When I was getting married some of my friends from college joked that it was a sign of the Apocalypse. That’s because all through college I vehemently proclaimed that I would never get married and I’d certainly never have kids.

Yes, I eventually learned that I should never say never.

But even after deciding there was a place for a child in my life, I didn’t immediately feel comfortable in the role of mom.  Her infant years were hard for me - I ran back to work as soon as maternity leave was over. I wanted to be where I knew how to do my job and people could tell me what they needed (as opposed to me trying to guess what all that crying was about).

To some of you I’m sure that sounds harsh, but I really think it’s a myth that all women naturally have some instinct for mothering.  Instead of being proud, I resented when my husband would say I was better at some element of parenting than he was.  It wasn’t because I had any more practice at it than he had (never did the whole babysitting thing and was the baby of the family). If I was better at something it was because I poured over books, magazines and websites to learn how.  Something he could have just as easily done.

Toddler years had their own challenges. Getting a mug with “World’s Greatest Mom” on it was still far from my idea of success; but, things at least got a little better once she was able to verbalize her needs and wants. This may still sound uncaring, but to the contrary, I began to realize during this time that I had a love for my daughter I couldn’t explain. It runs deeper and more differently than anything else I’ve experienced. Maybe I do have some sort of instinct after all - like the one that means you never want to get between a mother bear and her cub.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t often wish for the days when going out didn’t take the advance planning of lining up a babysitter. I still cringed a bit when someone would call me a mommy blogger even though I blog here about issues related to motherhood. But, I also found myself becoming more vocal about support for girls and representation by women - not for advancing myself, but in the hopes of better things for women of her generation.

Then, an interesting thing happened the other day. I was watching the news with my laptop in, well, my lap and I saw a couple of guys I follow on Twitter mention that they were heading to San Francisco where the weatherman had just said it was going to rain.  So, I tweeted to them about packing an umbrella and David Armano replied “you’re such a mom.”

And I didn’t flinch. There was no cringe. No resentment.

Instead, I replied with another “mom” retort: “And eat your vegetables young man!”

I think maybe, seven years into this mommy gig and entering my fifth generation of life, I might be finally becoming comfortable with the whole “mom” label.

Photo compliments of Leandro Queiroz via Creative Commons.

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.

I recently wrote a post about contrast and how we need it to define things, i.e. we can’t name ‘cold’ if we don’t have ‘hot’ to compare it to. But, now I’m wondering what to do if the contrasting and defining object is a moving target.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how big I am, or how small for that matter. Literally. I’m shocked by the mirror and the scale. I’m shocked when things are too big and when they’re too small. I’m shocked when I see pictures of myself and I come up to everyone’s chest. I’m shocked when I see my reflection and I seem larger than I expected.

As a result, I don’t trust any of it and I go about my days having no idea what I look like or how my body actually fits into space.

And, really, why should I? This is a case where the contrasting target is moving. AND, this is a case where the physical is heavily influenced by the emotional and intellectual self. For reasons feminine, cultural and uniquely circumstantial, my size and my perception keep changing.

• In high school, I was popular, successful and an athlete. I was larger than life, but my body felt small.
• In college, I was invisible, drowning with an eating disorder and unhappy. I was terribly insignificant, but my body felt huge.
• As I entered adulthood, I was told to be independent and strong, but society and its magazines were reminding me not to get too big. I was confused and yo-yoing, my body didn’t know which way was up.
• As I became a mother, I urged my body to grow in order to support my babies as they came to be and as they continue to need my protection, time and attention in this world. I am expanding rapidly, my body feels like it isn’t my own and its borders are too far away to see.
• As a wife, I need to pull those edges back in to ‘me’ so that I can feel my woman-ness. My body feels conflicted and exhausted and totally bent out of shape.
• As a writer, speaker and blogger in the context of this blog and a few others and in my immediate community, I receive insanely wonderful connections and feedback. My brain and heart feel big.
• As a writer, speaker and blogger in the context of the world and social media, I’m just tiny. Little fish, big sea.

When I look at all of this, I see that the common thread here is relativity. It’s similar to the fact that I still feel 17, but my birth certificate says I’m 36. I mean, really? Is that true? What’s true?

I’m not sure there’s a way to escape it. But, I’m certain I can’t let it color my forward motion. If we sat around all day and thought about the 300 million people on Facebook, we would never join or think it could be a successful social media tool - and we’d miss out on connecting and sharing with old and new friends. If we thought about the millions of other writers that are out there - either getting published or struggling with rejection letters - we would never type another word.

Why do we look to the outside to define our size or simply who we are? Why would we look outside when outside is constantly changing and insecure? Huh. Maybe that’s why we’re so insecure.

Hard to pin your edges on something that moves, expands, shrinks and bends, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the inside - that still thinks it’s 17 and perfectly sizable that needs to be the touchpoint. That way, at least, it’s always up to us, the magnitude of the space we take up in the world.

Originally posted on Writing Roads

Image credit: Steph & Adam

You’re never ready to have children.

You can’t be experienced enough, wise enough, wealthy enough, plan well enough…and if you think you are ready, then actually having them quickly disabuses you of that delusion!

You have the loving desire to invest in a new generation, and the rest of it you learn by doing. Ready or not.

After a while, perhaps, when the kids get older and start their metamorphosis into young adults, you may start feeling ready NOT to have these children anymore! The teens years can be exceptionally trying, and just when you thought you had this parenting gig down (during the relatively easy years of, say, ages 3-11), all kinds of twists and turns and detours rattle your sense that these (formerly) delightful little offspring are going to be ready for adult responsibilities. And for you…maybe that empty nest idea starts looking really good. If you can ever get these proto-adults ready for what’s coming.

If you have multiple children, you also find out that they don’t all become ready at the same pace. But your yearning is the same for each one - that they’ll have the raw ingredients, the responsibility and the mindset, to leave the nest and succeed at whatever they choose.

Next week, my #2 son begins basic training with the United States Marines. We’ve been through the agonizing years of wondering if/when he’d be prepared to shoulder “big-person” responsibilities. But, he made a commitment as he turned 18 to join the service, and since then, we’ve seen some major changes - changes that we’d labored long to bring about, but couldn’t seem to make happen. So as I finally realized last week, looking at my square-jawed and forward-looking son, that he was, indeed, READY, great relief flooded my heart. He isn’t going to stumble out of the nest and flutter to the ground. He’s going to stride forward confidently, head high and shoulders broad enough to be a man.

The bridge has been crossed.

And that’s the reward at the end of “Phase 1″ of this parenting adventure. When you can let go and say, “this one’s ready.” When your little daughter is suddenly a woman, when your little boy has transformed into a man. You know you had a huge part in it, but also, something mysterious is at work in their growing souls. Something strange and wonderful that, in its own time and its own way, finally makes them…grown up.

And ready.

I’ve been looking over my shoulder, frequently. I’m waiting for the parenting police to show up and take away my license. I know that they’re sitting around shaking their heads at this very minute wondering how I was ever allowed mom privileges in the first place.

They’re right, you know. I’m extraordinarily guilty. Guilty of crimes, guilty for crimes.

What have I done? Well, I’ve been selfish, I entertain the most selfish thoughts on a minutely basis (this being 60 times more frequent then an hourly basis), and I crave more selfishness. I want it to be all about me.

• I want to hide away in my bed and read whenever I can.
• I want to work 20 hours a day on my writing, weekends included.
• I want to eat what I want to eat, when I want to eat it.
• I don’t want to clean.
• I don’t want to make 20 construction helmets or motorcycles or excavators out of molding beeswax.
• I want to listen to my music.
• I want to yell, ‘FUCKING HELL!’ when my Blackberry implodes and not get ‘in trouble’ for it.
• …should I go on?

You know what this feels like? PMS, though it’s lasted way too long to be PMS. It reminds me of that special flavor of PMS where you can’t stand to have anyone touch you, talk to you or look at you. And everything just feels wrong. It’s like I need to be in a little room all by myself…(hmmm…one with padded walls?).

Of course, I’m being entirely melodramatic…I’m not to the point of needing a straight jacket. But, I need something. I’m going away next week for a few days to work with a client on a writing project, and I’ll have some time to work on my own writing…but will it be enough?

Though that isn’t the real question. The real question is, should I get to have everything that I want? When I signed up for this mom/wife thing, did I sign my life away? Do I get it back when they go to college? Or can I have it now. Or never?

Which reminds me. My mom, 66, is here for the summer with us. She retired in January…and she’s having a hard time reconciling her new retired life. She’s part of what’s been driving me crazy, by the way. I thought she was just annoying me, but as I write this post, I’m realizing it’s something else. Here she is with nothing but time to pursue her passions - nothing is holding her, she can be as selfish as she wants. And she’s just piddling the days away. She’s not doing anything, or more accurately, she’s not doing what I would do.

What the hell is she waiting for? What am I waiting for? Do I really need permission, am I really hogtied? Could I spend less timing being pissed and more timing doing what I want? And if so, why I am so hellbent on getting in my own way?

Anyone? Anyone?

Image credit: Txspiked

Maybe it’s a stretch to say I like funerals. But I do like it when the family of the newly departed speak publicly at a service, sharing stories or memories, and giving a sense of the person (if you didn’t know them) or — if you did — the depth of the loss.

So often, it feels to me like a chance to reconcile a kind of truth about the people who are part of the story of our lives — a truth that’s hard to acknowledge when someone is still alive and, say, still swigging milk out of the fridge carton or endlessly forgetting to put down the toilet seat. It sums things up, one final time, at the end: This is who they were, this is what they did, this is the way they made a difference. It’s a chance to remember that all the smaller annoyances and petty grievances don’t really matter, and what matters is the history we write together, and the way a life is lived.

In other words, I love it when people own their own rituals — be it birth, death, or one of the many life passages in between. I was reminded of that when I saw this video in which a St. Paul couple put their own spin on the traditional wedding march. I don’t know Jill and Kevin, but I found this at my friend Sonny Gill’s site, and you might have already seen it elsewhere: The video has been making the rounds of the internet lately because it’s pretty terrific.

I love the nonconformity of Jill and Kevin’s approach, and the fun vibe, and the celebration of it all. But what I love most is the way that this couple owns every second of the start of their life together.

There’s a good lesson in here — for life passages, for parents, for our kids, in business, in relationships, and so on: What if, instead of doing things to way they’ve always been done, just because they’ve always been done that way, you spin it in a fresh, new way? What then? What if? Business types call this being “remarkable.” But really, it’s all about trying an uncommon approach that can rise to become something extraordinary.

Oh — and please share any rituals you’ve owned (or seen owned) below. I’d love to hear about them.

The other day my 17-year-old came home from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is spending six weeks this summer immersed in Art. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)

When I tell people that he’s loving the long hours he’s spending in the school’s clay studio, how he goes back after dinner, and how he wants to major in Ceramics in college, people often nod about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?”

I can’t blame them, really. It’s crossed my mind a few times, as well, even though I’m not truly worried. And about 25 years ago, it crossed the minds of my own parents, too, which is why my mother said to me, when I announced then that I wanted to be writer, that I might want to have a backup plan.

She wasn’t trying to be cruel; in fact, she just wanted me to have what she lacked: independence, and self-reliance, and the ability, when the guy you marry turns out to be a shit in a lot of ways, to not have to take it. It’s true that money can’t buy happiness. Yet ironically, I’ve noticed — and my mother certainly knew — that the lack of it can bring plenty of misery.

A few weeks ago my friend Paul Williams created something he called the Killer Phrase BINGO. We’re all familiar with the game BINGO: Fill out the game card, trying for five in a row to win and shout, “BINGO!” “One key reason new and potentially innovative ideas don’t get implemented at companies is because skeptics and scaredy cats kill ideas when they’re first proposed,” Paul wrote. “They use killer phrases like: ‘We’ve tried that before’ and ‘Yeah, but….’”

And so it goes in parenting, too. How many of the phrases do we use, as parents, because our own parents said them to us (here’s where I’ll admit to “Don’t make me turn this car around!”) or because we can’t bear to see our kids in pain (”Don’t make the same mistakes I did…”)? How much of our own parents do we bring to our own roles in the job, all over again?

Once, when my mother and I were having an uncharacteristically frank discussion about sex, she said to me, “Your generation didn’t invent sex, you know.” But didn’t we? Isn’t it up to every teenager to figure it out mostly on his or her own?

In that way, too, every generation thinks it invents parenting. Or, maybe, it’s every person who is reinvented as a parent: Sometimes, we are inspired by our own upbringing, and sometimes we exorcise it. And sometimes, as is the case with me, it’s a little of both.

In any case, Paul created this BINGO card for parents strictly for fun. But then again, you could use it for awareness, too—a reminder, of sorts, that we didn’t invent parenting, but we certainly can guide its evolution.

I’m not a big fan of noise.

Some people seem to thrive on it. Loud music, crowded parties, auditory chaos. Not for me. A walk in the woods, a good book out on the deck, a one-on-one conversation with a friend - that’s how I roll.

But, I have kids. Five of them. Boys. And that means…noise. Lots of it!

Twenty+ years of noise (thus far), with about 11 more to go.

Of course, I love my kids, and I know that an inescapable part of the package is barely-controlled chaos. But as I get older, I find myself yearning for the mythical empty nest state, where things aren’t broken daily, bickering is someone else’s problem, and interruptions are chosen instead of imposed. Of course, at that point I’ll probably start to miss the whirlwind, and be demanding time with future grandchildren. Maybe I’ll yearn for some noise. But then again - maybe not.

I met a young married lady at an event this week and she has three boys, all under the age of five (one set of twins). She described the state of her house, from the moment the kids got up, as “airborne”! Perfect.

Truth be told, I secretly enjoy the liveliness (mostly). But I find myself trying to carve out little moments of escape, some safe harbors from the kaleidoscope of chaos. My RAM is beginning to fill up with sound files. My hard disk is getting fragmented. It’s just one of the job hazards of being a long-time parent, I guess - when you’re young, your signal-to-noise filtering capacity is greater. At this stage, I yearn for more signal, and a lot less noise!

I’m thankful that I have kids, and many would give their right arm to be in my shoes. But as all parents can attest - some days your bell gets rung one too many times by the percussions of parenting. The result: kid concussions! Punch drunk parents just looking for a little peace and quiet.

So, if you ever see me in a large group setting, looking ill at ease among the sound waves, do me a favor and lead me to a quiet corner for a chat. Or, if you want to come over and supervise the kids for a long weekend, that’s an offer that will be seriously considered! Finding a safe harbor from the aural maelstrom will always be much appreciated…!

(Image credit)

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