The World's Worst Housewife

The darndest things

2011-02-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

The best things my kids have said to me all week:

Henry, after listening to a children's reggae song (it was a GIFT) about how to make yucca pie: "He says it's made with water and sugar, but really I think it's made with people's blood."

Amelia, as I am snuggling her: "I love you, Mommy, but sometimes I burp in your face." Which is an uncanny description of our relationship.

The action figures have gone away

2011-01-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

This week we have had a problem with hitting. On Monday Henry hit Amelia over a disagreement about who could play with the Daddy in her new dollhouse, he may have hit her again while they were playing in the yard (I couldn't be sure because she retracted her accusation, not wanting to lose her mud-digging partner to a timeout), and he definitely hit her while washing hands before dinner because she was taking too long at the sink.

Normally, Henry is so sensitive to criticism that a stern, "I am very angry right now, Henry," elicits a cascade of tears and an immediate cessation of the offending activity. But after the third hit, it became clear that more severe consequences were in order.

"We don't hit in this house," I told him. "No dessert for you."

He was quiet through most of dinner. I thought maybe he was reflecting on what he had done, contemplating the error of his ways. Finally he held out his hand to me and said, "How about this? If I don't get dessert, I'll throw a fit. If I do get dessert, I won't throw a fit!" He beamed at me.

I smiled back at him. "How about this?" I said. "If you throw a fit, there's no dessert tomorrow night, either." Henry scowled.

After a few moments he spoke again. "If you don't let me have dessert, it will make me hit Amelia a lot more times," he said, this time with a smirk. This was the four-year-old version of hardball.

"If you hit Amelia even one more time," I said, "your action figures go away."

Henry's jaw dropped. I leaned over until my face was level with his. "I don't negotiate with terrorists," I said.

"I am very angry and annoyed with you!" he said.

"Fine," I said.

"I am going to be very, very sad if I can't have dessert!" he said.

"That's good," I said. "Maybe you'll remember that next time you want to hit someone."

From then until bedtime, there was more wailing, more pouting, more discussion of his feelings on the matter. I stood firm. I stayed calm. Finally, at bed time, he said, "I won't hit Amelia any more." I felt pleased with myself.

The next morning he hit the cat. Twice. First time was a warning, second time his action figures took a 24-hour hiatus. Worse, the cat would have nothing to do with him. He was heartbroken and, possibly, chastened. He hasn't hit anyone or anything since. I'll keep you posted.

(Meanwhile, I told this story to my mom and she was instantly trying to figure out where the "bad influence" lay. "Is he learning this from kids in his class?" she asked. "Is it from TV?" Preschools and PBS: secret hotbeds of violence.)

Cheering on the inside

2011-01-21T16:24:00.000-08:00

Simon and I have achieved something of a cease-fire, which is good, although we have declared cease-fires before and you see how far that's gotten us. Note to Israel and Palestine: I totally get it.

Honestly, I have no idea what an acceptable end-point for a marriage might be. I know people who would say "NEVER" and people who would say "When it stops being fun." I know happy and miserable people on both ends of that spectrum.

Let's say it's actually something like this: when it's more damaging to my kids that their parents stay married than that their parents get divorced.

I'll keep you posted.

*****

In other, less depressing news, Henry got his very first, very own library card yesterday. He signed the application and card by himself (just Henry, like Cher or Madonna). He remains wary of the whole "borrowing" concept--he doesn't want to have to give the books back--but he was delighted that he could bring home five books without a lecture from me about poor children who would trade their shoes to have one-tenth of his home library.

His picks included Star Wars ABCs, I Spy Spooky Night, and something about a robot babysitter.

When we got in the car to go home he said, "My insides are cheering because I got my own library card."

My insides are cheering, too.

Corpse marriage

2011-01-14T11:27:00.000-08:00

God, my last post was FOUR WEEKS AGO? It seemed like just yesterday I was whining about Santa stories. Partly I was just busy with Christmas and, well, mostly Christmas. How much productivity is lost in this country as a result of that holiday? Possibly a million work years a season.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about divorce. I'm nearly positive that's where things are heading, and it's just a matter of when and what we do with the house and whether I'll fail to get custody because I am such a class-A freaking lunatic.

I looked up "signs your marriage is heading for divorce" on Google (which should be a top sign in itself, but wasn't on any of the lists I saw). My favorite sign was "Your wife changes back to her maiden name." Really? You think that could be a sign of trouble?

A dying marriage is a fascinating phenomenon. You know what it was, you remember holding hands after a dinner out, or running together to catch a boat that time on vacation, or semi-seriously adding "Data" and "Lor" to your list of possible baby names for twins, and although sometimes you can still see that basic idea, it's become horribly distorted. A bloated, discolored, rotting corpse of that earlier time.

(Sign #2 your marriage is heading for divorce: You describe your relationship as a "bloated, discolored, rotting corpse.")

Santa

2010-12-16T11:09:00.000-08:00

Henry and Amelia finally saw Santa this past weekend. Twice, actually--once at the Oakland Zoo and once at my mom's club's holiday brunch. Having two Santa sighting so close together posed a problem: the kids remembered what Santa looked like on Friday, and they wanted to know why Santa looked totally different on Sunday.

Which brings us to the fact that the whole Santa story has many, many holes, and a parent committed to the Santa Experience is often forced to perform fantastic feats of split-second spin control. In the case of two different Santas, I explained that St. Nick can't attend all the holiday events himself, what with the prep work for his BIG DAY, so he sends out elves dressed as Santa who report back to him about what everyone wants for Christmas. Sometimes, of course, he shows up himself, so we have to be on the lookout for the real Santa. And that is why some Santas look real and some look very, very sketchy.

I also had to come up with a reason for Toys for Tots, because, really, shouldn't Santa be getting things for the poor children? Shouldn't that be his number one job? I told Henry that parents send money to Santa every year to pay for the gifts and delivery, and that some families don't have money, so we pick out toys for those kids to help Santa out. And that maybe Santa slips in a few extras for us because we're helping him out. That's logical, right? Although the whole pay-for-play deal does seem to suck the magic right out of it.

Anyway, Henry ran right up to both Santas, sat right down, and asked for Star Wars action figures, Star Wars Legos, and an iPad (I'll have to thank my dad later for bringing such a thing to my house before Christmas). And despite my wide-eyed head shaking at Santa, Mr. Claus's response has led Henry to believe that they have an agreement. No amount of explaining that Santa might have other video game systems up his sleeve can shake Henry from the conviction that he is getting an iPad. And he's not. So that will be fun on Christmas morning.

Amelia took a little longer to warm up to the old man. At the zoo she refused to sit on Santa's lap, and instead stood at the foot of the sleigh and shouted up, "I want video games!" When Santa asked what kind of video game she wanted, she shouted back, "Pink!"

She felt different at the Sunday brunch, when she ran up to chat with Santa three different times, once actually climbing onto Santa in the middle of another kid's meeting. By the third time she didn't have anything left to ask for, so she told Santa about our cats.

I'll post a photo if I ever get around to downloading them from the camera.

Why I seem a lot more fun than I really am

2010-12-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

So last week was my turn to go to school with Amelia (it's this "parents and children together" program that was a lot more charming the first time around with Henry). It being winter, I had a slight cold, so the tip of my nose, right around my left nostril, was dry and BRIGHT RED.

It looked hideous, so before I went in, I touched it up with some cheap cover-up stick in pale ivory. And that, of course, looked worse, so I tried to wipe it off. It didn't really wipe off, though, because of the dry skin. Instead it just looked like my nose was red with a light dusting of white powder around the nostril.

I can only hope I'm building an interesting reputation at the preschool.

That person

2010-11-29T10:39:00.000-08:00

I'm lucky, right? Look at those faces. I'm really, really lucky. And I have much to be thankful for: two great kids, a nice house, a warm bed, family who babysit for free, friends, a six-day-a-month job, that I'm not bald yet.

Things are good! They're great, in fact. Really, really, really [sob] great.

A couple of weeks ago I went out to drinks with a couple of old friends from high school. One friend is having a particularly hard time--his mom has Alzheimer's and he's working a job he hates--and he said his girlfriend is pressing for marriage and babies.

I leaned toward him, stared him in straight in the eyes, and said, "NEVER get married."

And even as I was explaining how it was a terrible institution, and how only a fortunate few could ever truly be happy being yoked to one person for life, I was flooded with the horror that I have become that person--bitter and jaded, glowing with a smoldering resentment fueled by the carcasses of my dead dreams. All I needed was a cigarette and maybe a limp and the whole picture would have been complete.

I can't say exactly how things got this bad. It's never one thing, just 10 years of things piled up and littering the floor until our home is the emotional equivalent of a cat hoarder's place.

I do love those kids, though. Thank God for them.

*****

On an unrelated note, but still under the category of "Things That Suck," Amelia seems to be suffering from some sort of insomnia. It started with one missed nap on Sunday when we took her to see a play. Then the next day she spent nap time wandering around her room, and the following night she was up for an extra 90 minutes performing stealth excursions to turn up the volume on her lullaby sounds. Since then, she hasn't napped at all, it's taking hours for her to fall asleep, and this morning she was up for the day at 4:30.

Meanwhile, her waking hours are what you might expect from a two-year-old who's missing four to six hours of sleep each day. There's a lot of whining and tears and writhing on the floor.

The poor dear needs sleep. But she won't sleep. So she's overtired. So she can't sleep.

This is not heading in a positive direction AT ALL.

"I hate you"

2010-11-18T15:45:00.000-08:00

I honestly thought things were going well between us.

Last night Amelia and I read two books: The Little Engine That Could and Good Night San Francisco. Except for my insistence that she sit with me on the rocker and not across the room on her stool, we got along swimmingly.

Shortly after going to bed she threw up. Half-digested spaghetti, carrots, and Kit Kat were in her hair, in her ears, down her pajama top. Simon did the heavy lifting, washing and rewashing her hair as she sobbed, "I throwed up!" But I was there, too. I got the pajamas, blanket, and sheets into the washing machine, I put new sheets on the bed, dried her, dressed her, and sat next to her, stroking her hair, until she fell asleep.

This morning at around 7:30 I heard her saying, "Daddy, I want to get up!" which is funny because I'm almost always the one to get her up in the morning, especially given that Simon has been sleeping on the couch lately (which is a subject for a whole separate, bitter, weepy post).

I went in, as usual, and said, "Good morning! How are you feeling?" in my sunniest voice.

She sat up in bed, furrowed her brow, and yelled, "I want DADDY."

"Daddy's downstairs," I told her, still chipper as I opened her curtains. "We'll see him when we go down for breakfast."

Amelia folded her arms. "I don't like you," she said.

But she couldn't mean that, right? Surely she was expressing dissatisfaction at, well, something else. An ongoing stomach ache. Hunger. Congressional infighting.

"Why don't you like Mommy?" I asked.

She looked down at her dolly, then straight into my eyes, "Because I hate you," she said.

And, you know, what?!? Was it because I told her to stop asking me for water when I'm driving? Because I wouldn't let her sit on her stool during story time? Did she blame me for the problems between Simon and I? Or did I damage our relationship irrevocably when I had to stop breastfeeding after a year due to a new medication? Had we ever really bonded at all?

I started to say that it hurt my feelings when she said that, because it did. But then I thought better of it, and, trying to be the best parent I could, I conjured up a smile and said, "That's OK if you hate me right now. I still love you."

Then I helped her pick out an outfit to wear, and called Simon to come upstairs because, really, I just want her to be happy.

And to love me.

Orange and black

2010-11-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

I didn't make it to the Giants parade last week. I thought about it. I even asked Henry if he wanted to go.

"Will there be cotton candy?" he asked.

"No," I said. "There will be a lot of people standing together on the sidewalk cheering for the Giants."

"That sounds super boring," Henry said.

My sister went. She said not taking my kids there was the best parenting decision I've ever made. Sadly, she may be right.

But missed parade and deformed "SF" jack-o-lantern aside, I am over the moon about their victory. Yay Giants!

*****

The build-up to Halloween at our house was epic. In length. We bought Henry's Boba Fett costume in early September. So I had been listening to "Is it Halloween yet?" for about six weeks by the time October 31 rolled around.

Henry was firmly aboard the Halloween bandwagon, wearing his Boba Fett jetpack to school and folding his arms in bored condescension at severed heads and zombie babies alike, declaring, “That doesn’t scare me one bit.” Amelia, on the other hand, was having none of it. Outside of her lukewarm approval of her bee costume and her genuine happiness about her Hello Kitty jack-o-lantern, her standard response to all things Halloween was, “Too scary for me!”

And then it was time to trick-or-treat. We approached the first house, a large Victorian with gravestones on its front lawn and a smoke machine in full operation on the porch. Simon and I each took one kid’s hand, and walked slowly into the foyer. A large man wearing a Jason mask sat at a table, surrounded by cobwebs and body parts. Amelia stood beside me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Jason silently held out a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup. Amelia immediately let go of my hand and ran toward Jason. “Thanks you!” she cried, happily.

She was hooked. For the rest of the night she wriggled out of my grip and ran toward houses that even Henry refused to enter. “That one!” she yelled, holding her Elmo treat basket proudly before her.

As for Henry, a block into trick-or-treating he stopped going into any house with more than a jack-o-lantern for decoration. Two blocks after that he said he was done, and I walked him home (happily, it being Game 4 of the World Series).

Amelia stayed with Grandma for another block or two. She would have gone longer, but it was her bedtime. As she fell asleep that night, she told me, “That scary guy so nice to give me candy.”

So what did my preschoolers learn this Halloween? Ignore your instincts about what looks dangerous! Take candy from strangers! Commit extortion! At least it makes me feel better about the whole Santa charade.

******

One last thing: A friend sent me this link to a blog post by the mom of a boy who went as Scooby Doo’s Daphne for Halloween and got flak for it by other moms. I hope she feels supported by all the positive comments. Her son looks awesome, too.

Personally, I am a little sad that Henry has moved on from loving princesses to embracing all things Star Wars. I mean, I like the movies and all, but I am so tired of the pretend shooting and light-sabering.

It's so odd to me that boys playing killer is A-OK, and boys wearing mod purple minidresses with kicky pink boots are bullied by grownups.

On not reading and pumpkins with three noses

2010-10-27T12:55:00.001-07:00

Monday night I attended the "parent education night" for Henry's preschool. One of the teachers brought out a box of multi-hued composition books. She explained that the box was available at the writing table each day because "I know a lot of your children are already reading and writing." Many parents nodded and smiled beatifically.

My stomach turned over. The reading and writing skills of Henry's classmates are not news to me. I have watched the progression of birthday-party thank-you cards over the last few months--first kids signed their own names, then some were writing "thank you," then a few were including messages and addressing the envelopes. For his birthday in June, Henry signed each card with a large "H," sometimes an "E" with up to eight cross-bars, and some stickers.

I raised my hand. "I know a lot of kids are already reading," I said, flushing with embarrassment, "but Henry has only just learned to write his name." It felt like a confession--Hi, my name is Meghan, and I have failed my child.

And then this other mom, the one who is so pretty and so nice with her hot husband and beautiful children, the one I have envied because her children will likely require far less therapy than mine, raised her hand. "My son comes home talking about how other kids can read and write, and he can't do those things yet. What can I say to him?" She had tears in her eyes.

See, here's the thing about parents. Almost everyone will tell you--if not to your face, then in their Facebook updates--what their child is doing well. My daughter's reading! My three-year-old solved for "x" in this equation! My first grader won first prize in the science fair for inventing a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon! They don't say that their kid threw sand in another kid's face or that they're having trouble expunging the word "idiot" from their 4-year-old's vocabulary.

So those of us whose kid is not reading and has not yet solved for "x" watch our beloved offspring pretend to shoot the cat with his tinker toy blaster and think that we are perhaps failing at this most important of jobs. Worse, we think we're alone.

After the meeting, which I left with a list of 14 things I could to do to become a better parent, a few of the parents stayed around, turning over art projects to see whose kid had made what. (Henry's jack-o-lantern was the one with three noses and the eyes on its chin. For the record, he knows where eyes and noses go. He just thinks it's scarier with them all mixed up.) One woman told me her daughter thought Henry was hilarious because he said he was making a pizza with penises and poop on top, which is yet another thing I won't be posting on Facebook. This other mom, whose son is a certified genius--the kid who made his phone number out of Legos when we had a playdate two years ago--said, "I am so glad to hear that Harper's not the only one who's making fart and poop jokes."

At least Henry is in distinguished company.

Love and marriage

2010-10-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

Lately Henry wants to marry Amelia.

"That's sweet," I told him when he first brought it up last week, "but you're not really supposed to marry your sister."

Henry glared at me and crossed his arms. "I don't care, I'm going to marry her anyway."

So, you know, fine with me. I'm certainly not going to argue the point with him. By the time he's old enough to marry, the thought of marrying his sister will make his skin crawl. In fact, after watching Simon and I snipe at each other for a few more years, the thought of marrying ANYONE will make his skin crawl. As well it should.

Unfortunately for poor Henry, Amelia does not share his ardor.

"Amelia," Henry said to her yesterday, taking her little face in his hands, "do you want to marry me?"

Amelia pursed her tiny mouth, looked him in the eyes, and gently replied, "No, Haya."

And Henry began to bawl. Just really bawl as though his heart had been shattered.

I held him and stroked his hair and tried to think of something to say to ease the sting of rejection. "You can marry me!" I offered. That's weird, right? But he's a 4-year-old asking his 2-year-old sister to marry him, so we've already veered off the beaten path here.

"I don't want to marry you," Henry growled. "I want to marry Amelia." And the tears began anew.

For the record, that officially makes no one in our family who wants to be married to me.

Lies and the lying liars that tell them

2010-09-22T11:01:00.001-07:00

Oh, God, it's been weeks. Weeks! I want to write more often, I really do. It's just that lately people have been offering me money for tedious jobs that suck up all of my blogging time, and I like being paid. Of course, I haven't actually been paid yet. Never be a contractor.

So now, at 4 years plus 3 months old, Henry is waist deep into lying.

It started a couple of weeks ago, as we were reading William's Doll, a book written in the 70s about a boy who wants a doll, and although his neighbor and older brother make fun of him for it, his liberated grandmother--looking smart in an orange-and-brown plaid suit--finally buys him the blue-eyed baby he yearns for.

Henry was quiet for a few minutes after we finished the book, then said, "I told Theo I want a doll, and he laughed at me and called me a stupid-head." Henry's eyes were downcast, his voice tinged with sorrow. It was a very convincing story.

Except that I know Henry, and I know that despite years of me pushing dolls on him, he has never shown even a flickering interest in them. He likes real babies, he likes certain stuffed animals, and he likes dressing up like a princess. But if he were in a room of only dolls, he would simply run in circles to entertain himself. It is as if dolls do not exist for him.

So I was suspicious of his doll story. But he repeated it to Simon, and then to my mom, and I began to wonder.

Then a couple of days ago, after Henry had been stomping and growling all evening, I asked him if he was stressed out about school starting. Henry climbed into my lap, and said, in that same small, sad voice, "Well, the other day I was playing with this little school, and my teacher called me an idiot."

This I did not believe, even for a second, which was all it took for the story to change to the teacher grabbing the toy student from him. Then it was his friend Brighton grabbing the toy student and hitting him. Eventually we distilled it down to Brighton taking the toy student after Henry sent the student down the toy slide. No grabbing, no hitting, no teachers calling Henry an idiot.

I proceeded to explain the importance of telling the truth, how I can't believe him it he tells me things that didn't really happen, how other people could get into trouble. He nodded thoughtfully and asked, "Is Chewbacca a good guy or a bad guy?"

Last night my sister was babysitting, and Henry gave her an elaborate story about how I make him wear pull-ups at night because it is too hard for him to climb up and down the ladder to his bunk bed for nighttime bathroom visits. And, you know, Henry hasn't worn pull-ups in months. I didn't even know we still had any pull-ups in the house.

"But he was so convincing," said my sister.

So, fabulous. He's not just a liar--he's a very good liar. Can you imagine what this kid will be like as a teenager?

Poo-poo, the sequel

2010-08-27T15:39:00.001-07:00

I know, I know. It's been weeks! I am getting blog lazy (blazy?). That's what happens when I have an actual work project to spend my time on.

I know I wrote about poop talk months ago, but it's returned to our house with a vengeance lately. This time it's not so much Henry as it is Amelia. Now that she's officially 2, there is nothing funnier to her than the word "poo-poo."

This is what it's like to read a book with her now:

Me: In the great green room, there was a telephone and a red...

Amelia: Poo poo

Me: Balloon. And a picture of... [pause to turn the page]

Amelia: Poo poo

Me: No, the cow jumping over the...

Amelia: Poo poo

Me: No more poo poo! If you keep saying 'poo poo,' I'm closing the book.

Amelia: OK, no more poo poo.

Me: Thank you. And there were three little bears, sitting on...

Amelia: Pee pee

And of course it's like hearing something funny at a funeral, right? It's not really that funny, but because you know you're not supposed to laugh, it is hilarious. So I set my face in a stern gaze, and then I snort, and then I guffaw, and soon I am crying tears of unadulterated mirth and Amelia is grinning in victory.

Science camp

2010-08-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

I had really started to make peace with myself as a mother. Sure, I was a little moody, a little loud, a little insecure. But I was doing my best, and that counts for something, right? RIGHT?

The problem is that sometimes my best sucks.

For the past two weeks Henry has been attending afternoon camps at the Lawrence Hall of Science. The first one was about bugs and the second was about pond life. The camps are awesome--real bugs, real salamanders, real crayfish--and Henry loves them. They have been amazing learning opportunities for him, and just absolute showcases of parental ineptitude for me.

I don't know what it is about the camps. Maybe it's the fact that the Lawrence Hall of Science is 30 minutes away. Or that once I park, it takes another 5 to 10 minutes to unload everyone, descend the giant staircase, and circle the entire O-shaped building to get to the classroom. Maybe it's the mid-morning swim lessons that leave me with an hour and a half to kill before science camp--too much time to purposefully head to the classroom, too little time to go home or run any significant errands. Whatever it is, I am just a mess around the whole thing.

It took me two days to remember I was supposed to pack him a snack, and when I finally figured it out, all I had to leave him were some sandwich wedges bearing Amelia's tiny bite marks. One day we were at LHS an hour early, and he was still late because I realized minutes before class started that I had left my purse clear on the other side of the building.

This week I didn't even pack lunches, preferring to spend a small fortune in the LHS cafeteria, which was nice, but it meant his snacks consisted of either a free-floating banana with his name written in ballpoint pen on the peel (3 days) or pretzels from the vending machine (1 day). Sometimes I drew a heart next to his name on the banana peel to prove I care, however half-assed the snacks I provided.

Each day I'd see the other kids lining up with their snack bags, their parents looking all grown up and organized, and I'd send poor Henry in with his lone banana. Or I wouldn't see the other kids because we were late, and they would already be sitting in the circle, name tags on, and I would send Henry in and place the solitary banana beside their neatly-arranged pouches. I wanted to cry for my son.

So it has been a bad week, one in which I have been driving up to 70 miles a day to and from various summer activities, while an unfinished 20-page research report due at the end of the month sits neglected on my laptop. And yesterday at pick-up time it finally all came to a head.

I had one phone call to make yesterday--just one!--regarding a part-time job with my old company. I told the woman I'd call between 4 and 5 p.m. Amelia and I picked Henry up at 4, and then they both wanted to climb the giant DNA outside, and I said fine, seven minutes. I warned them at five minutes, and again at two minutes. I announced a one minute warning. Then I told them it was time to go.

"I just have to climb through once more," said Henry, starting in from the front end. It had taken him all seven minutes for him to make it across once.

"No," I said, firmly, "I have to get home to make a phone call."

By then Amelia had run off squealing, her greatest entertainment these days being to either run or hide when I say we have to go somewhere. It took two minutes to chase her down, and another minute to talk Henry off the DNA, and finally, my brittle patience barely holding together as we walked to the car, Henry said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

And I just...you know...grrrrrrrr. What could I say, "no"? "No, you can't go to the bathroom"? "Hold it for the 30 minute ride home"? Of course not. So instead I said, "Dammit!" and dragged the two of them down the giant stairs to the bathroom where Henry proceeded to tell me he had to poop. Poop! This kid can take 25 minutes to poop.

This was all very frustrating in itself, and then my loopy, child-addled mind decided to take it to the next level by declaring this event to be symbolic of the fact that I will NEVER get a job, and that, in fact, I have RUINED my life by staying home lo these many years. Then it pointed out with great indignation that Simon has NEVER, EVER had to choose between getting a child to the bathroom and making a business call.

I started audibly weeping, right there, in front of both children in the Lawrence Hall of Science ladies' room stall. I continued grousing all the way back to the car. I buckled the kids into their car seats while loudly declaring that it was absolutely unfair that Daddy never had to take on drop-off or pick-up responsibilities. As I drove away I saw that the lady on the bench in front of our parking space was one of Henry's teachers. So, you know, swell. I hope they give him an extra hug today.

Incidentally, I still made it home in time to make my phone call. So I further ruined my kids for nothing.

On giant stuffed animals and heartbreak

2010-08-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

This is supposed to be Digit, the funny, Gilbert-Gottfried-voiced sidekick on Henry's favorite cartoon, Cyberchase.

But, of course, it is not Digit. It's not even Gilbert Gottfried. It is an unknown PBS intern wearing a large, hollow, stuffed-animal as a suit, peering out from a mesh grate in the mouth.

When I told Henry we were going to meet Digit, I'm not sure what he expected. I don't know if he thought Digit would still be a cartoon, or if maybe he thought he would become a cartoon, too. He may have imagined the two of them solving math problems and fighting the evil Hacker together.

Whatever he was expecting, I could tell by the look on his face when the real-life Digit came back from her bathroom break that it wasn't this awkward, Digit-ish fat suit.

"It's Digit!" I said. "Say hi to Digit!"

Henry slowly walked up and let Digit engulf his tiny hand with her giant, four-fingered wing. He smiled politely as Digit danced.

Digit's KQED representative friend did most of the talking. "Digit is so happy to be here!" she said.

"Henry loves Digit," I grinned wildly, trying to make up for Henry's lack of enthusiasm. Most of the other kids at the science museum didn't appear to have even heard of Digit, and I felt bad for both Digit and the KQED lady. "Cyberchase is his favorite show," I added anxiously, suddenly fearing that this lukewarm reception for Digit could lead PBS to pull the plug on the cartoon.

We snapped photos and took the free activity books and stickers, then said goodbye. But Henry lagged behind as we headed for the roller coaster exhibit.

"Was there something you wanted to say to Digit?" I asked him.

Henry looked thoughtful, then nodded. "I want to ask him what it was like to live with Hacker."

It was a good question. It was, in fact, a New York Times caliber question, and was a testament to Henry's extensive knowledge of the character's backstory. But this Digit had no voice.

"I don't think Digit can answer that, honey," I told him. "He's probably lost his voice talking to all those kids as he toured the country."

Henry took one last, longing look back at Digit. "Yeah, probably," he said.

When you're 4, anything is possible. The real Digit could show up and take you on a cyber adventure. Tyrannosaurus Rex could come alive and roam the Museum of Natural History. A fat man with flying livestock could slide down a blocked chimney and deliver a new Lego set.

But, alas, Digit is just one in a long string of overstuffed costumes that will show up when he's expecting an animated hero. Is this what growing up is? A long stream of disappointments as magic, hope, and eventually your very soul fade to gray? Or is that just me?

Now I have cats

2010-07-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

Last week I went and adopted two cats, because what I really, really needed were two more creatures depending on me for their welfare and nourishment.

The acquisition of these cats was the result of a skillfully executed emotional blackmail campaign on the part of my children. It started with our visit to Cleveland, and Henry's deep infatuation with Roy, my cousin's boxer. "I love Roy," Henry sighed, over and over again. "Can we get a dog like Roy?"

"That's so sweet!" I said. "And NO." We had this experience adopting a dog about three years ago, also immediately after returning from a vacation. The dog, despite a misleading show in the socialization yard at the SPCA, did not like small children. She did, however, enjoy rolling in dog and cat feces. Frequently. She was also incontinent, literally leaking pee around the house as she walked. The dog was not, to put it politely, a good fit for our family.

But I saw how much Henry loved Roy, and I recognized that however cheerfully I may talk them up, our goldfish will never fill that fuzzy, cuddly place in his heart. So the idea of cats came about as a compromise. Furry and nuzzly, but not so needy. That was my thinking.

They are lovely cats. Four-year-old siblings (brother and sister) who were surrendered because their owners lost a job and had to move to a no-cat location. They are friendly and pretty and have yet to swat or bite, even in the face of Henry and Amelia's aggressive attempts at affection.

We are still in the "adjustment period," which, according to the SPCA literature, can last from one week to several months. Our adjustment period involves a great deal of plaintive howling and knocking things off tables in the very small hours of the morning. It was irritating the first night, infuriating the second night, and by the third night I was sobbing and calling them "monstrous pieces of sh*t." (Have I mentioned that I have some mood issues related to lack of sleep?) Now I lock them in the downstairs bathroom when the howling begins, and we are all happier as a result.

Oh, and their names are Jessie and Woody. Like from Toy Story. I had some wry, clever names lined up for them, references that would have made me smile when I called them, and maybe have helped endear these quadrupeds to me. But apparently, my kids were the last things in my house I got to name.

Vacation

2010-07-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

We have just returned from our two-week sojourn to Cleveland and New Jersey. I know what you're thinking--the glamour, the excitement. Please, your jealousy is unbecoming.

But here's the thing with small children: it doesn't matter where you take them. The Great Lakes Science Center is just as interesting to them as the Louvre. More interesting, even. Besides, I haven't seen my Cleveland relatives since my wedding, 6 years ago, when I was too anxious and emaciated to talk to anyone.

I'll spare you the day-by-day details of the vacation. Instead, here are a few thoughts:

1. Cross-country travel with small children is the most effective way to dispel the fear that they're growing up too fast. I mean, I love these little babies, but I will love them just as much when I can read a book on the airplane without having to repeatedly apologize to the flight attendant for false alarms with the call button.

2. The good citizens of Cleveland are seriously upset over LeBron James going to Miami. So much so that the evening news identified him only as "The Traitor" on the onscreen tag.

3. I have more cousins than I realized who were secretly given up for adoption decades ago. It's not a closet of skeletons with that family, it's a freaking clown car.

4. The guards at the American Museum of Natural History know that if you are visiting with children under 5, you're looking for "Gum Gum," the Easter Island head in Night at the Museum. They will approach you and offer directions to Gum Gum without even asking if that's what you want to see.

5. The Morris/Essex line of the NJ Transit does not run from Penn Station after midnight, at least not from the NJ Transit area I was waiting in, even though the schedules all say it does, and there are no NJ Transit employees there at that hour. Oh, and a cab from Penn Station to Summit, NJ, will run you about $150 with tip. FYI.

6. We spent more than $200 for our day in NYC visiting the Museum of Natural History (not the same day as the $150 cab ride, clearly). We spent $10 the next day getting iced coffee and Munchkins at the Dunkin' Donuts and hanging around a New Providence playground. Our kids were just as happy, proving my original point that it doesn't matter where you take small children.

One more thing I've been chewing on these past couple of weeks. My cousin Kathleen pointed out that although my blog makes it seem as though I am constantly overwhelmed with parenting, I am not a bad parent in person. She even said I have a "calming effect" on my kids, which she would probably take back if she had witnessed the argument between Amelia and I this morning about the fact that her new battery-operated Hello Kitty toothbrush IS NOT A TOY.

But Kathleen is right. I may be feeling my way through the dark with this parenting stuff, but I'm not doing such a bad job. (Cut to 15 years later, where I sit sobbing and apologizing during the family sessions with my kids' therapist, finally knowing for certain that I was so, so wrong about the toothbrush.)

Bees

2010-06-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

For months I have been reminding my children to wear shoes when they are running through our back lawn, which, thanks to a field of flowering clover, has become a festive gathering place for honeybees.

My kids usually refuse to put on shoes, and I have stopped trying to make them, because, Christ, they're not my feet. I have better things to do than chase down preschoolers as they yell "hide!" and race away at the sight of me holding their sneakers. (I don't always do those better things, but I could be doing better things. It's more the principal of the thing.) My thinking is, a good sting might persuade them to listen to me in the future.

But it's been dozens of hours of bare feet and bees, and no one has gotten stung. Until I slipped my shoes off the other day. My feet were bare for about 45 seconds before I felt a slight pressure on the underside of my right foot. Thirty seconds later the pressure had turned to agony, and it was all I could do to resist unleashing a string of profanities that would have made my grandmother cry.

Instead, I grinned tightly, told my kids I was fine, and hopped into the kitchen for some ice. I suppressed my own sobbing for fear that I might frighten the babies. It felt like a good parent moment, putting their need to feel safe above my need to roll on the ground shouting, "Oh, f***," over and over again.

And then Henry came in.

"Mom?" he asked, his eyebrows scrunched in concern.

"Yes, honey," I said, rocking back and forth as I held the sandwich bag of ice over my arch.

"That bee spent all day collecting pollen so it could make honey for the baby bees, and you killed her," he said, crossing his arms and scowling in condemnation.

Now I'm thinking I could start a career of talking about my kids to teen pregnancy prevention classes.

Better

2010-06-24T13:43:00.001-07:00

I think I was just never a baby person.

I loved my kids when they were babies. I loved the gurgling and the cuddling and the toothless grins. But I could have done without the multiple nap-times and trying to guess whether the cry was related to hunger or wetness or an aneurysm. Also the spit-up and the smooshed food all over everything. And various rashes from the smooshed food settling into skin folds. And the night waking. And teething.

But suddenly, my children are no longer babies. They still scream about tooth brushing. They still push (Henry) and whack people on the head with trucks (Amelia). They still whine and demand. But they also talk, they hug, they tell jokes. They can carry their own dinosaurs to the car, pick up their own Legos, and put their clothes in the hamper. They often say "please," "thank you," and "I love you." They have become people, these shorties of mine.

Just as suddenly, these years that just six months ago stretched so long before me seem precariously short. In September, both kids will be in part-time preschool. A year later, Henry will be in full-time kindergarten. Three years from now, they'll both be school kids, and I'll have a job and possibly time to go to the bathroom by myself, and we'll continue slipping towards the day they take wing and I become a tiny speck behind them.

But for now we have time together to lie on the grass and see what bugs we can find. We have self-serve frozen yogurt after a doctor's visit. We have a game we play where they say they want to go home even though we already ARE home, and I get the diaper bag and the car key only to say a second later, "Wait a minute..." and they explode into laughter.

I told this to my mom last night, and she smiled and said, "It gets even better," which is wonderful news, but for now I'm just grateful that it's this good.

Anxieties can come true

2010-06-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was Henry's birthday party at Children's Fairyland. It was, to hear the talk in our house, the most anticipated event of the year. The talk went like this:

H: "Is my Fairyland party today?"

Me: "Not today!"

H: "Is it tomorrow?"

Me: "Not tomorrow! Soon! Very soon!"

H: (stamping, shouting) "I want it to be today!"

And this went on EVERY MORNING for the two weeks leading up to it. Toward the end I was threatening to cancel the damn party if the tantrums didn't stop.

I am a terrible parent when my children whine.

So I knew this was a big deal to Henry. It would likely be the highlight of his young life until he starts science camp at Habitot in July. The pressure, for me, was intense. I was on the phone to Fairyland every couple of days. First to follow up on our party application, then to follow up on the invitations, then to increase our head count, then to follow up on the increased head count. Fairyland party planners appeared to be about as dependable as cartoon pixies.

And then I got an Evite reply from a mom that said "Cool! We're going to a party at Cinderella's Shoe at the same time!" And so I was back on the phone to Fairyland. The pixies assured me that Cinderella's Shoe was indeed reserved for Henry, they had the paperwork right there.

You see where this is headed, right? Of course you do. I saw where it was headed, too, but I also have years of psychotherapy under my belt, and was thus able to dismiss my increasing feelings of doom as the product of my dysfunctional upbringing.

Towards the end of the pre-party puppet show, I noticed people I didn't know carrying balloons and presents to Cinderella's Shoe. I raced to the first person in a Children's Fairyland T-shirt I could find. "WE'RE supposed to have Cinderella's Shoe!" I cried, stamping and shouting.

A flurry of activity followed. First the Fairy Party Department confirmed that we did have the shoe. Then they returned and said that the other party had brought their paperwork confirming their ownership of the shoe. Did I have my paperwork? I did not. I had thought that my repeated communications plus close to $300 was sufficient to reserve the shoe. It was not.

By then the puppet show was over. Henry skipped over to me, beaming in the golden crown the puppets had bestowed upon him in honor of his birthday, and said, "Let's go to the shoe!" When I told him we were not going to having the party at the shoe, he began to wail.

And that was when I lost it on the fairies. I don't remember my exact words, just the tears in my eyes and the word "unacceptable" shouted again and again and again. It was both exhilarating and sorely humiliating as I realized the parents of Henry's friends were all watching my very public fury. When I was finished, the Fairyland party staff assured me that I would be receiving a complete refund.

"Thank you," I smiled, sweetly.

We moved the party to the Japanese Tea Garden, which was pretty, but, as Henry pointed out, had no shoe-shaped slide. He remained doubtful until a few minutes later, when Pirate Luna arrived with her box of balloons and face paints. Henry was blissful, making hiring the pirate the best $120 I will ever spend.

For nearly $300, the Fairyland fiasco was an abomination. Once it was free, it was really quite lovely. And in the end, I felt strangely triumphant. In terms of party planning, the worst had happened, and I had survived. Better than survived, I got my money back.

Four

2010-06-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Henry is 4.

What does this mean, this 4? It means the big-boy bunk bed will arrive in a week or two. It means I lay out the clothes and he can dress himself (it doesn't mean he always does it, but sometimes he emerges from his room ready for school and to me it is no less amazing than Superman in the phone booth). It means he talks on the phone with Grandma and then hangs up, because they no longer need me as an intermediary.

Today I went to Babies 'R Us for summer sleep sacks for Amelia, following a poop-smearing incident that convinced me that we will require sleep sacks for some time to come. I was browsing the sale clothes, and could find nothing in Henry's size. It took me a minute, and suddenly, blindingly, I realized that Babies 'R Us no longer applies to Henry. Henry's babyhood is officially over, from both a chronological and retail perspective. Those hours trolling the aisles for bottle liners, binkies, baby food, and diapers while Henry cooed from the car seat that never quite fit in the cart are scenes from the past.

Henry isn't the only one moving on and up in the world. I had an interview for a long-term, part-time contract position at a pharmaceutical company today. I think it went well. Which means I could have saved myself the frantic sobbing last night and this morning that I was so severely under qualified they would laugh me out of the building. When I grow up I want to find some self-esteem.

What keeps me up at night

2010-06-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

1. Three months ago, I said yes to cohosting a bike party/fundraiser for Henry's preschool. I love saying yes. I love that moment where everyone loves me and I feel like a good and charitable person for something I don't have to think about for another 12 weeks.

I hate throwing parties. I hate the tiny details like number of forks and how many jingle bells for the kids' craft table. I hate the unpredictability of using a public park (Will there be anyone else there having a party? Will that bearded guy be bathing in the drinking fountain? Will there be vomit in the sand?).

But I went for the immediate glory, and now I'm left with throwing a party that has netted only about $30 after the money I've spent on food and supplies. The worst part is that I'm throwing another party next Saturday for Henry's birthday. I get so caught up in the "yes" moment that I fail to consider things like my son's birthday.

2. We're having Henry's party at Children's Fairyland. And hiring a pirate. And there will be 20 kids there.

How did this happen? I used to scoff--I still scoff--at stories of over-the-top preschool birthday parties. A pony? Ha ha. Hired a bartender? Hilarious! Now I'm throwing a circus for a 4th birthday party.

3. I am going bald.

About three weeks ago I was diagnosed with androgenic alopecia. Female pattern baldness. It's hereditary, except no one in my family, male or female, for at least three generations, has ever lost their hair.

I don't know what else to say about this except that I spent the first week wanting to die. I am doing much better now, but at 4 in the morning I often lie awake wondering how long I have before I have to live out my life in a wig.

Poo-poo

2010-05-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

Lately Henry is discovering potty talk, particularly the multiple uses for the word "poop" and variations thereof (poo-poo, poopy diaper, poo-poo boy, and poo-poo girl, to name a few). For special occasions, he wheels out his absolute dirtiest word: BOTTOM. He relishes the word. He says it slowly, in a voice deeper than the way he usually speaks, drawing out the first vowel (Baaaaah-tum).

Which brings me to the nuances of policing potty talk. Technically, bottom is not a bad word. In fact, considering the range of possible terms describing that physical region, bottom is maybe worse than "buttocks" and more polite than "rear end," but it is clearly on the cleaner end of the spectrum than "ass."

So I have to consider several factors, such as location, intent, and audience. When he tells Amelia that the squirrel in the yard is a poo-poo head, and she laughs, I let it slide. When he tells me dinner tastes like bottom, I object.

Henry has noted that there are exceptions, and he has become sort of a potty talk negotiator. The other night at dinner, when I invoked the no-poop-talk-while-eating rule after he referred to Amelia as a poopy diaper, he immediately apologized. Thirty seconds later he sighed and flipped his wrist and said, "Oh, poo."

"Henry," I warned.

"I'm not saying 'poo' like what comes out of your bottom," he argued. "I'm just saying, 'Oh, poo.'" He flipped his wrist again in demonstration.

And then I laughed, thereby ensuring that potty talk at the table will continue indefinitely.

Ghosts and lies

2010-05-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, I asked Henry who threw the pillows off the living room couch and he lied to me.

"It was a ghost," he said.

I went into a whole spiel about how I wasn't mad about the pillows, but it was very, very, VERY important to tell the truth, and I would be mad if he did not tell the truth right this very second.

"Mommy," he said, looking me square in the eyes. "The ghost came into the room over here, and then he disappeared. Then he was by the table, like this [scary face with waving hands over his head]. Then he flew past the couch and knocked all of the pillows on the floor. Then he left."

It was a good story. It was a great story, actually, because I spent at least a minute considering the possibility that the pillows on the floor were, in fact, the work of a ghost. Remember the kitchen chairs scene in Poltergeist? I had this eerie vision of me returning to the room to find the couch cushions stacked like Stonehenge.

"Henry," I said, "you should be a writer when you grow up."

Henry grunted and rolled his eyes. "I already told you, when I grow up I'm going to be a princess."

Never sign up for anything

2010-05-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

I signed up to canvass for Measure E, the Alameda parcel tax to keep their fine, high-scoring public schools alive.

Do you know anything about canvassing? It is a slice of actual hell right here on earth. Here's what it looks like:

Ding dong. Barking dog. Irritated noises from inside. Slow shuffling. The door cracks. "Hello?" someone says, warily.

"Hi!" I say, trying to suppress my desire to run or vomit or run while vomiting. "I'm Meghan, your neighbor from down the street, and this is my son, Henry [I bring Henry on the mistaken assumption that it may keep people from cursing at me]. I'm volunteering for Measure E, and I'm just trying to find out whether you've heard about Measure E, and if so, if you're planning on supporting it." I smile, hopefully.

There are three possible scenarios that follow:

1. Person is not the homeowner, is possibly a son or nephew or friend of a resident teen, appears to have just woken up at 3 pm, and would likely test positive for more than one illicit substance. He (almost invariably a he) is not a voter, does not care, and takes a flyer which no one will ever see again.

2. Person is a supporter of Measure E! He or she shares stories of canvassing for parcel taxes over the years, wishes me luck.

3. Person is opposed to Measure E, to illegal immigrants, and/or to the Obama administration, and would like to take this opportunity to vent 50 years of fury over being last picked at wall ball on me and my 4-year-old, as I say "thank you" and back slowly down the stairs.

There are 62 individual households on my list. I have contacted 10. That was more than a week ago. Since then I have avoided all contact with neighbors. My faith in humanity is diminished.

I hate Alameda.

***On bringing Henry: He was quiet for the first three houses. Then he would stand a few feet away from me on the porch and loudly ask questions like, "Does a skeleton live here?" "Why is this porch so dark?" and "What smells?"***

I also signed up for a writing class. It's called "Finding Your Writer's Voice," from the Writing Salon in Berkeley. On the plus side, the teacher is very nice and employs the Amherst Method, which involves the radical notion that creativity and talent are more productively fostered when people are told the strengths of their writing instead of what sucks about it. On the minus side, everyone in the class is so much better than I am that I again expend a great deal of energy fighting the run-vomit urge.

Also, there's one guy whose "supportive" comments are always something like this: "I liked how that sentence about dead grandmothers was completely incomprehensible." Asswipe.

Rejected

2010-04-26T13:20:00.001-07:00

It's been a week since I've written, which breaks my two-postings-a-week pledge, which matters to no one but me, but still rankles. At this point in my life, clean laundry, regularly vacuumed floors, and semi-regular blog postings are all I can point to as accomplishments, so they take on ridiculous importance.

I know, I know, it is waaaaaay past time to get a job, and I will get one just as soon as I can figure out what I'm good at.

So this morning, as I was about to drive Henry to school, he began to wail that he did not want to go with me, he wanted to go with Daddy. This is a simple request, no? Simon was gone all last week, so Henry wanted Daddy time. Also, Daddy drives a beat-up Mitsubishi truck that requires Henry to sit in the front seat, and that is way cooler than riding in the back of my tiny minivan. Of course a 4-year-old wants to go with Daddy in the truck. It is nothing personal.

And it absolutely slayed me. The ride to preschool three days a week is our time. We talk, we sing, we laugh. It is also one of the few times that I have a distinct destination and arrival time. Sure, we go to the park or the grocery store, but does it matter if we go at 10 am or 3 pm, on Tuesday or Thursday? No, it does not. Preschool drop-off is a rare anchor in my amorphous days.

But perhaps the real issue is the fact that Henry no longer needs me in the way he once did. His all-Mommy, all-the-time years are behind him. We are entering the era of Daddy, soon to be followed by the era of friends, and eventually the era of leaving home altogether except for the occasional 11 pm phone request for extra money.

I am done. Finished! I am Jennifer Aniston to Simon's Angelina Jolie (am I the only one who reads Us magazine?).

Holy crap, I need a job.

St. Teresa

2010-04-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

Some days my inferiority complex is so fierce that seeing a cool hair cut on someone in line at Peet's can make me want to shave my messy, split-ended, thinning, graying hair and just give up on hair and the world all at once.

Today is one of those days. Henry got a CD from his friend Harper's birthday party yesterday (Harper is the 4 year old who can read and do math, so you can add that to the complex) with all of Harper's favorite songs. We listened to it in the car on the way to drop Henry off at preschool, and as Weezer blared, I was sick with the thought that my musical taste pales in comparison to this preschooler's, and that Henry's emotional growth would somehow be stunted from listening to Rihanna and Ludacris as a child instead of some soul-stirring indy group.

So after I dropped Henry off I started playing some iTunes to make myself feel better, and "St. Teresa" came on. It reminded me of one night in college, when I was living in the guest room at my aunt and uncle's house in New Jersey, and Joan Osborne was the musical guest on Letterman. I was lonely and depressed and empty, but it was spring, and there was a full moon out the window, and there was "St. Teresa," and I felt electric. Like I meant something. Like I was waiting to begin. I was lost, but I was new, and a blank future stretched ahead, vast and mysterious. I hear the song, and I remember having a burning faith in myself, and for a few minutes my grown-up prison fades, I see an empty road ahead, and I feel like moving forward.

Incidentally, I also feel better when I listen to Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama." His mama was a crack fiend, and he still appreciates her.

You know you suffer from a lack of self-esteem when "at least I'm not a crack fiend" is a pep-talk.

Great moments in parenting

2010-04-16T10:31:00.001-07:00

1. Picking Henry up from school Wednesday. I walk in, excited to see him, to see the way he breaks into a smile and a run when he sees me. Instead he scowls and walks right past my open arms. "I want Grandma to pick me up," he grumbles.

"But I'm here!" I say.

"I don't want you," he says.

I smile and tell him he is welcome to stay at school until Friday, when Grandma will come pick him up.

2. Walking to the car after picking Henry up from school. We're headed down the street, and Henry sees a person walking toward us.

"Is that Daddy?" he asks.

"No," I say firmly.

"Yes it is! It's Daddy! That is Daddy!" says Henry. "Daddy! DADDY!"

"Ha, ha! You crazy nut!" I say, lightly, as the black woman Henry was referring to scowls at us. The child is clearly messing with my head.

3. Thursday afternoon, trying to clean the house. After an hour spent folding two loads of laundry, changing a dirty diaper, vacuuming, and cleaning the kitchen, I tell Henry to pick up the game pieces to Busytown.

"Aaaagh," he says. "Why do I have to do all the jobs around here?"

Potty training, completed

2010-04-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

Although Henry has been potty trained for more than a year, he has still been wearing diapers at night. All the books I've read say that you'll know your child is ready to go diaper-free when he wakes up dry most mornings. Henry has never woken up dry in his life. I was starting to worry that his first sleepover would come along and he'd be bringing a size 11 Pampers with him.

And then Monday night he simply decided he was done. He refused to put the diaper on, and I said fine, expecting a long night of changing sheets. Instead, I woke him up once at 12:30 to pee, and he stayed dry the entire night.

Last night was the same, except that I didn't wake up at 12:30, I woke up at 4:30. I debated, and decided to take him to the bathroom anyway, for fear that he'd wet the bed at 5:30 and then be up for the day. He peed, but he wouldn't go back to sleep. I had, it seemed, made a horrible miscalculation. After 20 minutes, he was pleading to get up, I was pleading for him to go back to sleep, and he asked for Daddy instead. Simon sat with him calmly until he drifted off again, this time until 8 am. Still dry.

Tonight I'll just let the poor child sleep and let the pee fall where it may.

But there you go. For all the books, videos, and consultants related to potty training, they just kind of figure it out for themselves.

Talking to my 3-year-old about death

2010-04-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

I was dreading having to tell Henry that his Great-Grandpa had died. I remembered the fly funeral we had a few weeks back. Henry had been inconsolable then. What would happen now that a person he loved was gone?

I called him into the kitchen, then I crouched down and put my hands on his shoulders.

"I have some very sad news," I said. "Honey, Great-Grandpa died."

Henry stared around the room for a minute, then asked, "When will Granny get a new Great-Grandpa?"

"She's not going to get a new Great-Grandpa," I said, gently. "You only get one."

"Will I die?" Henry asked.

"Not for a very, very, very long time," I told him. "So long you can't even imagine it." God willing, I added in my head.

Then Henry placed his hands on my shoulders, rested his forehead on mine, and looked into my eyes. "Mommy," he asked. "Can I play a video game?"

Thus ended our first brush with death in the family. I managed to eke out a 5-minute memorial by setting up a laptop slide show of some photos I had of Philip, but though I was misty eyed, Henry just said, "NOW can I play a video game?"

It was, apparently, less traumatic than I had expected.

Lost and found

2010-04-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday I lost Henry at the Bay Area Discovery Museum.

I was doing my best to keep track of both of my super-mobile children in the midst of approximately a million other kids who were taking advantage of spring break plus Free Wednesday. And by "doing my best" I mean that I scanned the play area or room we were in every couple of minutes to locate one or both of them, then I turned back to my adult friends.

This strategy worked until we hit the train-table building. I saw Henry run in. Then I talked to my friend Nancy, made sure Amelia didn't get run over by the movable crane, scanned around for Henry, helped Amelia secure a train car, talked to my friend Jennifer, scanned around for Henry, talked to Nate and Nancy and Jennifer. About 15 minutes later, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually seen Henry since we entered.

I searched the building, searched the tunnel, the bridge of the play boat, the funny mirror room (I'm not trying to make myself look better, but you see why it took me so long to realize he was gone. Incidentally, this is exactly how I lost my pet toad in the backyard 30 years ago.). I organized a search party of two 4-year-olds to crawl into the tunnel to look for him.

Finally I grabbed Amelia and left the building. I scanned the writhing walkways and play areas, quickly realizing that unless Henry had found a flare gun, I had no chance of finding him in the crowd. It was exactly at that moment that I heard a blond woman asking the picnic area if anyone was looking for a boy named Henry.

"Me!" I said. "I'm looking for a boy named Henry!"

The blond woman was all smiles, and I felt relieved. As we walked to meet Henry, we ran into another employee of the museum who said, "Yeah, we've had him for a long time," and I felt like a slug.

But then Henry was there, running to me, hugging me, kissing me, and things were fine. I am officially out of the running for mother-of-the-year, but things were fine.

****

I am still a basket case, but I have not yelled at my kids since my last yelling-at-my-kids entry. Except for the time Henry was simultaneously kicking Amelia and poking her with a chopstick, and even I refuse to feel bad about that one.

PF Harris turns the page

2010-04-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

This is great-grandpa Philip F. Harris, walking with the kids to Thanksgiving dinner last year. He died this afternoon (afternoon in England, morning here). He was 92.

You'd think that would soften the blow. I mean, at 92, it's not an untimely death.

But death is always surprising to me. It's like those bookshelves in the old Scooby Doo cartoons, the ones that spin the character into a secret passage while everyone else is looking the other way. Suddenly I'm looking around the room, and everyone else is still here, and I'm thinking, "Where the hell is Philip?" My concept of life is that it's a closed room. And of course it's not. There are any number of exits that someone can slip out of at any moment.

At his birthday party last year, Philip gave a toast. He said the secret to a long life was to know when it is time to turn the page on some phase of life, and not to regret it, but to enjoy the next chapter.

Enjoy the next chapter, Philip. It has been my privilege to know you.

Brain sick

2010-03-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

It is incredibly hard for me to write at the moment. I am struggling again with my vaguely defined mental illness (Borderline personality disorder? Bipolar II? Pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder? I have yet to find two psychiatrists who agree on what is wrong with me.), and I am such a terrible, snapping, sobbing, unjust mother as a result that I am not sure how to live with myself, let alone craft a witty anecdote about it.

This morning, for no other reason than my children wouldn't eat anything except some high-sugar yogurt for breakfast, I threw their little IKEA breakfast bowls into the sink and mango-lime yogurt splashed everywhere. My self-loathing is already dangerously close to being too much to bear, and then the yogurt bowls, and Henry and Amelia's wide eyes, and, oh, I am in very bad shape.

I expend a great deal of energy trying to conceal my lunacy, so I'm not sure why I'm writing about it in a blog. Undoubtedly, this will be one of those things that comes back to haunt me during a job interview 10 years from now.

In the meantime, I tell Henry it is not his fault I am sad or mad, that I am sick in my brain.

"When are you going to get better?" he asks.

"Soon," I say, and I really, really, really hope that's true.

Really, really sorry

2010-03-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

So last night Simon and I had a big fight that was 100% my fault.

I hate that. Not just the fighting. I hate when there is absolutely no shred of substance to my side of the argument. I am not wronged, I am simply a stark-raving bitch. And this after he bid on those Giants tickets for me.

Simon and I talked and mostly made up this morning, after a chilly, glaring breakfast during which Henry kept trying to guess what was wrong. "Are you mad because Amelia spit out her sorbet last night?" "Is Daddy sad because I ate the Mommy-candy (a.k.a. dark chocolate)?" "How come sometimes you're nice Mommy and sometimes you're mad Mommy?"

I also yelled at Amelia because she wouldn't get out of the bathroom doorway so I could get dressed. Then she followed me into my room saying, "I sah-ee, I sah-ee," and trying to hug my shins.

I wither with shame.

I try to console myself with the thought that I am much more stable that I was six months ago. But, then, so is Afghanistan, and you see how that's working out for the innocent citizens. They're less likely to get blown up by drones at a daughter's wedding, but it's still a possibility.

For someone who wasn't beaten as a child, I am remarkably defensive. I see insult and malice behind every smile. And I fight back. I yell, I stomp, I scowl silently. Then I spend hours apologizing. I need to get business cards printed that say, "I'm sorry," so I can hand them out when my voice finally gives way.

Baseball and other games

2010-03-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

On an historic note, I just want to say how thrilled I am about the passage of the health care reform bill. Somehow, somewhere, the Democrats found their spines. God bless America!

Now back to me.

It pains me to admit this, because being completely self-righteous is one of my few joys in life, but my husband is wonderful.

Saturday night, at a fundraising auction for my former high school, I grew starry-eyed at the Giants' "Homerun" package listed in the auction catalog: a catered luxury booth for 18 people, 5 VIP parking passes, a ball autographed by every member of the 2010 team, and a Giants jacket. Two members of the group will be allowed on the field during the Giants batting practice. And if those members haven't passed out from the sheer enormity of it all, they get to spend the 7th inning stretch with the finest play-by-play man in major league baseball today, Jon Miller.

Simon joked that we should bid on it. I laughed. He bid. The alumni tables cheered. Simon dropped out at one point, and I kissed him for his efforts, and he bid again. More cheers. He dropped out again. He bid again.

So I am going to be on-field during batting practice, and I'm going to meet Jon Miller.

For the record, we're not just filthy rich people throwing our money around here. The winning bid was technically placed by Simon's engineering company, because he's going to fill the luxury box with clients. It actually ends up being cheaper than taking that many people to dinner. But batting practice, Jon Miller, the baseball: all mine, baby.

Simon's a good man.

I, on the other hand, continue my efforts to drive my kids into therapy before they're 10 years old.

Our latest issue has to do with Candy Land. I got it for Henry last week. I thought it would be a nice change of pace from video games, as well as something we could do together. And then Henry won. Once he got that first taste of victory, he wanted more.

Now it's like playing with John McEnroe. When he pulls ahead, by just a few spaces with a double purple card or by half the board with a Princess Frostina card, he laughs and dances around the room. "I'm winning!" he sings. When he falls behind, either because I slip through the Gumdrop Pass or he gets sent back to the candy cane forest, he throws himself to the ground and screams, "Noooooo!"

In spite of the histrionics, I refuse to let the boy cheat. "Two blues! Not six!" I tell him, making him slide his plastic gingerbread man back a few spaces. I am now the traffic cop of Candy Land. It is not fun for me, and not fun for him. Unless he's winning.

But that's the point of these games, right? Teaching kids to follow the rules of a game, teaching them how to win graciously, how to lose cheerfully. Or something. I mean, I am speaking as someone who once locked herself in the bathroom when a former boyfriend beat her at Scrabble. I only wish I had learned those lessons.

Of course, he's not learning those lessons. He just doesn't want to play Candy Land with me anymore.

Undertaker

2010-03-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday as I was cleaning the kitchen, or maybe not cleaning the kitchen--more likely I was staring at the pile of unread magazines on my counter with tears filling my eyes at the impossibility of it all--Henry came running in from the backyard, wailing.

I dropped to my knees and held him until he quieted down enough to speak. "I killed my friend the fly!" he said, between heaving sobs.

I told him he could come in and play with the big housefly that had been buzzing around the living room all morning. "That fly is not my friend!" he said through a fresh wave of tears.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Of course he's not." I felt callous for suggesting that his friend could be so easily replaced.

I suggested we have a funeral for his fly friend. Henry agreed, and led me outside to a tiny, half-smooshed fly on the patio.

"Thank you for being such a good friend to Henry, fly," I said as I scratched a thimble-sized hole in the dirt of the planter box and dropped the fly inside.

"Goodbye, fly," Henry added, tearfully.

We marked the grave with a cross made from two sticks tied with crab grass. As Henry ran off to play again, his heartbreak eased, I had one shining moment of feeling truly useful.

And then it was gone. As I was silently congratulating myself on being such an outstanding mother, unsupervised Amelia tumbled down a few stairs. More crying, more hugging. And the kitchen remains a mess.

Sunny day

2010-03-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

Today I will begin with a small confession: I am a little bit manic depressive. For about six months I was bordering on severely bipolar, but now I'm on a new birth control pill, and despite my $225-an-hour psychiatrist telling me that would never be enough to control my severe mental illness (that, in fact, I would require a lifetime of lithium if I wanted to stay out of a mental institution), the pill is enough, and I am back in the realm of normalcy. I may, arguably, be on the outskirts of normalcy, but I am certainly within the county line. And I also have less premenstrual cramping. Win-win.

At any rate, today I am on a mood upswing. This means that I can get by on just 7 hours of sleep, and I feel ever-so-slightly productive. This morning I identified two publications to query, two possible sources to call for information, and questions to ask those sources. After lunch I plan to actually make several phone calls. It is all very exciting, this doing something.

It has not been easy. After nearly four years of staying home with small children, my mind has come to behave like one. I require constant redirection away from Facebook and celebrity gossip columns and even my own old journal entries. I feel like I need parental controls for my own laptop.

I have been thinking a lot about marriage recently, too. Our strategy of venting our resentments sort of backfired, and instead of liking each other more, we came to like each other less. So now we're just working on this revolutionary new strategy of--get this--being nice to one another. We're trying to be appreciative and affectionate and respectful. Weird, right? Of course, we are still left with a warehouse full of unaddressed anger. But we are having sex again. It's really hard to find a downside to that.

Dirty girl

2010-03-12T16:11:00.000-08:00

After the underwear discussion with Simon, I turned over a new leaf and recommitted myself to doing housework. Since then, I have washed and folded the laundry promptly, cleaned the kitchen after every meal, and vacuumed at least once a week. I cleaned out the book boxes, reorganized the downstairs playroom, and created an "art box" to hold the kids' paints, crayons, and stickers. I made Henry and Amelia help me clean their rooms each afternoon before Simon came home.

It was a very educational exercise. Mostly, I learned why I don't do this on a regular basis. First, it's not like you do housework and it's done. Five minutes after I've vacuumed, Amelia tears up tiny pieces of toilet paper onto the floor. Two minutes after we've cleaned their rooms, I turn my back to answer the phone and the two of them proceed to take every toy out and leave it in the middle of the room. It's a sisyphean effort, and, really, didn't we all think Sisyphus was an idiot for continuing to push that stupid rock up the hill? I may be a slob, and I may be lazy, but I'm not an idiot.

Wow, that last sentence was a lot less empowering that I had anticipated.

Second, despite all of my efforts to clean and reclean and keep a perpetual cycle of laundry in motion like a row of spinning plates, Simon has noticed none of it.

Anyway, I'm back to my old filthy ways, letting the dishes and crumbs pile up while I read the New York Times. Which has its own drawbacks. Did you see what Texas is doing to its educational curriculum? They cut Thomas Jefferson out of the list of people whose writings influenced revolutions in the 18th and 19th century. Why? Because he coined the phrase "separation of church and state," and they are trying to emphasize that the founding fathers actually wanted to create a Christian country. And these assholes declare themselves to be REAL Americans. Right, because Thomas Jefferson only wrote the Declaration of Independence and much of the Constitution and was our second president. That socialist, commie bastard.

Aaaaaaaaaugh.

Now my house is dirty and I'm pissed off. This may not be the best use of my time.

Old yeller

2010-03-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Reason number 132 why I would have been refused a parenting license if they issued such things: I am a yeller.

I am angry, I yell. I am irritated, I yell. I am tired and overwhelmed, I yell. It's not always screaming and shouting. Often it is just loud and sharp. Over the years, yelling has become an intrinsic part of my personal communication style.

The first time Simon and I went to marriage counseling, the therapist asked us to describe our coming-home-from-work routines. I said I got the mail, came inside, yelled at the cats, fed the cats, and started dinner. She looked up from her notebook. "Why do you yell at the cats?" she asked, cautiously.

"Well," I said, slowly, trying to understand her curiosity about the behavior, "I walk in, and they are meowing, loudly, and tripping under my feet, and I'm just trying to hang up my coat, so I yell at them." I didn't go into the specific profanities I hurled at the cats, or the fact that some evenings I also threw the mail at them. I mean, it's not as if I kicked the cats, or set fire to the cats. Being cats, they barely even noticed the yelling. If I threw the mail they might scatter for a minute, but then they were back at my ankles, mewling for dinner.

The therapist just stared at me, wide eyed, then pursed her lips and went back to writing in her little book. Two sessions later she declared that I was a "prickly pear" whom no one could love.

Still, I didn't really consider that yelling could be a problem until a few years later, when I became a parent. I don't curse at Henry and Amelia, and I certainly don't throw things at them. Early in the day I am even able to calmly say things like, "I know you don't like it when Amelia plays with your cars, honey, but I don't want you to grab from her. What could you do instead?" But by the afternoon, when the grabbing and growling between them escalate, and I am tired and trying to do some tedious chore such as cooking or vacuuming, I am barking little motherly gems like, "If I see you grab something from her again, I will take the item, and throw it directly in the garbage can."

These children, they are not like the cats. They don't see this as part of our repartee. Instead, they cry. Especially Henry. His eyes grow watery and his lip trembles as he says, "I feel bad for myself," before bursting into sobs.

And I feel like a monster. I tell myself I won't yell anymore, I will be patient and kind and will finally take one of those classes on positive discipline. And then Amelia is back in the warming drawer, and I am yelling, "No babies in the warming drawer," and then she is crying, and then I think maybe I am just not temperamentally cut out for this parenting business.

Regrets

2010-03-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

You know what sucks? My life.

God, that's whiny. This is exactly why I drop my blog when I get depressed. Depression is bo-o-o-ring. Especially coming from a woman who doesn't have to work and lives in a nice big house where it doesn't snow with two happy, healthy children and a husband who...well, anyway, a husband.

When I get in these moods, there are so many layers of regret and self-loathing that I don't know where to begin. I'll just say this: never, never, never become a stay-at-home mother. Ever. It seems like a great deal when that first baby is so little and lovable that you can't possibly imagine leaving him or her to spend eight hours a day in a beige cubicle. But after a year or two, or, in my case, almost four, you start to realize that your kids' time with the babysitter is infinitely more positive, educational, and fun than their time with you, and in the meantime you've created a black, gaping chasm in your resume that will hinder you for decades. Add to that a marriage that more and more resembles a caged death match, and suddenly you understand why so many moms in the 1950s were alcoholics.

Clearly, it is time for me to get back to work. And as soon as I can identify one or two marketable skills in myself, I will dust off my resume. In the meantime, I tend to my children, try to keep my house clean, and wonder how I ran my once-promising life into a dead-end.

Warming drawer

2010-02-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, while I was reading the paper, Amelia placed herself, her dolly, and several packs of trivia cards in the warming drawer of the oven. I found her sitting quietly, intently trying to figure out how to close herself in.

Then Friday afternoon I finally ran out of diapers after forgetting for three days to pick up a new pack. Amelia was naked from the waist down for 45 minutes while I ran out to the store. My mom stayed at the house with her, trying to keep her off the new living room rug, and wiping up puddles of pee.

On the bright side, the earlier bedtime seems to be working for Henry. Now he's only as manic-depressive as the average 3-year-old.

For worse

2010-02-22T11:57:00.000-08:00

So my marriage is falling apart. In the course of a very serious discussion about this fact on Monday, Simon confessed that he resents, among other things related to my lack of housekeeping skills, the fact that he sometimes runs out of clean underwear.

This is a fair complaint. He is off to work 50 or 60 hours a week so that we can have a nice life and I don't have to work, and in return he expects to have clean underwear.

I am mortified. Not just that I haven't been doing his laundry, but that he has been silently judging me for this for years. In my defense, I do laundry almost daily. But most days, I am physically pushing down the kids' clothes and the towels and the dinner napkins to make it all fit. There is seldom room for my clothes, let alone Simon's clothes.

So I have to do his laundry more often. That's the deal, right? I take care of trivial tasks like underwear washing so he can have his brain free for running his company. It has been the division of labor between stay-at-home moms and their husbands for millennia.

I resent it ferociously. I am a smart woman, maybe smarter than Simon. And yet I wash his underwear. What I want to say is, "You're 42 years old. Wash your own goddamn underwear." But I don't, because I am a 34-year-old woman with no job.

In theory, we are a team, balancing family and work, child care and checkbooks. In actuality, he is the widely-applauded circus elephant, I am the guy with the shovel following him around.

I love being with my kids. But there is a mixed bag of financial dependence and underwear washing that goes with that privilege. I feel powerless and ashamed and very, very torn.

Worry wart

2010-02-17T14:15:00.000-08:00

This is Henry.

He looks happy, right? This was at the zoo. He was happy at the zoo.

At home, he is not happy. Lately, he is neurotic and miserable nearly all the time.

He sobs when it's time to stop playing PBS computer games, or when it's time for a bath, or when I ask him to wash his hands. He wails when Simon tries to brush his teeth in the morning instead of me, or when Amelia looks at him in the car. Often, the wailing erupts into screaming. The neighbors must think we're using a cattle prod.

He has developed a particular gift for finding the horse shit behind every pony. On Saturday, when I told him we were going bowling with his friend Serenity, his fleeting smile was immediately replaced with a tearful, "If we go bowling today, we can't go bowling tomorrow." When I told him he could get his own "Get Well Soon" balloon bouquet the next time he was sick or injured, he whined, "But if I get balloons, Amelia might try to grab them, and then I'll push her, and then I will feel bad for myself."

I feel a particular burden to find the right response because I, of all people, should know about obsessive anxiety and persistent misery. So I start out being upbeat and supportive, offering a hug and a positive perspective. "I know it's so hard to have to put your shoes on when you'd rather play with your train set, but we're going to have so much fun at the park!" He cries some more, I encourage some more. I am Phil freaking Donahue.

And then I am not. After the third or fifth or tenth iteration, I am irritated with the crying, irritated with myself for being so completely ineffectual, and, frankly, a little panicky that my preschooler has a major depressive disorder. My tone switches from soft to stony. "Henry," I snap, "Life is tough. Knock it off."

Sometimes this works. Sometimes it sparks louder and wetter tears. I am at a loss. Sure, I've managed to get my own issues mostly under control, but I have little advice for a small child. "Henry," I would say, "Take a meditation class, start writing, and have a beer or some sort of gin-based cocktail."

Instead we are trying an earlier bedtime this week. We'll see.

Successful surgery

2010-02-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

Amelia is fine. She is more than fine, in fact. She is a superstar.

The child didn't have a single, solid bite of food from 7 p.m. the night before until 2 p.m. the day of surgery, and she was not only OK, she was peppy. I did sneak her a 4 oz. bottle of milk at 5 a.m., which was against the hospital's "no solids or milk past midnight" rule, but which was well within the actual food-consumption guidelines set by the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (honestly, parents have to do their own research about these things). She also drank apple juice up until 9 a.m. After that--nothing. Personally, I had breakfast, but I skipped my mid-morning snack so I wouldn't be eating in front of her, and I was starving by the time she went into surgery. I am in awe of the child.

She was happy and busy in the waiting room, and happy and busy in the pre-op exam room. She liked her surgical pajamas and the yellow slippy-socks.

***This is where I thought we'd post a photo of pre-op Amelia. Funny, by the time she was in her little outfit, 10 minutes before surgery, the camera was the very last thing on my mind.***

We carried her to the surgery room, and I laid her down on the operating table. She didn't even wiggle. She just held my fingers with one hand and clutched Little Dolly with the other. She looked curious when the anesthesiologist put the tiny mask over her nose and mouth, but she didn't flinch. After a minute or two she started grinning inside the mask, and kicking her feet high into the air. Then she was still, her eyes only half-closed.

I held it together until we got out to the waiting room. Simon asked if I was OK, and I started trembling and tearing up. I mean, this was a tiny procedure involving a tear duct. Can you imagine what I would have been like if they were wheeling her off to a five-hour open-heart surgery?

Twenty-five minutes later the nurse called for us, and I could hear Amelia screaming in the recovery area. She had woken up immediately after surgery, asking for Mommy, and now she was inconsolable. Her left eye was red and swollen. She wailed loudly for a good 10 minutes, alternately clawing at my shoulder and pulling at the tape around the IV in her hand. Finally, the nurse removed the IV, the blood pressure cuff, and the little toe-monitor. I whispered a made-up version of "Hush Little Baby" into her ear, and she fell asleep for 10 minutes. When she woke up, she was happy again.

And that was it. The nurses gave her a bear, they gave us some eye ointment and care instructions, and we were on our way. Aside from the blood-tinged tears and snot, she was completely normal.

Henry, on the other hand, was a weepy mess all weekend. I think he was overwhelmed by a combination of worry for Amelia and heart-piercing jealousy over the attention she's been getting. He looked absolutely wounded when the bouquet of "Get Well Soon" balloons arrived from their cousins.

One last note: As we were leaving the hospital, I saw a little girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, walking out, holding hand with her mother. The little girl was bald, probably from chemotherapy, and the mother had shaved her head, too.

The girl with the leaky eye

2010-02-10T12:37:00.001-08:00

Although she is, generally speaking, a study in toddler health, Amelia has one lingering physical abnormality: a leaky left eye.

The pediatric ophthalmologist has diagnosed her with nasolacrimal duct obstruction, a.k.a. blocked tear duct. The tears go in, but they cannot drain out, so they either run down her face, giving her a perpetual sad-clown appearance, or they stay in her eye, giving her persistent eye boogers. Worst case, allergens which would normally be washed quickly away linger on her eyeball and make her look like she has a black eye, as shown in this Halloween photo. This is uncomfortable for Amelia and does not seem to reflect well on my parenting.

Last September the ophthalmologist suggested a very quick, simple, painless procedure to correct the problem, which, oh, by the way, requires general anesthesia. I balked. Anesthesia? For a leaky eye? But it could clear up on it's own! It's already better! She'll be cured all on her own within a couple of months! I refused the surgery.

Since then her eye has gotten worse, and since winter and cold season set in, more and more often she wakes from naps with her lashes crusted together. I am increasingly concerned with the possibility of infection. I also can't imagine it's good for her vision to be looking through a glob of goo most of each day.

Anyway, Amelia is scheduled for surgery on Friday at noon. My pediatrician seems to think this is no big deal, but I am sick to my stomach over it. I am looking at baby pictures of her and weeping, worrying that I didn't appreciate her infant-hood enough.

Part of me thinks the whole surgery thing is a bad idea, but I can't let her grow up looking like a James Bond villain. Right?

Vacation

2010-02-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

A family vacation for a stay-at-home mom is like one of those old-school racing video games in which you can choose your race location. At first the prospect of driving around New York or Japan or Egypt is compelling, and then after the first lap you realize it's the same stupid game but with palm trees instead of skyscrapers.

You know what made me think of those video games? Henry spent five hours a day playing them while we were in Tahoe. Vacation for him, vacation for me. Amelia can't play video games yet, and that's a loss for all of us.

Fortunately, we did not go alone. We brought my sister and our friends and former best-next-door-neighbors-ever (former because we moved, not because they slacked off), Marion and Shiloh. This is the key to vacationing with small children: adults should outnumber them by at least 2-to-1. It's brilliant. Everyone has time to read, everyone can go down the sledding hill, anyone who gets up to watch The Lion King at 6:15 am can go back to sleep by 8.

Mostly we went sledding, which is a much more athletic activity than I would have thought. This is a photo of Henry taking flight after the other adults sent him down the hill by himself. He was fine. Mildly traumatized, but fine.

It was actually a wonderful time. We ate good dinners and laughed a lot. The sledding was the most fun I have had in years. By the time we left I was a little more relaxed. I was also exhausted from the repeated night-wakings of my disoriented children. For me, exhaustion is a clear precursor to anxiety, and last night, after we returned, I was weeping to Simon that after three days with me, Maura and Marion and Shiloh had finally realized what a dill-weed I am, and we'll never see them again.

This is me: good friends, good times, crippling self-doubt, tears.

Last one on the bandwagon

2010-02-03T14:07:00.000-08:00

Seconds after I emailed my friends and family members that I am keeping a blog, I read on SF Gate that a new study proves that blogging is no longer cool.

"The results indicate blogging has become so 2006, when 28 percent of the two groups studied, teens 12 to 17 and young adults 18 to 29, actively blogged.

By the fall of 2009, that percentage dropped off to only 14 percent of teens and 15 percent of young adults as blogging 'lost its luster for many young users,' said Amanda Lenhart, one of the report's authors."

This is exactly what happened when I got stock options, too. It proves, yet again, what I have suspected for many, many years: my involvement in a trend is a sure indication that it is ending. Perhaps I will look into Twitter in a year or so.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/03/BU3O1BRJDU.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0eVsiXLCr

My living room

2010-02-03T10:55:00.000-08:00

We have now been in our new house for five months, and this is what our living room looks like.

Those boxes used to just be filled with books, but somehow have become receptacles for toys, stray socks, and missing house keys, too. I've never claimed to be a good decorator or even a decent housekeeper, but even I am getting embarrassed to invite people over. Not just people--family even.

To be fair, we finally bought actual furniture last weekend, and it will arrive next week. I'm just not sure it will be much of an improvement. It's brown, for one thing. I figured brown would be fine, sensible for sticky little fingers and maybe even cute with stylish throw pillows. But it took me five months to get a sofa. How long might it be before I find throw pillows? Or a rug? Or a coffee table? Years. It may be years. And in the meantime I will have brown furniture amid boxes and toy strollers.

Amelia and Henry, at least, are quite happy with the current decor.

Oprah

2010-01-29T16:29:00.000-08:00

I'm watching Oprah. This is the only thing I do that makes me feel like I am a real housewife. It would be better for my family if I could cook, clean, decorate, not get surly when my 3-year-old wakes up with a mystically sore toe at 1:30 in the morning, or garden. Instead, I watch TV. My whole life, that has been one of the few things I have excelled at consistently.

That, depression, and getting pregnant.

Oh, here she goes. Oprah is getting "in your face" with a snippy 20-something who thinks it's funny that she texts while driving. I have alternately loved and been irritated by Oprah over the years, and I've been watching since 1989. Now I've settled in to revering her. When I get anxious about politics I imagine her going in and yelling at the people I disagree with. It's surprisingly soothing.

Henry and the princesses

2010-01-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening we went to Park Street to find a lunch box for Henry, after I inadvertently smashed his Bob-the-Builder one by slamming it onto the floor in the midst of a fight with Simon. Another really stellar moment in parenting. And marriage, for that matter.

I had seen an assortment of non-commercial lunch totes in the window of Lauren's Closet a week earlier, and I liked them, so we went there. As soon as we walked in, Henry's eyes bypassed the two shelves of tiger, dinosaur, and fire truck bags, and immediately rested on the Disney princesses.

"I want that one," he said.

"Are you sure?" I asked, although I knew a princess lunch box was exactly what he wanted. He had been talking about it for weeks, ever since Milan, a girl in his class, brought her own princess lunch box to school. "They also have a ladybug one, and these diggers are cool..."

He didn't even glance at the other options. "Princesses," he said.

"Great!" I said, and I got the sparkly pink bag off the shelf. "I'm so happy they have the princesses!"

I was not actually happy that they had the princesses. I don't mind the pink and sparkly. I'm delighted that he has some interest besides his current fascination with swords. But, really, princesses?

The bag is a perfect illustration of my issues with the princesses. Belle, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty each wears a coquettish half-smile and half-lidded gaze. Even Belle, the feisty, book-loving heroine from Beauty and the Beast, offers a come-hither stare from over her shoulder. The whole tableau looks like it could be an ad for an escort service.

In spite of that, or maybe because of that, Henry loves them. The Disney princesses are currently right alongside Peter Pan, the movie Cars, and Legos in his field of interest. I don't want to discourage Henry from loving princesses just because he's a boy. I'd just rather he loved a more three-dimensional image of femininity. Like Rosie the Riveter, maybe. Of course, a Rosie lunch box would probably look pretty similar to his Bob the Builder one. Maybe that's why he’s so drawn to the docile, glittery princesses. They are different from anything else he has.

As Henry stared happily at the princesses, I asked Amelia which lunch box she wanted. She immediately reached for the one with the dinosaur on the front. The dinosaur was not flirtatious or sexy. It was posed very academically, as if in a side-view mug shot.

“Great!” I said, and meant it.

Every possible mistake

2008-09-24T16:25:00.001-07:00

So I joined Facebook, and immediately and unintentionally sent an "invitation to join" to every one of the 400 or so people in my Yahoo address book. I feel like an idiot. But I can't be the first person who's done that. Right? Right?

More importantly, Henry had his first day of preschool!

The first question everyone asks is, "Did you cry?" and the answer is no, because they want the parents to come to the first three sessions, because it's this parental-involvement program for 2 year olds. So I was there, and Henry spent most of the two hours pretending he didn't know me.

But he loved it! He played with cars and trucks, he kissed the fish tank a few dozen times, he painted a picture, squished play-doh, had a snack, played outside. What's not to love?

He did better than me, anyway. All the parents seemed to be chatting with ease and I felt like, well, I guess like a kid on her first day of school. All awkward and socially incompetent. Proof that I still have a ways to go in becoming less self-centered, because this was about Henry, and
not me.

On another note, I am outraged that McCain has dodged the first presidential debate. Outraged! Even I had no idea how much I was looking forward to Friday. I follow this campaign with the intensity only a shut-in could muster. I'm not an Obamamaniac by any means, although I've really been impressed in the past week, now that he's acting like his campaign isn't being run by handicapable gerbils.

Oh, little potato has just opened her eyes. My time is up.

One last thing: This morning Simon had Amelia dozing on his bare chest, and she bobbed her head around for a minute, then clamped her vise-like gums onto his nipple. Simon howled in pain, and for one brief moment, I felt very, very happy.

All hail the baby swing

2008-09-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the solution to Amelia not sleeping during the day: the battery-operated baby swing. She loves it. She'd spend all day in there if that didn't make me want to vomit with guilt.

I am still in survival mode. Each day--each hour--that I get through is a small victory. So much the better if I get through it without crying. It's not the lack of sleep so much as it is the lack of any time to myself. And the guilt. I am currently a half-assed mother to Henry and my swing-bound Amelia. I feel guilty when I can't help Henry because I'm feeding Amelia, I feel guilty when I'm reading to Henry instead of talking to Amelia, I feel guilty when I have to pee and stay in the bathroom 30 seconds longer than I really need to just so I can breathe in a room by myself.

Also, my nipples may wear through soon. Everyone who has successfully breastfed for 12 months (or more!), you have my deep respect. I would quit now except that a) if I had to load up formula and the portable bottle-warmer I would never leave the house and b) the size of my rack makes me feel better about the size of my stomach. This is the closest I'll get to implants. I have cleavage!

Today we went to Target. Henry was a star--never running away and calmly leaving the toy aisle when I told him it was time to go. Amelia screamed half the time, which is a state I have come to accept in some instances, but which seemed to alarm every grandmother-aged woman in the store, each of whom offered me different advice about what I was supposed to be doing. If I had any energy I'd have felt either irritated or incompetent. Instead it was just nice to talk to people.

I like going to Target. It reminds me that I'm not dead yet.

Mysteries

2008-09-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

Amelia still takes two to four hours of soothing to go to sleep for longer than 20 minutes at a time. WTF??? She's tired--exhausted even. Why does that not translate to sleep? When she's hungry, she cries, I give her a boob, she eats. Yet when she's tired and she cries and I soothe her to the brink of deep sleep, her eyes fly open and she is suddenly WIDE AWAKE and mad as hell about it.

I had no idea Henry was such a brilliant sleeper.

This gets better, right? Anyone with kids who didn't sleep right off the bat? I mean, I'll be sleeping more than four hours a night by next February, right? Maybe? Throw me a bone. I need some glimmer of hope to cling to.

And back to the gender stereotyping. MargaretJames blogged about people giving her son NASCAR sheets. The only thing worse than big machines being shoved down the throats of little boys is the offal that gets presented to little girls. Can't they wear anything other than pink? And not just pink--I have nothing against pink, I got her a couple of T-shirts with little salmon-pink birds on them--but Pepto-Bismol pink. With flowers. And ruffles. And maybe bunny rabbits with pink bows on them. Christ. Let's just change her name to Princess and be done with it.

I know--crab, crab, crab. Things are actually fine. Great, even. The fact that I have time to write this is a testament to the fact that my life is not over, as I had thought in the first couple of days. There's still a lot of crying in this house, but now it's mostly Amelia and Henry, and not so much me. Progress!

Love love love

2008-08-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Today was much better.

It wasn’t that Amelia slept anymore, because she slept less, especially last night. But a lot of my misery seems to have fallen away anyway. It may be a hormonal shift, because I see my face is breaking out a little. It may also be that now I’m so tired I just can’t muster the energy necessary to feel guilty and overwhelmed. I think giving myself an hour and a half break between feedings is helping, too.

At any rate, yesterday I was bawling as James Blunt sang “My Triangle” on Sesame Street, and today I didn’t shed one tear.

Today was also the first day I really felt like I’ve fallen in love with my daughter. With Henry that happened right away. I was beginning to worry that maybe I’d never feel the same way about my little girl.

But then we were lying down in my bed, and she was reaching out at me with her pointy little infant fingers, and there it was. That crazy, all-encompassing baby love.

Also she makes this adorable face when she’s dozing while I’m burping her. She has her jaw agape and her eyes closed, and every minute or so she’ll bust out with a huge, open-mouthed smile. Sometimes she wrinkles her nose to go with it.

I still can’t fathom how this will work once Simon goes back to work, or, worse, once Simon starts traveling again in two weeks. But for now I am taking it one day at a time.

She’ll have to sleep someday.

Oh, one other thing. I did a weight check at the lactation consultant's today. Amelia is supposed to be gaining an ounce a day if she’s getting enough to eat. Last Friday she weighed 7 lbs. 8 oz. Today she weighed 8 lbs. That’s two ounces a day!

This girl is a champion eater.

She can’t sleep to save her life, but she has the eating thing down.

***

I'm watching Hillary speak at the DNC right now. I can't tell you how proud I am of how far she came. I mean, go Barak and all, but I will weep with joy the day a woman finally becomes president.

On a semi-related note, I am going to kick the next person who says something about me having "someone to go shopping with." Is that still all anyone can imagine doing with a girl? I hope Amelia is someone I can talk politics and baseball with.

The world's worst mother of two

2008-08-25T21:51:00.000-07:00

Holy holy holy crap. She doesn't sleep.

Well, OK, Amelia sleeps great between about midnight and 7 am. She just doesn't sleep any other time, unless I'm lying down with her, which just isn't going to work with Henry.

Our days are spent doing a lot of jiggling, a lot of shushing, and so much breastfeeding that my nipples may pop off the next time she eats.

I am exhausted. Not just sleep deprived, but emotionally exhausted. She needs me constantly. Henry wants me constantly. I spend a quarter of the day sobbing. I feel like I am failing both of my children. And my husband, too, because I yell at him all the time. I think I'm bitter that his life goes back to normal next week, whereas mine never will.

I need a psychological epidural to get through the next three months. That, I have determined, is pretty much when I stopped feeling completely out of control with Henry.

Amelia Catherine

2008-08-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that was labor.

I finally took it seriously when I got up to get a drink of water and literally fell to my knees on the kitchen floor. I started screaming for Simon. After about three minutes he called from the bedroom, "What?"

"What do you think?" I yelled back.

The contractions were still sort of irregular, but the on-call doctor told us to come on in and he'd check me out. Simon roused our next-door neighbors, who were kind enough to come over at 3:30 am to sit for Henry.

The contractions were so painful by the time we got to the hospital they had to send a wheelchair out for me, I think because it looked bad to have someone screaming on their front walkway. Once I got to triage I was already 5 cm, which surprised me because with Henry I was only 3 cm after 9 hours of labor and 4 hours of pitossin.

I asked for the epidural, because, well, it hurt, but it took them forever to get the required 1 liter of fluid into me, so by the time the anesthesiologist came along I was 8 cm. I got the epi anyway, which was silly. I've been beating myself up about that ever since, but, God, it felt nice at the time.

My OB called to say she was on her way, and that Dr. E, the on-call doctor, could break my water if he wanted. So he did, with this long white hook, and it exploded out so fast it got all over my feet. There was meconium, or baby poop for those not familiar with birth lingo, which can be bad, but I wasn't worried.

My OB arrived at 6 a.m. We chatted about her kids for a while. Then I said, "I think I feel some pressure," and sure enough I was 10 cm. Dr. S said I could start to push, and I pushed once and she crowned, which set off a whole flurry of activity involving disassembling the bed/delivery table and Dr. S stepping into some sort of official baby-catching robe.

I pushed again and her head was there, which I could feel just fine, thank you, epidural or no. Dr. S said I didn't tear at all at her head, but then baby got me with her elbow as her shoulders emerged, and so there were some stitches after all.

I pushed for less than 10 minutes, and at 6:43 a.m. there she was covered in poop and a girl. When they said it was a girl I sat up to check for myself. Then I cried. I had no idea I wanted a girl so much.

The meconium turned out to be nothing bad. They spent maybe two minutes suctioning her mouth and wiping her off, and then she was with me, and five minutes after that she bobbed her pink little head over to my breast and started nursing like a pro.

So I was in labor less than 6 hours. Not bad. I so didn't need the epidural.

So now we're home and adjusting. Henry is a champ. He loves the baby, kisses the baby, cuddles the baby, and then quickly loses interest because she doesn't do anything. Visitors have been very gracious about bringing gifts for him, too, so the whole ordeal has been kind of an extended birthday.

Amelia is beautiful and oddly advanced in her motor skills. Yesterday I put her on her tummy and she immediately turned her head to the other side. Then today I laid her on her back on the couch and she flipped over onto her tummy. I don't know what that's about.

She is also very, very hungry. We had to supplement with some formula before my milk came in because she was so damn angry and because poor Henry ended up dehydrated from lack of breastmilk and then never nursed again.

Oh, and she doesn't like to sleep on her back. Or in her bed. Or anywhere that is not my boob, which is sweet, but really not feasible. As a result, she ends up staying awake for four to six hours at a time, then getting frantic, then crashing for five hours.

Mostly it's great. She's great. It's so different from Henry. He seemed so fragile to me from the moment I saw his funny-looking face. Amelia seemed tough and confident from the get-go, even though she was smeared in baby poop.

I'm functioning OK now, although I have had moments of sobbing, wondering why I chose to go through newborn-hood again, mourning the days when it was just Henry and me, kicking around town, sleeping through the night. But then those moments pass, and I love her and Henry and Simon and our whole little family.

I have no idea how any of this will work once Simon goes back to work, but for now we are doing OK.

Labor. Maybe.

2008-08-16T02:34:00.000-07:00

This better be the start of real labor, because it hurts like hell, and it's robbing me of desperately needed sleep.

I'm only about an hour and a half into it, and already I am thinking epidural. It's just past 2:30 a.m. I should be resting, I know. But I'm getting these 40-second contractions every 5 minutes or so that feel like my lower abdomen is about to rip apart. And as much as they hurt sitting in this chair, they hurt twice as bad when I'm lying down.

I'm timing them myself, because Simon's still asleep. I want to make sure this is the real deal before I drag him out of bed. Last night I was up for two hours with contractions--less intense, to be sure--and then they stopped dead, leaving me very, very tired and still without a baby.

Here's the thing: I don't really know when to go to the hospital. With Henry, my water broke, so we just got to go when we wanted. Now I am torn between not wanting to be sent home and really not wanting to give birth in the car.

What is it about the middle of the night that causes contractions? I was really hoping to get a good night's sleep before giving birth.

Meanwhile, my last contraction was shorter and further apart than the last ones. I am half hoping they'll just go away so I can crawl back into bed.

My due date...and the sound of crickets chirping

2008-08-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

My doctor says I am dilated 2 cm. Last week I was at 1 cm. At this rate I should deliver some time in October. Kidding! But I am caught in that surreal place of knowing I'll have a baby in a week, two at the most, and still feeling really surprised when I realize there will actually be a new baby in a week, two at the most.

Dr. S stripped my membranes this morning, which, for those who've never had the pleasure, involves her sticking her finger up my cervix and poking at the baby to make it come out. It's not extremely painful, but it's not in any way pleasant. The baby wriggled around a little like it was annoyed, but so far not annoyed enough to vacate the premises.

I'm calling my acupuncturist tomorrow.

Thank you to my friends who commented on my last miserable entry to let me know I'm not a complete monster for having some trepidation about the new baby. I notice I added nothing last week about how excited I am to meet and hold this new little person, too. I am, I just forget that sometimes.

And even if I weren't excited, my increasing discomfort is quickly overriding my doubts. Seriously--bring on the wailing infant. It's not like I'm sleeping anyway.

Mixed feelings

2008-08-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

I am four days away from my due date, and feeling pretty schizophrenic about the whole idea of a new baby.

"Any day now!" people say.

I always respond, "The sooner the better!" This is sometimes received with a knowing little laugh, particularly from women who have been through the baby waiting game.

But really that's only sort of true.

Yes, there is the part of me that is dying for this baby to arrive. I am tired of being fat, tired of not being able to sleep on my back, tired of my parents and my in-laws and even my husband, who should know better, and who now probably does after I screamed at him the other night, asking, "Anything yet?" Like I might fail to mention that I'm in the throes of active labor. Idiots.

Labor also offers a bit of excitement in what otherwise is a deathly boring, repetitive life.

But there is also small, still pool of dread in my chest about the arrival of this baby. A fear that there's not enough in me for another child, another helpless, screeching, pooping human with an endless need for me. Honestly, I am so tired lately I can barely get through the day being Henry's mom, and Henry is practically emancipated compared to an infant.

How can I possibly love this baby enough? How can I possibly love it as much as I love Henry? How can I possibly not resent this child for stripping me of my already meager writing, reading, and sleeping time?

These are not the thoughts I share with most other people I know. I think the accepted feeling toward an impending birth is joy. Saying I am not completely thrilled about the arrival of my new baby would be equivalent to saying I was planning on leasing it to a Satanic cult for extra income.

No wonder this baby won't come out.

---
On another equally dark subject, I just got back from dinner at my mom's, so I am glowing with that special blend of anger and self-loathing that I get from spending time with her.

During dinner, I asked her not to interrupt her own meal to go play with him, because it's very important to me that he learn that there is a dinner time, and that although he doesn't have to sit at the table the whole time, other people will finish their dinner before they join him. That's reasonable, right? It's the radical notion that the world does not revolve around his every whim.

My mom, however, wants to give up her plate every time we have dinner together, because she can't stand to see him denied anything. So she looked peeved, and then said, "He just doesn't understand because usually when he's here I play with him the entire time."

I said, "I know. I can tell when he comes back home and can't tolerate playing by himself for five minutes."

OK, maybe that was snippy. But it's true. Henry is an angry little tyrant after spending extended amounts of time with his grandma.

But the comment obviously deeply hurt my mom, who hung her head as if to cry, and then didn't talk at all for another 10 minutes. Because, of course, we don't actually discuss things in our family. She prefers to silently communicate her victimhood, while I usually choose to smile, then go home and cut myself.

Again, no wonder this baby won't come out.

"Meg"

2008-08-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Henry has started calling me "Meg."

It happened in the last few days. He said something like, "Let's go, Meg," and I thought I must have misheard him.

"Did you just call me Meg?" I asked.

"Yeah, Meg," he replied happily.

I'm still "Mommy" when he's wailing for me in the mornings, but "Meg" when we're in casual conversation. I feel like maybe he'll start taking a morning coffee soon.

Meanwhile, D-day is 9 days away. I forgot how much I hate this end part. Maybe tonight! Maybe next week! Maybe two weeks from now! In the meantime, just go about your business as though life as you know it isn't about to end!

I did get my toenails and eyebrows done today. Those were the last things I really felt I had to accomplish before childbirth. I'm not really that vain, but when I'm sweating, grunting, and naked in front of a roomful of hospital people I've never met before, at least I'll feel, you know, groomed or something. Some shred of dignity while I'm pooping on the delivery table.

The potty was a passing fad

2008-07-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Looking back, I see I made a vague mention of Henry peeing on the toilet. But fortunately I failed to launch into a glowing, awe-struck exposition about how he was suddenly using the toilet five times a day, including every single poop.

That was all very exciting, and although I told everyone I had nothing to do with it, I secretly thought it might be a sign of very good parenting on my part. I wasn't sure what I had done, exactly, but clearly it was successful.

But now, less than two weeks later, the potty is already a thing of the past. Last weekend he came up to me and said, "Poop," and I said, "Great! Let's get to the toilet," and he yelled, "No! Poop in diaper!" and ran away.

I tried a few more times. I even bought him "Elmo's Potty Time" on DVD. He loves the show, but doesn't seem interested in emulating Elmo. I'm not pushing it. Not now, not with the baby coming.

Oh, here's something I forgot about late pregnancy: insomnia! I remember having trouble sleeping with Henry, but I thought it was due to really sore hips and really bad heartburn. There's a little heartburn with this one, and some discomfort lying down. Oh, and the restless leg syndrome, which is some sort of preview of hell. But mostly it's just that once I'm up--to pee, to change Henry's soaked diaper, to shove Simon over for snoring--I'm just up.

So I am exhausted.

On the bright side, I've been doing a lot of reading. Nothing like a good murder mystery at 4 a.m. I recommend anything by P.D. James.

Bad mothers

2008-07-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

I always swear to myself that I won't judge other parents. Parenting is a hard job, there's no right and wrong, every child is different.

But then today at McCaulou's, where I was buying big-boy underpants for Henry, I saw a mom a little older than me with a boy a little younger than Henry. As Henry played quietly with the toy train in the toddler section, this little boy was pulling clothes off the racks and laughing as they dropped to the floor.

This in itself did not spark my judgement. Frankly, if not for the train, Henry would have been right there with him.

The mother said cheerfully, "Thank you! Thank you for organizing these clothes! But they don't need you to organize the clothes, honey." Then, as she hung the little clothes back on the racks, "What a good boy you are!"

Of course, within minutes the boy was happily pulling more clothes off the racks. Wouldn't you? I'd probably loot a drugstore for gratitude and praise, I get it so seldom.

Again, the mom said, "What a good boy! But you don't have to organize these clothes."

Outwardly, I was perusing 2T-sized shirts for Henry. Inwardly I was rolling my eyes and snickering like I was in middle school. Nothing worse than misdirected praise, I thought. It's so sad when parents are so afraid to tell their kids no, I thought. Way to send your kid a mixed message, I thought.

For about four minutes I felt warm and peaceful in my superiority.

Then the young child wandered over to where my own sweet, well-mannered child was playing with the train set. As the child approached the table, Henry, easily a head taller than the child, swung around and shoved him.

The child teetered, but stayed upright. Until Henry shoved him again. That time he went down, whimpering.

"No pushing, big guy!" said the cheerful mother to Henry. She was less cheerful now. "No pushing!"

I was mortified. My son the bully.

"No pushing!" I said, sternly. Henry, unimpressed, turned back to the train set, but I took his arm and led him away. "You pushed that boy, so now you can't play with the train anymore."

Henry began wailing. Really almost screaming his dismay as two or three tear drops feel from each eye at a time.

"Can you say sorry?" I asked. I'm not sure he even heard me over his own shrieks. Even if he had, he was crying too hard to say anything.

So I said 'sorry' to the other child and his mother. I thought she looked disapproving, but that may have simply been me projecting, embarrassed as I was by my inability to control my own son who, to those who didn't know him, now appeared to be a bully and a brat.

Still holding his hand as he bawled, I felt completely incompetent. I've been trying for more than a month to get Henry past the pushing thing, and here he was shoving this little child harder than ever. But then his sobbing made me wonder if I was a tyrant for pulling him away from the train.

The truth: I have no business judging anyone. I have no idea what I'm doing myself. Let this be a lesson to me.

Toddlers and husbands

2008-07-09T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've been morbidly depressed lately, but today I'm feeling better. Why? God knows.

Toddlers
One day a week or two ago I suddenly realized that baby Henry was gone, and in his place was this almost-lanky child who talks and climbs and washes his own hands and destroys things I hadn't even thought of moving out of his reach.

Two days ago he peed in the toilet, because he wanted to. This is not something I've been pushing. The last thing I need is to be breastfeeding when Henry announces he has 30 seconds for someone to remove his pants and get him onto the Elmo seat.

But he's interested. So I applaud and I give him a high five and I realize that parenting is sort of like having only minimal steering control over a vehicle that someone else is working the pedals for. I can veer it in a general direction and try to avoid a major collision, but when we get there is up to someone else.

The other day he pulled his cousin Cece's hair to get her off the toy car they were sharing. I was shocked and mortified. "No no!" I shouted. "You hurt Cece. Now you can't play with the car anymore."

And he pouted and he cried, mostly about the car, but he's been talking about it since then. "Pull Cece hair," he'll say, dreamily.

I hope he's not a sociopath.

Husbands
Three words about my marriage: I give up.

We've been in therapy for more than two years now. My major issue, in fact, the issue that keeps us going to counseling, is communication. Namely, that we don't have any.

Two nights ago he called from Philadelphia, where he's on a business trip. He was energetic and chatty, and I listened and responded happily while he talked about the fabulous hotel he was at, the guy he's been trying to set up a meeting with who turned out to be an old friend, the business deals he's lined up. He talked for at least 10 minutes. This was a great call from Simon! Then he asked, "What did you guys do today?"

I told him that we had gone to the park where Henry's friend had held his birthday party over the weekend, and after I warned Henry his friend and the party would not be there this time, we stumbled upon the same friend having another party for his park friends.

And there was silence.

OK, I know it's not gripping, but neither was his story about the guy he used to work with.

But I got nothing. I assumed his phone had gone dead, so I said, "Hello, hello?" to confirm.

He said, "What? Sorry. What did you say?"

So I had listened enthusiastically to him wax on for nearly 15 minutes about what a stellar salesman he is, and as soon as I opened my mouth he went back to checking emails.

I just said goodnight and hung up. He sent an email the next day about how sorry he was, and how he'll not read his emails while talking to me from now on.

From now on? That was the first promise he made in marriage therapy. It's what he promised two months ago when I said we're heading for divorce unless things change. But from now on things will change. Really.

It's stupid, isn't it? If it weren't such an ongoing issue it would be funny. It is sort of funny. My husband finds me so boring he can't pay attention for two minutes!

Not small-for-dates after all

2008-06-26T20:30:00.001-07:00

Hooray! My small-for-dates baby is normal-sized!

We had our sonogram today, and baby is just fine. "Not too big, not too small," the sonogram technician said.

This is such good news. I told myself and everyone else I wasn't worried, but in my head I was thinking maybe I should pack an overnight bag in case I was sent immediately to the hospital for an emergency C-section.

Henry, on the other hand, took a face-first dive off his chair onto the brick floor of the patio at Dona Tomas restaurant this evening. I was droning on about American political consultants while trying to maximize the amount of mole salsa I got on my tortilla chip when he just lurched away and smacked down.

I usually make a point of staying calm when he bonks something, but this time his face was covered in blood from the nose down. So he was bawling, I was sobbing with guilt, and Simon was trying to get the busboy to bring us some ice.

The ice stopped the crying because Henry became focused on eating each piece as I tried to ice his lip down. Then he just wanted his beans and rice. Within three minutes all that was left of the accident was his fat lip and three bloody white napkins. Oh, and blood stains down the front of his shirt. He looked like a street thug.

Simon said, "Should we get them to wrap up the food?"

"No way," I said. Honestly, how often do we go out to eat? OK, pretty often. But usually to the burger place, not someplace nice.

On the career front, I've sent two query letters and gotten no response from either magazine. I know, editors are busy, but can they at least type a "No thanks"? Something. Anything. At this point I'd take a Simon Cowell response--"This is atrocious, stop writing now." I just want to know--are they not responding because they didn't get it, the topic is too narrow, or it's so appallingly bad that my letter is now stuck on the office bulletin board next to yesterday's Bizarro cartoon?

Well, of course I'll keep sending my queries around. It's not boldness or determination. I just have nothing better to do with Henry's naptimes.

"Small for dates"

2008-06-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

Hi. I'm feeling better since my last blog entry.

Honestly, I fall into a pit of despair so easily. Most of the time I really love my life. Or at least like it a lot. It's just once in a while that I wonder how I can get through another day.

It's hard because there are not many people I can talk to when I slip into severe depression, which happens for a couple of days every month or so. I know everyone has mood swings, but I think most people don't swing so far into the my-life-is-agony realm. So then I feel depressed and isolated.

Thank God for a couple of people in my life who understand. I don't know what it is about empathy, but it is better than Prozac. Just having someone else who can say, "Oh, yeah, one of those days where you have no reason to live. I hate those." It's brilliant.

At any rate, it is hard to stay down for long with Henry around. Yesterday we went to the Little Farm in Tilden Park, where he fed celery to goats and one large cow. The cow mooed very loudly at one point, and Henry clutched me as if for dear life. Now it's all he talks about. "Big cow," he says, in his deep scary voice. Then he says, "Mmmmmmoooooooooo" with such intensity his fists shake. He makes it sound like we saw Godzilla.

On the crest of feeling good, I had my 32 week prenatal appointment today, and Dr. Schleuning said I was "measuring small." I said, "Good," because up until now my biggest concern was a 10 pound baby. But apparently that's really not good, because now I need to go in for another ultrasound to see why baby isn't growing as fast as she or he has been and should be.

Schleuning said it could be any number of things, including the fact that the baby is just in a sideways position. But of course I can't stop thinking about other things it could be, like intrauterine growth restriction caused by a placental abruption.

Dr. Schleuning also said it may take a week or two to get an ultrasound appointment, and she wasn't worried about that. So maybe it's nothing.

Meanwhile baby is kicking around like a star athlete, as usual. She/he does not seem particularly concerned either.

Beyond depressed

2008-06-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

So long since I've written. Not that anyone reads this.

Henry is 2! It's a miracle we've kept him alive this long. Alive and, by all apparent measures, thriving.

And now I'm just two months away from another one.

Joy. Right?

Quite the contrary.

I am so depressed I can't write. I can barely sleep, yet I'm tired all the time. I can barely abide sitting here, because I am so disgusted with my enormous self.

I am wary of therapists since my last one flipped out on me. Also, I don't think we have the money. Oh, yeah, and now that Simon is travelling every week, I don't have any free time.

I would exercise, but all the prenatal classes are in the evening, and, again, I'm flying solo during the week.

I know--excuses, excuses.

In the meantime, I hate myself, I hate my life. I would kill myself without hesitation if it weren't for Henry. I may have ruined my own life, but I will not ruin his.

2008-05-16T01:49:00.000-07:00

Henry got a haircut today. He barely even cried. I was so proud. He looks like a bonafide Big Boy now. Or maybe again. He always looks about a year old when he gets his hair cut.

I just saw a picture of him from when he was 10 months old or so. He was such a baby! He is growing up so fast.

---

Today we saw a VW Golf parked near our house. Henry saw it from the back and said, “VW gone.” It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got what he was saying: the circle where the VW logo should have been on the hatchback was blank, like the insignia had fallen off. Which is not only damn good observation, but also creepy because that meant there were no identifying VW marks visible on the car. How the hell did he know it was a VW?

Smart man.

Guilty mom

2008-05-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight was the third night in a row that Henry wailed when I put him down for bed. It was an angry, betrayed sort of wailing. The only thing worse than letting him cry it out is letting him cry it out while he's screaming, "Mommy! Mommy!"

I feel like that woman in Texas who hit the homeless man with her car and then left him stuck in her windshield for a week in her garage, calling for her and pleading for help, until he died. Really--that guilty.

The strange thing is Henry hasn't cried for more than five minutes about bedtime in about a year. Last week he didn't even want to cuddle anymore. I'd just turn out the light and he'd say, "bed," and I'd lay him down and go about my afternoon or evening.

I was ready to declare victory over the whole sleep issue.

Last night I went in a couple of times, because I was sure he must be covered in poo or caught in the crib bars. Really, though, I could tell by his cry that he was simply overtired.

And there's the rest of the guilt: he's overtired because he's gone to bed more than an hour past his bedtime for three of the last four nights. Why? Because I've been out to dinner and have lost track of time.

Tonight I was having Chinese food at my next door neighbors', and Henry started saying "bed" at about 7:45 (his usual bedtime). Although I said I was leaving, I ended up talking for another 25 minutes as I edged toward the door.

I don't know how long he cried for tonight. 15 minutes? 20 minutes? I got a new air conditioner today, in honor of the heatwave, so I couldn't hear him so well. It was a blessing, and I feel guilty about that, too. At least I feel like I'm doing some penance if I have to listen to him in his misery.

This is all on top of the fact that we missed seeing his friend Santiago this afternoon, after Henry had been talking about him and I'd been promising a visit all day. But then Henry took a super long nap, which I didn't interrupt because of the above sleep issues, and when he woke up he didn't want to get dressed, and I didn't feel like pushing him on it.

When we finally got in the car, and then hit traffic, I knew we wouldn't make it to the park in time to see his friend.

"See Santi?" he asked from the backseat.

"Honey," I said, "I don't think we're going to see Santi today."

And his eyes got huge, and tears flooded in, and he asked again through trembling lips, "Santi?" And when I said no he began to bawl.

Mommy broke Henry's heart. Again.

---

I know I only write these sniveling little pieces about parenthood, but the truth is I love it. I love him. I love the way he runs, I love the way he tries to count ("two, two, nine, three"), and I love the way we dance together to the jazzy Sesame Street theme song that runs during the credits. Some days it's so good it's ridiculous.

3 months, 2 days left

2008-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

I am getting scared about this new baby.

Am I prepared to get up five times a night again? Without being able to nap during the day?

I talked to another mom the other day who said that when the second kid is born, you mourn the ease of your life with one child, just like you mourned the ease of your life with no children when that first one came along.

Holy crap, I thought, it's that bad?

That annual SAHM salary thing

2008-05-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

Every year around Mother's Day, salary.com comes up with the "market value" of a stay-at-home mom's efforts. This year they set it at $117,000 a year.

They estimate that moms at home assume 15 different professional roles around the house. Child care is, of course, number one. But they also throw in things like teacher, cook, janitor, CEO, and even plumber and auto mechanic.

It's a nice gesture, offering up this large sum of money to express the value of a home-based mom's work. And I think it's important, too, because most people I meet seem to think I paint my toenails and watch soap operas all day.

***For the record, my toenails are pretty fancy. That's because a $20 pedicure, a book, and a latte is a great big chunk of heaven when you've got an hour to kill while your in-laws bond with the kid. Also, we have to take off our shoes at Babygym, and I think my toes help offset the half-inch graying roots of my hair.***

But the study raises the question: Is this what I'm supposed to be doing?

Because, you know, there's no job description for this sort of thing. If there were, I'd clearly be getting a very poor review.

I'm all over the child care, of course. It's what I do 10 to 12 hours on most days, and what I'm on call for the rest of the time. And I'll give myself some credit here: I'm good. I know what Henry likes to do, I know how to stop him from crying, I know about 90% of what he's trying to say. Although if I were paying someone I'd probably ask them to spend a little less time reading up on the Democratic nomination process in the morning.

But honestly, that's all I do. Teacher? Not so much. Yesterday Maura babysat, and when I came home she showed me how they had worked on "Up high" and "Down low," and also she had drawn pictures of a car and the sun on his easel and wrote the names of what they were. Here's what he's learned from me: when he spills something, he says, "Oh man."

Cook? Almost never. Most lunches are cold cheese, olives, a toasted pita, and some fruit. And dinner? When we have a stove and oven, which we don't due to our kitchen remodel, Simon cooks at least 70% of the time.

Housekeeper? If I were my housekeeper, I would fire myself immediately.

Plumber? Auto mechanic? No and no. Simon does these, too.

Like I said, it's a great study. And I know plenty of SAHMs, my step-sister Bridget, for example, who do all of these things at a professional level. I think she even washes and irons her husband's shirts. (I actually used that as a selling point about how we'd save money when I quit work, and after 4 weeks with no shirts, Simon quietly began taking them to the drycleaner again.)

Meanwhile, all I have to offer are my bodily presence and some kind of nebulous motherly love. I adore the child. He is exhausting, but I think he's a wonder.

That, right there--not even minimum wage.

Oh, here's the other thing I found under "Dream Job: Stay-at-home mom" on salary.com: "All three women are able to pursue hobbies they weren't able to give attention to while working out of the house. 'I love to read and have an insatiable appetite for books,' said Allshouse. 'Staying at home has given me time to read books that I've been wanting to read for years, including classics and current works.'"

She's reading books? Plural? I have been working through The Book Thief for three months.

Let's recap: Stay-at-home moms should be professional-level nannies, teachers, house cleaners, cooks, facilities managers, plumbers, and auto mechanics. And they finally get a chance to read those books they've been meaning to get to.

Do these women actually have kids?

At least it indicates that Simon should get a raise.

Still freakin' sick

2008-05-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

Simon keeps asking if I need anything, and I keep saying a loaded gun so I can shoot myself.

What have I got now? A cough that gets so violent it makes me pee if I haven't just done so, congestion that might be crushing my eye socket, a headache that's probably from the cracks along my eye socket, and now, possibly, a return of the stomach flu that kicked this all off last Tuesday night.

Actually, Simon just asked again, and I said I need him to juice a lemon for me, because that's my new "cure": fresh lemon juice and hot water with honey. He made a very irritated face. Apparently, he did not mean "anything." I think he meant did I need a glass of water. Either that or he was hoping I'd ask for the gun again.

I have now been bedridden-sick for almost an entire week. Of course, I haven't actually been bedridden, except for about a day and a half. This may be why I'm still sick.

This is the dilemma of the sick stay-at-home mom: who do you call in sick to? If I had a job, and thus a nanny, I'd just call my job, and stay in bed all day while the nanny did her thing.

I think this is where the co-parent is supposed to take a day off of their work, just like you'd do if your nanny were sick. We did that the last time I was sick. Simon didn't offer, I just told him I was taking the day off, and he'd have to figure out how to make that work. He was very displeased.

This is the other part of the sick SAHM dilemma: few people believe that you do enough to merit a day off. After all, isn't every day at home a day off? My neighbor Carl, the retired mailman, suggested I stay inside on the couch today. I consider it a victory that I didn't curse.

I have to be extremely grateful, then, that my sister, Maura, is in town with nothing better to do than come to Trader Joe's with Henry and I, then spend her afternoon visiting the park with the man while I napped.

I actually saw the doctor last Friday, who prescribed me antibiotics, which have been useless, and Robitussin with codeine, which has been a godsend, except for the fact that my unborn child is now ready for narc-anon. Poor addicted little fetus.

Meanwhile, my housewife and mothering skills, which were poor to begin with, are slipping. It is all I can do to wash dishes. The food under Henry's chair is simply too much for me right now. And the seven separate stacks of junk mail and magazines on my dining room table/desk? I cry if I even think about sorting through those.

I will be significantly better tomorrow. There is simply no other option. I've got a big freelance project, and my mom and Maura are lined up for babysitting, so I'm set to head into the big city (So. San Fran) to work in a real office (Simon's).

2008-05-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I wrote about how nice it was to feel needed when Henry got all Mommy-centered when he was sick.

Now he has been sick for a week, and I am sick, too. Now it is not so nice.

All I want is to sit. Actually, to sleep. I’d like to sleep. But that’s not happening, so sitting is the next best thing.

But Henry is tired and weepy. He’ll play with “Guy” in the red truck for maybe three minutes before Guy gets stuck behind the steering wheel. When he’s well, Henry will just bring the truck to me and say “Guy stuck,” and I’ll remove the guy, and play will continue while I read up on the Barry Zito debacle. But when he’s sick, as he still is, stuck Guy is a major issue, and Henry bawls. Not his fake cry, but his “Oh, God, why have you forsaken me?” cry. He actually throws himself on top of the red truck, weeping.

So I have to get up, and we have to sit for a minute or two until he can breathe again. Then I pull Guy out of the truck. Then I have to get a wipe for his nose, which has by then run all over his face, and which he’s smeared to his ears.

This goes on all day. It’s not always Guy in the red truck. Sometimes it’s that the pinwheel arms have popped off. Sometimes it’s that the water bottle nozzle is closed. Sometimes it’s that he is saying “box,” wanting the Dr. Who flying police bank, and I think he’s saying “blocks.”

I am very, very tired.

-------

Simon and I are sitting on the couch, playing “what’s that?” with the baby-to-be. Is it a head? A butt? A back?

Baby enjoys pressing on the back side of my uterus so that I get this hard lump in the front of my belly. Sometime the lump sort of hurts.

There it is again.

I think this might be an elbow.

I expect this one will be a nightmare by my ninth month.

But this time around I appreciate how easy baby is right now, comparatively.

The gift that keeps on giving

2008-04-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

So now I have Henry's stomach flu. I also have a sore throat and a hacking cough.

The good news: Maura is in town and was coming to babysit today anyway, so I got some rest.

The bad news: This was supposed to be my first full day off in 10 months.

The really bad news: After a painstaking recovery process from Henry's own cold/stomach flu, this morning he was weepy and cuddly all over again. When, at 9:30 am, he said he wanted a nap, I knew things weren't going well.

Dr. Vo fit us in at noon today. Henry has ear infections in both ears. Poor man!

So now I am relieved that he's got antibiotics and thus he should get better very quickly, and I am feeling like a really bad mother because I had no idea. No idea! Here I thought I was being calm and prudent, following the advice in my pediatrician's handbook for his cold and then his vomiting and then his fever. Instead he may have had ear infections for days.

And for the record, he never even tugged at his ears, so that's a big myth.

Remember when being sick meant you could lie around and watch TV all day? Me too. Instead I "took it easy" by napping in between trips to the doctor's office, trips to Jamba Juice (a treat for Henry and something I thought I could eat without revisiting), washing the dishes, doing the laundry, and cleaning the bathroom.

God, are all of my entries going to be this boring?

Sorry. I'll be more interesting when I'm not also trying to supress a fresh explosion of vomit.

Tar-jay

2008-04-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I love Target. Really, if I were Britney Spears, with all of her money, I would be hitting up the Target at 3 am in a manic haze, too.

I went there one day when Henry was two months old. I think I only needed Neutrogena face wash and some diapers, but I drove to El Cerrito because driving on the freeway made it sort of an event (excitement is so hard to come by when you're at home with an infant).

When I got there, unshowered and in the same clothes I'd been in for three days, I found other moms--at least a dozen of them, all slowly pushing their infants aimlessly around the aisles. Three people stopped to talk to me.

Also, there is a Starbucks.

No drink-holders on the carts, though. Management really needs to put two-and-two together there.

Target is also a fabulous source for maternity wear, because at least 80 percent of their regular clothes fit pregnant women, and the Isaac Mizrahi stuff is pretty hot, even if it is under $20. Today I got myself a blue shift-dress for $17.99.

Their actual maternity clothes are revolting. There are four or five giant posters around the maternity section featuring pregnant models in gorgeous clothes. But they don't actually have any of the poster clothes available in the store. Nearly everything there looks like an oversized pillowcase with a strategically placed drawstring, made from rejected IKEA fabrics. I can't believe Liz Lange puts her name on that crap.

I was actually at Target this morning to find a swimsuit for prenatal water aerobics.

You know what I hate about pregnant swimsuit shopping? My ass. It would be fine if it just got huge. I could work a J-Lo look. But when I'm pregnant it gets huge and flabby and today I even saw cellulite. I've been doing butt exercises for weeks now, and I still look like an overweight 80-year-old from the rear.

I actually bought a "skirtini" bottom. I look like I'm borrowing my grandma's swimsuit. At least I look like I might have a nice butt under that grandma's swimsuit. I am keeping the mystery alive.

You know what I love about pregnant swimsuit shopping? Breasts. I don't usually have any, so now that I'm jiggling 36-Bs, I feel like a porn star. I look smokin' hot from about the ribcage to my neck.

Oh, after Target I went to Elephant Pharmacy to get my awful all-natural haircolor so I don't deform the baby while covering up my grey.

The woman at the checkout counter was all nice until I told her I'd need a bag for the things I was buying. Then she seemed to get all irritated with me. Damn Berkeleyites. I have to remember to bring a tote bag next time I go.

Poor, sick, puking boy

2008-04-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

Henry was sick all weekend.

It started Friday with goop in his right eye. I called the advice line at the pediatrician's office (I'm actually surprised they haven't blocked my number yet), and the nurse said it was probably related to the small cold he had going, and to call back if it hadn't cleared up in two to three days, which is pretty much what they say about everything.

Then Friday night the vomit started. The first vomit is always the ripest and chunkiest and this was all over the crib and also in his hair and his ear. We had to give him a bath, which made me feel like a particularly bad mother, because there he was, sick, sad, and confused as to why his parents were torturing him in his hour of need.

He puked again that night while Simon skillfully held him over the toilet. And then again Saturday morning, after he seemed better and ate breakfast, over the side of the grocery cart when Simon took him to the Safeway.

Let me just take a moment to express how very, very happy I am that I wasn't there. That was some sort of divine gift.

**Here's a disturbing note: Simon returned to the Safeway about 45 minutes later, after both he and Henry were bathed and changed. When he got there, both his cart and the vomit were just as he had left them.**

Sunday he didn't throw up even once. Today he didn't even have a fever. He was just tired and weepy and wanting to sit on my lap reading books all day, which was exhausting but adorable.

I didn't appreciate how independent Henry is until this past weekend. Usually I can read the paper and have a cup of coffee while keeps busy moving the contents of my purse into the garbage can and vice versa. This weekend it was all about constant Mommy attention.

You know what's funny? I haven't felt this not depressed in weeks. I feel on purpose. So many times I wonder if Henry even cares that I'm around, particularly when he asks 50 times a day where Grandma is, or Auntie Mo is, or Jeff Walsh, my dad's friend who he met once. But when he was sick, all he wanted was Mommy. Even with a 104.5 degree fever, sitting with me (and his lovey and binky) seemed to make him feel better.

Not a lot of appreciation in this job. It's nice to feel like I'm doing something right.

---

Tonight I had to talk to my mom and explain several times that sometimes I need a break from her, and that when I do, I am not "punishing" her by withholding Henry. Gah.

BFB: Big freakin' baby

2008-04-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at my 24-week prenatal appointment my doctor told me she is worried that this baby is going to be a giant.

Apparently, second babies tend to weigh more than first babies, and Henry was 9 lbs., 2 oz., so she has visions of a 10+ pounder and brought up the dreaded possibility of a C-section. Yuck. This is exactly the problem with doctors instead of midwives. You always have to be prepared to ward off the scalpel.

I told her I'll accept the C if it comes to that, but that, regardless of the size, I want to try to do this vaginally. After all, giant Henry and his giant 15 inch head were no problem. Except, you know, for the part where I had to sit on a hemorrhoid pillow for the next two weeks.

She said the good news was that if this baby is even 8 1/2 pounds, it should be a snap.

"You might consider taking up coffee and cigarettes," she said.

Then she said, "Just kidding."

Then she said, "Actually, a little coffee might not be bad."

2008-04-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

Day 9 without a break from childcare:

I finally snapped and yelled at Henry. He was taking his bath, sucking bathwater from his squirting Thomas the Tank Engine bath toy. I told him no, as I always do when he starts drinking from those little lead- and mildew-coated trains. He kept sucking. So I took the blue one away. He grabbed the red one and started on that. I took that one away. He grabbed the green one. Each time he grabbed a new toy, he stared right at me in sinister toddler defiance. Each time I said no, my voice got louder. By the fifth one, I was shouting as I announced that bath time was over.

I thought he might cry. Worse, he just sat silently on my lap as I dried him off. I felt awful.

"Do you know that Mommy loves you?" I asked.

He didn't respond.

Then there I was, explaining that Mommy was very crabby and tired and that he is, in fact, a very good boy who just has to work on not sucking moldy trains.

He sat quietly with his lip out.

Ouch.

Oh, yeah, my job people never even called me. All that anxiety for nothing. Too bad for them. At this point I would agree to be paid in pita chips just to get out of the house.

The World's Worst Job Seeker

2008-04-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

So I applied for a job.

Friday night I was doing my tri-weekly scan of craigslist for any remotely interesting part-time position, when I found it: television news segment producer, three days a week every other week, two days a week on alternate weeks.

I was so giddy I almost couldn't sleep that night. The next day, during Henry's nap time, I sent my updated resume and a cover letter to the email address. I felt electric.

And then 10 minutes passed and I felt ill. Every Feminine-Mystique-y stereotype I have in my head about the necessity of being a full time mother came charging out of the far corners of my brain. I'd be abandoning my son. Outsourcing the most important job I'll ever do. Turning him over to a stranger to satisfy my own selfish needs.

It didn't help when I told my mom about the job. She won't come out and say she thinks it's a terrible idea, but she manages to slip the idea in between supportive statements. "I totally understand the need for a job," she said. "That's why I started working as soon as you were both in school full time."

Then she reminded me that no job could be as important as taking care of Henry. And that although these years seem long now, when I look back I'll realize they were just a fraction of time. And that I will have more stress than I can imagine if I get a job.

But that she really, really, thought it sounded great.

I'm not blaming her. These things wouldn't bother me if they weren't already lodged in my psyche.

Don't get me wrong: I do not think working mothers are a bad thing. In fact, the mothers I know who worked from the time their children were born always seem to have the most confident, well-adjusted kids. Every one of my mom friends work or are returning to work, and all of their kids are lovely, happy little people.

This is just another way for me to beat myself up. Not just beat myself up--beat myself up over something that hasn't happened yet. And, let's be honest, will probably not happen.

Sure, the employers may be so impressed with my qualifications that they manage to overlook the fact that I failed to capitalize and italicize "the" in The Economist (which may not seem that bad to you, but as an editor, I feel like it's the equivalent of showing up to an interview in assless chaps). But there is no way they can overlook baby #2, which already has that I-ate-the-whole-basketball housing. I know pregnancy discrimination is illegal, but really, if you were a non-commercial satellite station, would you want to have to find a temporary employee within three months of finding your permanent one?

So to recap: I found a possible means of escape from housewifedom, I felt good, I felt guilty, I talked to my mom, I felt more guilty, I have almost no chance of getting the job anyway, which makes me relieved for a minute, and then sad again.

At least mental and emotional instability gives me something to do.

Anniversary

2008-04-17T14:45:00.000-07:00

Today Simon and I have been married for four years. Four years! As much as I complain, I still can't really believe it's been that long.

I know it often seems that I have nothing good to say about Simon. Next to my mom, he is my biggest archenemy. And however many new leaves I turn over, I am likely to continue to bitch and moan about him and to him because he is abysmal at interpersonal communication and he is self-absorbed in a way that a boy might become if his mom always cooked his food and made his bed and put the toilet seat down so silently in the background that the boy thinks those things just happen on their own.

But it occurred to me last weekend, as we drove out to Stinson Beach and I tried to give him the silent treatment the whole way over (I made it to the San Rafael Bridge), that I relish my resentments. I get a sort of self-righteous glee in turning them over and over in my mind.

Then this morning after breakfast Simon turned to Henry and said, "Did you donate to Daddy's race fund? Thanks, Henry!" And my stomach flipped over as a realized that his 200 mile relay race is this weekend and I haven't donated one red cent. This after he donated $500 to my marathon fund last year because I had been griping about the fact that I wouldn't get the free hat they gave to early fundraisers.

And I remembered that before I hated him for things like breathing too loud in bed, I felt a near-constant guilt over being a lousy wife.

So maybe the truth is that I still love him dearly. I just have guilt issues in relationships. Oh, yeah, and this whole traditional-spousal-role thing also cheeses me off. Seriously, the next time he says, "I can watch Henry for you," I may smack him.

He did send me a large bouquet of flowers today, with a note that says, "I love you." This after I grunted and dodged a kiss when he wished me a Happy Anniversary this morning.

Honestly? I'm pretty lucky.

Glamour

2008-04-15T20:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight as Henry and I drove to Cactus Taqueria to pick up dinner, he reached his hand out from the backseat and said, "ay-you," which means "thank you," which means he wants me to take something from his hand.

I reached my hand back, and got a little gummy ball in my fingers.

"What was that?" I asked Henry.

"Guk," he replied, which means "dirt."

A couple of minutes later I parked the car, and when I went around to get Henry he was just pulling a finger from his right nostril, and there was a large booger on it. He held it up to me and said, "guk."

Suddenly it all became horribly clear. "Did you give Mommy a booger a few minutes ago?" I asked.

"Yeah!" he said proudly, offering me the next one.

This is the closest I get to appreciation these days.

Jealousy

2008-04-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my cousin Liz came by to see Henry.

She looked fantastic—long, gorgeous hair, perfect yet minimal makeup, a black-and-white mini dress with matching sweater. She looks very New York. Very successful New York.

She just broke up with Paul, her Dutch boyfriend of four years. She has a fabulous Manhattan apartment and great friends. She's applying for a job at Ralph Lauren Home.

From her perspective, everything is uncertain. But I from where I sit, her future is absolutely gleaming.

And me? I am thrilled for her. Just really, really ecstatic. And so jealous I cried on and off all evening.

As free as she is, that’s how trapped I feel in my (not always, but currently) miserable marriage and my teeny-tiny cluttered little house.

Now I cry at least once a week as I do dishes in the temporary sink in our laundry room. I don’t see possibilities anymore. I only see more dishes.

So to celebrate my despondency I had three cookies and a quarter of a tub of fat-free Cool Whip. Then I was despondent and also sick to my stomach.

I adore Henry. Most days I love staying home with him. But, Christ, if I have to spend another two years as nothing more than someone's mommy, someone's wife, and both those someones' housekeeper, I'll lose it for good.

Husky Baby

2008-04-11T21:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog!

Crap. I had this idea that a blog would be a fine activity for me and that maybe my struggles with motherhood/marriage/depression might be relevant to someone other than myself.

In my head I had these brilliant topics lined up. I am really, really pithy in my head. I'm freakin' Anne Lamott.

And now I sit down and I am reminded that my life is excrutiatingly boring. That, and I have only a very tentative idea of what a blog is.

So, you know, welcome and my apologies.

Here's me on a wild Friday night: On my ass, on the couch, trying hard to focus on writing instead of researching Aspberger's Syndrome because my 2-year-old son, Henry, has an obsession with auto insignias.

Henry's asleep. Simon, my husband and sometime nemesis, won't be back from his business trip until past midnight. It would be silent if not for the clothes drier that's almost always going.

This morning I had the horrible realization that my son may be fat. Not just chubby, but actually overweight. The light first flickered one when I slipped the 24-month T-shirt over his 22-month head, and it barely fit over his belly. Then, as he ran around with his buddies at baby gym, it occurred to me that he looks like a linebacker. As I mulled this over, I mentioned to my friend Susie that Henry stepped on my mom's scale the other day and it read 31 pounds, and Susie said, "Oh my God!"

Sure enough, I typed in his weight and height into a BMI calculator and it says he's overweight.

This is probably not a big deal in the scheme of things, but I have no job besides this, and so I take it as a failure on my part. I always thought fat kids just ate crap and watched too much TV. Henry eats berries and yogurt for breakfast! He eats raisins instead of candy! He spends half the day running laps around our house or our yard or the park.

The worst part is I wrote a column about childhood obesity back before I had kids and it was all know-it-all-y. It's so easy to give advice when it's purely on a theoretical basis.