Here’s a little public service announcement: if you are a mom with a new baby, and you see me in public, you should steer clear of me, because I will terrorize you.
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29
May
Happy birthday, diagnosis Mom. You are, and always have been, and always will be, the best mom ever, the mom whose momness I will always aspire to emulate, the mom who taught me...
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My mom sent me this email yesterday, for my birthday. It caused me to miss her, badly, and also to spend a solid twenty minutes ruminating on the singular unattractiveness of my toes.
20
May
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience." -- Henry Miller
Unless you're a small child, in which case all growth is a leap into the sunshine,...
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20
May
Sometimes, you're just hanging out at a luau, trying to get your toddler to eat some pineapple, when all of a sudden some man in a loincloth grabs you by the arm and throws...
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18
May
It’s Jasper birthday today. He’s three. Don’t tell him that, though.
Me, this morning: “Is it your birthday today, Jasper? Happy birthday!”
Jasper: “No, Mommy, not my birthday. YOUR birthday.” He’s close: my birthday is just a couple of days away. Still, you’d think that the child would be kinda pleased about having a birthday. Birthdays are awesome when you’re a kid. Less so once you’re a grown-up, but still.
Me: “No, baby. It’s YOUR birthday. You’re three! Happy birthday!”
Jasper: “NO, Mommy, I NOT. IS NOT MY BIRTHDAY.”
Okay, then.
16
May
It always seems like a good idea, when the opportunity arises, to take my kids on trips with me. This week, in particular, it seemed like a fantastic idea: take the kids and the...
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There’s nothing like being away from home and getting a text from your spouse that says call me as soon as you can.
It’s about Emilia, he says when I call.
What about Emilia? I don’t know what the right words are to express, here, how shrill my voice was. ‘Shrill’ works decently well, I suppose. My voice was shrill.
She came home from school with a note. It said that she hit Madeleine, and that L and C were involved, and…
At which point I tuned out, a little, because I needed to take a moment to exhale. Everything’s okay, nothing happened to her, everything’s okay, she just hit another child. And then I had to take another moment, because wait, what? My child hit another child.
Oh god, is she a bully?
The old saying that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ has always struck me as really misleading. Most pictures you can describe in, like, 140 characters, otherwise why would there be TwitPic and Instagram? And anyway, why ‘a thousand’? If that number is meant to signify ‘lots,’ it kind of misses the mark. A thousand words is not a lot of words. I can easily bang out a thousand words just on the topic of cat barf, about which I know much, having stepped in it three mornings in a row now. And trust me, you wouldn’t want to see a picture of that.
Anyway. I was thinking about the stories that pictures tell as I reviewed my Instagram stream from this weekend and realized that anyone scrolling through those pictures would think that I’m raising my children in the wild and letting them drive cars and possibly also putting them to work as psychics. Which is totally not true. I only keep them out of doors in daylight hours – they’re free range – and they only work as psychics when they want to.
I think that Mother’s Day is as good a time as any to break out the heavy emotional artillery, don’t you?
I can’t say that I regret having had an abortion, but I also can’t say that I don’t. It’s complicated. Its complicatedness sometimes hurts my heart. Which is precisely why people talk about the emotional consequences of abortion. Because many women find, like I did, that their hearts hurt. Because many women struggle to figure out how to reconcile the complicated tension between regret and not-regret and find that they’re unable, and because many women do so while bearing their children, their wanted children, in arms.