I know a lot of bad moms. They have nannies when they don’t have jobs, they get sitters to go shopping, they go to spas for the weekends with their girlfriends. Most of them have housekeepers and painstakingly highlighted hair. I don’t use a sitter and my hair is frighteningly D.I.Y. My floors are encrusted with Cheerios, and each drawer in my house is stuffed like a Rubik’s Cube, where moving one item requires moving another, and so on.
Of course I envy these women. My son goes to preschool four days a week, minus when he’s sick (40 percent of the time) and for Teachers’ Institute Days (27 a year); conferences; winter, spring and summer breaks; and major and minor holidays, including Presidents’ Day and Casmir Pulaski Day, a special Chicago-only holiday. (In L.A. they have Jean Carruther’s Day, named for the woman who invented Botox.)
This leaves me two and a half hours a day, four times a week, to myself—hours that pass like lightning. (Greased, oiled, and otherwise speed-enhanced lightning.) Dropping off Ian takes 15 minutes. Then I zip through 30 minutes of housework—just enough to keep the house from being declared a Hazmat site, but not enough for it to be actually considered clean. This leaves me something like an hour and a half before I have to pick up Ian. Generally, I write or make stuff. Jewelry, soup, whatever.
One day recently my husband stayed home sick, and I wondered when he was going to notice how I passed my time. It happened to be a day I had to finish some jewelry for the school auction, so I sat hunched over my work the whole time Ian was at school, ear buds in place, coffee mug in hand. He did complain, after a while, but only because I used his sick self to watch Ian, so I could have even more time to myself.
Because there’s the rub. No matter how productively those two hours pass, it’s not enough. I can’t write a book, or learn my craft the way I really want to. I can’t take a class or go to yoga. (The times don’t fit the schedule). I can’t get on the train and meet a friend downtown for lunch, because what if I didn’t get back on time, and Ian was left on the school playground with a disgruntled teacher? What I can accomplish is to post a new blog about twice a month. I make a few new pieces of jewelry a week, and the other day, I even washed the floors. (I had to. The crunching noise was getting on my nerves.)
It’s not that I love my son less than I did before he was born. I loved him the instant the doctor laid him on my chest. Earlier, really, when I felt him lurching around in my belly, hiccupping, his heels pressing against my skin. But it’s hard to see your old life passing you by. I’ve forgotten how to use software I used to use on a daily basis. I no longer have a “city” wardrobe that fits or is close to being in style. And the things I try to accomplish and which give me some sense of self—outside of being a mother and wife—are never given enough time to do well or fully. I don’t even feel that I’m that good of a mom anymore. And that’s the really sad part.
The first two years of Ian’s life were a cakewalk for me. Sure, I was stressed out about all the newness. How scary the first bath was. Figuring out the changing table at Target. Carrying those damn car seats back and forth to the chiropractor. It was easy to be a good mom, though. I would always ask myself what the “right” thing to do was. If I suspected Ian needed a diaper change, I would check him. If I thought he had a fever, I would take his temperature. In the mornings—and I am not a morning person—I would lie awake waiting for him to wake up.
My son and I had something childcare experts call “goodness of fit,” which basically means we liked each other immediately. We had the same goals: to sleep, breastfeed or be breastfed, and gaze adoringly into each other’s eyes. We’re so strongly bonded that—two and a half years after I stopped nursing him—he sticks his hand down my shirt for comfort the way some kids suck their thumbs. (After he sticks his hand down my shirt, he holds his hand to his face and sucks in my scent, like Dennis Hopper and his oxygen mask in Blue Velvet. Only cuter.)
Novelist Ayelet Waldman caused a furor a while back proclaiming that she loved her husband, fellow novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children. (Hell, I love Michael Chabon more than her children. His grocery list could win a Pulitzer.) I’m the other kind of mom, the one who falls so deeply in love with her child she has to be reminded that she has a husband. That she needs to treat her man as respectfully and lovingly as she treats her child. It’s the way I’m wired.
But my son is growing up. His needs differ from mine. He wants to run and jump and play Transformers, and I still want to snuggle. He wants to ride his bike and build snow-robots, and I want to read the New Yorker and nap. In addition to being good with babies, I’m wired to be, well, selfish. The good mothers I know tend to fall in two camps: superachievers and martyrs. The superachievers outsource a lot, and the martyrs give up everything for their kids. Showering, working, having friends over the age of six. The latter group doesn’t seem very happy, but they’re patient as saints. Picture them with a toddler at each end of the rack, cranking the wheel tighter and tighter, until they’re so stretched out, even their high-waisted mom jeans don’t fit anymore. And all they would say is, “Honey, make sure you let your sister have a turn.”
The middle-of-the-road moms, like me, feel like we do everything half-assed. We don’t give enough to our kids, and we don’t have enough left for ourselves. Not to mention our husbands. (Sex? Please. As in, please get off me.) We lose our keys and our debit cards, the cat box is always dirty, and the five-second rule becomes the “if I didn’t see it, he didn’t eat it” rule.
I got an e-mail from an old friend recently who blew me off the couch with a litany of all the activity in her life. No less than three books going, conferences, music, nature, freelance work. As I remember it, she’s also a good cook and a master gardener. Hell, even her kids are published poets! I wanted to crawl in a virtual hole and hide. Since it was e-mail, I should have just lied. “Oh yeah, I’m meeting my agent in New York next week,” blah blah blah. But she’d probably Google me and find out I’m full of shit. So I fessed up to being a loser and quietly excused myself, vowing to rewrite my bio on Facebook with a lot less attention to the truth.
The truth is, I need a little life to myself to be a good mom. I need Ian to watch Scooby Doo sometimes so I can write. Or read. Or talk on the phone to my mom for an hour. Because my mom showed me that a whole person makes me a better parent. In fact, a good one.
(Thanks, Mom.)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Internal Twin Theory
One of my favorite theories about myself (see Navel Gazing, Chapter 1) is that I was nearly a twin. Physical evidence abounds: the right side of my hair flips out, the left side under; the right side of my chin is a bit longer than the left; my right eye a bit bigger. Even my right breast (if you’ll excuse me for pointing it out) is bigger than the left. As an embryo, I was clearly destined to be a twin. My egg-self started to split in two, changed its mind, and left me with two selves, me and my internal twin.
This internal twin is the opposite of me in every way. I am nice; my twin is nasty. I am loving; my twin is cold. I am happy; my twin is depressive. I recycle; my twin doesn’t. As you might guess, living with me can be difficult. I’ve been called, over the years: complicated (my mother), high-strung (ex-husband), “a rollercoaster,” (husband) and a spitfire (therapist). If I had a motto it would be, “When she was good, she was very, very good. When she was bad, she was horrid.” (See Mother Goose.)
You might think it’s kind of exciting—or at least not boring—to be me. But it’s getting old. I spend a lot of time (see Navel Gazing, Chapter 2) beating myself up for my behavior, but then I go on to make the same mistakes, over and over. F’rinstance, this winter I seem to have lost not one, but two friends. Without even trying! One friend I’d known more than 10 years; the other I had just met.
You could say I’m an acquired taste. It takes people a while to fall in love with me, to get past the shyness and weirdness to my odd, inner charm. But once they do, I reward them by giving as much as I can, just as they reward me with their amazing, inspiring selves. My soul glows after hanging out with one of my buddies.
But what seems to happen is that my twin goes around offending people when I’m not looking. I’ll call my longtime and recently estranged friend Exhibit A. A, whose own children are my age, was counseling me on the phone one day about my son’s behavior. (He didn’t want me to talk on the phone just then and was vocal in letting me know.) Natch, he’s my son—of course he’s mouthy. He’s four, smart, independent, and an only child. But his preschool teacher calls him “Golden Ian,” and his gymnastics coach says he loves a challenge and listens “most of the time.” He’s a great kid. So I defended him, saying “He’s only four,” and that type of thing. She persisted, and I couldn’t wait to get off the phone. Unbelievably, my friend seems to be dumping me over this. It’s March and we still haven’t exchanged Christmas presents, and she left me a voicemail recently, advising me not to get her a birthday gift because she’s “cutting back on presents for friends.” Ouch.
What I want to know is, why can’t we talk about it? Does she love me so little that our friendship has to end over one frustrating phone call? Is there something else I’ve done wrong? But I can’t ask her about it because of Exhibit B, which (or who) is the new friend I’ve also apparently alienated, and who (or which) seems to indicate to me that “talking it out” is not acceptable.
Right after B and I met, just a few months ago, she proposed that we collaborate on a writing project. She was a pro, I was a pro, so I was gung-ho on the idea right away. B even had an editor friend we could submit to directly, so we were both convinced the project was marketable. I did my end of the work, and for several months she convinced me she was “really cooking” on the idea, until she finally admitted she couldn’t do it. No apology.
So I got mad. Mad because she had the energy for 50 simultaneous projects of her own, and I felt like I’d been misled and disregarded. I told her (over e-mail, because my twin is confrontational, but I am a wienie) that I was disappointed as simply and honestly as I could, and she freaked out. A couple of e-mails went back and forth, where I continued to expect an apology and she continued to maintain how horribly I had injured her. We got nowhere. I tried to apologize—or at least explain—and she pretended like we were fine. But then a week later, she included me on a group e-mail. I responded with a “nice to hear from ya,” but she shot back, saying she was “too scared” to open my message and that she would “try in a few days when she didn’t feel so stressy and weak.” (She had a cold.) I haven’t heard from her since. (My twin wants to say, “Gosh, sorry, I didn’t know that you had cancer,” but I won’t let her.)
Now I feel a flutter of agitation (hope times fear) every time I check my e-mail, but nothing from B. I am hurt, but my twin is angry, so angry that her heart beats faster when we go online, and she thinks of cruel things to say to this weak, stressed-out human being whose emotional development stopped roughly at the third grade. (I’m a third grader too, but maybe that’s not a good thing to have in common). I remind my twin of the things we like about B: her humor, her creativity, her penchant for glitter.
In the end, both halves of me feel like crap. I would have done anything for A, and B really seemed like the coolest person I had met in a while. I forgave her for dissing me because I didn’t like Roller Derby, and switched to McDonald’s instead of Starbucks for our coffee dates, because French Roast gives her the jitters. I proved myself willing to compromise. But when someone erases you from memory after your first disagreement, what can you do? And as for A, aren’t we supposed to be able to disagree, sometimes, after 10 years? Isn’t friendship like marriage, where you have to work through your differences?
The timing of these two incidents has made for a rough winter. The sun is gone, the air is cold, my confidence is shot. And I am left to wonder what lesson I should have learned from all this. Is it that we can never admit to each other if we’re hurt, let down, or offended? Or is it that we should never be hurt, let down, or offended? Maybe a friendship that doesn’t have room for any of these isn’t that deep of a friendship after all. Or maybe it’s just not worth fighting for.
This internal twin is the opposite of me in every way. I am nice; my twin is nasty. I am loving; my twin is cold. I am happy; my twin is depressive. I recycle; my twin doesn’t. As you might guess, living with me can be difficult. I’ve been called, over the years: complicated (my mother), high-strung (ex-husband), “a rollercoaster,” (husband) and a spitfire (therapist). If I had a motto it would be, “When she was good, she was very, very good. When she was bad, she was horrid.” (See Mother Goose.)
You might think it’s kind of exciting—or at least not boring—to be me. But it’s getting old. I spend a lot of time (see Navel Gazing, Chapter 2) beating myself up for my behavior, but then I go on to make the same mistakes, over and over. F’rinstance, this winter I seem to have lost not one, but two friends. Without even trying! One friend I’d known more than 10 years; the other I had just met.
You could say I’m an acquired taste. It takes people a while to fall in love with me, to get past the shyness and weirdness to my odd, inner charm. But once they do, I reward them by giving as much as I can, just as they reward me with their amazing, inspiring selves. My soul glows after hanging out with one of my buddies.
But what seems to happen is that my twin goes around offending people when I’m not looking. I’ll call my longtime and recently estranged friend Exhibit A. A, whose own children are my age, was counseling me on the phone one day about my son’s behavior. (He didn’t want me to talk on the phone just then and was vocal in letting me know.) Natch, he’s my son—of course he’s mouthy. He’s four, smart, independent, and an only child. But his preschool teacher calls him “Golden Ian,” and his gymnastics coach says he loves a challenge and listens “most of the time.” He’s a great kid. So I defended him, saying “He’s only four,” and that type of thing. She persisted, and I couldn’t wait to get off the phone. Unbelievably, my friend seems to be dumping me over this. It’s March and we still haven’t exchanged Christmas presents, and she left me a voicemail recently, advising me not to get her a birthday gift because she’s “cutting back on presents for friends.” Ouch.
What I want to know is, why can’t we talk about it? Does she love me so little that our friendship has to end over one frustrating phone call? Is there something else I’ve done wrong? But I can’t ask her about it because of Exhibit B, which (or who) is the new friend I’ve also apparently alienated, and who (or which) seems to indicate to me that “talking it out” is not acceptable.
Right after B and I met, just a few months ago, she proposed that we collaborate on a writing project. She was a pro, I was a pro, so I was gung-ho on the idea right away. B even had an editor friend we could submit to directly, so we were both convinced the project was marketable. I did my end of the work, and for several months she convinced me she was “really cooking” on the idea, until she finally admitted she couldn’t do it. No apology.
So I got mad. Mad because she had the energy for 50 simultaneous projects of her own, and I felt like I’d been misled and disregarded. I told her (over e-mail, because my twin is confrontational, but I am a wienie) that I was disappointed as simply and honestly as I could, and she freaked out. A couple of e-mails went back and forth, where I continued to expect an apology and she continued to maintain how horribly I had injured her. We got nowhere. I tried to apologize—or at least explain—and she pretended like we were fine. But then a week later, she included me on a group e-mail. I responded with a “nice to hear from ya,” but she shot back, saying she was “too scared” to open my message and that she would “try in a few days when she didn’t feel so stressy and weak.” (She had a cold.) I haven’t heard from her since. (My twin wants to say, “Gosh, sorry, I didn’t know that you had cancer,” but I won’t let her.)
Now I feel a flutter of agitation (hope times fear) every time I check my e-mail, but nothing from B. I am hurt, but my twin is angry, so angry that her heart beats faster when we go online, and she thinks of cruel things to say to this weak, stressed-out human being whose emotional development stopped roughly at the third grade. (I’m a third grader too, but maybe that’s not a good thing to have in common). I remind my twin of the things we like about B: her humor, her creativity, her penchant for glitter.
In the end, both halves of me feel like crap. I would have done anything for A, and B really seemed like the coolest person I had met in a while. I forgave her for dissing me because I didn’t like Roller Derby, and switched to McDonald’s instead of Starbucks for our coffee dates, because French Roast gives her the jitters. I proved myself willing to compromise. But when someone erases you from memory after your first disagreement, what can you do? And as for A, aren’t we supposed to be able to disagree, sometimes, after 10 years? Isn’t friendship like marriage, where you have to work through your differences?
The timing of these two incidents has made for a rough winter. The sun is gone, the air is cold, my confidence is shot. And I am left to wonder what lesson I should have learned from all this. Is it that we can never admit to each other if we’re hurt, let down, or offended? Or is it that we should never be hurt, let down, or offended? Maybe a friendship that doesn’t have room for any of these isn’t that deep of a friendship after all. Or maybe it’s just not worth fighting for.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Commandments 11 Through 14
I only have 44 minutes to write this week’s blog. Blog Day was officially yesterday, but I spent my allotted time writing something that ended up too cranky to publish. So I’m trying again and posting the result whether it’s good or bad, because I’m the boss of my blog, and I believe it will get me “discovered,” like the woman who wrote the screenplay for Juno, without first having to become a stripper.
Here’s my beef: an anti-drug organization recently launched an e-mail petition that asked everyone to agree that drugs are bad. But then, if you didn’t sign and forward the petition, which proposed no further action, “your selfishness would know no bounds.”
Sadly, my selfishness does know some bounds. I don’t see the point in feeling guilty about not doing something that won’t actually do anything. Signing (or typing) your name and then giving it to other people you believe will do the same won’t convince anybody to “just say no” because it’s preaching to the choir, unless the friends you send it to happen to be sitting in front of the 7-11, checking their e-mail one last time before getting stoned. This so-called petition only puffs up the signers for having done some good, when no actual good was done. What can honestly be achieved with so little effort? You could take the five seconds it took to type your name and hit forward, and instead pluck a dollar from your wallet and donate it to MADD or Habitat for Humanity, or any do-good organization. At least once a week, the cashiers at my grocery store ask me to hand over a buck to fight lymphoma or some itis or osis, and I always say yes.* It doesn’t cost much, but it costs something.
The thing is, you don’t get something for nothing. (A lot of the time, you don’t even get something for something.) So stop forwarding e-mails that break the 11th through 13th Commandments: paranoia, guilt, and schmaltziness. If the e-mail draws upon the excessive use of angels, colored text, or the disclaimer “This was verified on Snopes.com,” think before you forward. If it promises that you will burn in Hell if you don’t comply, think. There are times you may still want to forward a dopey message, if the message outweighs the dopiness. For example, you’re sharing a safety alert IN PURPLE about falling out the window because you, personally, have fallen out the window, or you have some choice piece of information that no other reasonably well-informed adult is privy to. Because, you know what? We all get the news, whether it’s from Jon Stewart or The Economist. We know (sorta) how to prevent identity theft, eat right, and not get poisoned by toilet bowl cleaner, and none of us can afford to waste time passing on empty threats and promises.
If you’re really smart, you may feel confident applying the lesser-known 14th Commandment, called Know Thine Audience. Then, you can pick and choose who gets the e-mails about fluffy animals (mostly females, current pet owners, and people without allergies) and who gets the ones about keeping potassium iodide in the house in case of a nuclear event (your grandma and everyone she knows).
I realize that no one will ever forward me anything, ever again. I’ll miss the photos of kittens being nursed by dogs, toddlers flushing interesting objects down the toilet, and the news that a meteor is going to destroy the earth at 10:32 this evening. I won’t miss the threats of ostracism if I fail to participate in the next chain mail. Because, believe me, a crab like me can think of plenty o’ ways to get myself ostracized, without having to resort to mumbo jumbo.
However, if the world really is going to end tonight? Please tell me. I’ll tell you—and your 115 best friends.
*Well, once I said no, but I’m not a saint.
Here’s my beef: an anti-drug organization recently launched an e-mail petition that asked everyone to agree that drugs are bad. But then, if you didn’t sign and forward the petition, which proposed no further action, “your selfishness would know no bounds.”
Sadly, my selfishness does know some bounds. I don’t see the point in feeling guilty about not doing something that won’t actually do anything. Signing (or typing) your name and then giving it to other people you believe will do the same won’t convince anybody to “just say no” because it’s preaching to the choir, unless the friends you send it to happen to be sitting in front of the 7-11, checking their e-mail one last time before getting stoned. This so-called petition only puffs up the signers for having done some good, when no actual good was done. What can honestly be achieved with so little effort? You could take the five seconds it took to type your name and hit forward, and instead pluck a dollar from your wallet and donate it to MADD or Habitat for Humanity, or any do-good organization. At least once a week, the cashiers at my grocery store ask me to hand over a buck to fight lymphoma or some itis or osis, and I always say yes.* It doesn’t cost much, but it costs something.
The thing is, you don’t get something for nothing. (A lot of the time, you don’t even get something for something.) So stop forwarding e-mails that break the 11th through 13th Commandments: paranoia, guilt, and schmaltziness. If the e-mail draws upon the excessive use of angels, colored text, or the disclaimer “This was verified on Snopes.com,” think before you forward. If it promises that you will burn in Hell if you don’t comply, think. There are times you may still want to forward a dopey message, if the message outweighs the dopiness. For example, you’re sharing a safety alert IN PURPLE about falling out the window because you, personally, have fallen out the window, or you have some choice piece of information that no other reasonably well-informed adult is privy to. Because, you know what? We all get the news, whether it’s from Jon Stewart or The Economist. We know (sorta) how to prevent identity theft, eat right, and not get poisoned by toilet bowl cleaner, and none of us can afford to waste time passing on empty threats and promises.
If you’re really smart, you may feel confident applying the lesser-known 14th Commandment, called Know Thine Audience. Then, you can pick and choose who gets the e-mails about fluffy animals (mostly females, current pet owners, and people without allergies) and who gets the ones about keeping potassium iodide in the house in case of a nuclear event (your grandma and everyone she knows).
I realize that no one will ever forward me anything, ever again. I’ll miss the photos of kittens being nursed by dogs, toddlers flushing interesting objects down the toilet, and the news that a meteor is going to destroy the earth at 10:32 this evening. I won’t miss the threats of ostracism if I fail to participate in the next chain mail. Because, believe me, a crab like me can think of plenty o’ ways to get myself ostracized, without having to resort to mumbo jumbo.
However, if the world really is going to end tonight? Please tell me. I’ll tell you—and your 115 best friends.
*Well, once I said no, but I’m not a saint.
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