“Balance is bullshit.”

I first heard that epiphany at a women’s conference last fall. Since the Winter Olympics commences for the XXI time on the stage of

Gravity wins every time.

Vancouver in less than 72 hours, I’m sharing it here today.

The connection, you ask? As usual, figure skating events will be among the most watched. Thousands of breathless spectators and a few nitpicky commentators will scrutinize the skaters – especially the women — as they careen, leap and twirl on their millimeter-thin blades over polished frozen water, just waiting for the moment when someone’s barely-skirted butt bites the ice. A collective “oooh” will reverberate around the rink. Commentators will tsk. Judges will downgrade.

Me at home? Every tumble, every oooh, I’ll be cheering at the live example of the pure truth in those three little words: Balance is bullshit.

For years, I bought the BS on balance. Mental health, serenity, contentment – it was just a matter of achieving the right balance. It led to constant self-chatter: “Work’s becoming too consuming. Scale back there, amp up quality time with the kids. OK, balanced work and home life. Wait, what about time for you? Schedule a girls’ night out. OK, now I’ve got it. Oops, exercise has fallen off the wagon. ow Ho

“How about yoga class every other Wednesday? No, the car needs new tires, we really can’t afford it. But what about balance? What price can you put on your mental health? Maybe I can just go to bed earlier. Catch up on my rest. Hey, who’s that strange guy in my bed? Uh-oh, better plan a date night.”

And on and on and on. Another truism: It’s always something - especially for women and even more especially for mothers - that knocks us off balance. Yet we keep chasing the illusion. Achieving balance becomes yet another to-do, not to mention another source of guilt and blame. “It’s my own fault friends are neglected/I bought Valentines for the kids’ school party instead of making them/the home business languishes/fill in the blank…because my life isn’t balanced.”

So to hear that BS busted was empowering, to say the least. It made me recall my last yoga class (some time ago, what with the need

Tree pose

for new tires and all.) Yoga consists of the practice of sets of poses – standing poses, sitting poses, inverted poses, balance poses. According to my instructor, balance poses – another term whose brevity belies the enormity of its truth; what is balance if not a pose? – actually become more difficult later in the day. It’s easier to hold a tree or a flying eagle in the morning than it is in the afternoon, and easier in the afternoon than the evening. I see this reflected in the flow of women’s lives, too. When we’re young, there’s less to balance and it’s easier. As we grow older and take on more commitments, it gets harder. You’d think that’s when we’d ease up on ourselves.

Come Friday’s opening ceremonies, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be hopping around my living room, cheerfully trying to regain my tree pose, and cheering when gravity inflicts the inevitable in Vancouver.

It’s Wednesday morning. I love Wednesday mornings.

For now, anyway. Sometime next year, I’ll probably hate them. But I’ve come to accept that such duality is part of my life as a mother. It started at the very beginning. When my son was born a little more than four years ago, I hated motherhood.

After the colic and the breastfeeding struggles and the sleeping through the night struggles abated at about six months, I settled into a love-hate relationship with motherhood. Life was way better  than newborn-hood, but I still missed my pre-parental life more than I liked my present.

Between a year and 18 months, a period when I got a new job and we found reliable child care that we’re still with, the scale tipped toward the love end. So much so that the idea of a second child was broached, mulled and then manifested.

Said second child was born 11 days before first child turned three. We did not experience the alleged “terrible twos,” but three put me right back on the cliff of motherhood. Multi-round daily battles of will with my son poised me to plunge back into the abyss of regret and resentment. I was walked back from the edge only – to my abiding amazement – by the second child.

She was darling. She was sweet. She took naps. There were no breastfeeding struggles, no hours-long evening crying jags. My second maternity leave was one of the happiest times of my life.

And I felt guilty.

Parents are supposed to love their kids equally, right? Favoritism is unfair, breeds sibling rivalry, keeps therapists in business, etc. etc. etc.

So I tried to hide that I preferred her. I tried so hard, and since she was easy to handle and my son’s behavior – especially potty training – was all-consuming, I didn’t even realize how disproportionate my attentions became over her first year.

Which brings me back to Wednesday mornings. Wednesdays are one of my days off and until this fall, I spent them home with both kids. But my son started preschool in September. He goes Wednesday mornings, giving me three hours alone with my daughter.

One of those first Wednesdays, I realized I didn’t have to hide my preference. Since my son wasn’t there to see it, I could snuggle and kiss and coo and babytalk his sister as much as I wanted. (Plus there’s the fact that she’ll still take a morning nap, giving me precious writing time.) As I let it all flow out, I realized how much I’d choked myself back – in the name of fairness to my son.

How fair was that to my daughter?

But before succumbing to yet another wave of guilt (you do that, too?) I managed to somehow scramble up to a higher perch. Surveyed from above, I could identify my motherhood pattern. Call it duality, a pendulum, yin-yang, a see-saw, call it whatever, but it is a fact of my life as a parent. Now that I’ve experienced this pattern repetition, I’m no longer all that concerned with the conflicting rhythms between each child or each day, and forces that push and pull me toward one one or the other. Now that the three-year-old battlefield is behind us, it’s shifting already in the pleasure and gratitude I feel being with my finally four-year-old son.

It’s taken me four years to learn, but my norm is to yo-yo both between the kids, as well as between deep contentment as a mother and nagging, grass-is-greener thinking about a different choice. To fight it or wish it away is to deny myself. To realize it, accept it and say it publicly here is huge.

Gotta go. Less than two hours left this Wednesday morning.

Nod your head if three or more of the following apply to you:

• College graduate
• Employed
• Half of a couple
• Mortgage holder
• Parent

Nod again if, despite acquiring all these trappings of adulthood, you still

There's no fiddlin' with tradition.

don’t quite feel grown up.

To me, if often seems like the true benchmarks of our lives occur unexpectedly. You add up the sum of the parts above, and it equals an adult. But the truth of the matter really crystallizes in specific, isolated moments.

Take parenthood, for instance. While I remember the births of both my children in vivid detail, neither was attended by the blend of awe, fear, humility and hope that parenthood was reported to inspire.

But certain mundane moments conferred precisely that ton-of-bricks mix. Like when we moved our first child from his high chair to a booster seat at the table. Wham. Seeing our then almost two-year-old child right there at the table with us hit me square in the gut. In that moment, I got it. We were a family.

I recalled that moment this week as I sized up that table, wondering about squeezing 11 people around it. Another Adult Moment is in the offing. This Thanksgiving, at age 40, for the first time in my life, I won’t be eating my mom’s turkey.

Forty years is a long time to stick with a tradition, even a holiday one. I have celebrated away from my mom’s table. In the early 90s, when I worked as a newspaper reporter in other states and never got the Friday after off, my family came to me. But Mom always toted the turkey along, too.

My brother got married in 1998, and five years later, I followed. Traditions often shift as family members do. But ours endured. Neither of our spouses had a family Thanksgiving tradition. Since my mom lives almost exactly halfway between us, her place is a sensible and equitable destination.

In 2002 my father’s death further cemented the status quo. We packed up first one kid, then two, then three – now five kids between my family and my brother’s – and continued to head over the river and through the woods so Mom wouldn’t be alone on Thanksgiving.

Not this year, though. My brother’s family decided to stay home first. Meanwhile, my snowbird in-laws are delaying this year’s departure. It’s the first chance we’ve had to spend a major holiday with them, so we decided to stay put, too. My mom – who’s indicated that, after 40 years in a row, she’s not too sorry to skip cooking – will head to her sister’s.

I’m excited about a new tradition. It’s probably overdue. Yet at the same time, it conjures up my adult imposter anxieties. There’s no way 11 people will fit around that table. We don’t have a turkey roasting pan. The under-15 set that will comprise half the guests will likely turn up their noses at the traditional menu, making us wonder why we’re bothering.

Yet sometime early Thanksgiving evening, maybe when we’re cleaning up, I expect another gut-level whammo. One down. Thirty-nine to go.

Image credit: Hale Centre Theatre

I love Lucy.

Not that Lucy. The eponymous ditzy redhead character portrayed by Lucille Ball could hardly be more different than the Lucy I’m talking about: Lucy Stone, the first recorded American woman to retain her own name after marriage.

Actually, I don’t really love this Lucy, who died 116 years ago today.

Lucy Stone, the first American woman to use a maiden name after marriage. Image: Wikipedia

Rather,  as another married woman who’s demurred from adopting a husband’s name, I hold an abiding respect and appreciation for her. And as name pioneers go, I flatter myself as a kind of 21st century cousin.

When my daughter was born a year ago, my husband and I gave her my last name. Her four-year-old brother, meanwhile, has his last name. They each have the other parent’s last name as their middle moniker. So we parents, Cari Noga and Mike Henderson, have as offspring Owen Noga Henderson and Audrey Henderson Noga.

It’s different, to be sure. We’ve fielded some flak over it, mostly well-meaning inquiries about whether we’d considered that this might confuse the kids – and, to my ears, implying that’s exactly what we’d be doing.

Au contraire, I say. Indeed, it deviates from the U.S. norm. But if the kids are raised with this as their norm, there’s no place to sow confusion.  That question is also cloaked in the patriarchal stereotypes we’re trying to shrug off. No one objected that our son would be confused because he and I didn’t share a name. So why should our daughter feel confused about not sharing one with her dad?

After a year of living with it and writing about it (my personal blog explores the anomaly of having two kids with the same, married parents but different last names. OK, and a cute-kid picture now and then. I’m only human.) I’m ready to take the next step: advocacy for name choice equality. As this Salon article from 2000 puts it, why should a baby get the father’s last name? At the very least, can we think about why it’s the automatic choice for almost everyone? Other than that it’s expected and easy, there’s no real reason.

Admittedly, it’s uphill trudging. The most generous estimates I’ve seen say that only 10 percent of American women keep their names upon marrying, making for a small pool to persuade.  But the importance of the advocacy piece was reinforced for me this summer.

In August, researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah presented to the American Sociological Association their findings that 71 percent of Americans they surveyed believe it’s better for women to change their surname upon marriage. In addition, fully half supported government regulation requiring name change. (See UPI piece and Times of India story.)

“It was a little shocking to see,” said Laura Hamilton, one of the study authors and a Ph.D candidate at Indiana. (Read more about the study, “Mapping Gender Attitudes with Views Toward Marital Name Change” and my interview with Hamilton on my personal blog.)

Shocking, indeed, are such value judgments about what should be a woman’s private, individual choice. It’s also evidence how hard it is, even 116 years after Lucy Stone, to swim against the tide.

But, like Nemo, I’ll just keep swimming. After all, while patriarchal tradition has prevailed the last few centuries in most of the Western world, it isn’t this way everywhere. When I first broached this idea to my husband, he started doing genealogical research and found that ancient Scots – a dominant strain in his ancestry – gave daughters their mothers’ names, while sons received their fathers’. Some Native American tribes and Jewish denominations, to name some found right here in the U.S.A., practice matrilineal traditions, where one’s lineage is traced through the mother.

Let me talk about my husband’s reaction to the idea more. He’s an open-minded guy, but I wondered if this would just be too far out there.
Initially, he did hesitate, because he wanted our kids to share a last name. But I asked him to keep thinking about it. As he did, I got more invested in the idea for what I think it teaches both our kids.

We’re providing a crystal clear, living lesson of what we believe about family: Mom and dad are equally important influences in their lives.

So, from my cyber-soapbox, I make my pitch to you. Think about it a matrilineal name. Talk about it with your husband. (Or, husbands, with your wives.) Block out tradition, the questions from family members, all the white noise that obscures what really matters. Then, just do it.

Since President Obama was named the Nobel Peace Prize winner last week, vats of ink, servers full of pixels and hours of airtime have been expended debating whether he deserved it, especially in light of the long careers of his fellow nominees.

It's lonely out here.

No one has mentioned my nominee, however: Lisa Snyder, a mom from Middleville, Michigan. Snyder watches her neighbors’ kids for about a half-hour each morning, filling in the gap between when their parents must leave for work and the arrival of the school bus, which stops in front of her house.

Admittedly, I’d never heard of Snyder until two weeks ago. Her 15 minutes of fame came up because someone reported her neighborliness to Michigan authorities as running an illegal daycare. Rightfully, the media coverage has taken a tone of aghast incredulity, and it looks like the law here in Michigan will be amended.

And yes, I’m being facetious about Snyder as a Peace Prize contender. But not a lot. Lately I’ve often found myself in a state of mind I’ve dubbed the “back 40 blues.” Everyone knows the beautiful proverb turned hackneyed political cliché: “It takes a village to raise a child.” My personal adaptation adds a coda: “It takes a village to raise a child – and I’m living on the back 40.”

Most of the back 40 blues trace back to having a second child, as I wrote on my personal blog last week. In a way I didn’t anticipate, the demands of two vs. one completely drain the reserve energy, patience and time I used to rely upon when everyday issues and inconveniences cropped up.

In other words, I’m far less able to cope with disruptions to daily routine – illness, car problems, daycare holidays – at precisely the same time the odds of such disruptions have doubled.

Look in the mirror, right? We didn’t have to have a second child. True. But that easy blame-guilt response doesn’t feel fair. I compare myself to my mom. She didn’t work out of the home when my brother and I were as young as my kids. But when we were in elementary school, she took a part-time teaching job three days a week – the same kind of schedule as my part-time community college PR gig.

Maybe she just handled it better. (She was, after all, almost 15 years younger than me at this stage of motherhood.) Or maybe it’s because, on our same block, she had three peer moms, all raising kids in about the same age range. A posse of Lisa Snyders, if you will. The kids were all friends. The moms shared toolbox and cupboard inventories without hesitation. Most importantly, they backstopped each other when it came to pinch child care and errand-running. Maybe my perspective’s skewed by green-colored glasses, but they all helped make everyone’s lives run more smoothly – dare I say peacefully?

I look at my block. The house next door was foreclosed on over a year ago and has been vacant for more than 18 months. On the other side, our elderly neighbors spend half the year at their second home. Though we’ve lived here six years, we have barely a nodding acquaintance with the rest of the block, which offers only one other home with kids. Several rentals, with their short-term occupants, challenge any efforts to develop my own backstop.

Beyond the block, I do have local in-laws half the year. But a cancer recurrence this spring effectively quarantined my mother-in-law in the village. Babysitters? Our most reliable moved out of the area in June, leaving us with one in the stable.

So what to do about it all? One of the ideas I didn’t get around to executing this summer was to host a block party, to allow all the neighbors to at least meet each other. Granted, it’s a big step from sharing hot dogs together to the communal snow shoveling, car pooling and backup child care that I envision.

But the Nobel committee said Obama, despite lacking a long list of accomplishments, deserved the award for inspiring a world vision of peace. Likewise,  Snyder inspires me. The back 40 could get annexed to the village. So on behalf of Michigan moms, I’m awarding Lisa Snyder a Block Peace Prize. And if she wants to move up north, the house next door is a steal.

Image credit: www.oklo.org

From my corner on the sofa, I watch the red maple leaves waft to the front yard outside the living room window. This year, I find the seasonal herald to winter comforting. Brisk tromps in the snow will follow the leaves. Cozy months will pass inside. Now I can look ahead.

I look down at Owen, my drowsy, nursing, one-year-old son. We’ve spent

An equinox birth throws life off-balance.

hours on this sofa corner since his birth last September. From his vantage point, the view is always the same. From mine, with the view out the window, it’s been relentless change.

In the first weeks of his life I watched the maple leaves turn from green to yellow to orange-red. They floated to the ground, leaving stark branches against a cold, gray sky.  I imagined the tree might feel as helpless as I felt as a new mother, powerless to stop its once lush, full canopy from withering and dying.

Inside, I wanted to turn back to our days as a couple, before my husband and I ever conceived the notion of parenthood, let alone a baby. Our son’s care was a chronic round of unrewarding drudgery: Feed, sleep, wake, change, soothe, repeat. After his first week at home, any maternal joy was smothered by anxiety, exhaustion and resentment. Life as I’d known it had withered. The birth that had come, ironically, with the autumnal equinox had thrown me completely off balance. 

Late fall can be cruel, watching the trees’ blazing coats become tatters, knowing that inevitably, all must succumb to the wind, wet and winter. Last fall, it was colic that snuffed out the color in our lives. The crying was worst in late afternoon, coinciding with my husband’s return from work. I became a clock-watcher, willing those wails to wait until Mike at least had got in the door. I usually lost. We played pass-the-baby for four hours, until exhaustion finally led to sleep. Minutes later, we too were in bed, clutching each other for comfort, emotionally as bruised as the mottled gray sky. Oh, how I wanted those trees leafy and green again, as they were during my pregnancy, when we imagined only the fulfillment of becoming a family.

November. First snowfall. Wet, heavy snow, the kind that falls around 30 degrees and melts in two days. It plastered the naked maple branches. One 2 a.m. feeding, a sharp crack pierced my drowsy stupor. I got up from our sofa corner and peered out at the dark back yard. A huge branch had cracked off the old white pine, the heavy wet snow too much for it to bear. Frosty needles wiped the glass of the sliding door as it rested on the patio.

Later I would notice how crazily that branch had grown from the pine’s trunk, jutting out at an unsustainable angle. It was no surprise it yielded to the pressure of the snow, but I never considered it might fall. Nor did I see the metaphor it made to events on my side of the sliding door.

Some time before Christmas. I took Owen to run errands. Snow that was staying covered the streets. An opaque, dirty white sky blurred into the earth at the horizon, giving me the sense of occupying a fishbowl. I parked on the bridge over the river. We ran our errand, then returned to the car, me pushing his stroller through the sidewalk slush. From the corner of my eye I noticed the cold, frothing river. The car seat is heavy. Owen is strapped in. I could just drop this in, and it would all be over.

The thought wandered through my mind. I felt detached from it, like my mind was a marquee and this was today’s message. I felt no urge to act, to actually dangle the car seat over the bridge and release my grasp. I was merely a bystander to the emotions playing in my head. That was the scariest part: Not that such a thought could percolate up from the trough of my postpartum mind, but that I reacted so numbly, as if it were unremarkable. I snapped the seat in the car, shut the door and drove home inside the dirty white fishbowl that was my world.

Winter deepened. We approached the three-month mark. This was the crossroads. Even the few parents who would confide that they, too, had struggled with infancy assured us Things Would Get Better at three months. Instead of feeling like fumbling novices, rushing to our library of parenting books with every question, we would be competent, confident, instinctive parents. We could decode crying, soothe and comfort on demand. Another seasonal coincidence held tantalizing promise. The three-month mark fell on Christmas. If true, it would be the best Christmas present ever. It was also just days after the winter solstice, the return of the light. After living in a world shadowed by tormenting regrets and wishful thinking for three months, I willed for light again.

But those other parents were wrong. Things did not get better. Instead they deteriorated with every January day. My snowbird mother-in-law returned from her Florida home to lend a hand. From my corner on the living room sofa, the world looked cold and bleak. We’d dragged the broken pine branch off the patio into the backyard. Snow would cover it, then melt, exposing broken, dead, ugly branches. As a mother I felt broken, dead and ugly, too. “I want to like it more,” I told my husband one night. Talk about the awful truth. Owen was crying less. He was sleeping more. He smiled sometimes. But though I loved him, I did not like being a mother. Like the pine branch that cracked under the wet snow, I too broke down. I called a counselor and made an appointment.

I never thought I would welcome February. In February, winter becomes wearying. February teases with its thaws and lengthening daylight, yet the knowledge that winter’s grip won’t relent for at least another month. Last February, though, life finally relented. On the recommendation of my counselor, we arranged part-time child care. Owen’s sleeping improved. He started eating food in addition to nursing, relieving the pressure I carried to be his sole source of sustenance.

But it was the child care that was balm for my wracked psyche. These were golden hours, 16 of them each week that nurtured my starved soul. Time to work, to write, to feel competent at something. I started to anticipate the days again. Knowing respite was available, I unexpectedly began to enjoy my hours with Owen.

Spring beckoned. From the sofa corner, watching the maple tree begin to bud out in the front yard, I realized our kinship. All living things need time to replenish. Fertility and dormancy are a necessary cycle. As mother and son, our relationship started to truly flourish as the buds unfurled into the first of the green, green maple leaves. In the backyard a rhododendron, formerly shaded by the fallen pine branch, bloomed this spring for the first time, a gorgeous deep fuchsia.

Like the rest of the landscape, Owen and I ripened together in the warmth of summer. Mother is still the most draining, demanding role I’ve ever attempted to fulfill. But this fall, as I sit with Owen on the sofa corner, watching the maple leaves once again flutter to the ground, I feel no longing to return them to the tree.

* * * *

Dear readers – this essay was written upon my son’s first birthday in September 2006. (That’s him below, blowing out the candles at his fourth

Four years ago, I couldn't have envisioned a birthday celebration

fete last weekend.) My hope in publishing it now is that it will help balance the fairytale so many women are led to believe about motherhood. Unrealistic expectations and the feeling that I was alone in disliking and regretting this life-changing role worsened new motherhood for me.

I’ve recovered fully, and even had a second child, now one year old. With my expectations of motherhood more realistic, I did not experience post-partum depression with her. I hope that also helps women for whom PPD is a real and present threat to their well-being and that of their family. So please forward and link to this post. I’m glad to join This Mommy Gig — and I promise to be shorter in the future.