A few weeks after I gave birth to Jasper, I wrote this:

I do it every night now. When it’s dark, when the rest of the house is asleep, or almost, I untangle my tiny newborn bundle from my arms and lay him down in his nest and ease my birth-battered body from our bed. I make my way – gingerly, gingerly – around the bed, supporting myself on furniture, against the walls, down the hallway, to her door.

I open it slowly, holding my breath against the creaks, and slip inside. There, in the dark, is she, my first baby. Rumpled and tangled in her blankets, her breathing slow and deep, strands of fluffy blonde hair stuck to her damp, pink cheeks, she is every inch the baby. A big baby, but still. A baby, my baby. In the quiet, in repose, she is no longer toddler, no longer little girl, no longer big sister – she is just she, my first born, my first baby, always a baby, always soft and vulnerable and in need of me, always in need of me.

I bend over the rail of her bed, and kiss her cheek, and stroke her hair and whisper nothing, everything, about how I love her so, how I adore her, how I miss her. How every nuzzle of her brother’s cheek brings a memory of her; how every clutch and suck and moment of skin pressed against newborn skin makes my heart burst for him and yearn for her; how my love for him has made my love for her grow and stretch and strain and ache.

How I love her, how I love her. (continue reading…)

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…)

Emilia is the world’s pickiest eater. You probably think that I’m exaggerating. I’m not. There might be a child somewhere in Germany who will only eat bratwurst and cherries, but I’d be willing to bet that that child would eat a whole chocolate chip muffin if coaxed. Not Emilia. She’d remove the muffin top and pick three or four chocolate chips from around its edges and then discard it, saying that she didn’t like how it felt in her mouth. And that would be on a good day. (continue reading…)

I suppose that the following conversation with Emilia was inevitable. I just didn’t expect to have it when she was four.

Emilia, having spilled some juice down her shirt: “oh, f***.”

Me: “Emilia Elizabeth Ann! What did you just say?”

Emilia: “I said, oh f***.” (continue reading…)

I’ve been meaning to post a list of the ten things that I love about motherhood. Having posted about the things that I hate – albeit with a corny post-script about loving the love, in spite of it all – and having read all the wonderful comments about the silly and sublime things that other mothers love, it seemed the obvious thing to do. But I’ve been sick – really sick, allergy-induced sick – like, stab-myself-in-the-head-to-make-the-pain-go-away sick – and there’s nothing like being sick while two small, batshit, sugar-jacked creatures jump on your prone, aching body and natter ceaselessly about WHEN ARE WE GOING TO PLAY PIRATES MOMMY YOU PROMISED WHERE’S MY COOKIE I ASKED YOU FOR MILK to make it really, really hard to think of anything good to say about motherhood, so. That’s maybe going to have to wait for a day when I don’t hate motherhood and the world in general, and also when I can sit up without wanting to stab myself in the head. (continue reading…)

A writer at Newsweek wrote last week about how her son – and the general state of being that is motherhood – is torturing her. Then a writer at Jezebel responded to the story with something very close to exasperation: “I was left, as I often am by pieces on parenting, at sea. Nowadays, there is such a dichotomy at work: the hazy romanticizing of baby culture wars with the it’s-a-nightmare/I-don’t-love-my-child/I-wanted-another-sex” backlash and while one is surely designed to remedy the other, those of us who haven’t had a baby are left, ironically, with no very clear idea of the reality.” A consequence of this, apparently, is that childless women – unconvinced by the hazy romanticism of some stories and horrified by the ‘it’s-a-nightmare’ confessions of others – become terrified by the Unknowable But Very Probably Sort Of Horrible condition of motherhood and are put off having children. Population control!

The reality is, none of us can paint an entirely clear picture of the reality of motherhood, because the reality of motherhood defies tidy characterization. Which is why, arguably, we see so much cultural discourse about motherhood that skews strongly in one direction or the other: we are constantly trying to get our bearings, and sometimes it’s just easier to do so by telling ourselves that motherhood is just so undeniably all-around awesome or that holy hell this shit is HARD and sticking to those stories. And yes, those stories that skew dark are frightening, but then, so much of motherhood is frightening, notwithstanding the moments – and there are many – of awesome, so. (continue reading…)

I’ve spanked my daughter. I wrote about it earlier this year. It was just once, and under very specific circumstances – she was putting herself and her baby brother in danger and she needed to be stopped, quickly – circumstances that don’t excuse the spanking but do, I think, explain it. I didn’t spank out of anger. I didn’t spank as a matter of habit or consistent practice. I spanked because nothing else was working in a given moment and circumstances demanded that I do something. I’m not proud of it. I hope that it never happens again. I fully intend that it never happen again.

A report was recently released that suggests that spanking might be a good thing, that kids who are spanked might be better off, might turn out better, than kids who are not spanked. This, I think, is troubling. Not because I think that spanking and spankers are in all circumstances evil and terrible – my own parents were spankers – but because I think that although spanking is not always or necessarily abusive, it tilts too obviously and too dangerously in that direction and anything that encourages the practice just might, you know, grease the slope.

(continue reading…)

This was the week that I let my Bad Mother flag really fly, I think. I mean, sure, I have, in the past, covered such established bad ground as spanking my preschooler and nursing another woman’s child and dressing my kid up as a Droog, but that ground is pretty well-trodden – doesn’t everybody use A Clockwork Orange as a reference when costuming their kids for Halloween? – and in any case,  I don’t think that you can really call yourself a bad parent until you start blaspheming Santa. Which I totally did.

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You never really appreciate Santa until you have children. Sure, Santa is great when you’re a kid and he’s just that big guy in the snowsuit who flies reindeer and brings presents and eats a lot of cookies – which, let’s face it, basically boils everything that is great about childhood – presents, cookies, flying animals – down to its peppermint and gingerbread-infused essence and splatters a whole season with it – but once you’ve become a grown-up with your own children, Santa becomes something more. Something – some would say – better.

Santa becomes The Enforcer. A weapon, even. The Bad Moms’ Secret Christmas Weapon. Michael Bay should get on this.

(continue reading…)

I have a confession to make: when I said that I was giving up on any kind of sleep training, I meant it, but I was also kind of hoping in, some small dark corner of my heart, that ‘giving up’ would be the magic bullet and that by ‘giving up’ I would be making space for the possibility that the whole situation would just fix itself, you know, because doesn’t it sometimes work that way? Well, it hasn’t, so far, although it’s only been one night – a long, difficult night during which the boy yanked about 263 strands of hair out of my head, one by one (counting oneself to sleep by hairs instead of by sheep: over-rated) – and I have to remind myself to be patient, to let it go, to try to stop worrying and love the wee hands gripping my head, really, because I do remain committed to this idea that this – this whole thing – is a thing that I will someday miss and someday mourn the passing of and someday want back, badly and that I should just give myself over to that, in whole or in part, or something.

This is me reminding myself. This is me reminding myself. This is… zzzz…