Friday, October 15, 2010

Memoir in Pink: What Type of Parent Are You?

Part of this year's project - the whole point of writing Memoir in Pink - is to think about parenting in a focused way. Not just babies and children, but the work of parenting. This week I'm thinking about why we choose to be parents. I think people fall in one of two camps.


Some people understand in their soul that children can teach them things. They know that a child will teach them more about themselves than they can learn on their own. I remember a fall when my oldest son was just a little over two. We stood for hours collecting and sorting gold, orange and yellow leaves. He loved them. I loved him for loving them - for teaching me to notice how beautiful the world is.

Some people have children to learn about themselves - but I think some people also have children to help them forget about themselves. This would be the second camp. After thirty plus years of ruminating on the same hopes, fears, worries and ambitions the decision to have children is a conscious decision to focus on something else for awhile. I little like joining the army - or a cause - or maybe even a cult. I remember reading an interview with Brad Pitt once, where the interviewer asked him if parenting was tough. He said something like "not really. you know I had like forty-five years to focus on myself. I'm kinda over me." I remember nodding "oh yeah" and showing the interview to my husband.

I can't decide which camp I really belong to. How about you? Why did you sign up for this parenting gig? Or maybe it’s not like being an Elvis fan or a Beatles fan (to paraphrase Quentin Tarantino) maybe, it’s possible to be both? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Monday, September 13, 2010

now that you are here

sometimes, I wonder
who I am love - now that
you are here.
now that these nameless
fears and desires are named.
I am different now that you are here.
even at the market
I count my coins so carefully.
I picture you in the café
pouring cream into your cup
your hair rumpled like your shirt.
once, you told me
you did not have enough.
old things pass before me
like traffic on the street, like unread words
painted on bright placards.
tender things are left neglected
by weeks without care.
even my garden has changed.
I grow impatient with it
-for good things that ripen too slowly.
the reddest tomato, I would
pick for you.
alone, I would devour it
sprinkled with salt.
after the rain now, I rush out
to stare into the pan
and still I wonder
should there be more?

Sunday, September 5, 2010

les alizes (Martinque)

my letters home
what can they say?
but here I am.
here I am everyday.
at the same bus stop
near the graveyard
in the same company
of school children, workers
and mothers on their way home,
beneath so many crucifixes
my palms
ache.
here I am.
under the power of the same
bus driver, who counts his fares
one by one
dropping them into the box.
here I am.
“last voyage” once again
reads the abandoned freight car.
here I am.
the same hill,
the same walk
and the black dog
who startles me
each day,
the mango tree
that calls to mind
Kali, with her hundred
heavy breasts.
here I am.
here I am in the black sand land -
in the distance far off.
here I am.
here I am.
my letters home,
what can they say but
where, my love
where are you?

Thursday, August 12, 2010

cat name poem

Frida, cat I named you.
You could care less.
But what are you, if the name I chose
has no meaning?
What must a cat
call itself?
Dust stirrer, bug stalker, button fiend, purr singer
tooth tongue?
Shadow jumper, snake tail, pink ear war-maker
carpet keeper, big paw, quick claw?
And what am I to you without names?
Chair setter? Soft tongue,
drum heart nest, blanket shaker,
ribbon stealer, kill sock thief?
Long-finger, mouth maker,
two hand no-no?

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Two Poems.

One.
Where are you going, my love?

Where have you been?

I have been to the kitchen and back

-to the living room.

I climbed the walls of our garden -

a copper penny

under my tongue

to buy you from the dead.

I knew you had gone.

Where are you going, love?

Where have you been?

My hands are as pale and white

as the stars.

They live in the water

- you drown me

before my time.

Where have you been my love?

Where are you going?

Wherever, I tell you, I have

been there and back again.

It is better here.

When we are together

- a copper penny pressed between us.

Loneliness is what I do

without you.



Two.

I climbed our garden wall, love.

I could not go as I am,

so I left my clothes behind -

folded like sleeping pilgrims on our bed.

The brambles tore my skin.

I left my coat as well, you see.

Outside the gates,

I left my shoes -

their empty shape

was so like my own.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Gardening & Marriage: The Five Year Mark



This summer I decided to do something extravagant for my garden. I recruited a photographer (my brother) to take pictures of everything as it bloomed – from the dark chocolate lilies, the tomatoes and morning glories, to the shy, new grapes, peeking out from beneath their shady, green leaves like toddlers at their mother’s legs. In my mind this is a revival of an old practice. All gardeners know that the best bulbs come from Holland. In the 1700’s – long before the camera – wealthy Dutch families would hire painters to commemorate the especially handsome blooms in their garden. The camera just puts this old fashioned idea within the reach of the rest of us.

I look forward to leafing through my garden pictures this winter. Minnesota cold can leach from the soul any hope for spring. There are some who would argue that this is the natural balance of things. That all things in life must pass – even spring’s flowers. There are a number of artists in this world who specialize in art that pleases briefly, then decomposes and surrenders to the earth. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is forever. That is so not me.

I feel a need to commemorate my garden this year. Perhaps because it has never reached so high, offered so much shady green or bloomed in such profusion before. It is a newer garden – something I started only five years ago when I first moved to this house with my soon-to-be husband. The pictures represent to me a way of commemorating our life together and our anniversary coming in a few short months.

When I moved in with my husband, he was already a confirmed bachelor in his forties. He had lived in the house with his brother and a succession of male roommates. The place needed a female touch. And a deep cleaning involving a boat load of bleach to sterilize everything. There were cat issues. Never let us speak of the cat issues. The yard where my garden is now, had a chain link fence, an empty flowerbed against the west wall, and nothing more. It was a deeply depressing square of plainness for a life together that was supposed to be fresh and new.

Like most couples starting out, we didn’t have much money. Friends and co-workers offered me bulbs they thinned from their gardens. One co-worker even had a sister who was a professor of botany – she brought me crates of extras from her garden in Wisconsin. From my grandmother’s garden, I transplanted some of the pale pink peonies she had cultivated since before my birth. From my mother’s acreage, I found wild daisies and the abandoned dwarf irises my Great Aunt Helen had grown in her garden.

The only thing I really purchased was woodchips and the Minnesota winter hardy grapevines. I planted these along the chain link fence – a monstrosity that kept in the dog, but limited my picket fence dreams like prison barbed wire. I soon learned, however, that having plants does not a garden make. The peonies were particularly stubborn. They resented being disturbed. It took them three years to offer only one half-hearted flower.

This year, however, I had a profusion of peonies. The grapevines cover almost entirely the hated chain link fence, creating a wall of green. Before the yard made me tense, now I can sit and relax in my lawn chair and watch my kids play. My eye trips soothingly from one patch of green to the next. I feel cooler in the hot Minnesota summer. It took five years to reach this point, something that seems hard to comprehend in this fast paced world. But gardening is different from ordering fast food. It takes time and I feel nurtured by it.

So the pictures of my flowers serve more than my desire to preserve what is by its nature ephemeral. Meant to last a season and nothing more. The photos also serve as a reminder to me of the need to be patient. I wish somehow, when I was newly married, someone could have shown me a picture of my future garden and said – “relax” or “calm down, you’ll get there.” The same could be said for my marriage, which - along with the garden - is hitting the five year mark.

Our marriage also took work. Here too there were chain link fences and stubborn, transplanted roots that took time to adjust. But we too are blooming now. It took time and work. I learned more patience. We learned to calm down. Gardening and marriage have taught me that nothing worthwhile in this life seems to take less than five years.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Memoir in Pink: I Know Daughters Aren't Perfect

This is the second chapter of a new project for me – a memoir of children, parenting sons and longing for a daughter. At this point, my husband has agreed to one more child. We’ve set a date to start trying – still a year away. I wanted to take this year to spend some time writing and thinking about why needing a girl child – in the midst of a full, busy, happy, crazy life – has become so important to me. The first chapter is below in a previous blog entry.



Chapter Two

The little girl aisle at the store slays me. Particularly the sun dresses on tiny hangers. Red and white cotton. Ruffles. They don’t make clothes for boys the same way. Flounces and skirts, pink and pastels. They also sell striped and polka dot leggings and pairs of socks that are matched but mismatched. One will have bright stripes and stars and the other hearts. They break my heart. The little girl aisle has headbands with flowers and tiny pink sandals. In the winter there are purple jackets with soft lined leopard print hoods. I don’t go into that section of the store anymore unless I have too. I avoid lingering when I do.

As a mother of two children already, I know that clothes have little to do with parenting. Parenting is about up all night, love you so much, stinky socks, homework, bath time and wet kisses. I know that neither pink socks nor a daughter is a guarantee of happiness. My muse George Sand (this was her masculine penname – her real name was Aurore Dupin) had a heart-breaking relationship with her own daughter Solange. Her son, however, lived with her his whole life, marrying a woman who told him frankly that she was wedding him mostly to be able to spend more time with his mother. They all lived together at her estate in Nohant, staging elaborate puppet shows, for which George herself sewed the costumes.

Winston Churchill was another famously doting son. He is said to have taken tea with his mother every day until her death. Lizzie Borden, meanwhile, is famous for being a daughter who murdered her parents. But really, I don’t have to delve that far back into human history to find examples of bad daughters. You see, I’ve never been a particularly good one myself. In fact, after my sons were born, I ran out of room for my own father in my life. When I added “good mother” to my job description, I crossed “good daughter” off the resume.

I was a Jane Eyre of a child – stubborn and intractable, passionate and moody, often holding aloft defiantly the placard where my sins were written, while sobbing privately in shame. I wasn’t a child who pleased. I preferred to be alone in my room reading, rather than playing games or making friends. Part of it was hiding out, but part of it was calculated rejection. My father drank – heavily and often. And my mother, well she lived with it.

I was never sure as a child what was worse – his drinking or her reaction to it. Something was missing. Something was wrong with our family; I knew that from an early age. Her anger, her tears, her wailing sobs often woke me from my sleep. She would hyperventilate with grief and the ambulance would come. He at least, drank himself insensible quietly. Cruelly, I blamed her more than him. She was the only wall between three small children and his blackout fueled abuse or depravity. She held firm. She protected us. But back then, as a young daughter, I only saw the wall. She was so large in her grief and anger, overwhelming in her hurt that I felt swallowed whole.

By fifteen, I was numb - all thought and no feeling. Except sad, I clung to sad. It was the only emotion I had left. I held it. I cradled and cleaved to it, hidden alone in school bathrooms during classes, sobbing myself empty. Around the age of seventeen I no longer felt present in my own body. I had detached entirely, simply floating above myself.

Only school saved me, with its regimented, easy steps. I progressed from grade to grade. I followed the path – first to a public boarding school at fifteen and then to college. It was easy to achieve. To work. In college I took extra classes, even auditing them for no grades when I maxed out my credits per quarter. I worked three jobs and picked up seasonal work that came my way. I painted and wrote and wrote - poetry, hundreds of papers, most of two novels. I translated a French novella by George Sand over two years for my senior thesis. I completed enough classes for three majors – but didn’t even bother to fill out the paperwork for the last one.

But I was limited emotionally. I had few friends. On my days off from work at a bookstore near my college, I would still walk to the bookstore to eat lunch. I didn’t want to be alone, though I don’t remember talking to anyone. A boy fell in love with me – a tender, gentle, sincere boy. He would visit my apartment and I would hide in the bathroom until he left. We never made it work. My father, now divorced from my mother, came and went from the same apartment, often drunk and falling down the stairs.

My memory could be wrong, but I don’t remember seeing much of my father during college. My sister and I spent awkward holidays with him. A few times he picked me up for company to his regular bar. Once my car broke down in a bad neighborhood and he was the closest man to call. That’s about all I remember. Mainly he would call, long rambling conversations when he was lonely and intoxicated. They consumed hours of my time. In the morning, he would call again and berate me for never calling. He’d forgotten the call from just the night before. He was lonely. He was alone. He was abandoned and loveless. It was a little like pouring my own blood down the drain. Each call left me numb and empty. Of the two of us, I was the only one burdened with memory.

The end of my relationship with my father was abrupt. I was living in Washington, DC at the time. He was far away, still in Minnesota. The baby and I were sleeping – it was close to midnight when the phone rang. I had law school class in the morning and my son was still nursing every two hours. My father was drunk and weeping. He wanted to tell me how much he loved my son, whom he had seen only once.

I knew he wouldn’t remember the conversation in the morning. I didn’t want to spend days after the call feeling numb and sad. Instead, I wanted to wake up happy the next day and take my son to the zoo or the park. I wanted to giggle through lunch with my new friend Christina and debate cases with my law school classmates. There was no argument, no confrontation with my father that night. I just simply hung up and stopped taking his calls. I needed to take care of my son. Never before had being happy seemed like such an easy choice.

New parents often tell me that they are surprised by how much work parenting is. They weren’t ready for the demands. The sleepless nights. To have every moment seems seized by this tiny, helpless being. I was a young mother. Single and alone. I should have failed. How did I manage the work of parenting alone, they ask. To me, though, my son was such a light burden – a joyous, sweet, fulfilling burden – compared to everything I left behind to parent him fully. Because of him – for him - for the first time in my life, I was free.

I wouldn’t lay eyes on my father again until I was thirty-two and he was in a coma in a hospital bed. He was unclean and almost unrecognizable behind a matted beard. He had almost drank himself to death. The vessels in his throat collapsed from so many years of abuse. He bled himself into shock and then a coma. When my mother called me with the news, the weight of the burdens of my past came crashing back on to me. I hyperventilated in the car as my husband drove me to the hospital. Dad was in a coma for weeks. He wasn’t expected to survive.

When my father woke, he told my sister that he’d won the lottery. He told us not to worry; he could finally take care of everything. He sent my sister to his house to find his pants. He specified his newer jeans – the ones hanging on the bathroom door. The ticket was there. She went, terrified and bewildered. She found nothing of course. When we tried to gently tell him that it was a delusion from his coma, he grew teary-eyed like a child. His large, brown eyes looked wounded, confused. My oldest son has the same eyes. I felt cruel. He begged us to call our Aunt Frances – who he hadn’t seen in years – because he had just seen her. She would verify his story. Frances was living in California then. Seeing our doubtful faces, he sank back into his bed, tired, sick and ill. The next day we would repeat the same scene.

My father needed a lot of things after his hospitalization. My sister managed his hospital care and his bills alone, she worked with his caseworker. She attended his commitment hearing, where he was ruled incompetent and made a ward of the state. At the door of the hearing, the State attorney told her he thought we could avoid commitment with outpatient therapy. This is less expensive, and commitment is a hard sell – almost impossible - unless you’re strung out and also pregnant. My sister told him calmly that my father would be dead in six months and his death would be on his conscience. The judge agreed to the commitment. I visited him there only once.

For the first time in his life, my father was scared enough to follow the program. He’s been sober for at least three years now. At first, after he got out of treatment, my sister would call me to talk about his progress. She would go over to his house and help him fix things and pay his bills. His sight is limited and his memory is poor. He needs her help. Despite his helplessness, I’m still terrified of him. When she first started doing this, I would ask her – my voice cracking with emotion – to make sure she brought her husband with. I didn’t want her alone with him. Eventually she just stopped bringing Dad up.

In the last few years, Dad has left a few messages with my mom and asked for my phone number. He sends cards. I send cards in return for his birthday and Christmas. Several months ago he sent me a game for my oldest son. He wrote in the card that his therapist suggested family therapy for us – so that my oldest son and I could reconcile with him and be integrated back into his life. The card made me cry, but I never called and I hid the game. When my oldest son found it, I started to cry again. My husband finally threw it away for me. Dad sent a check for twenty dollars and a card to my oldest son for his birthday. I never told him about the youngest being born.

I’m not angry with my father anymore, though I can’t shake my fear of him – even in my thirties and safe in my marriage. Still, losing the anger is a big step. Parenting can teach you things. One of the things that being a mother to my sons has taught me is a semblance of peace with my own childhood. I realize now – having been through it myself – how young my parents were when they married. How they must have been scared and overwhelmed by three children. I give them more credit for how well they did, because I know providing is a struggle. I know now how many diaper changes go into raising a child. How many bumps and bruises and tears. I know how it feels to be tired. To not have the answers. I know how it feels to want just one minute to yourself to go to the bathroom – and not get it. How angry a toddler refusing to nap can make you.

So I give him credit for that. He drank. He made my mother cry. He wasted years of our lives. But he was there. He still went to work every day and fixed the car and made dinner sometimes. He coached little league and basketball. He took us camping and drove us across county on vacation. He called. He sent cards. I wish him well. I hope that he isn’t alone. I hope someone is there to answer when he calls. I hope that he is happy and well and has someone to share a life with. I just no longer think that person needs to be me simply because I’m his daughter. I gave up on being a good daughter too long ago.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Memoir in Pink

This is the beginning of a new project for me – a memoir of children, parenting sons and longing for a daughter. At this point, my husband has agreed to one more child. We’ve set a date to start trying – still a year away. I wanted to take this year to spend some time writing and thinking about why needing a girl child – in the midst of a full, busy, happy, crazy life – has become so important to me.

Chapter One.

When I was in the fifth grade I named my first daughter. I picked Bailey and lavished upon this completely imagined child an entire fictional life. Thoughts of the how or when or why she was conceived never entered my twelve year old mind. I never bothered dream up a father for her. She appeared whole –nearly the same age as I at the time - and allowed me to mother her. I pictured myself older, thinner, beautiful and independent. She traveled with me to the markets in Prague and Africa and to meet the President. I wrote books in my spare time and together we made collaborative collage art that hung on the walls of the Met.

We even had a home – a brownstone in New York - that I filled with scrupulous detail from magazines. The hefty Sears catalog still existed then. At my grandmother’s white Formica kitchen table, I’d pour over curtains and imagine what my daughter and I would like best. Bailey was the first name I picked – and my first conception of myself as a mother. I liked the way the name sounded masculine – a surname. My daughter Bailey had spunk.

I started writing seriously at about that same age. I bought a book of baby names (that I still have) to help me name my characters. I spent hours into the night making lists of the names I would use for my characters. The first half of the book – containing boy names – remained almost new looking. The back grew dog-eared and the pages yellowed from my touch. Only the girls’ names were interesting. The boys’ names were singularly boring and all sounded alike. And what would be the point? I never planned on writing about any male characters.

At fifteen, I began writing the novel that I would publish at thirty. I named my main character Kat – after my mother, whose name was Kathleen. At nineteen, I sold my first book to a large New York publisher – a picture book, imagining all the wonderful advice I would one day give my daughter. The galley proofs that my editor sent, found me studying at the Universite des Antilles in Martinique. I was on a college study exchange and living with a host family. I read the pages aloud to my eight year old host daughter, Ludmilla. Her parents had met in Russia while studying abroad themselves. They named their daughter for the Russian Opera they attended on their first date. What a beautiful name, I thought, as she rested her elaborately braided head on my shoulder to listen.

Pregnancy found me scarcely two years later in law school. I filled my first year torts and contracts notebooks with baby girl names. I lavished loops and curlicues on the ones I selected from my old fifth grade baby book. At first, I settled on Skylar, then made up my own name Cielle – from the French word for sky.

My sky shook when the ultrasound – just before midterms – gave me my first view of my son. A boy with his legs spread wide, practically winking at the ultrasound machine as my doctor chuckled “yep, that’s a package.” The sky fell and the world turned blue all around me and I cried. I had never pictured myself as the mother of a boy. The shock of this revelation was more powerful – more insurmountable – than the discovery of the pregnancy itself during my first week of law school. After I had moved alone across the country from Minnesota to Washington, DC. Oh boy, indeed!

My son was born, despite my misgivings about his gender. It was amazing to me how parenthood could provide me with such clarity and purpose in life. I loved being a mother – especially a single mother. When my son was two, I was desperate for another baby – a sister for him. But there were logistics to arrange. Five years passed. I found more baby girl names – Bronte, Frances, France. I started a new novel and named my characters Helen and Nini. I wrote their story during the parts of my day when my son’s father had custody. I graduated ranked number four in my class from law school. I moved back to Minnesota and married. After two years of marriage I was pregnant. I chose the name Persephone from a dream. My husband winced visibly. He too wanted a little girl, partially (though he never said this aloud) because she would be the opposite of the son he had lost.

I subscribe strongly to the belief that all things have their season. It was my season for a girl. God had been right to pick a son for me first – I wasn’t ready. I was ready now. I was a great mom to my son. I let him be. I let him breathe. I treated him as his own separate, distinct being. I didn’t share or burden him with my terrible self-judging thoughts (the way my grandmother and mother had with their daughters). I knew he wasn’t simply a miniature version of me – how could I not with his little weenie right there all the time?

I promised god and all the blessed saints and spirits that I would name my daughter Persephone to remind me to stick with the program. Through grade school, weight gain, high school athletics, boyfriends and college, I would give her the same space my son had – lest she run like Persephone to the devil himself.

When the ultrasound showed me my second son, my husband sighed with relief. By then he’d really come to hate the name Persephone. My kind, nine-year old son squinted thoughtfully at my teary face and then back at his tiny brother on the ultrasound screen. Always my rock he announced, “Well this one’s a boy, but maybe there’s still time for twins to develop. That could be a girl.” I realized that I should have explained a little bit more about how this all worked before that moment. It made me smile enough to stop crying.

And so my youngest son was born. I loved him completely – as much as I’d loved his brother before him – who made me whole, who brought me to life. My youngest wasn’t as easy going a baby as his brother. He stayed up all night – he got ear infections, he tossed and turned. He nursed poorly and often. He teethed without mercy. My husband and I had the type of marital arguments people with no sleep have. My youngest son was six months old when I started begging for another child – for a daughter. The universe still owed me a girl after two brilliant sons.

My husband instantly said “absolutely.” Followed by “not.” Looking at his tired face, I thought it best to give my petition a rest for a few more months, until our son was sleeping better. Two years later he was still sleeping in our bed. And I had a secret notebook of girls’ names.

Tonight my sons are playing together in the yard. The oldest has a beach umbrella he’s using as a shield. The youngest has a broken fishing pole that he’s using as a stick to beat his brother. They are laughing so much that at times they stagger.

Oldest blocks and parries. Youngest’s laughter peels out down the street like a small red, Honda. We’re in the damp quiet left behind after the recent July storm and his voice carries and carries. Everything is wet. Their feet are bare and covered with grass and mud – a slug clings to the youngest’s leg. He shrieks again with delight when I remove it and show it to him. At least, I think – flicking away the tiny creature – they’re not inside viewing violent tv programs. They’re making up their own.

As a parent, I’m not sure how to reconcile my deep wish that the boys bond through playing together (despite a 9 year age difference) and the reality that every game they invent is violent. Injuries are rare, however, and never more than a bump to the ground. The game ends when the youngest turns the fishing pole on my unprotected shoulder. Attacking noncombatants is against the rules that I make up on the fly. So I confiscate the pole. It is the oldest who is most upset. “Thanks, mom,” he mutters, stalking into the house to return to his video games. The littlest starts to eat sand.

I sigh and cart him in to wash his mouth out. He goes limp and slides from my arms like a boneless otter. I try again and again. Each time making it closer to the house. I can’t help but think that if my sons were girls we would still be outside, wearing the fairy wings I saw today in a catalog and pretending to fly.

It comes quarterly and I loathe it. I pour through every page. It is the type of catalog that sells educational toys – for the most part wholesome, wooden objects. One year I asked my oldest son to circle things inside it that he wanted for Christmas. He laughed. The catalog sells glittery fairy wings, in green and pink. There are wands as well. There is also a wooden barn that holds figurine ponies with soft manes. The ponies come with brushes. I hide the catalog in the drawer with my diary and list of baby girl names.

Inside the house again, all the ruffled feathers are soon soothed. I warm up soft, doughy pretzels in the microwave, One for each of them and then myself. The youngest plays with his trucks on the floor. He’s sleepy and moves them slowly, meditatively back and forth with the concentration of a yogi. The oldest tells me stories about the KLB (Kitten League Baseball). He invents daring plays and impossible scenarios, names whole rosters and fills in the biography of his feline players. The early July light of dusk is purple – it fills the house with a soft glow. My husband returns home from his volunteer firefighter training.

The bedtime routines comes and goes with the same calm motion of my son’s trucks running across the floor – back and forth – lullaby. I am happy. Still, when I finally climb into bed, I can’t help but think of the pictures my girlfriend emailed me that day – of her two year old daughter, wearing a flower in her hair. Ungratefully, I feel as if something flowery and fairy-winged is missing from my busy, happy life.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Secret of Parenting (And It’s Not Just Hard Work)


The New York Times ran a recent article “All Joy, No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” by Jennifer Senior that has been much blogged about. So naturally, I’ll pile on. The article can be found here: http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/index2.html

The article spans six pages explaining what most parents already know – parenting can be a grinding, repetitive job. Parenting doesn’t always result in day-to-day happiness. So why do we still breed? The article also notes:

“For many of us, purpose is happiness—particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it. (Seligman has seven children.)”

I agree from my own life that parenting has given me needed purpose. It’s hard for me to not read this article in connection with my last blog post. If I didn’t have parenting duties, most of what I’d be doing would involve sleeping and getting sloshed (and recovering from getting sloshed). By my own estimate in compiling the list – about 90% of it. With the remaining 10%, I swear I’d write more (right). In looking back on life it almost seems like a no-brainer. Would I have rather spent the past decade or so molding/protecting the young lives I was entrusted with? Or would it make me happier to look back on it all and say “well you only get one life, so I’m glad I made a good drunk/nap out of it.”


I guess I can easily make this analysis about the grind of my personal parenting life, because I feel I’m pretty closely tuned to the reality of human nature (well at least my own). I’m a novelist. It’s my job. I’m imaginative – not delusional. I see that what I have is 200% better than what I don’t have. I get that not everybody is in the same spot. A lot of the parents interviewed for the article (and quoted from the studies) seem to be contrasting their current life (with kids) against a wholly non-existent – but nonetheless shiny and seductive - reality. In this alternative existence (without kids) life is more fun, daring, filled with adventure, creative and sexy. Really? Honestly? Are you sure – 100% sure – that if you weren’t parenting right now you be a spy/deep sea adventurer/expat in Paris writing a novel while bedding Jean and Pierre-Luc at the same time? Were you living that life when you were single?


I admit I had my first child pretty young. Most of my 20’s were spent pushing a baby buggy, not hitting the clubs. But still I remember that single life wasn’t all that great. I had three jobs. There wasn’t a lot of time for fun. When I had time I couldn’t afford fun. I’m pretty certain that without my children I’d weigh 50 pounds more and be taking some anti-depressants with my gin. I’d also probably be alone and wondering why I seemed so “stuck” and unable to relate to other people in my life through meaningful relationships. Why? Because only parenting taught me how to do that.


How to feel and empathize weren’t the only things I learned from parenting. I also learned self-confidence and leadership. I discovered that I couldn’t let fear alone drive my life. Parenting is an MBA graduate-level course in time management and delegation. And on yeah – I figured out how to love. Without these skills – learned exclusively from parenting – I doubt that I’d be where I am today (which is happily grinding on through parenthood).

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Here is a list of 5 things I would do more of if I didn't have kids.

1) drink booze
2) write more
3) drink red wine
4) drink things mixed with rum
5) sleep

So you can see that parenting has been a godsend for my liver, but maybe a little rough on the writing practice. I adore my children. I love to write. When I let life, work, parenting, baseball practice (the list goes on) get in the way of writing I feel guilty. Then again when I'm writing I also feel guilty for taking the time away from snuggling and reading books to my kids. So it balances itself out. I'm pretty sure that's not the good type of "balance" all those life coaches blather on and on about.

I love writing. It is the one thing that always been there for me, never disappointed, bored, fled or failed me. Its the best part of my life. Except for my children. Writing has never been hard. Making life work around the writing is the hard part.

My Novel Whiskey Heart