Emilia is not a morning person. I am also not a morning person, but as an adult I recognize that I don’t have any choice in the matter of whether or not I get out of bed, and also I have coffee. Emilia is a child, and she doesn’t drink coffee, so she’s oftentimes – and read ‘oftentimes’ as ‘pretty much almost always’ – cranky in the morning. I would be sympathetic about this – as I said, I’m not a morning person myself, so I get it – except that her way of coping with mornings is to whine like a banshee. A sugar-jacked freak-banshee with no off button.

Mommmmeeee! I want toast! But no butter! NO BUTTER MOMMY! NO BUTTER! And don’t make it warm! It’s TOO WARM MOMMMEEEE! IT’S TOO WARRMMMM! OOOOH! WHY DO I NEVER GET TOAST THE WAY I LIKE IT?!?

She whimpers, heartbroken by the lack of unwarm, unbuttered toast in our house. WHYYYY, MOMMY? WHYYYY? I grip the counter and resist tossing the bread in the sink and/or hollering something about starving children in Africa. (continue reading…)

It’s wonderful, of course, that Jasper’s daycare goes to the trouble of helping the toddlers make personalized Mother’s Day gifts, but one wonders whether they aren’t also trying to send us a vaguely threatening message. Or maybe it’s a cry for help. I’m not sure:

Something along the lines of: every day after you drop off your child he turns into a huge arachno-lepidoptera and consumes the ECE assistants. Lo their bloody fingerprints! Or perhaps it’s a warning: if you do not potty train your child within the next month we will turn him into a gigantic octofly and your bloody fingerprints will be the mark of his wrath! Or something. I’m bad at coded messages.

Seriously, though: what is that?

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened? (continue reading…)

Jasper goes to playschool a couple of days a week. He loves it – loves it – and he knows exactly what days he’s scheduled to go. He toddles down the stairs on those mornings and heads straight for his coat and boots, which he tries to tug on over his pajamas.

SKOO! (School!) he yells. RUSSELL! ELLA! (friends) GO! GO! GO!

Yesterday was a school day. He’d been up throughout the previous night with a cough, and he’d felt a little warm at times the day before, but there are always bugs going around this time of year, and he seemed okay in the morning, and in any case, there he was, clutching his coat and boots and yelling skoo!

I hesitated, for a minute, maybe two. He didn’t feel warm, but he did have a cough, and he had been so, so sick before Christmas… but no, he wanted to go. And I wanted him to go. I had work to do. So I took him to school.

Some hours later, my phone rang, and the voice on the other end was a little panicked. Could I come right away? Jasper wasn’t well, he was hot, really hot, sweating through his clothes, his temperature 105 and climbing, and obviously in pain, and coughing, badly. I dropped what I was doing and ran straight there, not bothering to put on socks or scarf or hat or gloves, not stopping to lock the door, not stopping for anything. I just ran. And as I ran – the very short distance from where I was to where he was – I berated myself a hundred times with every step. I should have kept him home. I shouldn’t have taken him to school. I shouldn’t have let what was convenient and easy trump what was right. (continue reading…)

My husband had a vasectomy last year. There was a lot of discussion around it – another baby would not have been unwelcome, and so I wasn’t eager to close off the possibility – but we both knew that it would be madness for me to risk repeating the more or less pretty awfully terrible anxieties and stresses and mental and physical health concerns that I endured in my pregnancy and delivery and post-partum experience with Jasper. “You can’t go through that again,” my husband said, repeatedly, last spring. “We can’t go through that again.

He was right, of course. The pregnancy with Jasper wreaked havoc on my mind and body, as did his birth, as did the post-partum aftermath of that pregnancy and birth. In many ways, I’m still recovering. But still, I have moments in which the loss of the possibility of another pregnancy, another birth, another baby weighs so heavily upon me that it’s difficult to breath, in which the closing off of that future feels a little bit like heartbreak. (continue reading…)

I think that I’m stuck in the denial stage of grief. It’s not that I deny the fact that my father is dead – his ashes sit in a box on my mantle, surrounded, at the moment, by a few Christmas ornaments and my kids’ picture with Santa and Emilia’s bardo-drawing – it’s that I can’t wrap my head around the fact – is it a fact? – that his death is the end, that his life is over, that I’ll never see or speak with him again. The absoluteness of it all, the finality: I’m having trouble accepting this. I can’t accept this. My heart aches from its stubborn refusal to accept this.

(continue reading…)

Emilia’s birthday is this weekend. She will be four years old. Four year olds, she informs me, always have birthday parties.

“So do five year olds. And sixes. I don’t what happens when you get really old, but I hope you still get cake.”

I didn’t tell her that when you’re really old, like, thirty-something, you’re lucky if someone fixes you a bowl of cereal and washes the dishes. No point in rushing the disillusionment.

(continue reading…)

Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.

I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.

The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.

(continue reading…)

It started as a discussion about Balloon Boy and reality television and the corruptive effects of the pursuit of fame and whether children should ever be compelled to live their lives as performances, the better to line the pockets of the entertainment industry, but it became a discussion about whether writers – memoirists, bloggers, whomever – who deal in family anecdote can be said to be guilty of the very sins that we deplore in the Gosselins or the Heenes or the Duggars or whatever slimy, child-eating producer we imagine lurks in the offices of TLC. In writing about our children, some of you asked, are we guilty of the same kind of exploitation (if, in fact, we can call televising the lives of children for profit ‘exploitation,’ which I think we can), the same kind of troubling opportunism that is displayed by the Gosselins and the Heenes and the parents of Toddlers wearing Tiaras?

I’ve wrestled with this issue before. I always come down on the side of no. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes lay awake at night, interrogating myself about whether I am always perfectly conscientious in putting the best interests of my children before my impulse to tell stories, but it is a more or less clear-sighted ‘no.’ My children figure in the stories that I tell here, but they are not, for the most part, the main characters. I’m not writing their stories; I’m writing mine. And to the extent that they appear in that story – and, obviously, they do appear regularly – they appear as (as I said the other day) narrative constructions. Emilia and Jasper are not, like the Gosselin kids or the Toddlers in Tiaras, compelled to perform upon a literal or figurative stage. They live their lives, they do their thing, and I write stories about motherhood in which they sometimes appear – characters, sketches, reflections of their real selves.

But, but… can it not be said that living under my writerly gaze imposes a kind of (to mangle the term) performativity to their daily lives? They do not perform, but do I not take their movements and moments and weave performance out of these? Can story be understood as a form of performance, in which it is not just the storyteller who performs, but the story itself and the characters therein? In which case, does my role as a storyteller not put me in a relationship with my children whereby I view them, and the things that they do and say, through a performative lens? Do they not live under (and here I jumble Foucault and Lacan and others into a postmodern psychoanalytic jumble that I may not be able to disentangle) performative gaze? And if this is true, is it any better – any less harmful – than living under the lens of television cameras? Do I exploit my children for my own creative (and, yes, to some extent, material) gain?

(continue reading…)

So I was feeling unwell – which is to say, really, really vomitously sick – this weekend, and at some point I wandered off to have a nap, leaving the husband and the girl to the task of tidying the living room. ‘Please put away your toys,’ I said to Emilia as I dragged my pathetic self out of the room, tripping over the random dismembered doll parts and stray bits of crafting materials that she keeps in untidy piles throughout the house, ‘otherwise I’ll have to ask Daddy to throw it all away.’

‘It’s my ART,’ she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘Fine. Put away your ART.’

‘I’m using it for DECORATING.’

‘Fine, okay. Just decorate NEATLY, like, by putting it on the shelves or something.’ If I’d had a cold compress, I’d have pressed it against my forehead dramatically as I left the room in a sick huff, but I didn’t, so I just lurched a little as I headed for the stairs.The vacuum cleaner roared to life behind me, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t wish that maybe, just maybe, some of Emilia’s ‘art’ got sucked into the Dyson’s Vortex of Nothingness.

As it happened, that wish did not get fulfilled. Indeed, it seems that Emilia’s ‘art’ took on a life of its own while I was napping and took it upon itself to arrange itself as – as Emilia likes to describe it – ‘decoration:’

I swear on all that is holy that the above-photographed arrangement is exactly as I found it when I wandered downstairs after my nap. When asked about it, Emilia will only say, ‘that’s a dolly. She’s ART.’ She adds that the teeth ‘are Jasper’s,’ and that the book ‘is for you to read, Mommy.’ I can only hope and assume that ‘the book’ to which she refers is the Seuss, and that she doesn’t intend for me to brush up on my post-structuralism while contemplating the decapitated dolly with its bottle-figure, which I assume is some sort of commentary on body image in an age of environmental degradation, and not a Barthesian statement on the figurative absurd of the body imagined as plaything in childhood.

The teeth, I’m hoping, have nothing to do with anything, and were just randomly deposited there by a baby tired of novelty pacifiers. Otherwise the scene takes on a disturbing Blair Witch-ian subtext that I just haven’t the fortitude to decode.

I’m still taking very seriously the possibility that I never did wake up, and that the installation on my living room side-table is some sort of virally-induced nightmare. In which case, Freud has some explaining to do, but still. Nightmares are one thing, parenting a three-year old Cindy Sherman is quite another. I think.

(I think that her installation-slash-decapitated-baby-on-plastic sculpture needs a title. Any suggestions?)