Who do you love?

Earlier this week I was intrigued to hear ads for today's Oprah show talking about a mother's controversial confession and how that related to her having a great sex life. So I tuned in to see what this confession could possibly be about. Now normally I don't watch Oprah, not because I don't like her show, I actually think she's a voice of sanity in the daytime wilderness, but because I'm usually playing with kids or taking them out somewhere at that time (aka post nap time). But I was glad that I tuned in to this show.

It turns out that the mother involved, Ayelet Waldman, is a writer whose recent article in The New York Times caused something of a fury when she declared that she loved her husband more than she loved her kids and that, while she loved her kids, she was in love with her husband. Of course out of the woodwork came those moms that can't stand a mom with anything other than complete love and devotion and a plan of ultimate sacrifice of their entire life for their children. And the battle was on.

First of all this is an article about sex and its place in mother's lives. For most mothers, let's be honest, sex has no place. Waldman writes of this:
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But the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife's passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.

Except, that is, from me.

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any.

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Too true. Very few moms are getting any. And they don't care. To hear the moms on Oprah tell it sex is a chore, something to be done while watching TV, another to do on a already long list. I can understand. I felt the same about a year ago. Between having two kids and dealing with Q's autism I had no libido, no desire, and no burning passion except if it had to do with my kids. And really not so much even then. When DH and I almost imploded last summer I knew something had to change. Why is Waldman getting what she needs and wants? She's in love with her husband.

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Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

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Whoa. That is just not said in most of the two parent family households I know. And yet, while I wouldn't exactly say I love my kids more than my husband (I think it's kind of like comparing apples and oranges really.), I think I know where Waldman is coming from. It's about where your center is. What drives your family? Your love for your kids or your marriage and your love for your spouse? In my household it used to be the former, now it is the latter. And I love my kids and they get tons of my time and energy and attention but now, my husband and our relationship gets some of that time too. And if that means that DH and I are having a discussion about something and the kids want to play, they may have to amuse themselves for a few minutes while DH and I debate the meaning of life. And there were times, when DH and I first started to really talk again, that I felt badly that I was ignoring my kids. But now I see that it is so much better for all of us. DH and I get to have a healthy relationship which keeps us all together and happy. And Q and C hopefully will learn what it really takes to create a healthy relationship and take that with them into their adult life.

When we started having these conversations and spending more time together (date nights and long discussions over glasses of wine) I totally fell back into passionate love with DH. I mean I read trash novels precisely because I think that kind of love is possible and desirable. While I am not interested in true confessions or getting into descriptive details, I will say that once that love was real again, sex became much more enjoyable and indeed necessary to maintaining that connection. But like Waldman, I find myself one of the few moms out there that is regularly getting any. I am happy to be where I am but I wonder about many of my friends and how they feel about their husbands and their marriages.

So many of the other moms on Oprah seemed to think that this kind of torrid relationship wasn't possible if you have young children and that after the children are grown, then they would be free to rebuild their marriages and rediscover their love. Only I don't believe a word of that. I've been there, done that. And if DH and I hadn't decided that we would no longer put our relationship on the back burner, we would no longer be married. I still have very young children but my marriage cannot wait for them to grow up. What's more, my sense of self and identity cannot wait for them to grow up. I have to be who I am now, and though part of that is their mom, that is not all of who I am. And I don't want my daughter to think that being a mom means that you must give up everything else including a wonderful, loving, and sexual relationship with your husband.

Why am I sharing this with the world? Why do you care what my marriage is like? Mostly I am writing this to get people thinking about it. Let's debate this and spark conversation about it. There is so much talk lately about the importance of marriage, yet for some reason that talk says that the biggest threat to marriage is gay people. I think that one of the the biggest threats to marriage is making your kids and childrearing as a whole so high a priority that you forget the person that you first fell in love with. It doesn't matter whether you're married with kids now or just planning to be that way in the future. I don't agree with everything Waldman says or how she expresses it, but I do know this: if you are truly in love with your spouse or if you were ever truly in love with your spouse, don't let go of that. Don't let it lie and think it will still be there when you have more time for it. Don't transfer that love to your kids, or even your job, and expect to still be happily married for many years to come. And you should be having sex, great sex, and it should not be a chore or an obligation. And if you have a special needs child, like I do, this only makes this more important, not less. You have more grief and frustrations and joys that you need to be sharing with your partner.

I wish someone had given me a wake-up call about this a long time ago. But I am profoundly glad that I have come to realize that I do love my husband, and that our relationship is the most important relationship in my life. I don't love my kids any less and I don't think it makes me a bad mom at all. My great hope is that one day my kids will find their soul mates and be happily married for many years, just like I plan to be.

She will be loved

I didn't make my bed today. Most mornings my bed is made as soon as possible, or certainly by the time I am finished with my morning routine. But I was away running a youth retreat for most of Saturday and Sunday and my house looked like it had been trashed so I spent most of the day trying to run errands and pick up the house a little. My bedroom was not high on my priority list. And DH was going to be gone all day (not that he cares if the bed is made but somehow it seems to motivate me if I think another person will see my mess) so it didn't seem to matter what the bedroom looked like.

Having just got the kids in bed I was prepared to get out my clothes for tomorrow and get into my pajamas. And then I looked at my unmade bed. Apparently my cats had decided that an unmade bed was the perfect place to throw up. So now when I have a kitchen to clean from dinner and a family room strewn with toys and all I want to do is plop on the couch, I have to change my sheets and wash my comforter. That'll teach me to never ignore the bed even if it seems like it doesn't matter. I am so feeling the love.

Now I'm off to be a good little housewife again. Some days I really hate this job, especially the "house" part of it.

Baseball shout out

It is Nationals fever here in DC. So I feel like I would be remiss in adding my own insanity into the mix.

I wish I could be there at RFK to welcome the Nats to their new home but I do not have tickets. But I will be watching at home and we have tickets to two other Nats games later in the season. I can only imagine what it will be like for those players to walk into RFK tonight. Most of these guys came from a town that ignored them at best. Montreal had lost its baseball fever. Washington, by contrast, is on fire about baseball. Tonight 45,000 will be cheering them on at the stadium. That must be an incredible rush. They are no longer the Expos with a losing record and a sad fan base. They are the Washington Nationals, tied for first place, with a fan base that is nuts about them, all they are and can be. And I do know that the screaming and yelling, people pulling for you and cheering you on, makes a big difference to one's mindset and performance. Go Nats! I am very proud to be cheering for the home team.

On the other side of the league, the Yankees beat Boston and all is right with the world. Mo got the save, Giambi (my boy, even after all the steroid stuff) got the two run homer, and I just love seeing Tino back in the dugout. Yesterday was a good baseball day. I am looking forward to two more great games tonight. A great night that includes laying back on the couch with DH, flipping between the Yankees and Nats, and trying not to cheer too loudly that we wake the kids. Play ball!

Life's like an hourglass glued to the table

What I learned on retreat:

1. It is heaven to get away for a short time and not to be needed by anyone for anything. You forget how to relax and who to be if you don't get away sometimes. I was so excited about my free time I didn't even know what to do with it.

2. An ipod is just about the coolest thing ever and silence, though sometimes very useful, is highly overrated. So are breathing exercises that mostly just make me feel like I'm about to hyperventilate.

3. I need to eat better. At the retreat center we went to an incredible cook makes all the meals. They are nutritious and delicious and that's saying alot from one of the pickiest eaters on earth. I wish I could cook but I really suck at it and it feels like a giant waste of time. Still I am going to try to cook better and healthier for me and my family.

4. I love to sing. I spent hours Saturday night singing with a bunch of other women with one lone guitar to guide us. I'm wondering if I can get a similar small group to sing more in church.

5. I suck at forgiveness. I spent awhile during my free time probing some old emotional wounds, hoping they had healed over to some extent and I could be free of them. Not so easy as that. Yes, they have healed over for the most part but they're kind of like my c-section scars, just a little tender if you poke at them too hard. I'd love to say I can forgive and move on. After all that is what I love about Christianity. I screw up and say I'm sorry. God forgives me and I get another chance to do it right or screw up again. Only I am not that good. And I get stuck at okay I can forgive, but I can't forget. I can understand, and to some extent, I can even empathize a little, but I can't just sweep it away like it didn't happen. Somehow it seems like if I do that I lose the very valuable lessons that I think could be learned from the situation. So obviously I need to work on this more, though I feel I have made significant progress.

6. I do not have to become a congregational minister. A little backstory here - ten years ago when I went to graduate school I had a choice to just get a masters in social work or to also get a master of divinity and go into the ministry. I choose to just do social work for financial and emotional reasons. I have always gone back and forth over whether I think this was a good decision. But having seen what churches do to their ministers (generally suck the life out of them) I had a hard time thinking that I wanted to actually go to seminary. I am still not sure what I want to do with the rest of my life but I am pretty sure it isn't to be a congregational minister. And by acknowledging that I feel a little better about my future options and decisions.

7. I have no plans next year other than to be a mom and general organizer for my family. This is okay. It is okay that I am not going to school or going back to work in any significant way. It is okay to just keep doing what I am doing for another year and enjoy it. I do not have to justify this to anyone else. Especially the people who constantly ask me what I am going to do with myself once the kids are in school.

8. Real women don't look like 17 year old supermodels and neither should I. It would be nice to be in a little better shape physically but having been pregnant twice, I now have curves that 17 year olds just don't have. I can still be sexy, and I will remember this whenever I see an advertisement that makes me feel like crap about my body.

9. The director of Christian Ed at my church, also our retreat leader, isn't doing the job she is best suited for. I have to remember to breathe more often when dealing with her.

10. I need to stop shutting God out of my life. I need to let God out of the little box I've put Her/Him in. There was this huge ginger cat at the retreat center that ran in and out of our sessions and walked around looking for attention. He sat in the labyrinth I was walking and brushed up against me as I walked by. When I got to the center he sat under my knees as I tried to think deep thoughts. I ended up smiling and petting him while thinking. God was in that cat. God said "You need to lighten up and just enjoy a little more. You need to pay more attention to me. I'll be here hanging out waiting for you. And no you can't get out of here without some cat hair on your pants." Words to live by.

This woman's work

This past weekend I went on a retreat with 30 women from my church. It was an incredibly relaxing, spiritually uplifting, and intellectually stimulating weekend. I was so in need of a recharge and it was just what I needed. (It was good in spite of our retreat leader, not because of her, though that's another story.) There is something so incredibly powerful about being surrounded by that much female energy. We were women from all different ages and stages of life. We were powerful women who have been through a lot and have wisdom to share. And share it we did. Some of us stay at home, others work part time or full time. Some of us have children, some of us do not. We have all made different decisions in our lives for different reasons but in the context of this weekend, none of that mattered. What mattered was time for us to renew ourselves, renew our friendships, and see God in each other, or should I say see the Goddess in one another. Though we didn't crack a Bible (which I thought was a definite problem), God was still alive and well there among Her children.

But of course, even after those incredible mountaintop experiences, you still have to come back to the valley where everyone actually lives. And in our valley world women are generally only appreciated for what they look like or what they can do with their bodies, not their wisdom and their incredible spirituality. I am presently reading Sherri Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall, a kind of sci fi treatment of a backlash against women set in America in 2000. Scary how real it actually seems and how much of red state conservative America would probably not have a problem if women were actually treated the way they are in the book. Visit Progressive Commons to read about a very male dominated push to roll back women's reproductive rights. In the mail today was another pro-life brochure (the people who we bought our house from were apparently very catholic and very pro-life) about how "real" women needed to stand up and assert that women don't actually want the right to regulate their own bodies. The majority of america, don't you know, is not pro-choice and these real women need to stand up and tell america how women really are pro-life. (I hate this label as I am so not anti-life. I am pro-choice. I am pro keeping men from telling me what to do with my body. I am pro-child and pro-family and pro- making intelligent decisions about our bodies based on what we actually want from our lives.)

Well I spent a lot of time with unreal women this weekend. They were amazing and I felt amazing around them. It makes sense to me that many men really don't want women to get together without men around, because when they do, the power it creates is the power of the Maiden, Mother and Crone all in one. It is pretty scary, especially to those who would have women under their power. But I will be back at retreat next year and I know many other women will too. Rise up sisters. Together we are unbeatable.

(Many thanks to my wonderful DH who cheerfully took the kids all weekend to give me this time away. He knows the value of a powerful and spiritually renewed woman. We need more men like this in the world.)

That's what little boys are made of

All my friends with 4 year old boys are at their wits end. The boys are constantly talking about killing and death. "I'm going to kill you!" seems to be a fairly popular statement. And weapons have become the greatest thing since sliced bread. (One friend even reported that her son made a gun from the piece of bread he was eating.) The boys sees guns everywhere and want to play with them. Now these are not gun people, at all. I live in an area of the country likely to be cordoned off when they start locking up liberals for re-education. Here the question is are you liberal or radical. There are no toy guns in these houses but the boys create toy guns out of whatever they can use. Ah I guess boys will be boys.

Unless, of course, your boy is not the "typical" boy. Q has never commented on guns at all. I don't even think he knows what one is. The concepts of death and killing are abstract enough to be totally beyond his understanding. Yes, he can be aggressive and regularly pushes and hits his sister when she is in his business. But then again, C has been wising up and doing the same when she wants a certain toy. No, in our household Dora is Queen, Thomas the Tank Engine rules, and the Teletubbies are always good for a laugh. Violence of any kind is not part of the vocabulary.

I am not claiming that this is in any way due to my incredible parenting. (Ha! I wish!) I think it is simply because Q is not typical. And so I have found one of the many gifts of autism that I have started to catalogue. You might think that autism is one the most horrible things that could ever happen to your family, but to me, while there are many, many challenges, there are also many unseen gifts. Next year when Q goes to a regular preschool maybe he'll start to pick this gun thing up, maybe not. I know he won't always be interested in being different from the crowd. But for now I value the fact that my little boy is still just that, and his being different makes him unique and beautiful.

Now I'm just waiting until C finds out about Barbie. Her father has sworn that Barbie dolls will never be allowed in this house. I wonder if you can make a Ken doll out of a piece of bread.

The most wonderful time of the year

Oh my friends, it is baseball season again, and all is right with the world. I'm not exactly sure how I became such a big baseball fan. Years ago I was a football fan. This was mostly because my grandfather was a football fan. Poppa was a Chicago Bears fan and I remember watching many a Bears game with him. Due to this I know entirely too much about the sport and I can actually watch a football game and know what is going on. Years ago I hated watching baseball, especially on TV. I thought it was God awful boring. Now I spend most of my spring and summer evenings parked on the couch watching a Yankees game (and hopefully some National games this year). How did this happen?

I think it began when I worked in a high school on Long Island. I was the social worker but spent a lot of time with guidance counselors and administration. On Long Island there are two kinds of people: Yankees fans and Mets fans. I was never a Mets fan. I don't have anything against them, I just was never a fan. And I think I hung around too many Yankees fan. The other social worker in the building, a man, was a HUGE Yankees fan. It was hard not to have some of it rub off on me. Then one day I attended a real live baseball game with my sister. She had company tickets to a Mets game. We were really close to the field and it was actually fun. I started thinking maybe there was something to this sport.

When we moved to DC from NY, DH and I kind of joked that now we had to become Yankees fans. I don't even remember how we started watching games. But suddenly we were, together, and it was interesting and fun and we wanted to watch more. I think to some extent that 9/11 had something to do with it. Here in DC, of course, 9/11 had a deep and lasting impact but in NY the cuts were deeper, the psyche more scarred. Who wasn't rooting for the Yankees to win the World Series that year, if just to give NY something to smile about. After that, we were hooked.

For the past three years DH and I have ordered the digital cable baseball package that allows us to watch virtually any baseball game we want. Mostly we watch Yankee games but we have watched whoever is playing if we need a baseball fix. DH is more into it than I am, memorizing stats, playing fantasy league, and reading books about strategy. But we talk about the best players, who we think ought to win, and of course we cheer when the Yanks triumph. It has become an important part of our relationship, something we enjoying doing together. Q loves baseball too and C is learning that this is our family sport. We have tickets to at least 4 live games this year and we'll probably spend a few nights at the minor league stadium nearby as well.

Why is baseball such a great sport? It's a mind game. To play it right you really have to think. What kind of pitches does the pitcher have and how many can the batter hit? A simple mistake can blow it out of the park. An incredible pitch can blow by the best slugger. Move fast enough and you can outwit the fielder trying to throw you out, but make sure you know where the ball is or you'll run right into it. A pitching duel is a wonder to watch and a high scoring game has you screaming every time someone scores.

One day I'm sure that C and Q will remember that they watched baseball games with their Daddy (and their Mommy). They'll know all the rules and hopefully they'll be Yankees or Nationals fans. I imagine that for many years to come we'll all spend the best time of the year singing take me out to the ballgame. Hopefully we'll teach them well and neither one will marry a Red Sox fan.

For a great perspective on opening day check out The Trickster. And yes, he's a Yankee fan too.

Living in two worlds

I went to visit my family this weekend for Easter. My whole family still lives in about a half hour radius on Long Island. The longer I am away from Long Island the stranger I feel when I go there. It is like a different world, the uber-suburbs if you will. A place where you are only as good as the name on your clothes and handbag, your accomplishments noted in the number and size of electronics or other consumer goods, and you will be judged on how nice your house looks. I'm not saying every single person on Long Island thinks this way, but it is kind of the culture of the area. I don't mean to offend anyone, and if you are offended I hope you at least have that $500 Coach bag to make you feel better. Seriously though, although I can usually find those things in the DC suburbs too, it seems so pervasive back on the Island.

But as much as it can be disconcerting to visit your hometown and realize you no longer fit in there, it is worse when you visit your family and feel like you no longer fit in with them. I love my family and I miss them. I try to get up to see them every few months and occasionally they come down to visit me. But we are of two different worlds. This has become more apparent to me in dealing with Q as I try to navigate between with NT world and the world of autism. (NT stands for neurotypical, for someone who has a typical or "normal" neurological development vs. those on the autism spectrum.) In the NT world all sorts of things are expected from you. Socializing, normal speech patterns, the ability to deal with multiple intense sensory input, a pattern of thought that flows in a way that the world around you can understand. The NT world assumes that anyone can handle this. For Q, and anyone else on the autism spectrum, this is often not the case.

On a good day Q is fairly interactive. He wants to have a conversation with you. Be advised that this conversation will probably in some way involve Dora the Explorer (because what would life be without the map to tell us where to go), will probably include nonsense words that you will not understand, and will end either because Q will decide you'd be fun to climb and jump on or because he will find something much more important to focus on. Going in it is helpful to know this and not expect much more. It helps if you either play along with his nonsense words or know something about children's television. Do not expect Q to have an understandable conversation with you that has a beginning, middle and an end. Do not expect him to be able to have this conversation without moving his body around. Do not expect that he can have this conversation while there is ton of sensory information for him to sort through. Do not expect answers to abstract questions like "what is your favorite....?". Make sure you know that at least half of what he says is pulled directly from a television script or book (usually word for word). (This is where knowledge of children's tv comes in handy!)

So when Q walks into a room with my very NT family, two worlds collide. It's like a bad train wreck. Without fail someone usually questions my parenting, though in that way that I can almost be convinced that they're really on me side and want to help me. Though everyone knows Q they still expect much more than he can give them. And Q is usually not interested in cooperating.

But here is what I have learned in the past year: This is the way Q has conversations. This is Q. We can help him as much as we can to have the speech he needs and to stop doing things like reversing pronouns. We can give him work on fine motor skills and sensory input to help him carry out tasks and regulate his system. We can give him pictures to help him organize his thoughts and help him feel in control of his surroundings. But as important as those things are, it is equally important to just love and accept him for who he is. To not ask so much of him that he cannot succeed. To not expect him to be functional when a room is crowded and noisy and overwhelming. To not say "Q, stop jumping" because he NEEDS to jump to help keep himself comfortable in his own skin.

And my family, though they love Q dearly, and they occasionally try to remember to take these things into consideration, just does not get that Q is not NT and will never be NT no matter what you do to him. To try to make him NT is like trying to make a fish breathe air. They aren't made that way. And so I spend my time trying to negotiate between the NT world and Q's world. I try to educate those who don't understand. I try to make Q understand what he needs to know to function in the NT world and I try to make the NTs understand why what they ask is so difficult for him. It is frustrating because neither side understands and both sides get frustrated and everyone looks to me to fix it. In the end my NT family cannot help but think that if I was stricter or more "something" (I have no idea what this is but I hear it a lot.), maybe it would be easier or Q would be more NT. And Q would just as soon give up on the whole project of interacting when he's had a really bad day.

No one has laid out this course and explained how to do this. I feel like a guide dog most days. Only I don't get to wear something that says "please don't pet me, I am working". Now if only they had that in a designer label then I could really go home and fit in. Problem is that I no longer fit in the NT world but I also don't fit in the autism community. So I wander around pulling everyone along with me making sure they don't get hit by a car. Seriously, I need more treats. And I know that that is not bacon.