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.

In the morning she will wake, and run past me, blowing a kiss as she clambers into Daddy’s arms, waving gaily as she embarks upon the great adventure of a new day, while I sit, constrained, restrained, by the injuries of childbirth and new motherhood (shredded nethers, ravaged nips), my new love in my arms, my new love demanding everything of me and yielding himself to me, pressing himself to me, in return. I will drink up his love, bathe in his love, as she speeds away, leaving me in her wake, grasping at droplets, holding back tears.

But it doesn’t matter, because, always, she will stop again, however briefly, and rest, and she will allow me to bend over her bed, in the dark, and stroke her cheek and tell her how I love her, my first, my girl.

How I love her.

In those early days of my son’s life – those days that were so like the early days of my daughter’s life,  the days that were so often defined by exhaustion and anxiety and discomfort – my physical attachment to my daughter was a lifeline. The same, of course, could be said of my physical attachment to my son – his constant physical presence, his rootedness at my breast, night and day and day and night, around the clock, always – but this attachment carried certain anxieties: was my attachment to this baby drawing me away from my other baby? Were my demonstrations of love and devotion uneven? Would my daughter resent me for this, for my divided attention, for my allowing this other baby to usurp her place? How could my heart be in two places at once?

It was, of course, in two places, and it lived – it lives, now – in those places comfortably, expansively, but I could only recognize that and believe that, at the time, when I clung to my daughter and inhaled her and allowed myself to remember, to know, that my connection to her is always.

Jasper just turned two. Two years old. Two years have passed since he came into our lives, since we went from three to four, since Emilia went from being our one and only to being one of two. And he is such a big presence, this little man, with his stampeding feet and his grabbing hands and his dimpled grin, and his sister loves him so, but still, there are moments when she grabs my hand and she whispers I want a hug from just you, Mommy and my heart seizes a little and I hug her and I whisper, back, you’re my very favorite girl, did you know that? and I inhale the fragrance of her hair and feel the flutter of her heart and even though I know that I don’t need to keep her hand in mine or clutch her to my chest or curl up against her sleeping form to reassure myself that she is, always, my girl, I want to, I want to, and I tell myself, tonight I will sneak into her room and I will wrap my arms around her and sing, in a whisper, songs of love and candy and I will think – for the hundred-trillionth time – how I love her.

And I will wish that I could do it every night; I will wish that I could hold her and tell her that I love her constantly; I will wish that it were possible to live my love for her, my unique love for her, in every single moment and in such a way that she never, ever, had to tug on my hand and ask for a hug. But there is only so much time for so many hugs and so many kisses and there are only so many nights during which one can sneak into a child’s room and snuggle and sing and there are two of them, now, and I want both of them to have all of my love and then some and even though I know that my love for them is infinite, that is has no bounds, I sometimes feel the weight of those limitations – not enough time, not enough energy, not enough arms – like a mantle of chains.

We know that we have more than enough love to give. Whether we have one or two or six children, we know that we have more than enough love to give. So why do we sometimes worry that we’re not giving enough?

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.)

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.

Emilia prefers to stick the basics: bread, cheese, pickles, tofu, spaghetti noodles (only spaghetti) with butter, chick peas, corn on the cob, yogurt, cheese pizza (only cheese), hard-boiled eggs, ketchup, strawberries, cake icing (not the cake itself) and candy. And watermelon, but only outside, and only if it’s seedless. That’s it. Sometimes, she’ll eat only one or two of those things for days, and then reject those same things for weeks – “I don’t like them anymore, Mommy” – only to return to them once she has us convinced that the only thing she’ll eat is chick peas and ketchup. She once shocked us by eating a poached egg and declaring it delicious, but that was only once, and she never did it again. And she went through a brief Vietnamese noodle soup phase when she was a baby, but all babies do that and we didn’t think much of it at the time. She does not like macaroni and cheese or fries or chicken fingers or hamburgers, unless by ‘hamburger’ you mean ‘ketchup on a bun.’ I’d say that she was a vegetarian, except that she doesn’t like most vegetables. Feeding her is – what’s the scientific term for this? – a pain in the ass.

Jasper, on the other hand, will eat anything, as long as it's outside, and he's naked.

Some people would probably say that we’re not trying hard enough, that we should be able to get Emilia to eat anything. That seems to be the argument of New York restaurateur Nicola Marzovilla, who, in speaking out against the pernicious evil of children’s menus at restaurants, says that he has always forced – yes, forced – his kids to try a variety of foods because “I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend… I have a duty to mold and teach.” Right. Because friends don’t force friends to eat rabbit ragout.

I could care less about whether or not a restaurant has a children’s menu, although I admit that it makes life a little easier when they do. Smaller portions, simpler menu items – sometimes I want to order from a kids’ menu. But it’s not necessary: as long as we can order a small plate of spaghetti noodles, plain, with a side of bread, we’re good. But I do take issue with this idea that if you aren’t forcing your kids to eat whatever is on their plate, you’re doing parenting wrong. We should encourage them to eat a variety of foods, sure, but force? I’m not even inclined to argue strenuously about whether Emilia should try foods that she’s not interested in, never mind force her. Even if I thought that I could – and I’m about 115% certain that I couldn’t – I don’t see the point. If a little enthusiastic encouragement doesn’t get her to try a piece of California roll, I’m not going to push the issue. Attempting to force her to try something that she doesn’t want to isn’t going to make mealtime a more pleasant experience for either of us. That, and there’s one more piece of California roll for me.

I was a picky eater as a child. I didn’t like red meat and would only eat pasta with butter and cheese and went through a long and happy lima bean phase during which the only non-dairy protein I would eat was – you guessed it – lima beans. My parents encouraged me to try a variety of foods, and sometimes they were successful – clam chowder! – but mostly they weren’t and this never got in the way of us having happy mealtimes together because I was never stressed about what I ate. Mom would make sure that there were always at least a few things on the table that I would happily eat if, say, I developed a sudden aversion to creamed corn or refused to try the pan-fried trout, and so mealtime was always a relaxed and happy time during which I could focus on explaining my theories on why Barbie could run faster than Holly Hobby (stronger legs and aerodynamic hair) rather than on worrying whether I’d be forced to clean my plate.

Of course, I didn’t eat my first mushroom until I was twenty years old and living in Spain and didn’t know how to say ‘what’s in this paella?‘ in Spanish, and I suppose that there’s an argument to made that my life would been more fulfilling if I’d eaten more than just cucumber and mayonnaise sandwiches during seventh grade, but still – I never got scurvy and I eventually came to love such strange and fascinating foods as raw oysters and pico de gallo and ceviche and asparagus and tuna sashimi and apple pie (I never once touched apple pie during childhood. Fruit-based desserts seemed to me to be a travesty against the dessert gods, who, everyone knows, are gods of chocolate and caramel, with some exceptions made for desserts involving meringue. I am still a patron of this church, but have been known to enjoy a heretical slice of apple pie, but only if warm and served with ice cream, which makes it less offensive in the eyes of those gods.)

Being a picky eater as a child didn’t prevent me from developing more adventurous tastes later in life, and I like to think that my parents’ refusal to fight food battles made all the difference in me growing up loving the social aspects of dining – the fun of dinner-table conversation, the excitement of going out to restaurants and spending the evening together, the joy of lingering over our plates and caring more about the words coming out of our mouths than the food going in. I grew up a foodie who didn’t care all that much about food, and, apart from missing a decade or so of quality sashimi-eating time, I think that it did me more good than harm.

I’d love it if Emilia discovered the joys of curry and the pleasures of tempura and the bliss of creme brulee earlier rather than later, but I’m not going to force the issue. I’ll limit my anxiety to worrying about whether what she does eat is healthy enough and in sufficient quantities and that – most importantly – sitting down at the table with people she loves is always a pleasurable experience.

And I’ll enjoy, for now, the extra pieces of California roll.

(I’m not the only one with an insanely picky eater, right? How do you cope? Do you fight it, or just roll with it, or what? Also, would you ever boycott a restaurant without a kids’ menu, or does that seem a little fascist to you?) (NOT JUDGING.)

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***.”

Me: “Emilia, that’s a very bad word. You mustn’t say it, ever.”

Emilia: “Why is it bad?”

Me: “It just is. It’s a bad word. So you mustn’t say it.”

Emilia: “Is it always bad to say?”

Me: “It is always bad to say.”

Emilia: “Not all bad words are always bad to say. ‘Stupid’ isn’t always bad to say.”

Me: “Well, maybe… but that other word isn’t like that.”

Emilia: “What is it like?”

Me: “It’s just a word that is bad to say for any reason.”

Emilia: “What if someone’s name is F***?”

Me: ——

Emilia: “Because if someone’s name is F***, it wouldn’t be nice for me NOT to call them their name.”

Me: “Nobody has that name.”

Emilia: “How do you know?”

Me: “I just know.”

Emilia: “What if you’re wrong?”

Me: “I’m not wrong.”

Emilia: “How about, if you are wrong, and I meet someone named F***, I can call them that?”

Me: “Well, honey…”

Emilia: “Because that just makes SENSE.”

Somehow, in the end, she got me to agree that, if she did meet someone whose proper name was, in fact, ‘F***’, and was able to ascertain that ‘F***’ wasn’t just something that other people were calling that person (”but if people call someone that, isn’t that their name?”), and was certain that that person really did want to be called ‘F***’, then she could, in fact, utter the forbidden word with a clear conscience.

I don’t know if I handled that conversation the right way – I don’t know if there was a right way to handle to handle that conversation – but I do know this: if a four year old can argue me down to agreeing to let her curse under certain precise circumstances? I’m f***ed.

How do you handle this? When and if the curses come out, what do you say? How do you explain that some words just shouldn’t be spoken – by children, or by anyone, however you break that stuff down? (And no, she didn’t hear it from us. I don’t think.) What if she DOES meet someone named F***? WHY IS THIS STUFF NOT IN THE OPERATING MANUAL? F***.

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.

In the meantime, it’s Earth Day. Emilia likes Earth Day, “because we get to talk about the flowers and the trees and the air and the air, and also we get to pick up garbage.” Bless her.

Not shown: garbage.

Now, I’m going to cuddle my Benadryl and curse Nature for the blight of pollen that it has reduced me to a quivering mess of snot and ear pain. Don’t envy me too much.

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.

My stories skew in the latter direction, obviously, although I like to think that my love for my children and my love of being their mother comes through despite – or even because – those stories skew dark. In any case, I wouldn’t know how to tell those stories differently, because, although I have moments of hazy romanticism about motherhood, for the most I find mothering to be an extraordinarily tough gig, one that leaves me, at times, feeling – yes – tortured. But that’s mothering – the work of motherhood – and it’s something of a different beast than is the condition of motherhood, or the experience of being mother to one’s own children. The former can be tortuous. The latter can be sublime.

My own experience, broken down:

1.) Lack of sleep. The work of motherhood requires being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and some – nay, if you are me, many – of the hours in which you can expect to be called will be between the hours of 12am and 6am. I have not slept a full night through in over four years. FOUR YEARS. I am exhausted. Yes, I have sleep-trained. I have even worked with a sleep doula. There is nothing, nothing, that keeps my children from waking in the night, and as I draw the line at drugging them or gagging them and taping them to their beds, I fully expect to die of sleep deprivation sometime in the next few years.

2.) Pregnancy. I loved my first pregnancy, for about three months in the second trimester. The rest of it, and the entirety of my second pregnancy, was a hell of vomiting and anxiety and back pain and heartburn and amniocentesis terror and belly itching and sleeplessness and vomiting and anxiety ETC. And then, of course, childbirth.

3.) Recovering from pregnancy and childbirth. Torn nethers. Breastfeeding-ravaged boobies. Bigger feet. Bigger ass. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can probably never put your body back together exactly the way that it was before you had children, especially if you have your kids in your thirties and do not employ a personal trainer and plastic surgeon.

4.) Postpartum depression. It’s depression. It sucks. A lot.

5.) Childrens’ television. This was referenced in the Newsweek article, and rightly so. With a few notable exceptions (Sesame Street; much of what airs on PBS Kids), much of what passes for childrens’ television programming seems designed for the express purpose of driving you to grab fistfuls of well-sharpened pencils and jab yourself relentlessly in the ears. The Wonderpets are the reason that I hide sharp objects when the television comes on.

6.) Child maintenance. Children need to be fed and clothed. It is easier to feed and clothe wild animals than it is to feed and clothe some children – my children, specifically, who live on a diet of carbohydrates, mangos, bananas, pickles and candy and who have more particular and eccentric clothing tastes than Lady Gaga, to the extent that one refuses to wear anything other than three layers of Disney t-shirts under a tutu. To wit:

7.) Diapers. Also, potty training. The work of motherhood involves a lot of shit work, I’ll just say that. And, if you have a boy, expect to get peed on. A lot. Also: tub shits. TUB SHITS.

8.) Laundry/housekeeping. (This one, like ‘diapers,’ above, could probably be rolled into ‘child maintenance,’ but I loathe it so much that it deserves a category of its own.) Children make messes. Big messes. And they generate mounds of laundry and you spend hours and hours washing and drying and sorting and folding and putting-into-drawers but they will still refuse to wear anything other than that one Cars t-shirt, that other Cars t-shirt and the black sparkled tutu. (See above re: Lady Gaga, tub shits.)

9.) Mommy brain. Sleep deprivation, over-exposure to the Wonderpets and the near-constant hum of why-why-why-why-Mommy-why fries your brain. It just does. That’s why there are mommy blogs – we need to constantly poke at our mushified brain matter with popsicle sticks and pablum spoons and deflated binkies to remind ourselves that some of our synapses are still firing. Maybe.

10.) Fear. Loving a child means spending countless hours, days, weeks, years fearing for that child. You fear that they will be hurt, that they will become sick, that they will die, you fear that you will die and they will be orphaned, you fear that they will ask you about death and you won’t have an answer; you fear that they will be the one kid in their kindergarten class that isn’t invited to that one girl’s birthday party; you fear that they will never love books as much as you do; you fear that they will worry about their looks; you fear that their heart will someday be broken. You lay awake at night worrying about the fact that their heart will someday be broken. You lay awake at night, worrying. Which is why, on those rare nights when the children sleep right through? You’re still not sleeping.

But, then – and at risk of sounding unbearably, banally romantic – there is this:

1.) My children. Who are amazing, inspiring creatures and who fill my life with such light and love as to nearly, at times, overwhelm me. Who make me laugh and who make me cry and who make me laugh until I cry, every single day. Who make me grateful for my soft belly and squishy boobs and for my messy hair and my undereye circles and my scars, because these are the markers of this work that I do – this tiring, often frustrating work – and of the miracles that I have produced and that I am, every day, producing, through this work; these miracles, my children, without whom I would not know love as completely as I do. My children, for whom I do this work, if not gladly, then without regret. My children, who make it possible for me to bitch tirelessly about motherhood while still feeling, deeply, to the very tips of my toes and possibly even further, that this motherhood thing is the most beautiful – the most hazily, gauzily, barefoot-in-a-field-of-daisies romantic – thing in the world.

And if I’m clutching a bottle of tequila and an Ativan prescription while spinning through that field of daisies… well, as I said: it’s complicated. Wonderfully, terribly, delightfully so.

Quick: what’s the number one thing that you hate about motherhood? And then, what do you love? (Your kids, no doubt, but feel free to say “I get to spend rainy afternoons watching cartoons and eating cookies” or “three-martini playdates.” I won’t judge.)

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.

I spanked my daughter because she put herself and her brother in danger; it was a one-off, a much-regretted one-off, and although I forgive myself for it, I still regret it. As I wrote earlier this year, I would hesitate to judge any parent for doing what I did, simply because, as I said at the time and have said a thousand times since, I think that it is wrong in any but most the most obviously abusive circumstances to condemn the decisions that other parents make (discuss amongst yourselves.) But a study like this – one that argues that corporal punishment might contribute positively to our children’s success in life – could provide justification for the practice of corporal punishment, for the use of such punishment as a matter of course, as a child-rearing tool to be wielded regularly, as something to be provided as a matter of need, in doses, like vitamins. Have we smacked Junior enough this month, darling? We don’t want him to go soft!

This is where my commitment to relativism in the field of parenting runs into trouble. I do have trouble with corporal punishment as a mainstay of discipline, as a disciplinary tool that is used before or instead of other, less aggressive tools. And this study, because of its conclusions, could be taken to recommend corporal punishment as a parenting tool that should be used before or instead of others. The study might be on to something – I doubt it; as someone who has deconstructed her fair share of ’studies’ in the academy, it seems to me that this one smacks of biased conclusions – but it doesn’t matter. Even if you could prove to me conclusively that hitting my children as a matter of regular practice could guarantee their acceptance, someday, into Harvard, I would still not do it and I would argue strenuously against it. Because there are other ways of disciplining them, ways that don’t involve hitting. And because raising them in a loving and safe environment, raising them to be gentle with themselves and with others, matters more to me than whether or not they might some day be able to face down a future incarnation of Donald Trump in the boardroom.

That in itself might prove my bad mother bona fides – that the future material and professional success of my children matters less to me than does their love and trust – but that, as might be expected, doesn’t bother me. That the contrary might be held to be the better parenting does bother me. That corporal discipline might have worked, once upon a time, to turn potentially unruly children into disciplined citizens is beside the point. That it might work now is beside the point. That we might be raising a generation of soft, coddled moppets who grow up to be tree-huggers or sitar-players or stargazers or artists or poets or flower-weavers or dreamers or lovers or all of the above is beside the point. Or maybe it’s not.

I’m trying to raise my children to love the world gently. And that means that we try – we really, really try, so far as is possible – to never cause each other pain.

And if that means no Harvard, so be it. The world needs more soft-hearted sitar-playing poets, anyway. And the Canadian university system is fine for that.

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.

How bad have I been? Let’s crunch the numbers:

1) I blasphemed Santa, if calling out Saint Nicolas as a vampire can be considered blaspheming, which I’m pretty sure it can.

2) And even if it can’t, using him as a disciplinary tool doesn’t exactly count as good.

3) Nor does comparing snowflakes to penises and guns.

4) Or admiring weaponized strollers.

HOWEVER:

1) I aided and abetted my daughter in totally drag-ifying the Christmas tree that she had to decorate for school, and that’s good, right?

2.) Also, I laughed at her jokes.

3.) And I let Jasper puke in my hair.

4.) And I decided that I had to draw the line somewhere. I drew it here.

I think that I’m probably running evensies on the bad/good thing, although if you consider that I also missed Emilia’s school Christmas concert this morning that probably tips the scale. HOWEVER I am taking her to see Disney-Does-NHL tonight, and we all know that anything Disney is automatic WIN. Then again: PRINCESSES.

And I don’t know how to factor in the fact that I hit my head, or my attempt (good!) and failure (bad!) to produce home-baked goods for my daughter’s school Christmas party which, did I mention, included a concert component that I failed to attend.

So: 4g – 4b – 1mc +1d – (x)p +/- fba /head injury  [where g is good, b is bad, mc is missed concert, d is disney, p is princesses, fba is failed baking attempt and head injury is head injury] =LIQUOR. I think.

Math is hard.

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.

Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. There’s a whole song about it, about how Santa can see you all the time, even when you’re sleeping, and how he basically has a vengeful streak that runs second only to that of God in His Old Testament incarnation: he’s watching you, and if you piss him off, you’re going to be on his shit list, and maybe he won’t, you know, turn you into a pillar of salt or feed you to a whale or drown you in torrential rains while he saves pairs of meerkats and pigeons and tse-tse flies, but he might just dump a lump of coal in your stocking, and then wouldn’t you be sorry?

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t use this on my kid. You know, sweetie, if you don’t go to bed/stop thumping your brother/release the cat’s tail/hand over the stolen cookies, Santa will know. Because he’s watching, remember? REMEMBER? And then I launch into the song, and I maybe – maybe – wag my finger a little bit at the end – so be good for goodness’ sake! – and try to not think about how that last line basically negates the whole point of the song, which is to be good for the sake of getting a good haul of Christmas presents. I also try to not think about how it turns Santa into a frightening, semi-divine figure who exacts retribution for innocuous crimes like cookie theft which, when you think about it, is kind of hypocritical given that he’s been known to lift a few cookies himself.

Yes, I feel guilty when I do this. I feel guilty because it puts a kind of menacing twist on the whole Santa mythos: presents are rewards for good behavior, and Santa is the arbiter of what counts as good behavior, and he’s a cold and calculating arbiter, wielding his list like a sword with which to cut down the dreams of naughty children. (Also, he watches you when you’re sleeping, which, if you follow any of the criticism of the Twilight books or movies, is totally not cool and makes you a stalker, which is, apparently, worse than being a vampire. Which Santa is not, of course, but he could be a stalker, and that’s a little creepy, which is my point. Anyway.) Do I want my children to think of Santa as a sort of stalker-cum-judge who keeps tabs on their every move and evaluates their behavior against some ill-defined standard of appropriate behavior? There’s a reason why we’ve struggled with the whole organized religion thing, and it has something (among a great many things) to do with the whole He knows when you’ve been bad or good so be good or you’re going to Hell business, so why would I – why do I – deploy Santa, sometimes, in exactly this way?

The fast answer is, because it’s easy, and because it’s there, and because my child – for the most part – understands the rudimentary lesson at the root of it: bad behavior isn’t, or shouldn’t be, rewarded. To her credit, she regards the whole ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping/he knows when you’re awake’ thing as suspicious – how does he see us, Mommy? Is there a camera? Where is it? Is it in the lamp? How does he see me in different rooms? Can he see me at school? How can he watch me and (insert schoolmate’s name here) at the same time? Why would he watch when I’m sleeping? I’m not doing anything bad when I’m sleeping. It’s boring. Why is he watching? Doesn’t he have other things to do? (this is a girl who will probably never understand Edward Cullen) – and so responds, usually, to my Santa-based admonitions with a suspicious glare. I’ll stop yelling, Mommy, she’ll say, but only because I decided to and not because Santa said so.

– What about because I said so?

Maybe. But I decided because you said so, and it was my decision. Will I still get an Ariel Bath Toy for Christmas?

She gets the message – there’s good behavior and there’s bad behavior, and sometimes these have a bearing upon whether or not one gets what one wants – but she’s suspicious of the medium through which the message is delivered, which is, I think, as it should be. The Santa Claus Is Coming To Town story does not, admittedly, pack a lot of explanatory force. Why obey Santa? Just because he is – supposedly – the font of Christmas gifts? Why does he get to say who’s bad or good? How does he know, really? And if Christmas bounty is all about reward for being bad or good, then why do some good people not get very much? Why do some good people get nothing?

The message, too, has its problems.

Santa doesn’t know that his authority is thin on the ground around here, but that’s okay. We’re fumbling through what it means to believe in Santa, to believe in anything that’s bigger than us, anything that can’t be seen or measured or rationalized, and I want us to fumble through that stuff, to try to hold in our hands and hearts and feel the awkwardness of it and the complicatedness of it, but also, the weight of it, the rightness of it, the compelingness of it, and to make every effort to hang on it even as it defies our reasoning and even as we suspect that we are, sometimes, doing it wrong. I want us to fumble through it. And I want us to keep fumbling. And to keep wondering and questioning and then fumbling some more.

And if that earns me a few lumps of coal in the process, so be it.

(Do you use Santa as a weapon? Or even just as a lightly wielded candy-cane-like stick that raps gently against the knuckles of cookie-grabbing smalls? Does your Santa carry lumps of coal and loom like God in the Old Testament? Or is he unfailingly generous and non-judgmental, you know, like Jesus? Or do you just avoid the whole thing altogether? HAPPY NON-DENOMINATIONAL WINTER FESTIVAL GIFT CARDS AHOY.)

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…