Category: Motherhood

. . . and I don’t even have a license.

I Shouldn’t Even Say This

You know how you like to look as if you have things together? Or at least you try to keep from looking like a lunatic? You might be frothing at the mouth, screaming at your kids, but the phone rings and you say, “Hello?” in the sweetest voice imaginable? Or someone says to you in public, “How are you?” and you say, “Oh, fine. Busy, but fine!” when you are really thinking, “I’m drowning! If I have to wipe one more nose or smell one more stinky kid, I will throw myself out the window!”

Mostly, I strive to appear like a sane woman who has it sort of together. I mean, most days I don’t wear foundation and mascara and blush, so my face is bleary and lipless and blotchy which is always embarrassing when someone unexpectedly stops by. And recently a mom-friend told me she’d never seen me in jeans, only sweatpants, which is purely coincidental, because I don’t wear sweatpants all the time. Really. I don’t. But I don’t look like Sar*h J*ssica Parker, dancing my way through a Gap commercial, either. (Everytime I see that, I think, she’s my age, which is clearly wrong.)

But I know people think I am calm and sedate and rational. And today I wasn’t. At all.

I shouldn’t even say this–after all, what will you think–but today my twins made me furious. All I wanted them to complete for school was one unit of spelling and a few vocabulary lessons. Simple, right? They both woke up with the emotional stability of a teenage girl experiencing premenstrual syndrome. TwinBoyA actually narrowed his left eye at me while snarling through a curled lip when I went over his science assessment from yesterday. Both twins refused to do their spelling. Their defiance is what set me off.

Pretty soon I was gritting my teeth and demanding that they work. They dug their heels in. The baby was fussing in my arms while Babygirl and DaycareKid squabbled over toys. At some point, TwinBoyA expressed his displeasure with me by walking through the kitchen and casually knocking a high chair tray and a couple other items to the floor. He has been throwing things in fits of anger since before he could walk. He used to throw furniture–the child-sized rocker was a favorite–but now, he just slyly displaces things–I will find a stack of CDs on the floor or a pencil snapped in two and discarded behind a chair.

When he purposely tipped things onto the floor, I went berserk inside my head. I pursed my lips into a tight line and then went to his room and opened his headboard and threw his stack of playing cards on the floor. I dumped his bedding (unmade bedding) on the floor. I tossed some books on the floor. I emptied a plastic container full of blocks on the floor. TwinBoyB watched me do this. He was completely shocked. I did not care. I took the folded laundry from the couch and deposited it on the floor between their beds.

Both boys went upstairs and I found them playing Nintendo. I took the controllers out and told them to finish their lessons. They tried to make deals with me: “We’re not doing spelling. How about if we do music instead?” No. No. No.

I was so angry that I fantasized about grabbing the car keys and leaving the house. I imagined enrolling them back in public school next year. In fact, I called TwinBoyA over to me and I informed him how very close he was to returning to school. I said, “So if you’d like to be back in the halls of school, having people make fun of you, just go ahead because that’s where you’re heading.”

I thought of Mt. St. Helen’s . . . how it explodes when there is no easy outlet for its molten lava. I was like that volcano today–bubbling with fiery hot fury.

I thought I was such an easy-going, calm, patient, loving person. And then I had kids. Motherhood is a continual lesson in disappointment with myself. I thought I’d be better. I thought I’d have more control over how this situation turned out. I thought my kids would be more like me and less like themselves. I thought my kids would want to please me.

I thought parenting would be a stroll through a flower-filled park (quit laughing) and instead, it turns out to be an uphill climb in the rain. At night. Carrying four kids on my back. Without adequate footwear. Or a light. Or food. And all the while, they are chattering in my ears and arguing and calling each other “Stupid.”

My kids are more like magnifying glasses than anything else. They have supersized spotlights which peer into the very corners of my being, illuminating the cockroaches and dust and mucky ugliness that lurks in me. I much preferred the public me that I used to know, the unruffled person who was unchallenged and unquestioned, the person who excelled at things she tried. My kids will never know that person. They only know the screaming me who retaliates like a child and who says things like, “STOP. TALKING. TO. ME.”

For the record, I did clean up the mess I made. So did TwinBoyA. They also both finished their spelling units and we discussed their behavior later. They promise to be better, to do better, to work harder tomorrow.

When TwinBoyA said I overreacted, I peered at him and said, “Child, if you light a fuse, you just might set off a bomb.”

I need a vacation.

“It Could Always Be Worse”

My friend, Brandie, mentioned to me today in an instant message that I haven’t written a word since Friday. Why? I offered the following reasons before the phone rang and naptime arrived and I abruptly abandoned our chat.

1) I have been too busy. My husband worked Friday night, most of Saturday and most of Sunday. (Retreat for the board of a rescue mission, funeral, meetings, church, meetings, and then another meeting.) I accepted a transcription job, so I had sixty-four pages to transcribe by this morning. The weather here was glorious, so we spent a lot of time outdoors. I took the kids twice to the school playground where the boys rode bikes, climbed the monkey bars and ran around. Babygirl pedaled her bike, too, and played on the slides. We finished each playground excursion with a McDonald’s ice cream cone.

2) I am too boring. My husband worked Friday night, blah, blah, blah, blah. My big outing this week was a drive to The House I Lust After Love to take pictures of the neighborhood for my friend, MarathonMom.

3) No one reads my blog over the weekend anyway. Well, hardly anyone.

Not long ago, the boys read a story in literature called “It Could Always Be Worse.” This is a tale of a Jewish man who had come to the end of his rope. He went to his rabbi for advice. He complains how bad things are: he’s poor, he and his six kids and in-laws live in a one-room hut. “Believe me, ” he says, “–my home is awful, and things could not possibly be worse!”

The rabbi tells the man to take his animals–his cow, goat and some chickens–into his house to live with him. Of course, things get worse, much worse. The man runs to the rabbi to complain. The rabbi tells him to take out the chickens. Soon after, the man runs to the rabbi again, complaining about the goat. The rabbi tells him to remove the goat. Then, the man runs to the rabbi crying about the cow. The rabbi tells him to take the cow out of his house.

Not a day later, the man runs to the rabbi to report, “Rabbi! You’ve made life sweet again for me. With all the animals out, the house is so quiet, so roomy, and so clean! What a pleasure!” (The End)

And that, my friends, is why staying home with just my four kids feels like a sort of a vacation. Today, DaycareKid didn’t come (sick in the night, I guess) and CuteBaby only stayed half a day. I felt liberated. I cleaned out YoungestBoy’s closet. I washed the twins’ bedding and remade their beds. These chores, done during daylight on a Monday, no less, were a pleasure, because normally, I’m fully occupied by the duties of my regular life: schooling the twins during the morning, taking care of 3-month old CuteBaby, refereeing the squabbles between Babygirl and DaycareKid, answering the phone, interacting with the laundry. (Interacting! Ha!) ( realized very recently that I am a working mom and a stay-at-home mom. I even make more than minimum wage now, a whole lot more if you count my occasional transcription work.)

We left at 4:00 p.m. for the playground and stayed until 5:00 p.m. Normally, my childcare duties extend until 5:30 p.m.

Truly, the days when my twins were babies seem like a picnic compared to the juggling act I perform now. You don’t realize how easy it is to parent a baby (or two), until you no longer have time to watch “The View” or “Oprah.” You aren’t grateful for a non-verbal infant until your house is filled with the shouts of pre-teens and toddlers. You have no idea how easy it is to clean a house when the only ones messing it up are you and your husband because your babies can’t use their hands yet. You don’t cherish those monontonous hours until later, when you realize your house, now full of chickens, a cow and a goat, wasn’t really that bad before. Working around naptime? No big deal. Loneliness? I could cope. Boring television? Oh, if only I could actually locate the remote control and turn the television to something other than Sesame Street.

Those were the days.
These are the days.
For tomorrow, I just might be living with an aardvark. You never know.

It’s all in how you look at it.

Mole-Whacking: A Follow-Up

Shocking, but true. My 5:30 a.m. walk this morning felt easier. I came home to a tidy house because I put stuff away before I went to bed last night. All I had to do after my shower was vacuum. DaycareKid arrived at 7:45 a.m., following by VisitingToddler and VisitingBaby at 8:15 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., CuteBaby arrived. I took him upstairs and put him down for his first nap. YoungestBoy left and I instructed the boys to take their literature assessments.

The babies took turns napping and while each one was awake, Babygirl held and rocked them and fed them bottles. At one point, my husband sat in the back yard with the toddlers while CuteBaby slept in his carseat and VisitingBaby napped upstairs. I mentioned to Barbara Curtis in an email that my day was going so well, despite my fears the night before.

Taking advantage of a lull in my day, I hurried to the laundry room to keep the laundry cycle moving. A gigantic foamy lake greeted me. My washing machine hose came loose again, emptying water onto the floor.

I opened the patio door and informed my long-suffering husband, “My washing machine leaked everywhere again.” He said, “Well, the Wet-Vac is in the back of the van.”

Bad news, good news. Last week, when I flooded the bathroom, we borrowed the Wet-Vac from friends. Lucky for me, we still had it.

I vacuumed up 24 gallons of water.

Moral of the story: Brag about your day and the laundry will take revenge.

At about 5:15 p.m., I paused and counted how many children had entered my home. Including the neighbor boys, eleven children. Eleven. (Here is where you are momentarily impressed and you think, how does she do it? and then I remind you one mole at a time and besides that, Barbara Curtis is the mother of twelve children, whereas I only mother four children and borrow the rest.)

Mole Whacking

This is the time of the night (10:30 p.m.) and the time of the week (Sunday night) that I think, I can’t do it. I am tired, my head aches, my carpets need to be vacuumed and I just can’t wake up in six hours to walk. I can’t coerce my boys into completing their math in the morning. I can’t deal with my two year old being two years old. I can’t handle DaycareKid and CuteBaby and I certainly can’t manage watching the two extra kids I agreed to watch in the morning for four hours (ages 2 and 4 months). I can’t come up with dinner for tomorrow night. I can’t finish the laundry. I can’t face another day. I’m weary.

But I will, because that’s what I do.

I wake up, I move through my day step by step, moment by moment, chore by chore. I do what has to be done. I cook again. I wash dishes again. I change diapers again. I guide my boys through lessons again. I do it all again and again and again. I’m always puzzled when people say, “I don’t know how you do it!” because there’s only one way–tackle the next thing that pops up–a lot like “Whack-a-Mole.” Next time someone asks how I manage, I’m going to say, “Oh, I just whack the next mole.”

Last summer, I rode rides at the local fair with my youngest son. We chained ourselves into that giant circle of swings which rises up and flings its passengers high above the ground. At first, it was fun to feel the breeze and see the kaleidoscope of sights and feel the motion. And then, I clamped my jaw tight and fought the dizziness. We went around and around, past the point of joy and right into the land of too much. I held on until the swings slowed and deposited us back onto the ground, thankful to be stumbling on solid earth.

Some days, that’s where I am. I’m on the ride, no longer exulting in the thrill of circling in the air, just holding on and waiting to be dumped back on unmoving ground. One sudden day, the motion will stop and everyone will disembark, leaving me swaying and disoriented and wishing I could pay six tickets to get back on the ride. I’ll wish I’d taken pictures and laughed more and lived in the moment and avoided the dizziness.

I know. I know. I know. But tonight, the week seems daunting and unending and I’m tired already just thinking about it. Tomorrow, I will whack each mole as it pops up. That’s what I do. Please, from now on, I’d like to be called Princess Mole Whacker. And I want a sash.

Fudge Sauce on Ice Cream (Does Anything Stick to a Kid’s Brain?)

First, a recipe.

Keri’s Fudge Sauce (I got this from Keri in Wyoming–I don’t know where she got it)

1 cup sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
3 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

In a saucepan, mix sugar, cocoa, flour, salt and 1/4 cup of the milk. Blend until smooth, then add remaining milk. Cook, stirring constantly, over low heat, until sauce boils and is thick. Remove from heat. Stir in butter and vanilla. Serves 12-16.

——————————————————————————–

Lately, my efforts to teach my boys seem futile. How many times do I correct, suggest, direct, redirect, show, instruct and scold? Countless times. How many times do I remind, cajole, explain? Why do I have to say the same things over and over again? For instance, “Proper nouns begin with what? That’s right, a capital letter.” Or “CLOSE THE CUPBOARD DOORS! PLEASE!”

I am reminded of how pointless it is to pour hot fudge sauce over cold ice cream. The chocolate just slides down the icy slopes and puddles around the edges. Just like my words and their brains.

I worry that nothing I say actually sticks. They will never routinely flush toilets, wash their hands, and put punctuation at the end of sentences. They will always leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, forget to pick up their cups, and leave blobs of toothpaste in their sink. They will never clean out their ears, brush their teeth or comb their hair without a reminder. TwinBoyB will always say “Six times eight is fifty-six, right?” and I will always repeat, “No, six times eight is forty-eight. Always has been. Always will be. And so shall be forevermore. Amen.” They will never LEAVE my house because they will remain 11 years old forever.

Honestly, if we are making any forward progress, it is measurable in millimeters.

And yet, I keep scooping the fudge sauce over the top, over and over again. I hope one day, something will stick before the ice cream totally melts and makes a sticky mess. And I hope my kids will eventually become valuable citizens of the United States, remembering to brush their teeth and close and lock the door when they leave the house. (Please, I hope they leave one day.)

In the meantime, I need fudge sauce over ice cream over brownies.

Mommy Madness?

The cover of Newsweek caught my eye this week while I waited in line to pay for my ice cream groceries. I paged through it because I noticed Anna Quindlen’s name on the cover and almost added the meager, glossy pages to my cart, but then I saw the price ($4.95), which is about $2.95 more than I will spend for ephemera. Fortunately for me, I found the articles on-line. Here is the article in its entirety. My comments are added in red.

Mommy Madness
What happened when the Girls Who Had It All became mothers? A new book explores why this generation feels so insane
I don’t feel insane and frankly, I never had it all, but this is my generation.
By Judith Warner
Newsweek

Feb. 21 issue – Back in the days when I was a Good Mommy, I tried to do everything right. I breast-fed and co-slept, and responded to each and every cry with anxious alacrity. I awoke with my daughter at 6:30 AM and, eschewing TV, curled up on the couch with a stack of books that I could recite in my sleep. I did this, in fact, many times, jerking myself back awake as the clock rounded 6:45 and the words of Curious George started to merge with my dreams.
Sounds like someone has unrealistic expectations of herself and of motherhood.

Was I crazy? No?I was a committed mother, eager to do right by my child and well-versed in the child care teachings of the day. I was proud of the fact that I could get in three full hours of high-intensity parenting before I left for work; prouder still that, when I came home in the evening, I could count on at least three more similarly intense hours to follow. It didn’t matter that, in my day job as a stringer for this magazine, I was often falling asleep at my desk. Nor that I’d lost the ability to write a coherent sentence. My brain might have been fried, but my baby’s was thriving. I’d seen the proof of that everywhere?in the newsweeklies and the New York Times, on TV, even in the official statements that issued forth from the White House, where First Lady Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed “singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, just talking and listening” as the best ways to enhance a child’s development.
Those things come naturally to a mother who is with her child. What’s the big deal?

All around me, the expert advice on baby care, whether it came from the What to Expect books or the legions of “specialists” hawking videos, computer software, smart baby toys or audiotapes to advance brain development, was unanimous: Read! Talk! Sing! And so I talked and I read and I sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides … until one day, when my daughter was about four, I realized that I had turned into a human television set, so filled with 24-hour children’s programming that I had no thoughts left of my own.
How’s that possible if you were going to work all day? And didn’t anyone ever tell you that you can read while your child is otherwise occupied?

And when I started listening to the sounds of the Mommy chatter all around me in the playgrounds and playgroups of Washington, D.C.?the shouts of “Good job!,” the interventions and facilitations (“What that lady is saying is, she would really prefer you not empty your bucket of sand over her little boy’s head. Is that okay with you, honey?”)?I realized that I was hardly alone.
Those were probably nannies, not mommies.

Once my daughters began school, I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves?and their sanity?to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who?like myself?appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic.
“Quiet panic”?

Some of the mothers appeared to have lost nearly all sense of themselves as adult women. They dressed in kids’ clothes?overall shorts and go-anywhere sandals. They ate kids’ foods. They were so depleted by the affection and care they lavished upon their small children that they had no energy left, not just for sex, but for feeling like a sexual being. “That part of my life is completely dead,” a working mother of two told me. “I don’t even miss it. It feels like it belongs to another life. Like I was another person.”
Seasons of life are not forever.

It all reminded me a lot of Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique. The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia, and the push to be perfect. The way so many women constantly looked over their shoulders to make sure that no one was outdoing them in the performance of good Mommyhood. And the tendency?every bit as pronounced among my peers as it had been for the women Friedan interviewed?to blame themselves for their problems. There was something new, too: the tendency many women had to feel threatened by other women and to judge them harshly?nowhere more evident than on Urbanbaby and other, similarly “supportive” web sites. Can I take my 17-month-old to the Winnie the Pooh movie?, one mom queried recently. “WAY tooooo young,” came one response.

I read that 70 percent of American moms say they find motherhood today “incredibly stressful.” Thirty percent of mothers of young children reportedly suffer from depression. Nine hundred and nine women in Texas recently told researchers they find taking care of their kids about as much fun as cleaning their house, slightly less pleasurable than cooking, and a whole lot less enjoyable than watching TV.
And?

And I wondered: Why do so many otherwise competent and self-aware women lose themselves when they become mothers? Why do so many of us feel so out of control? And?the biggest question of all?why has this generation of mothers, arguably the most liberated and privileged group of women America has ever seen, driven themselves crazy in the quest for perfect mommy-dom?
Because motherhood is a tough job, a job that demands self-sacrifice (which is so NOT popular), a job which demands putting other people first. For some women, this is the first time they’ve experienced selflessness and it frightens them. They want it all. They want it now. And they don’t want to pay taxes on it.

I started speaking with women from all over the country, about 150 in all. And I found that the craziness I saw in my own city was nothing less than a nationwide epidemic. Women from Idaho to Oklahoma City to the suburbs of Boston?in middle and upper middle class enclaves where there was time and money to spend?told me of lives spent shuttling back and forth to more and more absurd-seeming, high-pressured, time-demanding, utterly exhausting kids’ activities. I heard of whole towns turning out for a spot in the right ballet class; of communities where the competition for the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers rivaled that for admission to the best private schools and colleges. Women told me of their exhaustion and depression, and of their frustrations with the “uselessness” of their husbands. They said they wished their lives could change. But they had no idea of how to make that happen. I began to record their impressions and reflections, and wove them into a book, which I named, in honor of the sentiment that seemed to animate so many of us, Perfect Madness.
Unrealistic expectations . . . coming from? Television? Magazines? Books? I wouldn’t know because I refuse to participate in this craziness. I didn’t go to the sign-up for it, nor did I pay my $65.00. Just say no.

I think of “us” as the first post-baby boom generation, girls born between 1958 and the early 1970s, who came of age politically in the Carter, Reagan and Bush I years. We are, in many ways, a blessed group. Most of the major battles of the women’s movement were fought?and won?in our early childhood. Unlike the baby boomers before us, who protested and marched and shouted their way from college into adulthood, we were a strikingly apolitical group, way more caught up in our own self-perfection as we came of age, than in working to create a more perfect world. Good daughters of the Reagan Revolution, we disdained social activism and cultivated our own gardens with a kind of muscle-bound, tightly wound, über-achieving, all-encompassing, never-failing self-control that passed, in the 1980s, for female empowerment.
We are blessed and we should stop whining. I, for one, would never want my greatgrandmother’s life, or even my grandmother’s life.

We saw ourselves as winners. We’d been bred, from the earliest age, for competition. Our schools had given us co-ed gym and wood-working shop, and had told us never to let the boys drown out our voices in class. Often enough, we’d done better than they had in school. Even in science and math. And our passage into adulthood was marked by growing numbers of women in the professions. We believed that we could climb as high as we wanted to go, and would grow into the adults we dreamed we could be. Other outcomes?like the chance that children wouldn’t quite fit into this picture?never even entered our minds.
Speak for yourself. Maybe I’m just unusually smart, but I knew I couldn’t have it all, certainly not all at once.

Why should they have? Back then, when our sense of our potential as women was being formed, there was a general feeling of optimism. Even the most traditional women’s magazines throughout the 1980s taught that the future for up-and-coming mothers was bright: The new generation of fathers would help. Good babysitting could be found. Work and motherhood could be balanced. It was all a question of intelligent “juggling.” And of not falling prey to the trap of self-sacrifice and perfectionism that had driven so many mothers crazy in the past.
Apparently, she missed Mary Pride’s books, particularly “The Way Home,” which I read early in my marriage. Many women were already questioning whether you could have it all, especially all at once. And what in the world is wrong with self-sacrifice?
But something happened then, as the 1990s advanced, and the Girls Who Could Have Done Anything grew up into women who found, as the millennium turned, that they couldn’t quite … get it together, or get beyond the stuck feeling that had somehow lodged in their minds.
That, my friends, is called reality. Sometimes it hurts when you bash into it.

Life happened. We became mothers. And found, when we set out to “balance” our lives?and in particular to balance some semblance of the girls and women we had been against the mothers we’d become?that there was no way to make this most basic of “balancing acts” work. Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs?and children?were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally.
In the words of M. Scott Peck, “Life is difficult.” And “most of us”? You aren’t speaking for most of us, I suspect.

One woman I interviewed was literally struck dumb as she tried to articulate the quandary she was in. She wasn’t a woman who normally lacked for words. She was a newspaper editor, with a husband whose steady income allowed her many choices. In the hope of finding “balance,” she’d chosen to work part-time and at night in order to spend as much time as possible with her nine-year-old daughter. But somehow, nothing had worked out as planned. Working nights meant that she was tired all the time, and cranky, and stressed. And forever annoyed with her husband. And now her daughter was after her to get a day job. It seemed that having Mom around most of the time wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, particularly if Mom was forever on the edge.

The woman waved her hands in circles, helplessly. “What I’m trying to figure out?” she paused. “What I’m trying to remember … Is how I ended up raising this princess … How I got into … How to get out of … this, this, this, this mess.”

Most of us in this generation grew up believing that we had fantastic, unlimited, freedom of choice. Yet as mothers many women face “choices” on the order of: You can continue to pursue your professional dreams at the cost of abandoning your children to long hours of inadequate child care. Or: You can stay at home with your baby and live in a state of virtual, crazy-making isolation because you can’t afford a nanny, because there is no such thing as part-time day care, and because your husband doesn’t come home until 8:30 at night.
Unlimited freedom of choice is a myth. And the either or of this choice is laughable . . . especially the part where if you stay at home, you are choosing to live in “virtual, crazy-making isolation because you can’t afford a nanny.” Here’s a thought: maybe if moms weren’t running themselves ragged attempting to be all things to all people, they could cultivate some friendships so they wouldn’t be in total isolation?

These are choices that don’t feel like choices at all. They are the harsh realities of family life in a culture that has no structures in place to allow women?and men?to balance work and child-rearing. But most women in our generation don’t think to look beyond themselves at the constraints that keep them from being able to make real choices as mothers. It almost never occurs to them that they can use the muscle of their superb education or their collective voice to change or rearrange their social support system. They simply don’t have the political reflex?or the vocabulary?to think of things in this way.

They’ve been bred to be independent and self-sufficient. To rely on their own initiative and “personal responsibility.” To privatize their problems. And so, they don’t get fired up about our country’s lack of affordable, top-quality child care. (In many parts of the country, decent child care costs more than state college tuition, and the quality of the care that most families can afford is abysmal.) Nor about the fact that middle class life is now so damn expensive that in most families both parents must work gruelingly long hours just to make ends meet. (With fathers averaging 51 hours per week and mothers clocking in at an average of 41, the U.S. workweek is now the longest in the world.) Nor about the fact that in many districts the public schools are so bad that you can’t, if you want your child to be reasonably well-educated, sit back and simply let the teachers do their jobs, and must instead supplement the school day with a panoply of expensive and inconvenient “activities” so that your kid will have some exposure to music, art and sports.
Ah, the myth that middle-class life is so expensive that both parents must work long, grueling hours . . . sure it is. If you need a brand new car and a vacation home and fancy duds to wear to your fancy job, maybe. Granted, in some families, a second income is necessary, but in most? “Most” of the moms I know who have careers outside the home do so for reasons other than dire economic necessity. Not that those reasons are wrong–every woman gets to decide for herself what is an important and valid reason to work, but the idea that both parents must always work to make ends meet, to survive? I don’t think so.

Instead of blaming society, moms today tend to blame themselves. They say they’ve chosen poorly. And so they take on the Herculean task of being absolutely everything to their children, simply because no one else is doing anything at all to help them. Because if they don’t perform magical acts of perfect Mommy ministrations, their kids might fall through the cracks and end up as losers in our hard-driving winner-take-all society.
Good grief. How dramatic can you be? Personal responsibility is a good thing. Blame yourself. Don’t shift the blame to society.

This has to change.

We now have a situation where well-off women can choose how to live their lives?either outsourcing child care at a sufficiently high level of quality to permit them to work with relative peace of mind or staying at home. But no one else, really, has anything. Many, many women would like to stay home with their children and can’t afford to do so. Many, many others would like to be able to work part-time but can’t afford or find the way to do so. Many others would like to be able to maintain their full-time careers without either being devoured by their jobs or losing ground, and they can’t do that. And there is no hope at all for any of these women on the horizon.
“No one else, really, has anything”? Are you kidding me? There is “no hope at all for any of these women”? What? I am not “well-off” and yet, I’ve chosen to stay home with my children. I cobble together a way to contribute financially to my household. Why do people in this country think that everyone is entitled to an easy, fulfilling life bulging with satisfaction at every moment? Just because you might not be able to make a particular choice at a particular moment does not mean you never will have that choice. Life is in constant motion. Situations change. Children grow. Be patient. Enjoy the moment. Relax. Slow down.

Some of us may feel empowered by the challenge of taking it all on, being the best, as Tea Leoni’s “Spanglish” character did on her uphill morning run, but really, this perfectionism is not empowerment. It’s more like what some psychologists call “learned helplessness”?an instinctive giving-up in the face of difficulty that people do when they think they have no real power. At base, it’s a kind of despair. A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world. A lack of belief in our political culture or our institutions.

It really needs to change.

For while many women can and do manage to accept (or at least adjust to) this situation for themselves, there’s a twinge of real sadness that comes out when they talk about their daughters. As a forty-something mother living and working part-time in Washington, D.C. (and spending a disproportionate amount of her time managing the details of her daughter’s?and her husband’s?life), mused one evening to me, “I look at my daughter and I just want to know: what happened? Because look at us: it’s 2002 and nothing’s changed. My mother expected my life to be very different from hers, but now it’s a lot more like hers than I expected, and from here I don’t see where it will be different for my daughter. I don’t want her to carry this crushing burden that’s in our heads … [But] what can make things different?”
How about setttling for less and enjoying that “less” more? I don’t feel sadness at all for my daughter.

For real change to happen, we don’t need more politicians sounding off about “family values.” Neither do we need to pat the backs of working mothers, or “reward” moms who stay at home, or “valorize” motherhood, generally, by acknowledging that it’s “the toughest job in the world.” We need solutions?politically palatable, economically feasible, home-grown American solutions?that can, collectively, give mothers and families a break.
No, what we need are people who understand commitment and sacrifice, people who don’t opt out of their marriages when the going gets tough and then divide up their families like spoils of war. We need people who understand that personal needs and desires don’t preempt the needs of developing children. We need people who count the cost of their choices before they set a tidal wave of consequences into motion. We need people who think before they act.

We need incentives like tax subsidies to encourage corporations to adopt family-friendly policies.
We need fewer taxes. We need less government interference.

We need government-mandated child care standards and quality controls that can remove the fear and dread many working mothers feel when they leave their children with others.
Oh, great idea. Let’s let the government be in charge. They are so efficient! And smart! And they are doing such a good job with our public school systems! And plus, they government has all that extra money just sitting around in vaults, right?

We need flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own. This shouldn’t, these days, be such a pipe dream. After all, in his State of the Union message, President Bush reaffirmed his support of (which, one assumes, includes support of funding for) “faith-based and community groups.” I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French?but do we have to bash it?)
Now, why didn’t I think of this? Let’s just hire . . . oh wait. Who will we hire? If you want to work for $10 an hour wiping noses and changing diapers and singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It” raise your hand. Oh, um, where are all the college-educated women? Not raising their hands . . . they all seem to be running the other way. That’s okay. We’ll just hire . . . uh, let’s see. Who will settle for earning a meager wage to do a grueling, mentally draining, difficult job? Where exactly do we find these people? Junior highs? Welfare offices? Homeless shelters? Who wants to raise the children while the rest of us go off to work?

And to say that I might need affordable part-time daycare so I can have a life of my own assumes that 1) I don’t have a life and 2) that this situation is permanent and that 3) I can’t figure out a solution that is not government-assisted. Have you ever heard of friends helping friends?

We need new initiatives to make it possible for mothers to work part-time (something most mothers say they want to do) by creating vouchers or bigger tax credits to make child care more affordable, by making health insurance available and affordable for part-time workers and by generally making life less expensive and stressful for middle-class families so that mothers (and fathers) could work less without risking their children’s financial future. Or even, if they felt the need, could stay home with their children for a while.
Yes! More taxes! More government control! Make life less expensive! Who needs capitalism anyway?!

In general, we need to alleviate the economic pressures that currently make so many families’ lives so high-pressured, through progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation’s wealth back to the middle class. So that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality?and quantity?time with their children. And so that motherhood could stop being the awful burden it is for so many women today and instead become something more like a joy.
“Transfer our nation’s wealth back to the middle class”? Hello? Communism, anyone? Let’s put all our money into a gigantic pot and divide it equally. That’s only fair, right? And while we’re at it, I propose national Robin-hood-green uniforms for everyone, nothing flashy. No accessories and for goodness sake, no more highlights in our hair! Rob from the rich and give to the poor and sword fight if anyone crosses your path!

Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility?for children, for families, for anyone, really?and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can’t, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.
THEY DON’T HAVE TO! (And wait a second. What would Strunk & Whitehave to say about ending a sentence with “to”?) I don’t want “society” to take care of my children. That’s my responsibility. And I do feel social responsibility in general–that’s why I make the life choices I do and that’s why I am raising my own children, not expecting someone paid $10.00 an hour to manage that.

I see this all the time. It never seems to stop. So that, as I write this, I have an image fresh in my mind: the face of a friend, the mother of a first-grader, who I ran into one morning right before Christmas.

She was in the midst of organizing a class party. This meant shopping. Color-coordinating paper goods. Piecework, pre-gluing of arts-and-crafts projects. Uniformity of felt textures. Of buttons and beads. There were the phone calls, too. From other parents. With criticism and “constructive” comments that had her up at night, playing over conversations in her mind. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said to me. “I hate everyone and everything. I am going insane.”
Sounds like she made some pretty rotten choices. She needs to relax those self-imposed demands.

I looked at her face, saw her eyes fill with tears, and in that instant saw the faces of dozens of women I’d met?and, of course, I saw myself.

And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I’d once seen. I’d come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. “If you keep banging your head against the wall,” he said, “you’re going to have headaches.”

I have thought of these words so many times since then. I have seen so many mothers banging their heads against a wall. And treating their pain?the chronic headache of their lives?with sleeping pills and antidepressants and anxiety meds and a more and more potent, more and more vicious self-and-other-attacking form of anxious perfectionism.

And I hope that somehow we will all find a way to stop. Because we are not doing ourselves any good. We are not doing our children?particularly our daughters?any good. We’re not doing our marriages any good. And we’re doing nothing at all for our society.
So adjust your expectations and move on. Life is difficult.

We are simply beating ourselves black and blue. So let’s take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let’s spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be.
What an abrupt and dissonant ending to an article which called basically for better childcare and redistribution of wealth. How odd.

From PERFECT MADNESS by Judith Warner. To be published by Riverhead books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. © 2005 by Judith Warner.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6959880/site/newsweek/

————————————————————–

Well, there you go . . . she doesn’t speak for me, but then again, I am old-fashioned and I’ve made the choice to be my children’s primary care-giver. I’ve also made the choice to marry a man worthy of me and to stay married to him forever and to adjust my expectations so I don’t wonder what’s wrong with me when everyone else seems to be so much more and better and thinner than me.

Now, in your mind, go ahead and add disclaimers, because I surely wasn’t speaking about you and your more difficult situation. I was just recklessly giving my thoughts a place to sit.

For more viewpoints on this article, be sure to check out Chez Miscarriage and Mommy Life, both linked on my blogroll.

Oh, and one last thought. Someone has to pay the price for my having children. And it won’t be the government and it won’t be my children. I will pay the price, even if it means I sacrifice something.

On Being A Good Enough Mother

In this month’s Newsweek, Anna Quindlen writes about The Good Enough Mother. I have always admired her writing and now, I like her even more. I love to hear a mother admit that she skipped all the seemingly mandatory kids’ sports leagues and after-school activities because she’d rather stay at home and read. I love to hear another mother mention that she hates to play board games. I, for one, refuse to enter the “Perfect Mother Pageant,” even though I hear it involves a really cool tiara.

Ungreat Expectations

When I was a dreamy child, unaware that the world as I knew it was about to shatter(aka The Divorce), my mother gave me a small jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. The puzzle featured a darling puppy and the saying, “Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.”

That may have been the beginning of my wrestling match with expectations and disappointment. I disappointed myself in so many ways when I was a child. I wasn’t skinny enough, outgoing enough. My clothes were hand-me-downs, my parents had old cars (we christened one truck “The Ugly Truck”), we were weird because we went to a Pentecostal church and when we watched “The Donny and Marie Show”, we had to turn the channel when Donny sang because rock’n’roll was straight from the pits of hell.

Oddly, I wasn’t disappointed with my parents for their rotten choices. I figured it was all my fault somehow.

So, you can imagine how disappointed I was with myself in so many ways. I was neither as cute as I thought I should be, nor did I play the piano as well as I wished, nor was I cool and worldly. I wasn’t a very good Christian if you considered a good Christian one who read her Bible every day and prayed out loud for hours at a time. I was embarrassed to be different. And embarrassed to be tall, for that matter.

And when my parents divorced, I tried really hard to wipe the slate of my expectations clean. Very, very clean, so there was no shadowy trace of my expectations that grown-ups would be dependable and life would be predictable and I would be safe.

The problem was, I couldn’t erase The Perfectionist that refused to die inside of me. The Perfectionist expected 100% on every school assignment and test. The Perfectionist insisted that I make no mistakes, that I toe the line of proper behavior, that I take no chances, lest I be humiliated and mocked. The Perfectionist demanded that I make correct choices, choices with only good consequences. The Perfectionist never let me forget that fateful day when I turned on the oven to bake without checking inside it first. I melted all my mother’s Tupperware, which she said was a “stupid” thing to do, which I took to heart. I was stupid. My mother even said so.

The Perfectionist didn’t get the whole “Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed” philosophy. Instead, she just expected stuff (a lot of stuff) from me because, really, who can I control? Me. Only me. Yet, I continued to disappoint myself with my occasionally blemished skin and my unflat stomach and my failure to get into jazz choir in high school. I was hard on myself for these shortcomings and often told myself what a dismal future waited for stupid girls like me. I had it all figured out. No one would ever marry me, let alone date me. My 3.96 grade point average would keep me from scholarships and good colleges and I’d end up a bitter, old-maid.

I only wish I were kidding. My bright future was obscured by the looming shadow of The Perfectionist.

Somewhere in college I came face to face with The Perfectonist and we came to an agreement. She’d have to move out and find her own place because there wasn’t room enough for an actual life if the Perfectionist were hanging about, pointing fingers and making dire predictions.

But, despite that eviction notice, The Perfectionist lurks about torturing me with self-recriminations and self-doubt. Now, she focuses on Motherhood. The Perfectionist expects me to be better than I am. She expects me to be patient and kind and gentle and wise. She cuts me no slack. She whispers meanly in my ears, points out my flaws. She also takes notice of other mothers who are superior to me in so many ways. I can’t even bear to list them all.

Some days I can’t figure out if my expectations are too low or too high. Are my kids struggling with school work because I don’t push them hard enough? Am I pushing them too hard? Should I force them (ha, as if I could!) to write neatly and legibly? Should I just ignore the areas of weakness? Do I coddle them? Should they do more? Or less? Are they more capable then I suspect? Less capable? Do I make excuses for them?

Why isn’t there a middle ground where I can find some firm footing? I feel like I’m sliding around in mud, barely staying on my feet. This would be funny on America’s Home Videos, but I am not amused.

I’m just muddling through, wishing that four small people weren’t following me, expecting to place their feet into my footprints. I want to say, “Wait! Hold on! Maybe we should have taken that left turn back by the stream? Or is that the path over there just past the crest?” Sometimes, Babygirl is so close to me, following, that I bump into her and knock her down.

This motherhood gig is tricky. That’s why I’m kicking out The Perfectionist. I mean it. It’s hard enough to find my way across this pock-marked land without having her snicker when I fall down.

And I’m kind of mad at my mom for giving me that puzzle. What kind of message did that imprint on my pliable young psyche? What kind of message do I imprint on the minds of my children? Which message will be the one they remember and blog about in 20 years?

(There she is again. The Perfectionist will not leave. How rude.)

Is That a Tootise Roll? (Or: Don’t Step on the Poop!)

My husband, The Pastor, is sick. He has a cold and has taken to our bed (actually my side of our king-sized bed because it has a better view of the television). Yesterday, he rested most of the day and this morning, he nearly didn’t go to church. As chance (?) would have it, he didn’t have to preach this morning, so he went, faked it and came home, back to bed. I stayed home with all the kids because Babygirl is recovering from her cold and sounds like she is coughing up a lung and her spleen, too.

Meanwhile, I’d invited my sister and her family over for an early dinner and trick-or-treating. This obviously meant that I had to clean off my dresser and pick up all the books scattered on YoungestBoy’s floor. All the toilets needed scrubbing, all the floors had to be vacuumed. The piles of laundry had to be washed and the dishes had to be put away. I had to cook. I had to bake homemade butter cut-out cookies shaped like pumpkins. I was nearly finished mixing the dough (which had to chill for one hour), when I realized I was a quarter cup short of flour.

Please. Why don’t I plan ahead? Check ingredients? Miss Huson, my seventh grade home-economics teacher, would be so disappointed in me. So, I joind a bunch of other people who do not plan ahead at the grocery store this afternoon.

I did have a slow start this morning, but then I worked all day (hello? Day of Rest? Where is my Day of Rest?). How can a medium sized house with only four children and three cats and one husband degenerate so quickly? If only the Second Law of Thermodynamics (The “Law of Disorder”) hadn’t been debunked with statements like this: A typically erroneous quote from a high school chem text is: “The law of disorder states that things move spontaneously in the direction of maximum chaos or disorder.” First of all, there is no such law of disorder for things. But the worst here is how the sentence misleads students about things moving by themselves when the author puts in that word “spontaneously”. That defeats understanding of how the second law works. Molecules tend to become random spontaneously by themselves, but things do NOT.

For one glorious moment, I thought the Second Law explained everything! The reason for scattered socks! For crumbs on the floor! The disintegration of anything resembling order in this house.

I put the boys to work cleaning and running the vacuum cleaner. Everything did come together–even with the unplanned grocery store excursion. My sister and her family were an hour and a half late (typical!) which I had anticipated, so when they arrived, it was 4:30 p.m. and just about time to eat tacos.

I had originally intended to leave Babygirl home with my husband, but since he wasn’t feeling well, I took her trick-or-treating, too. She was enthusiastic about the idea of going outside in the dark. Since the moon eclipse, she wants to go into the night every night.

I dressed her as a Seahawks cheerleader, completely with homemade pom-poms (made from yarn). She even let me put yarn ribbons in her hair. Her pink coat covered her costume, but I took pictures of her first, which really is all that matters. YoungestBoy went as “Flame,” an alter-ego he created himself. He had a black cape with “FLAME” in prominent yellow felt letters. Most importantly, he had red hair, thanks to red hair gel.

We live on a circle, so we hurried from house to house. Babygirl is a cautious soul and has refused to be held by another adult since she was three months old. She scares easily. But not tonight! Tonight she jogged in the dark streets and even went into some homes to snatch candy from their over-sized bowls. She said “trick-or-treat” when we were in the street and then at the doorsteps, she just said “Pleeeease!” And then “thanks!” The people in our circle are generous because we don’t have many trick-or-treaters, so they gave the kids handfuls of candy.

When we came home, we stood for a moment in the doorway, Babygirl and I, and I caught a glimpse of a chocolate colored mound in the entryway. I said to no one in particular, “Is that cat poop?”

Our mutant cats occasionally leave a random log of waste . . . it’s as if it sticks to their posteriors like some kind of stinky velcro and then falls off. I didn’t really think it was poop, but then TwinBoyA said, “Yes!” And I said, “Get me a tissue!”

Then I stood guard, holding Babygirl. The kids–my three boys and their two cousins–were high on the excitement of full candy buckets. They were circling around like vultures, scurrying like ants carrying a giant grasshopper corpse and then YoungestBoy stepped up to me and said, “Look, Mom!” And I said, “No, no, no, no, don’t M O V E!” And then, “NO NO NO NO NO NO! I SAID D O N ‘ T MOVE!”

And then he pranced, mushing that cat poop into about five different spots which I hollered, “WHERE IS THAT TISSUE!” I keep a tissue box as mere six feet from the front door and TwinBoyA had been gone for a long, long time, much longer than necessary. I didn’t dare grab a tissue myself because I was guarding the cat poop–and doing a–excuse me, I can’t resist–a crappy job of it.

My husband crawled out of his sick bed and came downstairs to see why I was yelling. I explained that there was CAT POOP all over now and I was waiting for a tissue–and here TwinBoyA calmly walked up and handed me a measly wad of toilet paper–not a tissue, as I had requested–and I made some kind of gutteral animal noise of disgust and horror and pain.

Then I took the smelly cat-poopy shoes to the bathroom and scraped them and cleaned them and rolled my eyes. I cleaned the carpet (yes, carpet in entry way, how stupid, huh?).

When I went upstairs, my husband said, “Are you finished yelling?” And I said, “You would have yelled, too!” He denied that. I contend that it’s only natural–and right–to yell when you have kids milling about a live grenade “cat deposit” and when you can see with x-ray vision that someone will STEP IN IT and the universe holds its breath for just a second while it waits for you to intervene. Yelling is a perfectly appropriate response.

You try it. And let me know if you yell. Place a chocolate-colored roll of cat poop in your entryway as five children stomp about and the doorbell rings and you are holding a two year old and a candy bucket and then let me know if you YELL when someone steps in it and grinds it into the carpet five times before he stands still while you wait for a tissue which should have arrived in seconds, not minutes.

Yeah. See? I’m right again.

And thus ends another Day of Rest. Bring on the week! I’m so refreshed.

It Could Always Be Worse (Or Why Mothers Compete)

In Five Year Increments: My Life Is Worse Than Yours

When I was fourteen, getting up and arriving at school on time–with obedient hair and fashionable clothing–consumed my energy. My parents were divorced. My hair was frizzy. I had no social life, but I was a Babysitter Extraordinaire. I had to ride my bicycle to school in the drizzly rain that characterizes the Puget Sound.

When I was nineteen, pining over college boys and studying hermeneutics kept me awake at night. What would I be when I grew up? Would anyone truly love me? Why did he talk to me, but not want to date me anymore?

When I was twenty-four, my customer service job at Blue Cross filled my days. My baby sister’s hijinks involving methamphetamines and my dad’s death broke my heart. A decision to conceive a child with my husband of two years proved to be the Impossible Dream, leading to severe heart bruising, and not that kind that heals with rest.

When I was twenty-nine, our adopted one year old twin boys wore me out. I no longer had time to read or exercise or write. Our family life revolved around these children, the very center of our universe. I orbited around them, anxious, attentive, devoted. We had no money. We had noise. And diapers. And chaos.

When I was thirty-four, God was still laughing at His surprise. I had another year old baby–a “free” baby I grew myself–and suddenly I wondered how it had seemed stressful to take care of twins. We left our home of four years and moved across the country with three children stuffed into the backseat of our car. Now, we were a family of five. I was tired.

Now, I’m thirty-nine. I have another child, another shocking miracle. She’s two now. I used to think I was busy. Even back when I was fourteen! And yet, every step along the way had added more, more, more. More laundry, more decisions, more expense, more children.

Last night, upon hearing that I’d agreed to take a transcription job for my occasional-boss, the private investigator, my husband said, “Did you not have enough to do? Shall I pick up an application from 7-11 so you can work the night shift?”

I have a 2 year old.
I have a 6 year old.
I have 11 year old twins. I am schooling them at home.
I babysit another 2 year old, nine hours a day.
Today, I watched a third 2 year old for two hours.
I typed tonight.

And today someone dared tell me that a 2 year old is easier–way easier, much easier, so easy, compared to having a teenager.

That is not what I need to hear two short years before I have two teenagers.

It reminded me of this lady I met at a writing class way back when I was a young woman, on a waiting list to adopt a baby. She heard about my situation and told me in a girlish voice, “I have nine adopted children. Worst mistake I ever made. I had no idea what I was doing. I totally regret it.”

Well. Um. Thanks for the encouragement.

Is it just human nature that we play this weird competitive game? “My Life is So Much Harder.” Or “I Know Someone Who Has It Worse?” Or “You Will Hate That. Don’t Try!”

I used to feel burdened by the pressures of junior high. And the rigors of college life nearly broke me. And the early days of marriage when my dad died and my responsibilities increased and my reproductive system wouldn’t work knocked me down like a runaway boulder.

And then motherhood. Oh, motherhood! These children obviously hadn’t read “Martha Stewart Living” or her companion magazine about children. For one, they hate wearing sweaters. And then, they hate art projects. They wouldn’t pee in the potty until they were three and a half.

Life was difficult. And then I had another child. And another. And more kid-debris and more bills and this part-time gig babysitting.

But I would never tell a new mom, “Oh just wait. It gets worse. Much, much worse. You might want to rethink that second kid. Stop while you’re ahead.”

I live by two slogans: This too shall pass and things could always be worse.

And please, I’m begging you, just tell me I’m right. Things are going to get better, easier, or at least that my boys will stop spitting popcorn kernels at each other.