So, remember how I got new glasses, and then freaked out a little bit, because, hell, they totally changed the look of my face? I’m over that now. I love my glasses. So much, I love them. I can barely remember what I looked like with my other glasses. These glasses are me.

The transition was, however, disconcerting. It’s a weird thing, to change your look, and especially to change that part of your look that is the first thing that people see when they, you know, look at you. And now I’ve gone and done with it with my virtual face, by which I mean this here blog, and, yes, I’m a little disconcerted. The change here isn’t radical, but it’s definitely changed, and every time I click over I’m surprised in the same way that I was that first got my new glasses and had to do a double-take every time that I looked in the mirror. Wait, what? Who is that, AND WHY DOES SHE HAVE MY HAIR? Which I was totally doing for days until our bathroom got gutted for renovation – I believe that if you’re going to make changes in your life, you should make a lot of them, all at once – and the mirror was removed, in addition to everything else, including the bathtub and the toilet, whereupon everything became confusing in a whole different way.

Because, where does one bathe one’s cats?

ANYWAY.

We’re still doing some buffing and polishing in this made-over space – as you can see, there’s been some reorganization, some shuffling of furniture between rooms, a few walls knocked down and a few others put up – and so the whole new look won’t be entirely settled for a few days, but still: the basic transformation has taken place. And I think I kind of love it.

What do you think? Don’t be honest. Unless your honest opinion is that it’s awesome, in which case, please! Do share!

Or, How I Randomly Decided That I Should Orient My Look More Around The Theme Of Elvis Costello:

I just picked them up this morning, and ever since this morning I have been wandering back and forth between my desk and the hall mirror, checking to see whether or not I really hate my face with these sitting on it. In some of those moments, I totally don’t hate my face – I’m all, ooh, funky Ray-Ban cats-eye glasses I AM SO COOL – and in others, I really do kind of hate my face, and also have to resist bursting into the song Alison.

All that said, I always go through a period of face-hating when I get new glasses, and I almost always get over it, mostly. Still. I’m struggling a bit here. You don’t need to tell me if they’re horrible. You do need to tell me if they’re awesome. Even if they’re awesome in a kind of girly Elvis Costello kind of way, which is totally a category of awesome, albeit one that I never thought I’d personally embrace.

(It’s hard to tell from the picture, but they’re kind of tortoise-shell-y brown. They are big, because I thought that I wanted them a little big. ‘Bold,’ I think is the word that I used at the glasses store. ‘Surprising’ is the word that my husband used when he saw them. He wasn’t expecting me to embrace an Elvis Costello look, either.)

Remember that one time, when I breastfed another woman’s baby? And somebody saw me do it, and thought it was disgusting, and blogged about it, and then everybody argued? Those were some good times. So good, that it seemed a really awesome idea to kick off the new year by looking back at that experience.

It was good, actually, to reconsider the whole experience from the vantage point of a year and some months later, which is about how long it took, give or take some weeks, for my indignation at having my morals questioned and my boobs scrutinized to wane. I revisited the controversy with some of the ladies at Momversation (where I’ve just hopped on board as a panelist), and we talked about what happened, and about why it is that the whole thing made – makes – people so uncomfortable. Here’s the video:

Our initial discussion was actually prompted by the question, do you trust other moms more than you do other people? That is, would you be more likely to trust a stranger or near-stranger who’s a mom than you would one who’s not a mom? The woman whose baby I nursed trusted me, obviously, but a big part of the controversy that erupted was the assertion, by some, that she shouldn’t have trusted me just because I’m a mom. After all, the fact of my motherhood doesn’t necessarily make me a better or more trustworthy person. It just makes me a mom, and just because we bonded over our shared mom-ness doesn’t mean that we developed – or that we should have developed – a bond of trust. Or does it? Doesn’t the intimacy that can sometimes develop very quickly between two mothers sharing unexpected moments of trial or tribulation with their children – the shit-disasters in restaurant washrooms, the toddler meltdowns in grocery store line-ups, the boo-boos at the playground, the engorged boobs at social media events – provide a very real basis for some measure of trust? Shouldn’t it?

So there are two questions here, really: one, would you nurse another woman’s child or let another woman nurse your own child, and two, questions of nursing aside, are you more or less inclined to trust other mothers more than other strangers? You can join the conversation about the first question over at Momversation, but I’m also interested in hearing your responses to the second. Do you trust other moms more than you do other people? Why or why not? And why don’t they sell breast pumps at hotel gift shops, anyway?

There really aren’t words to describe the awesome that was – that is – Blissdom Canada. Unless that word is, actually, AWESOME, in which case we’re off to a decent start.

We spoke a lot about words over the three days that we spent together, even in sessions that you might not have thought would draw heavily upon the verbal and the literal and the rhetorical. During the closing keynote panel, we discussed personal branding, and our opening keynote speaker’s assertion that we are, all of us, marketing ourselves all the time, and what words have to do with this. Every every time that you put yourself out in the world and participate in social life – he said – every time that you open your mouth (use your words!) or put your fingers on a keyboard (use your words!), you’re marketing yourself. You’re saying: oh, hey! This is who I am! I am THIS guy! I am THAT girl! Which is kind of a crazy way to think about social like and interpersonal relationships, but you know what? It’s kind of totally true. And so by the end of our two days, we wondered what that had to do with the totally over-used and amply abused idea of The Brand, especially in the context of One’s Personal Brand, as in, oh, hey! WHAT’S YOUR BRAND? as the latter-day equivalent of ‘what’s your sign,’ except much less obscure, and, perhaps, slightly creepier if misused.

The word you’re looking for here is ROCKSTAR.

Anyway.

At some point, I asked my co-panelists if they could summarize their ‘brand’ – which is to say, describe themselves as they see themselves putting those selves out into the world – in five words. “Do it in one!” someone shouted from the audience, and my co-panelists (the divine women that you can see in this video) nodded furiously and said yes, yes and I shook my head and insisted, into the microphone, that I couldn’t do it in one, and everyone shouted back, no, no: ONE WORD, and so I conceded and asked my co-panelists: “what’s your one word?”

“Tired,” said Julie.

“Grace,” said Janice.

(“Ooh,” I said. “I want that one.”)

“Industrious,” said Erica.

“And what about all of you?” I asked, speaking directly to the audience. “Who wants to stand up and say their One Word?”

I can’t remember who it was – they were hecklers, all them – but someone yelled out: “NICE TRY! What’s YOUR word?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t think of a word. ONE word? How could I narrow it down to one word? “BAD” seemed the obvious choice, but was that too cheeky? Too self-deprecating? “Um…” I said.

“Good!” someone shouted.

“Good,” I said.

“Bad,” said someone else, and a few others hollered their agreement. Fine.

“Bad,” I said, and then, just to make sure everyone knew that I knew that it was a sort of cheeky word, and that I can’t quite take it seriously unless I append a thousand-word expository essay to its use, I lowered my voice and repeated it in a hammy, radio-announcer voice: “baaaaad.”

And then we moved on. Others stood up and claimed their words, and later people began tweeting their words, and using the hashtag #oneword to mark their participation in this quote-unquote branding exercise that wasn’t so much ‘branding exercise’ as it was ‘exercise to challenge our core understandings of ourselves’ and ‘exercise that demands we articulate clearly who we are and why we’re here, dammit.’

Blogger (writer/artist/creator/human), define thyself.

I remained unhappy with how I’d defined myself. Sure, I’m “bad”, in the sense that I’ve appropriated the word ‘bad’ as it pertains to motherhood and womanhood and, what the hell, personhood, and turned it to my own use, the use of rejecting externally and artificially imposed ideals. But ‘bad’ is a cause more that it is a definition, and, sure, ‘bad’ is an integral part of my so-called brand, but does it describe all that I am? No.

I maintain that no one word can capture us perfectly, describe neatly the us of us, in all our complexity (the complexity that I insisted, in that session, could and should be part of our so-called brands. “We are vast,” I said, quoting loftily from Whitman. “We contain multitudes.”) But there’s something elegant about the challenge to distill our personae, however we understood those, down to an essence, down to the essence, the essence that, somehow, communicates us.

And so I thought about it. Is my One Word ‘good’? Is it ‘bad’? Is it ‘silly/flighty/kooky/smart/vain?

I am still thinking about it.

And thinking about it.

And thinking about it some more.

I’ve thought about words like ‘inspired’ – not inspiring, inspired – and ‘grateful’ and ‘reflective’ and ‘fearless-ish.’ I’ve thought about words like ‘writer’ and ‘crier.’ I’ve thought about words like ‘dork.’ I’ve thought about words like ‘love.’ I’ve thought about words like ‘fun.’

I’ve thought about some other words that I’m too shy to say, for fear they might be seen as too meek or too vain, and that is why I added ‘-ish’ to ‘fearless,’ above. I’ve thought about words like ‘confused,’ but then I want to append a parenthetical suffix, like ‘- happily so’ or ‘sort of.’

I’ve thought that I should be better at this.

I’m going to sit with this for another day or so. I’m going to hold the words in my heart and turn them over there and see which one settles. But in the meantime: what’s your One Word?

(And – if you don’t mind – what would you suggest as a word for me?)

*Photo greatness from the divine Ms. MooshInIndy, also known as Casey, also known as Pregnant Snow White, also known as awesome.

This is turning out to be one of those weeks that is usually described as one of those weeks. I have a really bad head cold. Jasper isn’t sleeping. It’s raining outside. Somebody died, and it was the kind of death that’s difficult to explain to neighbours who catch you on your front porch, sobbing. Yes, I lost someone. She was a reader of my blog. She sent me lots of awesome emails. (I tried just saying I lost a friend, but then the neighbour asked, oh, a close friend? And I was like, well, in a way. She once offered to sacrifice her goat for me. Which was confusing, so I tried to explain, but for some reason, reader of my blog was more confusing than sacrifice a goat. Next time I’m just going to say, distant cousin.)

And I can’t seem to get my shoes on properly.

Not shown: fully functioning grown-up.

Which is maybe the result of the aforementioned Very Bad Head Cold and the compromised sleep, but I can’t honestly say that it’s not also just a function of me being a twit who lacks proper life skills.

And that’s a little depressing.

(Semi-relatedly: if one – I’m not going to say who – has a 28 month old who is waking up screaming in the night, possibly due to night terrors, although possibly not, because he does actually fully wake up and then start demanding cookies and trains and coloring books – all at much the same shrieking pitch – and not settling back to sleep – in his bed, his parents’ bed, anywhere – for, like hours and hours and hours until everyone is very nearly dead of exhaustion, WHAT DOES ONE DO?)

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.

Why can’t I eat my toast with the television, Mommy? WHY? Why do I have to sit here? Where’s Daddy? I’m cold. I want socks. You said it was summer, Mommy! WHY ISN’T IT SUMMER MOMMMMY?!?! OOOOH! YOU SAID IT WAS SUMMER!

And then:

I thought you were making me not-warm toast, Mommy! MOMMY! I DON’T WANT TO SIT HERE – whimpers, sniffles – WHERE’S DADDY? WHY DOES JASPER HAVE SOCKS ON? WHY DON’T I HAVE SOCKS ON? WHYDON’TIHAVESOCKSONWHERE’SMYTOAST?!? MOMMMMEEE!

I don’t have a temper. I’m as mild-mannered as they come. There are kittens who get angrier than I do. There are kittens on Xanax that get angrier than I do. But five minutes of my four year old whining about unwarm toast and missing socks and I’m pressing my fingernails into the beds of my palms and sucking in my cheeks and willing myself to just not yell oh god don’t be the mom who yells DO NOT YELL DO NOT YELL -

EMILIA ELIZABETH ANN YOU WILL EAT YOUR TOAST YOU WILL SIT THERE WHILE YOU EAT IT I WILL GET YOUR SOCKS AFTER BREAKFAST STOP ASKING FOR YOUR FATHER *NOW*.

And then, if I’m really undercaffeinated, I stomp my foot.

And I feel ashamed. I yelled, and I became that mom. That mom who yells, for no good reason, just because the whining hurts her head and she hasn’t had enough coffee and it’s too early and where are my manservants and GOD, Husband, WILL YOU JUST GET OUT OF THE SHOWER ALREADY. And I know that when the whining starts up again, I might do it again. And then I will feel ashamed, again.

If I’m honest with myself, it’s not the yelling that unnerves and shames me. I’m raising my voice, but as I said, I’m an extremely mild-mannered person and anything more than a fractional decibel above friendly conversation feels like yelling. And I know this. I know that in the category of ‘displays of anger’ my children aren’t seeing much. It’s that I feel the anger. I feel angry at my children. Viscerally, irrationally angry. And that feeling? I hate that feeling. I am made uncomfortable by that feeling. Every fiber of my being screams out against that feeling. Not because I fear it – I mean, do fear it, in the sense that it feels so unfamiliar and foreign and wrong, but I don’t fear losing control of it, inasmuch as ‘losing control of temper,’ for me, would mean crying and stomping one foot, lightly, and then only if I was really, really pushed. No, I hate it because I am so used to not feeling it, that deeply visceral experience of anger or frustration – or, if I do feel it, pushing it almost immediately away – and because the idea of being angry, really angry, really unreasonably angry, with my children horrifies me.

I grew up in a household wherein nobody got angry, not really. Or, I should say, nobody expressed their anger. My parents would get mad, at times, but they always expressed those feelings clearly and more or less calmly and they always apologized if they raised their voices. I can remember, with perfect clarity, the only time that my dad ever yelled, really yelled, at me – I can still hear the break in his voice, the catch in his words, as clearly as if it were just moments ago; it so obviously upset him more than it did me that the memory still breaks my heart – and that was during the period of one of his breakdowns. My parents never raged, never stormed, never screamed. And they were adept at diffusing my upsets – my dad would hug me; my mom would try to make me laugh – and so I never had to confront rage, never had to tackle it and defeat it and – here’s the rub – understand it. So. It confuses me, upsets me. And I wonder whether I mightn’t have been better off if I’d been exposed to it a little more. If I’d felt it a little more.

So should I let my kids see when I’m angry? I don’t know. They’re well in touch with their tempers, and I roll with that and let them have those tempers and encourage them to express their feelings in whatever (harmless) way feels right to them. Which makes me wonder whether I need to get more comfortable with my own anger, to find ways to feel less anxious about expressing it, to accept it as part of the landscape of my emotions and let it have its place. And to recognize that when something – like, say, incessant whining – triggers it, it’s okay to let it rumble through me and even work its way down to a foot stomp or two.

Or maybe someone just needs to come up with some kind of kid-safe whine-repellent and send me a case. I don’t know. What do you think?

(And, since we’re all friends here, answer me this: I’m not the only one who sometimes gets driven batshit by the whining, right? I can’t be, right? RIGHT? How do you cope? It’s like a thousand fingernails running down a thousand blackboards with the soundtrack to Monkey ScreechFest 2000 – complete with monkey guitar feedback – blaring in the background at full volume, isn’t it? Maybe I just need earplugs.)

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?

It won’t, I say. Because we’re always looking. Because we value what we have too highly to let down our defenses. Because our love is our defense. And so on and mushy so forth. But I understand his concern. We live in an age wherein the opportunities for undermining one’s relationships are more numerous and more varied than ever before. There is more to be distracted by, more to be tempted by, more to cause one to forget – for a moment, for many moments, for far too long – about what really matters.

I’ve seen, in the last few years, too many marriages crash on the rocks of the Internet, too many relationships suffer because there is so much else to do and so many others with whom to do it. I’ve listened to peers complain that their partners don’t want them to write about this or that private matter; I’ve read the e-mails attached to countless submissions to the Basement, cursing the fact that a husband or wife or significant other doesn’t understand their need to share. I’ve seen far too many friends and acquaintances take their sharing elsewhere, away from the person with whom they share their offline life, to someone else, someone online, someone who better gets them and their deepest, innermost thoughts, the ones that they publish online. I’ve watched, and lent a sympathetic ear, and understood – this world, this virtual world in which we finally, finally get to tell our stories, uncensored, often seems so much more vibrant and more real than the world in which we change bedsheets and diapers and argue over who will drop the kids at school and who will make the doctor’s appointment and who will pick up the milk. In this world, we are writers. Artists. Activists. In this world, we are noble, we are fascinating, we are awesome. We get to project our best selves onto a virtual screen and see ourselves – and see others see us – as our best selves, as the selves that don’t change diapers or bedsheets, or that make the changing of diapers and bedsheets funny and interesting and – maybe, if we’re really on our game – poetic.

It is so easy to be seduced by those selves, by the idea of those selves, by the idea of being received and understood primarily on the virtues of those selves. It’s the dream of anyone who is a geek or has ever been a geek, anyone who feels or has ever felt misunderstood; it is the high school dream of having your secret poetry-and-sketch-filled notebooks discovered and seeing everyone realize that you are, underneath your Sex Pistols t-shirt and ironic barrettes and black fingernail polish, really a genius! And so funny! And then they all want to be your friend, or fall in love with you! Or both! The difference, however, in the age of the Internet, is that we put the contents of those notebooks up on Blogger or Twitter or Facebook and wait to be adored and when – if – the adoration comes, whether from one person or one hundred or one thousand or more, we sit back and tell ourselves that we always knew that this could happen, that we always expected this to happen, if we only had the opportunity to show ourselves as we really are. And we forget, some of us, in the thrall of this lived dream, that there are people who have always adored us for who we really are, only they don’t say so on Twitter.

This, I think, is the dangerous thing, the monster, that can creep up on us: this forgetting, this unvaluing or undervaluing – when held against the sparkle and glitter and heat of the virtual world – of our real, ordinary worlds, and the relationships therein.

There are corollary dangers, of course – the dangers attendant to finding ex-lovers on Facebook, the dangers of e-mail flirtations, the dangers of cultivating any virtual relationships that might supplant the one that is the basis of your real-world home, the danger of placing greater value upon one’s life in the virtual world than upon one’s life in the real world, the danger of simply being distracted. Such dangers are not, of course, restricted to interaction in the virtual world, nor are they new: Helen’s desire to pursue a new and more interesting life with Paris launched the Trojan war; Emma Bovary’s attachment to romance novels prompted her to seek romance outside of her marriage; Anna Karenina, of course, followed her unfaithful heart and ended up – broken and broken-hearted – underneath the wheels of a train. And so on. It’s an old, old story. But it’s one that, I think, becomes more common the more that we embrace opportunities to speculate upon and indulge the fantasies of what if? What if my spouse were more dashing, more romantic? What if I had a partner who loved discussing philosophy in the middle of the night as much as some of my Twitter friends? What if I were married to someone who truly understood my obsession with Glee?

The Internet – taken in the larger context of a mass media that assaults us, constantly, with images and stories about how much better our lives could be, if – has, arguably, become the postmodern, poststructuralist, interactive equivalent of Emma Bovary’s romance novels: it tempts us with the possibility that there could be something or someone better out there, that we might be happier with that something or someone else, that everything that we have here, right in front of us, is so much less interesting, so much less sparkly and fascinating and fulfilling than that those other possibilities, and then it invites us and gives us the means to explore those possibilities from the safety and security of our kitchen tables or home offices.

We don’t all do this, of course. And not all relationships that founder these days do so because of social media, and not all relationships that do founder for any reason related to social media are relationships that would have otherwise survived. It just seems, though, that this – this phenomenon, this thing – is so much with us, and that it carries so much potential for harm where harm mightn’t otherwise have occurred and it just makes me so sad every time I hear about another relationship being shattered after battering against the hard, glittery edges of new media. I tell my husband, when he voices his concerns, that these relationships probably would have shattered, anyway – any relationship that is so fragile that it could be disrupted by the Internet, or by what its participants see in magazines or on television or in movies, could not have had long to live, I insist – but is this true? I read another Basement submission or talk to another friend or hear another rumor and my conviction wavers.

I’m secure in my marriage, but still – I’ve set some ground rules. I won’t publish a story against my husband’s express wishes (just as I would expect him to do, were our situations reversed), I don’t seek out exes online, I don’t cultivate intimate relationships with members of the opposite sex, I don’t bitch about him online, I don’t share with others – confessions, secrets, grievances – anything that I wouldn’t share with him. Not because I believe that our marriage would be in mortal danger if I did any of those things, but because I don’t want to take any chances. What I have is too valuable, too precious. It wouldn’t be worth the risk. It just wouldn’t. I want to hold hands with my husband when we are in our very old age and the Internet and blogging and Facebook are so much far-distant retro bullshit and say, we have been together forever…

And then we’ll turn to our hologrammatic communication avatars and have them Twitter that directly into the post-electronic hive-mind, and we’ll high-five each other with our wrinkled, iPhone-bent hands.

This post was prompted, in part, by last week’s Basement post about a Facebook-fueled affair. It was not the first such post of its kind, of course, but came in a week wherein it seemed that every magazine and news feed had stories about infidelity and after a weekend during which I sat on a conference panel about memoir-writing and fumbled over questions about how and why I share or don’t share certain stories online and what my husband and family think about all that sharing. Which, you know, prompted some reflection. But am I overthinking this? Am I overexaggerating the dangers? Do you keep your real-life relationships front of mind when you’re deciding what to reveal – or to whom to reveal it – online? When you’re cultivating relationships online? What would you do if your marriage and your Internet came into conflict? Are you certain that your marriage would come first? What do you do – do you do anything – to make sure that it does? Could I have come up with a better topic with which to harsh Valentine’s Day?

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.

We spent hours at the hospital last night with our sick little boy. I spent hours worrying and fretting and, occasionally – as when they pulled him from me and, while he called out for me desperately with broken, cough-ravaged cries, bound him in a plastic tube and x-rayed his chest – crying. Pneumonia, the doctor said. It might be pneumonia – there’s certainly another respiratory infection – his lungs aren’t clear – we have to treat him for pneumonia.

I know that if I’d kept him home yesterday, it wouldn’t have made any difference. His lungs have been compromised for a while, and the development of pneumonia this time around wasn’t something that I could have prevented by watching over him. But still, but still. He’d been sick – he’d been getting sick – and I suspected as much and still I let him go. Still I let him go.

I lay with him in the wee hours this morning, listening to him rasp and wheeze and cough and I pressed my face into his hair and I promised him, never again. But even as I made that promise, I knew that I might break that promise, that I would break that promise, that I wouldn’t always know when I should be worried and when I shouldn’t be worried, that I would always be caught between the impulse to worry and the need to just let worry go and to forgive myself for letting go of worry because living in a state of worry is just no way to live.

And my heart ached.

Why is this so hard? Do we ever get comfortable with it being so hard? Or is parenthood just one long exercise in coming to terms with one’s own unreasonable expectations of one’s self, with one’s lack of control over all of the things that it seems so necessary to control if one is to protect one’s heart, with anxiety, with worry, with fear?

Must it always be true that our joy – our love for our children, our delight in our children, our pleasure in putting them in sunglasses and having them do parodies of Horatio Cane – is always shadowed by fear? Do we ever really become fearless? Do we really want to?

Can our hearts, will our hearts, (should our hearts?) be ever at ease?

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.

It’s a visceral, irrational thing, this feeling – a little bit like thwarted puppy love, like an unrequited crush – I know that I don’t need to have this desire fulfilled, I know that it’s probably better for me to not have this desire fulfilled, I know that the reasonable thing, the rational thing, is to reject this desire and put it in its place, but that knowledge is powerless, in those moments when that knowledge doesn’t stop the desire from pulsing and aching and drowning out everything but the want.

(I think about what we would name this child, I ruminate over whether Emilia and Jasper would prefer a little brother or a little sister or whether they’d care, I push aside the anxieties around another difficult pregnancy and birth and think about that feeling of fullness, I think about how we’d need a new vehicle, perhaps a new house, and then I think about how we couldn’t really afford it, anyway, and about how hard the depression was, this time around, and, really, we had a vasectomy, so it’s moot, this issue, and it’s all for the best anyway.)

And I have another moment, and I think: Beatrice. Oliver. Olivia. Alice. Theo. And my heart flutters, a little sadly.)

I don’t know whether, in those moments – and they are only ever just moments, sometimes protracted, sometimes not – what I’m yearning for is another baby, or just for the possibility of another baby, for fertility and promise and the experience of knowing that my body can do this, that it can grow and nourish and bring forth and nourish new life. I don’t know. I do know that when I look at my children I feel grateful and whole; I look at them and I don’t feel any lack, I don’t feel that anything’s missing, I know that we are complete as a family and that everything about us is good.

But then I have these moments, these utterly destabilizing moments of want and I’m confused. Just, confused.

Does this ever happen to you? How do you make it stop? Do you want make it stop? Or do you just keep your running list of baby names and make it a little game make-believe where you pretend that you have infinite abilities of baby-making and infinite resources for baby-sustaining and you can have as many or as a few babies as you like and you never wreck your body and you never get depressed and your boobs are glorious, resilient fonts of nurturing liquid gold that never ache or scab and you just get to live out the fantasy of motherhood as it never, ever is and then you have a shot of vodka? Or what?