This trip is hard. It’s awesome – there’s no question that it’s awesome – but it’s also hard. And not just hard because it’s difficult to wrangle two busy little children on one’s own – although that is hard – or because being on the road is hard – ditto – but because it’s challenging to find joy in such a wonderful, family-affirming journey when there is currently so much pain in my extended family (pain beyond the pain of grief; it’s much worse than that, and it’s so difficult and sensitive and defies my ability to explain.)

Death can bring out the worst in people. All the more when the death in question is that of a much-loved but complicated and difficult man, and when his death brings about the close of an era and an estate and when everyone around him disagrees about how he felt about everyone else and when some lash out angrily and cruelly in order to protect a certain narrative about that man’s life and death so that that person’s own interests can be protected. And when the ensuing storm shatters hearts and relationships to pieces, when a family faces the worst of each other and finds that they cannot forgive the worst, there leaves so little room in the heart for joy.

Funny, though, how the heart knows how to expand to fit the filaments of joy that squeeze their way in, that push past the dark and force their light into the corners and allow, for some moments, the welcome sweetness of light and laughter.

Never leave home without your beaver.

Here’s the thing that we discovered yesterday: when you decide to fly half-way across the country with three small children, just so that you can turn around and drive back in the other direction, you need to have a plan.

Our plan is: schedule travel around cycles of exhaustion, which is to say, schedule travel to occur immediately after the children have worked off all of their excess energy, such that they’re always near collapse by the time they’re loaded in the vehicle. And if that means blasting ABBA at 9 o’clock in the morning so that they can choreograph, practice, and perform a Live! Preschooler! 1970’s Dance Revue!, so be it.

And if the music box craps out, just pray that the car seat straps hold.

(More updates will be posted at the I’m A Mom Blogger On A Road Trip, Get Me Out Of Here website and at Their Bad Mother and pretty much everywhere else that I write. And if I go radio silent anywhere for more than 48 hours, it means that the ABBA didn’t work and the children have taken over, so. Maybe send help.)

(Have to close comments, because I just won’t be able to read them. Comments are open and being moderated at the Road Trip site, however, so if you have helpful tips for travelling with rabid badgers and perhaps music for the taming thereof, please do weigh in.)

Requiescat in pace, Grandpa. You were loved and will be loved, always. Always.

********

Life goes on, and though I’m stumbling a bit from grief, I am keeping moving. Literally. To the east, and then onward, backward, to the west. We would have visited and kissed and hugged and loved and overwhelmed Grandpa when we reached him on our journey – instead, now, we’ll bury him – but the journey goes on and will be wonderful and it starts in just a few hours. Deep breath, steady… and we’re off.

I have some pretty cool news to report. Problem is, I can’t yet report it.

Oh, wait: I CAN. Wanna guess? Guess away, and then scroll to the bottom of the post…

(No, not a book deal. Not yet.)

(No, not a new website. I’m full up on websites.)

(It’s a real-life kinda thing.)

(No, not pregnant.)

(God. Would it be weird if I said, I wish, when really I kinda mostly don’t?)

(Anyway.)

I can’t report it because things aren’t set up enough yet to report it, which, AGH. It’s kind of getting in the way of writing anything else, because my head is full of planning and plotting this super-awesome thing.

I did, however, find enough mental space to comment on the death of Michael Jackson, so, you know, if you’re interested in what a rhythm-challenged white girl has to say about the death of the King of Pop, you could go check that out.

Otherwise, check back here later BELOW! I might do have something cool to report. And, of course, there’s always the babies:

And their butts.

UPDATE: I HAS TEH NEWS:

Yeah, yeah, butts. Are awesome. You know what’s also awesome? ROAD TRIPS.

I’m going on a road trip. With the kids. And this chick, and her kid. Across Canada (mostly across Canada, but whatever.) Yes, we’re insane. Yes, we might not survive, because YES, this is basically I’m A Mom Blogger On A Road Trip, Get Me Out Of Here. Which means a couple of things: 1) if you’re Canadian, we might be coming to a Motel 6 near you. And! We’d love to meet you! SERIOUSLY (leave a comment at the road trip website to get our attention). And, 2) even if you’re not Canadian, you’re going to want to keep an eye on how this goes, because unlike Spencer and Heidi, we can’t just call our publicists to complain about the hardships of life on the road with two batshit crazy preschoolers and a turbo-baby. So when the going gets tough, the mom bloggers are going to have to just keep going. And it promises to be interesting.

So, I’ll be updating here, and there’ll be mile-by-mile accounts at the road trip site and at Canada Moms Blog (the launch of which is our ostensible reason for doing this.) We leave Monday to start the trip on Canada’s east coast. We’ll be counting on you to cheer us on.

I am overwhelmed, today – and was overwhelmed yesterday, and the day before that, and am certain that I will be similarly overwhelmed tomorrow – with this singular thought: I do not want my boy to grow up.

I don’t. I just don’t. I know that his future is bright and amazing and that the him that he will be in that bright and amazing future is a him that I will adore with every ounce of the intensity that I adore him now, and then some, but.

But.

At this precise moment in time I am so love with Baby Him, with his soft, pale curls and his baby-tooth grin and his chubby baby bum and his tiny, grabby fists that clutch and hold and cling and the fact that I can press him to me and just hold, just hold on and breathe him in and pretend that we are still two pieces of one body, that I could, if I wanted to, press him back into my chest to beat as my own heart. This him, this incarnation of the human being that he is, this small, precious, sweet-smelling clutchable form of him – this I want to keep. This I want not to lose.

I know that this is impossible; wrong, even. I know that I should rejoice in the fact that he grows, he thrives, he marches – he leaps! he runs! he tumbles! – steadfastly forward into his own future. And I do, I do rejoice in this, just as I have rejoiced in the transformation of his sister from baby into girl. But I also mourn.

This is a truth about being a parent that nothing and no-one can prepare you for: that it is a continual experience of loss, a never-ending stream of moments of goodbye. That from the moment your children come into your life you are losing them. That the person your child is today is a person you will never meet again, a person that you will, in some ways, forget, as he or she is replaced by new people, bigger people, faster people, people with more words, people with more independence, people whose primary purpose is to move continually away from you. I look at Emilia and I can barely remember who she was as a baby; that baby, that her, is gone and obscured in the fog of my memory. I adore the girl that she is, of course, and the woman that she will become, but still: sometimes I miss that baby. Sometimes I miss that baby with an ache so deep that I feel it in my toes.

And so when I look at Jasper these days, when I watch him toddling and stumbling and pitching his fat little self forward, eager, into his sunlit future, I feel that ache and although I try to push it down, to push it away to make room for the joy of racing forward to meet the Jasper that he is becoming, I keep failing, and instead of pushing it away I let it sit in my belly like a weight and hold me still while I squeeze him to me, my baby, and try to freeze time for an eternity.

Or more.

*********

Because I am forgetting, and regretting that I forget: Wordless Wednesdays over at Their Bad Mother are henceforth going to be Wordless This Wednesday In History Wednesdays. Because, this. I need to cling to this.

Join me if you feel so inspired.

I have spanked my daughter. There, I said it.

I have spanked my daughter – just once, and for as good a reason as I think is possible to imagine for spanking – and I hated myself for doing it. But even though I hated myself for doing it, and even though I hope that I never do it again, I can’t quite bring myself to be outraged at another parent – no, not even Kate Gosselin – for doing it. Not because I think that spanking’s right, or even okay, but because disciplining children is a hard and complicated thing and one that – I don’t think – we can presume to understand well enough to judge from across the garden fence or down the grocery aisle or through the TV screen. If it’s not your kid, not your situation, odds are that you can’t fully understand the reasoning that might have gone into the bum-paddle that you witnessed. And if you can’t know, you can’t really judge. At least, I think you can’t. I’m still working this out.*

My parents were spankers. They always insisted that they hated doing it, that it hurt them more than it hurt us, and I always fully believed them. I still do. I never felt abused or harmed. I never doubted that they loved me. I never doubted their gentleness. Spanking was a punishment that was delivered upon my sister and I when we breached certain familial rules, like not acting in any way that might bring harm to ourselves or to each other. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, we knew well in advance what was coming. It never came as a surprise, and it was never meted out in the heat of anger. I can barely remember the spankings, now, only that they happened. I can, however, remember with perfect, uncomfortable clarity how it felt – in the years after we were too old for spanking and so were disciplined formally with groundings and informally with guilt – to be made to feel guilty. Guilt carried a greater and more lasting sting than the spankings. I can still feel that guilt – the burning cheeks, the hot tears, the sinking feeling in my stomach as my mother or father told me that I had disappointed them, that they were disappointed in me – in an immediate, visceral way. I have forgotten the spankings. I have not forgotten the guilt.

So I worry more, as a parent, about whether the modes of discipline that I use with my daughter are stinging her soul than I do about whether they’re stinging her bottom. I worry about whether the words that I choose or the tone of my voice or the look on my face are impressing fear or shame upon her. I worry about whether I am making her feel too badly. I worry that I don’t know how badly is too badly. I don’t worry so much about spanking.

Which, yes: it is easy for me to not worry about spanking, because I do not, as a rule, spank. But I have thought about spanking. I have been tempted on well more than one occasion to spank. The one time that I did spank I was – my own parents’ good example notwithstanding – so appalled at myself that I cried and vowed never to do it again, and that has been an easy vow to keep. But I have cried harder on the few occasions that I have made Emilia cry because the words that I used or the tone of my voice made her feel more terribly than was – perhaps? I don’t know – warranted by her crimes. I have felt worse about certain other parenting decisions, certain discipline decisions especially, than I did about the spanking.

I don’t believe in – as if it were something that one could or could not ‘believe in’ – hitting. I don’t believe in doing things that cause children harm, that visit unnecessary hurt upon them, that create a climate of fear. But there are things, I believe, that can cause more harm, visit more hurt, create more fear than spanking. And I worry about these things. Avoiding spanking is – with the exception of that one incident where, my god, my god, she very nearly caused serious harm to herself and to her baby brother – easy: you just keep your hands to yourself. Choosing the right words, the right tone, the right facial expressions – containing your anger, your fear, your frustration and wrapping it, tightly, in a perfectly balanced, perfectly contained disciplinary package – is much, much harder. I do my best – I do my very, very best – but even in my measured moments, I worry: have I impressed too much guilt upon her? Have I hurt her feelings unnecessarily? Have I made her doubt my love for her?

That day outside the grocery store, a few months back, when I pulled her away from the stroller and her brother and brought my hand to her bottom, that was a bad parenting moment for me. If you had seen it, you might have thought so, too. But I do not think that it was my worst moment – not for now, not even for the future – and the complicatedness of that fact – and of the facts that I do not always discipline perfectly, that I was doing the best that I could under the circumstances, that even in doing my best, I failed, and knew it, but also knew that I could have failed worse – was not something that you could have seen.

Which is why if I ever see you or Kate Gosselin or anyone spanking their child, I will not – unless it seems obviously abusive, and no, I’m not even one hundred percent what that means, which is why these things, these messy, messy things involving judgment are just so, you know, messy* – say a word. I can not say a word, because I am not without that kind of sin, and because I am not even certain that that sin is the worst of its kind.

*Beyond messy. I have judgmental thoughts, all the time. We all do. The question is knowing whether or when to say something. We shouldn’t turn away when someone is abusing a child, right? But what if one person’s ‘paddle on the bum’  is another person’s physical abuse? We should not pass judgment on other parents’ parenting – we haven’t walked in their shoes, we don’t know their story, it’s not our business – but does that mean anything goes? That we turn a blind eye in all cases? That we never speak of the questionable cases? But what is a questionable case, anyway?

This is – these questions are – about so much more than spanking. It requires far more words than I have here. Far more head and heart space than I have to devote here. So I have to – again – leave it for another time. But feel free to share your thoughts. Perhaps they’ll help me to clarify my own thinking.

Follow-up questions (because the discussion has gotten interesting):

A commenter below says that she would have called the police and pressed charges if she’d seen me swat my daughter’s bottom. Which I think is extreme, but it raises an interesting question: how do we balance fairness in judging other parents with protecting children and determining what is right and wrong in parenting? Should state tell us how to parent? Should other parents? Do some parents NEED to be told how to parent? Does the need to guide some parents trump freedom of other parents to parent how they choose? How do we decide whether, when or how to intervene?

Here is the paradox about parenthood and marriage: having children with the person you love gives you a bajillion new reasons to adore each other, a kerpillion new horizons towards which your hearts, together, can shoot, an infinity of moments over which your hearts can, together, explode into a burst of white-hot stars, but, too, it gives you a septillion distractions, a gajillion reasons to pass each other by on the stairs, a googleplex of moments in which you are just too tired to do anything but murmur love you and blow feeble kisses at each other’s cheeks. If that.

Having children with the one that you love deepens and broadens and enriches, immeasurably, that love, but it also imposes such a strain. The strain is worth it – so far beyond worth that it almost seems ridiculous to say so – but still. It must be acknowledged, because the strain is what tests our strength as parents and as couples, as partners and as lovers, and that we withstand the strain – that we feel the strain, push back against the strain, work with the strain, and flourish – is testament to our tremendous, amazing strength.

To mine, and to my husband’s, and to ours together. But especially to his. Today, especially, the testament is to him.

You, Kyle: you love me, and you love our children, and both they and I thrill you and amaze you and challenge you – how forcefully we challenge you – and you love us all the more for this, and for this, I am so grateful that I could not find the words to say so even if I tried.

Okay, so I tried.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

*tap tap tap*

Is this thing on?

Can you hear me?

(Wow, it feels like I am standing in my underwear onstage, peering into the darkness beyond the lights. Which, yes, is weird. And more or less awkward, although not entirely unpleasant, you know, in the abstract.)

(Wherever you are out there? I am imagining you in your underwear.)

Okay, look, so I know that this isn’t really all that big a deal, in the bigger scheme. I mean, this blog mostly looks the same, sounds the same, acts the same. It is, basically, the exact same blog that it was yesterday. But! I gave it vitamins and scrubbed all of its underparts (well, this lady did, but still. I asked her to) and gave it, like, its very own i.d. and now it could totally go into a bar and buy a drink and flirt with the bartender. Look! It has tabs! An About page! Which are basically like perfume and jewelry for a blog. This blog is now all grown up and come-hither!

So, you like?

(Oh! Oh! I also have a Feedburner link, right up there on the left sidebar! I HAVE BIG GIRL PANTIES NOW!)

Right, so. Where was I?

Oh yeah. You like?

Oh, hey, you hear that? That is THE SOUND OF SILENCE.

It’s pretty quiet around here, and might be for another day or so. Because? I am – wait for it – moving shop! Finally making the move away from Blogger and onto to more sophisticated blogging platform pastures. Which, I know! SO AWESOME. Also, terrifying.

Anyhoo. If you’re starved for the pathos and pedantry and total lack of humor that only I can provide, you can amuse yourselves by reading my other blog. Or by checking out what we’re up to over at MamaPop. Or by puttin’ on the beaver over at Canada Moms Blog. Or by reading whatever it is that you read when you’re not reading me. Which, yeah.

You better promise that you’re coming with me on the move, got that? Otherwise, I will be sad. And we don’t need anymore of that, now do we? Right?

Good.

Because nobody likes teh sad.

I vacuumed.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I vacuumed.

We knew last night that something wasn’t quite right about the bug bite on the side of Emilia’s face. It was a little swollen, a little bruised. We debated what to do. It was late, the clinics and pharmacies were closed, and it didn’t look that bad. A bad allergic reaction would be pretty immediate, right? It wouldn’t be a slow swell, right? I wrung my hands and worried; my husband soothed: we’ll check on her in the night. We don’t know that it’s an allergic reaction. We’ll check; she’ll be fine.

We didn’t check.

When my husband went to rouse her this morning, he found a nearly unrecognizable child, a wee thing with a swollen and misshapen face, her cheek and neck grotesquely bloated, her right eye a purple, bulbous slit. My heart stopped.

And then – while my husband gathered clothes and prepared to hustle us all out the door to the hospital – I vacuumed.

I told myself, the floor is dirty and that’s just not helping things. The floor is dirty and it should be cleaned. Somebody needs to do this. Somebody needs to be on top of these things. Somebody needs to pay attention to these things. I told myself, the floor is dirty, it’s dirty, just do this, now.

Because the floor was dirty. But more because I couldn’t look at Emilia without my heart stopping, because I couldn’t speak without berating myself, without berating us, for not getting help for her last night, because I all could do was do something, anything, that felt like it might make some minute bit of difference in the universe. Because my little girl was sitting there, clutching her Toady, whimpering a little, asking why is my eye shut, Mommy? and because I knew that if I hugged her again, I would cry.

And I didn’t want to cry. So I vacuumed. And now my floor is clean.

But my cheeks are still streaked with tears.

Emilia is going to be okay. She had a bad allergic reaction to a bug bite, and the good news is that antihistamines are bringing down the swelling and returning her poor face and neck to normal. The bad news is, we don’t know what bit her, and so we don’t know what she’s allergic to.

And no, I didn’t take a picture. I thought about it, once I’d calmed down enough to stop vacuuming. But I didn’t. I don’t want to remember it. It was horrible. She looked horrible. I’m still sorting through my feelings about that – my heartbreak not only at her pain, but at the fact that her outer beauty had been so distorted – but I do know that I’m not keen to revisit them. I wouldn’t have shared the picture, anyway, so. So.