One-act Play: "Dog with Sock. And Poop." Or, "The Sock in the Poop."

Enter stage right: Dog (pseudonym). Sneaks nose into Child 1's hand. Eats sock. Subsequent action determines that dog has also previously eaten Child 2's sock, which had been placed in snowboot for safe-keeping.

Child 2: "My sock is in Dog's poop?"

Parent: "Not yet. Your sock is in Dog's tummy. It will probably be in his poop tomorrow."

Child 1: "I miss my sock!"

Child 2: "I miss my sock!"

Parent: "I know, I'm sorry. But it's just a sock."

Child 2: "He shouldn't have eaten my sock."

Parent: "He's just a dog, dear. He didn't know."

Child 2: "It's in his poop?"

Parent: "Tomorrow it will be in his poop."

Child 1: "WAAAA!"

Child 2: "They'll have to get it out of Dog's poop?"

Parent: "No, I don't think we'll really want it back, honey."

Child 2: "They have to get the poop out of the potty?"

Parent: "It'll probably be outside, dear. Dogs don't poop on the potty."

Child 2: "If I eat Dog, he'll be in my poop?"

Child 1: [Snoring]

Parent: "I suppose so."

Child 2: "And we'll have to get him out of the potty?"

Parent: "Well, if you eat something, it's usually not alive, so . . ."

Child 2: "My sock will be in Dog's poop when I'm at school?"

Scene continues ad infinitum, or at least until 24 hours later, when Family has determined that Sock has probably passed through Dog by now and will not be recovered. Suggest scene ends with oblique references to loss and materialism. Also to not leaving loose socks around dogs.

Addendum: Child 2 has discovered the power of eating + poop. Viz, when wanting to annoy Child 1, Child 2 informs Child 1 that Child 2 is going to eat Child 1's favorite toy. Favorite toy will then -- da da DUM -- end its life as Child 2's poop.

Is It Over Yet? (When I Was too Depressed to Smell the Lilacs)

One of the things I loved about the Bread Loaf-Orion Environmental Writers Conference was that there was a lilac tree just outside of the building I was staying in. Our lilacs had already gone over, but these were only halfway done, so I got an extended lilac season this year.

Lilacs were one of the early clues, a couple of years ago, that I was not just mother-exhausted, not just tired of living in a place I didn't love. There was something more going on.

Years ago we planted two lilac bushes at our house, and once they got large enough to produce flowers above deer-chomping height, they made gorgeous, fragrant bunches of blossoms.

Only I wasn't smelling them that year. I missed lilac season. I was too busy, couldn't be bothered, I don't know. I didn't take the few steps from our deck or the garage to bury my nose in lilacs, and not doing so made me feel . . . sad, depressed, resentful. Maybe other things.

I've always wavered between pansies and lilacs for my favorite flower -- pansies for their variety and fun, like playful flower-kittens with balls of string, and lilacs for their scent and abundance and their proclamation that spring has truly come. Life feels good when the lilacs are around. They're a sign that things are about to get slow and lovely and luxurious with time and sunshine and days of laughter.

When you can't appreciate that, can't feel it -- when I can't -- there's something wrong. And that year, I couldn't. Nor could I the next year. This year I made intentions. Every time I have to go out to the damn car to haul the kids somewhere (I can't wait to live in a walkable community; having to drive absolutely everywhere is no kind of freedom at all), every time I took the compost out, every time I did anything outside with the kids, I took a minute to step over and smell the lilacs. It was a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it action, but I think it worked.

Having an extra week to stop, smell the lilacs, and smell them again, to remind myself of dark days and better ones to come, that was a gift.

Clean House? Not if You're Riding the Rails

I recently published an essay on Full Grown People about my slightly OCD relationship with housecleaning. There was no need to go into specifics about the cleaning schedule or the minutiae of my twitchiness. I would have liked to include a section about the book that taught me how to clean -- What To Do When Your Mom or Dad Says . . . Clean Your Room! -- but couldn't find a way to work it in. I love this book. Someone gave it to me when I was a child, and I still use the methods covered in it because they tap directly into the childlike love of having a routine and creating chaos at the same time. When my house, or a room, is a real mess, I chuck everything possible into some central location (as a child, it was the middle of my floor; these days, it's the kitchen counter), clean every single surface, and then start putting things away where they belong. The book is out of print, which is a real shame because I've never seen anything better.

I also didn't have an appropriate place to mention our Clean House playlist. There's a lot of fun music on there, and all of it shows my poor taste. But hyper-anal cleaning sessions require frequent dance breaks.

Except that wasn't the point of this post. The point is, Wednesday is our usual Clean House day. My kids are so used to it that sometimes my son (who's 6) will actually do his required duties (it's not rocket science -- all toys off floor and tables and put away somewhere, and Legos organized; sometimes he earns a bit of money washing the windows or the kitchen floor) almost before I'm done with breakfast. That sounds awesome, except that his purpose is to nab Angry Birds playtime before I have a chance to sit him down with arithmetic or have him read a Little Bear story to me.

That also wasn't the point. The point was, this happened.

It actually happened three weeks ago. These tracks go out of his room, into the hallway, and off into every other bedroom. I have to wait for Gordon to pick me up in his express before I can go anywhere. My son has pretty much aged out of the obsessive track-building phase (it's all Legos and Minecraft now), so it was nice to see what might be one of his last inventions. And I don't mind chaos at all, as long as the base state is clean to begin with. But after a week . . . or two . . . or three . . . I'm starting to get really twitchy and itchy and have trouble sleeping. Last night I had a nightmare about the weeping angels on Doctor Who. I need to vacuum this floor.

Dear Vida: Why I'm not helping up the submissions percentage this week

The much-discussed 'count' by Vida: Women in the Literary Arts shows a saddening lack of women writers represented in literary publications, daily publications, book reviews, etc. Here's one sliver of a reason why:

9:30 a.m. The children have breakfasted and nursed, been toileted and diapered, medicined and vitamined, swept off and wiped. The baby is down for her reliable morning nap (the afternoon one is hit-and-miss, and requires long periods of holding and rocking). The 3-year-old is playing happily with his train tracks on the floor after I spent 20 minutes helping him set up an elaborate layout with plenty of bridges, tunnels, curves, and switches.

I've had two cups of coffee and even the breakfast dishes are washed. The new album from Bright Eyes is playing. So while Alex sleeps and John plays, I sneak out a story that I've been writing and rewriting for 5 years, and am hoping to send to a journal this week. (Even though I still feel shaky in fiction, creative nonfiction being my strength, and this journal has off-handedly rejected several of my nonfiction essays. But they mentioned on Facebook that they're looking for stories, so I keep working. When I can.)

I sit down on the rocking chair slightly out of sight, rest the clipboard on my knee, and uncap a pen.

John looks toward the kitchen. "Mummy, I want a hug." Gripping Percy the green engine, he trots over and climbs onto my lap.

Five minutes later, and again ten minutes later, I ask if he's ready to play with his tracks again. "No," he says, running Percy up and down my arm, "I just hugging now."

And in no time flat it's time to get the baby up and make lunch.

Of course I'm going to put the story down and give him a hug. There's a tug, an "I wish I could just have half an hour and then get lots of hugs," but there isn't really a choice. Does this make me not-a-writer? Are you a writer only if you push away the hug and stick to the story? No. It just makes me a writer who doesn't get things done very quickly. A writer who is always tired, and always trying. I'm betting a lot of women writers who are also caregivers find themselves in a similar position.

(I did attempt to keep working by offering to read John the story I was working on. While he was patient enough, and I always do a fair bit of editing while reading aloud, it is a bit hard to engage in serious rewriting when you've got your "This is George. He was a good little monkey and always very curious" voice going on.)

Mindful Parenting: Childrearing is a Job. Pay Me and Get Over It.

It's hard to know where to begin. Do I launch into a critique of Erica Jong's rambling, contradictory column in the Wall Street Journal, in which she criticized attachment parenting -- essentially, it seemed, because it put too much pressure on mothers? How about pointing once again to the Salary Survey study that found stay-at-home mothers, if they do 10 common activities per week (including preparing meals, minor housecleaning, and driving kids around to various activities), are worth nearly $118,000 per year? How about the studies that show that people who have children are unhappier than those without? Or last year's factually incorrect attack on breastfeeding in The Atlantic Monthly, in which Hanna Rosin sacrificed scientific fact in order to justify how pissed off she was at society's lack of support for breastfeeding and other beneficial parenting practices?

I will start, instead, with one statement and one little story. The statement: conditions for parents, families, and mothers in particular are never going to improve if the only people given voice in the media are the ones criticizing others' parenting choices.

The story: Last night I got really pissed off at my husband, simply because he offered to help me.

You see, I haven't made much money since our son was born 3 years ago. It's a long story, which I won't go into here. But this week, for the first time since he was born, I am taking on paying work in my job as a copy editor and proofreader of textbooks. As our house flooded recently and we could use the extra income, my husband was happy to hear it. Last night we were discussing how many hours I could do per week, given that our son is in preschool 3 days a week but we also have a daughter almost 5 months old who needs my care.

"I can't do it the days I have John home," I said. "It's just not gonna happen." I've explained to my husband (and friends without small children) that using a computer with our 3-year-old around is just an exercise in frustration. I can't even check email, much less concentrate on a detailed proofreading job I get paid to do. Forget it.

He said, "Maybe I can help a bit in the mornings on those days, and you can do an hour or so of work."

Ah.

Of course I knew, and I know now, that this was a generous offer. My husband is emphatically not a morning person. But he is a modern father, one who cooks dinners and cleans the bathroom and, before we had the second baby, took our son out on weekends so I could have Saturday mornings off. And one who wants to support me in the choices I make regarding our life, my life, and our children's care. However. Behind that statement (and I emphasize that my husband never intended this meaning, and was simply trying to be thoughtful and helpful) is an unspoken point that all of the other work that I do every morning is worthless compared to something that actually earns money. Being the one to get up at 5:30 when our son says, "I all done sleeping," playing with him, helping him poop on the toilet and wash his hands with soap, making the granola we all eat, packing a healthy, tasty lunch for both of them, writing notes to our son's preschool teacher and speech therapist. Making breakfast, sweeping up spilled granola, nursing our baby daughter, making coffee, washing the dishes, writing checks for bills, making our son brush his teeth, changing our daughter's diaper, reminding our son for the zillionth time to say please and thank you. God. Let's not even talk about the rest of the day. Or my often smothered efforts at writing essays, novels, stories.

None of those things have ever earned an offer of help in the morning. (Since so many people like to criticize women for complaining too much, I emphasize once again that my husband is awesome. He just can't deal with mornings. My brain checks out after 6 at night, so we balance each other.)

Then again, I don't earn an income for any of those things. And in this fact lies the tangle that mothers these days have found themselves in. Because while some of us read books and practice what I think of as 'mindful parenting,' other mothers attack us for treating childrearing as a job, a job for which we are not paid.

"When I was a mother, all we had to do was keep the kids alive," I've heard. "If you're breastfeeding exclusively you're only doing it because you've been brainwashed to think of yourself as a cow." (Okay, that's a paraphrase.) "If you treat childrearing as a job, then you're taking it too seriously."

So, essentially, those of us who actually spend the time and effort to consciously do a good job of mothering? We suck. And we make life suck for all the other mothers who feel guilty for not doing what we try to do. We should all just wing it, all just throw out the research of the last 50 years, ignore the benefits of breastfeeding and attachment parenting, put our kids in preschool, take our kids out of preschool, spend more time listening to them, spend less time listening to them -- basically, do whatever feels like it takes the least effort.

None of the critics has actually come out and said this, but that's what it boils down to. If any of your childrearing choices feel like they take mental effort or thought, then you'd better stop. Because it means you're taking it all too seriously.

Yeah, that attitude has worked real well for humanity up until now. You can see how well we're all doing. No greed, no wars, no poverty, no wasteful use of non-renewable natural resources. Life's just roses all over the world.

You think the state of the world, the condition of humanity, the choices that the powerful make, the struggles we have for equality and justice have nothing to do with how we are raised? They have everything to do with how we are raised.

Those who criticize some of us for treating mothering as a job have a misconception as to what that job is. My children are not my job. My job is to understand my children in the best way I can, to provide an environment for them to become the most complete human beings they can be, and to instill in them certain lessons that, if we adults actually followed them, would make the world a livable place for everyone: share, let everyone else have some, wait your turn, say please and thank you, wash your hands with soap, listen (if adults just listened and paid attention to others' points of view, we could probably solve about 80% of our problems), don't hit, clean up after yourself, apologize when you've hurt someone, don't take more than your fair share, everything you do has consequences, good or bad, listen to your intuition, trust yourself, respect your choices, respect others' choices, if you've done something you regret, then own up to it. Goodness knows how many others I'm not even aware of.

The most important of all these lessons is respect. And here is where the job comes in. Before my children can learn to respect others, they need to respect themselves. And in order to do that, I have to help them understand that I respect them. I think this is the lesson that sticks in the craw of many critics. Somewhere in the back of our minds still lies the mantra that children should be seen and not heard, that their needs are unimportant and subservient to others' needs. Even I was raised somewhat that way. When I say that I try to listen to and respect my children, too many people hear "I let my life be ruled by my children."

Not. What. I. Said. Listen.

When my son says that he wants to watch more Curious George when he's already had several episodes, or play with my computer, or squeeze his baby sister, I try not to say just plain 'no.' That's all it means. I don't let him do these things. I don't let him negotiate for them. But I do take 20 seconds to focus on what he is asking for, show him that I understand what he wants, and explain why it isn't happening.

Sometimes in response he'll throw a fit and have to go into time-out. But over time the lesson does sink in -- both the lesson of what is allowed and what's not, and the lesson that I will listen to him, respect his wishes, and explain when they're not possible. And I use the same lesson to teach him respect for me: that sometimes Mummy has to work, that sometimes she needs quiet or some space, that he can't just take my things without asking for them, that I am a person, too, with wishes and needs of my own.

If I expect my children to honor my needs and my space and my possessions (and, I hope, take those lessons to their interactions with others in the outer world), the best way to achieve that is to give them the same respect.

This is a really hard job. It takes an immense amount of time and energy. I read piles of books and articles, looking for more tips on certain sticking points. I talk at length with other parents about their difficulties and problem-solving tips and frustrations. I practice a lot. I start over a lot. I have done more work in three years of parenting than I devoted to my Master's degree.

Yes, I take this job seriously. And because I and others do take it seriously, the world might possibly be a marginally better place in the next generation.

Therefore, I think we should be paid for this job. I think the taxpayer should pay all stay-at-home parents a salary. You think I'm kidding? We pay politicians crazy amounts of money to solicit campaign contributions and future job offers from lobbyists in order to push through laws that they neither read nor understand -- I mean, we pay them to pass thoughtful legislation for the benefit of their constituents. How is that any different from paying full-time parents for raising the next generation in ways that are most beneficial to society?

Of course, the danger is that many full-time parents might do a bad job. There's little quality control. But seeing as how the aforementioned politicians largely fail to do the job they're paid for (concentrating instead on aforementioned campaign donations, thinking up nasty things to say about people they dislike, and trying to make sure the other party can't do anything they want to do), and seeing as how I can think of a number of bank executives who did a really shitty job and still walked away with millions of dollars each, I don't see why it's such a stretch.

The easiest way to put a stop to the "Mommy Wars" (for a critique on that concept, read my post Declaring War on the Mommy Wars) is to simply make full-time parenting a paid position funded by the taxpayer, like Congress or public schools, with Social Security benefits and a monthly check.

Personally, I'm going to continue treating this as a job. Maybe if I raise my children right, the next generation will pass more family-friendly policies and will start giving mothers some compensation besides brunch on Mother's Day, rights to half our 'working' spouse's Social Security benefits, and really repetitive essays about our children's love being all the compensation we need. And maybe a day will come when that is true, too.

[Note that during the time I spent writing this, I also made breakfast for 3 people, ironed a shirt, made coffee, nursed my daughter, showered and dressed, reminded my husband of tomorrow's haircut appointment, and 3 times took my son to poop on the potty and wash his hands with soap. I'd like to see my husband do that while performing the job he gets paid lots of money for!]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit my child's teething as proof of insanity

Oh, John, light of my life, bane of my existence. My son, my sleep-thief. Tee-thing-pain: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, so innocently, against the bones that cause such misery. Two. Year. Molars.

He was awake, plain awake in the morning, screaming upright in bed at four o'clock. He was stubborn at home. He was happy at school. He was flirtatious at the grocery store cash register. But in the depths of my night, he was always helplessly screaming.

Did it have a reason? It did, indeed it did. In point of fact, there might have been no screaming at all had there not been, one eon, a certain initial idiocy of evolution. Between the forestland and the sea. Oh when? About as many years ago as some fool decided our survival could stand an unimaginable torture called teething. You can always count on a mother for incoherently blaming existence.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the childless, the inexperienced, free-wheeling childless are snickering at. Look at this ream of sleepless nights.

(With thanks and apologies to Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)

Did Einstein have phenomenal powers of concentration? Or was he simply free of responsibilities?

I've been mulling over this question since reading Einstein: His Life and Universe. Where does personal responsibility infringe on a person's powers of concentration? What level of responsibility-feeling do we have to relinquish in order to devote ourselves to the task at hand?

The author described a scene in which Einstein sat at his desk completely engrossed in a physics problem while the children ran around playing and yelling. "Which shows," he said, "what powers of concentration Einstein had."

This statement ruffled me. The scene: a man sitting at a desk, pen in hand, oblivious to the children playing around him and likely housework or cooking of some kind being done by his wife in another room.

No, this isn't a feminist response. What I found curious was that the author wasn't quite imaginative enoughg to apply a role of responsibility to the powers of concentration. Einstein may have had great such powers -- many people do -- but the reason he was able to practice them was that he felt no responsibility for what else was going on in the room: care of the children, attention to them, the need for meals to be cooked and clothes to be washed and floors to be cleaned. Mostly the children.

There is a great difference, somewhere in there, between someone who can concentate in distracting situations, and someone who can employ such concentration when they feel at some level responsible for the care and welfare of a household, or a relationship, or a pet.

Einstein was by all reports an attentive father, and even an enthusiastic one when his children were old enough to teach and on the few occasions they were in the same place. But it was understood that his energies were saved for his research, and his thinking.

It is easy to wonder how many women today have that luxury, and men, too. After years of trial and mostly error, I have discovered that I cannot write when other people are in my home, including my spouse and child. Nobody thinks anything of interrupting me to ask what we should do for dinner, or where I've put the phone bill, or if I could please come down and show them where the strawberry patch is among the weeds.

I can concentrate through all this, although it gets harder to slip back into my writing bubble and some days I just give up. I prefer reserving my efforts for noisy coffee shops or bars, where I can concentrate just fine and nobody bugs me.

Harder than concentration is shaking the sense of responsibility. Say my husband Ian is looking after our son, while I catch up on some work in front of a notebook or computer. John cries for some reason. I ignore it, knowing Ian has his own way of parenting; I try not to interfere or impose mine on him. But John keeps crying and maybe my husband is engrossed in his email.

I don't want to parent for him, don't want to tell him what to do. He's given me a gift of time to work, and I want to take it. But I can't let go. I am pulled, always, every day, by responsibilities to my son, responsibilities to my husband, and responsibilities to my work. At this point in my son's life, on any given day, the responsibility to him is strongest. Because I spend more time with him every day than Ian does, I can tell that John wants his crayons, or for someone to let the plastic shapes out of his ball so he can put them back in, or he's lost his funky chicken somewhere.

Or maybe I'm trying to ignore the litany that comes from being a full-time mother: it's almost time for his nap, but he hasn't had lunch yet, and Ian doesn't know quite how to make the eggs so he likes them, and he should really take John outside to play because it's rained the last 4 days and he needs some sunshine, and I still need to pick up something at the farm for dinner or we'll end up eating pasta again and we're both trying to stick with eating more healthy, more vegetables.

And on and on. I bet Einstein never worried about whether someone was getting enough vegetables, or about cooking his young sons a nutritious lunch in good time for them to take a nap.

It's not as if it's easy for my husband, either. After all, he works hard and doesn't get much time to check his email, or just watch the news or dig in the garden or read a book.

The point is simply one of language. I felt ruffled because the author's admiration of Einstein implied that others (usually women) who can not work in the midst of their yelling children are somehow lesser beings.

Einstein of course had responsibilities, and took them seriously, especially in the area of providing for his family. This was not an egomaniac who expected all to be sacrified to his work. But it was his lack of responsibility in the area of home life that allowed him to practice his powers of concentration. Einstein was partly able to do what he did because he knew that someone else was taking care of the house and the children, of the little responsibilities that comprise daily life -- the daily life so demanding, so attention-consuming, so full of multi-tasking, that it keeps so many of us from concentrating on anything at all.

Declaring War on the Mommy Wars

A Pissed-off Mother and the Nonviolent Revolution

It was my husband’s fault, and started like this: “I’m just trying to teach him something. Come on, he’s the only kid in day care who can’t feed himself and doesn’t talk yet.”

I was supposed to be going out for a run while Ian took Saturday morning duty and fed our 20-month-old his cereal. Instead, I burst into tears as Ian blinked in confusion and our son John banged his spoon on the table.

“What’s wrong?” asked the tired, slightly overworked husband whom I knew had woken up with a headache and was doing his best not to be grumpy.

I just shook my head. There is no possible way to explain to a non-mother the load of guilt that came crashing down with his innocent words. What he heard was a simple statement of fact: John doesn’t yet use a spoon to feed himself, and his words so far are limited to warped versions of “plop,” “cheese,” and “thank you,” with slightly clearer “uh-oh,” “all done,” and “meow.”

What I heard was a repetition of the same thing I hear every time someone sends me a link to one of those damn articles about militant breastfeeders, or stay-at-home moms versus employed moms, or an attack on attachment parenting, or an attack by non-parents on mothers who dare to complain about the stresses of motherhood, or a debate about the merits of reading and Baby Einstein, and when and how to potty-train. What I heard was this: You’re a bad mother. Every choice you make is wrong. You are not doing enough. You’re doing it all in the wrong way. You should be more involved, pay more attention, spend more time, slice off the rest of your identity to devote every iota of yourself to raise the most well-adjusted and intelligent child according to the requirements and schedule we have laid out for you. Either that, or hand him over to caregivers who will do a better job.

Maybe I should blame it on the article I read the day before, in which a writer beat up on mothers who post pictures of their kids as their Facebook profile photo (yes, I’ve done it). She, as so many others have done, lumped me in with a non-existent camp of mothers who are intellectual idiots, socially inept, enamored of their children, and burying our own lives in order to spoil a bunch of cute parasites. Nevermind that I have a degree in mathematics, still do symbolic logic for fun, like to discuss Proust with those who have read him, had a career as a good copy editor, and am a working writer.

It’s not I who defines myself only by my child. It’s you. As long as my intellectual conversations are sometimes spiced with the word “poop,” I am dismissed as a brainless twit. On the other side, as long as my conversations about our children are peppered with the phrase “sometimes I just want to run away,” I’m a selfish beast who doesn’t love my son.

I am sick of it. There are CEOs and politicians getting paid millions, if not billions, to screw up their corporations, screw over the people who depend on them, and screw every last piece of life out of the planet. And all mothers can do is yell at one another for not doing the most difficult, most important, and least-paid job on the planet absolutely perfectly?

My bursting into tears wasn’t my husband’s fault. He’s doing the best he can, and, smart person, does not read all the parenting and Mommy War articles I do. Maybe it’s my fault for reading them at all, one more way I’m screwing up as a woman and a mother.

In the twenty months since my son was born, I’ve learned two things: One, that a mother’s instinct is almost always right. That doesn’t mean her decisions are right. But if she’s in touch with herself, her child, and an inner voice that has nothing to do with have read Dr. Spock and Dr. Sears twenty times, her instincts as to what is best for her child, and what her child’s needs are, are generally going to be on the mark.

The second thing is that society—the media, other mothers, often family, and a lot of people in the community—are going to do everything they can to both drown out that voice, and to convince a mother that her instincts are utterly wrong. In fact, the message is, those instincts will damage your child’s social adaptation, ruin his or her chances of getting into a good college, give him or her asthma, obesity, a complete lack of independence, fear of dogs, an addiction to television and sugar, probably a drug problem, psychological insecurity, and lack of judgment. And they’ll hate vegetables and reading unless you do it all just right.

I would like to say, politely, to all these people, shut up. On both sides. Just. Stop. Yelling. Information and education is essential. Expressing your frustration is necessary so others don’t feel ashamed for feeling the same way. But this is, without a doubt, the hardest job on earth. Any mother out there dealing with guilt or anger or bewilderment or frustration, do you really want to lay any more of that on the shoulders of other mothers?

*****

I have opinions, even strong ones, about many things regarding motherhood. I believe breastfeeding and breast milk have incalculable health benefits that formula can never compete with. But I also know that breastfeeding can also be difficult or impossible. And, having used a hospital-grade pump for a month when my son was in the NICU, I know it feels exactly like being a milked cow and have trouble imagining making time for it during employment, especially with an unsympathetic boss. I also know babies raised on formula who are doing beautifully.

I believe a baby physically needs its mother for the first three months of life, possibly even six. But I also know that, in a society that seems headed on a crash-course of productivity, believing that everyone needs to work until they’re ground into dust, two weeks with your new baby is a blessing. Three months is a priceless gift, and six months an unheard-of treasure. A professional woman who can spend six months devoted to her baby and then go straight back into her career without being sidelined or passed over for promotion? Millions of us envy you handful.

I believe children who don’t go into nature regularly will turn out more anxious and have weaker cognitive reasoning than children who spend less time with toys that beep and more time watching trees and birds. I believe plastic is akin to a slow-acting poison, and that the powder-come-gel in disposable diapers is probably toxic. But I use Pampers; my son has plenty of plastic toys. And I know how hard it can be to get outside each day when there are a million demands on your time.

I believe people who think parenthood is a lifestyle choice akin to picking out a car or switching careers are fools. But I also pity them, because if they don’t believe that parenthood is a community effort, then they don’t believe in a functional society.

I believe that being a mother has added dimension and depth to my life I could never have imagined. But I also believe those who choose not to have children can live and love just as deeply.

So right here, right now, I am declaring war on the Mommy Wars. Or, more to the point, I am declaring a truce on the Mommy Wars within myself and my relationships. I am laying down my weapons. This is the nonviolent revolution, the new motherhood.

If you want information or advice, I will give it without judgment. If you want to talk about the difficulties of motherhood, and the guilt and the fears, I’m in. If you hate yourself for having lost your temper or having lost your identity, I want you to know you’re not alone. If you just want to talk about a good book, and not worry that mentioning poop in passing will scare someone off, I’m with you.

If you give your children love, and food, and change their diapers relatively regularly, and haven’t yet thrown them out the window, I say to you: Good job. You’re a good mother. And so am I. Whether or not my son learns to guide his spoon to his mouth anytime soon.

Letter to a New Mother: Welcome to a Life of Guilt

A friend of mine is expecting a baby very soon, and in writing a letter addressing some of her anxieties about the adventure ahead, I found this treatise on guilt spilling out. Inappropriate for her, right now, but a little discussion of the guilt felt by Mothers with Brains is sadly needed. Because no one speaks of it, we feel guilty even for our guilt.


Dear Mother,

Welcome to the most fulfilling and challenging job on the planet. You will have moments of tremendous joy, of insights and awakenings, and a gentle shaking out of the bag that used to contain what you thought of as 'priorities.' You will feel weariness and pleasure, frustration and ecstasy.

You will also, from now on, feel guilty every day for the rest of your life.

If you choose, as I did, to stay home with your child, you will feel guilty for not earning money. You will feel guilty for spending money. When your money-earning partner sighs in worry over stresses at work or the economy, or asks ever-so-lightly about what the $70 at the grocery store went to, and if there's any way to shave down the household budget, you will be flooded with defensive responses, any of which will lead to an argument that -- underslept and over-stretched and unsupported by society as you are -- neither of you needs.

The defensiveness will come from your knowledge that, although you spend a grueling 16 or so hours a day giving the best of yourself to your child and your home (not to mention the frequent night interruptions), and you are certain in your soul that this job you've chosen is the most important on the planet, you do not in fact earn a cent for it, neither in real income nor in a retirement plan.

In a simpler world, or a mythical past, this 'woman's work,' the nurturing that is so crucial to a child's survival and the harmony of a household and the fabric of a community, may not have been paid for, but its value was nevertheless acknowledged in some way. Unfortunately, no matter how much someone appreciates your cooking or your plentiful and nutritious breast milk, it doesn't mean much if you never actually get to choose, or reject, the job of caregiver and homemaker.

The feminist revolution gave us that false choice. I call it false because it, also, is no longer a true choice. The acceptance of women into the workaday world created, suddenly, an economy in which, for most families, both parents must work simply to get by. This condition is now an accepted fact of modern American life, the conundrum of middle class existence -- working full-time to pay for quality child care.

But the choice is false for more philosophical reasons than basic modern economics. Most of us women, we modern mothers, want both. We want fulfillment intellectually, socially, emotionally, and physically. We have ambition. We want to be presidents and enterpreneurs and artists. And we want, also, to be the mothers our children need us to be: we want the early attachment, the nurturing and the thrill of watching our own small person grow and learn and discover.

If you are at home with your child, you will feel guilty for putting nothing in the family coffers, and you will feel guilty for the boredom that creeps over you after stacking blocks for half an hour or reading the same book repeatedly.

But if you go back to work, no matter how much you love your job, you will feel guilty for failing your child. For a newborn, the attachment created in the first six months provides a sense of self and security the child can never recreate. You will feel guilty for not being there.

You will feel torn apart when you have to leave your sick baby, or when separation anxiety kicks in and every drop-off at the day care is a re-enactment of being tragically parted for life. You will feel resentful that the work day, and success in your career, is constructed in such a way that it makes fulfillment as a mother nearly impossible. You will feel cheated by the empty phrase "work-life balance."

There is no out for a new mother, no matter what you choose. You will feel guilty when showering while your baby is crying. You will feel guilty for not singing to and rocking your baby all night long when you desperately need sleep. And if, for the tiniest of seconds, for the most momentary moment, if you look at your colicky newborn, who's been crying for two hours straight, with weary loathing, you will feel like the most evil and ungrateful individual on the planet. And you will know you can never mention this to anyone, because society will judge you as harshly and as blindly as you judge yourself. No matter how loving you are throughout the day, no matter how giving and how full of enjoyment with every interaction, that one moment will feel like poison.

This is when you will realize that the guilt must go.

Our society does not give Mothers with Brains choices. I was once at a corporate gathering of women who had come in hundreds to hear Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth) speak. She was enthusiastic and eloquent about her new project of empowering women in the corporate world and leadership roles.

At question time, one woman stood up to ask, "How do you balance your work and your life," a question always at the forefront of every hardworking mother's mind.

Wolf shook her head. She was sorry to say, she informed us, that in the current economic and corporate structure of America, "there is no such thing as work-life balance. My answer is that I work for myself. It's the only way you can really do it."

We can only overcome the guilt by looking at the struggles of our lives upside-down. We are brought up to expect certain things from adult life. Certain success, a certain style of work. For women to ever be truly, completely fulfilled, those expectations have to be flipped on their head.

In the first place, the job of motherhood needs less sappy recognition than in the style of Chicken Soup for the Soul, and a whole lot more economic backing. As long as motherhood and homemaking is completely unpaid in a world that values everything only in money, then in the workplace women will always be held back. Why? Because at the back of every corporate monkey in charge will be the thought -- perhaps suppressed and unconscious but still there -- that "she could always just stay home and raise babies."

Whatever the misogyny and prejudice of that thought, the real crime is in the word "just," which makes my job, and perhaps yours, into nothing more than a frivolous hobby.

Second, I'm afraid we have to turn out backs on the entire structure of our workday and economy. Its current collapse has shown that unbridled greed and growth simply do nothing for people, individuals, societies, the world at large. But more than that, it is hard-edged. It is built around hours and minutes and dollars and cents, none of which, in fact, have anything to do with the stuff of life: food, love, rivalry, joy, ambition, community, breath, family, and a search for meaning.

The system pushes Mothers with Brains into a frenzy of overachievement first by undervaluing our work, which actually keeps the planet alive, and second by overvaluing work that pretends to keep the planet alive, but which in fact kills it physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Work-life balance will only happen from the ground up, when we investigate what's under our various guilts and question our and others' values.

It won't make you feel less guilty for turning off the baby monitor so you can shower in peace, or for wanting to run away and crawl under a rock when you're suffering crushing sleep deprivation. But it might mean we have more time to talk about those issues, and others that truly matter to us. To bring them out in the light rather than condemning ourselves for every choice, however unavoidable, and every failing, however illusory.

Common Sense Study: Virtual Reality, Television, and Budding Brains

My mother was telling me the other day that someone's done a study on virtual reality, and discovered that, when people are reading and engrossed in a book, what happens in their head is essentially the same as virtual reality.

To which I can only roll my eyes and wonder if my tax dollars went to pay for said study. In other words, duh.

This reminds me of a study I read a year ago on Broadsheet, one that found out that the sight of their baby's smile triggers peaceful, loving hormones in mothers. Gasp! I mean, really. You couldn't just say, figure that out from looking at people?

And yet, it seems like we so often need studies like these, because people's grasp of common sense is so slippery. We need studies like these -- seemingly expensive and unecessary -- to reaffirm the obvious for the mass population that logic brushes only tangentially.

For example, the news this last week or two that bank executives in the US are using government bailout money to give themselves huge bonuses. Everyone's shocked. And all I can say is that you didn't need a PhD in anything so complex as underwater basket weaving to have seen that coming. The assumption that the executives would have been chastened and suddenly behave in a fiscally responsible manner defies even the most basic logic.

If any of the blind people in government or think tanks had asked me for advice, this is what I would have mapped out for them:

A. Greedy people are greedy.
B. Greedy people are generally greedy rather than smart (they use their brains to acquire more of what they're greedy for), and they're certainly never altruistic.
C. Greedy people made decisions that made them lots of money and flattened the economy.
D. The government then gave the greedy people more money, trusting said greedy people to use it wisely.

What do you think happens next?

This is all aside from the common sense realization that an economy based on people buying stuff they don't need with money they don't have is by definition unhealthy, no matter how fast it grows.

Personally, I'd go for a common sense study that researches something more useful than what happens in our brains while we're reading, or even what happens if you hand a bunch of bank executives billions of dollars with no strings attached.

I'd like to lobby hard for a study that goes into depth to examine what happens to the brain development of children exposed to any significant telelvision time before the age of three. I read a survey result recently that found that 45% of American children under age three have a television in their bedrooms. Situations like this, and DVD players in cars are, I'm willing to bet, far more damaging to brain development than, say, being exposed to moderate amounts of wine in utero.

When I saw that little statistic in my Mothering magazine, I flipped immediately to the section on the visual cortex in my favorite parenting book, What's Going on in There? by Lise Eliot, a neurobiologist. The visual cortex is essential to brain development, and does a lot of its growing in those first three years. Television is not evil per se, but watching it has an unknown and likely huge impact on the tiny brains of infants.

I've met many parents who have proclaimed to me how quiet their kids are in front of Spongebob, or how they love to watch Baby Einstein. They never make the connection that the mental fixation, and glazed expression directed toward flickering pixels and images that will never in fact interact with them, has to be hugely damaging to babies' tiny, developing brains.

That's a study I'd get behind. After all, even though my son has never met television or fruit juice, he will be spending the rest of his life interacting with children, and then grown-ups, who did. Seemingly simple parenting decisions like this can have unforseen and enormous consequences. Without a study -- confirming what, to me, seems to be common sense -- it seems that we can't change people's behavior.

The Handmaid's Son

I never thought I'd be in the position of taking my son's books away. It's so 1984 or Darkness at Noon. Remove the books, remove their curiosity and intellectual stimulation, remove their questioning. But I had to (as all good dictators say); he's like a bottomless pit for kiddie literature and I've got other things to do (as all good authoritarians say -- shut up! I'm talking about making dinner).

Where's this coming from? Is it budding genius or just obsessive-compulsive-reading disorder? Okay, so my family's packed with voracious readers, and I know my in-laws read constantly. Me, I'll read absolutely everything. I discovered Proust and Harry Potter and read them together, finishing In Search of Lost Time and the first four Harry Potter books the same summer. I couldn't put either of them down, except to pick up the other. (Wanna know which one I've read again since?)

It seems to be something I've passed on to my 17-month-old. I know I'm bad, I know I'm an addict, but come on. This kid's insatiable. Morning to night, he brings me books to read. He lifts them up in the air and says, "lidilidalidlalidladi" or something like that, and then does a whole little body wiggle and satisfied giggle when I open the cover. And then he wants it all over again at the end. Today I kept a rough tally:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar (his favorite): 4 times, plus 3 aborted (sometimes he just likes to stop at the plums and start over), plus one reading from Daddy
The Very Busy Spider: 3 times
Goodnight Moon: 6 times plus twice from Daddy
Goodnight, Gorilla: 4 times plus once from Daddy
Moo, Baa, La La La!: 5 times plus twice from Daddy
The Runaway Bunny: 0. It's new and he doesn't like it yet. He will.
Various soft books about animals: 6 times (mostly the sheep and the cow)
Langendsheidt's German-English dictionary: half a page once
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: 1 1/2 pages

Really. I get tired of reading to him. He entertains himself just fine with blocks and balls and one drum that holds lots of things (who knew drums spent half their lives as container ships!), but the second I sit down to, say, work, or type an email or heaven forbid read a book myself, here we go with the "ladiladlidliadl"s. So I admit it. Today I became a paranoid dictator whose actions suppress imagination.

I was reminded sharply of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, where women aren't allowed to read. All the shops are labeled with pictures so that 'normal' women who learned to read in the pre-authoritarian society have no words to fix on, and the new generations will never learn.

I have become one of those ruthless authoritarians. There is a pile of cheery little board books sitting on the kitchen counter, where my son can neither see them nor reach them, waiting to be burned so we can create a more placid populace.

Or I might just start over with them tomorrow.

Selling Ourselves Short

Last week I had what has become an increasingly common conversation for me: child care. The expense of it, the lack of it, the quality of it. The talk followed a predictable pattern with a predictable conclusion. I'm going nuts, as is the mother I was talking with, but neither of us can quite afford full-time day care.

This isn't quite true. My husband and I could afford it if (iff, that is -- "if and only if")I went back to a full-time job. So. I can go back to the task of copy editing increasingly dissatisfying children's textbooks, a job I used to enjoy, but only because it was freelance and part-time and I could write on the side. This would mean doing what millions of other women do every day, getting up early, getting showered and dressed, getting my son up, dressed, fed, with diaper bag packed, ready to leave by 7:30 so we can all race to the day care center and then to our respective jobs.

Maybe it's selfish of me, but I don't think I can face that life. It seems overwhelmingly pointless, harried, and stressful, for my son as well as me. Given the two options, I think I'd rather let him sleep as long as he wants, and spend the day reading him Goodnight Moon a zillion times, making sure we all have nutritious meals, and, during his naptime, trying to squeeze in my dream of making my living as a writer.

That's given only those two options. But truly, like most Mothers with Brains I know, I want both. I want to have quality time with my child, and I want to have time to pursue my own intellectual development and freelance career.

What struck me after this recent conversation was a) the guilt that Mothers with Brains feel over wanting to spend money on child care in order to pursue things that might not necessarily bear financial fruit (although keeping ourselves from going berserk could be argued as a financial benefit), and b) the realization that, in complaining about full-time day care costing $15,000 a year, I and other mothers are selling short our own talents, activities, and value.

Honestly, is that all I'm worth? I read to my son constantly. I take him for walks and make sure he has a strong relationship with nature, ensure he learns to love fresh air and sunshine. I play with him. Not "development activities." Just play, stacking blocks, chasing a ball, whatever he feels like doing. I cook three meals a day that are generally organic, nutritious, often from locally grown produce (sometimes even grown by me), and hopefully super tasty. I keep the house tidy and clean, but not sterile. If my son is sick I nurture him and make chicken soup. I still breastfeed, a health benefit for him that's been calculated to have a value of about $30,000 a year. I take the cats to the vet and the cars to the mechanic. I volunteer time and writing skills to two organizations. I am on call to edit and shape the freelance efforts of various friends working on their writing. I keep the flow of community and family relationships going through letters, emails, and phone calls (I loathe talking on the phone, so really should get extra points for that). I play music for my son, sing to him, and help him play music, too. I try to speak to him in Russian sometimes.

All this is only worth $15,000 a year? You've got to be kidding me. The Salary Survey calculates that a typical stay-at-home mother doing about 10 tasks every week is, in real salary terms, worth $138,095. I'm not saying day care should cost over a hundred grand a year, but it does seem to say something about how little "women's work" is still valued, at least in American society.

And it tells me something about how little I value my own work, both the parenting and the constantly-shoved-aside creative writing, that $15,000 just seems like an insane amount of money. What are we worth? As mothers, as thinkers, as human beings playing roles in an intricate web of communities and social constructs? The answer is -- we're worth more than we think, but nobody's going to hand us free time and intellectual stimulation on a silver platter. We have to learn to ask for it. And to do that, we have to learn to value ourselves.

Why are kids always sick? Stress research in primates might point to an answer.

Most parents will know what I'm talking about when I say, in response when people ask how my son is, "He's between colds." That's the answer I give if he's not actually sick, either with a cold or some random virus that doctors just shrug at and say he seems to be fighting it off okay.

Kids are always sick. This seems to be a fact of life, at least life in the Western world, which is where most of my experience is limited to. Whenever I take John to a toddler group, or invite people with kids over for dinner, it's almost guaranteed that he will come down with something about 24 to 48 hours later.

It seems like a remarkably stupid decision of evolution (like teething, also designed poorly, as it drives everyone to distraction and keeps me, at least, from wholeheartedly fulfilling my son's needs) that I generally come down with exactly what he has at just the time he most needs me to be fully functional.

(Pause while I read John the soft piggy book five times in a row, and then wipe the accumulated snot off his face.)

The question is, why? I was talking about this with my sister a few weeks ago. We all take our children's constant minor and exasperating illnesses as a matter of course, but it suddenly struck me as very odd. So I've been asking everyone I know -- do humans actually get sick a great deal more than other animals? And if we do, it really leaves you wondering not only why, but how on earth we've survived this long.

Nobody seems to have an answer, although I've come across one possible explanation. (The surprising part about this unscientific survey is that the question doesn't seem to have occurred to many people, which tells you something about how mentally exhausted most otherwise intelligent parents are.)

In a 2007 article on sciencedaily.com Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, discusses his decades-long research on the social behavior of primates, and the greater incidence of stress-related diseases among primates and humans. His words put it best: "Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out," he said. "But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick."

Higher stress levels are certainly a factor in reduced immune system function, which could explain why I've spent the last two days blowing my own nose as well as wiping my son's, although I don't think it gets into the issue of why human children get sick so frequently in the first place. Sapolsky's research, at least in this article, focuses more on stress-related illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.

So I'm still asking the question: why the heck is my kid's best health simply "he's between colds"?

One Rotten Apple...

The Dictatorship of Healthy Living

I have been living in a bubble ever since my daughter was born almost two years ago. I do not have time to read the paper or watch the news and a lot of days pass without me even starting up my computer. I admit that I live my life in a state of ignorance-is-bliss, but so far I do not miss much.

Some weeks ago I made the mistake of checking on the state of the world and went online. The headlines that greeted me were horrifying: Tibet was burning, Belgrade was burning and the stock markets were collapsing. It took me about thirty seconds until I had seen enough. My computer shut down and I decided that as long as I did not know about these disasters they simply did not exist.

I am bad about denying and ignoring, and I certainly do know that the world can be a rotten place. Of course I blame politicians and big industries for it. Governments are unpredictable and unreliable. They see threats in every neighboring and far away country and in every foreigner crossing the border for whatever reason. They pass laws that restrict citizens' rights and freedoms under the pretense that it is best for their safety.

If political reforms are tackled they usually sound good when they are first presented but by the time the bill is passed the original idea is barely recognizable because of lively horse-trading behind closed doors, also referred to as compromising. Not that compromising is a bad thing. No relationship will stand without mutual compromise. The difference, however, is that in a relationship the parties involved are not under the influence of big industries or political strategies.

Governments also support any questionable form of science as long as it puts their country up one place in global rankings and as long as it promises to make products better and cheaper. This is why we can never be sure how much toxic and genetically modified food we have in our fridge. In the US, nowadays, about 80% of all grain is GM, a German farmer recently told me. It is hard to check and confirm this figure but even if it is only 50% it is too much. Especially as we do not know yet about the effects GM food might have on us and on our children, nor do we know the effects it will have on the environment. One hint is that the honeybees are already dying. Of course, pro-GM-food lobbyists claim they die from anything but GM plants. Apiarists, however, are convinced the cause lies in the new crops and demand immediate removal of GM plants.

I consider our little family a miniature state built on grassroots democracy. We discuss big decisions and act according to the final vote but in some departments everyone gets to make his or her own choice because not everyone can be a specialist in every field. As I am taking care of our daughter full time I get to decide on most issues concerning her.

I have never been a greenie except for a short excursion into vegetarianism and self-knit sweaters when I was sixteen. This phase wore off soon enough because my self-made clothes looked hideous and I also could not resist my grandma's roast beef. Where the food came from never really mattered to me as long as it was tasty and on my plate when I was hungry.
However, ever since our little daughter started to join us for meals, I have taken very good care that I put as much organic food on the table as possible. You might say that organic products are unnecessarily overpriced and that I am a victim of some clever marketing strategy of the organic food industry. You might further argue that organic food producers are just as profit oriented as everybody else and that their means of cultivation are not any better for the environment than the traditional ones. You may be right and I do not claim that organic food is the panacea for a better future. But I am convinced that even the slightest decrease in pesticides, hormones, antibiotics and whatever else farmers use to make their products more resistant, less fatty and faster growing is an asset for our and my daughter’s future. Buying organic food is a compromise I am more than willing to make. And the best thing is, it is a decision I make on my own, like any other dictator of the home who cares about the well-being of her people. Moreover, as I do it for my daughter it also makes me feel good and it improves the spirit in our little, happy world without wars and terror.

How Much Guilt Can a Mother Take?

I've been having one of those soul-destroying days that makes you want to crawl into bed with a cup of tea and an escapist novel. Or else throw things. Neither of which I can do because in the other room is my lovely boy who's been crying and fussy all day long, and he's been like that for several days running. It's the teeth, I know it's the teeth and they hurt and it's awful but I've just had enough of it. He's in his crib right now, crying and whimpering intermittently, and I feel guilty and horrible for just letting him be there--an evil, rotten mother who cares nothing for children at all, who's waspish and mean and selfish, the mother of nightmares.

How come nobody ever talks about these days? How come nobody ever warns you of them?

I'm not the mother of nightmares. I'm a good mother so far, loving and giving and conscientious most of the time. But I am also so tired. Bone tired. Today is one of those days when motherhood feels like living with an abuser, being buffeted by violence so often that you can only, finally, be still inside and take what comes and look forward to escaping into sleep.

Days like this I just want to run away. I want to be free--to be a person, my own human being, again. Why aren't mothers allowed to admit that more often? That we're tired of our own personhood being taken from us, or taken for granted? I am. This isn't a job you can quit or take a vacation from and it sucks up every particle of energy, every moment of the day.

It feels damned unfair that we're not revered and worshipped and paid zillions of dollars (or euros or pounds) for what we do, like movie stars and professional athletes.

How long can I let him cry before psychological damage sets in? How much guilt can I take?

Not enough. It's been about twenty minutes with little abatement. I know he's exhausted, but his teeth hurt and he will neither eat nor sleep. I don't know what to do except either hold him, rock him for ages and ages, or drop him off at a friend's house and run away forever. I know what sounds more appealing right now.

How can infinite love and something akin to hatred exist so seamlessly, side by side in one person so that you can shift from one to the other in the time it takes to blink?