The UnREAL Reality of Normalcy

I find myself drawn to "reality" shows.  I used to watch the multitude of prime time so called "reality" shows, which really just consist of a group of less than grown twenty somethings consuming large amounts of alcohol and sleeping with a lot of strangers.  I must admit, most of us watch for the same reasons we slow down to survey the scene of a car wreck.  You thank God it didn't happen to you or someone you know and yet for some unknown reason you feel the strong desire to know what happened to the victims and whether or not they will survive.

Will any of us ever survive these "reality" shows?  Now that I'm (gulp) officially in my 30s the "booze it up, get it up" shows hold little to no interest for me anymore.  There's only so much stupidity to go around and how many times can you really watch someone make a fool of themselves in exactly the same manner.  What I watch now are the "unreality" shows that center around families.  Call it another attempt to slow down and survey the damage, but I actually think of it as a way to view through an open window the family life of someone else to compare normalcy.  We all want to feel normal, whatever the hell that means.  We all want to feel like we're doing something right in our marriage, in raising our children.

So I occasionally tune in to some "unreality" shows particularly those involving large families - 19 Kids and Counting, Sister Wives and the like to figure out how the hell one survives more than a dozen kids and multiple spouses.  What I get is this sugar coated attempt at normalcy, the very thing which denies my need to feel normal.  I tune in because previews hint at conflicts, jealousies, potential problems, and what I get is an artificial dose of isn't my life so very normal considering I have 19 kids or 4 wives.  I feel cheated by the whole experience.  What viewers like me tune in for is the hope that someone will say, Good God this is fucking hard to deal with.  Nobody wants to admit that marriage is hard, raising kids is hard, working, paying bills and just getting through life is hard.  Everyone wants to feel normal and so we project our own normalcy onto others.  We are all cheating each other. 

Take me for instance, if anyone was going to show you the real deal it'd be me.  I've long ago, tossed aside any attempt to fake a smile when I want to cry, pretend to be all lovey dovey with my husband when we get into a fight right before company comes over, placate a screaming child with niceties and bribes instead of pulling them out of the restaurant and waiting for the tantrum to be over - theirs or mine, whichever comes first.  I wear my misery on my sleeve and my love on my shirt.  I am stained through and through with the blood, sweat and tears of life and yet no one is knocking down my door offering to film my family.

I want answers just like everyone else.  I want someone to show me how it's done, show me what I'm doing wrong so I can fix it all.  I want to know how women voluntarily share their husband with other women and raise other people's children when I have a hard enough time getting my husband to help with chores and raising two children.  How do they not feel cheated of time, attention, and help?  As for the "look how well we all get along and resolve conflict" I say shut the camera off and wake me when reality calls. 

How does a woman who's spent nearly every year of her adult life pregnant, nursing, and raising kids, say that she never yells?  Give me a break people.  To all my fellow viewers I say don't drink the cool-aide.  They just want what we want, to show the world how fucking normal everything is, despite this amazingly different lifestyle they've chosen to live.  I want to see the child who throws fits because she's tired of being raised by her siblings instead of her parents.  I want to see the wife that wants to fly off the handle but chokes it down because he's got three other women to go to for understanding when he's upset. 

I'll admit that I've thought to myself on many occasions, maybe there's something to this idea of having a wife of my own to cook and clean, and yes even take care of my husband when I'm too exhausted after taking care of two kids who haven't napped all day.  That has more to do with my underlying theory that "wife" and "mother" really mean slave in some exotic language and nobody has bothered to clue me in yet.  I would never, and could never share my husband with anyone, because flaws or not he's mine and if anyone is going to see through my bullshit and still show up than it's going to be him.  I cannot imagine having so many children that scheduling in "one on one" time would be necessary.  I feel enough guilt trying to juggle two kids and make sure they feel special and loved.

So if anyone out there in TV land is listening, wake me up when you do the show about a mom crying in a ball on the floor because she's overworked, unappreciated, and expected to carry on taking care of everyone else when she has nothing left at the end of the day for herself.  I know I cannot possibly be the only mom that feels the cold stone irony of spanking a child because though you've told them a hundred times not to they still insist on standing on the table, counter or dresser and you don't want them to fall and get hurt.  You know that you cannot prevent every injury, but you just do not have the energy to contend with a screaming toddler for five hours in the emergency room tonight. 

Show me the wife like me who is sick to death of hearing that all the tantrums she throws in an attempt to get "help" (that is another blog post entirely) really are hurtful when I just want to say I'm attempting to make it clear that I am completely crushed by the weight of my responsibility right now and I'd really like you to just step off the dirt that's covering me, and dare I dream, grab that shovel over there and take a little of this off me right now so I can just BREATHE.  If you've got any shows like that, I'll tune in faithfully, cause I know that I would love to know how she does it all correctly.

Redefining Happiness

Ask any mom if they were happy before they had children and I'll bet they say yes.  They had freedom, energy, creativity, and their youth was on their side.  A few days before my daughter turned four, my mother said to me, "How is it possible that just four years ago you had no children?"  That was a lifetime ago I thought.  Four years, two kids ago I considered myself to be happy.  I was a newly-wed, coping with being a cash poor home owner.

I was happy at the time.  But from the moment my first child was born, I decided that happiness was a moving target and in fact, I didn't know just what my capacity for happiness was until I looked into the eyes of this tiny person that I had created.  It's safe to say that I had no idea just what I was capable of until I had children.

I never knew just how much I could love another person.  Despite losing my dad at a painfully young age, I didn't know until I became a mom just how much I stood to lose in this world.  It is that ever painful reminder, that gaping hole that losing a parent creates in ones life, that reminds me nearly every second just what can be lost, without warning and without any regard for what I consider fair.  It's the grindstone my emotions are constantly sharpened against.  It's the reality we all know but seldom acknowledge, filtering in with painful clarity when a little blurriness is actually necessary to get through the every day routine of life.

When I was in high school, friends would ask me why I was single.  That was the high school equivalent of being unhappy.  The truth was that I never really cared to be in a relationship.  I actually prefered to watch the high school melodrama unfold from the sidelines instead being caught in the web of adolescent romance whose rules and affections moved and changed with a swift breeze.  Then in college, while wallowing in homesickness I did something I had never done before.  I gave my number and a chance to a boy I had never seen before and didn't know at all.  I don't think I could have imagined at 19 that he would be it - my whole notion of love and trust and the model relationship I never saw growing up.

Falling in love with my husband was to that point in my life, the single scariest thing I had ever experienced.  It forced me to let go, be out of control, give someone this power over my happiness that I had somehow imagined to be the gesture of a weak person who didn't really think that they alone were all they needed to be happy.  Falling in love turned out to be the mirror that I always wished I had.  My husband allowed me to see in myself the person I always wished I was, the person I had been all along.

Tonight while driving home, I looked at my kids faces in the rear view mirror and I thought about how everything I believed about happiness now centers around them.  They made me realize that I will do whatever it takes to spend as much time with them as I can because they define happiness for me now.  The fact that Hannah and Jayden love me, depend on me, and because at this moment in time I can safely say that their happiness depends on me, I have defined happiness as being worthy of them.  I owe it to them to pursue my dreams with passion because I have spent too much of my life thinking I didn't deserve to have all my dreams come true.  I think that despite all my fears that my imperfections as a mother will somehow change them in a negative way, I know that I am one of the only people on this Earth that gets to make them smile and be the mirror that they need in order to see the amazing people that they are.

Being a mom has made it pretty clear to me, this one amazing truth, that happiness is not something I have the luxury of hoping will happen.  I must make it happen.

No Spotlight In Love

Ok, so I really have no idea why, but the series finale of Medium really had a surprising impact on me.  For those of you that don't watch the show, it's about a Medium who can see and talk to dead people and she helps solve murder cases for the District Attorney's office.  While the show centers pretty clearly on the main character and her supernatural abilities, it's also about Allison's family; her husband and three daughters.  So if you watch the show and haven't seen the series finale, read no further.  The way they ended the show was that her husband Joe dies in a plane crash and Allison so clearly can't deal with it that she invents an entire dream where he amazingly survived the crash and is living in Mexico with amnesia and can't remember who he is or where he's from.  Then Joe's spirit comes to her and sadly informs her that it was just a dream and in fact he didn't survive the crash.  The show fast forwards to her as an old lady passing away in a nursing home and seeing Joe again and they are young and in love and will now be together for eternity.

I really don't know why, but I was so saddened by her loss and because it's TV they really got to skip over the bulk of the grief, but it made me think of my own marriage.  Blame the estrogen if you want, blame sentimentality or blame love itself if you want, but in the moments after the show I wondered how I would pick up the pieces of my life if something were to happen to my husband.  There would be no fast forward to move me in time past the crater forged through the center of my life.  There would be a sharing of the secret pain of the fatherless club, my children would be forced to join.  How could I deal with any of that?  Though I'm only 30, I have spent 12 years of my life loving one person.  I look at him and he is at one moment the boy I fell in love with, spotting him across campus in his ball cap and baggy jeans and feeling my heart race, and also the husband and father I have watched him become. 

When I had my surgery last year, I tried my best to muster forth my "if should something should happen to me" speech while my husband and I pulled up the hospital drive.  I had a knot in my throat the size of a golf ball as I let myself for a minute imagine for my family a life without me, but my husband predictably waved the scenario away as a matter of fact.  It was not necessary.  I knew it probably wasn't as well, but I also know the pain of hearing unexpected news, recounting final conversations, knowing there will never be reply or answers ever again.  What is harder, in my opinion, is being the one left behind to pick up the pieces, to carry on when all you want to do is pull the remainder of your life over your head, hide and perhaps fast forward to a better point in time.  Pretty much what the show conveyed.

So here's what I'll take from this show.  Despite the fact that we are the main characters in our own lives, we can't forget that we cannot live in the spotlight if we are to share our lives with someone.  I hope my children will one day understand this.  Children live in the spotlight for a long long time, through adolescence and into their young adult lives.  But one day, love will find them as it did for me.  Ready or not, it will move in and change their lives as they knew them.  I think people say they fall in love because it's passive.  Nobody ever says they jumped into love, because frankly love is so powerful and scary that nobody would willingly jump into that void.  Ironically enough, I think it's amazing that so many of us of take the leap into parenthood.  We know it will be scary, we know it will be hard, but I think we also know that the love is more certain.  Loving our children is innate, like a switch that gets turned on involuntarily.  For me, it's like the pregnancy test was the switch, loving my child was that easy.  Pee on a stick and instant love for another human being.  Don't we wish all love was that easy?

Is it really the THOUGHT that counts?

Here's what I remember about the first Christmas I learned what LOVE really meant.  I can't remember exactly how old I was, maybe 7 or 8, and per usual I was at my grandma's house for Christmas Eve.  Since my parents separated when I was 5, spending Christmas Eve with him at my grandma's house and Christmas at home with my mom was the norm.

We were all opening gifts.  Aunts, Uncles, grandma, dad, and us kids were sitting around the tree.  The kids were fists of fury; paper flying everywhere.  I noticed that my cousin had gotten this singing teddy bear that I thought was just SO cool from my grandma and I remember thinking, "WOW" she must really love him very much.  It was no doubt true, but I put the thought aside for a moment and opened a gift from my dad.  It was a Rainbow Bright doll.  Unfortunately for my dad, I wasn't really into Rainbow Bright at the time.  I immediately thought, "he doesn't love me very much if he doesn't even know what I like."

Poor, poor divorced parents.  The ones without custody are like onlookers on the other side of the glass.  They know their children, but they sometimes miss the details just for lack of being with their kids everyday.  It must be a heartbreaking thing, to only see your child on weekends and holidays.  I cannot imagine what that must be like.  Even though I joke that I would gladly take a day off from my children, I'm not sure I could stitch together enough pieces of me to make myself a whole person with the holes they would leave without their laughter, crazy dancing on the carpet, splashing in the tub, and yes the chaos of wrestling, shoving, and doing it themselves without any help from mommy.

So I do what all small children do when they are completely disappointed, I throw myself full tilt into a melt down; tears, storming out of the room and the icing on the cake of all tantrums I will not explain what has me so upset.  So I'm sitting in my grandmother's basement trying to piece together the connective strings I have learned in my short time on Earth.  Love equals things.  Better things equal more love.  So less things or lesser quality things must equal less love, right?  So that means that my dad doesn't love me nearly as much as my grandma loves my cousin because she gave him a way cool singing teddy bear and my dad gives me a Rainbow Bright doll that I didn't even want.

I want to cry at my childhood innocence and stupidity.  Blame our consumer culture if you want, but these are the sad lessons we as children learn through the actions of the adults in our lives.  My dad comes down and asks me what is wrong and I don't remember what I said.  Though I was saddened by his "lack of love" for me, I still didn't want to hurt his feelings by telling him the way I really felt.  Eventually, I confess that I'm not a big Rainbow Bright fan.  He seems a bit hurt, but instead of being angry with me he assures me I have other presents to unwrap and I might find something else I like.

After a little while of talking, he convinces me to go back upstairs and finish opening my presents. One of the very next presents I unwrap is Rainbow Bright's horse.  It had a big star on its forehead, which I thought was pretty cool at the time.  Now I'm happy.  Now she has a pet and this makes her better than what she was alone.  So I assure my dad that I'm happy with his presents.  I'll never know if he believed me or not or how badly I hurt his feelings by throwing a fit and almost ruining what I didn't know then would be one of too few holidays in our painfully short time together on this Earth.  But I learned something, despite my age; it didn't matter so much what he had gotten me.  He loved me and had wanted to make me happy with a gift and I used that gift to measure something for which there is no Earthly measure - the love a parent has for their child.

Despite my regret during this poorly timed growing experience, I'm eternally grateful that I learned that love can't be measured by anything, least of all a gift you can buy at the store.  Some people still walk this Earth, trying to measure it this way.  I think it's because it makes them uncomfortable - the enormity and the responsibility of love.  We try to break it down into smaller bite sizes pieces we can analyze and hold, and study with a microscope.  It makes us feel that much safer to put it into our pockets then to know it spans the entirety of every breath we take, every moment our heart beats, and the limitless sky we sleep beneath.  So on this Christmas day, when I myself have become the parent, I think of my Dad and I try to breathe without him.  I pray that he can hear my heart beat, because he helped design its rhythm.  I will sleep under the sky- the majestic, infinite sky that he watches me from and I know, without hesitation, just how much he loved me.

The Ultimate Unfairness of Fair

We try to teach our children to play fair with others because as our reasons demonstrate it's in their own best interests to do so.  Would you want someone to take your toy from you?  Would you want to play with someone who will not wait their turn?  Would you want to play a game with someone who doesn't follow the rules? Who will want to play with you if you don't play fair?  Well ideally, the answer would be no one.  We teach them about fairness supposedly because it is in their best interests, but the reality is that they will grow up and go out into a world that is ultimately UNFAIR.

We tell them to do their best and that will be enough.  We try to brace them for the reality that "you can't win them all."  But what we don't tell them is that when they grow up, they will be living and competing in a world full of adults that simply didn't learn this lesson as a child or who simply disregarded the archaic idea that it was in their best interests to be fair.  What to do?  What to do?  One day when we get frustrated enough we will tell them "Life is NOT FAIR.  AND there is NOTHING we can do about it."

I have lived through plenty of loss, lies, betrayals, and broken promises to be the walking Poster Girl for UNFAIRNESS.  I lost my dad at fourteen before I even had a chance to push him off the pedestal.  I've worked for years for a promotion that was promised to me and ultimately denied and after fianlly quitting was doled out to a stranger free of charge.  I work hard and at every pass am made to feel that my best is not good enough because mistakes carry more weight than good ideas and intentions.

For me, I have no choice but to be the good girl that I am.  Somewhere way back in my past it must have been burned into my brain, or else we are born hardwired with the personality we have.  In any case, being UNFAIR simply doesn't register as the thing to do.  I'm not saying I'm perfect, oh I'm so the Poster Girl for UNPERFECTION as well if such a word existed.  I have been angry, frustrated, disappointed and saddened by the UNFAIRNESS of life, but knowing my children will meet it head on one day scares me.  Some part of me wonders if my training in FAIRNESS will leave them completely unprepared to survive in an UNFAIR world. 

Should I be teaching them the truth; that people who put their needs first, who take short cuts, who simply don't care whose feelings get hurt or don't look back to see whose lives are left drowning in their wake are the ones who succeed in the UNFAIR "real" world?  Am I dooming them to failure?  The short answer is most definitely YES.  But here comes my hard wiring again - I simply can't show them a roadmap that I don't have.  I will probably never know what it means to have SUCCESS by life's standards.  I have no grandiose notions of acquiring enough money not to give a crap about how I spend it or having strangers know my name and thinking that they perhaps know me too.  Happiness for me,  survival for me, depends on drowning these notions.  These notions are simply not compatible with my brain.

I fear for my children like all parents do.  We want to protect them from anything bad.  We want them to be safe and happy and healthy and we tell ourselves that if we can just accomplish this holy trinity of parenting then life will be fine.  It will open to them all the opportunities we never had.  It will give them the happiness we dream for them.  But the cynical me will always think in the back of my brain that life isn't going to GIVE them anything.  They will simply have to TAKE IT for themselves.  But my brain starts to overload at this juncture in thought because is TAKING what they want ULTIMATELY UNFAIR?

Will Work For Daycare

Today a very clear and distinct vision of my life came into comical view.  I stand on the side of the road with a dirty rough cut piece of cardboard in my hands with the words WILL WORK FOR DAYCARE written in magic marker.  (Side note: Anyone have any idea what is so magical about a magic marker?  Will I get what I write as long as it's written in magic marker?  Totally wish that were the case.)  So in my vision I am like that jobless person who stands by the side of the road, desperate for work, so desperate they will work for food.  There is something especially captivating about these people.  They don't ask for handouts; they ask for help and it's really hard not to really SEE them.  So too am I, standing on the side of my career path if you will, asking for help - WILL WORK FOR DAYCARE.

Since my mother is currently in the hospital with a broken ankle, I'm left in limbo with childcare.  I work part-time (3 days a week) so you'd think that there would be some monetary break for less than full-time childcare.  But I have not ONE but TWO children. Here is where the real exponential cost of having more than one child comes into play.  The cost of one more plate at the table, the cost of one more pack of diapers, an additional toy, none of them really level your budget like the cost of daycare.  For the first time since I was pregnant with my three-year-old daughter, I've starting pricing out daycare.  I'm hoping my need for it is for the next month to three months while my mom recovers.

I priced out a local daycare center, you know the kind, full of amenities like feeding your child, reading, singing, playing, changing them (the things moms do automatically, for free, but perhaps without the formal agenda).  It would cost me, not one of my two monthly paychecks, but basically one and a half of them.  After the cost of gas, I would be left working to pay for my children to be cared for by strangers.  Sigh....  So I thought, let's ask anyone who might know anyone who might be able to watch them in their home.  So I talked to a stay-at-home mome who watches children in her home. Yes, it's a decidedly cheaper option, but still regretably expensive when you consider my budget for childcare was $0 and there is really no extra money in sight.  Believe me (and if you don't just ask one of my friends) I am one of the most frugal people on Earth. 

I don't know for the life of me how working families pay for childcare these days.  I understand how important it is to have someone you trust caring for your children when you're not around, ESPECIALLY if you have ones far too little to tell you if something bad happened or they were ignored or...let's step off that bad path at the turn here.  I get it, but I also know from working in a daycare for my whopping two days (yes it was that stressful and oh yes I was already getting a fresh cold) that you pay people WAY TOO LITTLE money and put them in a room filled with more children then they can responsibly care for and even the caregiver with the best of intentions can't care for your children the way they would like to.

It's so beyond frustrating.  I keep thinking, this is NOT what I signed up for when I had children.  When I hatched my brilliant job-share plan, I did it with the belief that a stranger would not be raising my child.  I would raise my children and my mother who loves them would care for them, if not exactly like I would than equally as well.  So for now, they are being looked after by other family members for as long as my welcome and wallet aren't worn out.  I'm grateful for the help, but I am woefully worn out from stressing about money and childcare and work.  I realize there are a lot more women with less resources and options than myself and I wonder how they do it.  For weeks I have felt frustration, shame, failure, and guilt.  I go to my job and my day is punctuated with moments of utter sadness.  I know I'm rowing against a current I cannot possibly overtake.

In college, when things got bad I came up with my very first Erinism as I now call my quotes, my snippets of life philosophy.  It was meant to keep me going when I wanted to give up.  I wrote it down and hung it on my wall.  "It's a hard lesson to learn that sometimes your best is not good enough, and a harder lesson to keep going when it's not."  I guess it's about that time to write it down once again and hang it, preferably at height level, where I might be inclined to bang my head if it weren't there offering me a more positive option.

The Mommy Track

Work and Motherhood should be synonymous, but for some odd reason they are not.  When talking about outside paid employment, motherhood is viewed as sort of a detour on the road to career advancement - a maternity leave during which you bond with your baby then promptly enroll them in daycare and mother them on nights and weekends.  Well that is the way it used to be thought of anyway.

It's so rare to find a stay at home mom these days.  They are going extinct at a rapid rate.  Society tells us that we simply cannot afford to care for our children "full-time" and besides women are independent and career oriented and should want to reach for the brass ring with the same zeal as our husbands.  But what happens when you trade in the brass ring, for dare I say it, a teething ring?

When I was pregnant with my daughter I expected to return to work full-time and enroll her in daycare, as most moms now do.  I was totally fine as long as I operated under the assumption that I simply had no other choice in the matter.  I was fine with my assumption oh until about three days after my daughter was born.  I called my grandmother to tell her the good news and she asked me if I was going to return to work. When I said yes, she asked me, "but why you wanted that baby so much?"  That is one of the few moments I can point to in my life and say see this is where it all changed.  She wasn't saying it to be mean or criticize my choice, she simply saw choices that I did not.

She was an immigrant to this country from war-torn Germany.  She raised three kids alone for the better part of their childhood.  She worked damn hard on farms, in factories, and for wages that may have made my first job after college look like I had made it to "the good life."  Work was life for my grandmother.  Motherhood was life too and the two things were not in fact separate ideas.  I did a paper for college about her work history and in every answer to my questions about work, she infused paid work with family work.  Without knowing it, she was saying that for women, the realm of work is not one thing, paid employment or work in the home, it's both simultaneously.

So after crying for weeks about a question I hadn't expected to shake me to my core, I started thinking about what would really make me happy.  I talked with my husband, then my mom, then finally my boss.  I did something up until this very moment in my life I found so very daunting, I asked for what I needed to make me happy.  I wanted to work part-time so I could spend time with my child and still contribute financially to my household.  I arranged with my boss to turn my full-time job into a job-share so that I could work part-time.  My mom agreed to watch my child (and later my two children) while I was at work.  And as a happy consequence I made a great friend in the co-worker and mother who was able to work the other part of my job. 

I was lucky that it worked out.  I have been happy and now all my stitching of my ideal life is starting to slowly unravel one stitch at a time.  All the knots that hold together my work/motherhood life are coming undone. 

My job is undergoing a major transition and there is a possibility I could be laid off.  My mother broke her foot and is in the hospital and afterwards will need months of rehabilitation and help herself.  It's like I'm back to that very moment when my grandmother questioned what I was going to do about work and motherhood.  The difference is, she recently passed away and she can not ask, so I guess I have to ask myself again - What's it going to take to make me happy?

I look for jobs online that require me to work full-time.  I think of how much more we would struggle if I stayed at home.  I look at my children and think of what it took to bring them into this world.  I know now, thanks to my grandmother, that I do in fact have choices, but she never said they would be easy ones to make.  I can think of just one thing that would make me happy.  Just one.  Again it hinges on the cooperation of others, it hinges on timing, it hinges on a future that I can not see or touch in this moment in time and like anyone else would be, I'm scared.  So I cling to today.  I take help when it is offered and say thank you instead of struggling in silence.  I try to think of getting through today and tomorrow and try not to assume anything more about the future than that. 

There is an old saying that if you have a job or a career and choose any other path besides full-time employment or choose to leave at the end of the day instead of living for your job, you are in fact on the "mommy track."  It's a term that was meant to put down women who choose to stand up and say that my family is just as important as my job.  I even had a professor in college who tried to discourage me when I told him I didn't plan to go on to grad school by saying, "What are you going to do then, stay home and have babies?" 

I was in my early twenties and didn't have a voice then.  But I do now.  I'm proud to be on the "mommy track."  Not everyone gets the privilege to be a mother.  But I will be blessed the rest of my life.  So while others are pushing their career up the track of success one piece of paper and project at a time, I take the track that meanders, that takes the short hill instead of the mountain.  I enjoy the view of my life as it sprawls out before me.  I know how this goes; this track is just a different segment of the same roller coaster. The difference is, I fill my car with my family and my hopes for them, not just myself.  It goes slower because there is more to pull.  It takes the hill over the mountain because what is an exhilarating rush of adrenaline to some, to others is just a rush of fear.  I don't know what's going to happen next any more than the next person, but I know one thing that perhaps others may not.  I choose to define success on my terms and I know I have more power than even I realize.  I can only hope that other women know that too.

Breaking The PIGGY Bank

Few things in life have made me feel like an utter and total failure as last week's dilemma.  I know many people are feeling the sting of the GREAT RECESSION, and my family is definitely feeling it.  My bank account often involves a delicate balance and I have to be extremely creative to make it by each month, but within the last year or so I am finding myself teetering on the terrifying edge of being BROKE nearly all the time.

Last week, with virtually nothing left in my checking account and having used all of my savings (which wasn't much to begin with) to pay for household expenses, I had to make a decision: Pay for groceries on my credit card or borrow money from my three year old daughter Hannah's piggy bank.  Well I chose to borrow $100 dollars for groceries and managed to spend a meager $57 on groceries.  I spent $20 on gas and am saving the rest for gas money to make it to the next paycheck.

I feel bad about taking money from her bank, especially considering it was my idea to stow away for her any birthday money she gets from family and friends to be used for college.  I wonder just how many moms like me are facing the same dilemma these days.  I have excellent credit and the thought of paying 14% interest on groceries that will be consumed long before next week when the dilemma starts again, makes me feel ill.  Would other women rather pay back their child or their credit card company?
What helped make me feel ok about it was that it is my job as her mother to make sure she is fed and well cared for today.  I have no idea what tomorrow will bring; only that we must do whatever we can today to ensure that it will be there waiting for us when we come to it.  I remember as a child, having a piggy bank started by my grandmother.  She would put a little money in it every week for me.  One day my mother asked me if I wanted to go to the Catskill Game Farm (an amazing petting zoo that has since closed).  Of course I said yes, but she said that we could only afford to go if we used the money in my piggy bank.  I agreed and off we went.

When my grandmother found out, she was extremely upset.  The money was supposed to be for me, she explained.  But it was; it was my choice to use the money to go to the zoo.  Looking back I can totally see both sides of the coin (pun intended).  I see how you want to save for your child's future, but you also need to remember that getting to that future always has an associated cost.  Whether its for an adventure with your family or just groceries, sometimes we have to stand together as a family.  Maybe its ok to give your child a choice and with that choice, an understanding that things cost money.  My mother had taught me that things are not free and that choosing to spend money on one thing means that you are choosing not to have money to spend on other things.

This morning my daughter begged me for a donut as we drove to my mother's house (Mimi's).  I told her no, repeatedly but the pleading continued.  When we got to Mimi's house she looked me in the eye and said, "Mommy why can't I have a donut?"  So I looked her in the eye with love and sadly a little shame and explained that donuts cost money and mommy doesn't have money for donuts right now.  She said to me in her sweet innocent voice, "That's ok mommy, I have some at home I can give you."  My heart melted. 

She's really doesn't understand she has a piggy bank with real money that is "hers."  In all likelihood she is talking about loose change that she finds around the house and we let her keep.  But hearing that made me believe that if she was old enough to make the choice to help her family, she totally would.  For that, I am the wealthiest person on earth.

Bad Mommy

We try to teach our children the lessons we think will prepare them for life, keep them safe, and at least at the toddler stage - keep others safe from them. But then every so often we forget to follow the same rules we teach them. I still can't believe I accidentally gave my 3 year old daughter a shinner.

It was one of those nice days out that stretches into too long of a day out. Willie and I took, Hannah and Jayden to the Walkway Over The Hudson. It's a beautiful view of the Hudson River and a decent walk. Willie was dragging on the way back pushing Jay in the stroller. Our one hour drive home turned into a two and a half hour saga of backed up traffic, gas light warning inspired hunt for a gas station, yard sale detours and a stop at a farmers market. So when Hannah started whinning for her cup and Jay was out cold, I just said "here catch Hannah" and tossed it back.

Then I hear the cry, you know the one - the "I'm really hurt" cry and you always hold your breath when you hear it. We pulled over and yup - pegged her right in the eye and it was all purple and puffy. So of course I feel like the worst mom ever and I'm crying just as hard as she is. I ride in the back with her the rest of the way appologizing.

My co-worker gave me some peace of mind - if that's even possible. She said that it was a good lesson for us all. That now Hannah knows mommy isn't perfect and mommy appologized for not following her own "No Throwing Anything" rule. I hate the idea that I hurt my child even though I know it was an accident. I guess all I can do is learn from it and move on.

There probably will be more days in the years to come where I'll feel like a bad mommy. Fingers will probably get pinched, heads bumped, knees will get scraped. I wish I could protect my children from all pain, but life is full of pain. At least the physical is a little easier than the emotional. I'm definitely not looking forward to her first heartbreak. But I'll never forget the sweetness in her voice when she wispered to me, "its ok mommy it doesn't hurt anymore." If she could in the midst of her pain find it in her heart to comfort me, then I know at least I've done something right.

Parenthood is the BEST Birth Control

Before you have children, you use birth control because you THINK you are not "READY" for the RESPONSIBILTY of raising children. Once you have your first child, the decision to have another child becomes a sheer act of will. You must BELIEVE that you are "READY."

The irony of ironies is that already having a child or children is the best birth control. Even if you are "READY" to have a child and even if you're down for some...um..shall we say "practice" you have to fight with all the child related obstacles - lack of privacy, time, sleep deprivation, to-do list overload, etc. So just keep in mind, it takes knowing what you're REALLY in for to know whether or not you're REALLY "READY." That my friend is why, crazy as it sounds, Parenthood is the BEST Birth Control EVER!

Motherhood The New Career!

I have decided that we ought to be paid to be mothers. We work from sun up to sun down and even in our sleep we hear phantom babies/children crying or simply calling for us. Even the woman, like me, who can sleep through most anything will wake up at the smallest muffled cry when she has children. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the shower and heard my son or daughter cry for me only to realize that in fact it was perfectly quiet and they are both still tucked in and sleeping peacefully. What I'm getting at is that motherhood doesn't shut off, even in our unconsciousness.

If you work "outside the home" and you're a mother then you really work two full time jobs. In my case one and a half. Since I work "outside the home" part time you can count that as my half a job. I hate that 1950s term "outside the home." Work is NOT a place; it's a state of being. It's a to do list that never ends, replenishing itself the second one item gets crossed off. That is motherhood -WORK.

Even if a person LOVES their job. At the end of the day it's still a JOB. So if you have a CAREER is it different? Is the To Do List outlined in glitter? Do you skip to work? Do you hum while doing menial tasks like filing papers, typing notes or sitting in a marathon of meetings? My guess would be a big fat NO, but then again I have a JOB. What that means is that I work for the paycheck, the occassional pat on the head if it's offered and the chance to keep my brain from turning into baby mush. I often wonder if I would forget how to speak "Adult" if I were home by myself with my kids all day. I like my JOB, but I know there is no UP; there is nothing to work toward in terms of advancement. Is that a CAREER? Wanting to move up toward something better, towards a position more full of responsibility and one hopes pay??

Is a CAREER a calling, a strong desire to do something you would do even if money were no object? Is a CAREER the willingness to step into a role (sometimes knowing that you will need to grow into that role) that is more responsibility and one hopes more rewarding as well. If that is the case, then why the hell is MOTHERHOOD not a CAREER? It's perfectly clear to me that we do it, the never ending to do list that is motherhood, with money being no object because it doesn't pay a dime. I happen to think the world would be a lot better place if it were a CAREER. There would be a hell of lot less war, crime, greed, and corruption.

It would be great to get paid for all the work I actually do. I am shaping a future generation and I do it while balancing a bank account that is always teetering on the edge of empty. That means that I'm constantly balancing many other things as well- my marriage, my children, my home, and my job. My responsibilities are hovering around me every second of the day. I'm proud to be able to contribute to my family's income, but I know that if I lost that income I could not afford to stay home and simply raise my kids. So it absolutely sucks on those days when my life and my responsibilites to all those that I love feels like a JOB. If MOTHERHOOD was given the proper respect it deserves, and if it paid just half of the amount good parenting would save our society in punishment of crime, then it would definitely be a CAREER.

Triage On The Parenthood Battle Field

If you have more than one child you have now entered the fun triage zone of the parenthood battle field. There comes a day usually early after you bring home baby number two when suddenly both kids are crying at the same time, and here comes the instant triage scenario: You do a mental checklist, trying to come up with an assessment of which child needs you most urgently at that moment. Is one child hurt and the other simply lonely? Is one child hungry and one is tired and cranky?

The mental checklist is long and we mothers go through it at a supremely fast rate. To outsiders it may look like we are playing favorites when we quickly rush to one child's side over another, but what outsiders don't know is that we fight the war of guilt that consumes us all the time. It's all because we had the audacity to have and love more than one child, all the while knowing that we are simply one person with the limitations of being one single person who can not possibly do all things for all children all the time. Then we find ourselves begging our children to wait, be patient, hurry up, quiet down, behave, the list goes on and on. All because once your family goes from "one child" to "one more child" we have inadvertantly given our children the upper hand. Now we are out numbered.

When one child is sick the choice may seem easy. You go to the child who is sick first. But life and motherhood are not so simple. Just because one child may need you a lot more, you still must tend to the other or others. My heart goes out to women who face impossible choices every day, who carry guilt that they can not untangle from their love and devotion.

I guess all we can do is remind them, remind ourselves, to look up from our medical kits and our bandages and our checklists to see that there are other nurses and doctors in this triage tent of ours. That love can come from more places than we can possibly imagine and though the feeling of responsibility seems so overwhelmingly ours alone, it simply is not. Our children get love and guidance from our close and extended family, friends, friends of family, co-workers and neighbors.

I think that because mothers are responsible for our children from the moment of conception a part of us never lets go of the ENORMITY of that responsiblity, but sometimes, just sometimes it's ok to allow ourselves to step back and let someone else take over. It's ENORMOUSLY important for us to relinquish the responsibilty to our spouse, mother, father, sister, brother, friend or anyone who loves us enough to take some of the responsibility off our plate. We, as mothers, can not afford to look up from our checklists one day to see that it is no longer our children on the triage cot, but ourselves.

Baby Poop And Other Fun Stuff

WARNING:THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE EASILY NAUSEATED.

Very few things really start the day off right like a big healthy dose of baby poop. It's my nice metaphor for life - Baby Poop. It's messy, it smells, it demands our attention and action, and we clean it half-heartily, begrugingly, and for the most part you wish someone else would just take care of it for you. Few people in life get excited about baby poop and those few people are yes, you guessed it MOTHERS.

In the first few months and years of your child's life, you spend an odd number of hours thinking about oh, here it comes again, BABY POOP. There is the wondering about what is normal or not normal - size, frequency, color, consistancy, etc. Then when my eight month old wasn't pooping and was so constipated he cried there was the fun of giving a supository to a crying baby - or as some of us know it - a butt bomb. As if shoving something up your infant's butt isn't weird enough - you watch for a few seconds/minutes for the explosion.

Oh the explosions I've seen in my life time. My favorite was when my daughter was sick and it was so bad I made my husband get this scissors because sometimes, no clothing is worth the price of washing putricity out of it. Now that my daughter is toilet training I wonder if the poop obsession will ever end. Will she ever tell me when she has to go or will my mom continue to find her pulling off a retched pull-up in secret. So where am I going with this? I'm not sure.

It just occured to me that it's a good metaphor for life. Life is BABY POOP, messy and necessary and suck-tastic. It's also a great metaphor for Motherhood because mom's touch, smell, and clean some of the nastiest things EVER. I have held out my cupped palms to catch my daughter's vomit, had poop on my hands more times then I can count, even got it in my hair once too. We are the caregivers and we take the shit. If we didn't love our kids we probably wouldn't do half of the things we do.

So why doesn't Mike Rowe follow us around when filming Dirty Jobs? It's man-tastic programing at its finest and I bet every man in every dirty job featured on that show wouldn't hesitate for one second when he comes home from a long day cleaning porta-potties, cleaning animal cages, or hauling trash, to hand off his son or daughter to his wife at the first wiff of BABY POOP. If you've got a husband, boyfriend, or even know a man who willingly changes stinky, baby poop, and especially if he can do it without making the vomit sound- buy that man a drink because lord knows it takes more intestinal fortitude for him to do what we do every day.

So if you've got a funny Baby Poop moment, feel free to share it cause god knows as mothers, sometimes we need a good laugh to get through life and oh yes the BABY POOP.

There is no "ME" in MOMMY

If you ask yourself at least once a day, "Am I doing the right thing?," "Am I failing my children?," "Am I a horrible mother?" LISTEN UP - you're perfectly normal. What I find most intriguing about motherhood is that rarely does a woman truly ask herself, "What about me?"

The first thing to go when you become a parent is simply "you." Short of changing your identity by joining wittness protection, you are in short a completely different "you" once you have children. If you're like me, you view your pre-child life kinda like a good old familiar movie you remember watching over and over. You know the lines by heart, but ultimately you are a spectator viewing your own past. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just different.

I wish I could say that having children makes you completely selfless. That you are devoted 100% of the time to your child(ren)'s utter happiness, but this is real life and not the hallmark channel. There are days, especially when your feeling sick, tired, rundown, unappreciated, overwhelmed where you want to scream, "WHAT ABOUT ME???" You wonder, sometimes outloud, where's my help? Where's my vacation?" Hell most days I'd settle for getting in the car by myself and going anywhere, hearing silence and not being so utterly tired that I can appreciate it for more than the few minutes it takes to drag my ass to bed.

As a very introspective person, motherhood has been like riding a rollercoaster blindfolded. I always prided myself in knowing exactly who I am and what I'm capable of. But I have found myself, even hearing myself as I'm doing it screaming at a toddler, begging a baby not to cry, cursing a husband for working late even though I know it's for the benefit of our family but because I need help and god damn it there is no freaking end to my day. Parenthood doesn't have a pause button, a rewind, there is no do over so this is where the worry comes in "Am I failing my children?" "Am I balancing work and family or will the scale always be tipped?" God the worry doesn't stop. I simpy have to hope that we all escape parenthood and childhood without any permanent scaring. But I have decided at least for myself that there is no Right Way to be a parent. There is simply what you do and what you don't do and as long as you can appreciate that and the fact that you can't always control the outcome and for the most part you're ok with the direction you take, then you ARE a good parent and you ARE a good person.

I may wonder sometimes "Will there ever come a day where I have more than a 20 minute shower to call my ALONE TIME?," but while walking around my empty house after returning from urgent care a few weeks ago, I was a little freaked out by how ALONE I really was. I simply didn't remember what to do without children to take care of. So I cleaned, not my favorite past time by any stretch of the imagination, but I was used to feeling useful, needed, depended upon and completely loved nearly every second of the day and the temporary silence was utterly deafening. So I have traded in "ME" for "MOMMY." It's not to say there is no more me, there is just a new ME, a forever changed version of ME. Sometimes I may look back, but never with regret.

What Surgery Has Taught Me

So I just had my galbladder removed three days ago and here's what I learned. Hospitals really suck at customer service, but more importantly families don't. After waiting from 11:30 am - the scheduled time of my surgery until 5:30 pm when they finally got around to talking to me about my surgery I realized that to these people I was a procedure - not a person. A procedure that could be bumped and there was no need to actually talk to me and tell me what was going on.



I could focus on the horrible experience I had or focus on what I learned. My family really stepped up to help me. My mom waiting at home with my screaming 2 month old who didn't know where mommy and subsequently mommy's milk went and with my two year old in all her new found defiance. My husband watching movies with me on his ipod touch so I wouldn't notice how long it was all taking. So here's what I learned. I'm a lucky person to have people who love me and whom I love. Surgery for me was new and it was not just a procedure for me. I was scared but more importantly I wasn't alone and for that I'm grateful. I also learned that it takes three grown adults to do what I normally do alone which I kinda suspected all along.