Utopia Lost and Value Reframed

Posted on June 30, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog • Tagged children and childhood, Debi Lewis, economics and parenting, motherhood, stay-at-home mother, working mother • Leave a comment

By Debi Lewis

Am I home because a woman should be home or am I home because, as a woman, economic forces guided me there?

Here is the utopian dream, masquerading as a concrete plan, which I formulated before my second child was born in August of 2005:

My well-paying, full-time flexible-hours technology job at a national nonprofit organization would continue as it had for the next year, after which I would begin a PhD program in writing at a local university (which happened to have on-campus childcare). I would fill my days with heady conversation and scoop my children up in the afternoon to eat ice cream on the campus lawns and return home to my husband—who would keep us afloat with his job in finance, the one he loved as much as I loved the idea of academia.

This plan never came to fruition.

My baby was born with a host of ambiguous medical problems. She was in the hospital with dangerous respiratory infections twice in her first four months, and her doctors gently and then less-gently told us that daycare would continue that cycle. She was considered medically fragile. By the end of the second hospital stay, which was five days long, we had decided she could not stay in daycare.

We did the math; if we hired a nanny, the cost per year would have been more than half of my salary. Our older daughter would still need to attend preschool, adding another several thousand dollars. My husband made more money than I did. It made more sense for me to leave my job. Our baby was five months old when I did.

My well-paying, good job had been my identity for five years. Prior to that, I’d been employed in one way or another for the previous fifteen years—starting in high school.

Suddenly, I had no income.

My husband was working, earning a salary that covered our expenses, though not as easily as when I’d been employed. I sat down at my kitchen table on that first day when my husband left for work—and I didn’t—and I cried. I was in my pajamas, and when I went upstairs to put on clothes, the baby still slung over my hip, I looked at my closet and realized that most of what I owned was business-casual.

Then I got a rejection letter from the graduate program to which I’d applied. The last piece of hope I’d had for an identity which declared to the world that this woman is making something of herself had vanished. Though there was hope that my daughter would outgrow her fragile state by the time the fall semester came around, I would have no fall semester to attend. Instead, I nursed, rocked, held, walked, medicated and worried over my constantly-sick baby. What just happened? I asked myself, over and over for months. I remained, for a long time, shocked to see what I thought I had become: bored and boring.

In the years that followed, I scraped together a new life, starting my own consulting business in hours snatched from naps and, as my daughter’s health improved, while she was in preschool. I now have new dreams—smaller dreams, always tied to my need to stay flexible for my children. With both of them in school these last few years, I work out of a local coffeehouse that sells scones delivered warm every morning. It has not been terrible; at times, it has felt like a close second to my original plan.

Still, I resent those early days, the burden falling on me and the perspective-shifting I had to do. I resent that, as a natural progression of being the one at home and being a woman, I’ve fallen into gender roles I never intended. I am the one who cooks. I am the one who shops for the organic berries and the mint Oreos, knows the children’s friends and teachers better, and manages the laundry. In a nine-to-five job that, inclusive of commute is really a seven-thirty-to-six-thirty job, my husband has become the one to pop in and “help out” with occasional rides to Hebrew School and play rehearsals, but the real burden of making sure everyone is where they need to be is left to me. It’s my job because, nine years ago, I left my other job to stay home with my sick baby, a baby I both loved fiercely and resented quietly.

How to unravel all of that? Am I home because a woman should be home or am I home because, as a woman, economic forces guided me there? What if my husband and I had made exactly the same amount of money? Would he be home? What if medical insurance covered at-home childcare for children like my younger daughter? Would neither of us be home?

I feel very lucky that we made it work, un-utopian as it felt to me at the start. As I struggle with what it means to be an at-home parent—even with my part-time consulting business—I have a partner willing to struggle through it with me, to talk about and name this arrangement for what it is: fragmented. My daughters are now thirteen and almost nine, and they see the juggling every day. I am in and of both worlds all the time—sometimes from the same spot in my kitchen, on the phone with a client and stirring the soup.

Now, most mornings, I walk to the neighborhood elementary school with my once-sick baby—now a thriving nine-year-old. In one hand, I hold hers. In the other, I hold the bicycle I’ll use to ride to the coffeehouse where I’ll work for much of the day. There’s dinner to prepare, and laundry to sort. Rides to give, and counters to scrub.

It is, in the end, a comfortable life. I am there for it all. Sometimes, on the playground after school, we even eat ice cream.

Debi Lewis is the mother of two daughters and blogs regularly at swallowmysunshine.com. You can find her essays at Brain, Child Magazine, RoleReboot, Mamalode, The Mighty, Kveller, and ChicagoNow. She is currently at work on a memoir about her younger daughter’s journey through medical mystery.

Self Preservation

Posted on March 17, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, From The Archives, General • Tagged Antonia Malchik, baby, canning, childbirth, motherhood, NICU, stay-at-home mother • Leave a comment

By Antonia Malchik

An hour into my peach canning session on a hot August afternoon, I’ve peeled five batches of fruit. I’ve long since ceased to think about how the ripe, sinful flesh, blush-colored and naked, always brings to mind Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and sex. Instead I hustle, doubtfully eyeing the diminishing, discounted box of orchard-run peaches, the ones that have fallen off the trees and bruised. I picked them up three days ago at a farm five miles away. Some are already growing mold. The waste angers me as I cut away bruises and green fuzz, sometimes throwing away most of a peach, but I haven’t had time to get to them. The wedges pile up in the pot, splashing into squeezed lemon and leaking peach juice. Even as I pick up the pace, I try to remember that I’ve chosen this time-consuming and unnecessary hobby, that it’s a process to enjoy. I move the knife too quickly against the naked peach in my palm and it slips close to my thumb.

Water spits constantly onto the hissing gas burners. I’m working alone, lifting peaches from a boiling pot into an ice bath. The skins slip off peach-flesh—dusky, firm, and slick. The peaches are freestone variety, chosen for their rich flavor and the ease with which the flesh falls off the pit. They boil for a scant thirty seconds to release the skin, no more than six at a time in the pot because that’s the most I can dip in and out before the fruit begins to cook.

Upstairs, the baby wakes up crying. I brush sweat-soaked hair out of my face. His nap lasted thirty minutes less than usual. I’ll have to wrap up early. The baby’s fingers are too eager and his curiosity too persistent to allow him near an activity that requires scorching hot burners and my full attention. I’ll be lucky to finish this half after he goes to bed tonight.

The last six whole peaches come out of the pot. I slough the skins off as fast as possible, turn off the boiling water, put the gigantic pot of skinned, sliced fruit on a back burner; contemplate washing up the bowl full of shed skin and pits, the knife and cutting board, the lemon juicer, the thick puddles on the counter splashing silently onto the floor, before everything turns sticky and mixes with cat fur.

Through the baby monitor, my son’s crying increases in intensity and violence over the rattling of his crib bars against the drywall. I stop wiping the counter and try not to begrudge his theft of my time alone. But the resentment comes anyway: Get me. The fuck. Out of here.

* * *

Everything about canning season, including the crying from upstairs, reminds me of my son’s birth. My first attempts at this old-fashioned practice took place a week either side of his delivery, seven weeks early. Bored with pregnancy and summer heat, my husband and I played at freezing peaches in sugar syrup on one oppressive Wednesday in August. We made jokes about the pornography of the fruit and covered the kitchen with juice and sugar. The next Sunday we bought a box of tomatoes, thinking to cook them down and likewise install them in freezer bags. By then I was, unknowingly, already sinking under the effects of HELLP Syndrome, a rare, often fatal pregnancy illness. Complaining of stomach pain, I put off the tomato project and went to bed. I thought I had a mild case of food poisoning. By Wednesday, my liver was failing. The obstetrician performed a Caesarian while I was unconscious. I met my son thirty hours later, after the machines in Intensive Care stopped monitoring my breathing.

The next Wednesday, my son was still lying in Neonatal Intensive Care with the other tiny, sick premature babies. The doctor had called at seven a.m. to warn us they’d found a second air bubble next to his lungs and might have to move him to a tertiary care center two hours away. I can’t leave him, I kept saying to the nurse, who’d heard the same from countless discharged mothers and would continue hearing it long after my child was strong and growing. I kept putting off withdrawing the tip of my thumb from his miniscule fist, the only part of him we were allowed to touch until they removed the chest tubes and oxygen sniffer. I spent the drive home twisted in tears. I didn’t want to stop crying, thinking somehow it kept me connected to him, forty-five minutes away.

Nine o’clock at night my husband found me blanching tomatoes in the kitchen, stripping their torn skins.

“You should be resting,” he said.

“I need this.” I fished six tomatoes out with the slotted spoon and tried not to cry. The incision from the C-section ached; my feet ached; my head ached. But the movement from box to pot to icy bath to bowl, knowing I was making something without having to eat any of it, kept the tears at bay. “I need to do something real,” I said.

Splash, roll, split went the tomatoes. Their skins didn’t slide off like the peaches’ did. I had to peel them, papery on top with a squishy underbelly dripping watered-down red.

* * *

I’m descended on both sides from families in which competence is the predominant religion: the ability to make things, fix things, grow things. The knowledge that you could scratch out a life far from the conveniences of modernity. For my paternal and maternal grandparents, food was simply about survival. But more than that, its production and preservation defined the value of a woman. My Russian grandmother kept my father and his siblings alive during World War II by digging potato beds and scouring the woods for mushrooms after working double shifts managing the metallurgical lab at the weapons factory. On my mother’s side, my forefathers went West to Montana, where the women, no matter how soft they’d begun, grew hands puckered and hard from the sweltering woodstove, the endless kneading of bread, the maintenance of the vast pickling crock, the coaxing of vegetables from the water-starved soil of Eastern Montana, the drying and preserving and pickling that ensured—they hoped—a winter free of hunger.

The summer my little sister was born, another August, my mother sweated, short and swollen, over a stove bubbling with jars of beans drowned in vinegar. Dilled pickled beans became her signature side dish. In later years, every time a jar was opened she restrained my sisters and me from eating the entire thing at one sitting, and we would negotiate over the chunks of pickled garlic on the bottom.

I was four that summer. My mother grew her own beans, and I marched colanders full of them from the garden to the quart jars waiting in ranks on the counter. The jars lay on their sides, each dosed with feathery dill leaves, cloves of garlic, dill seed, and crushed red peppers. They waited to be packed with beans and filled with vinegar.

In many families, this would be a story about the harmony of the kitchen, mother passing down to her daughter the practices of her pioneer grandmother. But it isn’t. My mother didn’t want me kicking my heels on the alderwood kitchen stool, didn’t want me snapping the tops off the beans with eager, sloppy fingers. She didn’t want me there at all.

“Sweetheart.” Snap, snap, snap went the beans. She worked fast over the chipped enameled colander, her huge belly pushing her well back from the sink. A light-blue kerchief kept her blond hair out of her face. “Go outside and play.” Stuff, stuff, stuff went the straight beans tighter and tighter into the jars. The rogue skinny curled ones landed on top, once she’d set each jar upright again.

I studied the orange diamonds worked into the ugly brown kitchen carpet. I didn’t want to go play. I wanted to help. But my mother’s explosive temper was formidable. Her statements were not requests or suggestions; discipline was another thing she had brought from frontier farm life: brisk and painful. I slid off the stool and went out to the garden with my toy tin bowls, where I pretended to make a soup of Jerusalem artichokes and red currants.

The dilled beans joined the rows of jams and jellies and crocks of melon balls in liquor already established in the cool earthen root cellar below the back porch. After my little sister was born, my mother was happy to let me help change diapers, but shooed me away from the bubbling in the kitchen, where she was squishing bitter chokecherries for jelly into a conical metal sieve.

It would be easy to say that my mother practiced and maintained her frontier-woman, pioneer-wife skills because she loved them, the rhythm and movement of the seasons and the process itself. Part of that is true. Canning was also the only way she could escape from motherhood and still keep a fingertip in the creative life she passionately wanted. She chafed at being a mother of small children. More than anything, she wanted to spend her time writing stories, a dream she put off until my sisters and I were grown.

Raised to believe that the only time well spent is spent producing something or fixing something, she could not bring herself to throw her children on neighbors, friends, or her own parents so that she could write. Who would have understood, then, in that small Montana wheat-ranching town, where everyone was poor and few women worked outside the home and the only daycare was a bedraggled part-time place run by the local Kiwanis in the basement of a church?

Canning was the only household activity that was marginally creative and belonged solely to her. She did not want help. On the contrary, she wanted her husband and daughters far away for long days so she could devote her energy to an act that would for a time both soothe her artistic urges and satisfy the expectations of her competent, long-dead grandmother.

Mostly, she pickled beans.

* * *

My son, the baby upstairs, is almost a year old now. A month of hell followed his birth, a month of breathing and heart monitors, a month of chest tubes and oxygen. We almost lost him twice. I love him with a fierce possessiveness I never thought myself capable of. Whenever he gets sick, I vividly imagine losing him, and I hold him tight and cry like an idiot.

We brought him home from the hospital when he was four weeks old, scraping the five-pound mark—lighter than the smallest of our four cats, barely the size of a bag of sugar—and still three weeks to go until his official due date. We’d been turned inside out through that month, our priorities shaken out and stomped on. The freelance copy editing career I’d planned on returning to seemed pointless beside his need for me, and mine for him. I couldn’t imagine ever being tired of his presence.

He cried for months. He nursed every hour and a half around the clock. He slept flat out on my chest every night until he was four months old. Each morning I woke up, back aching, to remember I would not have a minute to myself for at least thirteen more hours. I woke up to resent the life I now had, to resent the baby whose life I, an atheist, had prayed for. On the days when he cried the most, when neither the breast nor swaddling nor pacifier nor his bouncy chair could soothe him, the mother I dreaded becoming seemed dangerously close. The kind of mother I’d grown up with: angry, impatient, unhappy, frantic to have a day alone.

I envisioned terrible things that I don’t want to admit to, screaming back at him being the least awful. One day my arms, meant only for motherly comfort, felt weak after a desire for violence surged through them, and I laid him gently down in his crib, shut the door on his cries, went to the garage, and shrieked at the top of my lungs until I grew hoarse. Then I sat there among the dirty garage smells, trying to work out if I still existed, under the exhaustion and frustration and constant nursing.

I had never envisioned being a full-time, stay-at-home mother, yet there I was with a high-needs child I couldn’t imagine abandoning to daycare but one I couldn’t continue sacrificing every moment to. If I kept trying to devote myself—myself—to him, one of us would get hurt. I foundered, fumbling in the dark, looking for a way back to the person I used to be. Before marriage, before mortgage, before who I was became defined by the small, delightful, draining individual whose life I was responsible for.

Every now and then my father used to take my two sisters and me out for the day so my mother could write. We’d go fishing or run errands. When we came home, there’d be hot jars of peach chutney or dilled beans resting on the counter, but rarely did any writing get done. It’s a hard thing to battle those demons every day, the ones that tell you that putting pen to paper without knowing what will come of it is pointless or worthless. To do it occasionally is almost impossible.

It’s hard to admit how many years I’ve spent trying not to be like my mother, trying not to let an urge to create pickle in frustration. After I had a child, it was hard to find out that, I, like my own mother, felt I had to purchase the right to create by doing something useful. Much as I enjoyed the canning itself, I wanted the approval of my dead ancestors. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I could give my grandmothers and great-grandmothers a bright quart jar of peaches I’d put up and an essay I’d published, I know which one they’d be proud of.

When I started to can peaches and tomatoes, I was grabbing at anything that would restore a sense of self as someone other than a nursing, soothing, rocking mother. A hobby I could pick up the instant my son went to sleep.

It was surprising to discover I liked it. Now, when I turn down a social invitation in late August because I’ve got a box of tomatoes to put up, I do it because for the last two months I’ve been looking forward to skinning and bottling those just-ripened San Marzano tomatoes. The sight of those jars standing in ranks in our cool basement is immensely satisfying. It makes me feel … well, competent. And achieving those jars—the canning process itself—has a soothing rhythm that quiets all the tense, trivial thoughts I tend to obsess over during the day.

I know that my passion for canning is often a stand-in for something more. Sometimes I’m sweating over a boiling pot of blueberry-lime jam because I badly want to be sitting somewhere else with a notebook in hand. I’m reminded of my mother then. The difference is, I can change that feeling, acknowledge that there doesn’t have to be one predominant self—whether mother, writer, or competent frontier-woman—to feel whole. Canning, which began as an escape, has simply become part of the ebb and flow of who I am.

* * *

I put a lid over the stockpot of peaches, switch off the baby monitor. The kitchen is awash in canning detritus: a pot of cooling sugar syrup, three sticky knives, a dripping cutting board, the wide-mouth funnel and jar lifter, the dishwasher full of clean, hot quart Mason jars, the flies around the bowl of skin and pits, fruit flies still feasting on the box of uncut fruit. Peach juice everyfuckingwhere. I wash my hands and forearms where the fruit dripped. I step barefoot into an unseen puddle and wash that, too. Then I take a deep breath and look around the kitchen, preparing to shift mentally, if regretfully, from the time that is mine to the time that is ours.

Up in his bedroom, my son is facing away from me, and my heart turns over as I see how big he’s gotten, how vigorously he’s using the lungs that began life so tentatively. I pick him up and hold him against me until he snuffles and his crying slows. This year he might be able to eat those canned peaches. I won’t. All I need is to skin them, pack them in jars, dance through the kitchen, making my own little thing, over and over and over.

My mother’s lesson is now a lifeline: It’s the sealing in of self, hoping to get reacquainted with me later, when the diapers are done and the school bus has stopped coming by and rides aren’t needed to sports events or music lessons. When everyone can wipe his or her own bottom. When the babies are finally in college, on their own, busy with jobs and lives. Then, maybe, I can pop open the sealed lid of that jar and taste the self again.

Author’s Note: This is written with gratitude to my mother, for being who she is, and a request for the dilled beans recipe, please.

My older sister commented that this essay made her sad because my life with young children sounded so insufficiently rewarding. This got us discussing women (like me) who struggle with their sense of self after having children, and those (like her) who are generally happy with the balance they achieve, and why. When she said of herself, “[Maybe] it’s natural for me to err on the side of self-indulgence,” I thought her word choice said mountains about how easily mothers still judge themselves for meeting their own needs.

Our son is now three. Our daughter was born a year ago. She was nine days late, and we spent those tedious nights making more than a hundred jars of jam. We still have most of them.

Antonia Malchik’s essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Walrus, and the Jabberwock Review, among many other publications, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in upstate New York and can be reached through antoniamalchik.com.

Brain, Child (Summer 2011)

Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Mom

Posted on October 27, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Featured Content, Slider Content • Tagged babies, children and childhood, Dawn Davies, depression, emotions, family, motherhood, postpartum, postpartum depression, stay-at-home mother • 9 Comments

By Dawn Davies

Stay up late on a Sunday night reading a book about a woman in medical school because you have gotten it in your mind that you, too, want to go to medical school. Not now, of course, but someday, when the kids are older.

Read long past the time when you should be asleep, until your eyes drip tears of exhaustion. Your husband is out of town on business, and you have allowed all three children to sleep in your bed, though you fear that, like feeding a begging dog from the table, you are creating a habit that will be impossible to break. Program ‘911’ into the instant dial function of your portable phone and nestle it next to your ribs in case someone breaks in and you have time to hit only one number.

Go to sleep and dream about vampires. Wake up ten minutes later to the sound of crying. It is the baby: let him nurse you dry. Notice the deflated shape your breast takes as it lies across the mattress. Go back to sleep. Wake up again to the sound of crying in the distance and locate only two of your children, sleeping curled and stiff, like the victims of Pompeii. Break the suction and peel the baby off your boob, then get up. Kick the Labrador off the bed, call him a nasty name, and then trip over him in the dark as you follow the sound to the children’s bedroom.

The smell of urine surrounds you. In the corner, the three-year-old is sitting on the wood floor in a swath of streetlight, marinating in a pool of pee, her footie pajamas half off, yet twisted and inside out enough to render her as helpless as if she wore a fuzzy, size 4T straightjacket. Note the eviscerated night diaper oozing from under her buttocks.

Change the child. Sop up the pee on the floor with your husband’s favorite bath towel. Pray that the child was not sufficiently stimulated to be interested in truly waking up. When she rubs her eyes, lay her gently in her own bed. Do not speak. When she falls asleep, return to your own bed because the baby is in it and he could roll over onto the floor. When the child hollers out, “I can’t sleep,” play quietly with her in her room. Crawl into her bed with her. She is warm and round and soft and trying to wheedle a story out of you. She calls you “Beautiful Mommy” and “Angel,” and her dimpled baby hands explore your face sweetly, so you read to her until your words begin to come out garbled and you wake up from the sound of your own snoring amplified inside the Little Golden Book covering your face. The child is gone. You hear her in your bedroom shaking her tambourine and shouting the same, “Stick out my wiener!” she heard the next-door neighbor’s six-year-old future predator calling out of his upstairs window the day before. Note: it is 5:37 a.m.

Bring your hands up like an orchestra conductor and cue in the baby’s cries. Unzip the five-year-old’s pink Dr. Dentons and tell her to go use the potty. Outside, it is still dark, but you know that when the sun comes up, it will not be satisfying because the godforsaken Northeast, where you live, is exhibiting a record streak of cold rain, so bone chilling and wet that the sight of the sun, even for fifteen minutes, would make you weep for joy. You have not seen it in weeks and everything around you looks grey, including your own skin. At 6:15 a.m., take the children downstairs for breakfast because, even though you are exhausted, the onus is on you. It is always on you.

Let the dog out the back door. Put four frozen waffles into the toaster and make a 13-cup pot of coffee. Add sliced bananas to the children’s plates so you can at least say you offered them fresh fruit. Let the baby transfer all of the food in the dog’s bowl to its water dish, because he is happy doing it and, for three minutes, not hanging off your kneecaps. Drink your coffee. Drink it. The children pull all of their toys out of the toy box and scatter them around the house. Your resources are low and you do not know what to do with this day. Even though your husband has a burgeoning career at a newspaper, and you own a starter house, you are broke, nearly as broke as you were in your student days, when you worried about gas, and groceries, and paying the utility bills, only back then you could get a second job or sell some marrow in a real emergency, and now you are tethered to three other people who will die if you don’t feed them, and whom you can’t leave alone for five minutes.

Decide to take them to church because the day before the five-year-old asked, “What is church?” and because church is free. Remember the few times in your single days when you attended a local Unitarian church which offered a loose Pagan ceremony culminating in a barefoot group dance down the aisles with percussion instruments and pan pipes, and sexy, lean, bearded vegan men who scoffed at the Establishment. Look up “Churches” in the Yellow Pages and decide on a Methodist one a few miles away. Without yelling at the children or the dog, whom you find eating the crotch out of your only pair of stockings, get everyone dressed for the icy rainstorm that is predicted to last all day, choosing leggings, velour jumpers, and tight turtlenecks stretched down and popped over their enormous heads, making their hair collect static-like plasma balls.

Think of the ‘A’ you got in inorganic chemistry the semester before you met your husband in college. Think of the noble gasses, of neon filling thin, rounded glass tubes shaped into seedy, blinking signs in the window of a bar, a bar that serves whiskey—which you would like to drink—and of argon, and a gallon jug imploding when the oxygen is sucked out of it. Think of small amounts of krypton in a flash bulb, and of everything you know going up in a mushroom of white. While you get dressed, the girls rub their socks into the area rug and shock the baby with the tips of their fingers, making him laugh and cry at the same time.

Stuff their arms into their coats, fishing at the end of the sleeves for fingers to pull through to the other side. Think about rolling a condom onto a limp nob. Notice how, in their winter clothes, your children look like blood-stuffed ticks. They complain, like they always do when wearing coats, about being too hot. Ignore this and pack them into the nine-year-old wreck of a Saab and wonder if your husband is up yet and reading the paper in a quiet, clean hotel room on the other side of the country.

Find the church and park in the only spot left in the parking lot, which in the sleet looks impossibly far away from the church door. Carry the two younger children, who are now crying because the freezing rain is whipping them in the face, dragging the hem of your long, wool skirt in icy, slushy mud puddles as you go. The five-year-old, who must walk by herself, trails behind, stomping her boots into dirty potholes out of spite.

The service is pleasant and easy to endure. The choir sings hopeful songs about God’s love out into the clean, warm space, and neat, controlled people occasionally look at you and smile. Do not see one toy truck or Barbie littering the carpeted aisle and there is a faint smell of Lemon Pledge and old-fashioned perfume, the kind that would be found in matron ladies’ bosoms. All of this makes you want to go home and clean your own house. It makes you want to start over. It makes you want to confess something wildly, something that will make you feel better, something that will wipe your slate clean, although you know the Methodists do not practice confession.

When the service ends, wander down to the coffee hour in the basement. Look around for people who don’t have that glazed, New Testamentesque appearance, and absentmindedly switch the baby to your other hip to fill out a visitor’s card. Drink coffee. Notice that the L.L. Bean denim jumper/hunter green turtleneck ratio is high, too high for your comfort, perhaps nearing 70 percent. Get cornered by a woman in one such jumper whom you fear is a designated ‘greeter’ after she immediately begins asking you questions about yourself. Put your guard up. Lie when possible, especially when projecting the idea that you have your shit together, and that everything you do you are choosing to do. Nod when she mentions Sunday School and mothers’ groups, knowing you will not join these things.

Corral the children and force them out of the church, which they now don’t want them into their car seats. Insert the key into the wretched Saab, and for good measure, since you are in the church parking lot, pray that the car will start. Turn the key and accept the dull ‘click’ that follows to be punishment for teasing that soft kid, Jeffery, in fifth grade. Think about Karma, think about Jesus, think about the Holy Spirit coming down and filling you up like sunshine fills an empty room, renewing your mind like the minister preached during church. Squint your eyes. Try to make it happen. Feel nothing. Realize you don’t know how to pray.

Pop the hood and get out. Suck on the rain dripping off of your lips and stare into the engine as if you know what you are looking for. Jiggle the battery connectors and see a spark. Hear the children whining from inside the car and note the love of Christ the parishioners exhibit when they drive by you, blank and faceless. Mutter, “What the cuss frigging fudge muckers!” at them for not stopping to help, and marvel at this particular combination of almost-curses you have vowed to use ever since the five-year-old has asked you to stop being so foul.

Turn the key again. Sense a slight difference in the way the car doesn’t start and feel a surge of hope. Get in and out of the car eight more times, jiggling the battery cables and listening to the car almost start before it finally does, yelling, “Bite me,” into the open air only twice. Drive away in pouring, freezing rain, blasting whatever you can on the radio, which is Hootie and the Blowfish, to drown out the sound of the baby’s shrieking and the animated discourse between the three-year-old and the five-year-old in the back seat.

By the time you pull into the driveway, the baby is sleeping so hard he looks drugged. Bend over to scrutinize the depth of his unconsciousness and lift one of his lids to see if his eyes are rolled up—a sure sign that he is sleeping deeply. Take the two older children inside, intending to leave the baby asleep for the four more minutes it will take for him to be sleeping deeply enough for you to carry him inside without waking him, because you really need him to take a nap and get out of your life for thirty minutes. That’s all you are asking.

Check the answering machine for messages. There are none. In the dining room, while watching the car out of the window overlooking the driveway, read stories to your other children until your eyes start involuntarily tearing and closing. Lie down on the floor and suggest they play “Doctor Heals,” with you as the comatose patient. Lie like a corpse and drift in and out of sleep for perhaps four minutes while your children drop feathers, to which you are allergic, onto your face. Feel a nice, tickling sensation on your fingers.

Wake up to discover they have colored all of your knuckle joints with the indelible black magic marker you told them never to touch. Both girls are sitting on top of the kitchen counter eating a plate of cookies. There is a spilled bottle of delicious looking, ruby red antibiotic pills next to the five-year-old’s thigh, the ones you were prescribed for your quarterly sinus infection. Ask her if she opened them. When she says no, grab her shoulders and shake her, asking this time through clenched teeth if she ate any of them. When she says no again, multiply the number of pills you take per day (three) by the number of days you have been taking the pills (three) and subtract the total from the total number of pills that should be in the container (ten days’ worth). Thanking the God you just went to visit, find 21 pills on the counter. When your child asks to eat one, shout, “NO!” then hug her hard. Wonder how many milligrams of amoxicillin it would take to kill a thirty-four pound-person. Imagine yourself sweeping the crayons and paper and glitter off the dining table and laying your five-year-old across it, performing a gastric lavage with supplies you happen to have lying around the house, then see yourself walking in slow motion, down a hospital corridor in a white coat and stethoscope, your hair flowing perfectly behind you, forgetting the now-closed bottle of pretty drugs next to the candy fiend that is your child.

Suddenly jump up from the table and run outside. Find the baby shrieking in the car seat inside the nearly sound-proof Saab. Bring him out. Ignore your neighbor, the tire-shaped, middle-aged gossip, who is looking at you through narrowed eyes, and imagine how far this story will make it around the block by the time lunch is over. Go inside and nurse the baby, tuning out your other children for as long as you can, which is less than a minute, since one of them is jumping up and down on your feet and legs and the other is trying to ride the dog. Think about Sophie’s Choice and imagine, if you had to for survival only, worst-case scenario only of course, which of your children you would give away if you were forced to in order to save yourself and the other children. Weigh the pros and cons logically. Scare yourself with your own thoughts.

When the baby wakes up enough to put him down without him bucking and screaming and flailing, the phone rings. Lunge for it viciously, hoping it might be your husband. It is a lady from the Methodist church calling because you filled out the visitor’s card an hour and ten minutes earlier. It’s part of their ministry, she says, to reach out to newcomers. Leave the room to take the call, because you are considering pouring your heart out to the strange lady on the phone. Imagine her soft, grandmotherly bosom smelling of perfume. Imagine pressing your head against it and sobbing. Imagine the kind of hugs you could receive from these partridge-shaped church ladies. Remember standing outside of the church with the hood of your car up while all of these ladies and their husbands drove past you in the rain. When shrieks ring out from the living room, hang up the phone and rush back into it in time to witness your three-year-old flat on the floor, with the baby on top of her in a wrestling hold, trying to gouge out her eyes. Tell the five-year-old, who is climbing up the armchair to knock it off and to “stand up and just sit there.” Separate the fighting children and smack the dog who has jumped into what must have looked like a fun foray.

Calm down. Suggest to the three-year-old that the dog might like to play while you change the baby’s diaper on the couch. Watch her roll the dog onto his back for a belly rub then jump onto its extended leg, self-performing the Heimlich maneuver. When she vomits up several bites of cookie and one bite of cranberry bread and starts crying, jump up, and with one foot on the baby to keep him from rolling off the couch, reach for the three-year-old. When the baby starts crying, ask the five-year-old to hold him, and when she says, “No!” holler at her, making her cry, too. Don’t care when the dog immediately begins eating the vomit from the floor, as he is doing you a favor and you now do not have to clean it up. You must go somewhere where there are other people, you think, because you are so lonely you could scream, and besides you want to shake someone and this frightens you. Call your mother. Listen to the phone ring empty on the other side of the line. Call your husband’s hotel and leave a message. Take more Tylenol. Drink coffee.

Feed them grilled cheese sandwiches. Give the crusts to the dog, who has become an expert beggar since the children were born. Think about slipping under the table for a quick nap while they eat.

After lunch, stuff them back into their coats and boots and drive to the mall, cruising a few extra minutes around the mall parking lot until all three children are so deeply asleep that they could be hung from their heels and not awaken. Envy them. Park the car and decide to rest your eyes for a few minutes. Tilt back your seat and rest, feeling a deep fatigue behind your eyes, hoping that you will not fall asleep with your jaw gaping open to the point where you and your family resemble a Mafia hit to passers-by. Fall deeply asleep. Wake up to utter darkness with dried spittle crusted on your chin. Freak out, shouting, “Jesus Christ!” until you realize it is the middle of winter and only 4:30 p.m., 30 minutes after you fell asleep. Stare at two worried mall cops slowly circling the Saab with flashlights.

Drag the children into the mall and walk around. Thank whatever God you hope might exist for their public behavior, which for a change is orderly, calm, and obedient. Stop in the food court to buy them a giant muffin the size of a cauliflower with your last ten dollars. When your three-year-old starts hopping up and down and grabbing her crotch, yelling, “I have to do a dinky!” stuff the muffin into the diaper bag, then herd the children to the bathroom. Beg the three-year-old not to touch anything except the toilet paper and her own pants. Put the baby down and help the three-year-old onto the toilet, then go back out and unzip the five-year-old’s sticky zipper, and guide her into a stall. Stand near them so they won’t be abducted, until you notice the baby toddling out of another stall with festoons of toilet paper streaming from his mouth. Grab the baby and remove from his mouth a gray mass of wet paper molded into the shape of his hard palate. Hope that it came from the roll in the dispenser and not from the toilet.

Grabbing the baby, race back to the three-year-old, who is now shouting, “Mommy, close the door. Strangers can see my ganina!” Hold the three-year-old’s door shut while the baby bucks and kicks and flails in your arms, and the fiveyear-old initiates a display of linguistic skill by saying, “It’s not ju-nina, stupid, it’s bu-gina.” Don’t dare put the baby down because he might fling himself back onto the filthy bathroom floor and crack his head against the tile, possibly rupturing one of those fragile arteries that could cause a hemorrhage in his brain—you read about them last night in the book about the woman who went to medical school and now, for as long as your children are your responsibility, these arteries will forever worry you. Impress yourself by discussing in depth the types of bacteria that might be found in a public restroom with the five-year-old who asks questions about germs.

When the three-year-old, out of the blue, asks to get her ears pierced, look at your watch. Sigh. When she says it will help her look more like you, exhibit poor judgment and say yes, because this is the child who calls you “beautiful Mommy” and “Angel,” the child who knows how to use a gentle touch to get exactly what she wants from you. Walk to the piercing place quickly, lugging the bucking, screaming baby, as the five-year-old attempts a precise depiction of how much and how little it will hurt. At the piercing place, ask the three-year-old if she is sure and when she says yes again, whip out the credit card you only use for emergencies, then help her pick out a pair of heart earrings. Watch carefully with her as a slightly older child gets her ears pierced without crying.

Let a young sales clerk hold the baby. Sit in the piercing chair with the three-year-old on your lap as she looks around brightly, yet shyly. Love her to death. Feel like her betrayer when, after the piercing girl stabs her simultaneously in both ears, the three-year-old starts shrieking and does not stop. When the baby, never one to miss out on anything, howls along in concert with his sister, kneel on the floor of the piercing place and rock them. Yell, “No!” when the five-year-old asks you to buy her a fur-covered diary. Look at the three-year-old’s ears and notice that the earrings are wildly askew, and that that the piercing girl has completely botched the job. Get angry. Demand a refund, and although you are not ordinarily a nasty person, smirk when they tell you to come back for a free re-do when the holes have closed up. Tell them if they ever see you again it will be in court. Drag your screaming three-year-old and the rest of them three hundred yards through and out of the mall to where you parked the wretched rust-heap of a Saab. Feel the same small stab of disappointment you usually feel when you see it hasn’t been stolen. Buckle everybody in. Straighten up to get out of the car and hang yourself on the clean shirt hook. Ask the three-year-old to unhook you.

When you try to start the car 20 times and the engine doesn’t turn over, yell, “Fuck!” as loudly as you can. The sound of it echoes in the air and the five-year-old starts crying. Unbuckle everybody. Pick up 56 pounds of wretched children and carry them a hundred yards back into the mall to a pay phone. Call the AAA that your parents gave you for Christmas last year—a subtle hint that they do not think your husband is a good provider, with your finger plugging your other ear to block out the sound of the five-year-old who is still weeping, clearly trying to recuperate from your profanity. Wait for a tow truck while the mall shops close around you. Your three-year-old, recovered from the piercing ordeal, flounces about asking strangers, “Do you like my new earrings? I used to be a girl without earrings, but now I am a girl with earrings. My mommy made me get them,” then quietly, “It really hurt,” and the baby eats a third of a jumbo pack of sugarless gum and its foil wrapper.

Stand outside under an awning while the rain spits around you. Spot a tow truck trolling around the parking lot and run through dark puddles of slushy water as you chase it down. The tow-truck guy jumpstarts the car in the two minutes it takes you to buckle everyone back into their seats. Snort when he warns you to not stop anywhere else on your way home. Dig the leftover muffin out of the diaper bag and hand chunks of it to the children. A sense of frantic futility fills you as you drive down the highway, and you glance back at the five-year-old tracing raindrops on the window, the three-year-old, her crooked earrings in her beet-red ears, sucking her thumb, and the baby burping mint. They sit silently, slumped and broken-looking in their car seats, and it is here where your own tears unleash like rain from the clouds in your sky that have been living over you for months, for—truth be told—who knows how long. Cry hard as you drive down the highway. Imagine, on impulse, taking this highway south instead of north, and driving to a place filled with bright light and warmth and sunshine. Imagine pulling over, releasing your children into a field of flowers, where they happily chase butterflies into the distance, getting smaller, smaller until they are gone. Then imagine getting back into the Saab and following the road to a bridge suspended over a rushing river, and speeding up as you drive over the rail of the bridge, straight into the warm, blue water. Hate yourself. Hate everything about who you’ve become and what you are destined for and how much everybody needs you all the time, and as you pull into your dark, icy driveway, realize this: you will never go to medical school. Carry your sleeping children, one at a time, into the house, putting them straight to bed in their clothes. Kiss their sticky mouths and filthy cheeks and whisper, please forgive me, I promise to do better tomorrow. Feel like a crappy mother and wonder what kind of a doctor you would have made if you can’t even manage three healthy children through one long Sunday.

Check the answering machine. There are no messages. Wake up to check the locks on the doors and bring the portable phone into bed, making sure 911 is programmed into the instant dial function. Fall back to sleep to the sickening sound of the cat licking itself at the foot of the bed and dream of fat, milk-white lizards crawling through the round letters of the alphabet.

Author’s Note: It took me 14 years to write this piece. I would start it then stop, telling myself that no one would want to read anything in second person. But I needed the second person for two reasons: first, I was trying to capture how overwhelming it felt to have three really young children, and writing out the minutiae gave some sort of tribute to what mothers go through every day. More important, I needed the distance of second person, because every time I wrote “you,” I didn’t have to write “I.” I was depressed for a time after the birth of two of my kids, and I didn’t give it a voice for several years, because I was ashamed of it. I no longer am. Being able to see humor is what gets me through hard times, and I’d like to think this piece gives a voice to that as well.

Dawn S. Davies is an MFA candidate at Florida International University and the fiction editor of Gulf Stream Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in River Styx, Ninth Letter, Saw Palm, Cease, Cows, Fourth Genre and others. She can be reached at www.dawnsdavies.com.

Artwork by Katie M. Berggren

I’ve Earned It

Posted on September 9, 2013 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Blog, Highlights • Tagged kate haas, motherhood, parenting, preschool, stay-at-home mother • 7 Comments

By Kate Haas
A few weeks before my oldest son entered kindergarten, we attended a playground get-together for incoming students and their parents.

“This is my last kid to start school,” one mother announced mournfully. “The house will seem so empty. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.”

I regarded her with envy and astonishment. “All that time to yourself? Oh, you’ll find something to do.” I gave her the comradely grin of one mother-in-the-trenches to another.

She looked at me as if I’d insinuated that she might take up exotic dancing.

“Yeah, I’ll find something,” she said, stiffly. “I’ll keep busy.” She moved hastily away.

Clearly I had made a major faux pas.

There’s hardly a moment in the day when I’m not tending to one or both of my young boys. I chose to stay home with them and don’t regret that decision, but I’ve always treasured solitude, and I never really made my peace with the loss of it that motherhood so abruptly imposes.

My husband and I do our best to give each other breaks, and I savor every moment of these interludes. Finally, a breather. A chance to shed the ever-present sense of parental responsibility and simply exist by myself. Still, with two active kids and a slew of home improvement projects on the agenda, time alone these days is mostly like bad teenage sex: unplanned, unpredictable, and it doesn’t last long enough.

All this will change next year when my youngest starts preschool. His three mornings of singing and art projects will translate to ten and a half hours a week of freedom for me. I’m giddy just thinking about it.

For years, I’ve been in the thick of hands-on, day-in, day-out mothering. A break in the intensity, even one represented by a few mornings of preschool, has long figured in my mind as some sort of Holy Grail. Like everyone else, I have ambitions, projects that have long simmered on the back burner. Those hotly anticipated free hours represent the opportunity to start fulfilling them. But until that conversation at the playground, I hadn’t realized that some parents actually mourn the end of the daily round I’m chafing under.

A few days later, I encountered another mother, an older woman whose youngest had just entered first grade. Tentatively, I asked whether she had misgivings about all of her children being in school. She looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Are you kidding? I work from home and now I can do it in peace.” She sized up my two-year-old in his stroller. “Preschool next year?”

“Yeah. Three mornings. I’ll have ten and a half hours of free time. Not that I’m counting.”

“Nothing wrong with counting,” said my new acquaintance. She leaned closer, as if to impart a hard-won secret. “Listen. You might want to look into part-time work when your baby starts school. That’s fine later on, if you want to. Or if you need to, of course.” Her voice took on the cadence of a preacher or a politician. “But not right away. That first month, you enjoy yourself. Watch a movie, go to a bookstore; whatever you want. As long as it’s something just for you. Because after all these years of changing diapers and cleaning up after those kids, you’ve earned it.”

I continued my walk, her words echoing in my ears. Earned it. Have I? Thanks to a combination of luck, location, and frugality, our family can live on one modest income. I do plan to return to work, but not until the boys are older. Theoretically, I could use my free time to eat dark chocolate and watch all five seasons of The Wire, which I missed the first time around. Have I earned that?

More to the point, do I regard the work of motherhood this way? As labor for which I’m racking up invisible points? For which I deserve some compensation beyond that of seeing my children grow up to be decent human beings?

It feels petty to admit, but there’s a part of me that does believe a reward is in order. Sure, I do this job for love. But it’s work, all the same. I’m not getting a salary for it. Social Security won’t credit me for these years at home. Neither am I likely to land a part-time job during those preschool mornings. Time to myself is the only payment I can expect to receive at this stage. And frankly, from where I stand, time alone ranks right up there with gold.

As a parent, I’ve put my children’s needs before my own, wholeheartedly, day after day, discovering in the process a capacity for acting unselfishly that still surprises me. I don’t like to think about how often, lately, it’s just an act. After six years, stay-at-home parenting is wearing me down. I love my children dearly, but I don’t mind admitting it: not only will my eyes be dry on the first day of preschool, they’ll be alive with anticipation.

Finally, time alone. Not with one ear on alert during the unpredictable span of a child’s nap, but for hours on end. Time to dig into long, complex novels, to compose that letter to my senator; to organize the basement (well, maybe not). Time to assess who I am, now that the intensity of the early years has lifted.

Sure, I’ve earned that.

Kate Haas edits creative nonfiction at Literary Mama and publishes Miranda, a long-running print zine about motherhood and other adventures. Learn more about her writing at www.katehaas.com.

Illustration by Christine Juneau