Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  * * *

  Almost eleven years after that summer, I sat at our dining room table, surrounded by my lists. They were back in full force. They populated my desk, my kitchen table, and my mind like litters of rabbits. I was back to feeling perpetually unsatisfied, consistently behind. For every item I checked off, I added two.

  Uncharacteristically, I paused. I stopped the chatter that was doing some killer laps in my brain. And I sat there. I gently placed my forehead against the table and allowed myself to feel the full weight of my frustration. I thought about our neighbors that summer my daughter was born. I thought of holding her in the kitchen window; I can still picture the windowsill, although it was a house ago now—two vintage hobnail glass salt cellars sitting side by side. One blue. One clear. A dried dandelion puff and a pinky print of a sand dollar. A tiny glass bottle with a clutch of violets peeking out, the water evaporating.

  “This is what life is,” I whispered aloud.

  This is what life is. We are still in the thick of life, and this is what it looks like. It is lists upon lists. It is work and school, thank-you notes and errands. As long as we own this house, it will include things that are falling down, apart, or off it. The life I chose isn’t without its issues; it will always involve things needing to be done. Right up until it doesn’t. And as I am needed less, my lists will get shorter. I will no longer need to concern myself with whether my children have proper shoes for the summer or a library card. It will be a list for one.

  A week later, my kids had the day off from school, a day I didn’t realize they had off. It’s a little scheduling menu item I like to call “Working Moms’ Surprise!” Usually when I’m working and they’re home—especially when I’ve had little time to mentally brace myself for it—disaster and frustration loom. One crouched on each shoulder, because there are only devils on days like that.

  But that day, the low winter sun flickered through our windows and the dog snoozed to the right of my chair. I saw it and felt it. I noticed. My son read on the couch, and my daughter practiced piano, her high, steady voice broadcasting her lack of cynicism, her not-weary-as-the-damn-rest-of-us-ness. I heard it.

  As I worked, I continued to listen, headphones off and down at my side for a change. I listened to the humming and piano playing and dog snoring. And all that quiet, stuffed so sneakily into the gaps. At one point they would switch, it would be my son’s turn to practice piano and then the sax, then she’d read in his spot. The dog would wake up and need to go for a walk. Soup was for lunch and my first deadline would be met, one kid out the door later that afternoon for play rehearsal and the other undoubtedly hunched over Legos in his room for longer than feels good on his tall, curved, still-growing back.

  Just as, inevitably, things would fall apart too. They would fight or get too silly too fast and one of them would end up mad or being slapped or doing the slapping. Someone would get an elbow “accidentally” to the stomach or ear and all hell would break loose. There would be trouble and separation, as always.

  But I knew my husband would be home early to jump in, I’d meet my next deadline, and we would get to the end of that day, no major highs, no major lows, yet it would feel like the greatest gift. To have just a day, one day to feel it unfold. To really see it instead of sprint past it, checking things off as I went.

  As I get older and more people are lost to me, I’m beginning to absorb that an uneventful day is a very good day indeed. The doing, the shuffling and shuttling, the eating and sleeping and, yeah, the fighting too. This is life, together.

  I listen to the crows caw outside my window and the squirrels remind me there’s no rest for the weary. I can hear the dryer in the basement tumbling and why that’s comforting I’m not sure, but it is. This is what life is, for now. Still so much to do, still so much left undone.

  Dear Stay-at-Home Moms and Working Moms, You’re Both Right

  For the past eight years I’ve lived in the middle ground between two categories of mothering. Of course reducing all of mothering to two opposing sides is such an American thing to do, isn’t it? To make it a catfight wrapped in an apple pie.

  As mothers, we are fed a steady diet of panic-inducing or choice-affirming headlines. We’re told just as many studies support staying at home full-time as support mothers working outside the home. We are pitted against one another at every turn, whether it’s in culture, in hot takes, or in our own neighborhoods and classrooms. What working mother hasn’t been asked to join the other moms for coffee after drop-off and had to answer, “I’d love to, but I actually have to go to work”? And what stay-at-home mom hasn’t been treated like the daycare backup on snow days because, you know, she’s already at home?

  But the truth is less shrill than the headlines, comment sections, Facebook, and occasional in-person frictions would have us believe. I spent my first five years of motherhood as a full-time working-in-an-office mom. I worked anywhere from thirty-five- to sixty-hour weeks, sometimes more. In my last year of that job my kids were just under three and five years old. I worked longer days than I had before they were born. It was unsustainable and insane.

  During one memorable stretch, I was working every weekend, trying to fit three months of work into two. With the exception of sleeping and eating breakfast, I spent an entire Memorial Day weekend at work; on Saturday pausing to watch the Vermont City Marathon go past our building. I missed fresh air. During those weeks upon weeks, I would go home for dinner and then turn around and go back to the studio until eleven o’clock or sometimes midnight or one in the morning. One night my daughter, three years old, her face framed by curls, marched over to me as I put my coat on to go back to work. Without a word she tugged on my sleeves and tried to unbutton the one button she could reach. She must’ve thought if I didn’t have my coat on then I certainly wouldn’t be able to leave. When we come home, we take off our coats, we kick off our boots, we stay awhile.

  When I told her I had to go, her eyes welled up with tears. She crumbled. She had had enough of me leaving every night, every weekend, coming home late, leaving early. And so had I. I was giving my entire life over to this place while my daughter cried and tugged, wanting me home. Naturally, she has absolutely no memory of that moment. Suffice it to say, it’s branded onto me for life.

  I was laid off when the economy crashed, just six months before my oldest child was to start kindergarten. I was fortunate to transition quickly into freelancing, and since then I’ve had the kind of schedule that allows me to be the one dropping the kids off at school and picking them up, the rare working mother in a pack of stay-at-home moms who are present for the afternoon bell. I can attend morning poetry readings, be there for field trips and performances, or take them to appointments without sacrificing vacation time or having to lie about my whereabouts (something that, for the record, I used to do regularly and without guilt).

  I have been a mother double agent, straddling these worlds and passing seamlessly between the two for the past eight years. And it’s given me some perspective on how both “sides” get it wrong. And right.

  Yes, working mom, you have missed fresh-from-a-nap rosy cheeks and spontaneous smiles. But you have also missed another human crapping straight up your arm. You have missed the shapelessness of time, given your calendar is parceled out into fifteen-minute chunks. But you’ve also missed the tedious minutes and hours that parenting young children can sometimes (always) entail.

  Yes, stay-at-home mom, you have missed jumping in the shower first thing in the morning without a lot of little feet and hands and eyes interrupting or hustling you out, but you have also missed excruciating conference calls where twelve people try to talk all at the same time and then everyone stops talking at the same time and fifty-five minutes later you think, Someone else is taking care of my baby so I can do this shit?

  Yes, working mom, you have missed a first. I know you have. Every one of us has. Maybe it was your baby rolling over or sitting up or the very worst—taking his first step
or full-on walking. It is a gut punch, no question. But along the way you have probably dodged a bullet or two or a half dozen on the colic or the crankiness, the teething or earache front.

  Yes, stay-at-home mom, you have missed sitting around with coworkers, shooting the shit or belaboring lunch plans for later that day. Lunch with adults. You have missed stringing your thoughts together and having them stay that way without someone tugging at your shirt or your hand, to come, come now, and do this thing. But you have also missed the mind-numbing tasks, the manufactured chaos, and the never-ending client dinners that have taken you away from your family. You have missed the things that would make you feel better about your decision being the right one.

  Or maybe, actually, you haven’t. I have seen every mother question her choices. There is working-mom guilt and stay-at-home-mom guilt because there is enough guilt to go around for each and every mother in this country. And that’s assuming you even had a choice. I didn’t feel I had a choice, as the breadwinner for our family. But I also really liked my job; I was certainly lucky. For so many mothers the choice isn’t whether to work but it’s how many jobs to get. It’s how to keep everyone’s heads above water.

  I can only speak from my own experience. And what I know is, when I was a working-outside-the-home mother with much more on my plate than I have now, I did a better job of parenting in many ways and a worse job in others. One small thing that stands out to me is how I used to make pancakes almost every Saturday morning. I felt so guilty over how rushed our weekday mornings were, all of us shoveling cereal in our faces with one foot out the door. And now, while I have no fixed schedule and certainly have my weekends free? It takes a sleepover to get me to deal with pancakes. Pancakes. Is there anything easier than pancakes? I’m not sure there is.

  And I know since I started working from home I have patted myself on the back for spending so much time in the same room as my kids, while rarely questioning whether I was actually present. Freelancers don’t have scheduled workdays or even a scheduled anything. I’m often on my laptop on a Saturday morning, a Friday night, and most afternoons when they get home from school. So is that better than working away from them, where I could often keep work somewhat contained? Debatable, isn’t it?

  Back then, before leaving on a work trip, I would create some sort of token for my kids. Behind these gestures was a timeless combination of working-mom guilt along with the ol’ “Well, if the plane goes down . . . ,” because I like to be optimistic like that. Recently I came across a booklet I had made for them before I left for a shoot. I reused old envelopes from our studio’s mailroom for the pages and printed out photos of us together, of me separately, and of the places and things I might see. I stayed up late taping it all together and binding it with a ribbon, all so it would be ready to leave on the kitchen counter early the next morning.

  As I flipped through it, all these years later, I was stunned at the amount of effort it took to pull this thing together. Especially given I had undoubtedly had a very long day before I got to work on it. I did this at a time when I was getting little sleep, was exponentially stressed, and had almost no time to myself that wasn’t work-related. I thought about how I would never do that now, now that I controlled my schedule and could make five books a day if I wanted to.

  I was in awe of former me. Not because I did anything perfectly but because I truly didn’t see what a great job I was already doing. At the time, I felt nothing could make up for my absence. And I also knew that behind these efforts were a raft of apologies: “I’m sorry I’m away from you. I’m sorry I have to make money, even though sometimes what I’m doing is stupid and utterly pointless.” But also “I’m sorry that I’m probably really enjoying at least part of it.”

  Stay-at-home moms, working moms, all moms, we are allowed to be proud of our choices and to question them; sometimes all in the same day. We have all missed things we wished we hadn’t and been present for things so soul-deadening it’s a miracle we ever get out of this thing alive.

  We have all been left so adrift by our society, our culture, and our government when it comes to the first five or six years of a child’s life. We are left to sort it out for ourselves, to cobble together our individual plans. No wonder we take all of this so personally.

  If you don’t believe me, ask yourself the last time parents were shamed for sending their kids off to elementary school. Why would they be? There is a societal and governmental expectation that all children should attend school; that education is necessary for a child’s development and that schools play a critical role in any community. School has our support. Imagine if there was a societal and governmental expectation that all children should attend a quality preschool or daycare program? Imagine the freedom and peace of mind it could offer all mothers, stay-at-home and working-outside-the-home alike. Imagine.

  Instead, we are held hostage by hysterical pronouncements and blood-pressure-spiking headlines.

  Have you ever told someone your child is in daycare? It’s an awful word; it’s a hard one to get out. It’s where babies go to die on their first day. That’s the only time we hear about those places. I hated telling people my kids were in daycare because there was always a look, that look, that said, “I’m sorry you don’t love your baby enough to stay home with her.” Sometimes I’d get one of those exaggerated jutted-out-bottom-lip numbers that all but said, “Aww, you know that’s just wrong, right?”

  Or consider the phrase stay-at-home mom. Maybe the house as a home base was accurate four decades ago, but I’m pretty sure I spend more time in my house than stay-at-home mothers do. How does it feel introducing yourself at a cocktail party with that title, surrounded by professional whatevers? Americans do like their ambition. And staying at home with young children is the opposite of ambitious, isn’t it? Just tell that to a mother who is on hour fourteen with a partner out of town, two kids under three, a dog who just ate half a birthday cake, and bills that need paying. At least when you work outside the home you have the option of actually leaving work.

  I have liked this middle ground I’ve been in. I’m incredibly fortunate to have experienced it. And it has underlined, more than any other experience, how we are our own worst enemies and our very harshest critics. We hold ourselves to intense and impossible standards. We, of course, don’t do this alone. Our culture has set the bar so high that it’s hidden in a place where we’ll never find it. And, conversely, the bar for fathers has been set so low they can easily step over it on the way to the bathroom.

  But please believe me when I say we aren’t making nearly the amount of life-altering mistakes we think we’re making and we are doing an exponentially better job than we can even comprehend. We are in it deep; we are wrong, and we are right, regardless of what side we’re on. We are human, and we’re doing the best we can. Can we not, just for a moment, save a little charity, a smidge of empathy, a bit of softness of the kind we would extend to our kids and extend it, just this once, maybe a bit each day, to ourselves?

  Time-Out

  Just What I Wanted, a Whole Twenty-Four Hours of Recognition Once a Year

  What’s this? One single solitary day of recognition on an annual basis? Wow, it’s like you can read my mind. It’s exactly what I wanted for Mother’s Day. Back when I was thirteen months pregnant and my crotch felt like an inside-out cheeseburger solely held together by gigantic cotton underpants I thought, Maybe, just maybe, there could be a whole twenty-four hours of half-assed thanking in this for me.

  And again, when my nipples were cracked and bleeding and I had to remind myself it’s “not okay” to think about wanting to “slap my infant daughter to the ground” when she approached my naked vulnerable breasts with her gaping gummy vise grip born of the river Styx, I knew it would all be worthwhile if just once a year I could get a handmade “napkin card” that had been hurriedly scribbled that same morning.

  And most recently, as I sat through yet another school team meeting where I had to really commi
t to not blurting out, “Jesus, kid, JUST LEARN A TRADE,” to try to bring all meetings forever to a real and final conclusion, I thought, If I could just feel mandatorily appreciated for no more than a day and in all likelihood about two and a half hours max, all of these exchanges with incompetent school administrators, humorless hard-ass teachers, and genuinely helpful and lovely people who are having their love of working with children slowly drained out of them by the system, it will all have been worth it.

  And here we are.

  What day is Mother’s Day again? A Sunday? You mean a day everyone else has off anyway? Of course. Perfect.

  So let me see if I’ve got this straight—you’re saying that me, a mother, will have the same hours of national recognition also afforded bobbleheads, lumpy rugs, personal-trainer awareness, spaghetti, one-hit wonders, Baked Alaska, “hole in my bucket,” cellophane tape, home warranties, “something on a stick,” spiral glazed ham, beer-can appreciation, cabbage, cheese doodles, and earmuffs?

  Someone pinch me.

  Next you’ll tell me my personal reward for mentally keeping track of roughly one thousand food dislikes, dentist appointments, classmate birthday parties, bike helmets, other mothers to avoid, weather-appropriate footwear, and snacks to bring to school for whatever the hell they’re celebrating this week will be forcing some kind of garbage smoothie and a charred heel of bread past my involuntarily pursed lips with a “Mmmmm-mmmm good” while noticing that the tulip on my breakfast tray bears a striking resemblance to one of only two tulips the squirrels managed to not take out GODDAMN IT. And I have to smile because these photos are definitely going on Facebook? And to not gag over that smoothie because honestly I think there might be canned dog food in it? Or not lose my shit—even a little bit—over that tulip? Wow, this really is some kind of . . . a day . . . isn’t it.