Mother in Chief

My kids cried today because no babysitter was coming over and they would be stuck with just me.

I wasn't annoyed at them for wanting someone else. I felt a sense of relief that over the years, I have brought other people into their lives. To add depth. To add variety. To add another layer of security and joy for them. How could I be upset that they cried for Daddy last week when they were stuck with me? The fact that they want other people and not just me all the time is a gift. Because I can't always be with them.

There was a time when I had a hard time letting other people parent my kids. I was paranoid about the mistakes that people might make around my kids (like giving the wrong dose of medicine) or offering them a viewpoint that I disagree with (Hummers are great!), or just that it was wrong for me to be off doing things for myself or by myself (because somehow being a parent meant that I was to sacrifice everything in my life for the creatures that grew within me). So I was with my kids every day. I dragged them to the store and was frustrated with them when they demanded my attention when what really needed was some alone time. A chance to reflect on the changes that took place within me as I transitioned from a woman with dogs and a writing career to a lactating, over-tired mother with little sense of direction.

But eventually I did hire childcare, drop my kids at the daycare at the gym, and get sitters so that I could go learn salsa or drive to a concert at the beach. I slowly learned that my kids would be okay if other people took care of them, changed their diapers, made their dinners, read them books and tucked them into bed. Letting someone else do those things does not mean that I love my children any less. Although there certainly have been times when I've questioned my love for them. But I do love them, especially when I don't spend all of my time with them.

It seems silly to have taken six years to learn all of this -- and it's remarkably obvious -- but I now know that it really is quality and not quantity.

I had the best Mother's Day ever this year. I was without kids, I slept in, and had brunch with one of my best friends. It was a joy and there wasn't any guilt at all. I've realized that guilt serves no purpose in parenting or in other types of human relationships. The only thing it does is make us feel inadequate, as if we've fallen short of some expectation (set by whom exactly?), and takes up time as we wonder how we could have done things differently.

And after time away from them, I look forward to playing games with them, playing baseball in the yard, to creating bubbles with giant wands and large, soap-filled bowls.

I don't have the time, the energy, or the desire to second-guess every choice I make as a parent or as a person. But as our lives evolve and schedules change and relationships wander down different paths, I'm grateful that my kids like me in moderate doses. The feeling is mutual.

It scares me sometimes how little control we have over our own lives. Sure we get to make grand choices for ourselves – I want to go to this school or that school (if I get accepted); I want to live in this town instead of that town; I want to have kids; I want to make this for dinner; etc. But really, so much in our lives and so many of the things that shape us have little to do with anything we get to choose.

I often get stuck in this line of thought when I think about my son R. His birth defects really didn’t have anything to do with a choice that I made. Yes, my husband and I decided to have a baby, but that was the last real choice I had in the matter.

Random luck took over from there.

And luck couldn't care less about who I am or where I grew up and whether I'm a good person or a bad person or a mediocre person. Luck doesn't care about where I went to school or what town I live in or what I'm making for dinner. Ultimately a little bit of planning combined with a heaping helping of luck got me here because there are the things that you can't plan and don't plan. Like having a child with massive health problems.

I started thinking about luck and control and choices recently after my mom told me that my almost 18-year-old nephew is smoking. I know that there are worse things in life that smoking, but there are so many better choices too. Choices that say you care about yourself and your health. That you care about your body. That you care about the environment. That you are stronger than peer pressure. That you care about your family who wants nothing but the best for you.

It’s an individual choice that kids make when they are too young to really know the long-term implications of lighting up. Or of lung cancer. Or emphysema. But it’s a choice none the less. And each person gets to make that choice for themselves, regardless of what I think.

Maybe because I managed to not smoke (even though my father smoked two packs a day of filterless cigarettes), I have always had hopes that my niece and nephew would also choose not to smoke. Maybe because I managed to get out of the small town I grew up (even though the guidance counselor at my high school tried to convince my parents that I should NOT be allowed to go to college in Boston), I have always had hopes that my niece and nephew would do the same. A small town can be stifling.

I always had hoped that if I set a good example by not smoking, by not getting pregnant as a teenager, by going away to college, by moving to another state where there were good jobs to be had, that I would somehow influence them to have big dreams for themselves. I always hoped that if I talked to them like adults about the risks of pregnancy and smoking and the benefits of getting away, they too would avoid the negatives and shoot for the positives.

To be fair, there are benefits to staying in a small town near family. Maybe I need to let go of the part that thinks I can influence them when I live so far away. When my words are few and far between. Maybe I need to let go of the idea of what I think is right or that it matters. Or that somehow I failed them. Or that it was somehow my responsibility. It isn't. It's not.

I can only make choices for myself (and my kids, at least for a few more years). And even then, I suppose luck will still rear it's ugly head from time to time.

It seems like a simple enough equation: Applying to grad school + getting into grad school = overwhelming sense of joy and accomplishment.

But somehow in my whacked out head, this seemingly-simple math problem is quite complex.

The satisfaction that should come hand in hand with an acceptance letter (or an acceptance email, in this case) is not quite so obvious. In this situation, I’m more confused as to how it came to be that California College of the Arts wants me to be a part of their Creative Writing program. I’m sure my confusion has something to do with low self-esteem, the low self-esteem that often goes hand in hand with long-term, full-time parenting. The longer I’ve not been officially employed, coupled with a stack of rejection letters from literary agents, and another recent rejection from the magazine I covet a byline from makes me hesitate before feeling what seems as a given to others – feeling proud that I was accepted because I deserve to be accepted.

Yes, I’m certainly excited about being accepted to grad school (so far I’ve been accepted to 100 percent of the schools I’ve heard from). But mostly it gives me pause. It makes me feel that there must be something wrong with CCA if they want me. It reminds me of that famous Groucho Marx quote: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”

I’m sure I’ll get over this initial sense of confusion and then the hard part will begin. Am I ready to make this commitment to school? Am I ready to be a full-time student again? Am I smart enough? I’ve always tried to live by the idea that time is going to pass me by no matter what I’m doing, so I might as well be doing something worth while. Getting my MFA is worth while. And it will be hard. And there will be times when I wonder if I made the right choice. But it will give me a sense of direction. A sense of purpose. Something a wee bit selfish after years of serving the needs of the wee folk in my life. And that is probably a good thing.

So maybe it’s not the math equation that is hard. Maybe what is hard is the sense of feeling like I’m entitled to do something just for me just because I’m worth it. Because I am. It's just hard to remember that sometimes.

C started his new preschool last Thursday. Phew. Finally.

I'm just not cut out for this full-time-parenting thing. At least I'm not cut out for it with my second, and very active boy. I was happy to learn that this preschool has NEVER kicked a kid out for bad behavior. Sure they've had um, challenging, kids before. But the undesirable behaviors are used as a learning experience, not as reason for expulsion.

Teacher Friend helped me feel less guilty for feeling a little overwhelmed with having him all day, everyday. She said, "Some people are cut out for it (full-time parenting) and some aren't. The ones that are, are called nannies."

Or babysitters. Or childcare providers. Or teachers. Here. Here.

I can almost feel the the tension seeping out of my pores.

Here are two reasons I will never win the "Mother of the Year" award:

1) I gave my son a large bowl of Cherrios, turned on the TV, and went back to bed for nearly two hours this morning.

2) I fed my son chips and guacamole for lunch.

He didn't complain, so it can't be all bad, right? I'm sure he'd be thrilled if both of those things happened on a daily basis.

I’m wondering if getting an agent to champion my book proposal is like playing Skeeball.

I always want to go for the slots in the upper corners. They are worth 100 points if you get the ball in. But if you miss and your ball falls to the bottom slot, you get zero points. As a result, I usually stick with the safer, and more reliable, 50-point slots. Or at least they are more reliable for me. I'm pretty good at Skeeball.

I attended an all day seminar for people who want to turn their idea into a published book. Outside of having the seminar leader tell me that she wants to take me on as a client so that she can champion my book project, I heard the best thing I could hope for at my one-day seminar on turning your idea into a published book. “You’re doing all the right things,” she told me more than once during the six-hour class sponsored by Media Bistro.

And who doesn’t love praise? It felt great to hear that my hard work has produced a sound strategy and a compelling two-minute pitch. It’s nice to hear that I’m doing the right things when it comes to writing query letters, organizing my book proposal, contacting agents who have represented authors in similar genres, and trying to get a sample chapter published in a magazine. But there is something about that sentiment that is truly disheartening.

If I were truly doing all the right things to get my book published, then I would already have an agent and a book deal and a publisher.

To be fair, she did offer a few suggestions on how to make what I’ve produced even better. I’m going to make those changes, tweak my proposal, and create an online presence around my book idea. So I guess I’m not really doing everything right. Maybe that was just part of a praise sandwich.

Getting praise and decent feedback is like racking up a respectable Skeeball score. But in the quest to get published, only getting half of what I need is like getting nothing at all. Maybe just doing almost everything right isn’t right enough. I need to stop shooting for those reliable 50-pointers.

Hopefully a few more tweaks, along with my boosted confidence, will help me land in that most coveted place -- in the determined hands of an amazing literary agent.

Today was one of those lazy weekend days when we wondered what we should do with our precious family time. Father in Chief tossed around some ideas – Coyote Point, the Children’s Discovery Museum, the Academy of Sciences. He figured today was a good day to check out one of those usually-too-crowded museums because most people (he hoped) would be home getting ready for their Super Bowl Party.

But I hate kid museums.

Call me a curmudgeon or a bad parent. But I hate them for all the same reasons I hate taking my kid to the playground. They are crowded. And they are pretty much boring for parents. Or at least I find them incredibly boring. Whenever the weather is nice and it’s light outside, I always have the babysitter take the kids to the park. At least they get to go. I’m pretty sure there is no rule that says I have to take them, right? As for museums, I avoid them too – unless I’m going to be meeting up with one of my favorite friends. Then I’ll suffer through it.

As we pondered the list of kid-approved venues, I figured that they’re had to be a better place for us to spend an hour or two without crowds, without germ-infested buttons to push, without kids fighting over the buckets and shovels in the sandbox. I wanted to go somewhere that the kids could still learn about life without it being a place specifically designed for learning about life. We decided to take the kids to the bike path near Oracle.

R rode his bike. C finally figured out how to pedal his tricycle. We stopped at nearly all of those exercise pit-stops, which are part of one of those ancient exercise circuits made of wood. We did push-ups. They slid down the one that was supposed to be for inverted sit-ups. We saw birds. We saw cyclists. We saw rollerbladers. We saw flowers, clouds, and talked about brackish water. We saw airplanes, leaves, stones, and sticks. C and I even marveled at a spotless ladybug for several minutes.

It was great. There was fresh air, no hefty admission fee, no stressful search for a parking spot. There was no line for the bathroom or the drinking fountain. There was no one demanding anything from the snack bar. It was just our family enjoying each other’s company at our own pace out in the real world.

Sure, we didn’t learn about gravity or wind in any kid-designed experiment. But we saw gravity in action as we watched the kids hurl sticks out to the marshy water and as stones fell to the ground. We learned about the rules of the road as we corralled the kids to the right side of the path to lets others pass around us. We learned about the food chain as we talked about the birds swooping down to the water as they scooped up their lunch.

It was the best.

Last weekend was a test. It was test of my self-confidence. It was a test of my desire to still be just like the old me. The old, pre-kids me when I felt comfortable going out to dance clubs all by myself.

I had plans to meet at Ruby Skye in San Francisco with some acquaintances from my favorite dance club/Irish pub on the Peninsula. We firmed up plans to drive separately. We firmed up plans to meet at the club at a certain time. Then once I found the perfect street parking just a block from the club, I got a call saying that they would be delayed. They were meeting up with some other friends at the W Hotel first. Since I was not giving up my free street parking (the lot was $28!), I said I would head to the club solo.

Going into the club alone was relatively easy, but heading onto the dance floor solo took a little extra courage. As I stood at the edge of the floor I watched for a few minutes and tried to pick out the most-friendly-looking group of women. Fortunately they were very nice, and I stayed with them the whole night.

Earlier this year, I started to learn the joys of going out to dinner by myself. I also learned that I like traveling by myself. It forces me to get outside my comfort zone and talk to new people. And now I know that I still have it in me to go out dancing alone. I'm proud of myself, but honestly, I prefer the company of friends. Still, I won't let a lack of a companion hold me back from doing the things I want to do or going the places I want to experience.

And as for those lame acquaintances who ditched me -- their loss.

With just two weeks to go before the cut-off date, I decided to apply to grad school to get my MFA with an emphasis on creative writing. I've been meaning to get my masters since I graduated with my BA from Northeastern University more than 10 years ago.

Fortunately the program I'm interested in does not require the GRE, which makes applying at the last minute much easier. So now I'm schmoozing up former editors and colleagues so that they'll write me flowery and glowing letters of recommendation. And with all the work I've done on my book, I have an overwhelming amount of material to pick from when deciding what to submit for my writing sample. I suspect the applying part will be easy and the waiting part will be much more difficult.

C is no longer welcome at his preschool. I just found out Wednesday, and I was initially feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. I was told that he continues to hurt other kids and can be disruptive during nap time.

I knew that there were having trouble with him occasionally. I knew that he had hit another child with a toy, and I knew that he did not nap one day and some of the other kids started to emulate him. But I didn't know that it had gotten to a point where they didn't want him at the school. His problems seem like typical behaviors for two year olds. After a few hours of reflection, my initial feelings faded, and I decided that they are just old (the couple that runs the school is in their mid- to late-60s) and they don't want any kids that aren't super mellow. R would have been the perfect preschooler for this hippy school with the chicken coop, bird aviary, and organic vegetable garden. I used to hear that he was "such a delight." Turns out they were talking about R -- R would join his brother at the preschool a couple of days a week after kindergarten.

C was welcome to stay though the end of the month, since we had already paid for those days, but I decided that yesterday would be his last day. If they don't want him there, then I certainly don't want him to be there. Fortunately they refunded my money for the remaining days. With Christmas just days away, I'm sure I'll find another way to spend that $240. Oh wait, I already spent it.