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.

Long before I ever got pregnant – long before I even knew that I would one day want a baby, desperately – one of my very, very dearest friends told me this:

When you have a baby, the one thing that you must never forget is that you WILL forget. You’ll forget how scared you were, how anxious, how tired, how frustrated. But you’ll also forget how tiny she was, and how she smelled, and what she sounded like and how she looked at you. So always, always – in each and every moment – try to commit what you’re experiencing to memory. Remind yourself that you’re going to forget the details, and that you will miss the details, desperately. Remember that no matter how tired or afraid you are, you are one day going to wish, hard, that you could have those moments back. Even the scariest moments, the hardest moments – you’ll want them back. Never forget that. Try to cherish each and every one of those moments for what they are, and hold on to them as long as you can.

I’ve never forgotten that. Those words (which exist in my memory only in paraphrase) echoed through my mind and heart during all the long, wakeful nights of the first weeks and months with our new WonderBaby, during the first, excruciatingly painful and frustrating weeks of breastfeeding, during our first trip to the ER with our feverish infant, during the first bad fall, the first tears of anger, the first flailing of tiny, furious fists. During the depression. During the highs, and the lows, and all of the in-betweens, I remembered this: that I would, one day, forget, and that I would regret, to the bottom of my soul, that forgetting.

And so I struggled to commit everything to memory. Every sniff of her wee head in the dark of night, every sharp tug on a ravaged nipple, every bite, every giggle, every paralyzing moment of fear, every overwhelming instant of insecurity – I stopped there, in each of those moments, and tried to preserve them. I tried to really feel them, to really live them. So that I could remember them, all of them.

It didn’t work, of course. As promised, I can no longer remember exactly what it felt like to be woken in the night by her plaintive cries. Nor can I remember the fresh new scent of her head, or what it felt like to have her mouth on my breast. But I can remember what I felt. I can remember that I paused, and that I let myself feel. I can remember thinking, and feeling, in the moments of my greatest fear or anxiety and in the periods of my darkest, most inexplicable sadness that these things bound me to her, and that they were woven tightly into the tapestry of my life with her, and that one day I would try to search out those threads, try to identify those threads and tease them out so that I could remember. I can remember thinking: you’ll want these moments back. And I do.

But you can never get those moments back. You can only live them. And you only get to live them once, all of them, the good and the bad.

So love those moments. All of them. Don’t be fearless: feel the fear and embrace the fear (and the anxiety and the sadness and the frustration) and pay attention as it weaves its way into the tapestry of this new, extraordinary life with this new, extraordinary love.

This post is dedicated to Liz and Christina and Tammie, on the occasion of their baby shower, and to fearless (or, better, consciously fearful) mothers everywhere.

Because you all know.

(Check out links to other dedicatory shower posts here, and the Mother-Talk Fearless round-up here. And read more about fearlessness here.)

(And prayers to Tammie, please, because she’s started her tapestry already, and it’s been difficult so far. Good wishes that there’s not too much fear for her to embrace.)