer. So I am a Writer and I am a Mother, but I am not a Stay at Home Mother who writes. Just in case you were looking to give me business cards for Christmas or whatever. I don't know why, but this decision to reject that label has really affected me the past few days.

3. I have been writing for pay. Or, at least, assembling writing. I completed two first drafts of books between April and October, and it kicked. my. butt. I kind of hated the struggle to balance my kids and my employer. My hat is off to the better multitaskers than I am... I sucked at it.

4. I miss my people. I'm feeling very disconnected from my kindred spirits right now, for whatever reason. Suburbia is getting to me. I am feeling smothered and yet lonely all at the same time. Does that even make sense?

5. I want to write. For ME. So I am pledging to myself that I will write more and more frequently. I am not sure I will ever be a daily blogger, but I can try. It's good for my soul.

I've missed my space. It's good to be back. The adventure continues!

I just want them to be happy.

2011-10-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

The school year started and I was caught in the undertow. Between a part-time job writing (from which I am happily taking a break!) for pay, my school volunteer commitments, and my children, I have been just treading water for a long time now. But the main thing keeping me overwhelmed: that elusive goal of happy children.

I'm not even sure if "happy children" is a goal I can attain. What do happy children look like? Are they okay with going to bed a little earlier than they hoped? Are they pleased to go to school every morning and happy campers at the end of the school day? Do they acquiesce to homework management without resistance?

If so, my children are NOT happy. But if "happy children" can be grumpy, grouchy, moaning kids, say, 50-60 percent of the time and happy or at least content the remainder of their days? I have at least a shot.

Before this school year began, I will admit I was feeling a little cocky. My kids scored the reputed "very desirable" teachers. I was feeling on my A game. And then, as it usually happens, everything really got underway and the cracks in my system started showing up.

Firstborn is happy in class. His teacher is attuned to him, impressed by him (maybe a little TOO much), and he has friends in his room. He defines school as a happy place. But after a year of struggle, I finally let him drop violin and swimming in favor of a fall season of baseball.

Firstborn LOVES baseball. But baseball doesn't always love Firstborn. And the league we have played in before and now is very competitive and very much Daddyball: political and hotheaded. When sitting in the stands, watching the men huff around the field with their chests puffed out and their middle -aged butts stuffed into uniform pants, I often hear Springsteen songs in my head.

This season, Firstborn aged up into kid-pitch (because third and fourth graders' arms are so ready to pitch seven-inning games) and finds himself among eight, nine, and ten-year-old Athletes. This is basically the pros compared to what he has been doing. Needless to say, he's been in left outfield, kicking the grass. But even more, his coaches have been instructing him not to even swing at the ball, because he has a better chance getting on base if he walks than if he tries to hit.

So we have been struggling with how much to intercede, how much to let it ride, how much to let him figure out for himself that he's not going to play infield or be a star -- maybe ever again. The kids he plays with now have, like, muscles. And Firstborn, despite his armpit hair and increasing need for deodorant, is still gangly and sorting out his limbs. After his first game, in which his coaches sat him out two innings and he hit nothing, he came home and cried, and my heart broke off into eight thousand pieces, but somehow we have survived. I'm beginning to see that disappointment might be not only an inevitable part of the next phase of his childhood, but a necessary one. And I am fortifying myself.

And then their is C., my middle child teddy bear. He was assigned to the "nurturing, sensitive teacher," but that has turned out to be something of a curse. She is certainly sensitive -- sensitive to the fact that C. is not at all engaged in her classroom and that he doesn't like school. C., unlike Firstborn, finds school a drag. He does have friends, and he works hard at that. But the worksheets and the smartboards completely bore him. After two conferences already this year in which his teachers wondered if he is a "gifted underachiever," depressed, an enigma... you name it, I am coming to the conclusion that his teacher has a need to be liked and given attention (by her students) that C. is not giving her, and C. might not thrive in a typical public school classroom. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I don't think he's particularly happy at school, but putting him in a karate class is one of the best things I have done for him lately. It's a work in progress.

The littlest guy just struggles with not wanting to go to school at all. He talks my head off, he wants to hang around the house, and he doesn't want to have to behave himself. Details. He is, overall, happy at the moment. I'll take it.

This parenting thing, it never. gets. easier. It does get different, but it never lets me coast. I don't want to coddle my children, I don't want to spoil my children, I don't want to over-analyze my children. I just want happy children. Could someone please hand over the instruction booklet?

Stuck in the middle

2011-07-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

I'm about to turn 37 later this month. Oh my God, that sounds so old. It's not an age I ever imagined myself actually being. Yet here I am -- closer to 40 than I am 30, almost through my childbearing years, inching ever so much terrifying closer to the word "mature." I have never had much of a problem with aging... but maybe that's because I wasn't yet aged. I'm starting to take issue with the whole process.

The worst part of all of it is that I am finding myself smack dab in the middle of two generations of maddening, obstinate, unruly people: my kids and my parents.

My kids are... my kids. You know what I am talking about. They are growing up, messily, loudly, and not without a whole lot of laundry. My parents, though, are a whole different steam train that I will confess I never saw coming when I was younger.

My family has had its share of messes and lovely dysfunction. In my early 20s, my parents fell -- hard -- off their pedestals, and the curtains came down and revealed that my "normal, average" childhood was more facade than reality. I dealt with that with some therapy and a lot of hours logging time with the Indigo Girls.

But seeing my parents as senior citizens now -- my mom is 65, my dad 64 -- changes everything. In the past year and a half, my father has collapsed four times. He still works seven days a week and has nary a hiccup in his work performance, but he drives himself into the ground otherwise, and nothing I say or do can stop him. My mom, with her own varied set of health issues, tries to prop him up. They are stubborn, and reckless, and they drive me absolutely batshit crazy. When I raise issues or ask them to take care of health issues, they tell me to step off. Then I get the hysterical midnight or 6 AM phone calls and I have to race to the ER to meet an ambulance. It's wearing on me.

I don't know what the future holds for either of them, but I am filled with dread. I want to shake them and tell them how much I love them and don't want to lose them, but it's not that easy, is it? It never is. Because we have electricity between us, charge in our air that spans the past almost 37 years -- expectations and disappointments and criticisms and sadness -- and I don't know what to say anymore. I force myself to face the fact they they will decline, whether it will be sudden or slow, and I will lose them. How do I want to spend this remaining time together? When will it be time for them to downsize? How will it all go down? And I have no idea. It makes me sad.

Part of me wishes I didn't live two miles away from them so I didn't have to live out every second of this process. Part of me knows I couldn't have it any other way.

With my children, I feel that I gain something of them every single day. With my parents, I feel a daily loss instead. Here in the middle, I just know my mid-section is softer, my knees weaker, my boobs saggier.

... my heart heavier.

Nine

2011-07-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, my firstborn child turned nine years old.

At my college reunion, there were many, many babies, many, many toddlers, and more than a few tummies swollen with the promise of those to come. But nine year olds were far fewer in attendance. I walked past the former lacrosse players toting baby strollers and wondered how I had managed to reach this place where I had no stroller at all -- just three sure-footed, mostly (sigh) potty-trained little boys who are gaining on me in height.

Nine years ago, I was struggling. I was sleeping in a La-Z-Boy with a colicky baby who refused to sleep by himself no matter what Harvey Karp-Dr. Sears-Marc Weissbluth method I tried. I was nursing around the clock and showing off my new party trick: a milk supply that turned my breasts into Rocket Boobs, capable of hitting distant targets like the opposite wall of a restaurant or passersby.

Nine years ago, I looked at this beautiful baby boy with expressive eyebrows and huge blue eyes, and I worried. I worried about the responsibility of raising a little person whom, someday, somebody would love. I worried about being a good enough mother, about doing right by this little being who was obviously so cranky to have been born. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I cried myself -- not to sleep, because I wasn't sleeping. But I cried along with this little baby that I loved so completely.

Nine years later, I have four feet, nine inches of boy by my side. He still has sandy, light brown hair, still has the same huge, light eyes and the same laughing eyebrows. But all traces of pudgy baby thighs are long gone, replaced by knobby knees and impossibly long shins. He comes up from behind and takes my hand when we walk out of restaurants. He squeezes my hand hard when he has to get a vaccination. He no longer demands to sleep in my armpit as he did as a baby, but he still thrills at the every once in a while opportunity to sleep in our bed.

Nine years later, he's brave beyond my belief, confident beyond my expectations, and surprisingly reasonable given his toddler years. He is still my most challenging child emotionally, but he surprises me with growing maturity every day. He's competitive but not without generosity. He loves his friends.

It has been a long, long journey, mothering this little boy. He made me a mother, and then he taught me what that meant. It was nothing like what I expected. At. All. But instead, it has been an adventure -- sometimes complex, sometimes beautiful, sometimes devastating. I have not always been certain I was cut out for this, that I was made of the stuff he needed. But nine years later, I think I can say that I am.

Nine years later, he loves baseball so passionately that he happily goes to baseball camp for five hours a day in the relentless 90-degree heat. He's excited to receive the latest Rick Riordan tome in the mail for his birthday. He makes homemade trading cards for the Greek gods. He's waiting breathlessly for the final installment of Harry Potter on film. He sleeps in a little gabled room with a window looking out into the trees, his treasures tucked into his bedside table, his shelves littered with trophies and game balls and Lego figures. He talks smack to my classmates from college when challenging them in chess. Then he beats them (sometimes).

I am insanely proud of, a little apprehensive about, and always challenged by this boy. The next nine years are going to be crazy. I can't wait.

The patch seen 'round the world

2011-06-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

Summer has been crazycakes around here. The book I am working on is due in two weeks. The campaign I have been working on for my alma mater ends this week. I have already started working on projects as our elementary school PTA's VP of Ways and Means (read: fundraising, a specialty I never knew I would hone). We've had one week of camp and several weeks of Oh My God I am Going to Lose My Shit.

This past week, I took Firstborn to the pediatrician for a camp physical in preparation for his first sleepaway camp experience later this summer. Everything was going routinely until my long-legged offspring stretched out on the examining table and folded his arms under his head. I am not huge on sleeveless shirts for my boys, but I did buy Firstborn one tank for the summer because it says "Baseball Legend" on it -- something he definitely believes he is. My point is, I never see my child's armpits.

And there it was: a patch of hair.

Not fine little blonde body hairs. This was a patch of longer, brown, still fine and delicate hair. In his armpit.

Firstborn turned nine last week (another post I have yet to write). He's only just nine years old. I didn't really expect patches of anything to be growing on his body yet.

I wasn't able to contain myself. I audibly gasped, and I called his pediatrician over to him. "What is THAT?!" I demanded.

"Hmm," he answered. "Nine is a little young for puberty in boys. But yeah, that looks like the beginning of something right there!"

He asked Firstborn if he could check "under the hood" one more time, and he confirmed that nothing else was growing patches. Which is reassuring, yes, but... still. There is a patch. In his pit.

The doctor told me to watch for any more signs of things revving up, like body odors or growth spurts, but explained that sometimes these things pop up and go nowhere for a while. That would be nice, since we haven't even tackled fourth grade yet.

Shocked, I walked zombie-style through the rest of the exam, left with our completed camp physical form, and piled the kids back in the car. "Mom, why did you get so upset when you saw that hair under my arm?" Firstborn asked from the back of the van as we pulled out of the parking lot.

I paused. "It just means you are growing up," I answered slowly. "And sometimes that is hard and a little scary for mommies to see their babies grow up."

He snickered softly from the back, and he said nothing more. Since then, it's been like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, pulsing from beneath his clothes and glowing in my brain: pit hair. Pit hair.

Puberty.

Here it comes, ready or not.

Home Base

2011-05-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

I'm back from a ridiculously wonderful, way too brief trip back to my alma mater's reunions weekend. Every year, the day after I get back is one steeped in bittersweet melancholy: I am hung over on several levels, most of them emotional.

This was my 15th reunion year for my illustrious class, so although Husband and I attend reunions every year, this one was all about US and full of our friends, our classmates, our music, our memories. It was almost like having another wedding, with every face we have loved our that loved us in the virtual room at the same time.

While I cherished every second, I can't help but feel brokenhearted that it will take another five years to get everyone in the same space again. I am wondering if I can somehow pull off an initiative to get my entire class to agree to return every year instead of waiting until 2016. Unlikely, I know, but I am not one to shy away from a challenge. I'll work on that... tomorrow.

For me, going back to this place, to these people, is like tagging home base. I have been so many places since my four years on that campus and I have met so many people, but that is the place I loved, the place I grew up, and those are the people I loved and grew up alongside. Going back reminds me of who I was before all this and who I still am beneath it all. It is so, so valuable to me. It brings me both an aching longing (oh, the choices I would make differently!), an overwhelming sense of gratitude (how lucky I am to have this, and to have had it), and a full-to-the-brim kind of happiness.

There are funny observations, especially as we age -- the once-hotties who are now bald, or a little pudgy, or much more willing to stoop to talk to the likes of me and the former playas who now carry pacifiers in one hand and push a stroller in the other. Parenting small children outside, in heat, during a several-hour parade turns out to be a remarkably universal equalizer. No one looks suave and accomplished while surviving such a challenge, be he or she a hedge fund manager or CEO or regular stay at home parent. The older we get, the more we have in common, it seems, along with our common histories.

One big revelation this weekend was that part of my need to go back to my reunion every year is to see my guy friends. In college, I had many, many guy friends. In my career, I had many, many guy friends -- probably sometimes more than I had girl friends. As a stay at home mother, I really do not get the chance to interact with men very often, and when I do, it's kind of inappropriate for me to grow close to them. So my remaining guy friends from college, and these few chances to see them, have become incredibly important to me. Maybe that is why I enjoy Facebook so much -- and yes, I received tons of remarks about my Facebook activity this past weekend -- there, I am still allowed to talk to men! I felt so much more in balance this weekend, so much more able to engage both sides of my social personality. I love women and I cherish and adore my female friendships, but it was so nice to get to hang with my homeboys too.

I miss it all already. I am already upset about the people I missed or didn't talk to enough. I am dreading the long, hot summer ahead. I want nothing more than to scoop up my kids and go back now, reveling in the old sidewalks and the ice cream shops and the surreal green grass. I wish I could spend every day tagging home base.

Until we meet again, my friends, take care. I need you.

The Diet

2011-05-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

This week, I go back to my alma mater for my fifteenth college reunion. I am trying not to think about how old "those people" seemed to me when I was a college undergrad -- how I snickered at the strollers in the courtyard, guffawed at the double strollers, and smirked at the placid, docile crowd. Our reunions are not known for being docile, but the denizens of the fifteenth reunion seemed to just be at that place in life.

And now I am one of them.

I am reveling in the fact that in the past few weeks, not one but TWO different people insisted I had to be in my twenties. They couldn't believe I had a child, much less three. Those were some awesome moments I had there. I have a notoriously young face, to which I credit my apple cheeks (read: plump cheeks). When I was younger, it annoyed me to be carded. Now, I want to kiss the person asking.

If you had asked me a month and a half ago, I would have told you that I was excited to go to my reunion, but I would have been a little bit lying. As a relentless extrovert, I usually love going to our annual reunions. I love seeing people, talking to people, standing in the crowds, seeing the familiar faces. I have loved it when employed with fabulous jobs, unemployed with no job at all, staying at home with children, newly postpartum, toting toddlers. But I had never gone back to a major reunion overweight before, and this year would be the first time.

Weight. It's such a tough subject for me to write about. Weight and I have been frenemies for lo these almost 37 years. In my adult life, we have mostly been on friendly terms, but in the past three years, it had turned ugly.

I gained a lot of weight with my third child. An unfair amount of weight, in my opinion, for how sick and awful I felt that pregnancy. Afterward, I lost a fair amount, but then my weight didn't budge at all for the past three years and change. Not at all.

I have tried to be healthy, but the truth is I have a sweet tooth and three small children who attract sugar like magnets. My sporadic attempts to work out and my third baby/toddler, he of the Hell-No-I-Won't-Go-to-Gym-Childcare, kept me firmly in a five-pound range of misery.

I am unhappy overweight. It doesn't feel like me. I'm a Leo and an extrovert, and I like to be seen, literally and figuratively, in the world. But when I am overweight, I don't just want to disappear, I feel like I actually am invisible. I feel like men do not look at me at all and women don't respect me. It's tough to write that, but that is how I feel. Less than. Ironic, when I feel "less than" only when I am actually "more than." The truth is, when I am overweight, it's probably the vibes I am actually putting out into the world that lead men to overlook me and other women to dismiss me, at least in part. But the result is the same, and I hate it.

Four and a half weeks ago, Husband and I started a diet. I don't want to proselytize, because diets are very personal, and all sorts of things work for all sorts of people at different times in their lives. My favorite "diet" is simply eating less and exercising more, for the record. But this time, we went on a medically-supervised, lower carb, lower calorie diet. It doesn't require exercise, which was what I could manage best right now. In the four weeks and change, I have lost twenty pounds. Husband, in typical male style, has lost more like thirty. (Bastard. Sigh.)

Now, I am really, really excited to go to my reunion. Not because I think I now look "acceptable" or thin -- because I still have a ways to go for that adjective -- but because now I feel like I look more like me. I feel more like what I am displaying to the world is more reflective of who and where I am in life. I still look very much like a mother of three children, with the muffin top and the somewhat depressing breasts to prove it. But now my face looks more like what I expect to find in the mirror. It's a face I haven't seen for a while.

I'm so glad my face is back.

The conversation

2011-05-04T18:19:00.000-07:00

"Have people at school been talking about Osama bin Laden?"

Firstborn and C., in chorus: "Who?"

"Oh, nothing."

F: "No, who is that?!"

"Just a bad man who died a few days ago."

F: "Why was he bad?"

C.: "Did he hurt animals?"

"No, he hurt people. A lot of people. He was a terrorist."

C.: "Oh, I know what a terrorist is."

"Do you guys know what happened on 9/11?"

(in chorus) "No."

"Do you know about the World Trade Center? The Twin Towers?"

F: "You mean when the airplanes flew into the buildings and they fell down? And everyone in them died?"

"Yes. Osama bin Laden was the man -- the terrorist -- who made that happen. He ordered that to happen."

C. : "Then it is a good thing he is gone."

"Yes."

C.: "Mama, when there are bad men like terrrists, if we find them can we just pick up a shotgun and shoot them?"

"I don't know. I mean, I think it's probably better if you try to take them to prison alive. But that is what happened to this bad man. The soldiers found him and shot him."

C: "Are all terrrists bad men, Mama?"

"Yes. All of them are bad men. They try to scare people with violence. That's why we call them terrorists."

F: "Mom, didn't the Twin Towers fall down, like, a hundred years ago?"

"No, honey. That happened just ten years ago. Right before you were born."

And now they know. They know that there are real bad men in the world, and that they hurt real people. I had no idea that conversation would happen today.

Work

2011-05-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

So, I got a job. I know, I know, I haven't told you anything! It all happened kind of fast. Long story short, I am helping another writer assemble a memoir for a celebrity. It's not writing my own book, but it certainly is a lot of writerly thinking and process. I'm enjoying the brain exercise and the material. I am learning a lot about a certain someone whom I cannot name!

This isn't the first time I have worked for this writer, and it's not the first time I have taken work since I have had children. But it is really the first time my children are old enough to appreciate that Mama has a job. I get to use nifty phrases like, "No, you can't play on my computer, because I have to work." These are not words they have heard from me before. It's kind of fun.

But sometimes, it's not fun. "What do you mean, you have to WORK?" Firstborn says. "Since when do YOU have a job?" Yeah, ouch. Nice. Sometimes it's not so fun when I have both a deadline for a man who pays me and deadlines for people who most certainly do not -- PTA obligations. Teacher Appreciation Week gifts to buy. Laundry to do. Bills to pay. Cleaning for the cleaning person (I know you do it too) who only comes every blue moon. Expectations.

I like this work because it's temporary -- the book is due in July -- and I can do it in chunks each day. But I don't like that when I feel like I COULD be putting clothes away, I feel like I REALLY should be doing work. I don't like that on Little B.'s days off from preschool, I feel relieved if I can work while he watches Nick Jr. instead of playing with him. That's not really ideal.

This is just a taste of what "real" working-outside-the-home or from-home moms experience. My hat is off to you. Because this whole juggling act is super hard, and my brain hurts from the thinking. I sure do sleep well at night, though!

Surprising myself

2011-04-14T06:37:00.000-07:00

When Firstborn was a baby, I literally would stress myself to tears thinking about sending him to Kindergarten. I could not imagine ever being okay with leaving him somewhere, out of my sight, in the care of others, for a whole school day. It seemed completely out of my capabilities. I literally started to cry thinking about the panic and the anxiety of not knowing what he was doing all day long.

This week, I applied to send him to sleepaway camp this summer, several states away.

Now, I haven't entirely revolutionized. I plan to drive him to camp, to drop him off and pick him up myself, and to stay relatively nearby while he is there (it helps that we have family close). I declined to send him for the two weeks he wanted and stood firm that one week is plenty for his first time away. He will be nine years old when he goes, and that in and of itself has me both gasping in disbelief and wiping away tears. NINE YEARS OLD. The baby that made me a mother is almost nine whole years old.

In these nine years, I have obviously changed and evolved so much as a mother (and, of course, as a person in general). My increasing ability to let go is probably the quality that surprises me and makes me the most proud, because there were times there at the beginning that I feared I would never get to this point.I feared more than anything the searing pain of figuring out how to let him grow up.

I never had the chance to go away to summer camp, and it is something I always wanted to do. A few people mentioned that others were sending their children this year, some with horror and some with awe, and I started to think about it. I brought up the subject to Firstborn, thinking maybe next year would be a good time to try it. "What would I do there?" he asked. I listed the activities from the camp websites: archery, canoeing, swimming, pottery, art, hiking, climbing... "I want to go this summer," he stated with no hesitation whatsoever. And thus, I had to readjust and recalibrate and start researching camps.

I watched the camp video this morning. It made me cry. This time, the tears are not at the thought of having to leave my child with someone else; instead, they are because my child has the chance to take such an adventure and explore the world by himself for a time. I am going to miss him, but in some ways, I miss him all the time -- his little baby toes, his sleepy baby head, his stubborn toddler face, his little boy body. I bought him deodorant, much to his indignation, last week. This letting go, it doesn't just mean summer camp. I'm proud of both of us for getting this far, I am excited about what's to come, but it doesn't mean it doesn't still make me cry. A little.

Sending you elsewhere...

2011-03-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

while my family and I recover from the dreaded Stomach Bug from You Know Where.

Heather Spohr is posting about this year's March of Dimes walk and how you can join Team Maddie. The March of Dimes is a cause close to all our hearts because it is about babies, but Maddie was a very special baby and Heather is a very special mommy. To march for Maddie or support Team Maddie, click over to The Spohrs are Multiplying and sign up.

My heart dropped to my stomach when I clicked on Amalah and saw that Amy's father passed away a few days ago after a very brave fight with cancer. Amy's pregnant with her third boy and she is sort of a rock star. Her sense of humor and her writing are enviable. This is an unimaginable loss and way too early. You might want to show her some love.

Finally, I know it might shock you, but I do love me some non-mommy and family blog action as well. I met a blogger who calls herself The Zadge at BlogHer last year, and let me tell you something: she's awesome. She's not a mommy to humans, but she is a mommy to some furry people, and she is freaking hilarious. She has become one of my favorite people to read, so check her out at Blue Skies and Yellow Dogs. Also? I LOVE her decorating and home renovating skillz.

Hope to be back in fine form soon... the carpet cleaner is on his way!

Facebook friends I no longer relate to, part deux:

2011-03-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

The one who lost her college baby weight, not that she was ever in any way even remotely pudgy, and now looks like a skinny Barbie doll, who spent the past few weeks posting status updates from the Paris fashion shows and reviewing the clothes of designers including Gaultier and Chanel.

Um, I could give a kick-ass review of Old Navy yoga pants and the current selections of the Merona line at Target. Look for my updates from there. And yes, it was a sobering day when I realized that in the Target world, I am quite decidedly not a Mossimo or a Converse One customer. Merona is my section. It was more defining and shocking than the day my OB gave me a scrip for a mammogram. Welcome to "maturity," Mama.

Man and the Moon

2011-03-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Tonight we piled into the car, the older boys and I, and C. gasped at the sight of the moon. "The moon! It's huge and it's gold!"

It was a gold moon, at least at dusk. As the night wore on, it became big and bright, the super moon that people have whispered about for weeks. As we drove home, we looked at the moon.

***

Last week, I chaperoned a field trip to Kennedy Space Center for Firstborn's third grade class. We don't live very close to the center, so it was a big field trip requiring about nine hours of time including travel and about a zillion components to the child care arrangements I had to make for the other two children and the puppy, but it was worth it. I hadn't been to the center since I don't even know when -- probably since my very early 20s -- and Firstborn had never been.

I walked Firstborn and his friend around the exhibits, and I enjoyed how much the two of them really appreciated the magnitude of what we were seeing. We walked into the Space Shuttle Explorer, and touched the walls with the kind of halting, hesitant touch one usually uses in holy spaces. They giggled and squealed in the simulator that made us all feel like we were actually blasting off in a shuttle (including incredible gravity effects that made us lose our breath). They stood in awe of the giant Apollo rocket that hung above our heads while we ate overpriced hamburgers at one of the cafes.

After taking a bus out to the launch pad area, our eyes glued to the peaks of the rocket boosters of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, already on its launch pad, we piled into a screening room to watch an introduction to the Apollo program exhibits. The theme of the screening was 1968, and my two little charges' minds were blown by the examples of how much has changed since then -- the price of gas, the price of movie tickets, the price of a Whopper.

Towards the beginning of the short movie about the Apollo program was a clip of JFK, talking about why Americans were trying to go to the moon. The Soviet Union had beaten us to space, after all. But now, even though our first attempt was not successful, we were determined not only to go to space, but to the moon. It was the stuff of fairy tales and The Twilight Zone, I imagine.

President Kennedy was speaking to a football stadium full of people at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It was September 12, 1962.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The words struck me, and I hoped that Firstborn was listening to them the same way I was. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that's what we do. We choose to do the hard things. We choose to go to the moon.

You can tell me that our country is a hot mess. You can say that politics are polarized beyond functionality, and they are. You can bemoan the youth of today, the broken education system, the pathetic and ridiculous state of health care. We have so many problems. And today, with so many American service men and women still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq, and still in Japan under threat of radiation, we bombed Libya.

I look at my child, and I see hope. Because when I told him the space program is ending, and when he heard the tour bus driver remark that although a summer launch is planned, there is no funding for it, he blanched. Of course we can't end the space program, he protested. We can't. Why would we do that?

Money, I told him. We cannot afford it. It is an answer he, like so many children in our country, has come to understand and know well these past few years.

But we can't, he said firmly. We have to keep going to the moon. Of course, he is right. We have to go to the moon.

If we have to go to the moon, I have to believe that we will figure out a way to make the rest of things things right. We have to do better, because we -- under the hairshirts of so many issues, so many problems, so many hurdles of late -- we are still that country that said, we are going to go to the moon because it is hard. And we did.

We have it in us. Right now it is dark. Japan is under an ominous, huge dark cloud of despair. The Middle East is a field of land mines. Our country -- a country full of people that I believe, at heart, are still dreamers and doers -- is a mess. But over us all tonight shines a crazy bright moon, beckoning us to remember how small we are, how big the universe, and how very essential it is that we remember we are all in this together. We owe it to our children to remember.

Walking on broken glass

2011-03-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

Today was not a great day. We stayed home all day, and instead of decompressing and enjoying the staying-homeness of it all after a very busy Saturday, my kids fought and destroyed things all day long. Husband was at work, and after struggling to do some housecleaning amidst the house-uncleaning efforts of my children, I decided to lie down and rest for a bit. It is Sunday, after all, I reasoned. I'm SUPPOSED to rest on Sundays.

No sooner had I been lying down for all of ten minutes, but I heard my older two children fighting, screaming, chasing one another down the stairs. And then it came. Glass shattering.

After my middle son's accident this fall, when he went arm-fist through my kitchen window, I take shattering glass seriously. Luckily, this time it was a glass IKEA vase and I managed to get in there before he or the three-year-old could walk on any of it. But let's just say that by 5 PM tonight, my nerves were completely shot.

This was compounded by a nagging heartache I have had for several days now. On Friday, C. went to my friend's house for a playdate. That night, she was over for dinner en masse with all of our children when she told me, laughing, about something C. had said at her house. Somehow, the subject of marriage came up, and C. told her very matter-of-factly that he would not be getting married when he grows up. "Why?" she asked. "Don't you want to have children?"

"Noooo," C. answered firmly. "Children are too much work, and my mom is mad a lot. I just want a job and a dog."

My friend thought C. was clever and funny. I laughed along with her, but inside I died a little. C. is just turning seven this month, and apparently I have already ruined him. I'm mad a lot? That's all he can see?

I am mad a lot. The five men I live with, big, small, and furry, are very frustrating. They break things. They fight. They complain. They don't clean up after themselves. Children are a lot of work (at least he recognizes that part). But once again, I had it hammered into me that somehow, I am not making this work. My kids are not supposed to feel like they are my work, that I am mad a lot and it is because of them.

I'm feeling really beaten down and defeated right now. I want to be positive and creative with my kids. I sit on Firstborn's bed at night and talk to him, and I am kind of amazed at what a cool kid he is. He's so articulate and so perceptive and I feel like I don't want to jinx it but look! He is kind of turning out well after all! And then we have a day like today, and I am trying to go to bed and yet dwelling on the times I yelled today, how I am damaging their psyches, how frustrated I am that my kids argue and fight and berate and bicker over toys. On days like this, I want a do-over. On all of it.

My children are not the only thing in my life, and being a mother is not my only basis of my identity, but my honest truth is that, as Jackie Onassis said, if I mess up this whole parenting thing, nothing else much matters to me. And I am being honest when I say I truly worry that I am, in fact, screwing it all up royally.

[ I feel really guilty that so many of my posts are angsty. I try to write when I am feeling good and positive, too, but more often I feel all writealicious when I am emotional. So just know I am not phishing for "You're a great mom!" reassurance or always throwing quite as much of a pity party as it may seem, but this is my outlet and here I get it all out. Flipside to today's post:this morning we finally put Just Dance in the Wii and Firstborn and I danced to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and "Eye of the Tiger" together and we have not laughed that hard in a long time. So it's not all bad, it isn't. It's just that what weighs on my mind are the heartaches more often than the hilarities. Bear with me.]

Minutiae

2011-03-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

Dirty dishes -- including a milk glass -- on the kitchen countertop.

A pile of candy wrappers on a bedroom floor.

A mound of wet bedding to wash -- AGAIN -- just like yesterday. Despite pull-ups.

Said wet pull-ups still in pajama bottoms on the bedroom carpet.

Traces of poop on the bathroom floor, and I haven't even looked to see what the toilet bowl holds for me yet.

A wet, wadded-up hand towel in the same bathroom. On the floor. In the corner.

Clothes on the floor -- in the MASTER bedroom -- that are not mine.

It's not the big stuff, not the over-arcing traumas or the nagging issues of marriage and parenthood and stay-at-home-momhood that bring me down. It's the minutiae. The constant, never-changing, daily, they-never-learn-or-change-minutiae. When they cart me off to the asylum, tell them that's what did it. And put me in a clean, white, padded room free of anyone else's body fluids PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY.

Passion

2011-03-03T11:23:00.000-08:00

I have made it pretty clear in the past that of all the sports and activities my children have tried or engaged in, baseball? Not number one on my list.

Truth be told, I just have a really hard time getting super worked up about children's sports, and baseball parents -- in general -- tend to be a little hardcore. At least, the baseball parents in my neck of the woods. I am sure part of it is that my kids are not, so far, athletic prodigies. And, you know, neither was I. Husband was an athlete, but he didn't get serious about his sport until middle school. So, at this point, I see athletics as great for conditioning and burning off ya-yas, but I'm not counting on college scholarships here. Secretly, I might be hoping we can snatch a scholarship for chess or violin. That would thrill my nerdy heart.

Firstborn is playing his third season of baseball now. After our disastrous first season when he was five, I tried to distract him with any host of other activities, but we came back to baseball last spring and had a better season. This year, he's playing in the same pretty crazy-intense league, but he's in the B league for his age group and he's one of the oldest in his division, so he's finally kind of a big man on campus. Keeping in mind that he is turning nine this summer and he's tall for his age, picture that one of his teammates is five years old, in Kindergarten, and is the same size as my three-year-old. Firstborn is finally the supahstar he has always believed he is.

The thing is, Firstborn is not naturally talented in baseball. He looks like a foal out there in the field -- all legs and knees and limbs akimbo. He has a decently strong arm, but his accuracy is sketchy, in part because those legs never set -- they just wobble. Sometimes he hits really well; other games, he can't hit the nose on his face. He doesn't always make the best decision about what to do with a ball he has successfully fielded. But baseball is the first and only thing we have ever found that Firstborn will work on, happily, whenever he is asked. He never flinches about practices or games, and heaven knows there are plenty of both. He is always up for a game of catch or a trip to a batting cage.

He loves baseball.

And so here we are, knee deep in practices and games and oh my God, how does one successfully wash white baseball pants? HOW? We spend hours at the elementary school field, the littler ones running around messing with the school garden (oops) and picking weeds, my seasonal allergies having a field day -- literally -- with my sinuses. We sit in the metal bleachers for hours at games, eating hamburgers grilled at the ballpark for dinner followed by Ring Pop chasers, chasing after wayward three-year-olds, hoping that we will get home before 8:00 PM.

I want to support Firstborn's dream. It's killing me, for several reasons, among them bedtimes and siblings who like to run right where foul balls might whack them dead. But after years of trying to skirt it, I am finally realizing that until he tells us otherwise, this is his dream. It makes him happy. Better get used to it. The look on his face when he brought me the game ball from the first game this season -- his name etched into it with the date -- sealed my fate. It's not what I would choose, but the past almost nine years have given me something of an education on not getting my way. I'm starting to mature myself and let my kids be the people they are, both when it thrills me (Firstborn made trading cards for the Greek gods this week! Swoon!) and when it doesn't (two games and a practice in the span of five days).

Now, the almost-seven-year-old is saying he wants to try baseball. Over my dead body. Well, maybe.

Beaches

2011-02-23T17:25:00.000-08:00

Confession: When I was in high school, I went to see the movie Beaches in the movie theater around fourteen times. True story. Can we still be friends? Wait, where are you all going?

I saw Beaches on some channel -- probably Lifetime -- some Sunday morning recently, and while I still loved it out of pure nostalgia, I have to admit it doesn't quite justify fourteen theater viewings.

But when I was fourteen and couldn't even drive myself to the theater, that movie provided the perfect cathartic release: it featured my beloved California, it focused on female friendship, it gave me a darkened room in which to cry and process a whole bunch of hormones and emotions. It filled a need.

This past weekend filled another need. One of my very best friends from college, one of my touchstones, came to visit me. She wasn't here on business and she wasn't here to go to a theme park. She just came to see me.

I met her the first day of my freshman year. She was a big, know-it-all sophomore on my hallway. I thought her very glamorous with her long legs and her boyfriend. Soon, we were fast friends. I was a sheltered, naive, clueless kid from the suburbs, and she was my wise and profound friend from the Bronx. She taught me a lot about music and a lot about beer. I am forever indebted.

Flash through a montage of smoky, beer-soaked parties, skipping classes lying out on beach towels on green lawns, a birthday dinner at Tavern on the Green, sultry summers in the humid city, late nights in taprooms dancing to Van Morrison. And then it -- college, the golden hour -- it was over. She moved on to law school, I graduated and moved on to New York. We moved on to our own romances and marriages, our own trials and hours of desperation and sadness. And since college, we have only briefly even lived in the same time zone. But there was always us, good or bad, frustrated or elated, weary or thrilled. Us.

And now she is godmother to my Firstborn, the perfect audience for his best baseball game ever. She cheered for him when he won his first game ball this past weekend. Better yet, she and I were able to spend one lovely, languid night together at the beach. Awash in a sea of Nascar fans, we drank 20-ounce Yuenglings and talked about marriage and life and how far we have come and how much and how little some things change. We walked for two hours on a sunny beach, earning taut sunburns for the effort, and we passed out on the couch. We've been going to beaches together for almost twenty years now, I realize.

Hooray for friends who really are like sisters, for beaches that remind us of who we were at 18 and 19 and the dreams we still have room for even as we turn 37 and 38. Hooray for weekends -- even moments -- that give us respite from the grind of our daily lives, so vastly different in their details. How lucky I am, and how lucky my children are, that I have her in my life.

Therapy

2011-02-15T09:38:00.000-08:00

I have been in therapy for the past month or so.

I have been in therapy before. When I lived in L.A., it was common to know people who had more than one therapist. To just see one was, duh, a no-brainer -- especially in the entertainment community. I also started a Master's program in clinical psychology when I lived in L.A., and part of being in school to become a psychologist is being in therapy yourself.

Ironically, though, it was my mother-in-law -- to whom we haven't spoken in almost four years -- who pushed me into therapy when she demanded that Husband and I attend premarital counseling. I don't remember what she held over our heads, but we did it to appease her. Eventually, I just kept seeing that therapist on my own. Hey, even evil mothers-in-law are good for something.

In any case, therapy is not so common in my current suburban landscape. People do go, but it's much more on the down low. A lot of the therapists in my area are based in religion, too. It can make finding a good match for me difficult. But I decided to brave the sparse tundra to find an outlet and, I hoped, some better coping mechanisms. I found myself dwelling on Stuff that I couldn't actually blog about for reasons of privacy, and I didn't know what else to do.

One of the little truths that came out during my sessions recently was a recurring feeling that my kids and I don't have a lot of completely positive or bonding experiences during our weeks together. There is a lot of discipline on my part, a lot of time management, a lot of "yes, you have to." As I have written before, I feel like I am always the bad guy, and furthermore, that I don't even really speak the language of the other denizens of my household. I feel like an outsider.

The therapist stopped and paused and asked, "Is there anything you do with your kids that you feel is just positive and bonding?" He noted that I don't play video games with them like Husband does. No, I don't play video games. I have a complicated relationship with them, for one thing, and I have a hard time sitting still in my house because I feel like there is Always Something to Be Done, for another. He nodded, and waited for me to come up with something, anything.

"I volunteer in their classrooms," I offered. "That is the one time when I feel like they truly are excited to see me and are happy about what I am doing."

There has been a lot of brouhaha about volunteering moms lately. Moms are experiencing volunteer burnout, there is push back on how much help schools expect or rely on from parents, and some parents are even upset that other mothers are given so much access to their children's educational experiences. I understand points from all those points of view. But the truth for me is that my children's eyes light up when I walk into their classrooms. Even Firstborn makes a point of hugging me when I am there. They are proud of me. And unfortunately, that's not a feeling I get to have every day.

I am working on other ways to bond with the kids. In the summer, I get to take them to water parks, and that is fun for all of us. Someday, I hope we can afford another family vacation -- our last true attempt was when Firstborn was four, four years ago. I'm working up the motivation to pull out Just Dance and make them play with me on the Wii.

One of my biggest goals in the coming year is to find ways to be me with my children -- not as their boss or their manager, but as their mom. My goal isn't really for them, either -- it's for me.

Tiger Mothers

2011-02-03T06:15:00.000-08:00

In the past month, Amy Chua became a national pariah and a publicity agent's dream. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, debuted at the same time her article, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

A friend pointed me to the article first, and then the firestorm erupted. Amy Chua and her "Tiger Mothers" were everywhere -- in Time and Newsweek, on the Today show, featured in every blog, all over Facebook. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and a mother of two teenage daughters, became both a bad word and an entry in the American pop culture dictionary overnight.

Not very many of the writers talking about Amy Chua actually read her book. Most everything you read about her is the result of the provocative WSJ article. I haven't read her book either, in full disclosure. But I did listen to an enlightening interview with her on NPR's "Diane Rehm Show."

In the NPR interview, Chua elaborated on her article. At times she seemed to be back-pedaling something fierce, but she in no way seemed like the voice of the WSJ piece. She explained that the book was an arc, a journey in parenting, and that the article represented a sometimes slightly tongue-in-cheek view of how she viewed parenting at the beginning of her journey.

In fact, on the very cover of the book, the title reads: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and then in smaller (much smaller, not backed by red ink) print,

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs.

It was supposed to be a story about how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old girl.

Huh.

Well, that's not quite as provocative, huh? Right there on the cover of the book. That makes her sound jut like... hmmm... every other mother ever who had a definite, clear view of how she wanted to parent and what was right and what would work and then was humbled by the little person she gave birth to?

After the interview, I was very motivated to read Chua's book, not because I wanted to learn how to be a pushy parent and not because I want to unlearn pushy parenting, but because I thought the stories about her immigrant parents, who raised her and her siblings with nothing, was way more interesting than Amy Chua's story. I was especially interested in the story about her mother raising her sister with Down Syndrome and how it led her mother to learn about more "Western" ways of parenting. So much more interesting than hearing about Chua berating her daughter during violin practices.

In any case, I did read the titillating WSJ article that started the national campaign to squash Amy Chua. And even in that article, I agreed with her on a few points. It surprised me, believe me. But I did.

I agree with Chua that children do not like to do things at which they feel unsuccessful. Any time someone tells me that her elementary school age child dislikes school, I wonder what cog is out of place. In my experience, children like school until they feel unsuccessful at school, and for the average kid, that comes in middle school.

In my own children, I have watched them struggle with tasks that are awkward for them. Firstborn, with all his mild hypotonic floppiness, finds it challenging to play the violin. It's especially tough for him to hold his wrist straight and keep his posture correct. It feels unsuccessful, even though his teacher assures me that he "gets" the violin and could be a good player if he would practice more and stick with it.

It's been the same with handwriting for both boys, with swimming strokes and practices, even with reading at times. Kids like to be good at things. As an adult, I can be content -- even excited -- about things at which I do not excel: Karaoke. Baking. Swimming. Running. Decorating. But as a child, I liked to do what brought me praise and recognition and a feeling of competency.

I also agree with Chua that most people, given enough practice, can master tasks and skills. I have had to teach myself this as an adult. My "Western" parents didn't push me as a child, so I had exactly four months of piano lessons, no sports, and no domestic skills when I went off to college. I bake a lot now, but I don't think I am especially good at it. I am hoping to be good at it after I practice. A lot. I plug away at the gym, learning how to run better and more efficiently. But it often takes a trainer barking at me to get me to finish a run.

And so, I find myself becoming a pussycat version, perhaps, of a "Tiger Mother." My children balk at swim team practices because they involve a transition, a change of clothes, and sixty measly minutes of swimming drills, but boring drills, back and forth and back and forth across the pool. Well, I don't care if they balk. Swimming is non-negotiable. For Firstborn, it builds core strength in his floppy body and helps him do everything from sit upright in his chairs to holding his pencils at school. For C., my tall but more than solid six-year-old, it provides the only form of exercise he tolerates for any length of time. There's no berating, but there is tenacity. Despite screaming, despite swimsuits being thrown back at me, despite complaints, we swim. We don't only swim, mind you -- Firstborn loves baseball, so he is playing that as well -- but we do swim, two to three times a week.

Violin, too, has become non-negotiable. Firstborn would rather learn the guitar, and several of my friends have let their kids start guitar lessons this year. Firstborn has a year and a half invested in violin, though, and I am determined for him to stick it out longer and learn it fully before he moves on to a more popular instrument. Anyone who knows how to play a violin can learn to play a guitar. So, despite complaints, despite the groaning, despite the declarations that I am officially the meanest mother in America, Firstborn goes to a violin lesson for thirty minutes every week. Someday, he can learn the guitar. For now, he will learn the violin.

I don't care to be the Tiger Mother depicted in Chua's article. My children do sleepovers and playdates and plenty of fun and distracting things. They might never be the best at anything and that would be fine with me because they are already the best kids ever (in my biased view). But I want them to have a range of experiences, and I want to feel that I gave them the best chance at having some skills that might move through life with them. Swimming and playing an instrument are both skills that can last a lifetime. Because they are children, they might fight back against the transitions and the boring parts of practicing and the daily grind some of these skills require, but that's why they have me.

So I want to thank Amy Chua for making these points of my own parenting clear in my head. I receive so many messages that I am harming my children by overscheduling them or demanding too much of them, but the truth is that when my children come out of the pool at swim practice, they are radiant. They are happy and engaged and feeling good. When Firstborn comes out of his violin lesson, he feels more competent than when he went in. They don't always want to get in the car or stop watching the TV show after school, but when they do, they get a lot out of it.

[This post brought to you by a dog crate and a three-year-old bribed by yogurt tubes and an insect net.]

Miss me yet?

2011-01-29T08:58:00.000-08:00

Hey, party people.

I know, that was a long break!

I have been taking it one day at a time since Christmas. Every member of my family has been sick. Every kid has been on antibiotics at least once. Did I mention we brought a puppy home? An expensive, designer dog kind of puppy that I splurged on in the hopes that I wouldn't have an allergic reaction to him? Yeah, well. Allergies abound here at my house anyway. So much for the splurge. Also: who knew that raising puppies was so much like raising children?

Seriously, it has been crazy-cakes time as usual, but even more than that, I just needed some silence. I needed to stop talking for a moment and catch my breath. So I have been reading comments when they come to my inbox (and you guys are awesome, commenting when I am not even posting!), but other than that, it's been quiet. I have not been reading my Google Reader, and chances are I haven't been reading your blogs if you have one. I hope everyone understands that sometimes it's nice to have fewer voices inside a head. Just for a moment.

But I am hoping to be back now. Ooh, I have so much to say now that I have given myself some time to think. Lots of thoughts to share and very excited to "hear" you guys again! I hope you all had a lovely January with less trips to the doctor than we did. I am excited to officially start 2011 now.

I have a pile of laundry threatening to eat me whole at the moment, but I'll be back to ponder Amy Chua (The Tiger Mother), of whom I am something of a supporter (shocking! scandalous!), as soon as I tame the beast.

Just like Charlie Sheen,

2011-01-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

... rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I am here, I am just sick. as. a. dog. And speaking of dogs, we own one now. And he is much on the level of having another three-year-old!

I'll be back when I can have a coherent thought, but I am wishing everyone a wonderful 2011 with great things big and small. Thank you for being part of my life.

Re-post: Hard to Love

2010-12-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

It's the week of Christmas, we are picking up our new puppy tonight, and I am struggling. I will write more when I can properly sit down (What is the point of school half days? WHAT IS THE POINT? I ask you!), but until then, this is how I feel this week: lonely and hard to love. I am desperately trying to make Christmas work for me, work for all of us, but right now, I'm feeling more Grinch and less Cindy Lou Who. I hope you all are faring better. Here's a re-post from earlier this fall that encapsulates me right now:

It's also me that tells the children they have to stop playing the Wii to get ready for (fill in the blank) school, for dinner, for swim practice, for bed. It's me that tells them that no, we made a commitment to the (fill in the blank) swim team, the violin teacher, the chess coach, and we need to show up for practice. It's me that signs off on homework, that tells Firstborn to re-write the words he wrote incorrectly, that sends them back to brush their teeth again because the first time they literally only did it for two seconds. It is me that cleans up the potty training messes and insists on a new pair of underwear. No wonder they hate me. No one wants to be this person, the Fun Sponge.

And yes, I know they don't really hate me. But why shouldn't they? Some days, I just want to say, I give up. Do what you want to do. When I was 27 years old and wanted to be a mother, I had no idea what I was committing to. My biggest issues were what to make myself for lunch and if I could fit into my skinny jeans. Now, it feels like my life is just filled to the brim with chores -- mine or others' that I must make them do. I don't want to be a taskmaster, but I am not really sure how to do this without being one.

I have this nagging feeling that I am doing this thing all wrong. That if I was more (fill in the blank) zen, more patient, more laid back, more something, this would be going a lot better. My kids would want to hang out with me more. My kids would be happier. My husband would want to hang out with me more. My husband would be happier. The truth is, I do my very best never to look in a mirror these days because I have no idea who I am anymore and I am afraid I will see it. I've built up all these defenses and walls and tried to zone out because I am just trying to get through this marathon -- no, this IRONMAN -- and I am not parenting with purpose or strategy anymore and I am not being a good participant in my marriage. The cracks are beginning to show.

If I was my kid or my spouse, I am not sure I would love me. I'm not sure who is left to love.

This was always going to be a rough week, and I am trying to remember that and focus forward, knowing that in a month, this will just be how it always was. I hope. I am not one to wallow, and we can't stand still on this treadmill anyway. It will get better. But I would be lying if I didn't say that in this moment, this is all really a lot and I have no idea where I am going with all of it. I am wondering if other women feel the same uncertainty, the same self doubt, the same wonder at how we got here?

Following up on "When opinionated old men attack":

2010-12-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Hello from the bottom of a mound of flour, sugar, and ground ginger! I am elbow-deep in Christmas cookies and wrapping paper, thrown off track by a croupy three-year-old and a six-year-old with a case of the crazies (I am assuming -- hoping, even -- that his new, screamy, defiant disposition is a result of a lack of adequate exercise due to stitches recovery. Stay tuned.).

I wanted to thank everyone for the comments on my last post. I was a little hesitant to post it because of the religious stuff, for lack of a better word.

I agree with several of you that this incident was not so much about religion as about a pushy, well-intentioned, buttinski type of man. In many ways, he was no different than the woman at the grocery store check-out handing out Mommy Drive-Bys (rude, unsolicited commentary on your parenting from someone who knows you not at all) to the frazzled mommies trying to grab the missing dinner ingredient with strung-out, witching-hour-crazed children in tow. Like most other unsolicited advice, this man's was unwelcome and irrelevant.

But I do believe that what transpired at the violin lesson wasn't completely NOT about religion, either. It just wasn't about any of our religions or our definitions of our religions. It had to do with how this man interprets the Bible and God and how he applies it to life and child-rearing. But I certainly don't equate it with other Christians or even other Baptists. Religions and religious people, as we all well know by now, come in every single shade and texture. His grated on me and you, it seems.

In the end, I wanted to let you know how I handled C.'s anxiety about the issue. I called for help. I have a friend who happens to be a child therapist. I talked to her, and I found her take interesting. She advised me to stop splitting hairs with C. on what words and intent the man actually had, because C. made it clear to me how HE heard it and how it landed on him. She suggested that, instead, I tell C., "That man was wrong to say what he did to you. He tried to threaten and scare you into behaving well, and that was not a good choice." She said to emphasize that like children, adults can make bad decisions too, and that his was a bad decision.

I didn't look at it that way, because I know that the man had good intentions. But my friend is right: he was basically using a threat to scare C. into submission, no matter what his intent. I don't want C. to equate God with threats. As a few of you pointed out, that's not the way we generally want children to relate to God or religion. So I focused on letting C. know that the man was the one in the wrong here, that he had gotten this wrong. He had not meant to scare him, but he did, and he chose poor words.

C. seemed to take this in and accept it. We haven't had more anxiety about death. And though my children have discussed death and seen animals die, I think that we all struggle with the concept and the actual thought of ourselves dying -- I even struggle with it at my age -- and I also believe C. had taken the man's words to imply an immediacy to death that scared him. He seems to have recovered.

In any case, there were good reminders and lessons here. I love Christmas and all the festivities leading up to it, but I also find this a delicate time of year. Christmas can be the popular girl that marginalizes the less festooned winter holidays of other religions. This gave me pause to remember how it feels to be bossed around or to have someone else's opinion shoved in my face or to have my children assaulted by someone else's "stuff." Hey, 'tis the season.

Check back in, because coming next week will be a new family member here in Crazytown: a puppy. You don't want to miss that. And if you go that way, you can start praying for me now.

When religion attacks

2010-12-09T06:18:00.000-08:00

The title is facetious, of course. I respect religion and the religious, but today... today it did me wrong.

My son takes violin lessons from the wife of a Baptist pastor. We trek to their home, which is also their church, once a week for lessons. She is a kind woman, and she is patient and tolerant and a good teacher. She also prays for us when we have our (many) ER visits, and I appreciate all the help I can get. But I have always been a little bit skittish about the fact that she is very, very religious and we are very, very not.

I have been afraid to be found out.

Today, I waited in the van with the other two for Firstborn to finish his lesson, and the pastor walked out into the yard. We exchanged niceties, but then he approached the van and started talking about how crazy the Christmas season is and how it has become nothing short of profane with its focus on Santa and toys and commercialism. Well enough. I agree with him.

The problem was, C. was not in a good mood. He was tired from school and, let's face it, he's not so good at the whole self control thing. So he interrupted us a few times, whining about wanting me to fix the video playing on the minivan DVD system. I tried my best to fix it while not being rude to the pastor.

I want to pause for a moment and say that yes, my kids struggle with their behavior. We have a lot of toys. I am working on it. Constantly. I am working on balancing what I require for my sanity sometimes (entertainment for the younger two while the older takes a violin lesson), what I give my children, and their behavior. I do realize that when I tell a story like this one, it has to include the Happy Hour half-price grape slushes from Sonic that has become our weekly ritual and treat, the movie playing in our car, and the fact that my child interrupts adults, and the result is not an idyllic picture. But I am working on it.

The pastor, however, tried to help me work on it. Unfortunately, he chose to address my son directly, without my consent, and he used language and resource material unfamiliar to him.

After explaining to me quickly that he believes that children misbehave because God is not involved in their discipline enough, he peered around me and said to C., "Young man, do you want to live a long time?"

C. froze in his seat, his lips pursed around his slushie straw. His eyes grew big and he tried to look away.

"Young man, I said do you want to live a long time? Do you want to live a long life?"

"Answer him," I urged, hoping to end this as soon as humanly possible.

C. turned his eyes toward the man and nodded his head slowly.

"God says that if you want to live a long life, you must obey your parents," the pastor said. He went on to quote two Bible verses to C., explaining he would live longer if he listened to us more. I watched C. the entire time, and I saw his eyes fill up with tears, but he held it together.

Nothing the man said was really out of line or outrageous. I hadn't asked for parenting help, but he was trying to do his best. He proceeded to tell me how much he loved children and hey, why don't we come to church sometimes? The kids love his hand puppet "Squeaker" and he talks justlikethis in a high voice and spreads the word of God to the kids and Oh, do they love that! I nodded and smiled and thanked him for the invitation and tried desperately to end the conversation because I knew what was happening just behind me in the backseat. But the pastor wasn't done. I then was able to hear the entire story of the day he was saved and how he had been an alcoholic from the age of four until he was 19 and his twin brother convinced him to go to church. It was a sad, and then happy, story, but I could feel the squirming in the backseat the entire time and I was terrified that C. might do something to earn another Bible verse from the pastor.

As soon as the pastor walked away, tossing over his shoulder one last time to me that see, all C. needs is some God in his discipline! I rolled up the window.

Immediately, C. burst into tears. Gasping, huffing, hot rolling tears. Tsunami tears. Wailing tears.

"I'm going to die?" He gasped to me, his eyes wet and red. "That man said I am going to die!"

Awesome.

"That's not what he said," I hedged. "He said that you would be safer if you listened to me more. What he meant was that you need to obey your parents. And you do." Just that morning, I had told the kids I quit and that Christmas was canceled, if that gives you any idea of how our day had been so far.

"But he said I am not going to live! He said God said so!" C. cried, "He said I am going to die because I didn't listen to you!"

"He never even used the word 'die,' C. That is not what he meant," I continued. But I really didn't know what to do or say. Hearing a man of authority use language and phrasing, complete with references to Bible verses and chapters, had not only confused C., but absolutely terrified him.

When we came home, C. locked himself in the bathroom. I could hear him crying and talking about dying and how he would miss Christmas. For the rest of the evening, no matter how much we tried to explain, C. had random outbursts of "I don't want to die."

And of course, it did nothing to make him listen to me more. Not even in the short term.

I wish I knew how to handle those situations better. Our children attended Christian preschools and an Episcopalian school until this year, so they have had some experience with religion and chapel services. But their religion teachers had never talked in such terms of living and dying and they had not employed God in discipline. The well-meaning pastor had interjected himself into my space and into my parenting without knowing us at all, and he unintentionally scared the wits out of my six-year-old. I am not sure how I could have avoided it, even now.

Nothing says"Happy Holidays!" and "Merry Christmas" like the chance to explain to your six-year-old that the pastor didn't mean you are going to die because you were rude to your mother. Now I get to figure out a way to explain to Firstborn's violin teacher why we won't be coming to that church dinner her husband invited us to -- because my children are scared of him.

Not for long, and not forever.

2010-12-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

I read this post at Ask Moxie recently and smiled wryly. Oh, have I been there. I have SO been there, lost in the haze of newborn and infant days, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into and daydreaming about running away from home, preferably to a sidewalk cafe in Europe.

I didn't comment on Moxie's post, because I was pretty sure mine was not the answer that mother needs to hear: it doesn't get easier, it just gets different. During each phase, just when you think you cannot bear anymore, it will change. Nothing is for all that long, and nothing is forever.

Though my days as a new mother were somewhat dark and hazy, mottled with extreme sleep deprivation and the unfettered frustration of colic, they almost seem sweet to me now. Because now that loud, screamy baby is so long and lanky that it is hard to snuggle with him. Now he doesn't always tell me when he wants to scream. Now the days are numbered when he wants to be seen in public with me. I don't have the stressors of his babyhood, but I also don't get to spend the majority of his day with him anymore. I miss him.

Today I picked up my baby today from his preschool and we drove to the big kids' school to pick them up. I carried him to the school gate, and he wrapped his little legs around me and threw his arms around my neck and laid his head on my shoulder and I thought, "not for much longer." Not forever. He's already 40 pounds now, and soon it will be hard for me to pick him up at all. It's beyond that point for me with my six-year-old C., who is close to 80 pounds now. My eight-year-old is lighter but just too gangly. So B. is my only child I can carry now, and not for much longer. Not forever.

It's almost cruel to have stepping stone sons that remind me daily of what comes next. Firstborn doesn't need a lot of tucking in anymore, and he reads himself his bedtime stories. He runs off to sleepovers with nary a backwards glance. He'll hold my hand sometimes, but not at school. And not, I am sure, for much longer. Not forever.

Soon C. will follow his lead, and finally my Baby B. So, while I can, I will carry B., and hug him closely, and cherish every moment of that little head on my shoulder, of that little body that crawls under the covers next to me in the early dawn hours and burrows into my armpit, of those little feet in footed pajamas.

Today, as I was trying to compile our annual photo calendar for grandparent gifts, I found a picture of B. from not even that long ago. He was in his baby stance, standing in a diaper, sucking his middle two fingers. I realized that I didn't even notice when he stopped sucking on those fingers -- a habit he had since infancy. It was one of my favorite things, the way he sucked those fingers. I didn't even notice when it went away.

I wanted to tell that mother, Not for long, and not forever. But she'll find out soon enough.

Thanksgiving: Fail

2010-11-30T07:50:00.000-08:00

I did not have a happy Thanksgiving. It's making me feel like a total heel. While everyone else gets into the Holiday Spirit and decks their halls and still happily waxes about gratitude, I am sort of bah humbugging through my days and fixating on the fact that last weekend pretty much sucked.

I am writing about it not to garner sympathy, because as I am well aware, I am inordinately blessed. I am not fishing for pity or flattery or, most of all, criticism, thanks much. I am writing to process, because I want to do better. You know, preferably at this next small holiday coming up in just about 26 days.

Holidays are hard for everyone in some way, and I am no different. My family and I have a love/hate thing going on, wherein I love them but, you know, they drive me completely insane in a way only someone's family can and they push every button on my personal emotional keyboard with alarming dexterity and expertise. Starting out the holiday, I am already at DEFCON 3 knowing that it is going to involve all the interaction with the different personalities in my family members and their particular ways of rubbing against the grain of my own.

I love to bake, I am not so hot on cooking. But I have learned a lot in the past few years (thank you, Pioneer Woman!) out of necessity, because my grandmother -- who used to do every single bit of our holiday cooking -- is finally too old to continue, and my mother does not cook. Like, at all. Not exaggerating here. At. All. A lot of Domino's and Taco Bell in my childhood, people.

So Husband and I cook or bake the majority of all holiday meals now, sometimes supplemented by my sister-in-law. Thursday was a work day for us, then, as we scurried around the kitchen mixing, baking, sauteing, folding, kneading. As we worked, our children, no doubt ramped up on holiday hormones and cousin excitement, trashed our house and broke out into frequent, loud, screaming, wrestling, I'm-going-to-kill-you fights. This led to me and Husband fighting over who needed to abandon his food to go Deal With the Children. One child, you know, still had stitches holding his arm together. Another is still growing back his fingernails. We couldn't afford a Thanksgiving Day trip to the ER.

By the time we were heading to my mother's house that afternoon, I was completely broken. I had screamed, threatened, ruined a batch of Parker House rolls, thought many mean thoughts about my brother and his lack of help watching my children while he decidedly did NOT cook, and tried on thirty different items of clothing in my bathroom mirror, cursing my fat cheeks and the way everything I own does not fit right AT ALL.

I let Firstborn out of the car and he ran into my mother's house. I sat in the car and cried, my forehead on my steering wheel, for twenty minutes before heading into the house. I struggled not to convey my mood to the entire family, but I don't think I was very successful. I felt detached, as if I was slipping into a dark hole and watching my family from below, the entire day.

I need to figure out a way to make holidays work. Whether it is lack of strategic planning, time management, patience, tolerance, or acknowledgment of my own limitations, this is just simply not working for me, or anyone else in my family. I didn't enjoy my dinner, I didn't gaze lovingly at my children, I didn't enjoy my extended family. The simple truth is that there are no do-overs for this time. As stressful as holidays can be, my parents will not be in this age at which they are young enough to enjoy us and old enough to appreciate us for much longer. My children will not be young and excited forever. And Husband and I are watching our thirties slip through our fingers like so much sand.

I need to find the sweet spot -- the place where holidays are special and substantial, but not so much work and chaos that they leave me feeling like a blob of nerves.

For Christmas, I'm thinking pizza. Pizza and black yoga pants. At my own home. On paper plates.

Thankful

2010-11-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I am thankful for this blog, the people who read it and share in my days, the people I write about near and far, and all my blessings big and small. This time last year, I had no idea I would find a new home, place my children in new schools, or embark on new adventures in 2010. It truly is amazing the difference a year can make.

With Thanksgiving upon us and a dinner to cook, I am not certain I'll get to sit down again until the weekend. I am wishing you and yours a fabulous holiday and many full tummies.

This is the reason why.

2010-11-17T19:42:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a commenter -- Alexicographer -- noted:

Pushing back to the "why" question you raised, a breakfast for ten crossing guards and bus drivers and a luncheon for 80 school staff members and faculty: are you kidding me (obviously you are not)? I haven't read enough of your blog to know whether your kids are in public or private school but goodness gracious great balls of fire! No offense to the guards, drivers, or staff members, who I'm sure very much deserve it, but that is nuts. Your kids' school decided to do this ... why? You decided to do this ... why?

Why indeed. Even my local friends have questioned my commitment to volunteering in my children's school. Why don't I take advantage of my child-free time? they ask. How could I give up going to the gym or spending time alone or with my friends to check out books with the first graders or spend time working on reading with the third graders? Don't I have enough to do, and couldn't I even use that time to maybe work on my house? Work on myself? Work?

They're not wrong, of course. I do spend a good bit of my time when all three of my children are in school volunteering. I did when my children were in private school, and I do now. In part, I am enjoying the opportunity to get to know the faculty and staff at the school and my children's new classmates and friends. I am also truly enjoying working with children -- I enjoy being in the educational setting and I miss my work with kids. I'm good at school (so much better than I am at housework!), and I like it there. But yes, it is a lot.

I am on the PTA Board this year, and my position is to co-chair American Education Week. The premise of AEW is to celebrate the country's public schools and the people who make them great. Yes, American public schools are struggling. Yes, they are very, very flawed. Oh yes, I would change so very much about them if I could. But there is no denying that there are also very special people working in our schools.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone would still grow up dreaming to be a teacher. The pay is crappy, the working environment stressful, the students unsupported at home in many instances. It's freaking depressing. But even mired in all this bad, there is still good. No, there is still great. I have been so heartened this year to see that my children's teachers are excited about what they do. They know these kids. They work very hard. In a broken school system, they are making it work.

Tonight I baked my beloved Pioneer Woman's pumpkin gingersnap caramel cheesecake for the luncheon tomorrow. While it was in the oven, I sorted out the slips of paper we gave the children at the beginning of the week. On the slips, there are blanks for the children to write a faculty or staff member's name and then, below, tell why the student thinks that person makes our school special.

There were many, many, "You teached me everything I know," statements, sure to incite some chuckles and probably more than a few groans. There were many, many "You are nies," statements. But two of the slips stood out to me, even though I didn't have time to read all of the hundreds of slips as I sorted them into piles to wrap in ribbon and present to the teachers and staff at tomorrow's luncheon:

"You put up with me even though I am a handful," scrawled one first grader. He's a first grader I happen to know, and he is a handful. But somehow the self awareness and the acknowledgement, written in his small, block-print handwriting, felt so vulnerable it nearly made me cry.

"You didn't give up on me," wrote a fourth grader to his third grade teacher on another slip.

And that, my friends, is the reason why: the reason why I spend my child-free time helping my children's teachers accomplish all they need to in their classrooms, the reason why I am spending my nights organizing a luncheon for the entire faculty and staff, the reason why I baked a cheesecake tonight despite being thoroughly exhausted from a week of injuries and sleep deprivation. I'm so, so grateful that my children have teachers they love. Apparently, I'm not alone, as I have had emails and phone calls all week from parents asking to contribute as well. I'm lucky enough not to be waiting for Superman and I am lucky enough to be able to volunteer my time. This is the kind of work that keeps me sane, not the other way around.

Next year, though, my co-chair and I will likely NOT plan both the breakfast and the luncheon on the same day. That was crazy talk, I agree!

Oh, the irony!

2010-11-16T07:10:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday, I had the honor of reaching out in a national way on Lisa Belkin's NY Times blog "The Motherlode," asking about why so many of the mothers I know (including myself) have needed or do need anti-anxiety or antidepressant medication.

Yesterday was a big day for many reasons, not the least of which was that blog post. I was nervous about the Motherlode readers' potential reactions. As it turns out, I have been really pleasantly surprised at the resulting thoughtful discussion.

Around lunchtime yesterday, though, I was still really nervous. That's when I arrived at my first grader's classroom to escort groups of his classmates to the media center to check out library books. It's one of the jobs I do as a volunteer since the school had to eliminate assistants this year due to budget cuts.

Herding six children to the media center to check out books is much like herding proverbial cats, but we were getting it done. Then, when I was walking back to the classroom with the first group, I stepped off the sidewalk with my right foot and tripped over my left foot. Because it is still in the 80s here, I was wearing flip-flops, and my exposed big toe was sliced open on the concrete.

I was immediately in a world of pain, but I tried to keep it together. By the time we reached the classroom, though, I was failing miserably. My toe was open and bleeding -- all over the classroom floor. One little girl started to cry. Little boys had their hands over their mouths. The entire class of eighteen children leaped from their desks and encircled my toe. "Mrs. S, Mrs. S, she's bleeding all over your floor! You don't allow blood in the classroom!" they cried. Incredibly embarrassed, I wrapped the toe in tiny band-aids and somehow muddled through two more groups of first graders.

Last night, I was exhausted. I am in charge of American Education Week at my children's school this week, and it includes a breakfast for ten crossing guards and bus drivers and a luncheon for 80 school staff members and faculty, among other duties. This is my Big Week. I took a hot bath with my toe, now wrapped in gauze and Neosporin and still throbbing, in the air. I planned to go to bed very early.

Just after I emerged from the bath, Husband left the room to gather the two youngest boys and take them up to bed. That's when I heard scurrying from the kitchen, then a crash. Broken glass. I imagined that someone had knocked a picture off the kitchen wall. I heard Firstborn say, "You are so dead." Then I heard Husband.

There are a few sounds that strike fear in my heart: the phone call from the school nurse. The phone call from my mother, choking out words through tears to tell me someone has been hurt or someone is sick. The sound that strikes deepest in my heart, though, is when my husband -- usually infuriatingly calm and slow-moving -- yells my name from another room of the house, loudly and urgently.

That's what he did last night. When I rounded the corner and looked in the kitchen, he was holding C.'s arm, and there was a long gash on it. And blood. C. had run through the kitchen, tripped on a chair, and flown straight through a windowpane in our kitchen, hand and arm first.

Husband later criticized me for wigging out [*Note: Husband has since written in indignantly that he was simply noting that I had to throw gauze at him from twenty feet away lest I faint at the sight of the wound close up and what's me to explain he is not a total jerk. Duly noted.], but while I do admit to freaking out and not being at all good around blood, I got the three of us to the ER pretty quickly and effectively. The result: at 1 AM, one nurse was wrapping up C.'s newly-stitched up arm (the sight of which I might never get over) and applying ointment to his myriad cuts and scrapes, and one nurse was irrigating my still throbbing toe, which apparently had chunks of gravel inside it.

C. was very, very lucky. He could have easily cut an artery, a tendon, a nerve. He managed to avoid all of it, but I will tell you what: the mental image of my child's arm folding open really might be my best diet weapon ever.

So I can wonder why mothers like me need anti-anxiety medication. I think I have my personal answer.

Thirty Days of Truth: Something For Which You Have to Forgive Yourself

2010-11-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

[I admit I changed the meme title. It was "Something You Have to Forgive Yourself For." The grammar dork in me couldn't take it.]

One goal that has remained constant in my life is to live with as few regrets as possible. In general, I do my best with the resources and information I have at the time, and therefore I try to be gentle with myself about the decisions I make.

I regret moving myself and my family back to the East Coast from California when I did, and I need to forgive myself for the decision.

At the time we decided to move, I had not slept through a night in over a year thanks to a colicky, stubborn, crazy nursing toddler. I was unexpectedly pregnant again despite the Mini-Pill (PSA: It doesn't work), co-sleeping, and breastfeeding (PSA 2: Breastfeeding does NOT inhibit fertility). I was, in short, Freaking Out.

Husband had a job he loved and I was in a good place too. We had a house in a city we loved, nestled in the hills and fifteen minutes from the Pacific Ocean. Our closest friends were nearby and we seriously loved where we lived.

I panicked. I was afraid we wouldn't make enough money. I wanted my children to have grandparents in their lives. I felt like we couldn't have the family life we wanted if we stayed in Los Angeles. So I pushed us to move.

Honestly, the reasons I had were pretty valid. Now that we live back East, we have my parents down the street, and my children have a great relationship with them. The children have cousins nearby and they are growing up with them in their lives. We can afford a bigger house with a huge, flat yard (Los Angelenos just fainted from jealousy -- flat yards are the Holy Grail in L.A. **). Living back East definitely does have benefits. We have a good life here, and our kids are happy.

It's just that our hearts? Are back in Los Angeles.

I wonder not infrequently how things would have gone if we had stayed in L.A. As much as the East Coast is home to us now, the West Coast is where we are most ourselves, where we feel alive. Husband has not yet forgiven me for moving us here, and if I am honest, I have not either. It's a bit too late for woulda-coulda-shouldas, because buying back in to L.A. is a lot harder than buying out of it, but I will admit that I haven't yet given up hope that we will one day decide to chuck it all and go back, even if it means living in a tiny bungalow and sleeping in one big (BIG) bed.

For me, this was a huge lesson to realize that sometimes even though I have all good and practical and even emotionally valid reasons to do something, I need to listen to my heart. And my heart wears black pants and shops at Gelson's and eats at Baja Fresh and knows alternate routes over Mulholland to avoid traffic on the 405.

But what is best for me and my marriage and my children, now, is to forgive myself and move forward. Limbo does no one any good. As they say, life is what happens when you are making other plans: we live here, we have friends here, we have jobs here, and our children are growing up here. So I have to forgive myself, and I have to put my eyes forward instead of behind me, and I need to start saving up for a little weekend away to get my California fix sometime soon.

** Edited to add: I have been receiving a lot of comments about this sentence. I lived on both the Westside and the Valley when I lived in L.A. My experience was that a flat backyard was coveted and more rare. Obviously, I am just one person and I bought exactly one house in L.A., and perhaps I overstepped my rhetorical bounds with that assessment. Many apologies. Perhaps it was just the area I was buying in: the West Valley, south of Ventura. We bought there not to be snobby and elitist, but for the schools and the commute to the Westside. So, amend my thoughts in your head to say that I was extremely grateful and lucky to live where I did in L.A. and I LOVED it there, but I also feel lucky to live in an affordable house now with an expansive, flat backyard where three little boys can run around and play soccer or football easily. My point was one of counting my blessings, not of putting down L.A. (or the Valley, which was my home). I am sorry if that did not come across.

What's going on?

2010-11-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to write this post for a long time, but I didn't know how to write it. I want to do it right, and I am afraid that I won't have the right words, that I will be inelegant in my articulation. But I cannot ignore it anymore, this post. It bangs around in my head and troubles me in my sleep. It wants to be written.

Sometime in the summer of 2008, I went to my doctor and asked her for medication.

I wasn't depressed. I have been through periods of depression before -- "situational," my therapist called it, because it hinged upon certain events and phases in my life. I know what depression is, and I am not a chronic sufferer (and I feel damn lucky about that).

I also know what anxiety is. I have watched friends and family members struggle under its heft. I wondered, from time to time, if I had a problem with anxiety. But eventually I, and even my therapist at the time, decided I did not have an anxiety disorder. I was stressed out for sure, but I always came back to the conclusion that I was not more stressed than my situation called for, and I had adequate coping mechanisms in place.

That summer, the summer that my baby was turning one year old and my older children were four and six, I decided that wasn't good enough. Even though I was "appropriately" stressed, in my opinion, what with three crazy boys and a household to run and summer's unstructured days swirling around my head, I was struggling. I yelled. A lot. Maybe I wasn't unjustified in my yelling, but all the same, it made me miserable. I felt like my shoulders were hung up on a clothes hanger every single day from the moment I woke up until the moment my children were in bed. Once they were there, asleep or at least safe in their beds and crib, not falling down staircases or eating or stuffing Legos up their noses or pummeling each other, I slumped. Visibly, physically, emotionally slumped. I was exhausted, and I was anxious. The anxiety made me a miserable person and a miserable mother.

The medication helped me. It gave me a pause button. I didn't yell as much, but I could still yell if I needed to yell. I didn't cry as much, but I could still cry. I felt like a stronger, more competent mother and wife. I felt like I could survive. I didn't slump at the end of the day. I felt more capable.

Last year, I weaned off the medication. Since then, I will admit that I think about returning to it. I'm not as anxious or as stressed as I was then. I feel a lot more in control. But when I yell, I always wonder... should I go back on the medication? Will my children remember me as an angry, yelling mother? Could the medication keep me from being that way? Would my life simply be more enjoyable with the help of a little anti-anxiety medication?

But even more, I wonder what the hell is going on in this country that so, so, so many of my friends, so many of my fellow mothers, also have medication. I am a huge advocate of medication for short-term or long-term use if it is warranted and if it is the best thing for someone. I know that the best, most effective mode of treatment is usually a combination of medication and talk therapy, so that a person can develop coping strategies beyond the drugs. I don't want any mother to struggle more than she needs to, and if you even have a tiny inkling that it might help you, I encourage you to try it. If it doesn't work well for you, under the supervision of a competent doctor, you should have no problem weaning off successfully, no harm done. I am glad I asked for medication, and I would and will do it again in a heartbeat if I feel I need it.

But that doesn't mean I don't wonder why so many women in our society do, in fact, need it.

What is going on here? Why are women and mothers so stressed out, or depressed, or anxious? Is it the nature of the job? Is it the inhumane way our country doles out puny maternity leave or non-existent paternity leave? Is it because we feel alone? Exhausted and overwhelmed? Hormones? I realize that motherhood, that parenthood, is not easy. I am just not sure that it is supposed to be debilitating. I will honestly tell you that when I asked for the medication, and many times since, I have felt debilitated, whether by parenthood or by life's demands or by the combination. I can also honestly tell you I do not believe I am a person inherently anxious or depressed.

I believe I know more mothers on medication or that have been on medication than I do mothers who have never used it. And those are just the ones I know about. And those are just the mothers.

So what's the matter here? I think there has to be something going on. We need to talk about it.

Thirty Days of Truth: Something You Love About Yourself

2010-11-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

When I was in third grade, one of my teachers wrote a comment in my report card:

"Mama is a great student, but she tends to be too cautious. She doesn't like to take risks."

It was true. I was pretty shy in elementary school and even more shy in middle school. It wasn't until around the age of 14 that I broke out of my shell and decided to go balls out into the world, little by little.

I was a little girl who was afraid to take risks, afraid to fail. I was afraid to be disliked. Afraid to be wrong. Afraid to be scolded for not following directions. I was a pleaser, and pleasers don't color outside the lines.

Somewhere along the way, I changed.

I grew into a fiercely independent, confident woman, and I can't even put my finger on the turning point. There was no one profound moment, no watershed when I saw the truth for myself. The only factor that stands out is that I can say very surely that with all their quirks and all their flaws, my parents never once doubted that I could do anything and always, always, always supported me no matter what crazy idea I came up with next. They had to have something to do with the change in me.

And so, I ran -- and won -- student body president out of a high school of 2500 students. I flew to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., the summer before my senior year in high school, attending programs at UCLA and Georgetown and navigating the airports and cities alone. I went away to college many states away from home. I applied for internships in the entertainment industry even though I had zero contacts there, and I ended up moving to New York City for the summer I turned 19 and lived and worked alone in one of the biggest cities in the world. I took on projects including managing hundreds of people for a national television show before my sophomore year in college. I moved to New York by myself after graduation and landed a job at a network. I later moved to L.A. with few friends to greet me, but only after requesting and receiving an interview with a legendary television producer who pledged to help me find a new job.

In my career after my career, I have finished both a triathlon and a half-marathon. I have returned a rental car and flown home with a three-year-old and a baby in tow and both their Britax carseats and a diaper bag and all our luggage. I have taken three kids to Disney by myself. I have guest blogged for the New York Times and lived to tell the tale. I have attended BlogHer on a whim and thrown myself into a sea of blogging strangers.

I am independent, confident, and brave. I can talk to anyone. I take risks. I am not afraid to fail. I am not afraid to put myself out there.

I love that about myself.

One of my biggest goals as a parent is to give the same to my children. I want to support them and have confidence in them until they can fly for themselves. I can honestly say that I look at the world and see what I can do, not what I can't. I want the same for my children. Because even when I am floundering or trudging through a dark place, I never stop believing that I will overcome, that I will make whatever is troubling me work out. It has been an incredible, invaluable gift.

Ezra is gone.

2010-11-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Little Ezra Matthews, whose family I wrote about earlier this month, died this morning.

As I often do, I find myself mourning in spirit with his mother. This mother of three boys has lost two of them in the past year. It's incredibly unfair. It's cruel. It sucks. It's unimaginable.

Hug your little ones today, and, as Ezra's father implores, help those who need it when you are able.

Cancer sucks.

Explain yourselves.

2010-11-03T18:18:00.000-07:00

So, there's a cool new little Stats button on Blogger dashboards, and through it I can see which posts are getting the most page views, referral sites, the lowdown.

Blogger has been tracking my stats since May 2010, and in that time, the post with the most hits of all time is by far my post entitled "No Comment," about the comments I get about having three boys.

Uh, it has 797 page views since May. That is more than 500 more page views than any other post tracked by Blogger in that time frame.

So... where are all of you people reading that post coming from? I am dying of curiosity. My stat tracker isn't giving up the goods.

Thirty Days of Truth: Something You Hate About Yourself

2010-11-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

(Well now, this isn't a very positive way to start out the challenge, is it? But I suppose that is why they call it a challenge about truth.)

When I was in fifth grade, my mother took me to the department store.

It seemed that I needed a bra.

In all honesty, I had likely needed a bra for a little while, but my mother is a big believer in that lovely oasis called Denial. In any case, when she decided to finally bite that particularly bitter bullet for a mother, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the whole situation. I was ten, after all.

I didn't need a training bra. I needed a bra bra. This puppy wasn't just for show; from the get-go, I needed a working machine. Little did I know how large the role these garments would have in my life as a woman.

By the end of high school, I was sporting somewhere between double Ds and triple Ds, depending on my weight fluctuations. My mother, who would probably prefer to live in a country where burkhas are prevalent, encouraged me never to wear anything form-fitting. Showing the curve of a breast, you see, would be the equivalent of passing out to my classmates engraved invitations to an orgy starring ME. Eager to please and earn As at home as well as school, I complied: my wardrobe consisted of oversized shirts and hoodies courtesy of the Gap. I even wore a T-shirt over my bathing suit, much to the confusion of my friends. I successfully managed to hide my femininity though high school, and I am sure my mother was relieved.

The sense of shame about my breasts that was cultivated in puberty has never left me. Mine are too big and way too real for the adorable bras they sell at Victoria's Secret or Gap Body. Instead of matching lingerie sets or sexy bras with designs or ruffles or quirky prints, I am best friends with Wacoal. Don't get me wrong; Wacoal is a wonderful company with a wonderful product. But let's be honest: Wacoal sounds like your hefty German aunt who wears comfortable shoes. Cosabella, Felina, La Perla, Natori -- now those are the Italian and exotic cousins with perky breasts wearing stilettos. They ooze sex. Wacoal never gets laid. Wacoal is not perky.

My breasts managed to feed three children for a combined total of forty-two months, and that is nothing to dismiss lightly. In that amount of time, they never succumbed to mastitis and barely even acknowledged a plugged duct. That is pretty cool of them. On the other hand, they had a tendency to produce enough milk for, I don't know, the population of Los Angeles? And so I was able to do many party tricks during that time, including nearly blinding my children with close-range lasers of hot milk and hitting walls on the other side of the room -- often in public places -- after releasing the clip on the nursing bra. Good times, friends.

Between babies two and three, I lost my baby weight and my breasts were very much akin to long tube socks filled with uncooked rice. They hung, National Geographic-style, due south. I rolled them up in the mornings and tucked them into my Wacoals, still size 36DD or DDD, and heaved a long sigh of depression that never in my life did I ever actually sport breasts that ever pointed anywhere close to north, and now I never would without the help of a whole lot of painful surgery.

Since the birth of number three, however, I haven't lost all my baby weight. My breasts have remained very full. That sounds like a good thing, but it's really not. At the age of thirty-six, I might as well be back in tenth grade. My breasts make me look even bigger than I actually am. They demand larger sized shirts that don't pinch back in at what remains of my waist. They are impossible to lug around at the gym and, when forced to chase a certain threenager in public, they bounce ponderously and threaten to throw me terminally off balance. They don't make me feel feminine; they make me feel like a heifer. Even in normal clothes, they give me such cleavage that I have to worry about wearing normal, everyday clothes to my sons' elementary school. They make me feel like a slutty heifer. They make me hot, they are heavy, they can hold several pencils under their heft.

I hate my breasts.

I'm not a fan of elective surgery because I am afraid of pain and, well, surgery. I don't have back issues because of my breasts that I can claim. Really, I need to lose my baby weight and then see what remains when the dust settles and the fog clears. It's a pretty safe bet, though, that my breasts and I are never going to be on great terms.

It could be worse.

Thirty Days of Truth

2010-11-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

After reading the amazing Faiqa's posts for the Thirty Days of Truth challenge, I am excited to embark on this adventure myself. Yes, I will have to talk about myself an awful lot. But I am hoping to a) not bore you with all that, b) find it stimulating and motivating for my writing, and c) find some insight along the way. Let's see how it goes.

It's the month of November, the month when many bloggers will be writing a post every day. Maybe this will help me keep up?

I'm also hoping to get my first post up tonight. We'll see how much progress I make on the Halloween wrapper clean-up. Fingers crossed.

Ezra

2010-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a link to a blog on Facebook in her status. She goes to church with a family whose little boy, just two years old, is in grave crisis. His name is Ezra Matthews.

As the "quick story" link on the blog details, Ezra was diagnosed with stage 4 neauroblastoma a year ago, October 4, 2009, at the age of 13 months old. Two days later, his young parents found out they were pregnant -- with twins. While Ezra struggled through the unspeakable obstacle course of treatment for his aggressive and invasive cancer, his twin brothers were born early, at just 26 weeks. A few days later, one of them, Price, passed away from complications of their premature birth. Little Charley has had a long road but is now at home, smiling and babbling.

A month ago, Ezra turned two and his parents threw a big barbecue at their house, celebrating his birthday and his "No Evidence of Disease" status. A day later, the grim news came that he had relapsed already. A week ago, it seemed that Ezra's body was shutting down and that he was dying. There was little hope.

Today, there is some hope. He is stable. He is still here. His father wrote a post today that I think is important to share, because he says that instead of reading his family's story and being grateful for what you have and hugging your kids, he hopes that what has happened to them will make people think about being nicer to other people, more compassionate, more giving, more helpful. Read that post here.

We're all carrying burdens and experiencing our own rocky paths. We're all finding joy along the way. It is a wonderful life, but as Kyle Matthews asserts, it's not a life full of butterflies and roses. Let's all try to be a little gentler on each other, in Ezra Matthews' honor.

This video about the Matthews family will make you cry, but it will also make you marvel at the strength of a mother.

The Ezra Matthews Story from Kyle Matthews on Vimeo.

will.i.am and "What I Am"

2010-10-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

With thanks to Elizabeth at Boy Crazy [clarity in the chaos], one of my favorite musicians and some of my favorite Sesame Street denizens sing a song good for big souls and little:

Was it worth it?

2010-10-25T17:10:00.001-07:00

Baby B. (Can I still call him that? He now says, "I'm not a baby, Mama. I'm a big boy. I THWEE" and he holds out three fingers) turned three in early August. Two days later, I had to potty train him. He was starting his three-year-old program a few weeks later, and his school -- like every other preschool in the area -- requires three-year-olds to be potty-trained.

I briefly thought about just holding B. back and asking the preschool director to let him be in the "Almost 3s." If I did, he could go in pull-ups. It was a tempting choice. But the teacher I love teaches the 3s, and I am not sure whether I will send B. to Kindergarten "on time" or not (that's a whole 'nother Oprah show, if you know what I mean), and I wanted to hedge my bets and keep him with his own age group. So I commenced potty-training.

Potty-training went great for a week. Then B. started having "accidents," probably a misnomer for what I am sure are conscious choices on his part not to make it to the potty. We are now a few weeks shy of THREE MONTHS of potty-training, and B. is exactly where he was August 20: he has had exactly zero accidents at school, a handful of accidents in public (including one memorable afternoon when he peed AND pooped in his pants outside the elementary school where we were waiting for his brothers, then ran from me in front of all the other parents, excrement dropping out of his shorts) and approximately a zillion "accidents" at home.

Most of the time, when we are home now, I just send B. around half-naked -- no underwear. MOST of the time, he will go to the potty if he is naked. Only about five percent of the time will he go to the potty and make it if he has any clothes on his bottom half. It has become a way of survival for me and our carpeting. We are coping with what I see as a giant battle of wills from a Threenager, and at this point, the only way out I can see is to actually wait it out. I can't threaten, bribe, plead, or reason him into using the potty all the time, because he doesn't want to. I just have to wait for him to grow up a little. At some point, it will hold less allure for him to potty in his pants. At some point, he will make it his lifestyle choice. I hope.

And so I find myself wondering -- was it worth it? Was it worth putting him in the three-year-old program to go through this? Our relationship has definitely suffered greatly from this potty-training mandate. Neither of us like each other as much as we did on August 9. Try as I might, it is hard to show no emotion at all when your child drops a load on the floor two feet from the toilet or pees directly in front of the bathroom, giggling. The frustration of throwing away pair after pair of (cheap) underwear and wiping down his whole lower half has worn on me. But the true PTSD comes from not knowing when or where the next load or pee will fall -- can we risk a trip to Disney? Can we make it all the way to violin practice from school pick-up? Will he pee on the brand new IKEA $250 sofa slipcover? The unpredictability, the utter helplessness, is relentless and exhausting.

Even though he has the teacher I love, even though he adores school with a thrill and delight that I find completely endearing, even though I left all my options open, even though he is in class three days a week and leaves me open for volunteering and the occasional lunch with friends... I miss my baby. I miss the child who didn't have such expectations placed upon him, who didn't feel the need to push back against something that is very important to me whether I like it or not about myself. I am not sure it was worth it. I would be happy to be changing diapers right now. He's all of 38.5 months old and I could have waited a few more months. This tug-of-war that I feel so often with my older boys, the tension of what I need for them to do versus what they want and choose to do -- it wears me down. It makes me sad. It reinforces that, once again, I have to be the Heavy, the Bad Guy, the one asking them to do something they don't want to do. I could have had a little longer with my baby. I'm not sure it was worth it.

Walls

2010-10-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason -- sleep deprivation, hormonal funkity-funk, a perfect storm of anxieties and thoughts and needs crashing together in my head -- I am hitting a wall this week.

I would love to write a witty, articulate post about how I am feeling, but you see, I have hit a wall. So, forgive the brevity that follows. I am due for bed.

My whole house smells like pee. This is a result of a six-year-old boy who refuses to wear a pull-up to bed even though his bladder is not yet ready to make it through the night without wetting. I am so tired of doing extra laundry because of this.

I also have a cat who now refuses to pee inside the litter box. Instead, she lets her hoo-ha hang over the edge and she pees just outside the litter box. I am both baffled and incredibly annoyed by her impressive physical feat. I am really tired of cleaning up extra cat urine.

Nobody -- and I do mean NOBODY -- picks up their clothes in this house. I am completely befuddled as to how to rectify this. Stating that it is unacceptable has not worked. Leaving the clothes there has not worked. Yelling, begging, pleading, cajoling, bribing, rewarding, and punishing? Yeah, not worked. I can walk around the house collecting wet towels, underwear, used pull-ups (if I'm lucky), dirty socks, school clothes, pajama pants, work khakis, you name it... every single day. So glad I am using my college degree this way.

I hate cooking, but I do it because that's kind of the way it goes and it's economical and healthier. And then, once I stumble through making something for dinner, pushing against my own personality and skill grain and frustrated all the while? The children refuse to eat it.

B. is a total threenager and has accumulated an impressive amount of bad habits from his brothers. Bad habits like calling me, his beloved mama, a "stupidhead." And telling me to shut up. He's only newly three, and I really don't think he understands the gravity of the situation, and I have absolutely no idea how to discipline him.

B. snores like a three-piece band. He needs a sleep study and probably an adenoid-ectomy, however that should actually be spelled. I'm worried and overwhelmed by the thought of my first surgery as a mama and I'm worried about him in the meantime, because I don't think he gets good sleep and I listen to him snorting and have ridiculous thoughts about oxygen deprivation and brain damage. Neurotic much? As an added bonus, the snoring wakes B. up almost nightly and I often find a loud, snoring three-year-old in my legs, tangled up with the sheets and his Mickey Mouse doll, at 4 AM. Fun times. Last night, I moved to the couch to escape both the snoring three-year-old and the snoring thirty-five-year old in my bed, and my cat decided to sit on my head and harass me until I would feed her.

At least it wasn't the cat who pees just outside the litter box.

All little, puny, petty things, things I am privileged to be dealing with instead of bigger, scarier, things. But nonetheless, walls. Maybe soon? Straitjackets.

A letter to my niece I cannot send, for obvious reasons:

2010-10-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

Dear M,

In a week, you will be fourteen years old. That's, like, a real teenager. High school material. Crazy talk.

It's no secret that you were a bit of a shock and surprise to us in the family. We didn't expect you. At. All. I didn't even know about you until you were over a month old, and it blew my mind to imagine my baby brother a father. I felt sorry for you, if I am honest. You entered the world in a messy time in our family's life, and the people around you really didn't have their bull hockey together when you arrived.

Luckily for you (and all of us), you kind of motivated everyone to get their acts together, and you have a pretty good set up now: a professional and responsible father, an involved mother, two younger siblings, a room and (score!) bathroom to yourself tucked away in a brand new suburb with an awesome neighborhood pool and a cul-de-sac full of kids. You have a good church community and a good school and a lot of close friends.

Still, I worry about you. Fourteen years old is a turning point, and next year you will be a freshman in high school. I receive your Facebook status updates and I wonder why the heck you useeeeee aaaaaall thoseeeeee exxxxxttttttrrrrraaaaaaa letttttttersssss in your sentences. Seriously, what is up with that? I want so badly to ask you, but my child therapist friend advises me never to point out that I am actually paying attention or I might get the big Unfriend. I look through your posted pictures and see that you are wearing a lot of eye make-up and lip gloss and maybe even a little contraband blush, and I worry that you think you need all those things to appeal to someone, when I think you are absolutely adorable in no make-up at all. You post song lyrics and you quote thoughts about love and I wonder who and what you are talking about, and do I need to kick his ass?

Your parents are a wee bit controlling and, I think, punish you for their own sins. They conceived you at sixteen and seventeen themselves, and I think it downright terrifies them to see you creeping towards your mother's age when she had you. As a result, they are pretty hard on you. I kind of hate it, because you are a great kid and you don't really deserve to be ridden quite so hard. I see you desperately trying to please them and I worry, because I don't want you to feel desperate for the approval of other people as you get older. You are great just the way you are, but no teenager would ever believe that.

I want to hang out with you and tell you I think you are wonderful, but your mom and dad are a little afraid to hand you over to the Scary Liberal Aunt, so I don't get to see you as often as I would like. They don't want me putting any free-wheeling ideas into your head. I won't remind them that I am the one was incredibly squeaky clean while they got drunk and had a kid in high school. That never goes over well. So instead, I just hang back and try to lift you up when I can. You are special to me.

As you enter your major high school years, all I want you to know is that exactly who you are is enough. You are beautiful, especially when you are yourself and not modeling yourself on your best friends. You are a wonderful, thoughtful friend. You are a great thinker. You are observant of people and it makes you more considerate and helpful because you see what people need. You have crazy long legs that sometimes trip you up and a genuine smile that doesn't come out often enough. You deserve to be surrounded by people who make you feel good.

Don't ever let a boy make you feel less than. Don't pine for boys who don't treat you well. I listen to the high school swimmer girls while they are drying off on the pool deck and my boys are getting into the water, and it scares the living daylights out of me. They make so many excuses for boys' bad behavior. Don't ever excuse it. Demand better.

I wish I could save you from the heartache I know is coming. I wish I could surround you with bubble wrap and unpack you when you are twenty-five and a little bit more fortified. Most of all, I just want you to know I am here. I'm not your parent, I love you, and you can't disappoint me.

I just wish I knew how to tell you that in a way that you would believe it and understand it.

Notice anything different?

2010-10-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Shalon at Pretty Lovely Designs for giving me a little blog makeover. My friend Melissa at Another Lunch recommended her, and she was very easy to work with and she tolerated a lot of indecision from me. Anyway, I hope the new design will make my blog easier to search and read. I also hope you like it as much as I do!

Anniversaries

2010-10-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

My blogging anniversary, October 2, came and went quietly. I knew it was around this time that I started blogging, but I didn't have time to check. Ironically.

October 2, 2007, I had an infant, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old Kindergartner. I was still sporting the porn star boobs of a nursing mom and I was juggling a lot of balls in the air. I can still remember the nights of bathing small children, my creaky knees on the floor, while wearing a newborn in a wrap on my chest and hoping to get dinner made on time.

Now I am the mother of an incredibly leggy (seriously, sometimes I just stare and marvel that a child of mine has such long, thin sticks!), ridiculously wise-ass eight-year-old third grader, a somewhat gigantic Ferdinand the Bull of a six-year-old (who sports his mother's less lengthy, more substantial thighs, unfortunately), and a crazy, mostly naked three-year-old.

The past three years have seen us move, change schools, gain promotions, lose very little weight (*grumble*), and learn so very, very much about ourselves and the world. They were a big three years, and not just for the little people. Going from thirty-three to thirty-six -- that is a bigger leap than I would have imagined.

In a few weeks, Husband and I will be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary as well. And while the past three years of parenting have seemed to fly by in many ways, the past ten years seem like they should have been much longer. Was it really only ten years ago that we were round-cheeked 26- and 25-year-old babies in grown-up clothes, standing before a bankruptcy judge (fittingly) and reciting Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" as our wedding vows, surrounded by our dear college friends? It certainly has been an adventure, a journey, a very open road. Neither of us would have ever guessed on that November day that we would be here, doing this, now.

The air has changed, and the temperatures have dipped just enough to give sweet relief from the unrelenting heat and humidity of summer. My beloved college football is on the television set in the background, full of emotion and passion and heroes and underdogs. I love the stories of college football. I broke out the pumpkin this morning and baked my first loaves of the season, and the house smells like a home to me now. I never expected ten years ago to be here, and I never expected three years ago that I would still be writing now, but here I am. And it is good.

The words of Whitman still stir and soothe me at the same time. There is still an Open Road; life is still an adventure. Therefore, Allons!

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

The second born

2010-10-14T05:42:00.001-07:00

When C. was nine weeks old, my mother dropped him. On his head.

We were at my alma mater for a reunion weekend, and my parents were with us, in part to serve as babysitters and in part because my dad is an alumnus of the same lovely campus.

There is one problem with going to a university that is over 250 years of age: sometimes the walkways are a bit uneven. On that afternoon, we were walking down the main thoroughfare when my mother, who was holding tiny baby C. in her arms, stepped into a divot in the pavement and her knees buckled beneath her.

I, ever the control freak, was walking right beside her, pushing the stroller. When she went down, I was so close to her that I couldn't see what exactly happened, but I did see her let go of C.'s small form and I saw him hit the ground. I couldn't tell how hard he hit because of the angle, or what hit first, but I could see his head and his back bounce a bit when they hit the ground. (Thus, it's true: babies do actually bounce.) I scooped him up quickly and checked him for blood while he screamed hysterically and my mother keened beside me.

After a ride in an ambulance and X-rays and a lot of traumatic everything, it was determined that baby C. seemed completely fine. His mother and his grandmother, however, were forever scarred. We now refer to the incident as "The Day Grammy Fumbled C." Of course, it wasn't my mother's fault, and it was unavoidable, and she probably protected him from worse by not falling on him. But as with anything, it's hard not to replay the scene and run through all the what ifs.

It was also hard not to think of that day every single time something came up with C. over the last six years and wonder if he was truly "fine." Firstborn was crazy verbal as a toddler, but C. was not. Eventually, he had to go through three years of speech therapy. "Was it because he was dropped on his head as a baby?" my mother would ask me, tears in her eyes. "Did you tell the therapist I dropped him?"

Unlike Firstborn, C. is sensitive and dramatic. When he is upset, he has a tendency to throw himself on the floor and wail and yell. At times, Husband and I have looked at each other with questions in our eyes. Is something wrong with him? Is it because he was dropped on his head as a baby -- literally?

While I didn't have an issue sending Firstborn to Kindergarten "on time" even with a summer birthday, I wondered about C. Was he mature enough? Could he handle it? Would he be able to withstand a long private school day and adhere to the expectations?

I admit it: For much of his young life, I have wondered if C. is okay. I have tortured myself over how to protect him, how to keep him out of his big brother's dazzling shadow.

About a month ago, the phone rang. "We're going to test C. for the gifted program," the school psychologist explained. "I have been hearing some great things about him." Immediately, my reflex was to start hedging my bets. He doesn't warm up right away, I warned. He's shy. He needs to build rapport with a new adult. He might be too young for this kind of testing. Maybe we should wait until he is older.

"It will be okay," the psychologist said. "I will make sure he is comfortable first."

A few weeks later, we were in the guidance office at the school, having our meeting about C. The psychologist started talking about C.'s test scores, and I almost had to ask if she was talking about the right child, the right C.? It's not that I didn't think C. was bright, because I did. I knew he was bright, and artistic, and that he has a huge smile and an even bigger heart. I knew that children at the private school and now the public school loved C. and saw him as a leader. But I am being brutally honest when I say that I wondered if C. would always live in Firstborn's academic shadow. For Firstborn, things come easily and quickly... just like they did for me. My own little brother struggled his whole school career to live up to me, just missing the entire time. In my heart, I feared the same fate belonged to C.: that he would always be the also-ran. In the back of my head, the image still lingered too -- that while Firstborn has the privileged only-child, white-gloved babyhood, C. was dropped on his head. I wasn't able to protect him then, and I feared I wouldn't be able to protect him in the future.

Obviously, academics matter to me, but they are not the most important thing to me -- that spot is held by my children's happiness. My only goal in elementary school is for my children to love school. Entrance into the gifted program for me only holds value because it means that one day a week, my children go to a classroom where they are allowed to study subjects outside the box and play brain twisters and finish puzzles. It's an oasis away from the curriculum dictated by standardized testing and state standards. Every child should get the same opportunity, and it makes me a little sick that isn't the case. In the meantime, though, I am greedy because I want my kids to have it. Firstborn started the year in the program, and C. knew that.

So there we were, sitting in an office that used to be the classroom where I went to my own gifted class back in the '80s. The psychologist pointed out C.'s scores to us, and I had to hold back tears. The little baby who fell on his head, the toddler who dutifully went to speech therapy for three years and blew into horns and bit on sticks so that other children (and his own parents) could understand him when he spoke, the child who has to endure a cocksure, relentless older brother, scored as high as a child can score on the verbal section of his test.

He scored higher than his older brother did.

And I don't care if he is considered "gifted" or whatever, I know the tests are arbitrary, and I don't care what that means to society, and I know that it is hard to talk about how our children score on tests without sounding like McBraggalots and I know in the grand scheme it doesn't mean anything at all and it might even mean that he could have a harder life because sometimes these kinds of labels are hairshirts of their own and... and... and...

For that one day, it felt like a big, reassuring neon sign that said, "HE IS OKAY." And right now, I am hanging on to that. Tomorrow I will forge ahead and worry about the next issue, but I am going to hang like crazy onto the small signs that say something, anything, might be going well.

Carry that weight.

2010-10-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

I like Facebook. There, I said it. I don't spend hours playing games or uploading pictures or any of that stuff -- I don't dabble in Bedazzled Blitz or tend to any farms or wars. But I have a lot of friends on Facebook and I love that it has returned some people to me that I thought I had lost forever.

One of those people was my friend D. D and I were as close as it gets in high school. Both editors of our school paper, both lovers of pop culture references and good (or bad) food, both adventurers. Because I was naive and because I was a bit sheltered, I never questioned why D and I could be so close without any awkwardness at all or why D was so anal about ironing his clothes. Later, of course, it didn't shock me at all to find out he was gay.

After high school, I only saw D occasionally -- a trip to Vermont and a spontaneous road trip to Montreal; an overnight at his Boston apartment on my freshman Fall Break from college; a Chili's dinner at home. Ironically, we both ended up in Los Angeles for many years -- but because the inventors of Facebook were likely still at middle school dances at the time, I had no idea how to get in touch with him. We missed each other.

This past summer, I finally found D on Facebook. We got in touch, we caught each other up. We told each other about our grown-up lives, our significant others, our careers (and now lack of careers). We made plans to meet up this winter.

Wednesday night, also on Facebook, I found out that D passed away of a heart attack this past weekend. When I read the words, it felt like the floor dropped from beneath my feet. D, who had been so much a part of my high school years, was just gone. Just like that.

Last night I went to D's open casket visitation, and the only word to describe it was awful. Awful and hard. When I walked in the door, the first thing I saw was his hand, and it stopped me in my tracks. I have been lucky; I haven't buried many people yet. I lost my uncle after years of cancer had mangled his body and tortured his soul. I lost my grandmother, but not until she was well into her 80s. I have lost acquaintances, but I haven't lost someone like this, someone my age who was so integral to a big part of my life and development as a person.

When D and I grew apart, we were setting out into the world. We knew each other in our most perfect forms, overflowing with life and excitement and potential. We weren't jaded yet; we hadn't had our hearts broken yet. Sitting at the funeral home last night, I stared at his body. It looked exactly like him, like a Madame Tussaud rendition of the boy I knew when we were young. I almost held my breath waiting for him to jump up and yell, "Just kidding!" The expression on his face was familiar, the temple bone in in his forehead exactly as I remembered. Nearby, a slideshow flipped through pictures of D's entire life: a fat-cheeked baby, a toddler dressed as Raggedy Andy, a little boy beaming from a race car at Disney, an awkward tweenager, an adult surrounded by friends, hugged by family, snuggling his puppy, traveling the world.

When his mother approached on the aisle, I stepped forward to introduce myself to her. She whispered my name and smiled. "You look exactly the same," she said. I started to cry. Her child was lying in a casket nearby, while I stood there whole and alive. How did this happen?

Today was the funeral mass, the graveside service, and the luncheon. I cried throughout the morning, angry and sad and wondering what and why. When the priest spoke about his life, I marveled at how he encapsulated it into just a few sentences. Thirty-seven years, six continents, so many friends and so much family, and just a few sentences seemed to sum it up.

I watched his mother walk the casket down, tears wetting her face, and I couldn't hold back the ugly cry: if I had to bury one of my own sons, you would have to pry me off the casket. I don't think I could let him go without me.

D was one of those friends you could cackle with under your breath. He had a comment for everything and he was the perfect partner in crime. Now that all is said and done, I am a little comforted in knowing he is just up the road, in a quiet place where I can go and sit and talk if I need to, knowing he would understand. But I wish he was here in the flesh, hard to get a hold of and racing through life, instead.

When I spoke to his cousin today, she recognized me. "D was just talking about you to me," she said. "He showed me pictures of your children on Facebook." I had to smile. Facebook is many things, but not all of them are bad. I am thankful for Facebook today.

And a message to all of my people who are out there reading this: You take care of yourself, do you hear me? Because I am not ready for this to be a part of my life. I want my people above the ground. If you need me, you tell me. Promise me. Don't make me come after you.

Cruisin' 2010

2010-09-30T07:06:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, I leave for my second annual Moms' Time Out Cruise! This year, it is me and I think about sixteen other moms, sailing south and away from our cherished babies and husbands for three days of boat drinks, dancing, and finishing our sentences.

We invited some women who declined to come this year because they "don't do things without their husbands." I respect that POV, but I encourage women to consider going on trips with their girlfriends. I am a whole person, and alongside my roles as wife, mother, sister, daughter, I am friend to a whole bunch of awesome women. Last year, we had a fabulous time just being US. No wiping any heinies but our own, no worrying about bedtimes or homework. Just three days away from civilization. We came back refreshed and better for it -- and that has to mean we were better to the little and big people waiting for us at home.

I made a pre-cruise playlist, so I am sharing it here. You can live vicariously and dream of the Dirty Bananas, the singing at the tops of our lungs, and the belly laughs we will be having this weekend!

Dynamite (Taio Cruz)
Nothin' on You (B.o.B.)
Tik Tok (Ke$ha)
Bulletproof (La Roux)
California Gurls (Katy Perry)
Magic (B.o.B.)
Like a G6 (Far East Movement)
Club Can't Handle Me (Flo Rida)
Teenage Dream (Katy Perry)
Imma Be (Black Eyed Peas)
Take It Off (Ke$ha)
Say Hey (I Love You) (Michael Franti)
Empire State of Mind (Jay-Z)
A Pirate Looks at 40 -- Live (Jimmy Buffett, because he is required and because egads, we are all looking at 40!)

Bon Voyage to me! See you when I get back.

Avert your eyes.

2010-09-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

In the Horrible Days Hall of Fame of my mothering career, last Wednesday is going to have at least an Honorable Mention. I won't get cocky and think it will rank among the super doozies, but it will stand out from the mundane for sure.

I was sick. I felt awful. I felt like someone had stuck me in the washing machine, dragged me out wet and ragged, and forced me to run windsprints. My throat hurt and I had no energy.

My mom, fresh back from a trip to Europe (oh, her horrid life) and eager to see the kids, offered to take us to dinner since I was single parenting that night and in no shape to cook.

So, the five of us headed to a nearby restaurant that I rank as 1) easy, 2) surefire for kids actually eating the food we will pay for, and 3) pretty awful when it comes to said food quality. But did I mention the sore throat and the need to feed the children? I ordered a Diet Coke and tried to tune out the din at my own table.

About three quarters of the way through our meal, middle child C. decided to visit the WC. Of course, Baby B. decided he also needed to visit the WC, even though he really didn't need to go. But being the dutiful guardians of a newly potty-training child, we were beholden to take him whether we believed him or not. I begged my mom, however, to take the reins. I mean, isn't that kind of the point of grandparents sometimes? They are willing to do things like supervise potty outings while the run-ragged parents nurse their Diet Cokes in a moment of peace? No?

A few minutes later, my mom returned to the table sans Baby B. "You need this like you need a hole in the head," she began, and pictures flashed through my head: pooped-in underwear. A child who had fallen in the toilet. A potty accident of some kind. "Baby B. ran away from me all stubborn like he always does, and he smashed his fingers in the bathroom door. It's pretty bad."

"Where is he?" I said, looking behind her.

"I left him in there," she said weakly. "He wanted you."

I ran to the bathroom through the nearly-empty restaurant, and when I opened the bathroom door, I found my little three-year-old baby standing at the bathroom counter, crying hysterically but quietly, his hand splayed out on the countertop, wet and bleeding. Two of the fingertips on his right hand looked flattened on top, with blood and bruising.

As I walked him quickly out the door, my adrenaline pumped and my thoughts raced. It's amazing what the motherhood thing does to you -- it's like your whole body chemistry changes. I fully believe when I am in those moments when my child is hurt and crisis is current that I could lift a car if I had to. But I'm still just a thirtysomething kid, feeling like I wish a grown-up would step in and tell me what to do.

I ran Baby B. out to the car and grabbed the Polysporin and bandaids I had there from the last wounds we had to treat a week or so ago. Without thinking about it, I just squirted the ointment on the fingertips and wrapped the fingers. When my mom and the other boys made it out to the car, I just started driving towards our after-hours pediatric clinic of choice. Downtown. In rush-hour traffic. I called Husband at the office: "I need you to leave right now and meet me at the clinic," I said. He said okay and hung up, no questions asked. Baby B. wailed the entire way to the office -- easily twenty minutes. It was a constant, pained wail of a child in shock.

Luckily, the office was empty, and the nurses rushed Baby B. back quickly. Even in the front triage office, Baby B. was so hysterical that he would pass out asleep in mid-scream against my chest. Since then, I have spoken to several parents who said they knew their children were really hurt when they fell asleep right afterward -- as if the body just knows how to help defend the psyche. B. continued to fall asleep abruptly off and on throughout our 90-minute stay at the clinic.

Eventually, we X-rayed the hand, unwrapped it, cleaned it, re-wrapped it. No obvious fractures, but the doctors weren't sure what to think and said that we would have to just wait and see how he would heal. As the nurse finished wrapping his fingers for the night, B. cried hysterically. "It's okay," I said in his ear. "It's all over now. It's finished."

B. whimpered and slowed his crying. "Do... I ... get... a ... sticker... now?" he choked. We burst out laughing. "Dude, you will get MANY stickers," we assured him.

After a pediatrician referral to an orthopedic hand specialist (because when he saw the wounds, my pediatrician said, "You know, I have seen this kind of thing in the movies, but I don't think I am ready to guest star in this film"), it was determined that B. had two fingernails completely ripped off during the initial accident. He's under the supervision of the specialist now and he's past the initial risk of infection. Now we just wait to see how his fingernails grow back, if they grow back, and we hope to keep him safe from re-injury.

I am a very slow learner, I think, because I am always amazed at how quickly things can happen and how much can change in an instant. B.'s perfect little hand is mangled a bit right now, his fingertips still bruised and bloody and not at all okay for my squeamish eyes. We were just going out to eat. And even still, this is a relatively small hiccup in our lives. He'll heal. But look how fast -- and how dramatic -- a simple act can be.

I think my children are the reason anti-anxiety medication is developed. If we all survive their childhoods, it will be a freaking miracle.

I got nothing.

2010-09-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

So September is almost over, and where have I been? Somewhere between swim team practice and preschool pick-up. I have been a busy, busy person in the past. I can honestly say I haven't been this busy since maybe high school, when I edited the newspaper and served as student body president... of a student body of 1700 students.

I have thought about blogging, but my mind is almost blank with the overwhelming feeling of Tasks. I am studiously trying to make it to the gym for more displays of my lacking physical fitness. I am decorating the book fair, planning for American Education Week, trying to make the PTA meetings I am supposed to make. I am supervising homework and forgetting to give my three year old a flashlight for Flashlight Day at preschool and attempting to keep up with the housework and, God willing and the creeks don't rise, possibly make a dent in the ever-remaining clutter. I don't want to get too cocky, but I might be able to hang pictures on the walls next week. Maybe. It could happen.

In the meantime, I still have a child who won't poop in a potty, two Cub Scouts with meetings at the same time on the same night in different locations, and the swim team. I have a stubborn, unruly eight year old who wants to quit violin after a year of effort. I don't want him to quit violin; I want him to have an instrument. But trying to cajole him into practicing is making me insane, and paying for lessons when he doesn't practice at all enough makes me want to cry.

If I just said fine, do what you want, we'll quit everything, my life would be SO MUCH EASIER.

If we quit everything, my children would be bored and fight all afternoon, every afternoon. JUST LIKE SUMMER. And that would make me want to hang from my toenails from the ceiling. For the pain relief.

So you see why I am not here. I am somewhere in the car, somewhere in a chair by the pool but not in a fun way, somewhere in a gym contorting my body and watching the clock.

The weekends are never long enough and the weeks... the weeks are so very exhausting.

And I thought the newborn phase was hard.

Date Night

2010-08-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, Firstborn and I were driving somewhere and had the radio on in the car. That awful, maudlin Delilah person was on (I believe she is nationally syndicated so that the whole world gets to hear her sappiness) and a mother called in and asked her to play a song for her date night with her son. She explained that they go out once a week together and do fun things, just the two of them.

It's no secret, especially to regular readers of this blog, that Firstborn and I have struggled a lot. I saw him listening to what the mom was describing, and right there, I decided we needed this idea in our lives. Since I see Baby B. a lot without his brothers on his two free days off from preschool, I figured that I would try alternating taking the older two out for a night one-on-one. So, last Sunday night, I had an inaugural "date night" with my middle son C.

Why did C. get to go first, you ask? Oh, because the two boys FOUGHT OVER WHICH ONE OF THEM "HAD" TO GO WITH MAMA. Yeah. Made me feel ultra special, let me tell you. After C. conceded in his middle child way and offered to go first, I heard him whisper to Firstborn, "... but you OWE me now." Awesome. Thanks a lot, boys. To all those eight thousand strangers and friends who like to coo, "Oh, boys love their mamas!" and "You'll be the Queen of the House!" I say, Shut up.

I decided I want date nights with the boys to be more than just one-on-one time. I want it to be time when I get to say yes a lot. I want to be the Good Time Parent, the role usually reserved for Daddy. It will only be a few hours a week, so I don't want to worry about setting examples and limits during that time.

Last Sunday, C. and I took a trip to Toys 'R Us to purchase a few small Lego sets with a gift card we had left over from some holiday. It's not often I get to just take the kids to a toy store out of the blue for no good reason, and it's even less often that the kids get to stand in the aisle and look up at the myriad boxes and choose something just for them. You can understand why this was special to C. Afterward, we went to Friendly's, that bastion of healthy kid food, where we shared sliders and french fries and C. was able to order a Make Your Own Volcano Sundae. He even licked the bowl. We talked about the new school, his new friends, his teachers, and his new swim team. We talked. That in and of itself was both miraculous and special. I gave him a few dollars for the much-coveted Claw Game in the Friendly's lobby and we drove home.

Tonight, Firstborn and I ventured out for a showing of Nanny McPhee Returns, which was really cute and made me cry, dammit. Firstborn was able to eat popcorn and a Sprite, a very rare treat, as well as some gummy candy, also usually verboten for its cavity-inducing qualities. I let him have two dollars after the movie to play video games in the theater lobby, something he always asks to do but I rarely acquiesce to, and then we went to grab frozen yogurts just for good measure (hey, it's nonfat). There we had time to talk about various flavor combinations, the movie, and his new school. It was so nice to just be able to hang out with him and not be disciplining him every five minutes. I could focus my eyes on him and not be watching two other children. I didn't have to worry about whether or not the toddler would miss a potty-training cue.

So this date night thing is working out. Yes, I am plying the children with sugar and treats. So what? I have to say no to them all week long. It's great to have a few hours when I get to say yes, to slow down and let them lick the bowls. We're not in a hurry. In fact, I savor every single minute.

Adventures in personal fitness

2010-08-25T05:29:00.000-07:00

No, people. I am not sitting around listening to Nirvana and wearing a lot of black. I'm okay. I have my moments, but I am okay. In fact, I am more than okay after going to the kids' Open Houses last night -- they have lovely teachers and I think that once the dust settles, they are going to have really good years. We might just have a bit more transitioning and adjusting to do in the meantime, and that is fair, considering they left a tiny school and tight groups of pals.

But enough about the kids. Let's talk about ME!

I have been trying to get my mojo back for, I don't know, how old is Baby B.? Three years and a few weeks. I have been pretty unsuccessful. But with the new school year (and a fifteenth college reunion looming large, replete with ex-boyfriends and Husband's ex-girlfriends and everything in between), I am making renewed effort. This has included a few (desperate) attempts at taking classes at my new, cheaper-and-more-practical-in-this-economy gym.

It quickly became apparent to me, however, that our new school adventures leave me with exactly zero time for gym excursions. Even on the mornings when all three of my precious offspring are ensconced in school, I have way too much on my agenda: PTA meetings and book fair decorating and school volunteering and grocery shopping and, yes, lunches with friends I would otherwise not see. I am SO living the dream, you know. So, finding a time to actually sweat has become a challenge.

That leads me to last Thursday morning, when I threw sleep to the wind and woke myself at 5 AM, gently pushing the toddler trying to crawl up into my armpit in his sleep aside so I could escape the bed, and I somehow got myself to the 5:30 BodyPump class at my gym. If you don't know about Les Mills classes or Body Pump specifically, it's a syndicated group fitness class that involves weights and aerobic exercise. It's a pretty efficient way of getting in strength training while also getting heart rates up, and the music is pretty good (very important in my little world).

When I walked gingerly into the group fitness classroom at 5:27 AM, I saw about fifteen people stretching and setting up. Immediately, a woman in her early 20s looked over her shoulder and determined me to be a "newbie." She scurried about me, setting me up in the back of the the room next to two impossibly thin twentysomething twins, also, apparently, relatively new. She gave me a step, a mat, and a barbell with "light" weights (equaling about ten pounds). "Any heavier, and you won't be able to walk tomorrow," she noted ominously. A man, who certainly didn't look like he was a regular in a group fitness class, nodded sagely. "Yeah, good luck lifting your arms tomorrow!" he chirped. Sweet.

Our leader looked harmless enough -- probably early 30s, well built but petite, and, as I was about to find out, incredibly perky. As she led us through push-ups and bench presses and tricep curls, she mouthed the words to the Bon Jovi and the Britney Spears. Sometimes, she sang along or growled some of the lyrics at us. I'll be honest -- she scared me a little. But when you are working out before sunrise, I suppose an enthusiastic lyrics-growler is a pro, not a con.

The class ended promptly at 6:30 AM. The sun was just rising. Um, this is insane, I thought to myself. I limped out of the class and went home, where by 7:30 AM I was crashing and by 10 AM I was starving, having been up for FIVE HOURS at that point.

*****

In an effort to be a little more sane about the whole fitness effort, I chose to spend my first truly child-free hours this past Monday at the gym again, this time at a way more realistic time slot (9:30 AM) but in a far more frightening venue: the Zumba class.

I had taken Zumba once before, at a different gym. I spent most of the class tapping on foot to the side cluelessly and wondering how the teacher had managed to suspend her hips in mid-air. This time, the class went a little something like this:

9:27 AM: Step slowly into the classroom. Wonder why I am the only person there under the age of 60. No, 65. Step out of the classroom to re-check the group fitness schedule. Return to classroom.

9:30 AM: Two other random thirtysomething women also find themselves lost amidst the seniors with me. We look way out of place. Our teacher, a perky (I am sensing a trend) early 30s blonde woman who tells us about her two-year-old's recent birthday party, starts the music. In my head, I think that this woman with washboard abs is definitely only a mother of one child. Secretly curse her to having twins next so she can find out what a stretch mark looks like.

9:35 AM: This is not SO bad. I'm so not a dancer, but this is pretty fun. And hey, I'm better than the Golden Girls in the front row!

9:45 AM: Wonder if this is truly a one-hour class? Surely not. Surely it is a 45-minute class, in which case I have finished a third of the class. Go me!

10 AM: Okay, I am done. All my energy is gone. The twisting hurts my knees. My stomach is growling. I don't think I ate enough for this. Start imagining a scene in a movie where a housewife thinks she can dance at a club using her Zumba class maneuvers.

10:15 AM: This is not a 45-minute class.

10:20 AM: Our teacher asks what we want to do next. A Latina woman in the front row calls for salsa. Immediately, the teacher starts a song and starts moving at a speed best described as "fast forward." I am not a fast-forward type girl. Nearly mow down woman next to me, which would be bad, because she is somebody's grandma.

10:25 AM: Teacher begins what she calls "cool-down." Then adds spins to it. I shake my head in protest. There are no spins in "cool-downs."

10:30 AM: Walk slowly out of the class, completely exhausted. See my friend waiting outside. My friend points back at my teacher. "She's teaching the next class too!" she says in disbelief. "BodyPump!"

Needless to say, I am still trying to find my fitness niche. But in the process, I am finding some good people watching!

Hard to love

2010-08-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

The past week was a positive one, but a long one, rife with change. I'm one who likes change and adventure and independence, but even I took a beating this week. We started at the new school, Baby B. and I continued a second week of potty training with moderate success (read: moderate failure as well) and prepared for his entry into preschool next week, and we started new activities -- most significantly, the swim team for both my older boys. I was waiting all week for the other shoe to drop.

Last night, I picked Firstborn up from a long afterschool playdate with an old friend who happens to go to his new school. He was happy and tired and sweaty and his tummy was full of pizza. I was feeling really good about it, that he was so well settled in and had good friends and was a happy camper. When we hopped in the car, though, he dissolved into the puddle of something I feared all week.

"I hate you for taking me out of my school," he said clearly and firmly, taking my heart with both hands and snapping it into two sharp pieces in the process. "I miss my old school and my old friends. Everything is different now. I miss our old house. I miss everything." It was just that out of the blue, too.

It was everything I feared he would feel after the changes in the past six months -- a change of house, a change of neighborhood, a change of school, a change of activities. On the day we moved back in January, he watched my father collapse at his baseball try-outs. He's been through a lot ever since. I had hoped that he would roll with this school move and find it a novel adventure, and I think he did -- for a week. Now, he's ready to go "home."

My middle child is more stable in his sadness about changing schools. This week, he has made two friends. He still wants playdates with his friends from his old school. He's less expressive, more quietly sad. Nothing has upset him or been negative about his experience, but nothing has made him forget was he is missing just down the road at his old school. When I looked through my friends' Facebook pictures this week, I saw glimpses of what would have been his classroom, where his tight circle of buddies were settling into first grade. It made me sad for him.

The truth is, I am the reason they had to change schools. It was probably inevitable anyway, and the costs of private school just are not in our budget. We are lucky to live in a great school district with good schools full of very involved families and good kids. But that was their school -- the only school they had ever known -- and I did take it from them. It was me that found our new house, me that wanted to go for it, me that put us in a position to have two mortgages and to spend our savings completing this deal. We are all settled now and we are in a good place and in a great house that we can live in forever, and that has a lot of value for our family. It's invaluable, in fact. But it came with its costs, and I am the one who ultimately decided we would pay them.

It's also me that tells the children they have to stop playing the Wii to get ready for (fill in the blank) school, for dinner, for swim practice, for bed. It's me that tells them that no, we made a commitment to the (fill in the blank) swim team, the violin teacher, the chess coach, and we need to show up for practice. It's me that signs off on homework, that tells Firstborn to re-write the words he wrote incorrectly, that sends them back to brush their teeth again because the first time they literally only did it for two seconds. It is me that cleans up the potty training messes and insists on a new pair of underwear. No wonder they hate me. No one wants to be this person, the Fun Sponge.

And yes, I know they don't really hate me. But why shouldn't they? Some days, I just want to say, I give up. Do what you want to do. When I was 27 years old and wanted to be a mother, I had no idea what I was committing to. My biggest issues were what to make myself for lunch and if I could fit into my skinny jeans. Now, it feels like my life is just filled to the brim with chores -- mine or others' that I must make them do. I don't want to be a taskmaster, but I am not really sure how to do this without being one.

I have this nagging feeling that I am doing this thing all wrong. That if I was more (fill in the blank) zen, more patient, more laid back, more something, this would be going a lot better. My kids would want to hang out with me more. My kids would be happier. My husband would want to hang out with me more. My husband would be happier. The truth is, I do my very best never to look in a mirror these days because I have no idea who I am anymore and I am afraid I will see it. I've built up all these defenses and walls and tried to zone out because I am just trying to get through this marathon -- no, this IRONMAN -- and I am not parenting with purpose or strategy anymore and I am not being a good participant in my marriage. The cracks are beginning to show.

If I was my kid or my spouse, I am not sure I would love me. I'm not sure who is left to love.

This was always going to be a rough week, and I am trying to remember that and focus forward, knowing that in a month, this will just be how it always was. I hope. I am not one to wallow, and we can't stand still on this treadmill anyway. It will get better. But I would be lying if I didn't say that in this moment, this is all really a lot and I have no idea where I am going with all of it. I am wondering if other women feel the same uncertainty, the same self doubt, the same wonder at how we got here?

Using blog as pillow I can scream into for a moment:

2010-08-19T06:39:00.001-07:00

I AM SO SICK OF CLEANING UP OTHER PEOPLE'S PEE.

I just needed to get that out before I lost my ever-lovin' mind.

Thank you. Carry on, as you were.

The new kids

2010-08-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

This was the first week of school. Blessedly.

My two older boys started at a new school, the public school, in third grade and first grades.

It's the elementary school I attended. I still remember my own first day of Kindergarten there. My Kindergarten teacher still teaches there. That is a little scary and a little wonderful. I am not sure which outweighs the other, frankly. I can tell you that the kids come home smelling the same way I remember elementary school smelling, and there is no doubt there -- that's just scary.

We walk to school, the four of us, me hanging onto the hand of the toddler for dear life as he tries to wriggle free and chase every butterfly and horsefly. Six-year-old C., who once yelled at me in outrage when he found out I had signed him up for golf lessons "because you KNOW I HATE TO WALK!" lurches behind us, bemoaning the fact that we must walk one whole block in the admittedly blazing heat. Firstborn trots along, his cowlicked hair bouncing in the sun, thinking his own thoughts. I never was able to walk to a school before, and it's pretty dang cool.

At the gate, I send them off to the orange hallway and the third grade pavilion line. It's a big school -- almost a thousand kids when you add in the preschool -- and the school we left last May had just about two hundred and change. This is a big change. It's a big deal.

I was never, ever the new kid. I was in the same schools, the same school system, my entire life until I left for college. My kids are having experiences I never did -- walking to school, starting over, learning a new way of doing everything. I am so proud of them.

The first day, Firstborn came home heartbreakingly (and awesomely) happy: "I made new friends! I love the lunch! Let me tell you about my teacher and my class and my..."

C. came home lukewarm. "I didn't make any friends," he said pensively. "But there was one kid I liked." Progress.

This was a big leap for my kids and a big leap for me. I have never made my kids do something quite so uncomfortable, so un"safe," before. When I was in third grade at the same elementary school, in those same concrete walls, my gifted resources teacher sent a note home to my parents: Mama is an excellent student, but she is very cautious. She needs to take more risks. Risks are not my favorite, it's true. But here we are, and we're happy. We are good.

If Summer was a triathlon, August was the swimming part.

2010-08-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

If you have ever raced in a triathlon (or, like me, finished a triathlon, but you wouldn't call it "racing"), you understand my title. The swimming part comes at the beginning, unlike August, but it is for almost everyone (except competitive swimmers) the hardest part, the part requiring the most endurance and adrenaline.

That was August for me.

Today was my bigger boys' first day of school. Hallelujah. But the past week, since I have been back from New York, has been one of the roughest in recent memory. And if I am describing a week as "rough," you know it involves one thing: emergency doctor visits.

I'll spare you most of the gory (and they were) details. Long story short: my middle son and the toddler rammed heads around 5 PM one evening, resulting in a whole lot of blood, a whole lot of screaming (some of it me), and some seriously gnarly looking gums for the toddler.

The next day, I hauled all three children to the pediatric dentist for an emergency visit. The week before school started. Also known as, "the busiest time in a pediatric dentist's year."

Baby B.'s front top teeth seem to be okay despite the incident, and the gums above them, navy blue and puffed out to THERE last week, are now looking their normal, petite selves. But while we sat in the office that day listening to the dentist, my middle son came out of the bathroom and attempted to rejoin us. C. is something of a pratfall artist -- he is physical in a very physical way. He flops on the floor when he is mad about something. He runs everywhere. He's dramatic. Maybe I should start calling him Chevy Chase on the blog. Anyway, he's a character.

So he decides to run out of the bathroom, full blast towards me. Except, he doesn't seem to notice that the actual door to the office is closed. He runs straight into the floor-to-ceiling, plate glass window beside the door instead.

Like a bug flying into a windshield.

As nurses and receptionists flew out of various corners and huddled with a (barely bruised but way upset) C., patting him with ice packs and whispering to him, I burst into laughter. Yes, I am the Worst Mother Ever. But suddenly, the absurdity of my life -- a toddler with navy blue gums, a six-year-old with a rising bump on his temple from flying smack into a plate glass window, an eight-year-old manically playing with a stuffed animal gorilla with abnormally large plastic teeth nearby -- just hit me. I couldn't stop. It was pretty much the moment I lost my shit.

So today, the big kids went back, this time to a new school. They had good days. I celebrated their absence with the toddler by taking a completely impractical trip to the frozen yogurt shop. I'm completely exhausted tonight, but I am nothing compared to what I was last week. I really do feel like I just finished the swimming portion of a triathlon -- wearing my street clothes and sneakers.

As always, I wish I could just enjoy these days. It's just hard with, you know, the blood and stuff.

The Inevitable, Apparently Mandatory? BlogHer Post

2010-08-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

This fall, I have been blogging for three years. It's a long time in a lot of ways -- three years ago, I had a newborn. Now, I have a new three-year-old peeing on my feet and announcing gleefully that he just "peed on Kung Fu Panda's head." Ah, cheap character underwear from Target. You are the only thing keeping sewage from hitting my wood floors.

I still consider myself a newbie of sorts in the blogging world, though. This was never more apparent than this past weekend, when I flew to New York City and attended BlogHer '10, largely on a whim. I bought my ticket a year ago, not really thinking it through but not wanting it to sell out. I wasn't sure if I would use it or not, but then I found out that Lindsey from A Design So Vast and Kathryn from Marbury v. Madison Ave. had a room at the Hilton, and suddenly it seemed a lot more manageable. So off I went, in an effort to do something for myself and to see what the whole shebang was really about.

There are a LOT of posts about BlogHer '10 out there on the Interwebs right now. Everyone has a take. Everyone has something to say -- big shocker. If you Google "BlogHer '10," you will have reading material for a few days. The word most commonly used to describe the experience is "overwhelming" -- probably a predictable word to describe the convergence of about 2397 women and approximately three men on one hotel in the middle of New York City in the blazing heat of August, bookended by elaborate parties and swag extraordinaire.

I suppose it was overwhelming. But it also wasn't. I mean, that part I actually expected -- a lot of women, a lot of vendors, a lot of buffets. I expected a lot of laptops, a lot of smartphones, a lot of crowded ballrooms. I didn't expect Bruce Jenner to be pouring orange juice (WHY?!) or life-size Mrs. Potato Heads and Padma Lakshmi either. But that was just the beginning, really.

Others have described BlogHer like high school or junior high. I will agree, though not exactly for the same reasons. In my high school, we had a lot of students -- around 1800. Among those students, you had those who were in the highest level classes and were shooting for big colleges from the day they were born. You had kids who were better suited for vocational classes and were there to learn a trade. And then you had the kids in the middle, the ones who just weren't really sure yet whether their fates lay in community colleges or the Ivy League.

BlogHer was a lot like that: a big mix of "students," some completely driven and ambitious or well on their way to success, some happier to keep their heads down and learn the trade and just take the ride, and a whole bunch of women who just don't know yet. I was one of those. Among all of us, there were the inevitable stereotypes: the popular girls, the nerds, the beautiful people, the purposeful outliers. There were older women, younger women, women with babies, women with pregnant bellies, fat women, skinny women, bespectacled women, lesbians... it was a microcosm of the female American universe.

I think I didn't prepare enough for BlogHer, because I didn't really know who anyone was enough to understand the social dynamics at play. I am a really extroverted person, and I pretty much never feel out to sea at big social events. I did at BlogHer, however, and I think that was because I quickly figured out there was a social scene I had no idea or place in at work. And you know, that's not a judgment. It's kind of natural, right? In the blogging world, people read each other's blogs and comment and create a community. They apparently also Twitter relentlessly, a social media phenomenon I only started dipping my toes in recently (you can follow me and my very rare tweets at the handle ElmoWallpaper now, and I'll follow you back). In short, these women arrived as friends and they wanted to see each other, whereas I was sort of Sandy arriving at Rydell High with no clue as to what I was stepping into. I came home with a slew of new blogs on my Google Reader, and I wish I had read blogs more broadly before I left.

I was bedazzled by the few blogging starlets I did see (hello, Pioneer Woman!) and I met some amazingly nice and funny and articulate women. In fact, that is my biggest take-away from the entire weekend: wow, there are a lot of effing smart women out there in this blog world of ours. Like, wicked smart. I was so pleased to hear about the speeches at the Washington Project (encouraging women to run for office) and at the Voices of the Year talks. The BlogHer coordinators really did a fantastic job of encouraging a pool of crazy smart, crazy resourceful women to own their power and use it. It was inspiring to me.

The panels were hit and miss, and I am not sure how I would recommend changing them to make them more useful. Perhaps more of a workshop atmosphere, or smaller groups, or a forum? At the panels I attended, it was clear that the audience had as much to say as the speakers. I mean, hello, it's a blogging conference. We are all a bunch of over-sharers. I think more participation would have been more educational for me, and I would have relished the chance to interact more with perfect strangers. As it was, my favorite panelists were Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess), who was freaking hysterical, and Rita Arens (Surrender, Dorothy and BlogHer itself). Both had a lot of great things to say and wonderful advice.

It was hard to break out of the small groupings of people we knew during the conference itself, because other attendees seemed very attached to their old friends and not as invested in making new ones. I can't blame them, but my main goal in blogging at all is to make connections, so for me, this was a fail. If I had old friends at the conference, it probably would have been me doing this. As it was, I clung to the few people I did know and felt, for the first time in a really long time, like a fish out of water. Still, I managed to meet a few new friends that I am really excited to read in the future, and that is a gift. Watch my blogroll as I add the blogs of some of my new-found peeps.

Because I am incredibly lucky, too, my supportive, wonderful friend Lisa Belkin invited me to a small lunch and tour at the New York Times. There, I met some really awesome bloggers, including Because I Said So's Dawn Meehan, Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids, Heather and Whitney from Rookie Moms, Amy at Selfish Mom, and more. I was so in awe. I do believe I was the only one without a book deal or a book under my belt. When they asked what I write about, I fumbled around and usually ended up just saying, "Um... I am a mommy blogger?" Yeah, DUH. Good one there. Really impressive. The Times building was phenomenal, and lunch was fun. A pinch-yourself kind of fun.

Another highlight? Dinner Friday night with Aidan from Ivy League Insecurities, my brave roommate, Lindsey from A Design So Vast, and Denise from Musings de-Mommy, a new friend I met through Aidan and Lindsey. We laughed a lot. We ate apparently sub-par flaming cheese (I have a hard time criticizing flaming cheese, but I also have limited experience on the subject). We talked -- really talked -- about all sorts of subjects in our lives, big and small. That was the kind of exchange I hoped to find at BlogHer, and I found it with these smart, funny, expressive women.

I wandered through the rest of the conference -- the crazy Expo Halls and swag booths, the parties where I wore a bag on my head and danced to Bel Biv Devoe. I met two amazing writers who live right here in my bubble at home -- who knew? And I came home with a dozen Magnolia Bakery cupcakes. If you haven't had a Magnolia Bakery red velvet cupcake, let me tell you something: put it on your list.

So, all in all, I gained a lot from BlogHer'10: new friends, new insights, and a renewed sense of motivation and inspiration to figure out what exactly I want from this blog (and what I do not). I didn't exactly find what I thought I would out of the conference, but I received a lot that I didn't expect. Mostly, I realized how big this blogging world is, how smart and articulate and awesome the women are who are in it, and how untapped our resources still are. I am proud to be part of the collective female blogging voice. This world was built on the stories of its people, and I feel like I am continuing a part of that oral history -- creating our cyber Red Tent, telling our stories, making the world smaller and our influence bigger all at the same time. I am humbled by the women who stand beside me in that effort.

"So... do you write about... wallpaper?"

2010-08-09T13:18:00.001-07:00

By far, the most popular question I encountered at BlogHer '10 was what the heck my blog name means. Even people I assumed knew did not know.

Complicating this was that I also had no good pitch for this blog when I met other writers, publishers, and editors. "What do I write about?" Um... me? My kids? Being a woman/mother/sister/daughter/wife/lover of frozen yogurt? It seemed like such a short, vague answer compared to the many women milling around with book deals.

Someone actually did ask me if I write about wallpaper. I do like wallpaper, but I don't actually have any in my house. I'm not sure I am grown up enough for it yet. It's such a commitment. More than one person asked if I just really, really like Elmo. Elmo's not even my favorite Sesame Street resident (that title would go to Ernie).

When I was contemplating starting a blog, I decided I couldn't start it until I found the perfect blog title for myself. I thought and debated for a long time. I like to think of myself as creative, so it took me forever to be pleased with my own idea. The Elmo Wallpaper just flashed into my brain at some point, and I knew it was perfect. I read a Victorian short story in college titled "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (published in 1892), about a wife and mother who goes crazy and starts seeing things in her yellow wallpaper in her bedroom, where she is confined. It's the perfect analogy to my own life, in which I also often start to feel crazy and lost in a sea of toys and the stuff of children and home.

Be certain, we have several Elmos in our house. We have been longtime viewers of Elmo's World. We love Elmo. But we don't own any Elmo wallpaper. However, I think you all would be truly impressed if you knew how many people in the world either own or want to buy Elmo wallpaper. Trust me, it's pretty crazy. My sitemeter referrals from searches for "elmo wallpaper" are through the roof. I went to a BlogHer panel this weekend about small blogs, and when people were comparing their low hit counts, I giggled. I get TONS of hits... for one second each. Once the hitters realize I am actually NOT a purveyor of Elmo wallpaper, they move on. Just as well, I suppose.

So now you know. I hope you are not disappointed in my lack of actual Elmo wallpaper. I hope that, instead, you are delighted by it.

In the meantime...

2010-08-09T09:23:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this post from my dear friend Michelle's oldest son (of SIX KIDS), Ben, on the Mormon literary blog Segullah. Oh Michelle, how I hope I can someday say I did half as well as you did. Great job, Ben. Can you come to my house on your mission and make my children your project? It's a worthwhile cause, I promise.

Back from BlogHer '10

2010-08-09T08:59:00.001-07:00

I'm back. And boy, it's like I never left. When I stepped onto that airplane on Thursday, I was nearly broken. I needed a break like nobody's business. Over the course of the weekend, I acquired about 14,000 blisters on my poor, suburban feet. I ate xxx (number hidden to protect the very guilty) cupcakes from the way-too-nearby Magnolia Bakery. I had a fabulous sojourn to the New York Times for a lunch with other bloggers courtesy of my wonderful and supportive friend, Lisa Belkin. And I had two crazy awesome dinners, one at Tabla on Union Square and the other at an old favorite, Dos Caminos, this time in the Meatpacking District (and whoa has that place changed in the last fifteen years! Hello, crazy trendy!). I met several awesome women and I have a ton of new feeds on my Google Reader to dig into in my spare moments.

I tromped home yesterday, leaving the city a little after 11 AM, riding the train from Penn to the airport, then waiting on a delayed flight. I spent the flight frustrated as heck at my TV screen, which kept flickering in seizure-inducing style ways so that I couldn't actually SEE Bethenny giving birth, but I could hear it. I think I would have preferred the opposite.

I arrived home to a tired, frustrated Husband and three children who had eaten very little but McDonald's while I was gone. They had torn down the main shelf in my closet. They somehow pulled a sliding, paned door off its tracks in the dining room. I can barely see my desktop screen through the sticky fingerprints. There's a new chocolate milk stain on my white coverlet and my well-meaning husband put it in the dryer. Oh, and potty-training commenced today. Just that. You know. Little stuff.

So I am back. And I am writing a post about BlogHer itself, but I am still wondering how to write it. It was a whirlwind and it wasn't. It was overwhelming and it wasn't. It was something like a phenomenon. I didn't fangirl the Pioneer Woman as I wanted to -- just said hi -- but I did fangirl Heather Spohr, and by the time I did, I had no idea what to say. I was so scared by all the blog posts about what you should and shouldn't say to your favorite bloggers if you saw them at BlogHer. So instead of saying what I wanted to say, I told her I lived in Los Angeles once too. Um, okay. She then giggled at my blog name (which, by the reaction of fellow bloggers at BlogHer this weekend showed me, I need to explain -- post forthcoming). So, yeah, that.

Okay, had to run off to get Baby B. out of his first pair of poopy underwear (poor Thomas the Train) and throw it in the trash. B. is now in the shower, since no brand new three-year-old can step out of a pair of poopy underwear at all gracefully. I might have eaten a cupcake for breakfast and another for lunch.

Yes, I am back.

Stuck in a Moment...

2010-08-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

Hello, long-lost friends and readers. I feel terribly guilty about my lack of blogging this summer, especially as I begin to pack for, duh, a conference for BLOGGERS (you probably do need to blog to enjoy such a conference!).

I cannot explain my silence this summer easily. I can say that I have had an awful lot of childcare to do, and that has kept my computer time to a minimum. I'm a desktop gal -- laptops make me nervous -- and so blogging demands actually sitting down in my bedroom office nook. There have been just a mere six days this summer when all three of my offspring were ensconced in summer camp, and I spent five of those days working furiously on my house. The sixth day was my birthday. So, you know, there are time constraints. Despite popular beliefs, not a whole lot of bon-bon eating and soap-opera watching goes on around these parts. I do believe that when school begins, I will be a much more prolific blogger.

However, I have also been struggling with internal limits. After a few of my more recent posts, some comments that were not even malicious or ill-meaning set off some alarm bells in my mama bear head. I blog anonymously in part to protect my children and my husband and in part because I don't want the local mom crews at school to know my every inner thought and whim. But lately, even anonymous blogging seems not protective enough. I have begun to feel censored. If I write my honest feelings, I cannot expect not to be judged for them. If I write honestly about my children, I cannot expect everyone to be gentle with them or to me and my parenting. We in my little family are flawed, imperfect, sometimes naughty. And at this moment in my life and parenting, I feel the need to put up some fences and protect myself a little more.

I have no interest in writing a blog that isn't genuine or brutally honest, and so these feelings are hindering me quite a bit. I am hoping that this weekend, I will be inspired and motivated to write without fear. I'm over-thinking things right now, and it's hard to form good words and sentences in that spirit.

So bear with me, and know that I am hanging in here with white knuckles. My kids are driving me crazy, my housework is threatening to kill me, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I hope to navel gaze about it quite thoroughly here in the coming months, and I hope you will be here when I do. In the meantime, I am off to the concrete jungle where dreams are made for a few days of a much-needed mommy break. And I didn't feel guilty, not one little bit, when Firstborn screamed at me in the Perkins parking lot this morning that he bet I wouldn't even miss them while I am gone. Because quite honestly, I will not. So sue me.

Help!

2010-07-23T07:37:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-12T12:18:00.001-07:00

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...

2010-07-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-04T11:05:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-03T11:24:00.001-07:00

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.

Well, this hit home.

2010-06-28T11:21:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-09T22:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-06-06T18:32:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-02T18:48:00.000-07:00

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:

2010-06-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

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.

A few housekeeping changes...

2010-05-31T12:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-05-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T11:49:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-11T16:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Some things never change

2010-04-27T08:23:00.001-07:00

This post is not about motherhood. This post? Is about frozen yogurt.

Because even though I am now a 35-year-old mother of three, I have to tell you, I have an enduring passion for frozen yogurt that began in my childhood. Allow me a moment to wax rhapsodic about a food product that has been a mainstay in my life:

In high school, it was TCBY. Do you remember TCBY? The vanilla, it was a spiritual experience. Vanilla with blackberries? Manna of the gods. TCBY was good to me, both in high school and in my young adulthood when it was available close to my home in Dallas. It is now gone, nowhere to be seen around here, and I miss it something fierce.

In college, well, it was the legendary Thomas Sweet. Not only did I eat Dannon fro yo out of soft serve machines in my dining hall every day (uh, for lunch and dinner, topped with rice krispies -- does that cover even one food group?), but I supplemented my dining plan with regular trips to "T. Sweets" for pumpkin fro yo in the fall, butter pecan in the summer, oreo everywhere in between. Blend-ins, sort of like a McDonald's McFlurry, made it even better. I think if I still lived in that college town, I might STILL eat fro yo for lunch and dinner.

In NYC, it was Tasti-D-Lite. Oh yeah, I know you have fancy-pants fro yo now, Red Mango and Pinkberry and whatnot. But give me some old school Tasti-D-Lite, the kind that you wondered if anything in it came from nature at all, any day. That stuff got me through my early 20s. It has a special place in my heart.

And now? I know there is a wave of trendy frozen yogurt shops sweeping through the country, especially in NYC and California. I wish I was there to partake. Instead, I am forced to forage the area for whatever is offered to me. It's at least a 20-minute drive to the nearest fro yo shop, located close to -- you guessed it -- a college campus. Now I eat tart fro yo, but I still eat it with my beloved blackberries on top. They are fresh, healthy berries now -- not the partially-thawed, soaked in syrup blackberries of my TCBY days -- but they get the job done.

So even as everything in my world changes on a daily basis, even as my knees let me know that replacement surgery is somewhere in my future and I carry a prescription for a mammogram in my purse and people who call me mommy possess adult teeth, some things stay the same. As much as I adore cupcakes and pie and a big old vat of guacamole and chips... I could eat fro yo every single day. Give me a chance, and I just might. And I kind of love that.

P.S. -- In a month, I get to visit T. Sweets!

No comment.

2010-04-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

Being the mother of three boys makes me the recipient of a whole lot of comments. Some comments are positive, some are negative. Some are insightful; others are inane. But whatever they are, comments are frequent and inevitable.

I don't consider myself to be, as the Dutch term it, a person with "long toes." That is, my feelings are not easily hurt, my toes not too easily stepped on. I can be hurt, for sure. I am sensitive about some topics, just like anyone else. I wouldn't call myself either thick-skinned or "thin-skinned." I am somewhere in between. But when it comes to the topic of parenting three boys, I have my peeves. So as you might imagine, some comments rub me all the wrong way.

You're so lucky you'll never have a teenage girl!

There are a few things I take umbrage to in that sentence, and not just because it's not just a little misogynistic. First of all, the movement against teenage girls kind of irritates me... a lot. Yes, they are dramatic, emotionally exhausting, they can be mean... there are a lot of things about teenage girls that can be intimidating or exasperating. I get it. You have to worry about a daughter, I know. But I happen to think that along with all those qualities, teenage girls are pretty kick ass. With all the drama and all the heightened emotions comes an exquisite, complex emotional beauty too. Creativity. Industry. Poetry. I love that teenage girls are so bursting with their emotions that they end up spilling all over the place whether they want them to or not. I love the vulnerability. I love the way they figure out the world. There is a reason my college thesis was on adolescent girls coming of age: it's an amazing, awesome process. When people give me this line about how I should be grateful I'll never have one of my own, I kind of want to punch them. Shut up. To raise a daughter is a privilege. To bear witness to the process of that daughter becoming a woman? That's a gift.

Boys are so much easier than girls!

For once and for all, people: if I had wanted things "easy," I wouldn't have chosen to have a child, much less three of them. I would have enjoyed a lifetime of Saturdays watching Lifetime movies and eating ice cream out of the tub, long bubble baths, and frequent vacations involving bed-and-breakfasts. I didn't sign up for "easy" when I embarked on the path to parenthood. Plus, watch me stumble through a day, trying to avoid the ER, feeding three ravenous young boys, eliciting more than one-syllable responses from them about various topics, and then tell me how much easier I have it. It's condescending and it's just plain wrong.

This statement usually accompanies something about how teenage boys are easier than teenage girls. First, see above. Second, while I hung out at bonfires roasting marshmallows with my anti-drinking Mormon friends and then went on to an Ivy League university, my little brother jumped off his bedroom balcony in the middle of the night to meet up with his friends for his own sort of adventures: drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll. The police brought him home more than once, and he had a daughter before Thanksgiving of his freshman year of college. Tell my mom how much easier a teenage boy is. There are no guarantees. In fact, I'll hazard to say that the only guarantee is that all teenagers are hard. There are no easy teenagers!

At least you don't have a girl. You won't have to worry about a daughter getting pregnant.

No, I won't. But I will have to worry about my sons getting pregnant. Of course, there is a difference -- as a woman, I understand that it's a whole different ball game when it is your child who has a baby growing inside her belly. But there is a ball game over on the boy side of this problem too, and no one ever talks about it: when it is your son who impregnates someone, you have no control over anything. You have no control over whether there is an abortion, or an adoption, or who raises your grandchild. And it is, just as much, still your grandchild in question. My parents learned this first-hand. It's not right or wrong -- it just is. There is a different kind of heartache, parenting the father of such a baby. You are at the mercy of the mother and her family. It's not a good place to be. So let me just assure you, I won't be coasting through those teenage years, nothing to worry about here. There will be a lot of worry and a lot of condoms on bananas.

There are other comments I don't love -- Aren't you going to try for the girl? It's so much easier for you to have boys since you already had all the boy stuff! You wouldn't even know what to do with a girl! -- but they don't carry as much baggage for me as those first three do. My biggest advice is this: when you learn that your friend is going to have a baby boy, whether it is her first, her second, or her seventh, the proper response is this: That is wonderful news. Congratulations! Let her follow up with any other comments. No editorial needed.

Lenore Skenazy gives me a complex.

2010-04-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

Have you read Free-Range Kids? Lenore Skenazy has done and written some interesting things. She's the woman who wrote about letting her nine-year-old son navigate his way home on the NYC subway system alone (with money, a map, a Metro Card, and change for a public telephone) from Bloomingdale's in Midtown Manhattan. At the time I first read about her, her blog, and her book, I thought her ideas were pretty cool.

Thing is, I could actually see letting a mature, savvy nine-year-old find his way home on a NYC subway alone -- during the day and allowing that he was very familiar and comfortable in the city. Having lived in the city, I know that there are tons of people -- almost every single one of them good and honest -- around at all times, and there is something of a feeling of safety in numbers there. It's not a seedy place, Midtown Manhattan.

It's not that I disagree with Lenore Skenazy or think her ideas are insane or think she is a bad parent. It's that I get the feeling, increasingly, that she thinks I am a bad parent. This week, she is touting a movement by a blog called The Neighborhood Crime Map for a national "Take Our Children to the Park... and Leave Them There Day," a day to take your kids to the park and, you guessed it: leave them there alone.

I don't have a hysterical reaction to the idea. I don't necessarily think my kids would die if I participated in this. They might die, but probably not.

But the vibe I get is that Skenazy believes we are all being overprotective if we don't embrace such ideas. Maybe that is because she says things such as this sentence in her post about the park day: "... the price we pay for our inflated fear is kids who are inside, bored, scared, screen-addicted and toddler-like in their dependency." Well, okay. That's not at all fear-mongering, is it? Or extreme?

I don't live in New York City. My parks are not surrounded by people and buildings. I live in a state that pretty much has the monopoly (along with California) on Weird Child Predators and Random Kidnappings. A child predator, with separate, distinct convictions for both sexual battery on a child under the age of 12 and lewd and lascivious behavior with a child under the age of 16, lives down the street from me. In the state where I live, children disappear steps from their homes and are found days later in garbage dumpsters. Alligators are in the many nearby lakes. Little girls get lost sometimes.

I live in the suburbs, where we don't have public transportation at our fingertips. Our parks are spaced out. In fact, I would hazard to guess that people around here have become so used to children not being very free-range that it's more dangerous just because we aren't used to sharing the road with children on bicycles or running into the street to chase down their wayward balls. I'm not saying our streets are devoid of children -- far from it. But suburbia is a big place. We're not surrounded by people as cities are.

So now, instead of the Judgey McJudgeypants voices telling me that I should be doing more to protect my children, I have what I feel to be Judgey McJudgeypants voices telling me that I am not protective, I'm overprotective. I'm robbing my children of fun and their freedom -- heck, their entire childhoods -- if I don't encourage them to ride their bikes to the store or if I accompany them on their walks to school or if I don't trust them at a park alone for a day. I'm a bad mother now because I do arrange playdates for my children instead of letting them scrounge the neighborhood for new buddies. Hey, I want that for my kids. I had that. Except now I know about the predator down the street, whereas my mother did not. Now I know he's probably not the only one -- he's just the one I happen to know about, the one who has been caught before. How am I supposed to reconcile that knowledge with a wish for my kids to go do their thang in the neighborhood?

Oprah Winfrey, love her or hate her (and you know I love her, unabashedly), recently started a No Phone Zone campaign after she did a show on how dangerous it is to drive while talking, texting, or reading cell phones in the car. One of the first stories on the show was a mother talking about her daughter, who was just pedals from her house when she was killed by a driver on a cell phone. Everyone has smart phones now, and my neighborhood is rife with teenagers using cell phones and driving. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge? How am I supposed to let my children ride their bikes free-range style when I know that drivers really are not paying attention anymore?

When my children were toddlers, I used to daydream about a padded room. I wanted a padded room in my house, somewhere they couldn't get hurt, without corners to jab their eyes or fireplaces to cover or toilets and bathtubs and other water hazards. Just a padded room for my kids to bounce around in and where I knew -- KNEW! -- they couldn't get hurt. Now I wish for a different kind of padded room -- more like a padded ranch, perhaps? Where my kids could roam, YES, ROAM! Outside! Without a "toddler-like dependency" on me!

I would like to be able to send my children out on their bikes, swinging from monkey bars, traveling in small child herds and finding new friends and adventures. I'm NOT a bad mother, yearning to lock my children in cages. But I made these children. I birthed them. I have crazy, wild, hard-to-tame hormones because of that. I have this feeling -- it's like ice in my veins, gripping my chest -- whenever I think about Somer Thompson, or that little boy in San Diego who was killed while his aunt waited for him outside the restroom on a public beach, or the little girl who was killed by that cell phone driver. I understand very well that random kidnappings and murders are very, very rare. I understand that the statistics do not favor anything catastrophic happening to one of my children in my neighborhood. But a friend of mine often says that "statistics" don't mean anything if it happens to you.

So I do the best I can. I let go, little by little, if only because I know someday I have to let them get driver's licenses and go to college. I practice my own attempts at free-range, even if they might look microscopic or ridiculous to others. Perhaps I have Post-Oprah/Dateline Syndrome. However, I know one thing for sure: I have enough voices from this society telling me how I am screwing up, how I am ruining my kids, how I am yet another dumb American making dumb American choices. When Lenore Skenazy acts like I am ridiculous to have my fears, that they are unfounded and that I am a "Helicopter Parent," destroying my kids' lives, it doesn't make me feel safer sending my kids out to play by themselves. It just makes the tension I feel between wanting them to explore and wanting them to be safe that much tighter, that much more fraught with emotion and guilt. As with everything else in parenting, I just wish there was less judgment, more tolerance, more listening, less yelling. Her blog and her book claims to want to help parents not go crazy letting their children go "free-range," but that's not the way they leave me feeling. They leave me feeling judged.

On May 22, I will be telling my children to go play outside -- in our fenced in backyard, complete with playground, pool, and soccer balls -- without me. That will have to be good enough for now.

Three Days in the Hospital

2010-04-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

I promised a few people, including Husband, that I would finish the Saga of the Stomach Virus, and so I pick up where we left off:

When I picked Baby B. up from Husband at home to take him to be admitted to the hospital on Easter Eve, he had thrown up three times and had many issues on his other end. He was pale and he was thin. But you would never know how sick he was when we arrived at the pediatric floor that night -- he bounced and trotted around the little room we were assigned for several minutes before he stopped suddenly and looked at me, concern spread across his face.

"Uh oh," he said ominously.

An explosive sound followed, and immediately I was carrying him gingerly across the floor, leaving a trail of body fluid behind us. I went out to the desk nurse to ask for a plastic bag for his clothes, and as I did, our assigned nurse came back, extremely annoyed with me for apparently breaking some unspoken rule about asking another nurse for something without her approval.

After I had cleaned him (and cleaned up the floor... ahem), the nurse told me we needed to put in another IV (remember, he just had an IV removed from his hand three hours before). I knew this was coming, but the dread overcame me just the same. I hate needles. I hate IVs. The pain of my own IVs was some of the worst pain of my child-birthing experiences (thank you to modern medicine for that!).

I am a little scarred too because when C. was born, the doctors feared he lacked a factor in his blood and that he had hemophilia B. Because of his clotting issues, he had to have NINE VIALS of blood drawn when he was THREE DAYS OLD. Have you ever tried to get that much blood out of a three-day-old? I so hope not. It involves sticking the baby numerous times all over his body, because the tiny veins just can't take much. I will never forget being in a tiny cubicle in the cancer ward of the hospital with my three-day-old son, holding him tightly while a nurse stuck him in the foot, the thigh, the arm, the hand, all while a mentally-disabled child somewhere nearby screamed bloody murder while his own blood was drawn. My boobs were exploding with milk, I could barely stand up, and I just cried and shut my eyes and willed myself through it.

You could say I have needle issues, in other words. Oh, and C. does not have hemophilia B.

So we trooped into a treatment room for the procedure, since, as the testy nurse explained to me, they don't like to "traumatize the kids in their rooms because the rooms are supposed to be a safe place for them." Great.

I didn't like our nurse. Can you tell? I was pleased to find out she would be the first to attempt a stick on a now-sleeping B. While he slept in my arms, she and her assistant prepped him and went in for the stick. I knew it wouldn't work, and as soon as she penetrated his skin, it was obvious it had not: he screamed. He hadn't even flinched earlier in the day in the ER, but now he was hurt. "Ouch! OUCH, MAMA! MAMA, SHE'S HURTING ME!" he wailed.

I steeled myself while she pronounced his vein "blown" and she removed the needle. Quickly, they began working on his other arm instead, the second nurse now in control of the needle. She shook her head, furrowed her brows, and stuck him. He screamed. "His vein is disappearing," she mumbled. "His veins are just too dry now."

At this point, I stood and let the nurses know we would be taking a break while I calmed down my hysterical son. I took him back to his room, his "safe place," and rocked him until he was calm again. I knew it wasn't really their faults necessarily, but I was bitter. I wished the ER nurses had left in a hep lock, anticipating a possible need for more fluids. I wished that I trusted these nurses more, but I didn't. I hated that it was now about 11 PM and my child was sick, exhausted, and still headed for another needle stick.

When he was quiet, I allowed the nurses to herd me back into the treatment room, which could not have been more cold and unfriendly, and a third nurse -- apparently something of a specialist -- appeared. She quickly and expertly stuck his arm, and the IV was in. They laid his arm on a board so he couldn't bend his elbow and taped him three ways to Sunday.

Exhausted, B. collapsed in my arms in the rocking chair and I was able to lay him down in his crib. I threw myself, fully clothed, onto the plastic couch and slept. It was fitful sleep, as I woke every time the nurse came into the room, but it was also the kind of bone-weary sleep that lets your brain stop working so that you can survive.

*************************************************

The glory of hospitals, if you ask me, is that you only have the same nurse for so long. It was awesome to wake up the next morning and have a brand new, un-attitudinal nurse. Yay for nice nurses! B. and I slept until around 9 AM. A soccer-themed Easter basket waited for B. -- "The Easter Bunny was here last night!" the nurse announced -- filled with crayons and stickers. A breakfast was there for him too: eggs, gray sausage-like substances, and juice. Um, okay.

I was sad. I was sad that I was missing Easter with my big boys. Every year, we hide eggs in our yard, and the boys have an Easter egg hunt first thing in their pajamas and sneakers. Then, while they simultaneously gorge on carefully selected candy, they open goodies from the Easter Bunny: small toys, sometimes wooden animals, play-doh, small stuffed animals. I had all my stuff stashed at home, but I hadn't had time to assemble it. Husband told the boys that the Easter Bunny delivered with instructions to wait for Baby B. It just seemed off and sad to me, though.

We also go to a local hotel every year for brunch with the grandparents and great-grandparents. The hotel hosts an elaborate egg hunt on a great green lawn, carnival games, pony rides, balloon twisters and face painters. Looking at the gray sausage-like substances on Baby B.'s breakfast tray just made me ache for the brunch we would miss all the more.

The day stretched on, and I truly believed that we would be released that morning. Wasn't I shocked to find out that the doctor had other plans? I likened our experience to the Hotel California -- you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Seems the doctors were afraid to release us and have Baby B. need to return, so we stayed for nearly three days in total, counting the ER. Our hospital was nice, and the floor was very quiet. We had on-demand movies, and for that reason, I had the pleasure of seeing the movie Curious George about fifteen times in a row. Baby B. refused to eat and I mostly subsisted on jellybeans.

The high point of the whole experience was the second night. Because he took a late nap, B. woke up at 1 AM ready to go. I was not ready to go. He was awake until 5 AM. I was delirious. Try entertaining a two-year-old strapped to an IV by his elbow in a ten-by-ten-foot room all night long when you are absolutely exhausted and recovering from a stomach virus yourself. Around 3 AM that night, I received a text from Husband: "C. just threw up all over his bed." I literally began to cry.

The Monday morning after Easter, the doctors stopped B.'s IV. He promptly had his first bowel movement since he exploded all over the room Saturday evening: more diarrhea. That kept us in the hospital until 7 PM that night, with more and more diarrhea to break up the monotony of the day. But once he showed that he could keep his fluids down by mouth, we were allowed to go home.

B. continued to have diarrhea for a full week afterwards, and C. threw up about every other night and had diarrhea too for the same amount of time. Good times.

The best part of the whole thing? Although I kept C. home most of the next week (until he was vomit-free for over 24 hours), the rest of the school proceeded to catch the virus -- and every single parent blamed it on us, announced the vomit on Facebook, and then posted messages on my Facebook wall threatening to send their children to my house. Even three weeks after we had the virus. As if we invented the stomach virus. We weren't even Patient Zero, thankyouverymuch.

Needless to say, I am happy that is over with, and I feel like we have paid our stomach virus karmic dues for the foreseeable future. We're also paying a carpet cleaner and a team of housekeepers. Lysol is our best friend. And I think I might need some PTSD therapy.

Stuck in the middle with you

2010-04-20T07:12:00.001-07:00

Even though I have been through it twice before, could see it coming, and know I can deal with it, the ending of Baby B.'s naps just came too soon. We are currently in that hellish in-between phase: he can nimbly and swiftly climb out of his crib. He doesn't need a whole nap, and when he gets one, he can't fall asleep until midnight. He really does need some nap, but he isn't quite tired enough to go down for it reliably. We are stuck in the middle with not enough sleep and no predictable or reliable nap times for this mama to count on day after day. Let's not even talk about the gripping fear that accompanies any car trip after 3 PM -- even a fifteen-minute snooze in the carseat could screw up up for the whole night.

There are other distressing landmarks happening too: Baby B.'s thighs are thinning out. He doesn't have those ridiculous, awesome rolls anymore, especially dimpled right near the knees. His little face is becoming more boyish and less babyish. His vocabulary is expanding in ways both amazing and embarrassing: I suppose only the third brother could know words like "dangit," "boring," "hate," and "shutup" when he is only two and a halfish. Le sigh.

He still believes a kiss from mama heals all boo-boos and he still runs unabashedly full-bore towards me at preschool pick-up. His little diaper still sticks up above the elastic waistband of his still tiny shorts. He still thrills that his sneakers have Snoopy on them and he does not, as my new six-year-old does, demand that his next pair be Skechers (oh, how I have dreaded the black Skechers request!).

I'll take what I can get at this point, but I sure don't want to lose this little baby boy to boyhood yet. I am going to revel in his snuggles, complete with ear tugging and finger-sucking and little feet that still like to curve into my side. I don't like the in-between nappage phase, but I love the in-between boyhood phase.

It didn't actually kill me.

2010-04-19T12:33:00.000-07:00

I know, I have been MIA. Believe it or not, the Stomach Virus of the Ages kept the family down a whole week more after I wrote that blog post, and I have been catching up ever since.

I have SO many thoughts I would like to write about, but my fingers never seem to find the keyboard long enough to write anything. I promise I will be back, and soon. Bear with me.

The Easter That Tried to Kill Me

2010-04-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

So, you know how last week I came home from my Black Eyed Peas virtual concert to some early-morning child barfing?

Oh, if only the story ended there.

My seven-year-old had a stomach bug last week. Sunday. He threw up twice and looked ghostly pale, maybe had a bit of fever, but though I kept him home the next day, he recovered quickly.

Wednesday, my six-year-old started throwing up. He seemed to have a worse case, and he threw up maybe fifteen to twenty times between 6 AM and 1 PM that day. After a long nap, though, he also seemed close to himself. I sent him to school the next morning, believing it was a standard 24-hour bug and not wanting him to miss his class egg hunt.

Thursday, I picked Baby B. up from preschool, sweaty and appropriately sugared up from his own preschool egg hunt and Easter party, wearing construction paper rabbit ears with his name on them. He and Firstborn and I headed to C.'s Kindergarten egg hunt. All went well, and all three of my children were happily playing on the class playground while I chatted with the sundressed, fancy private school Kindy moms, when out of the blue, Baby B. started throwing up. EVERYWHERE.

It was as if the Creature from the Black Lagoon had risen out of the lake beyond and lunged down at the innocent denizens of Kindergarten. The mothers shot up off the picnic benches, screaming their children's names, hustling them off the tainted mulch and into the safer confines of the classroom, dousing their offspring with Purell and baby wipes.

We were the Sick. The Shouldn't Be Theres. Oops. I stripped a flushed and bewildered Baby B. down to his diaper right there on the slide, much to the horror of the seven-year-old, who told me that if any of his classmates saw his naked brother, his "college reputation would be shot." We trundled out to the car, avoiding eye contact with the cowering mothers still in the classroom, and drove home with our tails between our contagious legs.

Baby B. then proceeded to barf for hours, every time giving me a heart attack because he would go limp like a rag doll and loll over onto his side when he did, making me think he might actually be dying or seizing or something I have seen on an episode of House, MD. By that evening, he was having diarrhea and suffering a fever as well. And in the middle of the night, C. started throwing up violently. Again. After taking a day off.

Friday, my mother, Husband, and I all acquired the plague as well. It was not a happy day at my house. I was still hanging on to hope that we would be able to make our annual pilgrimage to the Big Hotel for Easter brunch, the Easter Bunny, and egg hunts and games. I had outfits ready to go. Baby B. had a jon-jon with an embroidered bunny on the bib. The bunny had a tiny, perfect, fluffy tail. The boys had seersucker pants and sweater vests.I had Easter baskets ready, plastic eggs to fill with jellybeans, chocolate bunnies.

Saturday morning, it was clear that we were Not Getting Better. Baby B. couldn't hold down even an innocuous Pedialyte pop. C. was still barfing in the middle of the night. Baby B. began having torrid, nightmare-inducing rounds of diarrhea. I called the pediatrician.

We were off to the ER. In a last-ditch attempt to keep Baby B. from completely dehydrating, we decided to take him so that he could have IV fluids. I walked dejectedly into the ER waiting room, Baby B. on my hip in sad little pajama bottoms and T shirt, and I gave the receptionist his name.

The next second, Baby B. barfed. All over me. It was the banana I had tried to give him earlier that morning. It went all down my arm, all down my yoga-pantsed leg, and straight into my Kate Spade leather purse, where I had carefully stowed fresh diapers for him (now covered in banana vomit), my iPhone, my parking ticket, and fresh clothes for him. The entire waiting room came to a halt. I looked at the receptionist, cleared my throat, and said, "Well, I guess it's obvious why we are here."

We were quickly given a bed, but it would be three hours before the ER nurses were able to get back to us with a Zofran for B.'s nausea. The nurses looked skeptically at B., now only in a hospital gown and a diaper, and asked, "Can he pee into a cup for you?"

I laughed. "Uh, probably not." My children aren't potty-trained until after they turn three, and B. had never peed on cue ever, anywhere before.

"Pity," the nurse answered. "We'll have to run a tube up his penis and collect it that way instead."

I looked down at my baby, lying so little in that big ER gurney, his middle fingers in his mouth and his other hand tugging on his ear just so, and my heart broke. "Yeah, well, give me that cup," I said. "I can give it a try."

A second later, we were in the bathroom, and I had stripped Baby B. down naked, not voluntarily. I showed him the cup. "Can you pee-pee into this for me?" I asked him. He balked. "No Mama, I no pee-pee. I no wanna be in the bafroom!" He tried to leave, but I caught his arm.

"Little dude," I said quietly but firmly. "Trust me when I say that you WANT TO PEE-PEE IN THIS CUP FOR MAMA."

I held the cup under his penis, and he and I both stared down at it. Then I used my patented, this-is-going-to-make-me-a-million-dollars-someday method for little boy potty-training:

"B.," I said. "Talk to your penis. Tell it to show you the pee-pee!"

He paused. And HE DID IT. Just like that. The two-year-old who had not peed all day, thus frightening me and his pediatrician into an ER visit, unleashed a geyser of pee into that little cup. In fact, he peed so much that I feared that in a second, we would have more than enough. "That's good," I said quickly. And he STOPPED.

It was like MAGIC. It was like Desmond opening his eyes after he touched Penny's hand at the stadium.

You either get that reference or you don't.

I triumphantly waltzed back into our little ER room, brandishing my genius baby and his dark yellow pee. Unfortunately, the nurses didn't return for a long time. When they did return, they only gave B. one bag of fluid. I thought he was supposed to get more, but I decided that the doctor didn't seem too concerned, so I guessed it was enough. By the time we left, though, B. was starving -- eating anything I would give him, including graham crackers and Gatorade -- but also having voluminous and increasingly frequent diarrhea blowouts. I had to change three diapers in a ten-minute period.

We went home, and we were home all of ten minutes when Baby B. projectile vomited all over his changing table. Hmm. I thought Zofran stopped vomiting? Must be a fluke. A while later, I left for Target for last-minute Easter doings and to pick up the rest of Baby B.'s Zofran. Thirty minutes later, Husband called me.

"B. has thrown up twice more," he reported," and he is having diarrhea blowouts right and left." I digested this information, and suddenly I realized that this was not going to fade gently into this good night. "And," Husband added," your mother called. Her father died tonight."

It was almost a Comedy of Terrors.

I called the pediatrician, and he delivered the somewhat shocking, somewhat predictable decision that Baby B. would need to spend the night back in the hospital. Within minutes, the nurse from the peds floor called and told me to bring him as soon as possible. I drove like a robot, processing it all. Easter was not going to happen. I was spending the night at the hospital with my little exploding baby. My mom's abusive, scary father -- whom my grandmother finally divorced when my mother was just out of college despite his promises to kill her for it -- had died. It wasn't unexpected, but it was complicated.

Whew.

I think I'll save the hospital stay for tomorrow. It's worth a blog unto itself. Until then, I leave you in this moment, when I cried in the car as I drove to my home -- cried for my big boys and how they would miss their Easter morning, cried for my baby and how sick he was and how he would need to be stuck again for another IV, cried for my mother and for what she would be putting to rest this week after so much time, and cried for myself, because I was sleep deprived and brain overloaded and unable to figure out just how to navigate this obstacle course of motherhood. And because this? Just kind of sucked.