Why, I wondered, cradling my tiny son in his sling. He’d grow up and go away from me soon enough, perhaps as far away from me as I was from my own mother. Why in the world would I want to get away from him now, when he most wanted to be with me?
There would be plenty of time to take care of myself and my marriage later, I thought. If I noticed that some of the most fiercely attached mothers had spouses who seemed oddly detached, I didn’t connect it with the intense focus on child rearing, or to my own marital health. Everything was secondary to my way and truth.
It must be said, before anyone glares hard and long on my account at the next mother they see nursing a toddler (who is probably getting enough evil looks as it is, and could use a smile instead), that my views weren’t representative of the Order of the Sling. Some of us rode in on higher horses than others, and even the most evangelical among us was sure to have a counterpart on the other side of the playground, thinking we should all be arrested for indecent exposure of our breasts, and for endangering our children by sleeping with them. Moms are so hard on each other because we’re so damn hard on ourselves. None of us can really be sure we’re doing the right thing, or know how it’s all going to turn out. Today, I believe most parents—even the spankers—love their kids as much as I do, and are doing the best they can, like I do. But you couldn’t tell me that back then.
With each child, I became more relaxed, or maybe I was just more exhausted. At any rate, I was less rigid in my views. I found it was possible to compromise, and still be a good mother; perhaps, a healthier person. My firstborn wouldn’t take a bottle or pacifier, for instance, because I hadn’t dared introduce one before the recommended time, lest dreaded nipple confusion impair his breast-feeding technique. It worked. He was very clear on the difference, and spat out every kind of artificial nipple I tried. I couldn’t be away from him for more than an hour or two at a stretch. It was awful. I was discovering that I did need to get away from my baby sometimes, if just to go to the dentist.
“Do what you have to do,” I said with a meaningful look, as I left him with one of my nursing friends one morning so I could keep an appointment. I was only half joking.
With the next baby, I wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as he seemed to get the hang of nursing, I gave him a bottle. “This is a bottle,” I told him. “And this is a breast. Questions?”
He had none.
I was prepared to give the third one a pacifier as soon as his head was all the way out. He generally had one in his mouth, one clipped to his shirt, and one tucked in my pocket on standby.
Over time, I found I needed to revisit more than just my position on feeding and soothing. Having a second child forced me to consider how long I could possibly keep pouring so much of myself out. I was starting to think I might not be the earth mother I wanted to be, any more than I was the executive mom I thought I would be. After the first two years of immersion, the romance of homemade yogurt and hand-sewn sock puppets began to wear thin, as did my self-esteem. The labor involved in taking care of small kids is menial and repetitive. You’re cleaning up other people’s body waste day after day. There’s an aspect of it that works on your ego in a good way. It can be a humbling act of devotion. It can also make you feel like shit. My complete financial dependence on my husband was subtly corrosive, too. I began to feel as if I wasn’t really qualified to do anything but mind children, keep house, sort the mail, and make appointments—tasks that translated to the bottom of the pay scale in the job market. It frightened me. What if Patrick dropped dead, and I had to provide? Where would I even begin?
On top of all that—or more truthfully, buried deep beneath it—I was getting bored. Potlucks and playgroups were my main social outlet, and they weren’t enough. I called Patrick at the office to talk, and sometimes fight, several times a day. I poured my creative energy into projects that never got finished, problemsolving that didn’t help anybody, and any other diversion I could put between myself and the dread truth that as much as I adored my children, I needed something more to feel fulfilled. But I couldn’t admit it without a specific idea of what “more” might be. I needed a clear exit sign.
It came in the form of a part-time job as an assistant to a priest at the Episcopal church I had wandered into one Sunday when my firstborn was a few months old. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there, but it intrigued as much as perplexed me, so I kept wandering back. The liturgy was familiar; the “smells and bells,” as Anglicans say, of my Catholic schooling, minus the guilt and the gory crucified Jesuses. The service brought some structure to the week, when my days were so much like each other that it seemed to have no beginning or end. On Sundays, at least, I had something to get up and get dressed for, a place to go. It was a portal to a world that included, but didn’t revolve around, children. And it was a space where I had a chance to connect with myself, a prayer of hearing the small, still voice within—if the signal hadn’t gone dark permanently. The priest, Susan, was a sexy, mature woman with a sleek silver bob and flowing purple batik robes—so radically different from the cadaverous Catholic priests I’d known as a kid, that I had to do a theological double-take. I was wary about the Jesus-y bits, but I was drawn to her offbeat book groups and workshops on meditation and dreams. It was in one of those that she mentioned she was losing her assistant.
The small, still voice pinged. That’s your job.
I didn’t say anything, but when she offered the position to me a few weeks later, I considered myself drafted. “Yes,” I said, without really knowing what I was agreeing to do. It turned out to be the perfect part-time job for the next five years, requiring me to develop professional skills that went well beyond making appointments and sorting the mail. It alleviated my fear that my next résumé would have to include a section called “The Missing Years.”
I enrolled the children in a half-day Mother’s Day Out program, two days a week. They had hardly ever known a babysitter, so it felt like I was shipping them off to boarding school. Life was supposed to come through me before it came to them. It was my role to screen, diffuse, and manage their every experience. Nobody else, not even their father, was qualified enough, in my eyes. I planned to keep this up through the school years by educating them at home. Before any of my children could hold a crayon, I was already researching curriculums. One week I leaned toward the freestyle “un-school” approach to learning; the next I was sure that a classical education with Latin lessons was right for my future academy. Or we would mix it up, borrow from the best of both. I imagined us sitting around the dining room table, conjugating verbs and finger knitting, myself as a cross between Mary Poppins and the wizard Merlin—every lesson a magical adventure with talking animals and musical numbers.
I loved the idea of homeschooling. Still do. But I must have been thinking of someone else’s home. My fantasy didn’t account for the fact that I’d never been interested in teaching kids, or admit the possibility that there were trained teachers who had always wanted to teach kids, and might have something of value to offer mine. How could they? In my mind, motherhood was a kind of enclosed terrarium, a bell jar that contained everything my children would ever need to grow. I didn’t realize how much bigger their lives—and mine—were going to get. Like the little boy in one of my old storybooks who buys a goldfish and has to keep finding larger containers to hold it, I’ve had to ditch one cherished idea of motherhood after the other for a more spacious one.
I was braced for every possible repercussion of placing the boys in day care, except that we all might like it. It was a revelation to pick up my two-year-old at the end of his day, and hear the pleasure in his voice at having news to tell me. It was bliss to have five hours to myself at a stretch. None of us were going to fit back under the jar. The third baby was on the wait list for Mother’s Day Out in utero. They each graduated from a couple of days a week to half-days all week, then full days at school all week, and my work, like the contents of my purse, has tended to expand to fill all availa
ble pockets of space.
Along the way, I morphed from part-time priest assistant to full-time writer. I have a desk, but my “office” is generally the end of the dining room table. According to the amount of e-mail spam I get, advertising work-at-home opportunities for moms, I’m living the dream. It’s not unlike the dream where you sit down for an exam and realize you have no pants on. Only the exam is a magazine deadline, and there’s a chance that I really don’t have any pants on. Every day is casual day at Work-at-Home-Mom Inc. Also, it’s always bring-your-kid-to-work day, because my office hours don’t neatly correspond with the ringing of the school bell. The kids come home around the same time of day that New York editors usually approach the bottom of their to-do lists, where my name and number sometimes happens to be.
The first time one of my essays was picked up for publication, I had to leave a voice mail for one of those editors, a person I aspired to work with again and upon whom I wished to impress a certain air of decorum and professionalism. That whole neurotic, hapless, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, Wendy-Among-the-Lost-Boys thing? Ha-ha! Merely my literary persona, my dear. I can turn it on or off at will.
I left my message, and closed with this: “I have to go now. The baby is naked, and he has a hammer.”
It could have been worse. On any other day that week, I could have instead closed with:
“I have to go. The baby is locked in the dog crate.”
“I have to go. They are making a contest of jumping over the pee on the floor.”
“I have to go. They just lassoed the ceiling fan.”
I decided I needed the proverbial “room of one’s own,” so I claimed a utility room at the back of the house, which had previously been designated as an arts and crafts space for the kids, a place where mess-making was allowed. Of course they weren’t the slightest bit interested in it until I moved a desk, a chair, and my laptop in and declared it off-limits.
I might as well have baited it with candy. A few weeks later, in the middle of a project, I walked into my sanctuary to find it completely trashed. A cupboard full of art and school supplies had been pillaged. Paint was splattered on the floor, my file folders and copy paper strewn across it, a fine dusting of craft glitter sprinkled over everything. I went looking for the perpetrators, half tempted to rub their noses in the spilled glitter, wondering if I ought not to have revised my position on spanking along with everything else. I apprehended the vandals in the driveway, making mud pies on an industrial scale from a batter of dirt, water, poster paints, and school glue. They stared at me like raccoons caught in headlights on the rim of a dumpster.
“For the love of God,” I implored them, “go watch television.”
At various junctures, I’ve tried again to establish a regular work space, as if I were a regular person with a regular job. I stake my claim, furnish it, and accessorize it with file folders, letter sorters, and Post-it notes. Somehow I always wind up right back at the dining room table, laptop propped open amid the dirty breakfast dishes and school papers. It seems that I’m resistant to a room of my own, maybe for the same reasons the boys weren’t interested in a creative space that was designated exclusively for them. We like to be near each other. My sons’ correct sense of their place in the middle of my life remains intact. The difference now is that they aren’t expected to occupy the whole of it.
I never fell out of love with my mothers-in-arms. There are some I see regularly, though more often over dinner or a glass of wine than at the playground. These tend to be the moms who also sought the middle way, though I’m glad to know that others are still out there on the lonesome high road, if only as a challenge to conventional wisdom, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Every one of the rest of us has strayed from our early ideals in some way that would have appalled us then. We laugh and cry, and remind each other how short, how sweet, that time was.
As we assured each other would one day be the case, our children have, one after the other, weaned from our breasts, left our beds, learned to sleep through the night. On a Saturday morning, mine can get up, turn on the television, pour their own cereal, and fend for themselves until I’ve had my first pot of coffee. Before I’m done brewing the second, the screen door opens and bangs shut and the older two are gone, climbing fences, riding bikes, rounding up their neighbors, scheming sleepovers. Even the youngest can spend a whole night away from home now. They are on their way.
I still don’t feel a pressing need to be apart from them for more than a day. Whenever I have to travel without them, the final hours approaching departure are filled with second thoughts. I regret the decision to go, procrastinate packing, scheme to get out of it. Anything could happen, I tell myself. Life is too short to spend one precious minute away from the ones I love. Why should I go?
Against the undertow of impending separation, I pull them closer, touch them more, hug them longer. I bring my face to their hair and breathe in like it’s my last chance at oxygen for a thousand miles.
And then it’s time. I force myself to push off, to remember who I am without them, so that when it is their turn to leave me, I’ll still know.
4.
D-I-Y Spells Die
One morning a year, I wake up and remember that tomorrow is Pinewood Derby Day, an annual Cub Scout event that requires Cubs to design, carve, and pimp a car from a hand-size block of wood, which is then raced on a state-of-the-art electronic track, run by grown men wearing neckerchiefs. Space shuttles are launched with less precision and intensity than Pinewood Derby cars. There are exacting restrictions on dimension and weight that come down to micro-units of measurement. There are legalities concerning exterior enhancements and the types of lubricants allowed on the axles. There are innumerable websites devoted to Pinewood Derby aerodynamics, but form is valued closely behind function, with prizes awarded for “Most Patriotic” design and “Most Creative.” You can’t pull a prizewinning Pinewood Derby car out of your ass at the last minute, which is why our Cubs never win prizes. It’s not their lack of competitiveness, it’s their parents’. We are the seventies Chrysler of Pinewood auto production. Everyone else is racing Bugattis and our kids get K-cars.
I put Derby Day on the family calendar, and e-mail Patrick weekly reminders as the date nears, but somehow it always falls off his radar. When I go to him on Derby Eve and tell him there are twenty-four hours left before weigh-in, he acts like it’s an ambush. In the interest of preserving the marital trust, I will enable the “mute” button on the scene that invariably follows. But if you were to write captions based on observing our body language and facial expressions, you might come up with something like this:
“Are you fucking crazy??”
“Are you??”
And that would more or less capture the gist of it.
Sometimes—most times—I think we are doing a pretty good job as parents. Our boys slept between us as infants. They were breast-fed into toddlerhood. They never had to cry longer than it took us to figure out what was needed, and answer the need. We may not always keep up with the Joneses, but they have bikes, books and bunk beds, soccer, school and Scouts, and most of the other privileges of being a middle-class kid in America. We work hard at being whole people in a healthy relationship. Most times, I think my kids are as lucky to have us as we are to have them.
But then we hit a bump and it derails me completely. Instead of feeling like we are doing an outstanding job, I wonder who thought it would be a good idea to give us three human beings to care for. We can’t keep houseplants alive. We can’t change lightbulbs. We can’t sew badges on uniforms—hell, we can’t remember to wash the uniforms—let alone remember the goddamn Pinewood Derby. Other people seem to have no problem at all with going to work, paying their bills, mowing their lawns, dusting their ceiling fans, painting their door frames, and returning their library books on time. What is wrong with us, I ask myself on days like that. Did we miss an orientation session on Living Life? Did we ride in on the short bus?
&nbs
p; Homemaking is not my forte. Or my husband’s. Even before we had our own junior demolition crew, we were pretty well hapless. For the ten years we occupied it, the interior of our first home resembled a senior-year college dorm: crappy old furniture, broken miniblinds, and pictures hung randomly over nails that already happened to be sticking out of the walls. Our present home is furnished and decorated as if adults live here, but we haven’t been in it long, so give us time. The outlet in one of the boys’ bedrooms stopped working last winter. As of this summer, we still haven’t gotten around to having it fixed. Insulation hangs exposed over the side of the dishwasher, where the glass tiling I envisioned has yet to materialize. The cat is working on re-texturizing the freshly painted walls, and the boys are beating back the lovely St. Augustine turf, planted fifty years ago by the original owner, one runner at a time, pocketed on her walks through the neighborhood. We help by forgetting to water it. While it would sound noble to chalk our negligence up to our preference for spending time with our kids and each other over salaried jobs, a maid, and lawn service, that wouldn’t be the whole truth. It’s true that we are perpetually short on money, time, and energy, but it is also true that we simply aren’t on the ball.
I’ve heard that ducks, or maybe geese, only have a set number of offspring, because that number is as high as they can count. I am definitely one over my cognitive limit. Even a freestyle outing, like going to the park, taxes my stunted left brain, since it seems to be against some law of physics for three boys to move in one direction. I go hoarse shouting, “Come back!” “Too far!” “Not in the creek!” “Where’s your brother?” I sound like an especially high-strung border collie.
Planting Dandelions Page 4
