Before Emilia was born, I had a very clear plan about what kind of mother I was going to be. I was going to carry her with me everywhere in designer slings, I was going to hand-blend my own organic baby food, I was going to shun pacifiers, I was going to teach her sign language before she was six months old, I was going to lose the baby weight before she was four months old, I was going to forbid any and all toys that were not hand-crafted by Swedish artisans from entering my house, I was going to swaddled her bottom only in cloth diapers hand-laundered in eco-friendly detergents, I was going breastfeed her until she was two, I was going to not let her watch television until she was three, I was going to clothe her only in garments woven from pure cotton by Tibetan monks or, at least, certified Disney-character free. I was going to be master of my maternal domain! I was going to be the very best mother ever, and nobody would be able to deny it!

Then Emilia was born. You know where this is going. There was a pacifier in her mouth before we wrapped her bottom in some Huggies Little Snugglers, bundled her in a Winnie-the-Pooh sleeper and took her home from the hospital.

She refused to be carried in slings or Bjorns or Ergos or anything, really, other than arms or strollers, and even arms were usually disdained in favor of moving-moving-always-moving. She self-weaned just shy of nine months. She wouldn’t nap or sleep unless she was left to fuss it out for a while, or unless she was put in a stroller and walked around the block eleventeen times. She was bouncing around in a hideous red-and-blue plastic Exersaucer by the time she was six months old, and she never learned sign language. I never did get around to making my own organic baby food, and almost five years later, I still have the baby weight.

I agonized over all of this – all of these failings, as I saw them – for a very long time. I wanted to do motherhood right. I had very clear ideas, most of them conflicting entirely with the others, about what was involved in doing motherhood right. I had read all the books, was reading all the magazines, had found all the blogs. Angelina carried her baby everywhere. So did Jennifer Garner. And Dr. Sears was adamant that I breastfeed as long as possible, and that if it hurt, I was doing it wrong. Harvey Karp told me that there was no reason why my child shouldn’t sleep on a reasonable schedule, if I handled her properly (what was it again? Swaddle-Soothe-Swing-Swagger-Swill-Something?), and Christy Turlington was on the cover of Cookie Magazine showing off what yoga had done for her mom-bod. And don’t even get me started on Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth Paltrow, it seemed to me, had her shit down. Everyone else could be a good mother, dammit. Why couldn’t I?

I eventually found a way to let all of that go and accept – finally, and with difficulty – that not only did I not need to conform to somebody else’s idea of a good mother, there was no such thing as a perfectly, universalizably good mother. But that was – and, if I’m honest, sometimes still is – a hard road to travel. We’re so invested – as we must be – in doing this motherhood thing right that we forget – we overlook, we are misled about the fact – that there is no one universal ‘right,’ that there is only ‘right for us.’ In forgetting/overlooking/being misled about the absence of a universal ‘right,’ we are left open to anxiety, panic, fear about falling into the vast pit of universally wrong. If we do this wrong we will harm our babies! If we do this wrong we will destroy lives! THERE ARE WHOLE UNIVERSES BALANCED UPON THE TIP OF OUR DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO BREASTFEED/CO-SLEEP/HOME-SCHOOL/SHUN-DORA!

It’s this, I think – this anxiety about being a good mother – that traps us and imprisons us, and not, as Erica Jong argued the other day in the Wall Street Journal, the dictates of specific styles of parenting (her specific strawman: attachment parenting.) Whether you attachment parent or Ferber-parent or Von Trapp-parent (you know, where you dress them in starched pinafores and make them sing at your parties), if you’re driven by anxiety to follow a style or adhere to a quote-unquote philosophy, and/or if you persist in following that style or philosophy regardless of whether it works for you and your child, you will be imprisoned. It will be hard. It will suck. Maybe not desperately so, but enough, and when it comes to parenting, even moderate suckage is too much suckage. Why must we be so hard on ourselves? Why is it so hard – why does it seem so hard – to just follow our instincts and experiment and allow ourselves to fail from time to time without beating ourselves up and to just, you know, simply do what works? Which, no, is never going to look exactly like what works for your neighbor or your sister-in-law or that mom who you’ve heard about who works full-time and has ten children and yet always has her hair perfectly blown out and her nails manicured, but whatever. You are not that mom. Repeat: YOU ARE NOT THAT MOM.

You are you. You will only and can only have your own style. What makes you a good mother is whatever it is that you bring to mothering your own children, whose needs and preferences are always and necessarily going to be different from the needs and preferences of other children. Emilia was independent from the get-go: attachment parenting didn’t work with her. Jasper was and is the opposite: he wants and needs to be fully attached. The strategies that I worked out for Emilia – for comforting her, for getting her to sleep, for boosting her confidence, for distracting her – simply did not and do not work for Jasper. I’ve adapted my style, and I’ve adapted my style to him. There is, I think, an underlying consistency (for lack of a better word) to my style, which was informed by my experience with Emilia and by my beliefs about parenting (yes, I do have some), but it is, let’s say, a flexible consistency, one that’s more akin to thread running through fabric than steel girding a building. And at the core of all this, there resides this one idea: that only determining factors in whether or not I am a ‘good’ mother are whether I meet their needs – their basic, general needs, and their unique, idiosyncratic ones – and love them well.

Erica Jong is right that we trap ourselves and imprison ourselves with unnecessarily rigid ideas about parenting. But it’s not, as I said, the style of the parenting that necessarily forces that rigidity: it’s our attitudes toward those styles, and the spirit in which we adopt them. Attachment parenting is only restrictive if it doesn’t work for the parent or child being attached; for some it works, for some it doesn’t, and there’s no right or wrong about it, except inasmuch as we try to impose the beliefs gleaned from our own experiences onto others, which is what gets us into trouble in the first place. Erica Jong and that too-French-to-be-believed French woman who wrote that book on le conflit! de la femme et le mere! (merde!) recoil at the idea of carrying around babies and giving up coffee and what have you; that’s their prerogative. As Jong herself states, there’s no one right way to do parenting that’s been handed down through the ages and shared across cultures. Which means that – apart from obvious cases involving abuse and neglect and the withholding of love – there’s also no wrong way. Attachment parenting is only wrong (or restrictive or oppressive or whatever negative term one wants to apply) for those for whom it is wrong. That might be you. That might be me. It is not for anyone other than you or me to say. It is certainly not for Erica Jong to say.

As I’ve said before, that we even debate and dither over these things is a marker of our privilege, and something that we shouldn’t take for granted. We do, many of us, have the luxury of choosing, of surveying the parenting landscape spread before us and debating and deliberating over which roads to take, of wandering down one path and then veering off to another if the first is too rocky or too steep, or of forging our own paths in between the established roads. Parenting, for most people in most of the world, throughout most of human history, has only ever just been parenting, with no qualifying adverb – just whatever works, whatever is necessary, whatever is possible for best ensuring the survival (and, in the best case, thriving) of child and family. We are fortunate to have choices – those of us who actually do have such choices (it is important to remember that not all of us, even in the so-called developed world, do) – and those of us who would condemn any of these choices – regardless of whether we are condemning on the basis of what we think is good for mother or what we think is good for child or what we think is best for feminism or whatever – are doing all of us a grave disservice. We are the lucky ones, we who get to define the terms of our own motherhood. Why on earth would we – do we – get in each others’ way, try to prevent each other from doing so?

The answer is obvious, of course, and obvious even in Jong’s own argument: because this motherhood thing is so loaded, and we are so anxious about it, we get sensitive about it. We are afraid of doing it wrong, and so we look to each other, constantly, asking ourselves – sometimes asking each other – is she doing it wrong? Is SHE doing it wrong? Is SHE? Or is SHE doing it right? If she’s doing it right, and it’s different from how I am doing it, does that make me wrong? I MUST ASSERT MY WAY AS RIGHT. Jong herself admits, quietly, to worrying over her choices. “I hired nannies,” she says, “left my daughter home and felt guilty for my own imperfect attachment.” But, she adds,  “I can’t imagine having done it any other way.” So why could she not leave it at that, admit that she did it the only way that she could, that she did the best she could, and sure, maybe she made some mistakes along the way – one cannot mother without making some mistakes along the way – and maybe she wished that there had been other alternatives for her, but end of the day: she did her best, full stop. Isn’t that what we should all aim for? Isn’t that what ‘good’ motherhood should be about? Not about how or why or what are the socio-cultural-politico-economic implications of how everyone else is doing it – just about how you are doing it, and whether it is serving you, and your children. FULL STOP.

That’s what I’m aiming for. As best I can, anyway.

I had it in mind that I was going to write about it, that thing that happened last week , that thing that was really just so horrible and awful and unpleasant – in a First World Problems! kind of way, sure, but still – that thing that left me feeling so rattled and uncertain and bad. I was going to write about how it all happened – what was said and how I cried and what more was said and how much more I cried and then how I sat, alone, in a room with no clocks, my passport seized, and freaked the hell out – and about how I wondered what it said about the State of the Momosphere in North America circa 2010 that someone could be stopped and interrogated for claiming to be a ‘mom blogger’ – not even mommy blogger! I only said mom! and blogger! – (because I am so not exaggerating when I say that I spent all that time defending the fact that I make a living writing about motherhood and that I often go to conferences – yes, even at places like Yahoo! – to discuss doing so and they reviewed my blog right there and demanded that I explain to them what the hell it was and how it earned me money and I sniffled and gurgled and mumbled stuff about ad networks and marketing and GM Canada and it was only when I pointed to a post that thanked GM Canada for sponsoring an adventure and then another one that they finally relented and let me go) (which, thanks GM!) – and! or! — DEEP BREATH — whether it even meant anything at all, and how maybe this has nothing at all to do with mommyblogging being a radical act and more to do with how there happens to be random Internet-ignorant doofuses (doofii?) working at Homeland Security! Or something! So!

I was going to write something about all that. But now I’m not. Because, I haven’t even written about it – apart from saying that it happened and that I was scared and that I didn’t know what to make of it – and already there is murmuring and grumbling about who the hell cares and she probably deserved it and it probably had nothing to do with mom blogging and she wouldn’t last five minutes in Saudi Arabia! (Which, no, I wouldn’t, not least because I am not Maureen Dowd and am totally not up for experiencing misogynist subjugation just for the hell of it and, also, I already said that) and I’m just so totally not up for that, because, why? Why should I be? I’m not. And even though I’m kind of sort of simmering with the idea that this, this sort of thing – the presumption that ‘motherhood’ and ‘professional’ are two words that should spring off of each other like water on hot oil – and that sort of thing – the some-time compulsion within our community to sneer and to doubt – are evidence of the radicalness of what we do – living our motherhood publicly, and demanding respect for it – is as bright and hard-edged as it was five years ago when this fine lady declared it so, I’m too tired to let it come to boil. Not now, anyway.

This is cowardly, maybe. To avoid discussion – to avoid starting a discussion – just because it threatens to get difficult, just because one’s feelings might get hurt – isn’t that the very antithesis of what it means to be radical in a discursive space? It is this, without question, but I might object, in my own defense, that wandering into discursive territory that I know or suspect will be be hostile only wears me down, leaves me less able, or less willing, to engage in those discussions that are productive and stimulating and interesting and – maybe – radical. (By which I do not mean, those discussions in which everyone agrees with me. It’s never interesting – although it is, I’ll admit, gratifying – when everyone simply agrees with you. I was an academic – a student, a teacher, a wave-my-Communist-Manifesto-around-the-pub-table argument-pursuer – for too long to be averse to discursive friction.) (How many times in this paragraph can I use the word ‘discursive’?) (Why am I avoiding the subject at hand?)

And so this is the path I take today, the path of least (discursive!) resistance, and I walk it with headphones plugged into my ears and shades drawn over my eyes, and if anyone stops me, I will brandish my iPhone and holler, over the music blaring in my ears, WANNA SEE PICTURES OF MY BABIES???…

… and as those people move aside, I will just keep walking.

And I will feel guilty.

(So guilty, in fact, that now that I’ve come to the end of this post I feel reluctant to close comments, because I know that you would understand and I wouldn’t just brush you aside on this path that we’re on and I know that although you are always happy to see pictures of my children, you understand that there is so much more than that going on here, so why would I want to shut you out?

Lo, I have talked myself into a corner. That happens sometimes.

I’m going to leave comments open. You’ll be civil and kind, right? And we won’t debate whether or not I was silly or ridiculous or ego-inflated to have been been upset by my brush with Homeland Security? We’ll just walk and we’ll talk about the issues and the questions and the unbearable lightness of being mom bloggers, and radicals, and the beauty of my children. And it will be good. Right? So why IS this all so hard sometimes?)

The following is a comment that someone just left on my post about love in the age of the Internet. It was directed to my comment spam folder. I don’t quite understand why it went to spam. I mean, it does proclaim a universal truth, and universal truths are the meat of discourse. Or something:

“There is not much to say except the following universal truth: when loving someone unrequietedly (sic), remember this; while to you, he is a juicy steak, to him, you are a moldy wiener. I will be back.”

Everybody, write that down.

(On my way home from SXSW today. I would very much like to sleep for days when I get there. That’s not going to happen.)

I don’t know about you, but I think that my child makes a far slicker Horatio Caine than does David Caruso, who, let’s face it, is a hack. But CBS doesn’t care if my baby is an undiscovered Horatio Cane-impersonating genius, because CBS hates babies. Canadian babies, mostly, but also just babies, as a class, because they won’t let babies or Canadians – and certainly not Canadian babies – enter their Horatio Caine impersonation contest, which, seriously, is a crime against babies and also lovers of CSI Miami and anybody who writes baby-centric Horatio Caine fanfic. This is an outrage, you guys.

I might think that this was just a plot originated by David Caruso, who is very probably threatened by the sunglasses-doffing slicksters of tomorrow, one of whom might replace him one day, or get their own CSI spin-off, CSI: Playgroup, which would almost certainly be a ratings blockbuster, so you could see why he’d want to keep the young ones off his turf. So, yeah, I might think that, but isn’t CBS making a lot of dodgy calls about babies and baby-related issues these days, you know, what with their whole marketing love affair with anti-reproductive rights groups and all? I mean, sure, it’s hard to make the case that Focus On The Family, who get to have their anti-abortion ads run during the Super Bowl, are anti-baby – anti-choice, sure, but that’s not quite the same thing, even if the people whose choices they’re restricting used to be babies, and shouldn’t the women who used to be babies have choice? (which, I know, the standard anti-choice line is don’t the babies get a choice? which is mad loaded but not the primary topic of concern here and really, anyway, now’s not the time to debate baby vs. fetus, even if I do think that Horatio Caine would have some strongly worded and sternly delivered opinions about that, which would be interesting to hear, if only to find out at which point in the debate he would punctuate his remarks by removing his sunglasses) – but still, it seems that CBS only likes babies if they’re fetuses or if they’re not babies at all but grown-up people who are ‘over the age of 18 and residents of the United States of America.’ I call shenanigans.

Because, seriously. My baby would so totally have won their Horatio Caine impersonation contest if CBS weren’t all ageist and anti-baby and David Caruso weren’t such an insecure dork.

Pass it on.

(PS: Please keep tweeting and linking and forwarding our open letter against non-consensual nether-probing, which, let’s face it, Horatio Caine would never stand for. >>> *screeching-guitar-shred* >>> WE WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN.)

When I saw the news that Anna Kournikova’s mom had been charged with neglect for leaving her little boy home alone for an hour while she ran errands, I thought, how terrible. And then I thought, there but for the grace of a little more restraint go I.

I’ve left my daughter alone. Not for an hour – not for anywhere near an hour; more like a handful of minutes – and not at any significant distance, but still. How much difference does time and distance make, anyway? If you live in a big house, with a big yard, does leaving a child napping while you go outside to garden count as neglect? Running next door to borrow sugar from a neighbor? Crossing the street to return a snow shovel? Is it okay if you’re only gone a few minutes? If you haven’t gone too far away? Should you never, ever leave your children alone in the house, for any amount of time? Or does keeping your children at your side even while you’re dragging the recycling bins back to the garage mark you as an incurably hyper parent?

I left my daughter alone.

It was the other week, when it was cold and wet and windy and miserable outside and Emilia was home sick – not a lot sick, but sick enough that I didn’t want her going to school or outside or any great distance from blankets and tissues – and my husband had just called to say that he wouldn’t be able to leave work early enough to pick up Jasper from daycare. I would have to go get him. Which wasn’t a big deal, really, because the daycare is only a few steps from our house, just around the corner, less than ten minutes round-trip including coat-buttoning and boot-zipping time. Except that it was kind of a big deal that day, because I had on my hands a sick, bedraggled child for whom the walk in the wet, blowing snow would not – no matter how short – be pleasant and would likely make her feel worse.

“Just leave her,” my husband said. “You’ll be back in less time than it takes you to go to the bathroom. She’ll be fine.”

I hesitated.

“Really,” he said.

He had a point. She and I would be out of communication range longer if I took a shower or went down to the basement to do laundry. I was just going around the corner. I’d only be a few minutes. I would never tell anyone.

“Never tell anyone,” said Katie, when I told her that I’d done it, that I’d left Emilia for a few minutes while I ran to get Jasper. “I mean, I totally think it’s no big deal, but you know. People judge.”

Of course they do. Because, really, it can be hard to know where to find the line that divides free-range parenting from Madame Kournikova parenting, between making a choice based upon one’s confidence in one’s children’s abilities to function independently in appropriate circumstances and making choice that disregards the interests and well-being of the child. It can hard to find that line, because the location of that line depends very much upon the attitudes and opinions of the person looking for it. If you believe that a kindergartener should never, ever be left alone, under any circumstances, then even leaving them in front of the television while you take a shower or run next door to return a snow shovel might seem borderline neglectful. If you believe that if they can tie their shoes and operate an iPhone, they can take care of themselves unsupervised for reasonable periods of time, questioning the reasonableness of leaving them while you go outside to do whatever might provoke headache-inducing eye rolls.

I’m more or less in the latter camp. My own parents were a combination of hyper (they would enroll me in any activity – organ, voice, gymnastics, swimming, art, public speaking – if I showed even the slightest flicker of interest or talent, and then stage-parent me enthusiastically) and free-range (I was roaming our neighborhood freely, climbing cherry trees and stealing fruit when I was still in preschool) and I don’t think that their tendencies in the latter regard ever put me in harm’s way (and I say this as a child of the Clifford Olsen era in British Columbia, lest anyone think that that is only true because the late 70′s/early 80′s in Canada were a simpler, more innocent time). I think, actually, that their practice of worrying only about what they thought was the big stuff – was I being encouraged enough? was I being given enough opportunities? how could they best work toward ensuring that my future was bright? – as opposed to what they saw as the small stuff – was I old enough to be wandering off on my own to explore the neighborhood and ransack cherry trees? – was pretty reasonable, as far as parenting philosophies go. They wanted me to have a world of opportunity, so they guided me toward and encouraged me in the pursuit of and held my hand in the exploration of as much of the world as they could. But they also  wanted me to be independent, and so they let go of my hand, a lot, and let me be independent from an early age.

I don’t know if they ever left me home alone while I was in kindergarten. I do know that my dad forgot me at the mall, once, and that my mom gave him shit for that for years, but that’s a different thing, I think.

This is, I think, a long-winded apologia for what is really just another parenting confession: I left my child in the house alone, and I don’t want to be raked over the coals for it, even though I know that I might be raked over the coals and even though I know that such coal-raking is actually good for the conversations that we’re having or should be having about our choices in parenting and how we react to each others’ choices and so on and so forth. It is, too, one more effort to stick to my guns with the philosophy that if I’m willing to do it – ‘it’ being some act of motherhood – I should be willing to talk about it. If I really were unwilling to talk about leaving my daughter alone in the house for a few minutes, then I shouldn’t have done it; if I can defend my choice to myself – and I should never make a parenting choice that I can’t so defend – then I should be able and willing to stick up for that choice out loud.

So, I admit it: I made the reasoned choice to leave my child alone, in the house, for a few minutes, and I don’t think that I was neglectful to do so. What do you think?

(Go easy on me.)

When I was pregnant with Jasper, I asked my doctor for a c-section.

Can I have a c-section?, I asked.

No, she said.

I had been going through early labor for weeks. It was three weeks or so before my due date, but bio-physical ultrasounds were logging me at well over a week overdue based on Jasper’s size. Jasper, according to ultrasound measurements, probably weighed close to nine pounds. And I still had three weeks to go.

I was a little freaked out.

I’m serious, I told my doctor.

– We’re keeping a close eye on you. If he gets to an unmanageable size, we’ll talk about it. But you can do this. Emilia was big. You’ve done this.

But…

– We’ll talk about it again next week.

The following week, I informed her – my tongue only lightly in cheek – that I would perform a c-section on myself, if I had to.

I’m sure that’s not necessary, she said.

A few days later, I asked again. The most recent ultrasound had put Jasper’s weight at about 9 and a half pounds. I was having painful contractions every night. My body, I told my doctor, wants this child OUT.

– And it will get him out. But if he doesn’t come this weekend, we’ll talk c-section next week.

Jasper arrived that weekend. Oh, boy, did he arrive. All nine and half plus pounds of him, and in a hurry, and through an exit that he made himself, with his head. It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and mine, I’ll have you know, is a life that has seen life-threatening house fires, horrific car accidents and being held hostage on a Greek island. None of that holds a terror-candle to precipitous labor with blast-exit effects.

My doctor asked me, later, whether I was glad that I’d let Jasper come out on his own.

No, I said. No way.

I was glad – thrilled, grateful, ecstatic – that Jasper was out and that he was healthy. But if I could have had the delivery go differently, I would have, no question. With Emilia, I’d been in active labor for nearly thirty hours, with an epidural that only worked on half my body and pain so bad that I hallucinated my twelve-year old self hovering in the room and laughing at me. I’d have swapped Jasper’s mode of delivery for that one in a flash, hallucinations and all.  I’d also have swapped it for a c-section. I didn’t ever say that out loud, though. I knew from experience that this is a sensitive subject. And end of the day, I was just glad that Jasper and I – after a delivery that, in an earlier time, would have, no question, killed us both – were fine. So I wasn’t interested in – and didn’t see the need for – debating the subject.

Still, whenever some well-meaning person has made a comment or a joke about wishing that they’d had a ninety-minute natural labor – instead of their own ten hour/twenty hour/thirty hour labor, or induced or vacuum-assisted or medicated labor,  or c-section, or whatever – I’ve bristled a little. Not unless you like being terrified out of your mind thinking that you and your baby are going to die and having that baby crown while you’re speeding down the highway and then blast his own way out tearing you so badly that the doctors can’t see through the gore to give you a local before they stitch you up and even then it’s so messy that one of them stitches his finger to your hoo-ha and they’ve only given you a Tylenol 3 and THERE’S SO MUCH BLOOD and OH MY GOD THE PAIN and you can’t walk for nearly six weeks and then you’re left with post-traumatic stress disorder and a frankenvulva, I think. Not unless you’re mother-effing crazy.

But I never say that. I’ve always just said no, you probably don’t, made a little joke about frankenvulvas, and left it at that.

Because, end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s a cliche, but it’s one that is firmly rooted in truth: what matters in any birth is the baby. Not you, not me, not the midwife or the attending physician or one’s partner or anyone else. The baby. If the baby comes out okay, then it’s good. Which is not to say that you or I or anyone else might not be disappointed or upset or sore or post-traumatically stressed – I was sore and stressed in the extreme – or that we shouldn’t strive to advocate for our own and others’ best births, whatever that looks like, only that how the baby arrives in this world and in our arms (hello, adoptive moms!) is far less important than that he or she does.

This, too: although it seems that birthin’ babies is an experience with which all mothers can identify in some common measure (stick two or mothers in a room together and odds are good that at some point they will compare birth stories), it simply isn’t, not least because not all mothers give birth. Not all mothers give birth – some adopt, some are in partnerships or marriages with the birth-mothers of their children, some foster, some surrogate – and not all mothers view or experience birth in the same way. Some regard giving birth at home and/or giving birth naturally, without medical intervention, as the best possible kind of birth; others want a full team of doctors at their side with an epidural drip that kicks in at the earliest possible moment. Some want soft lighting and soft music, others just want it OVER WITH LIKE NOW. Some would very much prefer if stork deliveries could be arranged. End of the day, the birth experience – indeed, the experience of getting your child into your arms by whatever means, birth or paperwork or Stork Express – is a profoudly and necessarily personal one, one that only we, each of us, as individuals (and, I suppose, couples, although that might be another topic entirely) can judge as good or bad or acceptable or whatever.

What I wish is that we could talk about these differences – in all of their awkward glory – without falling at each other’s throats. Yes, I have – like some others – thought that getting a c-section would have been a lucky break. I’ve  joked about it. I’ve certainly joked and heard the jokes and cringed in response to the jokes about squeezing jumbo watermelons out of one’s nethers. But I’ve also listened with sympathy to stories about pelvises breaking during labor and complications after c-sections and heartbreak over needing to be induced or rushed away from home birthing nests to hospitals because intervention was needed, and I’ve commiserated countless times with other women who had their nethers shredded and are still – weeks, months, years later – a little bit traumatized by it.  I’ve listened to heartbreaking stories about failed adoptions and lost children and to heartwarming stories about children delivered safely to their mothers’ arms. These are personal experiences of the life-changing event that is welcoming a child into one’s life and one’s heart and none of us, none of us, can say whether another’s is anything other that what she professes it to be. And none of us should decry how another professes that experience or articulates her feelings around that experience.

And why should we? Some us need to cry, some of us need to rage, some of us need to laugh and laugh and laugh some more. These are rich experiences; these are the terrible and amazing and awesome and sometimes very darkly funny stories – stories that make us cringe and squeal and cry and rage and, yes, laugh – that make up the rich narrative fabric of motherhood.

Let’s not stop it unfurling. Let’s embrace – or, at least, be tolerant of – each others’ ways and means of sharing these stories, and recognize them for the intensely personal stories that they are. And then let’s all remember to be grateful, so grateful, that so many of these stories, whatever their dramas, have happy endings – BABIES – and that we live in an age and a culture where the happy ending is the norm, and where we have the luxury of discussing how to give birth and not whether or not we or our babies are or are not likely to survive birth.

Many aren’t so lucky.

Step 1: Ignore the trolls.

Step 2: Ignore the trolls.

Step 3: IGNORE THE TROLLS. Do not look at them, do not respond to them, do not point your finger at them and scream TROLL, because the only thing that trolls  loves more than the sound of their own voice (virtually rendered in the spaces of our community as unpleasant/derogatory/inappropriately critical/unnecessarily smug/indisputably bitchy words on the screen) is the sound of other voices responding to theirs. And what a troll hates more than anything else? The deafening silence that resounds when their words fall into the dark, empty pit of nobody cares, the dark, empty pit that rings only with the hollow echo of their mean spirits hammering against the walls of their vacant souls.

And in the space where you might otherwise have been tempted to put a rejoinder or rebuttal or argument or smackdown? Put love. Put friendship. Put community. Put laughter. Say something nice, something friendly, something clever, something ridiculous, something vapidly amusing, something about coffee or chocolate or how much you love person X or how much you admire person Y or has anybody seen that awesome thing that person Z wrote yesterday? or oh, look, MUPPETS.

And then move on. And forget that you ever saw that troll under that bridge because really, there are so many, there are always so many, always spilling out from the muck and the grime and reaching out with their spindly, warty arms and grabbing for attention, but they only have power if we let them, if we choose to see them, if we acknowledge that they’re there, if we let them seize that attention and hold it and turn it ugly.

Let’s not let them.

Let’s just not.

*I know. I don’t always do this. This is as much a reminder to myself as to anybody else.

**And? I know that this can be hard to do. But I think that it’s the only thing that makes any sort of difference. Fight hate with love. Don’t give it space to grow. Shut it out. SHUT IT OUT. Plant these spaces with good seeds and sunlight and clean water and care and weed out anything that produces rot. That’s all there is to do. Really.

***We don’t even need to discuss why I wrote this. Let’s just MAKE THEM GO AWAY by ELIMINATING THEM FROM THE VERY SPHERE OF OUR AWARENESS. (whips out canister of Troll-B-Gone) (pffssst-spray-pffssst). What trolls? Where?