Montana Momoirs Column

I was out for a hike with my two year-old the other day when I spotted another mother toting her own little baby boy. We approached each other warily, trying to determine friend? Or are you the kind of mother who will only make me more aware of my own inadequacies?

After exchanging niceties and complimenting one another on the beauty of our sons, she mentioned that this baby was her first child and stated that she was just enjoying being a mother so much.

“I loved my boys from the first second I saw them,” I told her. “But I think being a mom is really, really hard. Especially when they’re under a year-old.”

She looked at me, kind of cocking her head and arching her eyebrows with her mouth all twisted up, as I waited for her to say, “What dost thou talk about evil baby-hater mother?”

But instead, she let out this long deep sigh that made it seem as if she’d been holding her breath since she gave birth three months earlier and said, “You’re the first person who told me this was hard!”

That was all it took. For the next 40 minutes, she barely took another breath as she talked about getting up a hundred times in the middle of the night, and how she hadn’t sat down to eat a meal since her son was born, and she was so tired, and she hated going to work and at the same time, she couldn’t wait to go to work and sometimes her son cried and cried and she couldn’t get him to stop and she missed talking with her husband without interruption and going out with her friends.

We parted ways, never having even exchanged names, just two moms of young children, passing one another in the midst of our busy lives. But the conversation we had was more than just passing small talk. It was an affirmation from one mom to another that being a mom is hard in so many ways.

I spent the first 15 months of my eldest son’s life feeling overwhelmed and wondering what I had done and when it would get easier. I also spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me because every single mother I met told me how they had found “their calling” and that motherhood was one big hootenanny after another.

I, on the other hand, was staggering through my son’s first year developing an understanding of why sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture, and trying to figure out how to balance work, my new baby, and what was left of my life.

I wish that one mother had taken me aside and said, “You know what? It’s o.k. that you’d rather have a root canal than go to the park. And it’s all right that you can’t motivate yourself to teach your baby sign language or that without naptime, it is very possible you would commit yourself.”

But nobody told me those things. And it took me a long time on my own to come to terms with the fact that as a mother I will still occasionally lose my temper and I will never enjoy craft projects and that sometimes, I think child-rearing is just plain monotonous. Let’s face it: reading the same book dozens of times over the course of a day or playing with sidewalk chalk isn’t as intellectually stimulating as, say, coming up with a plan to save the world/company/community as many moms I know did pre-baby.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that admitting all of this doesn’t mean that I love my children any less. That bears repeating: I don’t love my boys less just because the thought of another glitter art project makes me want to flee. I don’t love my children less because I like going to work. I don’t love my boys less if I oh-so-occasionally put my needs before theirs.

All it means is that being a parent is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done by far – and I know I can’t be the only one who thinks this way. Maybe we all need to start being a little more honest with one another. Maybe we could lean on one another a little more instead of pretending to be skipping through motherhood by ourselves without a care in the world. Maybe then we wouldn’t need to get our motherly affirmations from complete strangers we meet on a hiking trail.

Montana Momoirs

Here's a link to the column in the Helena IR.

And here's the text of it:

My alarm goes off at 5:17 every morning. Most days, I roll out of bed and pull on my boots, hat, and coat and stagger to my front door as my friend Emily drives up my hill. Together, we head downtown to practice yoga for an hour.

When I tell people this is how I start my day, they always look at me like I’m crazy – crazy to get up that early, crazy to add something else to an already jam-packed schedule, crazy not to get an extra hour or two of sleep.

But that hour of yoga helps keep me centered in more ways than one. Yes, I’m focusing and stretching and breathing, but that hour is not just about the practice of yoga. For both Emily and me, it is the hour a day that we call our own.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to see Emily on Monday morning – in spite of the fact that she was in labor with her third child. Since this is her third baby, Emily fully realized that our hour of morning yoga was the last hour she would have to herself for a long time.

Before you have kids, it is impossible to fully comprehend just how much of your time and energy they will zap. Those first few weeks home with a new baby are not just a wake-up call. They are more of a drill sergeant with a bullhorn screaming at you, “Life as you know it is TOTALLY OVER! You will never have a moment to call your own again!”

I am like every other mother of young children. I haven’t taken a shower in five years without someone pulling back the shower curtain and yelling, “Hi mom!” Ditto for using the bathroom. I feel as if I do a session of squats during mealtime for the number of times I am up and out of my chair, fetching washcloths, ketchup, and towels to wipe up spilled milk.

But even worse: all of the things that I loved to do vanished – overnight. I once was a person who liked to go to the gym for hours or disappear for an afternoon at the movies or who went for all-day hikes or who plowed through several books a week. Then I had a baby and all of a sudden, my husband I were squabbling over who got to leave the house at 10:30 at night to make a five-minute diaper run.

As my children have gotten slightly older, I have started to see an occasional glimmer of light at what has sometimes seemed like a very long and dark tunnel. I now leave the house on a semi-regular basis – all by myself – and go someplace other than work. In the past few months, I have rediscovered the joy of perusing a bookstore, taking a walk on a nice day without pushing a stroller, and enjoying a glass of wine with friends.

While these moments are pretty short-lived, they are amazing. Sometimes I even find myself, if just for a brief second, forgetting that I have kids, like I’ve stepped into some time-travel machine and I can shuttle back and forth between my real life and my old childless life that, in retrospect, was filled with nothing but oodles of free time with which I could do whatever I pleased.

My five year-old, Mike, recently asked me about my favorite way to spend my time.

“Hhhhmmmm…” I began contemplatively. “I suppose that it’s a tie between reading and yoga.”

“Dad said his favorite thing to do was to spend time with Peter and me,” Mike informed me.

I hoped that I didn’t look too much like a deer in headlights as I tried to do some backpedaling, “Well, of course spending time with you and Peter is my favorite thing to do!” I said. “That goes without saying. Which is why I didn’t say it!”

There is no question: being a parent takes over your life. How much it takes over and how quickly it happens takes your breath away. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, amidst the challenges of parenting young children, that it is actually a time of far more joy and wonder than you are sometimes able to recognize on a daily basis.

But in the midst of all of that joy and wonder, there are things – important things – of which you just have to let go. And those things of which you can’t let go, you learn to schedule around. So for now, I’ll set my alarm for 5:17 and head off into the darkness each morning.

Montana Momoirs Column 3/15

I’m writing this as my dad is having quadruple bypass surgery. What had been a routine physical quickly escalated into my dad being driven by ambulance to a hospital with a better cardiac care unit. And it just went downhill from there.

My dad is having quadruple bypass surgery instead of a heart attack for one reason: he is going to retire in less than a month. He had scheduled a check-up with his doctor just to make sure his health was A-OK prior to retirement.

Most people look forward to retirement from an early age. My dad is no exception. He wasn’t planning a trip to Tahiti or an around-the-world sojourn, but I know he was not planning on spending the first few months of retirement shuffling between cardiac rehab and an easy chair.

It may seem like a strange time to retire – as the economy tanks, retirement plans go up in smoke, and everyone is scrambling to hang onto the job they have. But my eldest son, Mike, who is named after my dad, turned five last weekend. And, turning five is just one of those monumental birthdays – kind of like turning 30 or 50, except better – that makes you stop and think how quickly life is passing. And possibly passing you by.

Of course, Mike wasn’t remotely reflective about his birthday. He just wanted to go to his party, eat his cake, and open his presents. But my husband and I, along with my parents, all stood back and said, “Whoa – he’s already five! Next thing you know, we’ll be going to his graduation at Harvard!”

We live nearly 2,000 miles away from our closest family members. My husband, Brent, and I moved out here eight years ago, almost on a lark. I had never even been to Montana before and Brent had only been here on vacations as a child. He assured me I would love it so we packed up a U-Haul with our very few belongings and headed West, like so many dreamers before us who were looking for something different and better.

Of course, that was before we had kids, back when life was free and easy. When we were childless, my folks dutifully made an annual visit West. Now that we have kids, we take turns visiting each other, but we still only connect with my parents in person once a year, which isn’t nearly enough.

To fill the gap, we talk with them on the phone often, send pictures back and forth via email, and the boys look forward to receiving the many packages they get in the mail from their grandparents.

This long-distance relationship is pretty much the extent of how my boys know my parents. Thankfully, my parents’ retirement plans involve spending part of the year in Helena, so they can be close to their grandkids. My dad told me that he wanted to get to know the boys and wanted the boys to get to know him.

When I was growing up, both sets of my grandparents were actively involved in my life. They were at every holiday, birthday, class play, and special event. I remember trips to the zoo, Disney World, and many pre-dawn fishing expeditions, gliding across a lake that was as smooth as glass with only the loons breaking the silence. I remember my grandparents teaching me how to tie my shoes, how to bait a hook, how to make a bed, and how to sail.

Those were the big things. But I also remember the way their houses smelled. Picking raspberries with my grandpa on a steamy July morning. Baking chocolate chip cookies with my grandma. Listening to Ernie Harwell call the Detroit Tigers game as my grandpa worked on his car. Walking down the street to feed the ducks at the river.

These moments were nothing and yet, they were everything.

I’m not sure how nothing special adds up to be what you remember about a person – how, as a child, you know that a person is good and decent and kind and that they love you more than anything because they took the time to walk a few blocks with you or sat next to you on the porch stoop as you ate bowls of ice cream together.

But that’s what kids know. It’s hard to do that in a phone call or an email. And it’s definitely not about presents or cross-country trips to exotic locales. When my dad gets well and gets out to Montana, I imagine being the long-distance grandpa will be hard to shake. He’ll probably want to take my boys places and buy them stuff. But over time, I think he’ll get it: the best relationships with a child come from the simple extension of a hand. And the opening of a heart.

Montana Momoirs Column

I am the kind of person who will try anything once – when it comes to food. Over the years, I’ve crunched through a course of live grasshoppers, chewed and chewed horse steak, cured hangovers with menudo, scrambled cactus with my eggs, celebrated at a Burns dinner with haggis, and reveled in the glory of artfully-prepared sweetbreads.

Now that I am a mother living in Montana, many of the more exotic foods that were once a staple of my diet are hard to come by and most certainly wouldn’t be welcome at our dinner table. In fact, if I sat a steaming bowl of fried baby octopus or a platter of tongue tacos in front of my kids, I would expect, and probably deserve, a revolution.

As a result, our everyday fare is relatively pedestrian. Think chicken breasts and 1,001 things you can do with noodles and cheese. But still, I try not to let things get boring.

So, every once in awhile, I dare to swerve outside of our normal dinner fare. (Apparently I was out to lunch when the memo went around stating that small children seem to like boring, especially in terms of dinner offerings.)

The result? My kids, in particular my eldest, Mike, often react as if I am indeed serving them plates of hot steaming menudo, tongue tacos, or fried baby octopus. In fact, if you were to survey Mike, he might tell you that I am a terrible cook or, as he put it one day, “I just don’t understand why you never cook anything good to eat.”

Now please, dear reader, rest assured that I do not expect this child to revel in offerings of offal. I have never once tried to serve the boy chitterlings or trotters. Although I can’t begin to tell you how tempting it is.

And it is tempting simply because Mike is a non-consumer of food. In the simplest of terms, he does not eat. I am consistently amazed at that child’s ability to survive on 33 calories every other day. And, I am most embarrassed to admit that after five years of Mike eating like a bird when the wind blows a certain way, I still cannot let it go.

As a result, family mealtime is likely what will put me in an early grave since I cannot begin to describe how incredibly irritated I get when Mike refuses to so much as touch the dinner I have prepared. Especially if it is something that he eagerly lapped up a month ago. Especially if he is so completely repulsed by what I have made that he gags, always an attractive noise accompaniment to a meal.

In fact, it makes me so irritated that I have had to say to myself, “Put the fork down. Put the fork down. You do not want a child who has been deformed by a fork.”

Yes, mealtimes are often battlegrounds at our house, which is exactly what the experts tell you not to make mealtimes into, no matter how little food your child consumes or what they won’t eat.

Like many things the “experts” tell you, not getting irritated with a kid who doesn’t eat is easier said than done. Experts also tell you not to punish a child who refuses to eat (guilty), not to offer bribes (guilty again), and not to make a different meal for a kid who doesn’t like what is being served (ummm…hello, guilty).

But experts also say that the more often families eat together, the more likely kids are to do well in school, eat their vegetables, learn big words, and know which fork to use. I’m just wondering, when these studies were done, were experts thinking of June Cleaver, adorned with an apron and serving up meatloaf, as everyone sat happily around the dinner table, listening to one another in rapt attention?

Or were they thinking of my dinner table, with a kid on a hunger strike that rivals anything Mahatma Gandhi ever did, and two parents wheedling him to eat something – anything – on his plate.

Perhaps the most adventurous thing I can do now regarding food doesn’t have anything to do with a first course of fried scorpions. Maybe I should look for noodles and cheese recipe number 1002, serve it up with a smile, and then keep smiling all the way through dinner. That small act might just be something on which the experts and I can agree.

What's the Word I'm Looking For?

My friend Jason and I have an editing system down. I send him an article and he edits it using MS Track Changes (and does an amazing job). He then sends it back to me. I make virtually every one of his suggestions. Then I send it off to my editor.

But I can't seem to get my act together lately to send Jason my articles in what could be remotely considered a timely fashion. In fact, I am usually finishing up an article at about 11 p.m. the day that it is due.

So I've had to start relying on my husband as my pre-editor.

And this very well might ruin our relationship.

For example, last night, at about 11:30 p.m., I was screaming at him from another room, "USE TRACK CHANGES! USE TRACK CHANGES! I don't want to hear your voice!"

Because he sits at the computer in my space and procceds to nitpick and ask inane questions about commas and semicolons. Who has the English degree here, buddy? Who?

My very least favorite though is when he suggests different words and says things like, "Do you really mean 'wheedling'? Or do you want to use 'cajoling'?"

To which I want to respond, "Do you think a trial separation would be better? Or should we just file for DIVORCE?"

Montana Momoirs, Column 4

“Mom, you are a square!” Mike said to me the other day.

At first, I thought my eldest was commenting on my complete lack of hipsterness, but then he continued, “And dad is a rectangle, Peter is a triangle, and I am a circle.”

Oh. So I shouldn’t take being a square personally, I guess.

But being named the square got me thinking. Once upon a time, I was decidedly unsquare. I partied with rock stars – literally – without worrying what it might do to my reputation. I travelled around the world, for months, by myself – in spite of the fact that as a grad student, my major source of income was selling my own plasma. And, I pursued a graduate education in poetry, without giving a thought as to what my employment prospects as a poet might be.

I’m not sure when I became decidedly square, but I am fairly certain it has a great deal to do with becoming a mother. For instance, once, when I was in Rome, a very good-looking Italian man pulled up next to me on his motorcycle. “Would you like to see Rome from the back of my bike?” he asked. “Sure!” I said and hopped on.

The next time I rode a motorcycle was this past summer. My uncle, whom I know very well and who is most definitely not some strange Italian man who barely speaks English, offered to take me out on his motorcycle. This time, my first reaction wasn’t “Sure!” It was to go rummage around for a suit of armor to wear.

My uncle, who has owned motorcycles forever, is a very careful and experienced driver. We safely and slowly cruised around back roads, where there are few other vehicles and where it is very unlike downtown Rome. But the entire time, I kept thinking to myself, “Who is going to take care of the boys if I break one of my legs…or worse?”

In other words, I just couldn’t relax.

Which has pretty much been my status ever since having Mike. Perhaps while giving birth to Mike, some worry gene was triggered as he shot out of the chute. I certainly cruised through my pregnancy with nary a thought, let alone a worry, about baby preparations. In fact, we were so unprepared for Mike’s arrival that while I was in labor, Brent went out to Target and bought everything we thought we would need – from a miniature bathtub to a pack of diapers.

Today, however, I am definitely that parent who sniffs suspicious foods; washes hands obsessively with anti-bacterial soap; schedules everyone for flu shots; and looks up anyone who might come in unsupervised contact with my children on the correctional offender network Web site.

I worry that Mike is really bad at using scissors. I worry that Peter is going to have permanent brain damage from hitting his head so often. I worry that Mike talks too much and that Peter doesn’t talk at all. I worry that their wooden toys have been painted with lead paint from China and that their plastic toys are going to give them cancer. I worry that Mike doesn’t like to participate in sing-alongs at school. And I nearly have a heart attack when I walk into the living room and find Peter jumping from one piece of furniture to another.

I worry and worry and worry and worry. I even worry that I worry too much. Somehow I have morphed from the exorbitantly-priced high heel-wearing girl who partied with rock stars into the mom who buys my kids orthopedic footwear so that they have good arch support. How did this happen? When did this happen? And more importantly, did it have to happen?

“Mom, today you are a bottle of dish soap,” Mike said to me this morning.

“I’m not the square anymore?” I asked him.

“Mom, you were never the square,” Mike said, forgetting who was who in this strange naming game of his. Then he dropped his voice low, “Dad is the square, mom. You know that!”