Channeling June Cleaver

I am not a patient person. A statement which will come as no surprise to you if you have spent more than 10 minutes in my presence. When I was contemplating teaching as a profession, I was actually concerned about whether I was patient enough to last in a classroom with children. Interestingly, in the classroom is the one place where I seem to have endless patience. I'm not sure how or why but since it enables me to be successful at a job I love, I don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I only wish that same trait carried over to my house.

I love my children a lot and think they deserve a great mom, one who gives them hugs and kisses, makes their boo-boos (physical and emotional) feel better, and disciplines them calmly and rationally. I can generally manage the first two, but the last eludes me far more often than I'd like to admit. I have definitely yelled at my children and just last week had to leave my house when I found myself about to take Christmas away from TR (seriously). The worst is that often it is not even that their behavior is worse than normal, but that I am more tired and stressed out and have lost whatever limited patience I have. Lowering my stress level has therefore helped greatly and I don't think I have completely scarred them yet, but I wish I could show my own children the same side of me I showed my class.

Of course, in school all I had to do was work with my students so it was easy to figure out their quirks and be proactive in handling all their behaviors. At home, I juggle kids, laundry, dinner, cleaning and, occasionally, writing. In some ways, it was easier when I was working since I spent far less time with them and it's hard to get to frustrated in only 2-3 hours a day. Still, I know there are parents out there who manage to get through their lives without yelling at their kids and I'd love to know their secret, because I'm sure they want to yell often but have someone found a way to stop themselves. Anyone willing to share is welcome to do so. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to use tools from my classroom in my home and hope that helps.

Oh, and do I really want to be June Cleaver? Of course not. Still, the thought of having all of life's problems solved in 30 minutes is definitely appealing. I have a few I'd love to run by the writers right now.

Timing

You have probably noticed I am not writing every day. I actually come up with a lot to write about throughout the day (I have a list in my mind that would keep me busy for several days). Unfortunately, by 7:30 pm when TR and AR are in bed, I'm completely exhausted and incapable of putting together coherent sentences without significant effort. I tend to get a second wind around 8:30 or 9, but if I write then I don't finish until 11 pm and then need to detox a bit so suddenly it's midnight and I'm pretty much out of luck if I want to get more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep.

Someone told me once that the secret to truly successful people (the CEOs of the world) is that they need less sleep than the rest of us. I believe it. Note I said NEED less sleep, not GET by on less sleep. This is a crucial difference. I have spent much of the last 9 years getting by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep, but I am certainly not doing my best work and, really, most of us aren't. I am jealous of those few who actually need just 5 hours of sleep and so are in top form no matter how many times their child wakes up because they're cold or teething. (Actually, I assume they are getting less sleep because they are working long hours, but you get the picture.)

I'm hoping when Christmas is over, and I'm not out shopping for stocking stuffers at 10 pm so that I can leave AR at home, things will be better. I have so much useless information to share with you all and I know how sad you are not to be hearing my inner ramblings.

I, however, am going to do the unthinkable and try for 7 hours of sleep tonight. I'll need it since I will be trapped in the house tomorrow with vacationing children on a rainy day while men are finishing up some work. So excited. Did I mention they'll be turning off the water to the whole house for at least part of the day. Yay!

Admit it, CEOs, you're jealous.

Missing

I miss my life. I miss my friends. I miss coffee at Sureia on Wednesdays. I miss my semi-regular book club. I miss our old holiday traditions. I miss the metro.

Life is good out here, but it doesn't yet feel like mine. I want everything to be just like it was a year ago. Except that I don't, really. What I really want is everything I love about here and everything I love about DC at the same time. That's not too much to ask is it?

Yeah, I know. So for now, I'll just keep missing that life and figuring out how to make this new one fit as well as the old one. It only took 20 years to get that life in DC, right? Piece of cake. Sigh.

I miss my life.

Christmas in a small town

This holiday season is probably the first time it has really hit home that we are not in liberal land anymore. The first hint? When AJ shared that he learned Silent Night in music class that day. I was a little thrown, I admit, not just a Christmas song, but a religious one at that. I confess I did speak to the principal about it. Interestingly, she assumed we don't celebrate Christmas, and that's why I was bringing it up. I said we did, but knew that not everyone else does. She was very understanding and, frankly, I didn't ask for a lot. I was mainly raising it for future thought. We left it that she would talk to the music teacher about a less religious choice.

The big hint? That would be the great big manger sitting in front of the courthouse on main street. Apparently, as part of Christmas in Old Town, you can dress up and get your picture taken in a living nativity. I think it is meant to provide an alternative to the whole Santa photo op and is actually a pretty neat idea. My neighbor mentioned her daughter wanting to get a photo and raised the issue of the location, she knew I would have noted it. I said I wanted to get a picture to show friends in DC. She said "yes, we love Jesus out here" with a lot of conviction in her voice. This reminded me of my conversation with the principal. The idea seemed to be that you would only find something wrong with it if you didn't agree with the sentiment expressed.

This makes sense to some extent. After all, if everyone is Christian then a manger in front of the courthouse doesn't matter. It is only the existence of non-Christians, be they atheists, Jews or Muslims, that makes any of this an issue. I can't say I would have a problem with it if I knew for a fact that no one else would mind. So from one angle, loving Jesus, or perhaps not loving Jesus, is at the heart of the problem. If the nativity is only for those who already love Jesus then fighting to keep it in a location you find important makes sense, regardless of who you offend, because it doesn't matter, largely, what those who don't believe in Jesus feel.

I think, however, that it's not just for those who already love Jesus. I firmly believe a nativity scene can be significant even for those who will never see Jesus as a savior. Whether someone is a true believer or not, his existence and teachings can have a huge impact on them, and the nativity is one of the reminders we have that he was here and had something to share. Also, teaching others how to live better lives was his goal and Jesus probably knew you seldom bring about change in anyone by first offending them. Similarly, people who are busy being upset about the location of the manger will be far less likely to take in the simple beauty and message that a living nativity can offer. And isn't the message what really matters, not where you see it? Keeping that location feels a little to me like winning the battle but losing the war.

For now, however, I will choose my battles and heed my own advice about not offending others while seeking change and simply enjoy Christmas in my small town.

OMG, school is important for getting a job?!

Note: So I wrote this on a rampage and I stand by what I said, but do feel like I should add a caveat. The issues I saw with my students do exist, but I want to be clear that this was not all the students with whom I worked. Many of them were just as focused as their peers elsewhere and had the support system to get where they needed to go., They, however, are generally not the ones struggling years later. I'm writing here about a specific segment of the student body, not the whole thing.

DCentric is doing a hard-hitting series this week on the unemployment gap that exists in DC. They have made incredible discoveries, including the fact that unemployment in Ward 8 is 26.4% and in Ward 3 is 2.8%, and that this difference is likely caused by a skills gap between the two populations. Equally startling is the fact that the high percentage of Ward 8 residents with a criminal record contributes to its high unemployment numbers. Seriously? How is this even remotely considered news? Who living in DC doesn't know that someone with a college degree and no criminal record is going to have an easier time getting a job than a high school drop-out with a drug record? Who living on this planet doesn't know this?

I find this one of the most frustrating aspects of DC, the ability of people endlessly to research and discover the source of the city's problems without ever actually coming up with a solution for them. In part, I believe, this stems from a stubborn unwillingness to assign any responsibility for change to the people needing the help. Yep, I said it, I am a card-carrying liberal who believes in personal responsibility, as in fact most of us do. We just don't believe in personal responsibility without public support.

When I was teaching in DC high schools, I had a lot of students who would talk about going to college. They knew exactly where they'd go, what they'd study while there and what they'd do after they got their degree. In the meantime, they'd skip school at least once a week and never crack a book. (There's the lack of personal responsibility.) Here's the thing, however, they knew they were supposed to go to college in order to have a better life, but they didn't have the foggiest idea of what you had to do to get there. (That would be where the public support comes in.)

In high school, everyone of my friends and I knew our GPA and what that meant for our college hopes. We knew what SAT score we needed for the school of our dreams and spent our free time in activities that we enjoyed, yes, but that also would look good on college applications. My students often had no idea what their GPA even was, much less what it meant for their future. I had one student who was in her 4th year of high school but was still a sophomore, since she skipped so much school that she had yet to complete enough classes to equal two full years of school. When she announced to me in March that she'd miss me after she graduated in May, I was shocked. I assumed she knew she was only a sophomore, but she didn't. While we were explaining to her that she had at least two more years of school before graduation, if she attended consistently, she just kept saying, "but I've been coming to high school for 4 years." In her mind, it wasn't what you did in the building that mattered, simply that you were there, at least some of the time.

To give her credit, she did do more than many of her peers who simply stopped coming all together, so it was an accomplishment of which she could be proud in its own way. It would not, however, earn her a degree. She was not alone in simply failing to grasp how the day-to-day decisions she was making would impact her future. While I and my friends were being socialized into college prep, these students were socialized into high school dropout. There was often no one to make sure they were read to every night when little, or tell them to turn off the TV and do their homework, or help them with the math problem they just couldn't understand. They generally didn't hear their parents talking about their college days with their friends or visit their offices and see the jobs that these degrees earned them. They probably didn't hear about how hard they worked in high school to get into that college and how you can't take it for granted. A high school diploma is earned, not given, and grades good enough to get into college are even harder to earn. But all they knew was that you went to high school for 4 years and then college. As the reality of the work involved set in, a lot of them gave up.

Is this their fault? Not really. They are indeed victims of their surroundings and they need help. First, they need teachers that not only care about them but are honest with them. For example, nothing drives me more crazy than a teacher putting a sub-par piece of student work on the wall. When you put student work up on your classroom wall, you are telling them you are proud of that work and want to show it off to the rest of class. I have seen teachers do that with work that is full of spelling mistakes, poor grammar, and is generally sloppy. Is this what you want students to think is an acceptable level of work? I'm all about making students feel good about themselves, but I don't lie to them and I don't let them think I believe them capable of less than they are. I tier my work like crazy, so a student may only have to write a one paragraph essay instead of the two pages everyone else is writing, but that one paragraph will be perfect.

Second, they need someone to show them what life is like for the middle class. Most of my students had never been to the museums or the White House or the Capital. They didn't know how to act in a restaurant or store. Polite and respect were often dirty words. To be polite or to act respectful, to them, seemed to acknowledge someone as better than you or give them power over you. They couldn't do that and, coming from where they are, I don't blame them. But they need to learn that everywhere is not like where they live. They might as well have been on a different continent for all they knew about what happened outside their neighborhood. I actually had a conversation with one class that was shocked to learn that blacks were in the minority in the United States. They truly believed that whites were the minority, and that we were all rich. (They were always incredibly disappointed to see my old car that was definitely not high-end.) They just couldn't fathom life outside of their small neighborhood. Bottom line, you can't strive for something you can't visualize.

Finally, they need for people not to make excuses for them. At the end of the day, their lives will only change if they are willing to work to make them change. We can feel sorry for them and want everything to be better, but only they can do it. The longer we let them get away with behavior we wouldn't tolerate in our children or our peers, the greater the disservice we are doing them.

Birth and Life

A year ago right now, AR became an official member of our family. I've spent the whole day mentally retracing the longest and most complicated delivery I had. Truly, from beginning to end it was a disaster. They hadn't taken me off Plavix early enough so the anesthesiologist wouldn't do an epidural, which meant I did natural childbirth while stuck in a bed unable to move because I was hooked up to a ridiculous number of machines monitoring my heart. I did natural childbirth with my first three and let me tell you that it really only works when you get to move, otherwise it is like being on the rack. All the pain, and nothing to help distract you from it or make the process move along more quickly.

I did have intravenous painkillers but 10 hours into labor things weren't progressing and I began to tell the doctors I thought something was wrong. It just didn't feel right, it felt like pain not contractions. Two hours later they finally listened to me and did an ultrasound. (Perhaps because I was begging Craig to make them stop, or maybe it was all the blood?  Yes, that was sarcasm.) Turns out AR was sunny side up and had his head thrown back instead of chin tucked down. In other words, he was going nowhere and the pain I was feeling was the placenta tearing away from my uterus. Can you say emergency c-section? Actually, by that point all I wanted was for the pain to go away so I was completely fine with it. They whisked me away from Craig and suddenly we were in an OR. At that point, they put me under general anesthesia, which, on top of the pain meds, made AR's breathing a little dicey so Craig got to wave hello to him as they then whisked him off to NICU for a check-up. He was born at 9:25 pm, but I didn't get to meet him until 1:30 am on the 3rd.

The funny thing is, despite all the pain and craziness, all I kept thinking all day today was how happy I was that we both were there to go through all that together. It seems so strange to remember that at 16 weeks my doctors were pushing for me to terminate or that I had a conversation with our minister about what we wanted from the church in terms of ceremony if we didn't make it to 26 weeks. A close friend officiated at Aaron's baptism and when talking to the rector of her parish said it was especially important to her to be present because there was a time when nobody knew if either of us would even be here to have that day happen.

Craig and I call AR our agent of change all the time, and he is. It was his arrival that led us to completely change everything about how we lived our lives. In part this was the fact of him, we simply didn't fit in our house any longer. But mostly it was all that happened before he joined us that brought about change. You can't go through an experience like that and emerge without taking a really good look at what is happening in your life and what your true priorities are. The absolute most common statement I got from other moms when I told them we were moving out to Warrenton was "my husband would never make that commute." And I get it, Craig wouldn't have made it for years either, but it was actually his idea that we look out here and he was the one who kept things focused when I periodically panicked. Apparently, as I told one mom, you almost lose your wife often enough and it's amazing what suddenly becomes doable.

AJ was our first and the one who made us parents, and AR is our last and the one who made us understand fully just what a precious gift that truly is. What could you possibly give a one year old that would match that?

Silver and Gold

I have mentioned before that I moved a great deal while I was growing up, as in attended 13 different schools in 12 years. This meant that, between ages 5-12, I was moving roughly every 12-18 months either to a new state or a new school district in the same place (the same thing to kids that age since either way you didn't see old friends). There were benefits to this, I learned how to get along with people and adapt to new surroundings in a way many others don't. A skill I can still use. But there were also some negatives, one of the biggest was that I didn't keep childhood friends. At that age, kids connect easily, but most 7 or 8 year-olds are not going to build a life-long friendship in 12 months. I didn't realize it at the time but I came to think of friendship as a temporary phenomenon, here today and gone tomorrow. I tended, in general, not to stay in touch with people once I was no longer seeing them regularly.

My adult life has been a lot less adventuresome, with 20+ years in DC and 9 of those in our Brookland house. It took a while to break myself of this habit of not looking back when I left a school or job, but  break myself of it I did, mostly. And I am happy still to be in touch with people with whom I was in grad school almost 20 years ago (yikes, has it been that long?) and to have reconnected with some people from my first year of undergrad, back when there was a Cold War going on and no one knew or cared who Osama bin Laden was. (Yep, I'm that old.)

I admit, however, that the thought of leaving DC and all those people who had been with me on my first, halting steps into motherhood or who helped us navigate the overwhelming world of DC schools, was a scary one. Recognizing it was not a long trip into the city, it would still take some commitment to stay connected to all these great souls that I didn't want to lose from my life. And it would mean making new friends, which is much harder now than at age 7.

Six months later, the staying connected piece is going fairly well. I'm trying to get into the city at least once a month and people have come out here. Facebook obviously helps and email, but I still miss weekly get- togethers at Cafe Sureia and knowing I'd see everyone on the playground or at bookclub. That ease of friendship doesn't exist when you live an hour away. The new friend piece is also going all right. I'm lucky that a good friend already lived out here (and is actually moving to my 'hood later this month - yay!), so she helped me a lot. My neighbors have also been great and just bumping into the same people at kids' games or school events has helped. I can't say I have many true friends here, but I have met some wonderful people who I hope will be my friends.

Fingers crossed, I might actually have figured out how to heed the advice of the old Brownie song I learned during my year in Brookline, MA (or was it Wichita, KS?).

                                   Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.

Places don't change, people change

I loved living in DC. Craig and I met there at Georgetown, we married there, started a family there and had no intention of ever leaving. And, really, if we had more money or fewer children we'd probably still be there. I could easily write a list of things I miss about being there right now, especially all my friends who still live there. I also have to admit that I, like many city people, was always a little smug about living there. The assumption being everyone would live in the city if they could, and those that said otherwise were just sad that they couldn't or, perhaps, delusional.

The truth is, however, that living in the city is hard, especially with kids. Schools are hard, space is hard, money is hard, crime is definitely hard. You get a lot out of it, don't get me wrong, but you have to believe that the city is the best of all possible worlds because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to live there. Not when you could spend a lot less money for a lot more security and a lot less stress somewhere else. For some people, that belief never goes away but for others, like us, it does. Not because the city changed, it didn't, but because we changed or, rather, our lives did.

Four kids is a lot, four boys is chaos, and four boys in the city, well 'nuff said. Our lives simply didn't work there anymore. The time, energy and money you generally have to put into making life work in the city, we needed to put into our kids. Most of my close friends got it and, while sad to see us go, were incredibly supportive of the process. For people who didn't, though, it was hard to explain it. I remember seeing understanding in one person's eyes when I finally said that we had 6 people in our family, which meant a minimum of 24 coats to hang up, and no coat closet. Things that you can make work with fewer people, just didn't for us anymore. So Craig and I decided it was time to make the big sacrifice and head out to the country. We knew the boys would be happy and that was all that mattered. I figured I'd be lonely and a little adrift, but I could make do. The thing is, I love it out here.

I love my sterile little subdivision, just the type in which I swore I'd never live. There are 10 boys in the 9 houses immediately surrounding ours, all just around my boys' ages. For the first time ever, I am not in charge of my children's entertainment. I don't have to drive them anywhere or make play dates or do anything except feed them breakfast and tell them to come in for lunch and then dinner. Their play is completely self-sustaining. I love that I can go days without hearing someone ask to watch TV. I love that I know that, for the most part, everyone parents like I do so I don't have to worry when my kids go into their friends' houses.

I love how incredibly nice everyone is out here. One of our neighbors barely knew us when he helped get Drew registered to play on his baseball team. He's the same dad who was teaching Carter how to throw a football the other day. When I was stuck in traffic coming back from DC, I called a mom who actually left the grocery store to come home and meet the bus so my kids wouldn't freak out when I wasn't there. A complete stranger stopped in the store today to chat when Aaron used his new word, "hi," on him. The owner of the gym I joined started a conversation with me on Saturday, just because. These people are amazing. Everyone smiles and says hi and wants you to have a nice day.

I also love me out here. I'm not frazzled and stressed (which I handle oh so badly as we all know), Warrenton Laura is actually a little laid back. I get all the kids paperwork to school on time, generally know what I'm making for dinner before 4:30 pm and when I think of an errand I have to do, I simply do it the next day. I'm not constantly trying to catch up. My house is clean, our clothes are washed and put away and I'm reading books and, yes, even writing again. What's not to love about that? So I thought I came out here for my kids but, really, I'm here just as much for me.

When I left the city, I assumed it was temporary, that once the kids were gone I'd be heading back (maybe even when Aaron was still around). I could see myself living in a great condo just steps to restaurants and museums. And, maybe I will be living there in 20 years, or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll buy one of those quaint old houses in the heart of Old Town Warrenton that I love to admire when I drive by them. Because as much as I loved living in the city, that's also how much I love living out here.

Same old, same old

Nothing big to write about today. No burst of understanding or deep thoughts.  Apparently, my life just isn't that interesting. I am, however, amazed at how much you can accomplish when your house isn't working against you. We've switched out 5 lights and decorated for Christmas so far this weekend. All without having to stop and take on a completely new project necessitated by some weird problem with the house, unthinkable in our old house.

Old houses with lots of character are sweet and I miss mine very much, but for this stage of our lives I'll take new and low-maintenance every time. I think there is actually a longer piece here but it will have to wait until tomorrow, because I'm exhausted.

Process or Product?

Today, for about the 5th year in a row, I thought that if we had a fake tree, we could put it up this weekend. The boys would love that, it's such a great way to kick off the holiday season. We'd love that it would be easy, with perfectly spaced lights, and that it would last more than the 2 weeks Craig and I can manage to keep a real tree going (we have watering issues, well, more like remembering issues). And really, fake trees are so amazingly well done these days, you definitely don't sacrifice anything on the looks end of things for all that easy happiness. My brother's had one for years and my parents all do also. We really should just do it, I thought.

But then, for about the 5th year in a row, I thought not about having the tree but about getting the tree. I love picking out Christmas trees. We moved a lot when I was growing up (really, a lot) and we developed two traditions for our first night in a new place. No matter what time of year it was, we always had spaghetti and we always decided where our Christmas tree would go. The spaghetti because it was easy for my mom to make and the tree because it was our way of claiming the space as our own. So what tree went in that space was also important. I have great memories from my childhood of standing around a tree lot and arguing over whether we wanted the taller one or the fuller one and which had the best all around look for our house. Then, we'd load it up and get it home - and wait. It was excruciating. My dad had a rule that it needed to spend so much time in a bucket of water so it was happy and the limbs relaxed before we could bring it in and put it up. I'm pretty sure it was out there a week or maybe a month, although he would probably claim it was no more than a day. However long it was, it was torture. But finally, the tree would come in and go up and we'd decorate it, and that anticipation would have made it all the more special.

And so, for the 5th year in a row, I thought about what it would mean to have a fake tree, not just this year, but every year. I know it would look the same and would simplify a part of our lives (something I'm usually all about), but it wouldn't feel the same. I simply can't imagine never again embarking on the quest for the perfect tree with my boys as my parents did with us, so embark on it we will. For at least one more year, I will take process over product and acknowledge that for us, for right now, in this one thing, inefficiency is not a problem but an essential part of the journey toward making holiday memories.

Blue Friday?

Two years ago, I wrote about our annual Cawthorne girl Black Friday shopping trip. It was one of the things I looked forward to each year at Thanksgiving, not for the shopping but for the time spent with my sisters and niece. I am, therefore, sad that we will not be heading out tomorrow for the second year in row. In fact, the trip I wrote about could well have been our last one.

There are lots of practical reasons for not going this year. It is early in the morning and Erica has a 2 month old. Janine is in Hawaii, making simultaneous shopping more challenging, and we didn't tend actually to buy much anymore. I can understand all that but can't help thinking that it would be different if Samantha were still around. Shopping for Sam was never a treat (really, she was horrible at finding anything she wanted), but I loved the chance to hang out with her and talk that this one trip gave us and I hate that we won't ever be able to do that again. It makes what used to be one of my favorite days of the year a little painful and sad.

I'm thinking we need to come up with a new tradition to take the place of this one and I'm sure we will in time. Even then, however, it will be simply another reminder that our lives are forever divided into "before" and "after" the accident that took her away from us. I hate that most of all.

Thankful...

We have an enormous amount to be thankful for these days, I feel like I could write a page just listing them all. That said, my most thankful topic is a no-brainer. I am incredibly thankful this year for energy, not the kind that is causing global warming, but the kind that means I can once again play with my children spontaneously.

For years, I've felt like I've been on the sidelines of my children's lives. It was hard enough to get through the chores I had to accomplish each day, much less have the energy left to play a game of soccer or go on a long hike. But with no more heart episodes since March, I was actually able to go off a lot of my meds this summer and am feeling great. This hit home last month when I was walking back to the car from TR's soccer practice. One of his teammates kicked the ball right in front of me. Instead of just stopping it and passing it back, I found myself taking off across the field with the ball in front of me, racing to keep it away from her. This one simple, impulsive act was profound for me since it was exactly the kind of thing I had feared I would never do again.

I love my boys and all their energy and especially love knowing that now I'll be out there keeping up them, at least some of the time.

New Beginnings...

A week ago, I found myself awake at 6 am and everyone else was asleep. Ahhh, I thought, I should get up and do some writing. And, of course, five minutes later a boy was awake and needing something from me. So much for that, I thought, maybe tomorrow. I had some vague thought that writing would make a great New Year's resolution and, surely, in January it will all work better.

But here's the thing, nothing in my life will just work anymore. I have 4 young children, all of them busy boys, and if I keep waiting for the right time to come, I'll never write another word. My aunt said years ago that the goal should be to write something every day, it didn't need to be profound, it just needed to be. I've reminded myself of this endlessly, perhaps it is time to actually act on it? I'm not even sure on what I'm waiting anymore. The baby is sleeping through the night, so sleep is as much mine as it can be at this stage of my life. The move is complete, or as complete as they get. The boys are in school. My life is certainly not going to get less complicated than it is now.

I do find myself wondering what it is that I have to say that is important enough to put on paper and have others read, realizing that the answer to that question is quite likely, nothing. But then, most people who write don't do it for others. While everyone would love to find an audience that appreciates their words and heaps praise on them, if you ask them most people would say that they write for themselves, not for anyone else. It's true for me. I started this blog when we were trying to sort out life after CJ was diagnosed with a learning disability. I did send the link to family so they could keep track of our journey, but the point wasn't whether anyone else ever saw it, much less read it. The point was always that it helped me to make sense of what was happening around us. So maybe I don't need a theme or an angle, maybe I just need to write about whatever I'm trying to understand on any given day. Some days it might be a topic others care about, some days I might be the only one who bothers to read it.

Nonetheless, read it you can, starting today and every day. I can't guarantee more than a sentence, but there will be something to see if you care enough to check.

Opting out of the mommy wars...

I was talking on the phone to a friend, who works, and said I needed to go so I could head out to the gym. "Oh, rough life," she said, with the slight sarcasm that women seem to have so often when talking to each other these days. "Nope," I replied, "it's not. And I'm okay with that." It was funny how taken aback she was at my response, as I think many women would be. Somehow, we all seem to have gotten caught up in a competition over whose life is more stressful, working moms or stay-at-home moms. It is a competition in which I try very hard not to take part, because I don't see the point.

Is my life stressful at times? Hello, you're talking to the woman who shaved off all her hair last week because she just couldn't handle one more thing that day. Yeah, I have some stress. Is it more stressful than anybody else's? I doubt it but, and this to me is the central problem with the whole debate over whose life is more difficult, how on earth do you measure stress? How could you ever quantify the difficulty of any given life and decide how to balance that against another? Even within the two camps it can become an absurd endeavor to determine who has more stress. Is Michelle Obama's life, as she balances kids, a stressed-out husband and a very demanding job as First Lady, more or less stressful than that of a single mom who works in a factory and is constantly worried about money? Is this really a question we want to waste our time trying to answer? I don't think so. I'd rather stop worrying about who is more stressed out and put my effort into creating a balanced life for myself within which I can meet my needs and those of my family.

Yep, you heard me, a balanced life. The Holy Grail of parents, right? Everyone wants it and wants someone to tell them how to achieve it. But there's not a simple formula you can follow, because, and here's the rub, no two people see stress the same way so no two people will have the same balance work for them. What would seem unbearable to others might not bother me at all, and vice versa. To find your balance you to have find your greatest source of stress and then shift your life so that area is minimized, realizing that it will probably mean accepting a little more stress in other areas.

I figured out my greatest source of stress was not doing something 100% (so not shocking to anyone who knows me). I can't just punch the clock at home or at work and so I tried to do both as if the other didn't exist. I ended up unhealthy and unhappy and I'm sure unpleasant to be around. It didn't work for me or my family. So, I gave up a job I loved and left the city and my friends behind to live in a place with a lower cost of living. Except for 2 days in Williamsburg last March and time we spend with friends each New Year's, we haven't had a family vacation in years and we don't eat out much or buy a lot of clothes or new cars. I admit not having all those things is hard, but it's stress I can handle because in return I get to enjoy seeing my kids every day without wondering when I can get away to do work and I get to know that they enjoy seeing me because I'm smiling and happy and not rushing to get somewhere in a bad mood. This is what works for me. Craig's balance is different from mine because for him, my introvert, the stress of being around 4 loud and demanding boys all day is huge. He could never stay home full-time, even though he loves the boys just as much as I do. Neither of us is a better or worse parent, we're just different.

Hence, my answer to my friend's comment. I'm not ashamed to be in a good place right now and I won't apologize for it. She's right, I don't have a rough life and I've worked hard and given up a lot over the last few years to make it that way. Being the most stressed-out person in the room is not a prize for which anyone should be competing.