Yesterday I sent them all off with their father to the county fair, and then I worried. He doesn’t always watch them as closely as I do. I don’t always watch them that closely. I was glad to see them go — told Tom that a few hours to myself was a very good use of one of his precious vacation days. Still, I worried. All those strangers, all those blinking, flashing, catchy carnival noises to distract them.

I walked to the church to make sure Avery had gotten there okay. You know, just in case. She was there, laughing and hopping around and not noticing me.

Sometimes I want to strangle them myself (metaphorically: like, I wish they came with an off button, or a least a volume control). But whenever I think of something bad happening, someone bad happening, I don’t know how we bear it. How do we let the out there? They’re so precious, so innocent, so fragile.

They’re also so, so loud. Maybe that’s how we bear it.

—

BlogHer syndicated my Nine Lessons From an Electricity Fast post. I thought of a tenth lesson, and not just for symmetry’s sake. One thing I expected was that I would talk on the phone a lot, see people in person, be more social in real life, when my virtual world was cut off, but I didn’t. I indulged my hermit-lik tendencies even more. Maybe it was the heat, or the pregnancy, or having the kids around all the time, but I didn’t do any of the relationship building/real-life connectivityness that some say the internet has cost us — except with my immediate family, and since they’re the most important, maybe it did serve its purpose, but as far as women needing friends and all that stuff, I’m glad to be back online (though I haven’t been every active in recent weeks, and that is definitely an are-we-ever-going-to-have-this-baby?-I’m-going-to-be-the-first-women-in-the-history-of-the-world-to-be-dilated-to-3cm-for-a-year thing).

Since becoming a mother nine and a half years ago, I’ve been a working mom, a living-overseas mom, a going-to-school-and-working-a-bit mom, and a stay-at-home mom. It was funner and more-easily-rewarding to be any of those things than a stay-at-home mom. When I railed against “motherhood” in my not-finer moments, what I really meant was stay-at-home motherhood. I wrote stuff like Do you hate being a mother so much? and confessed my irrational rage at little girls digging into the brownies I was saving. (It’s never about the brownies.)

And then, slowly, things started to change. I noticed it first around the time that I switched from What About Mom? to Seagull Fountain and when Michelle included me in her mommyblogger thesis and analyzed how my posts had become less frustrated. Throughout it all, I believed that being a stay-at-home mom, if we could arrange our lives that way, was important to me, important to the vision I had of the kind of childhood my kids would have, the sort of homelife we would have as a family, taken as a complete whole.

But I didn’t realize how fully I had come to appreciate and enjoy the staying-at-home-ness until I read a Segullah post asking Wasn’t there supposed to be more to it than this? I remember thinking that exact same way, that no matter how fulfilling motherhood was supposed to be, I just wasn’t feeling it. And then — and then my kids started getting older and more interesting, I started writing this blog, we moved into a house where I started gardening and continued experimenting with cooking and baking. (I am not a Martha Steward type, but I like to eat, and when I eat, I like it to taste good.)

I started exploring things that previously seemed whacked beyond the beyond (natural childbirth, composting, seeing how cold we could set our thermostat and still be comfortable, homeschooling). The struggle to be a good mother (in my own eyes) got harder (it’s easy to know and fill all the needs of a newborn), and therefore more interesting.

And two things struck me. First, that what I feel, and what I fill my life with are up to me. It’s a free country. If I hated being a stay-at-home mom that much, I could just go get a job. I may have made some educational or career sacrifices along the way, but I could make up for them, and also — they must have made sense at the time. Meaning, there was a reason I did this, a reason it meant enough to me to choose it. I think of a nun in a convent — does she give up the cloistered life because it is boring and unfulfilling (can you imagine how boring an ascetic life would be without a deep conviction, a rich inner life and unshakeable purpose) or is that life the most fulfilling for her because it is her calling?(right then) (at that time in her life).

Tom spent Saturday on my new garden box, and knowing how much he hates yardwork, I responded quite mildly to his complaint Sunday night that I was doing the dishes too loudly for the scripture story he was telling the kids on the other side of the room. Mother’s Day angst is one thing; a strong Martha-complex is another.

Later than night I read about China’s arranged remarriages in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake last year. It’s interesting. Sometimes I think my marriage to Tom was almost arranged. I knew that God wanted me to marry him even before I loved him or really knew him. Twelve years later (on June 13th) I remember the feeling of driving home from a date and not being able to take my eyes off the shiny new ring on my left hand.

Everyone in China — the government, former in-laws, newly-set-up matchmakers — seems certain that quick remarriage is not only an antidote to the grief and rootlessness  of those who lost spouses and children, but also the best way to restabilize society. I wonder if we were faced with such a devastation if we’d think that was the solution.

But the part that haunts me is the characteristics and requirements listings on the matchmakers’ books. On one list, the most desired characteristic is “no burdens” — which is a really common characteristic of these widowers and widows. It means they have no child left alive. It’s fascinating because the very reason these people are grief-stricken is because they’ve been relieved of their burdens, and though it’s a child (not a spouse) that burdens them (remarriage-wise), the government payment for a lost son is $8,800 and only $1,460 for a wife. Because a spouse is easier to replace? Income-wise it doesn’t make sense to recompense so disproportionately for a minor.

Anyway, it made me think about my three (and a half) burdens. Yes, they are. And, no, no amount would ever recompense me for their loss.

Susan and Spot and I had taken a long, late afternoon nap, so we dawdled through leftovers and cleaning up the kitchen. Sally emptied the dishwasher as I listened to Susan’s reading lesson on the couch. By now it was 10 pm where Tom was and still no answer.

Of course I’m paranoid, and also pregnant, so the logical conclusion was that he was dead (or going to be when I got a hold of him), and I started thinking about what my life would be like as a pregnant widow with three small children. I’d move into my parent’s (nice) basement and go to law school or teach at the local high school. I’d never remarry, because I’d never find someone who understands me like Tom does (or that I can stand like I can stand Tom).

Then I remembered the baby. Spot will be four in October. The thought of leaving her with a babysitter or in preschool while I work or study is hard but not world-ending.

But could I be separated from my new baby?

I thought about what I would say at Tom’s funeral. How I would tearfully relate that the last thing he asked me to do, right as we pulled up to Terminal 2, was read scriptures with the kids tonight. (He knows I have Martha-tendencies to put that off — we talked about Samuel’s wicked sons and Israel’s desire for a king, honey.)

The other day I had an interesting exchange with a friend who knows us casually. I said something about Tom that surprised her and she said “well, he’s married to a feminist.” This was a short, undeveloped conversation (on Twitter), and I’m not exactly sure what she meant in the context, but it’s stuck in my brain.

On the one hand, I’m a bit flattered/relieved/gratified that she thinks I’m a feminist, because I am a stay-at-home mom and she works full-time at a paying job. So while of course I think a stay-at-home mom can be a feminist (as I define it, someone who knows women are as valuable, capable, and individual as men are), sometimes I don’t get that vibe from working women — that choosing to be a stay-at-home mom is somehow letting down the cause.

(And of course there are also my own feelings sometimes that staying-at-home is not as fulfilling or exciting as something else I could be doing. Maybe all of these voices are in my own head.)

I told Tom about it on the way to the airport and we puzzled on it for a while and then stopped at McDonald’s just in time for a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.

Eight hours later I pictured my life without Tom. I would not make a good single parent. I would be angry, resentful, uncontrollably unhappy. Even the thought of going back to school or working, With Grownups! For Pay! was not enough to cheer me up.

Because what about my baby? She’s going to need me, a lot, especially at first. I can’t leave her. The thought of doing what normally sounds like a really good idea, what I lie awake at night planning for in the not-too-distant future, fills me with a horrible dread. Almost as horrible as the dread of imagining a forever empty space beside me on the bed. (Even with the snoring.)

So, as a feminist (a hormonal, weepy absence-certainly-does-make-the-heart-grow-fonder feminist who is probably going crazy), what I want to say is:

Thank you, Tom, for supporting me, appreciating me, making it so I can stay-at-home, even though I sometimes rail against that very thing. Thanks for letting me work it out in my own mind so it makes sense and being there so I can happily imagine hours-days-weeks spent holding my baby (and maybe a couple other kids-and-house-things) and nothing else.

I don’t believe that writing and motherhood should be incompatible, in fact usually I am adamant that writing makes me a better mother, because it is how I examine motherhood (my life, at this point), and because in the examining I see both the ineffable divinity in every day and the humor (or at least reason) in even the most aggravating moments.

But the past several weeks I can hardly pull back far enough from the here and now, from the one-pound Scout jabbing me unexpectedly, from the Spot girl who says she isn’t my baby anymore “your baby’s in your tummy” in her cute munchkin voice. Now that I know kids grow out of that voice, that they learn, eventually, to say their g’s and k’s, I want to pause her so she stays with me and urgently explains every detail of her day at college the way she does her discovery that pulling on the skin around her unbent knee doesn’t hurt, today.

On Sunday as we walked to church I asked her if she’d gone to the bathroom that morning. She said, exasperated, “I peed on Saturday, Mom.” I said that’s great, but that she probably really should pee everyday, and did she pee that morning? And she said, “I didn’t pee in the tub, Mom. My bum made bubbles in the tub, but I didn’t pee.”

And then I started to dream. I dreamt I was in a car, driving to church in Maine (thanks, Charlotte ;p). It was a small car; Tom was with me, and we were younger, like in our college days. In the front seat was another college-age type guy and driving was a person from my past, someone I think less and less about every day, week, month, year, but an important person who belongs in the past. We were speeding, going way to fast. It was dark, even at close to nine a.m. in the winter. There were two little girls in the back with Tom and I; I think they were our daughters, but not really our daughters yet.

We were stopped by a cop because the person from my past was (typically) going way to fast. I did the talking and got us off with a warning, because we looked presentable and were on our way to church. We went through a dark tunnel, and now the other college-age guy was driving, and he wasn’t using his lights. We asked why he wouldn’t turn the headlights on and he said something that was probably symbolic blah-blah-blah about how the light at the end of the tunnel told him the right way even with the curves, and somehow the headlights would actually be more confusing.

We got to the church in Maine, which turned out to be a gorgeous old Victorian that a church family offered for services every week. The congregation was small, and it turned out my parents and the aunt and uncle I stayed with in Germany were there. The person from my past pulled out an iPhone and tried to show me pictures of our time together. I brushed them aside, saying I thought I hadn’t kept any pictures at all, but those pictures on the iPhone were so crisp, so clear, we were so young, and, in the pictures, having such a good time.

Then my aunt came up to me and asked if I could talk to her youngest daughter who had just had a preemie baby (but somehow it was also adopted) and she was trying to stimulate milk production so she could breastfeed this tiny new daughter, but it wasn’t going very well. I said sure, gratefully, and escaped to where my cousin was. I told her my breasts had felt full the past few days, since I’m four months pregnant, and I thought I might have some colostrum, so could I try to feed the baby? She passed the perfect, tiny baby over to me and I showed her how to latch (and there was some other stuff about aereolas and nipple stimulation, etc, but I’ll spare you that), and suddenly I was my current-day self (obviously, because I’ve nursed babies and I’m currently pregnant). And that baby went after my milk like  a sailor on shore leave and now I’m crying because I can’t wait to hold my own baby like that. I’m as excited and eager for this fourth child as I was for my first, and my second and my third, and that surprises me.

Then I woke up and realized this really puts a kink in what I was going to say in Sunday School (after I told Tom that, no, I wasn’t going to bring up anything about how the Muslims believe it was Ishmael who was sacrificed, or what I have been thinking during our family scripture study — that though the whole earth is supposed to be blessed through Abraham’s seed, it actually seems that almost every war ever fought can be traced back to Abraham through the rivalry between Christians, Jews, and Muslims).

No, I was going to say, before this little dream, that the only real thing I’ve ever sacrificed was my own ambitions, in order to be a mother, and to be a mother the way I have chosen to be. I was going to say that, of course, what I have learned in ten years of this “sacrifice” is that when I am happier in sacrificing, I think it is both a more acceptable offering to the Lord and an easier sacrifice for me to make. So the moral was that God liked Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac because there was no whining from Abraham about all the poopy diapers he and Sarah changed and all the hours they spent raising him into a kid who could actually pull his weight around the farm.

Instead I have to admit: I have sacrificed nothing.

I could say I have sacrificed this sin or that sin, and in some cases, that took a lot of work.

I could say I have sacrificed a night of sleep here or there (though much less it seems than most mothers).

I could say I have sacrificed my desire to do what I want when I want and in as much quiet as I want.

I could say I have sacrificed the life I might have had for the life I have now, but that sounds like a lie.

Now I have confused myself and have to look up sacrifice. “the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim.”

Turns out I have sacrificed a lot, and hope to be able to sacrifice much more, because so far, what I’ve gotten in return is much higher and pressing.

(And yes, it is easy to say that when the kids are all still asleep and I can make pancakes and stuff my face in the blessed early-morning quiet.)

Yesterday Susan or Spot or Sally, somebody spilled something and didn’t clean it up. Made a mess and wouldn’t take responsibility. I couldn’t get a confession. I resorted to, “I don’t care who did it, I just want you to be honest.” They are too young and trusting (and short-memoried) to know that I do care, and that once I’ve lavished the child who was honest with praise, I’ll still make them clean it up. Susan finally relented. “Mom, can I tell you the real, real truth now?” Of course, I said, pleased. “It was Spot,” she said.

Several weeks ago at lunch, Carina said she’d read somewhere that if your kid hasn’t asked you about sex, or where babies come from by the age of seven or eight, they already know, from someone who is not you. I started to panic. Sally was turning nine the next week, and she had never asked, or when we talked about the baby, she was satisfied with answers like, “people can have a baby once they’re married and you love your husband.”

But I thought, I know my child, my girl-child who would rather gallop like a horse than strut like a Bratz doll, who reads boy books and girl books without knowing that some people think there is a difference. Who wears her holey jeans to school with the same air of indifference that she dons her church dress and says she’d prefer to get her hair cut again because she likes it just below her ears.

Who, even though I offered first when she turned eight, and again before she turned nine, doesn’t want to get her ears pierced, not yet, not now. She is wholly, completely, gloriously, still a child, my child. Who doesn’t have a cell phone, doesn’t know how to work a computer without my help, who has never seen a video game, for whom a half hour of TV watching (Fetch with Ruff Ruffman on PBS) is a treat, one that doesn’t happen every day.

Some days she watches more TV, if I am done, for whatever reason. Sometimes she will only eat one of each vegetable in the salad, and makes gagging noises when we make her try the tilapia, despite warnings to set a good example for her sisters. Sometimes she wails when I ask her to unload the dishwasher, even though I’ve been expecting it of her for what seems like a decade. Sometimes I think she must be starting her period four years early as she screams, “You hate me,” and barricades herself in her room.

But I go up to her room later and see the twenty-seven horse posters on the wall and the picture of Jesus torn out from The Friend, and, in the front and center of her dresser, the picture of a three-year old Sally in her father’s arms, kissing his cheek, in front of the great pyramid. She knows I don’t hate her.

I came home from my lunch and asked her, casually, if she knew what sex was, and how babies are made. She shrugged and said no. I breathed in relief and went to find Tom to let him know we’d be having The Talk with Sally that Sunday.

On Sunday, after my nap, I sat Sally on the couch and told Tom that, yes, he needed to actually be there, to sit and listen, and maybe say a few things. I was surprised how apprehensive I was. I’m not shy about sex, or uncomfortable with my children, but The Talk is a delicate thing to balance.

I wanted Sally to a) feel how much we love her and want her to be happy, b) believe two seemingly contradictory things: that 1) sex is good and fun and special and 2) it’s only like that after you’re married (I want her to both look forward to sex as a wonderful, natural, normal part of life, and to resolve within herself to wait for it), and c) to comprehend some good, accurate information (I spent the years eight to thirteen thoroughly confused about one part of the male anatomy).

I started out talking about how dad and I got married, but resorted to the same thing that calmed me on my wedding day. I asked her about Adam and Eve, and what God told them, and what they did. I don’t believe the only purpose of sex is procreation, but it’s a big part, and it helps to think of it in those terms, biologically, especially as my own tummy gets rounder and rounder. I explained that sex also helps married people love each other more.

She had some questions. “Have you and dad, you know, done it?” I said, well, we do have three kids. “When do you do it?” And I told her, if our door is locked, like on a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon, you probably don’t want to come in anyway.

And then she asked, “How does it feel?” I looked at Tom. He didn’t want to answer that one. I said, you know how you feel when you’re really, really hungry and then you finally eat something? Or when you have to sneeze and then it finally comes, and it’s a relief? Something like that, but better. “But how does it feel?” (That was the only question I deferred until she’s older, like thirty-five and engaged. I promised to tell her everything when she is engaged.)

It was easy to explain keeping our bodies clean and pure to Sally, and why we do things differently even when the rest of the world takes sex lightly, because she’s used to choosing modest clothing from racks of stuff “we don’t wear,” and she knows that there are kid movies and mommy movies, for example, and that some good things are only good when you are older, like riding in the front seat of the car (even Spot can tell you that you have to be twelve for that). (There have been exceptions, of course, but only when mom said so.)

I remembered how, when I first went through the temple, I thought, this is all stuff we learned in Primary. Be obedient, serve the Lord, keep your covenants. The Talk is a little different, just like the temple the first time is a little different. It’s a big milestone, a moment in time that separates you a bit from childhood and pushes you toward adulthood. But I realized, instead of being disjointed, instead of being some big thing outside everything else we’ve ever taught her, it was just another step in what we’ve always been teaching her. (Forget for a moment how I teach them to yell and swear, when I forget that everything I do that they see is teaching them something.)

Tom finally made a contribution, at the end. He told Sally that she could ask us anything, anytime. In fact, we want her to talk to us about this stuff and not her friends, because we know there is a difference between sacred and secret. Of course when she’s older she’ll talk to her friends, her roommates, and that’s okay. As long as she remembers where she heard it first.

And then she asked one last question. At the beginning of The Talk, she was curled on the couch, knees to her chest, eyes half-hidden, giggles issuing from her circled arms. Slowly she unfolded, turned towards us, as her interest overcame her embarrassment.

So despite all my faults, my tantrums, my discontents, the days I shout for no reason and use the mean voice instead of the patient voice that is smart enough to know these kids are only children, only young, only innocent, Sally asked, finally, “Can I have a hug?”

And I wondered if Susan, at five, is really too young for The Talk.

And I remembered, after several years in primary, why it is often simpler to save my questions for later, if one does not want to be treated like a . . . well, like a faith-deficient troublemaker. (When in fact one is merely curious and intrigued by inconsistencies.)

Anyway, by the time Relief Society rolled around, I was properly chastised. Chrysanthemum, having taken Dick’s spot, may have heard mutterings, but mostly I was good.

Our lesson was a discussion of New Year’s resolutions, based on the three goals in the Introduction to Relief Society: increase faith, strengthen families and homes, and serve the Lord and His children. So far, so worthy a list of endeavors.

With each goal there is a quote from last year’s Ensign or Church News. The quote under “strengthen families and homes” is:

Although parenting is hard work, it is made a little easier with the gospel, said Joselyn Akana . . . from Hawaii. ‘It helps me when I have the gospel to anchor me in the caring of my family,’ she said it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like. The key to motherhood, she said, is having patience and relying on the gospel for guidance” (Lisa Christensen, “Convert Says Gospel Helps with Parenting,” Church News, June 13, 2009, 15). [sic]

I agree with a lot of this. Parenting is hard work, and the gospel makes it easier by infusing it with eternal significance and providing both interesting examples of parenting and the desire to be a good parent. And I believe whole-heartedly that the key to motherhood is patience. What dominated our discussion, though, was the middle part, that:

it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like.

If you have read this website for any amount of time, you know that I am rather preoccupied with what a mother should sound like, or rather, my regret over too often not sounding like what I think a mother should sound like.

But, no. We discussed what a mother should look like. The teacher (also our great Relief Society president who I personally love not only because she drives Sally to school every morning) started by saying her mother always got up 30 minutes before the rest of the family, no matter how early that turned out to be, even on camping trips, to do her hair and have full makeup on before anyone saw her. And (this is why I love her) she said that that always seemed like a huge waste of time to her, and that she is personally much lazier, etc, but now (and this is where things took a downturn) she thinks she maybe  should definitely be doing this.

Several sisters shared similar stories and proclaimed the virtues of treating motherhood like any other job (you’d get dressed up for a real job, right?) and having lots of mirrors in your house so you could check your hair and lipstick and your shirt to make sure you looked good all day, especially if your husband is retired and can see you anytime.

The 15-minute to one-hour power session of cleaning the house, grooming the children, and having dinner on the table right before dad comes home was extolled, and the testimonial given that if we only cared for our appearance we’d feel better about ourselves, and don’t our children (and husbands) deserve to see us looking our best?

I think about this a lot. I think about what my children, my daughters see when they look at me. I think about what they deserve, what they need, what will equip them best for life as they look at me. Especially when Susan makes some statement of discovery and description in the car about how being a doctor like grandpa or a writer like daddy are boy jobs and being a mom is a girl job.

Of course, being a mom is a girl job, and in some ways I do it it the traditional girliest manner possible. But I want Susan to know that girls can be doctors or writers too, and sometimes I worry about how I can ever really teach that to my daughters if all they see me doing is being a mom. On the other hand, I want them to see that I value them and our family enough to devote so much of my time and energy to being a mother. If this is the girl job I choose to show them, then what a mother should look like becomes fraught with meaning.

What should a mother look like?

Should a mother look like a clean home and dinner on the table and clean-faced toddlers and Mary Kay cosmetics?

In some ways (surprisingly), yes:

A clean house is worth pursuing because the cleaner and more organized things are, the easier it is for kids to play, create, and feed themselves, which leads, of course, to a messy house, but it’s a worthwhile cycle because the more the kids can do for themselves, the more I can do (and the more they are learning and growing), not because with a clean house I can be “unafraid to open the door if someone drops in.”

A table set for dinner when Dick arrives home and happy smiling children is worth working towards because it means the girls have learned to cheerfully help in the kitchen and that we have successfully worked together to create something we will all enjoy, not because it means I’ve worked behind the scenes to set a pretty stage.

Three daughters groomed for church or school (or dad’s homecoming) is a triumph when it means I have exchanged meaningful words with them while the hairbrush was in my hand, not when it means I’ve harped impatiently for them to JUST HOLD STILL.

And the Mary Kay cosmetics? Few things feel better than a hot shower after a hard workout or hours spent languishing with the morning sickness in bed.

Some things do, though. There are days, too infrequent, when Dick comes home and I look up from the book I’m reading or the story I’m writing, and I see the clock says 6:30 pm, and there are legos and Barbies on the carpet, paint and glitter glue on the table, clementine peels and yogurt containers all over the kitchen. Perhaps wet snow clothes are draped over chairs and I am smelly and muzzy from forgetting I even have a body. Dick is unperturbed (I chose well), and I wonder if I look then as a mother should — lost in thought.

I think I do.

(What should we have for dinner? Spaghetti? I should plan next year so that I have no shopping, even grocery shopping, to do the last week before Christmas. Why did Hillary Clinton promise climate change aid to countries like China when we have a huge trade deficit with them, and surely this has already been discussed and pointed out online, or could I write a post and be brilliant? I really need some caffeine today, better grab a fountain coke here after I get my membership card replaced. Why have I not had a period in two months and yet I’m not pregnant? Early menopause? I wonder what the samples are today. Maybe we won’t be able to do any shopping besides the prints and churros, to make it in time to pick up Sally.)

A lady in a blue minivan shouted, not terribly unkindly, “Ma’am!” and I stopped. “I almost hit your daughter. She was out in front of me and I would have felt terrible (hand on her heart) if anything had happened.” I was struck a little bit dumb by this, as I often am when suddenly confronted by a stranger in public. I turned at the first sound of her voice and saw Susan a couple feet behind me, angled closer to the moving cars than Spot and I were. I guess I didn’t react with enough visible horror, because the woman turned to Susan as I moved to take her hand. “Little girl, you have to stay right by mommy because I can’t see you out my windshield and I could have run you right over. You have to be more careful.”

I thanked the lady, and marched on, impressing on Susan the seriousness of the near-accident once we were safely inside, making our way to the bathroom. I was glad, obviously, that the lady didn’t hit my kid, and though it irritated me a little that she would take it upon herself to instruct my kid in front of me, insinuating that I wouldn’t have done the same once we were away from an audience, I might have done the exact same thing, especially with the rush of adrenaline that such a close call often floods the body with.

I really couldn’t tell you the number of times my children have been lucky enough to cheat death. We have forgotten to fasten seat belts or car seats, turned our backs on full tubs of water, left electrical outlets unprotected, crossed the street without benefit of a crosswalk, read a book while children played freely at the park, looked over the precipice at the Grand Canyon, and flown in airplanes.

I think most mothers (if they’re honest) could relate similar terrifying near-miss stories. But sometimes children die as a result of accidental, temporary parental inattention or distraction. Like the recent drowning of Military Mom‘s two-year old in the family pool. Shellie Ross was vilified online for having tweeted right before her son was found in the pool, and then again later asking for prayers as she waited in the hospital.

The saddest instance of accidental, preventable death I’ve ever heard of happened in my sister’s old neighborhood. A family with six small children came home from church, and the kids played in the family room while mom prepared dinner just a few feet away in the kitchen. The baby, a six-week-old, was in her baby carrier car seat on the couch while a toddler played nearby. Somehow the car seat got knocked off the couch, and the baby strangled in the unfastened straps.

I think it’s easy to assign blame or fault in these cases, just as if Susan had been struck and killed by the car in the parking lot two days ago, it would have been my fault.

It clearly would have been, because I was distracted, I was not holding her hand, I was thinking  my own thoughts. I don’t think I would ever get over the guilt of such a death. Ever. I don’t imagine that the censure of others would even have an impact because my own sense of shame would be overwhelming.

And yet, it hurts me to think of Shellie Ross or my sister’s neighbor feeling the shame that I project myself feeling. It seems grossly unfair and mysogynistic that anyone would blame them for making a mistake, for being inattentive, for having the audacity to entertain a thought outside her children for the few seconds it takes for death to snatch a child.

Is it even possible to focus and concentrate a mother’s every thought on the safety of her children? And if it were possible, is that what we require of a mother? That she have no thought or concern or desire outside her children’s every breath, waking and sleeping?

Is that what God requires?

Motherhood is hard for me because I feel tugged, most moments of the day, between what I want to do, what I need to do, and what my children need, what my children want from me. Accidental death of a child is an extreme example of this, but in every moment, I choose (unconsciously or not) whether to entertain my own thoughts or subsume them in service of a childish plea. Even many of my own thoughts are about my children (or about being about my children!).

If and when we criticize a mother who has lost her child as a result of momentary distraction, we deny her a human right more inalienable than anything the Founders ever codified: that of having her own thoughts.

It was selfish. My dad was in a Navy residency program back in the draconian doctor days, and he needed his sleep. I don’t even remember how often we had to be quiet, how often the need to be quiet impinged on what I wanted to do, or even being punished for being loud instead of being quiet. I just remember having to be quiet. I don’t know why I hated it, because my favorite thing to do as a child was to read, but my second favorite thing to do was a sedate sort of interaction with my brother and sister that led my parents to say “If you must kill each other, please, do it quietly.”

Today the snow was beautiful: thick flurries whitewashing the dead brown lawn stubbles, plastering over the evidence of a procrastinated autumn fertilization.

Dick needed us to be quiet today. All day, it seemed like. He recorded screencasts for his latest freelance work. He sat at the table in my kitchen, recording his work, letting the girls watch him through the camera viewfinder, more exponentially patient than my dad ever was, and I ever am. During one of his breaks, I made special brownies, two small pans, one for now and one to freeze for later next week when the friend who was best man at our wedding stays with us as he moves cross-country.

I am jealous of Dick’s new ventures. I hate that he schedules extra, complicated things for December, that he says he has to because we need the money, that he asked us to be quiet, on Saturday, when all of us are home and all I wanted was to bask in the coziness of home while the perfect snow falls to cover the hard ground.

I hate that he is learning new things and being rewarded for learning new things when I feel desperate to paint some fresh new snow over my just-scabbed frustration. I know I should have fertilized in the fall, but couldn’t God take my rage without my walking back and forth?

I cut into the pan of brownies that is for us today, and covered the other with clingwrap. The loud, rustling layer of tinfoil had to wait as Dick started another screencast. I went upstairs.

The snow really was beautiful. My thin crust of pure patience had seams of scratchy, too-long grass poking through, but I nursed my caffeine indulgence, cleaned the girls’ room, and filled bags with broken games, worn-out clothes, and ratty stuffed animals for disposal at the DI. There is nothing more cathartic than pruning the stuff that flourishes like morning glory in the corners of my house.

Back downstairs Dick agreed that the girls could have a brownie; Sally cut herself one from the today pan. Susan and Spot took the wrap off the next-week pan and dug into the middle.

Dick said the screaming and raw, impotent fury was a bit of an overreaction. But it’s never about the brownies. It’s about the seething bedrock of never having just one thing stay perfect, stay finished. I wash the laundry: they change clothes again. I run the dishwasher: they need a seventh glass of water. I feed them: they poop it all away.

I respond kindly to ear-grating whining and mind-shredding fighting five times, but the sixth time a clump of crab grass breaks through the frozen powder, and minutes later I wonder who is that awful woman who can’t seem to remember that she is a mother, not a monster? Why can’t this one day be perfect?

I am busy patching back together my snowy crust of calm and superficial serenity, of soft voices and sympathetic arms; if only I can paper over this seam, coax that anger back to hibernation.

I helped the girls get snow pants, coats, boots, hats, and gloves on, earlier, before the brownie violation occurred. They ruined the snowscape. They churned it up till the backyard was half dead, brown grass and half clean, white snow. I loved that they did that, so freely, so exuberantly. I thought: this is a great metaphor. I’ll say: you think you want pristine panoramas of perfection. You think you want order, and quiet, and sheets tucked tidily under mattresses.

You think you want a life where precocious children would never put a finger in the middle of a covered pan of brownies. But then you realize that you can’t make snow angels without disturbing the drifts. You can’t have joy without the mess.

I should have captured it right there. Preserved it, polished it, added it to the loop of stuff I tell myself when I wander in my thoughts at stoplights and while being quiet during screencasts.

Instead I constructed the other metaphor, of snow as bandaid, as wood filler for a rotten stump. It’s not as sweetly affirming as the other image. There’ll never be enough snow to cure the grass beneath. And even if it was never about the brownies, even if it was about something true and validly infuriating, it was never worth evoking fear and shame.

So it’s easy to think of giving up. Walking away. I am never going to be the mother these children deserve. I am never going to be deep down the mirror core of the patchwork covering of snow I mostly enough maintain on the outside.

But in the spring the snow will melt, both the brown snow sick with dirt and salt and the last baptizing whiteout of the winter. And it will be time to fertilize again, another chance to soak into the roots.

I was folding towels when Dick responded to Spot’s overtired hysteria past her bedtime. Sally was reading in her room and Susan had been allowed to fall asleep in our bed because Spot was so disruptive. I climbed the stairs and changed her back into her pajamas. Patience came from somewhere, and a promise to snuggle with her for awhile. My hand on her chest, I felt her heartbeat in my fingertips. She had forgotten, or forgiven, enough that my being there was calming. She rubbed her eyes vigorously, then turned her face away, as she always does to sleep, and sighed, long and low.

She mentioned something about the XYZ affair, early 1800s, John Jay, and things started ringing a bell, but I was going seventy on the freeway so it really wasn’t an optimal time for historical conjecture.

I got to Mama’s house (I don’t ever call my mother “mama” but right now I wish I did) finally and we started bumbling our way through canning my forty pounds of $1.29/pound chicken from Macey’s. Mama can sew anything. Anything. But she’d never canned meat before, so we were both studying the directions and calling her friend who does it all the time.

I asked if she’d decided what she’ll study in school when she goes back in January. Mama has twenty-three college credits from thirty years ago, and now that my youngest brother Ryan is the fifth and last of us to trot across campus to the testing center, Mama is going back.

She’s scared. Even though she can do anything, fix anything, build a family, and bring the nurture so the Giving Tree looks like a selfish putz, Mama’s anxious about going back to school.

I am tickled for her. Maybe even more excited than when my Sally started school for the first time.

Oh, the places you’ll go! (Mama!)

We laughed over Karin’s frantic phone call (Mama got one too and was also in the car at the time. Karin got lucky with our sister, Marcy, who it’s also not like she’s always in front of her computer). Later, as my fingers turned numb from half-frozen raw chicken and my skin cracked from repeated hand-washings, Karin called again and told Mama she was jealous that we were canning stuff and that when she’d called Marcy for last-minute cramming she was reading a book while grinding wheat.

Mama says Karin, who has three more semesters of school, is feeling the pull of the domestic. (Her boyfriend returns from a two-year mission for our church in a couple of weeks). I’ve already told Karin she has to graduate before having kids — even though if Mama had done that I probably wouldn’t be here.

So what are you going to study, Mama, I asked? And Mama said she’s been rethinking her plan to do nursing. Now she’s probably going to study something in the humanities, maybe everything in the humanities, because she’s been doing practical things all her life.

Of course I think back to college and wish I’d been more practical. It’s nice to know where to place a comma and that Aphra Behn was a foremother of the modern romance novel, but sometimes I wish I’d picked up some tax-return fundamentals along the way.

But for Mama? I hope she absolutely revels in the impractical, now that her season has changed.

It’s funny. “Bad Fathers,” I think, are men who suffer from strained (or non-existent) relationships with their children. “Bad Mothers,” it seems, are women who suffer from strained relationships with other women.

At first I thought this was the most profound thing I’d ever heard or read on the good/bad mother issue. Then I felt defensive — my relationships with other women are just fine, thank you very much. Now I’m back to thinking Josh is really (really) smart.

Because it is my relationship with this women that I mourn. I no longer look forward to spending time with her. I don’t want to share with her what is going on in my life. I can’t imagine opening my heart up or being honest about my worries.

(And if I am apparently such an inadequate mother in her eyes, she can’t possibly want to spend time with me, either.)

Josh is especially right that the good/bad mother label, as I now see it, as we feel it projected on us or think in our minds about each other, is not about the kids, how healthy and happy they are, but about how we compare, how we differ, from other mothers.

And that STINKS.

I also wondered, in the weeks after this experience, if I have often been so sanctimonious and insufferable to other mothers, and you know that I have. I know that I have, especially when I was first a mother. The older I get, the more conviction I have that the choices I have made are right for my kids and myself, and at the same time, I have less and less conviction that they are necessarily right for other people. Even the things that I love/value/admire most about being a mother (like breastfeeding) — some otherwise charming and delightful women get tunnel vision with their issues and I gotta tell you it is the opposite of appealing, no matter how much I like them personally.

I don’t even want to make a list of the things I do or believe in as far as mothering goes, because this isn’t about the disposable diapers or public schools in Utah or atavistic rejection of all things babywearing and co-sleeping — it’s about any woman thinking she knows what’s best for anyone other than the people who live at her house. (Sorry, I snuck a list in there, but if you’ve read this website before, you’re probably not surprised by anything on it.)

I guess my main point is: An apology to good mothers/bad mothers everywhere. May I never use either term ever again. Please forgive me if I have ever made a judgment verbally or to myself about the way you go about being a mother.

The End.

I’ve changed my mind.

Honestly, in my eight years of being a mother, I had never experienced the sort of criticism or judgment that these women described as the reason for wanting to carry the Bad Mother banner.

And then I did.

Recently I spent time with a Type-A, Alpha, Helicopter, hyper-focused maternal being who made me feel inadequate, defensive, judged, combative.

I wanted to park my kids in front of Phineas and Ferb for six hours while I gorged on bad carbs and made love to Spot’s leftover disposable diapers.

I wanted to smash her smug face in.

The way some women act, mothering should be an extreme sport or an Olympic event in the constant orchestration of a perfect childhood. And not just “a” perfect childhood, but “the” perfect childhood. With extra marks for each nutritional supplement and organized activity, bonus points for organic cleaning supplies and never desiring a babysitter.

I want to shrug it off. I want to go back to being a good mother and ignoring the corrosive effects of competitive mothering, something I so recently dismissed as easily ignored.

But now I’ve seen it, heard it, felt myself shrinking in and shutting down, giving up on sharing what works for me and mine, I wonder why we women do this.

Is it a female thing?

Do men sneer at the non-homeschoolers as they play pick-up basketball? (Maybe they do, but Tom has never come home wringing his hands over class sizes.)

Is it a cultural thing?

“Society” and the magazines at the doctors, the guests on Oprah, the blogs of perfect mothers, the parenting books by experts, all those things I can easily ignore. But when it’s your friend at the park, your neighbor at church, the checker at the grocery store, a sister or mother or the in-laws, then it is harder to disregard. Especially if that person points out your flaws out of “love” or “concern.”

Or, as C. S. Lewis put it:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Is it an identity thing?

From the time Sally was one month to eighteen months old, I worked at Columbia while Tom stayed home until his evening classes. I was so happy with that arrangement. My supervisor was supportive of my pumping and condensed schedule, my baby was being cared for by her father, and I was talking with adults every day. Later I was the stay-at-home parent.

That’s been up and down, mostly up, recently, but there’s a huge difference in how I stay at home and how he did. When Tom stayed at home he didn’t join playgroups or sign Sally up for classes. He fed her and napped her and took her to the park. He wrote his novel as he watched her in the baby swing. He put wooden letters from her puzzle on her head and took silly photographs.

Staying at home was what he did, not who he was. As soon as I started staying home, I set out to create a new identity for myself. It wasn’t what I did, it was who I was.

And now I think that was largely the problem.

The good mother/bad mother thing is a female thing because we’re naturally pretty competitive creatures, especially when it comes to our offspring. We fought for power and influence on the playground and now we fight for moral superiority . . . on the playground.

It’s a cultural thing too, because there are all those books and blogs and experts and a national holiday. And because your friend, your neighbor, your sister probably does things differently, and in order to feel a success, the things she does (the things I do) become the better way, the best way, the only way.

And, most of all, for me, it’s an identity thing. Attack my mothering, and you criticize not what I do, but who I am.

If that’s what it takes to be a Good Mother?

I hope there’s room in the Bad Mother tent.

I always love the middle child (the almost-5-year-old middle child) who, when we dropped her off at my parents last week, stroked my mom’s shin and said, “Grandma has spicy legs like you, Mom.”

I always love the Ally-Sheedy-from-The-Breakfast-Club character (the 8-going-on-13 year-old basket case) whose heart is broken whenever I ask her to empty the dishwasher or to explain where three hundred gumballs disappeared to.

I always love the sweet husband whose pneumonia from last month has resolved into a persistent hacking cough in my ear all night long.

I always love them, but lately, the liking has come easier too. Part of it is not having to change anyone’s diaper (what care I for a plunger that only half-heartedly plunges when it means luscious, unfettered toddler buns?). Part of it is being able to spend the lazy days of summer with them. Part of it is having fun house guests with three small boys and deciding my own loinfruit are not so bad. Part of it is realizing that some of our goals are becoming habitual (some of the time). Part of it is long naps and helpful basil harvesters.

Part of it, a big part of it, is thinking about having another kid. It’s hard to think about having another kid without remembering the older kids as babies and also considering their current (wondrous) incarnations. It’s hard to think about creating another life with Dick without grasping how utterly charmed is the life we have created the past eleven years.

I wonder if we could be finished, complete as we are. Did I enjoy my girls as babies enough? Did I get enough of the weight of their small heads nestled on my chest to last me? Do each of my daughters feel as important as an only child would?

I think they do, at least on the days that the dishwasher (and the chores it entails) only runs once.

But — do I have more of that, enough of that, to give to another child? I don’t feel the intense gush of baby-want that flooded me before, not even when I see bite-able chubby baby thighs. Spot is still happy to say she’s my baby and to cuddle her head in the crook of my arm for a solid four seconds.

And then there is the always-tantalizing imagining of what I could do instead of gestating and lactating and consternating (to echo PW) for the next few years. These kids here are practically ready to leave the house. I dreamt the other night that I applied to Columbia Law School so that we could live in student housing in Manhattan for three years (and so that I could become a Supreme Court judge in due time). I don’t really think I could become a Supreme Court judge, but it tickles me that my subconscious is so deludedly optimistic.

If we do have another baby, I’ll want a serious long babymoon. I’ll want to slow down enough so I’m not yelling more in the grocery checkout line. If I could stop shopping for groceries altogether, or stop shopping when everyone is hungry and tired, even when they began the trip fed and cheerful, I think the Supreme Court would actually be a criminal squandering of my awesome powers.

If I have another baby, I’ll want more patience, and more time to absorb the last infant, the first and last milky bubble burps.

Dick has decided that we will have twin boys this time. I think perhaps he needs to review the fifth grade maturation program, though twin boys would be great.

But what are the chances of that? Probably Dick doesn’t even make boy [insert comical term for sperm]. I asked how he’d feel if we had a fourth daughter and he said that would be great too. Then he can be like that dad on Pride and Prejudice. I pointed out that Mr. Bennet had five girls, and he just smiled.

Think God will hear me calling Dick “Mr. Bennet” and decide to show me that I don’t know everything?

As I walk towards the dirtiest red minivan in a lot full of Honda Odysseys, I breathe deeply of the summer air, protected from the harsh sunlit glare by my rose-colored prescription lenses, get in the toasty car, blast some Franz Ferdinand, and ride off past the orange construction cones dotting Highway 73, towards the ocean, and freedom.

Not that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.

I have a confession to make: I am a good mother. I know this comes as a surprise to many of you, because I have angsted over being a bad mother and hated being a mother and wished I could do anything else please by everything holy make the whining stop for five seconds so I can think.

But the truth is: I am a good mother.

Here are the facts:

I gave up caffeine for the first three months of my first pregnancy. Sally weighed over nine pounds, so I vowed to drink gallons of the stuff next time.

I breastfed, even when it was painful at first, and even when I sometimes felt like a human pacifier, back before it was trendy to complain about feeling like a human pacifier.

I daydream about going to law school or getting a masters in “motherhood archetypes in modern literature” or putting my kids in daycare so I can sit at Panera with my laptop all day, but I don’t. Not yet.

The TV hasn’t been on at all since summer began eight days ago. (For them. It’s been on after 9 pm. Oh, yes.)

Spot, at 2 1/2, can swim like an embryonic minnow and say words like “Rameumptom.”

Susan, at 4 1/2, can write her name, left-handed, upside-down, like the boy on Fringe who’d been sealed underground for years.

Sally, at 8, can choose a “Native-American” Barbie doll and answer the following social-awareness question correctly: “Which is more important — the color of someone’s skin or what kind of person they are inside?”

But that is only the good stuff, right? Of course I only tell you the good stuff, as a good mother, right?

Tell me — does anyone, anywhere, think that a Good Mother has only good stuff to tell?

Or that a good mother cannot tell anything at all, because she is too busy being repressed and dictated and obscured by niqab? In our western culture, with our free speech protections, are the “good” people those who are silent and dumb and unheard-from, or are the good people those who give voice to the obscure, the unpopular, the uncool? “Cool” probably isn’t even the right word, I am so far, far from embodying that trait.

I am a good mother, and I have bad to share: Like the time I whacked Sally on the head with a hairbrush because she wouldn’t hold still for a ponytail, and the time I yelled at Susan that I didn’t give a flying f&*^ if she didn’t want to wear her seatbelt because wear her seatbelt is what she had to do. And the time I ignored baby Spot crying in her crib because I just had to finish one more page of my trashy romance novel if you know what I mean.

Still, I am a Good Mother. I am not and never will be cool, sophisticated, or cynical enough to charmingly regale you with how proud I am to be a Bad Mother. I don’t let other people tell me what I have to do to be a good mother, either. Nor can I tell you whether you are a good mother or not (though chances are, if you try to be, and if you don’t do crack while you’re pregnant, you probably are).

The way I see it, being a good mother takes two things: 1) the desire to be a good mother: the earnest, chumpish, embarrassingly dorky, peasanty desire to be a good mother. And 2) the will to do those things that she determines to be important for the well-being of her children. Even those that require sacrifice, change of habit, or a lot of w-o-r-k.

For example, she can’t say “Of course nutrition is important, but I have to have a life too, don’t I? So I let my kids eat dingdongs for dinner yo-ho-ho, aren’t I fabulously way-cool?” Maybe nutrition isn’t important to her. Fine. THAT doesn’t make her a bad mother. Maybe she has great genes for winnowing the beta carotene from a cheese puff that she passed on to her kids. Fine (and can I get some of that?).

No, what makes someone a bad mother is knowing or believing that something isn’t good for her kids, and yet revelling in them doing it, whatever it is. And revelling in her own bad behavior (that she herself deems bad), whatever that is.

Being a good mother means wanting and trying to be a good mother. Why wouldn’t you want to be good at what you do or who you are? Do we wish to be friends with Bad People? Does anyone want their cancer treated by a woman proud of being a Bad Doctor? Would we like our country led by a Bad President? The difference here, of course, is that the Good Mother’s consituents do not include any other mothers or any other mother’s children. (My constituents are myself, my husband sometimes, and my children infrequently. Not my mother or mother-in-law or the internet.)

And here is the real problem: If a mother cannot shrug off the opinions of those who are not her constituents, this is not the fault of the term Good Mother, this is a weakness of personality that looks to others for approval. And, not seeing that needy reassurance forthcoming, rocks itself in a corner shouting intermittently, “Oh yeah, maybe I am a Bad Mother, but I LIKE it. So there.”

This doesn’t mean a good mother never questions herself, never worries or hopes to improve, of course she does, that is the whole point. A good mother seeks better ways to do things, just as a good doctor learns new surgical technique thingies. And maybe somedays she feels like a bad mother, because let’s face it, on some days the good mother is a real bad mother. It happens.

Thinking yourself a bad mother for falling short of your own goals is not the same as thinking yourself a bad mother because other people said so. One is a valid gauge of one’s progress, the other is just stupid.

And I know I said I wasn’t cool, but I do get that this whole embracing of the Bad Mother term is a linguistic reclaiming of the something-something-revolutionary-blah-blah-the-man-and-the-media-is-holding-us-down-and-making-us-feel-bad-about-ourselves-something-something.

But the truth is that bad means bad and good means good. They always have, and they probably always will. Instead of reclaiming “bad” I say we reclaim “good,” from both the sanctimonious and the self-satisfiedly-smug not-good. I do believe that would make us counter-revolutionaries, which, beat THAT for being better than bad.

I’ll go first:

Hi, my name is Jane (okay, it’s Shannon) and I am a good mother.

Brother W. called me after church to ask me to speak next week. He first asked how my Mother’s Day was going, and I said, “Fine. About as well as can be expected.” And he said, “Oh of course, you’ve got some sick kids at home. How are they feeling?”

Now here’s where I would normally enlighten this poor, clueless male as to the complexity of my disdain for the Mother’s Day holiday, which starts with things as petty as a husband who is so righteously helpful to unload the dishwasher for once but ignores the stacks of pots in the sink and the clothes on the floor, and ends with the nagging feeling that, short of undergoing a personality transplant, I’ll never be exactly the sort of mother I want to be to my kids.

And in the middle is this great example of why Mother’s Day never quite works: My good friend Chrysanthemum had a rare date night planned with her husband the Saturday before Mother’s Day. She had arranged for a babysitter, and the date was simple: ice cream and a walk SANS KIDS. Then her husband was called to go help with the strawberry-chocolate dipping for the mothers’ gifts at church the next day. So instead of a date night with her husband SANS KIDS, she got to stay home and put the kids to bed by herself (a chore her husband normally does himself to give his wife her one break from the kids all day).

Now of course, the one redeeming part of that story is that Chrysanthemum is blessed to have a husband so faithful to the Lord that he would give up his Saturday night to do the service that the church asked of him, a service that was well-intentioned by all involved to show appreciation for mothers.

Still. You see why Mother’s Day is a bit fraught.

But, Gentle Reader, fear not. Before I opened my stupid mouth and explained all that, I remembered that Brother W. and his lovely, lovely wife adopted their first baby several months ago after years of waiting for a child, and I bet you –

I bet you all-the-potty-training-progress-that-Spot-has-made –

that she doesn’t hate Mother’s Day.

Mean Girls and Bully Boys

I’ve been thinking about schoolyard bullies and schoolgirl meanness a lot lately. A couple weeks ago Sally brought home a note about an incident on the playground. She seemed just the same as always, but the note informed us that the second grade bully punched her in the face as she and a friend walked towards the swings. I inspected her mouth for knocked-out teeth and peered anxiously at the tender skin around her eyes. She was unbruised, her skin unbroken, and her feelings were fine too.

I was somewhat less than fine, somewhere between “you’re never going back there again” and “you know where to kick him where it counts, right?” less-than-fine.

Usually I worry more about middle school mean girl clique-y-ness when I think of the storms of schoolday melodrama. I even had a minor dust-up with my own mean girls from North Sevier Middle School on Facebook the other day. I felt so dumb after that self-induced reminder of things long-gotten-past that I finally read the book my mom recommended, Reviving Ophelia. The task of shepherding three daughters to womanhood often makes me fierce and fearful, and reading Reviving Ophelia didn’t help. Oh, it validated my concerns about tween-age girls (unfortunately) but even though it’s fifteen years old now, it details bullying and sexual harassment from boys that makes my heart tremble for my daughters.

They’re so innocently strong-willed and invulnerable to slights now, so self-sufficient and secure. Sally is almost callous in her friendships, returning effusive greetings at the park or the WalMart with nonchalant “hi”‘s, shrugging it off when her erstwhile best friend decides to play with someone else for the day.

And as for the boys, this week Sally started riding her bike to school with three neighbor kids of the male variety. They come to get her every morning early, and off they ride. They walk their bikes up the big hill, and I imagine she forgoes the incessant “it’s too hard” whining that accompanies our family bike rides. The oldest boy, Mike, is the kind of boy I wouldn’t mind so much her dating in twenty or thirty years.

Unless he turns out like Rory, of course.

It seems impossible now that such a quiet, respectful boy could turn out like that tormentor of my early young womanhood, but I have to remember that Rory had a mother just as nice as Mike’s mother, and things are changing. Kids are growing up younger (whatever that means), and whenever I think of the — well, maybe I should just tell you what that boy was like.

Rory

My family moved in to the neighborhood when I was thirteen, at the end of eighth grade. Rory and his friends welcomed us by toilet-papering our house. My friends and I forked his lawn in return; we were pretty disappointed when we heard that Brother K. cleaned up the forks instead of leaving them for Rory, who was away for Boy Scouts.

Rory and I rode the same bus until we got our driver’s licenses. Those last few years of waiting for vehicular deliverance were excruciating, and the only alleviating factor was being old enough to command seats in the back of the bus. Naturally, Rory and his friends set up camp back there. But I was valiant, and fearless. When verbal threats didn’t work, those boys threw gum in my hair and poured Pepsi on my seat. While I was sitting on it.

One day, I think it was the Pepsi-on-the-seat day, I turned to Rory’s best friend and screamed, “Go to hell, Gavin.” I was long-suffering and patient, of course, but I wanted those boys to know that I’d had it. And even then they managed to turn the tables on me. Ever after that, every time I got on the bus, and every afternoon as I walked to my door, they chanted: “Go to HEAVEN, Shannon.”

(Stop smiling! It’s not funny. It was dang effective at the time!)

Things weren’t much better at our church youth camps. Sure, Rory and his friends usually got quiet and reverent at the final campfires and said things like “mumble-mumble-love-Jesus-my-Savior-mumble-mumble,” but by day they continued their campaign of harassment, the worst of which was the stink bombs they set off in our tent. One day we had a Learn-to-Cooperate-and-Trust-Each-Other activity involving a human chain and crossing a fairly swift-moving river. Rory disappeared (not being a fan of cooperate-and-trust, I guess), and later appeared, alone on the other side, peeling off a wetsuit he’d brought to the mountains for who knows what purpose. He always was a pretty big show-off.

I felt a bit miffed that Rory was president of the debate team in high school. I don’t want to admit to being intimidated out of joining the club, but it felt like debate was Rory’s domain, and I retreated to calculus and the Thoreau Society, despite my (vague, passing) interest in winning arguments.

Practically my last memory of Rory is the week-long Survival trip a bunch of us went on our senior year. I had Melinda with me, and Mark, who was all the protection I needed against my adolescent nemesis, but I may have been (slightly) glad that the boy who could produce a wetsuit in the most unlikely of circumstances was also there in the desert, with his well-oiled pocketknife.

I guess Rory wasn’t all bad, at least, not compared to the boys in the Reviving Ophelia book (or even compared to Sally’s second-grade bully). He never swore at me or said anything that made me feel stupid or ugly or inclined to be silent. Unwanted in the back of the bus, yes, but never unhappy or discontent in my own life. He never punched me in the face or hurt me or scared me. He never belittled me or made me question my femininity. He never made me ashamed of my changing body or feel like I should hide the brain I had. He never used sexual innuendo or said anything that made me uncomfortable that way.

I take that back. I did hear Rory talk about sex once. We were on a National Honors Society trip to Cedar City for a play. I don’t think Rory was a regular member of the Society, too nerdy for him, but he was dating Leslie, who was on the council. The girls were talking about sex, about how it was this big, scary thing, and what would our wedding nights be like? Would it hurt?

Rory said, “I don’t want to have sex on my wedding night; I just want to hold my wife.” I can still see his smirk –this big, fat smirk that crossed his face. What a funny guy! Who did he think he was kidding?

Rory’s Mother

Usually for Mother’s Day I write a tribute to my mother (who, like most mothers, is the best mother ever). But this year I keep thinking about Rory’s mother. I don’t have boys. I may never have boys to raise. Bringing up my girls, because I have some idea of just what they’ll face as they grow into their minds and their bodies, this is terrifying enough.

I think raising boys must be easier in some ways — they can’t get pregnant, for one thing. But good parents know that getting a girl pregnant is just as life-changing. Women who raise boys to be the kind of men I want my daughters to know are doing hard work.

And I’ve come to appreciate certain things I never thought I would, like Boy Scouts. I always thought it would be the worst waste of my time at church to have to attend pack meeting and bring salad to the blue and gold banquet. After all, my girls will never be involved in boy scouts. Then I hauled them (Dick was busy with his 11 year-old scouts) to my first pack meeting, and we watched the little nine-year-olds bringing in the flag. They were so serious and solemn in their miniature uniforms, so guileless about learning respect and order and taking oaths of honor and loyalty.

I haven’t seen Rory since we graduated. I know he served a mission for our church and works in his father’s business. I hear from my brother that he married a smart, beautiful girl we went to school with. Maybe he has children of his own now. I hope so. I hope he has to clean up after them, as his mom and dad cleaned up after him. (And my parents cleaned up after me, a time or two).

I hope he is as good a parent to his kids as his mom and dad were to him. I hope he teaches his sons that sex is something that happens (or doesn’t) on a wedding night.

I hope my daughters have tormentors as innocently mischievous as mine.

And so even though I can’t stop worrying about my daughters, and dreading the day when their father’s warm approval and genuine interest in their lives pales before the pull of a high school crush — even though mothering is not for the faint of heart, I am heartened.

I’m not saying I wish I had dated Rory, but maybe, even if Sally’s friend Mike down the street turns out to be just like him, maybe I’ll let her date him. When she’s forty.

Jane

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Special thanks to Tara and Natasha for reading earlier versions of this. I labored mightily over it, and really appreciate their input, though any inelegancies remain my responsibility, of course.

Who doesn’t see my stretch marks (or ignores them).
Who doesn’t see my apron of spare tummy flesh that jiggles over my pants (or ignores it).
Whose eyes gleam quite flatteringly at the sight of my flabby white chest.
Who forgives my laziness, my yelling, my unreasonable, irrational, and variable discontent.
Who lets me be me, and loves me anyway.

If you don’t read Dick’s blog, you probably missed his post in response to the Penelope Trunk post* I tweeted/Facebooked about. Brock left a comment on this blog saying he feels like he gets the motherhood angst that his wife (one of my best friends from high school) feels. I think I understand what he’s saying, and of course Melinda’s motherhood angst is different from mine. Melinda, after all, worked for a special government agency doing special things before her children were born. And Melinda, more importantly, is a better all-around person than I am.

But for me, one of the regrets I sometimes I have about motherhood is the not-knowing what I could have done otherwise. Motherhood, for me, is a commitment to my children that excludes some other endeavors, at this time, at this point, in this place. I cannot be the kind of mother I want to be and also explore other things I would like to do, and since I became a mother at 23, and since I wanted to become a mother before that, it is something of a way of life. It is, for better or worse, who I have become.

And I don’t know how any person who does not plan this sort of way of being a parent could possibly understand what it is like to look back, occasionally, and wonder, what if?

When I had Sally, I went back to work for eighteen months, and Dick stayed home during the day and did his master’s degree in the afternoon and evening. This worked out tremendously well for us, but I wish that I had learned from how Dick went about being a stay-at-home father. He didn’t have the same commitment to stay-at-home parenting that I do now. He didn’t spend any energy on forging an identity for himself as a stay-at-home parent. He read and wrote and graded during the day. He took good care of our daughter, and talked with other parents at the park, but he was never emotionally invested in creating a place for himself in the world in that role. It was just something he did.

I think for me to survive and thrive as a mother, as a stay-at-home parent, which is how I have chosen to go about being a mother, I have to create an identity for myself. I have to be able to glorify, on the one hand, the great parts of my job, and I have to be able to grouse, on the other hand, about the terrible potty-training parts. Because if I didn’t think being a mother, as being a stay-at-home parent, was the most important thing I could be doing right now, I would not do it. And if I did not have an outlet for the un-happy parts of parenting, I would stick a fork in the artery that beats between my collar bone and my neck.

What I loved about Penelope Trunk’s article was that she said that being a stay-at-home parent is a choice. No matter how “poor” you are, you can be a stay-at-home parent if you want to. And she said that people do what they really want to do. So, I am doing what I really want to do, even if some days it doesn’t seem like it. Which is the other thing I liked about her article — what I have been describing as ambivalence for years, she calls “competing feelings.”

It’s okay to have competing feelings about something. Ambivalence makes it sound like I don’t care enough about either thing to be able to choose between them, or that I don’t either love OR hate stay-at-home motherhood enough to be able to lay it to rest already. But the truth is I care too much. I am passionately, intensely wed to the role I play in my children’s lives, and I am also desperately eager to do something else, something in addition.

Dick’s post (you should go read it) is about how we view our own roles and each others’ in limited ways. We’re quite traditional around here. I did not expect this domesticity and child-rearing when I was younger, but as soon as I met Dick, I started thinking about having a baby. I know that it is what I’m meant to do, what I’m meant to be, right now, but I can’t imagine doing it with anyone else.

Ode to my man . . .
Who, though he understands me better than any other person on earth, would never try to tell me he does.

Jane

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*Penolope Trunk does go a bit bat-poop crazy in her post. I’m not advocating all of her methods, I just adore how she talks about motherhood, and the one reference to you-know-what? BRILLIANT.