How to book yourself a long stay in Purgatory

Smack your little brother in the face with your Rosary beads.

I swear this is exactly how the conversation went

We’re in the car, discussing pizza versus Taco Bell. Shut up, it’s a Sunday, we wanted to treat ourselves.

Hubby decides on pizza. We can have it delivered, so we head home. The baby is asleep in the carseat, and the rest of us wait in the van while hubby carries her inside.

The second he’s out of the car, Mary erupts with complaints: I wanted Taco Bell! I don’t WANT pizza.

Me: Sorry, honey, today we’re having pizza.

Mary: But I like Taco Bell much better.

Me, because I am a total softie: Tell you what, we’ll have it for lunch on Tuesday.

Mary, not missing a beat: No! I can’t have Taco Bell!

Me: Bwah?

Mary: I can’t. I don’t like it.

God, I love this man

So last night my husband says, all sweet and tender: “Listen, I know you have worked really hard this week. Like you do every day. So tomorrow…since I’m not used to hard work, and you are, I’m just going to stay in bed all day. That cool with you?”

I have reached a new low

This morning, I was lying in bed reading blogs on my cell phone while the baby sat beside me chewing on a bottle of contact lens rewetting drops. And that isn’t even the low point, that’s just a normal Saturday morning. Once upon a time, I lingered in bed to read Austen or Chesterton. Now I’m clicking through last week’s American Idol open-thread comments at MamaPop, and even THAT isn’t the new low.

No, rock-bottom is when I spot a link in the MamaPop sidebar called “Ten Things I Learned About Amazon,” and I click it even though I know it will probably take forever to load on my phone, and then when it does load I discover that I read the link wrong. The post is called “Ten Things I Learned about the Amazon.”  THE Amazon, not Amazon.com.

Oh sure, if the kids were around—the ones too old to get half an hour’s entertainment out of gumming a bottle of Opti-Free Express—I could muster up some almost-genuine enthusiasm for learning cool new facts about a South American river. I’m a homeschooling mama pro, after all. But no, what I’m looking for on a lazy Saturday morning is more to the tune of insider gossip or bargain tips for the online bookseller who may as well just have a direct line to my bank account.

The thought that there might be Ten Things I didn’t yet know about Amazon.com made my heart go pitty-pat, right before my brain shuddered in disgust at the diet of junk food I insist upon feeding it nowadays. Remember when you used to feed me Chesterton? it whispered mournfully.

Shut up, brain. Who do you think shipped you all those Chesterton books anyway?

Can’t blame a girl for trying

Mary, the contrary one, comes to me, sobbing. She is eight and a half, and she takes rejection hard. It seems Jill, the six-year-old, doesn’t like the Pretty Pony that Mary gave her. When was this gift given? I have no idea. A long-ago birthday? It wasn’t this year, I know that much.

“She doesn’t like it!” wails Mary. “My present!”

They are tears of outrage more than sorrow. The nerve of Jill, having an opinion that does not please her big sister.

So I’m hiding a smile, but it does sound like Jill has maybe been a bit rude. Time for the “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all [to your sister's face]” speech. I summon her, and she too is bawling. Full-blown heart-rending belly sobs.

“It’s not my fault!” she sputters, before I can speak. “I WANT to like it! I TRIED to! I just DON’T!”

Oh, well then. I feel the same way about olives.

It’s about time

A thread over at BlogHer got me thinking about how fortunate I am to be able to be home with my kids, and have them home with me. My sister doesn’t have that luxury. I know a lot of women choose to juggle out-of-the-house jobs and kids, and I know that lifestyle has its challenges, but they are challenges that come about by choice which must make them easier to deal with, right?

My sister, a single mom, has no choice; she has to work, and she therefore doesn’t get to spend much time with her daughter.

This makes me think about that BBC show Berkeley Square that aired on PBS several years ago. It was all about nannies in Edwardian London. I think it was Edwardian. Or was it Victorian? I’m trying to remember if there were any motorcars. Now it’s getting muddled up in my head with Upstairs/Downstairs. It doesn’t matter. The point it, there was one nanny who had a child of her own (secretly, or she would have lost her job). She was an Irish girl who got pregnant by the son of the lord of the manor, oh the scandal, and she left home and went to London with her baby and found lodgings with a nice Russian woman who took care of the baby for her all day. And that just killed me, thinking about this girl having to leave her own baby to go take care of other people’s children.

But that’s been going on forever, and it happens all the time today.

I am so lucky. Well, my religion says you shouldn’t say “lucky,” you should say “blessed.” Except I have a hard time with that, because why should I be more blessed than my sister? God loves us both the same. I guess I do think there is an element of luck at play in our lives—not a superstitious concept of luck but something for which there is no better name than the luck of the draw. I drew a pretty fine hand of cards. Did God stack the deck in my favor? Did I just make better decisions with the hand I was dealt?

Hmm, better than my sister, yes probably. But still.

Okay, yes, I did work hard to put myself in the position of getting to stay home with my children. And I have made sacrifices, choices, that make this work. Small house, frugal living, career on the back burner.

But still, but still.

One of my kids just bounced over and asked me to scratch a terrible awful itch in the middle of her back. I got to stop writing this and scratch her. And I knew it was a luxury, a great blessing, a high card for my royal flush.

Ain’t no bigger gift than time to just be together.

What if they mostly remember the back of my head?

Sometimes I wonder what motherhood would have been like without the internet. I fell into both new worlds at the exact same time; we got our first modem the week I quit my job in anticipation of Polly’s birth. I became a stay-at-home mom and an AOL addict simultaneously. I learned to nurse my newborn sitting in front of the computer. I shared every gurgle and coo with the new friends I’d made on the pregnancy boards. Later we bailed from AOL and formed our own yahoogroup, and we’ve been in almost daily contact ever since.

I still have yet to meet some of them in person, but those women know more about my daily ups and downs during my first decade of motherhood than my own mother does.

Now it’s happening with blogs, too, only in a weirder, stalkerish way. I read your blogs, you other mothers, and I get all caught up in the milestones of children I will probably never see in real life. I worry about when Annika will get her new liver, and I go gooey over the antics of the babies, and sometimes—I freely admit this—I tell real-life friends a hilarious story about “my friend’s kid,” “friend” being shorthand for “person whose blog I read but don’t really know from Eve, but I’m sure we would adore each other if we met in person, or maybe not because you never can tell.” You could really bog down a humorous anecdote with an intro like that, so it’s easier just to say “friend.”

But I digressed from my original thought, which had to do with the way internet discourse has shaped me as a mother. Sometimes I catch myself rushing through a fabulous moment with my children because I am so eager to WRITE about it and capture its fabulousness in print before I forget it. It’s an extension of the way taking video of Christmas morning can spoil the sponteneity and naturalness of Christmas morning. Am I so preoccupied with chronicling my adventures with my children that I shortchange the adventure itself?

In some ways I do think e-lists and blogging make me a better mother. I do notice the miracle of the small moment because of this long-term habit of sharing such moments with my online pals. And some days I think I behave better because I write the truth, even when it hurts to do so, and I want to have something good to write, so I try harder to be fun and connected.

But it can be a kind of vicious circle. In striving to be fully present for my children, I work at bringing magic to the mundane, I really do. And then when it works, and the magic is there, I want to write about it, capture it, get it down so I won’t forget how magical these years are. I love them so much, these small people surrounding me. I want to fill their days with joy, and I mean that in the rawest, non-Hallmarky sense. Joy. A major requirement of a joyful childhood is, I firmly believe, that the people with whom the children spend the majority of their time are themselves joyful. And for these kids, that’s me. They want me, they want me to delight in their company.

I do, I really do! So much so that I can’t wait to sneak away from them and write about how much I love being with them.

Motherhood is a study in paradoxes.

Would I be a better mother if I were just living with my kids instead of writing about them?

Would you believe I just told the six-year-old, “Hang on, honey, I just need to finish this sentence”?

Kid fight du jour

You have to feed the imaginary fish twice a day. No, once! No, twice!

Every party has a wallflower, and I’m it

So there’s this party going on, and I’m slinking around the corners, snatching appetizers off the trays as the waiters zip past. Love those bacon-wrapped shrimp. And the Swedish meatballs, why are those only party food? Why am I not serving those for dinner instead of the fish scales?

Usually at parties I am one of those people who hovers invisibly at the fringes, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. But then if there’s a game of Pictionary I will awe the masses with my rapidly executed yet intelligible scribbles and my uncanny guessing intuitiveness. Oh yes, if you’re planning a game night you should invite me because I am your ace in the hole. But you have to pressure me into it, see, because I will never never volunteer. It’s not so much that I am shy as that I am holding a massive ego in check. If I start putting myself forward, I might never stop until I wind up on American Idol or something, which would be disastrous because I can’t sing for crowds, and they don’t let you play Pictionary on that show.

She may have blood lust, but at least she’s polite

A note delivered to me while I was on the phone:

Dear Mommy,

I know this is a lot to ask but could I have a bow and arrow?

Love,

Mary