Two kids and a dog

Motherhood, the hardest job you'll ever love. Or so the saying goes. Not that I disagree for certainly it is a very hard job and I do love it, but it seems so silly to try to encapsulate motherhood in one throw away sentance. Why did I become a mother? Now there's a question. It seems like I always felt like that's what I would be. Never did I really question whether I would have children. Okay, to be honest, back when I wanted to be a minister I wasn't sure how I would ever fit kids into my life. The job just seemed so all consuming. Sure men could become ministers and have children, but they had wives that did all the dirty work for them. How is it that women have come so far in society that we can be insanely successful in our professional lives and yet we're still expected to be the perfect wife and mother? Every woman that I know, even those with successful careers, still have to worry about the bulk of childcare and child related issues. Some men are enlightened enough to help out, but it is a very rare man indeed who will take on the burden as much as the mother of his children does.

I stay at home which means two things: I don't have to feel so incredibly guilty about leaving someone else to raise my children, which is a good thing, and that I am responsible for almost everything that happens that relates to the kids, which is not so good. Surely the kids are my job. I mean what else do I stay home for? (Don't tell DH I just really don't like working 9 to 5.) But of course I would take on much more of the burden of dealing with the children than DH does. Add to that fact that he's a successful up and coming young professor who is a perfectionist and a workaholic and there isn't much time in DH's schedule for me or the kids. But what truly drives me nuts is that I NEVER get a break from the kids. Up at night, I'm there. Medical and school related things, that's me. Get out and put away their clothes, I'm it. Feed them, me again. Take them out, I'm on it. Intellectually stimulate them, me too. I am on call 24 hours a day. I watch them by myself for at least 10 hours a day every weekday and another 4-8 hours on the weekend. When Dh goes away on a conferece or to teach a class, which happened every other month this past year, I am the one who picks up the slack. And not to rip on working moms at all because I think that everyone must make up their own path, but at least they get a lunch break where there are no dirty diapers to change, no one screaming for juice or snack, or climbling on your lap because you had the insane idea of trying to read the newspaper while eating. And occasionally when working you have adult conversation. I've often thought of going back to work just for these very benefits. But here's the thing, nothing else would change. Everything to do with the kids would still fall on me. I would just get to drop them in a daycare or at the babysitter for a few hours.

Do I sound a little whiny? Yeah, I guess so. I did choose to have children. And it's not just that I chose to have children. I had to actively work for them. Infertility, the most horrible emotional turbulence that will ever cost you several thousand dollars. My son Q is an IVF baby which means that for I think 17 days I gave myself a shot in the thigh or arm and then went through various other dignity destroying procedures just to get pregnant. So I asked for it. But there are times when I wish I was free to do as I pleased, shop on my own, talk for hours at a coffee shop, go see a movie, or follow DH to all the cool places he gets to go.

Are there rewards top having kids then? Hell yes. No one looks at me like my kids do. I am the sun and the moon and the stars to them. I know one day they'll hate me as all teenagers hate their moms but today I am a god. They always want to be with me. Who else wants to be around you 24 hours a day? Who else thinks you're that interesting and fun? I get to kiss their hurts and it actually makes them feel better. Very powerful. I get to watch them become real people. I get to watch them become the increible beings they will be. And I know that is what my focus should be. My kids are real people. And one day they will grow up and do their own thing and perhaps my daughter will repeat the very same complaints that I have. But I am only here to watch out for them as they grow and help them become the best people they can be. I only get to hold their little hands as long as they let me. So it is again I realize that I need to stay in the moment, stop looking for the next big thing, and enjoy what I have NOW. Later I will be able to do all the things I want when I am no longer the sun and the moon, when they don't want to see my face, when their friends are all much more interesting than I am. "Patience, patience" Yoda counsels Luke Skywalker. Ah, Master Yoda, I am still learning. Teach me more.

What would I risk to reach you and to find me?

"You and I
Have so much love
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one bed."
-Kuan Tao-Sheng-

"I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul
and I didn't see it.
But everything around
--horizons of land and of seas--,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive"
-Juan Ramon Jimenez-


Told you I was a romantic. Just was reading some poems tonight and wanted to share them with the world. Enjoy.

I got one hand in my pocket and the other one is playing a piano

Why is it that when we become adults we become much less emotionally demonstrative? We don't shout or jump around all that often. We try to keep our crying to a minimum. We keep a lid on our emotions. Should we? And what would it look like if we didn't?

It looks to be all but certain that baseball is coming back to DC. This is cause for much celebration. This morning DH was talking about possibly buying season tickets for next year and he asked me why I didn't seem very exicted. I was. Although that was greatly tempered by the fact that there are still many obstacles to overcome before opening day 2005 and I have no idea how much season tickets would cost. Even if I wasn't still worrying about these things I wondered what it would look like if I showed how excited I really was. I don't know. I seem to have somewhat lost the capacity for outward displays of emotion.

When DH and I were talking recently about how we were doing in our relationship he still felt that I didn't demonstrate how happy I was to see him when he got home or came upstairs from working all day in his office. He noted that our daughter smiled broadly and screamed "Dada! Dada!" when she sees him come in. Our son will run in and out of the room jumping and hand flapping and yelling "Hi Daddy!". (Quick aside that my son, Q, is on the Autism Spectrum and so the jumping and hand flapping is distinctive but you KNOW he's happy when he does it.) What do I do? I tried to think about that. Most days when Dh walks in I am running around trying to get dinner on the table. My kids have been melting down for the past half hour (they don't call it the witching hour for nothing!) and I am eargerly awaiting what is sometimes the best time of the day, bedtime (for the kids, not me, I stay up way too late). I don't run around and scream DH's name at the top of my lungs, though I'm quite sure that's not what he's expecting from me anyway. But what could I do to actually show him I'm happy to see him? So this is one of my new projects. Making sure I'm thinking about this when I greet him and taking special time to show him how I feel.

But this has led me to a wider questioning of what emotionality is allowed adults. I have always kept a lid on my emotions truth be told. They are WAY too strong if left unchecked. It would be less about namable emotions and more like a flow of colors or sensations. Not even something I could write about on paper. At least not in a way that made any sense. I have often felt that if I truly let go that the emotions would just overwhelm me. And I think I can probably remember and recount every time that I have let go like that. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I couldn't really live that way. I would get so lost in the emotion I would never be able to function in the "real" world. Recently on one of my morning walks I let go. For various reasons I was more open to sensations that morning. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was rising, my music was playing in my ears and I just FELT God. It was such an incredible feeling of love and beauty and wholeness that for a moment I felt like I could walk right into the sky and fly. It was incredible and I am so thankful that I was able to touch that emotion for a moment. But I had to come home after and get dressed and feed the kids and do the laundry. There is no way that if I stayed stuck in that sensation/emotion that I would ever be able to do any of these things. But somehow having had this emotion made all of these more tedious things more enjoyable for the rest of the day.

So here is the dilemma. How to be open enough to emotion, and demonstrating that emotion, that you truly feel but not get lost in it. And I mean feel everything. I mentioned a time when leting go and feeling resulted in a positive emotion but there are many times when it is a negative emotion: pain, fear, loneliness, anger. Those are the scariest of all. When you are in so much pain you feel as if your head will explode and you have no idea how to even put one foot in front of the other. But to be open to all that and yet still be able to exist and function in the "real" world. I am not sure yet how to do this and I think that when I really want to jump around the house or shout for joy and I don't, that is fleeing from that balance. And maybe I should just exist in that emotion more like my kids do. Have you tried jumping around the house today shouting someone's name (in joy or sorrow)? I think I just might do that before I make dinner.

So much wasted, and this moment keeps slipping away...

"You cannot raise happy, secure, emotionally well-adjusted children, revel in a fabulous marriage, and work a sixty-hour week. You want to, I know. So do I. But we can't. It is physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually impossible. We have tried. We have failed." - Sarah Ban Breathnach

Ah, but we think it is our fault that we have failed. That there is something wrong with us because we cannot do this. We don't often think that it just isn't possible and what's more - WE SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT. I gave up a long time ago trying to work the sixty hour work week but I still hold myself to unattainable standards of what I should be able to accomplish. I consider my job to be spending time with my kids, playing with them, taking them places, reading to them, stretching their minds. It's why I choose to stay at home. I also think I can have a spotless house with the laundry always clean and great food always on the table at 6:30. And then yeah I also want an incredible marriage that thrills me and stimulates me and fulfills me. Somehow in there I am to also find time to stimulate my own mind so that I am a fairly interesting person and not just a shell of the person I used to be. I can't do it. I just can't. And the biggest thing I fight everyday is to say - that's okay.

"Shouldn't I be capable of all that?", my perfectionist self asks. "Isn't that what the modern life promises us?" I am learning that my answer should be "NO!!!" You really can't have it ALL. You can have pieces of what you want at certain times and what you need to learn to do is to enjoy and fully live into what you can have right at that moment. Maybe an oppotunity for something diffeent will be right around the corner. But for NOW we have to find a way to be happy and enjoy that happiness with those around us and show them how much we love and appreciate them. That's all we HAVE to do.

"You probably can have it all, just not all at the same time. And...you might have to make certain compromises when your children are small. But your children are going to be small for a very short period of time...it will go by in the blink of an eye, and you will only be 40, 50, or 60 with another 15 to 25 years ahead of you." - Anna Quindlen

All I can say is ENJOY your life and the people you love. It seems almost counterproductive to have to work to remind yourself to STOP and just enjoy but in today's society where the only thing that seems to matter is how much stuff you have, or what rank you've achieved, or how much harder you can work, it is the best thing you can do. I always want everything I want right NOW and never stop to appreciate what I already have. Today I want to enjoy the not perfect but very nice house I live in, the not perfect but acceptable body that I inhabit, the not perfect but wonderful craziness of life with my kids, and my not perfect but beautiful relationship with my husband. And this entry is far from perfect but for a moment I just need to appreciate that I got a chance to write it. Now I need to look in on my kids.

When stars collide like you and I, no shadows block the sun...

My identity is inextricably bound up with my marriage. My husband and I are partners. I don't know who I am without him. Which is why my world seemed to stop this past summer when, for one terrible moment, it seemed entirely possible that our marriage would not survive. I'm not sure if its a bad thing that I can't really conceive of life without him. It simply is true and so it seems that if I want to be sure of who I am and happy in that, working on my marriage is part of that. A little background here might be useful.

I met my husband (who from now on I'll refer to as DH, the widely accepted email intials for dear husband) when I was 17 and a freshman in college (yes, I was a very young freshman, but that's beside the point). We lived in the same dorm and without going into tedious details I will just say through a strange set of circumstances and people we were involved with, DH and I started to hang out on a regular basis. We were dating other people on and off but were spending more and more time getting to know one another. It was clear we were heading in the direction of being more than friends. And I clearly remember the lightbulb moment I had when I realized that if I wanted to date anyone else ever again, I had better do so, since once DH and I started down the relationship road, there was no turning back. This was the man I would marry and I KNEW that beyond a doubt. I believed then what I still believe now, that he is my soul mate. (I do read entirely too many romance novels {historical England only thank you very much} and I've been in enough women's studies classes to know this has influenced my romantic view of life, but I like it that way.)

We were engaged in a year (much to my family's chagrin), and three years later, two months after I graduated from college, we got married. We were so young and idealistic and going places. He was a year into a PhD program and I was off to get my Master's Degree (not in the right area mind you, but well what did I know at 21). I thought it would always be that wonderful and for the most part, that easy.

Here's the thing - it is so easy to take your marriage for granted. Life gets in the way of your idealism and things get very busy and suddenly you find your self at the dinner table trying to have a conversation but you can barely hear each other because the kids are screaming and and the house is in chaos and you have stopped listening. You give up and stop trying to tell your spouse what excites you and interests you and fulfills you and makes you want to cry because there's no time or the kids never let you talk or you think the other person already knows. And you start to drift. In my case it was a very slow drift that I barely recognized. Thinking as I always have that DH and I will be married until way past our 50th anniversary and that our marriage was unshakable, I was totally blind to the fact that we had become less like partners and more like roomates.

I never for a moment stopped loving my husband. I simply got so sidetracked by life that I stopped trying to make sure he knew I still loved him. When we hit our breaking point this summer, he said that he no longer knew if he made me happy. That sometimes he felt like I only saw him as another pair of hands to help with the kids and not as the man I loved who I was thrilled to see walk through the door because I missed him. And never was that the case. But it was the case that I had stopped trying. We were coasting and it seemed we were heading downhill.

Faced with the all too real possibillity of the end of our relationship, DH and I took a good look around and decided it was time to make some major changes. We revamped our schdeules to spend more time together. We created a date night every week where we eat after the kids are in bed so we can have real conversation. We started communicating more during the day. We both blog and read each other's blog and talk about the issues we're working on in our lives. We have truly rediscovered one another. He isn't the boy I married way back when, just as I am no longer that girl. But he is still my best friend in the world and the person that KNOWS me and loves me anyway.

This came home to me when we were having a discussion recently and I was angsting (is that a word?!!) about the fact that though my life often looks like the middle american suburban stereotype, I didn't feel like that was me at all. DH pointed out that that wasn't me. And he shocked me by saying that some pastimes that I thought helped define who I was, I didn't even like. It totally rocked my world and that realization is a whole other entry. But what is important is that he KNEW me enough to know something that I didn't even know about myself. And that is exactly what I expect from my soul mate.

And I learned that if I wanted my marriage to thrive I had to live into it the same way I am trying to live into my body and my beliefs. One thing I know, my life continues to be defined by my realtionship with this incredible man. I wouldn't have it any other way, because no matter what, his presence in the world and by my side makes me very happy.

Take me out to the ballgame...

Four years ago we moved to the Washington DC area from Long Island, New York. We had no particular ties to the DC area but that was where my husband got a job, so that was where we went. I liked DC and figured if we had to be outside the New York metro area, DC was a pretty cool place to end up. I grew on on Long Island and ALL my family still lives there so it was a pretty big thing to move a few hundred miles away. I have always considered myself a New Yorker (and still do) and if you catch me at the right time you'll hear a very distinctive New York accent coloring my words. So my husband and I decided if we were leaving NY than we would have to become Yankees fans. No, it really does not make a whole lot of sense to start liking a baseball team just when you're leaving the area, and it makes even less sense when you coinsider we weren't really big baseball fans before that. Cut to four years later and baseball is like a minor religion in my house. For the last two years we have ordered the cable baseball package and watched Yankee games whenever we could. My husband, previously not a sports fan, now plays fantasy baseball, reads the sports pages, and has baseball hats. I will willing watch a game even if no one else is around. My son is crazy about baseball and at 18 months was trying to pitch like Mike Mussina. My daughter is only 15 months old and only has about 20 words in her vocabulary but one of them is "baseball". Really we've become quite fanatical about it as only our family can.

So it is with incredible excitement that I await Major League Baseball's decision about moving the Montreal Expos to Washington DC. To read the paper, it is looking more and more like a possibility every day. Now there is a baseball team only 30 minutes away from us. The Balitmore Orioles have a great staduim and we've gone there a few times to watch them play the Yankees. But I am not a Balitmore fan (unless of course they're playing the Red Sox and then "Go O's!!") and don't intend to become one. If Washington got a team though, now that might mean some divided loyalties. I would love to be a member of the home crowd when I went to a game. Though to be fair, it does seem like when we've gone to see the Yankees beat the O's, that at least a third of the stadium are NY fans. Go figure. But if Washington had a team we would almost certainly buy season tickets of some kind and cheer on our new team. After all Nick Johnson plays for the Expos and he was the Yankee's first baseman for a few years. No I have no idea what I would do if somehow the new Washington team met up with the Yanks. But for now I would simply savor the possibility.

I think part of why this is so exciting is that I am finally becoming more of a Washingtonian. There is a definite part of one's identity that is related to where you are from or where you live. Your accent, your expectations, your pace of life, and the way you drive are all influenced by where you grew up and where you live now. It was very hard for me at first to leave NY. I had lived there all of my life except for 4 years in college in Michigan (let me tell you, the midwest, when you're a dyed in the wool New Yorker, is not the place to be) and I wasn't sure what to expect. I have been pleasantly suprised. This area is incredible for cultural activities, festivals, and events and much of it is free. Our neighborhood is incredibly diverse. Within two blocks there are families of many colors, national origins and backgrounds. I love that and am very excited that my kids might see the world very differently than I did growing up in an all white area. The pace is slightly slower than NY but nice none the less. The people are great. I love that grocery stores help you pack your bags, people help you out when they see you in trouble and people look out for one another's kids. I've met many friends here. Our town is in the final stages of redeveloping its downtown area and the new square, with its kid pleasing water fountain, is surrounded by restaurants, a movie theater, and stores of all kinds. When I go downtown I almost always run into someone I know. I feel like we live in a fairly small town all while being able to enjoy the bigger city of DC. Now of course to my husband and I, DC isn't really a city like NY is, but as an alternative, I am fairly happy with it. Our county is VERY liberal leaning. I always felt so left of center living on Long Island but here I feel positively mainstream. It is nice for a change. I guess what I'm saying is I am really starting to like living here. Having our own baseball team would just cement the deal.

Identity lesson for today: I am a transplanted New Yorker. But I am transplanted and starting to flourish in my new home. Who knows whether some day I'll actually say I'm a Washingtonian. Now, play ball!

I know you're mine all mine, but you look so good it hurts sometimes

I went shopping for some new fall clothes this morning. When you decide to stay at home with your kids, especially if you worked outside the home before that decision, you find you need a new wardrobe. Before I chose to be a domestic goddess (yes, that is how I prefer to refer to myself today) I worked at a school so my wardrobe was basically career clothes, blazers, skirts, and the like. Not very useful for hanging around the house all day with an infant who seems determined to make sure you smell like sour milk before the morning is half gone. So I was left with basically the clothes that I used to wear on the weekends. These were not the nicest clothes one had ever seen. When you dress up all week the last thing you want to do is dress up all weekend. Hence VERY casual everyday once I started staying home. Then I got pregnant again and so maternity clothes became my everyday wear. My maternity clothes were on the whole very cool. They have some great styles now, even better during my second pregnancy than my first, and since basically all I could wear was maternity clothes, I bought some very cool ones. But after you have the baby the LAST thing you want to wear is maternity clothes and so I was back to my old clothes.

Slowly over time, since as an added bonus when you stay at home you have almost no budget to buy clothes anyway, I had built up a farily decent wardrobe. But when I started going through them last spring to kind of take out what I no longer wear, I got very depressed. These clothes were not ME. They were usually stuff I could find on sale (not always the best way to express yourself through style) or stuff someone else bought me. And if there is one thing I can say about my identity, it's that the people who normally buy me clothes for gifts have very little idea who I am, and are generally not interested in finding out. They have their own idea of who I am that they formed when I was about 6 and it hasn't really changed since that time. Suffice to say that I realized that most of my clothes were not flattering, not exciting, and not at all reflective of who I am or would like to be. My aunt, who has been just incredible to me this past year, gave me a sizeable amount of money for my birthday so I decided to basically buy an entire summer wardrobe and throw out everything I had in my drawer. I had decided, due to a variety of factors including pregnancy induced vericose veins, that I would no longer wear shorts. It's not that I hate my legs, just that I don't think they're my best asset and so I would rather cover them a bit more. I am no longer 18 after all. But I am not OLD so I bought a number of different, cool capri pants and some classic but sometimes funky t-shirts and wore them all summer. I threw out all but 3 pairs of shorts and I think I actually only wore shorts once this summer. I live in the mid-atlantic area and wondered whether I would regret not having shorts but I didn't at all. I felt very me all summer. I felt hip and cool, not old, but not trying to be something I no longer was.

So when the weather here started getting cooler (shouldn't really say that since today it's like 87 on the first day of fall, but it was cool earlier this week), I started to look through my closet again and got very depressed. All of my cooler weather clothes were kind of frumpy, didn't really flatter me, and didn't make me feel good about myself at all. So I informed my husband that I needed to go shopping. Thankfully he was okay with that. He understands that I am trying to become more ME and less what everyone else expects or wants me to be. In fact we've gone through some rough patches lately that in part came about because I had kind of lost who I was. I wasn't the woman he married, and to be honest he wasn't the man I married, and somehow we forgot that we needed to figure out the new people we were becoming and love those people too. But more on marriage and its potholes in another post.

So I went shopping this morning on a limited budget and with a baby in tow, but I was out there making decisions about the person I wanted to project to the world and it felt damn good. And although I have some leftover baby flab I need to get rid of, I was pretty happy with how I looked. I looked like ME. I found fewer clothes that I wanted to find and I think I will have to still wear a number of things from my old wardrobe but maybe I can dress it up somehow. It's hard to find these clothes since clothes seem to fit into the following catgories: Juniors (way too young. If I'm not 18 why try to look as though I am. No one wins this way.), Career clothes (way too dressy for staying at home and dealing with the reality of a toddler or two), Casual clothes (read frumpy or sweats or I don't really care about how I look clothes), and some other really scary stuff that is hard to define but basically that I would never be caught dead in (I have worn these before but always HATED it). Someone needs to put out a hip line of clothes for younger moms who stay at home but don't want to wear sweats all day.

But some would argue that why do stay at home moms need good looking clothes. After all, here I stand at 5pm with grass stains on my knees, juice on my thigh, and I'm not even sure what that crusty white stuff on my shoulder is. Why dress nice if that's what happens to my clothes? And another arguement I have heard is why dress nice when your kids are the only ones who see all day. To rebutt, first your kids are not the only ones who see you. You probably have a husband or partner and they see you and I doubt they like to see you look like a slob. And before you all skewer me for being so 1950 let me just say marriage is WORK and wouldn't YOU rather see your partner looking good and sexy rather than looking like a slob. It's easier to do the work when you like what you're staring at. And then you probably go out into the world at times, or at least you should, so people there see you. And even if you don't, your kids see you and what do they learn from your appearance? Above all, YOU see you. Look in the mirror. Shouldn't you like what you see?

What you wear affects you most of all. Last year my husband started to wear suits when he taught a class. It make a huge difference for him. Since he is a young professor, there tends to be a blurring of the lines sometimes with his students. But when he was in a suit he felt more authority in the classroom and I imagine the kids looked at him as more of a professor and as less of a peer. He started taking more pride in his appearance and started doing various things with his hair and other grooming. He started to live into his body. And he looks damn good because of it. I used to live into my body much more but then I had two other occupants who rented out the space and I started to lose who I was. I moved out of my body in a way. I am determined to stop that cold. My body and the clothes I wear reflect me to my husband, my kids, the world, and me. I refuse to give that way any more so I went shopping. My grandfather always said when you feel bad, go shopping and spend money and you'll feel better. You are so right Poppa.