The Stacked Deck of Motherhood

I have long believed that the whole game of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting holds at least one bad card for all women. For some, getting pregnant is the hard part. Other women have traumatic childbirth experiences that require years of recovery. And there are those for who pregnancy is a breeze, birth is nothing complicated, but parenting doesn’t come so easily. I have yet to meet even one woman who hasn’t struggled somewhere along the way.

When you struggle in the early stages—with getting pregnant, with staying pregnant, with a difficult pregnancy or a difficult childbirth or with breastfeeding or a difficult newborn—it’s hard not to see it as a sign of something. That you shouldn’t be a mom. That you’re a bad mom. That motherhood doesn’t come easy to you.

I’ve held my fair share of bad cards.

I have two kids, but have been pregnant four times. My first was at 19 and ended with an abortion. Even as an ardent pro-choice woman, that decision still colored me, felt like a failing.  I had thought of abortion as something fine for other people, but not something for me. Until I was there.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I wanted to be pregnant, that I realized how much meaning I had assigned my earlier experience. All of a sudden, it was a punishment well-deserved (so I harshly thought to myself) that I didn’t get pregnant the moment the intention popped into my head. In retrospect, it didn’t take long. But for those few months of “trying” (a euphemism if ever there was one), I was worried. Worried that I missed my chance, that I wouldn’t get a second one.

When my second conception ended in a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, that feeling deepened. I was being punished. I wasn’t meant to be a mother. There was something wrong with my body. That experience, complete with the loss of a third of my body’s blood, surgery and a complicated healing process, left me scarred. The scar on my body was deep and made it look like I’ve had a c-section.

The internal scars were more painful, and that awful feeling was deepened by the mystery about when or whether I would ever get pregnant again. The months between my second and third conceptions were sad. It was hard to be around anyone that reminded me of pregnancy or babies or moms.

The third time around, I was much luckier.

That pregnancy brought me my daughter. While pregnancy was fraught with things that felt worth complaining about at the time, it turned out that all of it was a “normal” part of the process. A happy pregnancy in retrospect, even if it felt awkward to live through.

My labor, though, wasn’t normal. It was a 4-day prodromal affair, a possibility I’d hardly paid attention to in my childbirth class. Kind of like the possibility of the ectopic pregnancy before it.

Again, I saw myself as someone who drew hard cards.

Motherhood had a way of easing me out of the feeling that I was being followed by a dark cloud, even as it had plenty of storms of its own.

But I finally felt lucky. I’d made it to motherhood. From early days, my daughter was easy—smart, beautiful, healthy, happier than I could even understand, a pure blessing. Being a mom was hard, but she was easy. Luck of the draw.

Then we gambled again. My second full-term pregnancy wasn’t nearly as cute as the first one. All those “normal” symptoms were even less fun that time around. But I made it through and wound up with a second birth that made me feel strong and capable and blessed. Another lucky card.

And then came nursing. With my second baby, I got mastitis five times before I gave up nursing. I also suffered some pretty terrible postpartum depression and anxiety. Quitting breastfeeding to return to the antidepressants I needed was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

When I was agonizing over the choice to stop nursing, I felt so judged. I’d nursed my first baby a few months beyond the one-year ideal. And I made it to nine months the second time around—farther than a lot of women can manage. I should have been happy, but it wasn’t my timetable. I was failing in my own mind, and again, my body was failing me. Failing to be able to do this womanly thing it was meant to do. I wasn’t strong enough to give my second child what I gave my first.

With all of that weighing down, I sent an email to our local parenting list-serv about my struggle to stop nursing. I live in a crunchy, hippy kind of town, where midwives and La Leche League rule the roost. I thought I would be attacked from all sides and encouraged to nurse through anything, no matter the cost to me. I secretly wanted to be told to keep nursing, so my contrarian self could somehow feel vindicated in quitting.

Instead, I got nothing but support. Dozens of emails encouraged me to do what was best for me, congratulated me for what I’d already done, sympathized with my struggle with mastitis, empathized with the guilt and the feelings of failure. Not one person told me to keep nursing through the pain—both physical and emotional. Not one woman said the slightest thing to make me feel bad about my body or what it was capable of doing. Not one.

I can’t explain how meaningful their camaraderie was to me.

Those early years of failed pregnancy, pregnancy and mothering of infants felt so fragile. I was so quick to think: Is there something wrong with me as a woman that I can’t do this pregnancy thing easily? Does the fact that I can’t keep nursing mean that I am less of a woman? Some kind of weaker mother?

Looking back now, I think: Those were my cards. That was the hand I was dealt.

Everyone holds different cards and no one has a perfect hand. Just because we can’t see that someone else has struggled—with fertility, with pregnancy, with depression, with nursing… with motherhood—doesn’t mean they’re winning some game we are losing. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s just not easy. At least, all of it isn’t easy. Not for anyone.

Motherhood is a stacked deck. We’re dealt the hand we’re dealt. I think it helps to think that every woman around has had at least one bad card, something she would discard is she could. And we all have our best card, too. Something to hold on to, to build a hand around.

The best part is—we get to discard what doesn’t serve us well. And we get new cards all the time.

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Ten Things Moms Should Be Able to Put on Their Resumes

When I dusted off my resume last year, with the daunting task of updating it with “what I’ve done” during my stay-at-home-mom years, someone said to me, “Just don’t put ‘Mom’ on your resume.” At first, I was horribly insulted. What kind of a lame person did he think I was to consider such a thing? Then I was insulted again! I have learned so much as a mom and—despite the fact that it has made me a much better person to employ—none of it will ever get any respect from anyone in charge of hiring anywhere. It’s the hardest job (that we know!), but it also teaches you more about working hard and fast and smart. More than any other job I’ve ever held.

Since I’ll never actually put any of my many mom skills on an actual back-to-paid-work resume, I’ll share here the list of “skills” I wish I could include:

1.      Strategic Planning—Quiz: Your husband is putting the baby down for nap, do you finally take that shower you’ve been planning for days? No! It’s quiet—type now, shower when naptime is over.

2.      Executive Function—Apparently, I am in charge.

3.      Prioritization & Decision Making—I have never made so many decisions in my life. And whenever my careful planning is met with resistance (all day long), I ask myself, “Does this really need to happen? Is this really important?” What if no one gets a bath tonight? What if my sick kid only eats ice cream today? Would I rather get groceries with two kids today or spend my alone time with a shopping cart this weekend?

4.      Building Strategic Networks—Hopefully, we can all agree that It-Takes-a-Village, but… How do you find your village? No one does it for you!

5.      Change Management—If you’re going through a tough time, rest assured it will pass. Things looking nice and calm and steady? This too shall pass. Change is the only sure thing.

6.      Community & Stakeholder Engagement—If you can make doing laundry and errands sound exciting to a toddler, you can get anyone on board for anything.

7.      Risk Management— This one may be the most important skill a parent can learn and is a particularly hard one for me. I know I need to give them enough space to make mistakes, to get hurt, but knowing when they’re ready and making sure they have everything they need to succeed… Not easy to know when to let go of the back of the bike, but these are everyday decisions for parents.

8.      Relationship Management—You can’t call a big meeting and take care of everyone at once. It’s all about one-on-one contact. With your kids. Individually. With your spouse. Alone, outside of the home. Yourself. Alone, at home. Not to mention friends, co-workers, extended family. You’re going to need a calendar.

9.      Flexibility—Not talking yoga here, though that helps with all kinds of flexibility. Not one single plan ever goes the way you actually plan, but you know how to bend yourself into a pretzel to make it work for everyone.

10.   Accountability—Ain’t no one else to blame (or claim credit). 

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Why We Parent the Hard Way

Our local parent ed organization has the slogan, “Take a class . . . because loving your child is instinctive, but parenting is learned.”

It seems to me that you don’t have to read very deeply to come across an article or even a whole book decrying the amount of thought people put into parenting these days. The basic idea behind the complaint is that people have been parenting for ages and not thinking about it, so we're doing it wrong if we dwell.

Truth is, the world is a pretty f'ed up place full of unreflective parents who think their kids will be fine no matter what they do. Abuse is far too common and horrifying and makes all of our lives a worse place to live. And yelling constantly at your kids, and thinking they'll be fine as long as you also hug them when it's over, is walking through the world not paying attention to how you impact those around you. There are plenty of people like that. I think they could do with a little more self-reflection.

When people talk about the good old days when people didn’t think about parenting, I think about how much the family structure has changed since then. It’s not so long ago that the family was a vertical chain of command, with husbands on top, wives below and children at rock bottom. That’s just not how we do it anymore. And the logic that put men on top and kids at the bottom was a pretty ugly philosophy that had broad reaching ugly consequences.

Parenting through fear, back when people put less thought into being a parent, was not the good old days. People unapologetically taking out their frustration on children was not the good old days. There is less acceptance of child abuse of all sorts today, and we are all better for it. From the impact on an individual abused child to the impact such violence has on society as a whole, we are better for it.

Studies have shown that—while child abuse continues to be an intractable problem we need to face together as parent communities—it is on a downward trend that can’t be explained away by any single factor. We are simply less tolerant of violence toward children than previous generations.

Domestic violence of all sorts is no longer a joke you can make in advertising, which has actually been true in the past. Spanking is still a highly charged debate that ignites from time to time, but I think there is less social acceptance of that, too. Just imagine watching someone spank a child in public. Not a lot of people will be standing by thinking, “Yup, that’s what we do with kids who step out of line.”

From yelling to spanking to ongoing verbal and physical and sexual abuse, the idea of a husband or a mother ruling their household by threatened or actual violence is no longer acceptable in our society. I'm sure there was something "easier" about scaring your kids—and probably your wife, too—into "behaving." Children afraid of physical and emotional violence may be easier to keep in line than children who need to be spoken to and reasoned with and convinced to cooperate.

Anyone in the current grandparent generation will tell you that the way we parent is a lot harder than it used to be. Parent wasn’t even a verb back then. Children were seen and not heard.

We do put more thought into it and do make it harder for ourselves. I think we do things the harder way—we have time-outs that don’t always work, time-ins where we’re not quite sure we’re saying the right thing, we bribe inconsistently, we try to talk it out, we have consequences. And I think the hard way, rocky road as it is, is a better way.

We work our butts off trying to do the right thing. Trying to be good parents. Trying not to yell. And sometimes, I can admit, when we are at the absolute end of our ropes, even trying not to spank or shove or grab with hands that are too strong and too tight. But we work hard to build up our parenting toolbox with all kinds of tricks so we don’t go to that bad place. And mostly, the place where we fail is with yelling. And we continue to work on that.

To build up this toolbox, of tools to pull out when things aren’t going right, you have to talk about parenting. Hitting when you’re mad is instinct. Yelling at your kids comes easily. Learning how to be a better parent? That requires thought.

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Dry Cleaning, Car Seats & Other Reasons I Yell At My Kids

Do you yell at your kids? Apparently, we all do. From toddlers to teenagers, the number one complaint our kids have about our parenting is that we yell too much (according to studies I read about in All Joy and No Fun).

When I started writing this blog post, I couldn’t think of any fresh anecdotes about yelling. Well, all it took was picking up the kids from school and trying to drop off dry cleaning for that no longer to be true. (Oh, how I hate dropping off dry cleaning! So thankless! Such a high ratio of buckling and unbuckling to length of errand!)

There we were, the three of us, trying to cross the street to the cleaners, when a driver stopped to let us pass. This, my son decided, was just the time to pause in the middle of the road for the sole purpose of biting his sister. Apparently, she’d committed the crime of not wanting to hold his hand. Punishment: one bite. So, as the patient driver looked on, I yelled. Expletives were involved. I’m sure it was ugly to watch.

It happens. I hate to admit that I yell, but I also know that this isn’t the sort of shocking confession for which anyone is likely to be criticized. No one’s throwing stones at glass houses on that one. But I still think it’s important that I hate to say it and that I really do hate that I do it. Even if we all do it.

When we stop feeling bad about those times when we really, really yell at our kids, we open the door a little too much to social acceptance of yelling at children. And on the other side of that door is a place I'd rather not live with my kids.

I share this because I think it's important to share what a normal bad parenting day looks and feels like. So, I do think we should talk about yelling—why we yell, when we yell, what we do that works to stop the yelling.

It’s important to talk about this, because there’s yelling, and then there’s yelling. If we don’t talk out loud about the kind of yelling that is human imperfection, we risk it being equated with the kind of yelling that is as damaging as physical abuse. And I think there is a distinction—a know-it-when-you-see-it difference.

There is a huge difference between occasional, bad day yelling and unapologetic, unreflective, constant yelling. It’s the feeling bad about it and the trying to do better that is the difference. It’s the ability to learn from a bad day so you can have more good days that makes the difference. It’s finding more patience and more love so that, when your kids behave in age-appropriate but not situationally-appropriate ways, you can set boundaries and be their teacher.

There’s one scene I picture in my mind whenever I think of yelling at my kids. Putting my kids in their car seats. Some days I put my son in his car seat and I’m sweet with him, maybe even give him a kiss. And other days, going through the exact same motions, I’m putting him in his car seat and yelling at him, “Get in your seat! You’re not paying attention! Focus! Where’s the strap? This shouldn’t take so long!” I think it must seem so crazy to him, how sometimes he gets yelled at and sometimes he gets kissed.

He doesn’t know how crazy being late makes me feel. But I do. And I need it not to be a reason I yell at my kids. That and dry cleaning. 

PS. If you feel like you yell too much, you definitely need to know about the Orange Rhino lady.  She has said more smart things about yelling that I ever could.

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Kill Sibling Rivalry Dead

My mom was crystal clear, “You will be friends with your siblings.” As she saw it, other friends would come and go in your life, but your siblings will always be there, and you’re going to want them to be your friend. We moved a lot as kids and there were four of us, so all of those things were very true.

Kids can’t understand how big that will feel later. Being friends with your siblings is a gift. One of the biggest gifts my parents gave to us, and one of the most important things I want to do for my kids.

Since not everyone in my family is dead and I don’t have unlimited, worldwide rights to their dirty laundry, I won’t name names. So, let’s just say the “you will be friends” model isn’t universal in my life experience. I’ve seen plenty of pain caused by the kind of alienation you can only experience with family.

For some parents, it seems odd to think of siblings as friends. There's more of a, "Why would they be friends?" kind of framework through which they view the inevitable battles of brother- or sisterhood (because of course they will fight, as any friends would). They're not friends with their own siblings, so why would their kids be friends with each other? Siblings just aren't like that in many families, and it can be passed down like an unlucky inheritance for generations.

We’ve had dozens of family friends and I’ve had more than one boyfriend who has been inspired by the closeness I have with my siblings to at least attempt reconciliation with theirs. I’m not bragging and I’m not saying all four of us lock arms and sing “Kumbaya” every day of every year. I’m just saying that we were raised under with the assumption that we would be friends and we are.

As a parent, I’ve learned that this is not common as an underlying understanding of the way the world works. Siblings rivalry is expected and assumed to be the default relationship between kids who share parents. It’s assumed that they won’t get along, that when they do it’s loaves and fishes and that it’s not a problem when they don’t. It’s normal.

The other day, we had two sisters over for a play date. In the car ride to our house, the girls started working out what they were going to play, and it was clearly not meant to include my son, even though one of the girls is closer to his age than to my daughter's. To their surprise, I think, I made it clear that he was to be included.

Don’t get me wrong—girls can and should have alone time. And siblings should be allowed one on one time with their friends. And if my son is being disruptive or the older girls are playing in a way that’s beyond him, I will swoop in any carry him off to do some “work” with me (which is usually what he’d rather do anyway).

But the default is inclusion.

A sibling is a built-in-friend. As far as I’m concerned, they’re a built-in best friend. I wanted to have two kids so they would have each other. No one else for the rest of their lives will understand them in quite the same way as they understand each other. No one but a spouse will ever have that I-know-who-you-are-everyday kind of closeness with them.

I’m feeling really lucky right now. My kids love each other. They love to play together. They kiss and hold hands and giggle and want to be together. Maybe I'm getting cocky. I don't expect a smooth ride forever--or even today. And I don’t know if my desire to make-it-true will come-to-be in the same way that my parent’s insistence came to be for me and my sibs. But it’s a place to start.

At my kids’ preschool, they teach the kids to approach other kids with the question, “What are you playing?” They don’t want them to ask, “Can I play?” Because that question has a possible “No” answer, and that’s not an option. The assumption is they will all play together.

And that’s how it should be with brothers and sisters. The default is to be together. The default is to love each other. The default is not sibling rivalry.

Or it doesn’t have to be.

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Where Have All the Old Moms Gone?

I've been stroller-free for over a year now.

No, this is not some weird new parenting movement (free-range lite!) or statement of superiority. I’m not comparing my stroller-free life to anyone else, just saying that we don’t need one anymore. The kids are big, and, whether they like it or not, they walk. (Ok, except when I break down and pick up the little one when he whines just loud enough. But then he gets too heavy and down again he goes.)

This morning, looking at moms pushing their babies in strollers, it hit me how far away I am from that. From having a baby, from needing a stroller, from being seen as a comrade to moms with tiny babies.

I remember smiling sympathetically at other moms with strollers and receiving those bolstering smiles in return. It doesn’t really happen to me anymore. It’s a kind of radar, picking up on the presence of another mom of similar aged offspring.

The new moms know I’m not one of them.

When I’m home with my kids now, I usually have a four year old with me—already old by today’s stay-at-home mom standards, but I’m also the mom of an almost seven-year-old, which makes me ancient in middle-of-the-day-mom years.

Being a stay-at-home mom with an infant is a world apart from staying at home when your kids hit preschool. The herd thins as the kids grow older. More and more moms go back to work with every passing year. 

(Do I really have to say something in support of working moms here? And then say something in support of stay-at-home moms, too? Can we just assume I did that?)

There's an arguably strong culture of moms with babies who don't hold jobs, but it's a culture that's not sure what to do about moms of older kids. 

It’s lonelier when the kids get older. I wonder what I’m still doing here. Feminist crises of confidence happen with regularity. Despite that, I have chosen to be home for one more year, to send my littlest off to kindergarten before finding another job, and I’m good with that.

But sometimes I miss the days when my first was a baby and I had a whole posse of mom-friends at-home with me. We were mostly first-time moms, but there were two moms who had second kids who were about 5-years-old at the time. Now that every one of those posse moms has had a second baby, we’ve looked back at the things we talked about, obsessed over, worried about, waxed poetic about… and thanked those two moms profusely for how merciful they were with us. We must have sounded so insufferable sometimes, thinking we had any idea what we were doing.

Aside from being mercifully quiet when we were insufferable, they were also a font of wisdom.

New moms have so many anxieties that can be vanished in an instant with a few words by moms who have been there, done that. Everything from breastfeeding advice to the reassurance that all children do eventually sleep better than newborns to saying out loud that it being a mom doesn't make every fiber of your being glow, we need to hear it.

And I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like a swan song to the days when fewer women worked, though I really wish I could figure out how to do that, because I don’t mean it that way at all, but…

It’s hard not to feel like we’re missing our village elders.

New moms are great for other new moms for those “yes, me too” moments, but sometimes it would be nice to see the view of a wider horizon. The horizon can be so small when you’re all new to everything. It’s not just that moms with little kids are working a lot more than a generation or two ago, but those little kids' grandmothers are working, too. So, they aren't around to be old moms either. 

Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe there’s a sense from our moms that today's grandmothers can’t share their wisdom, can't tell us what to do, in the same way that their mothers may have felt more comfortable. Moms of the Greatest Generation—it’s in the name!—seem to have had a stronger sense that there was *a way* to be a mom. It seems like they would have, for better and worse, taught that to their daughters, along with the breastfeeding and sleeping and the rest.

Of course, their daughters were among the first generation of moms not to listen, to look beyond tradition, for different ways to be a mom. It’s easy to see how it might not be in the Baby Boomer grandparent DNA to tell their daughters how to raise kids in the same way as it would have been for post-depression era parents, who had less doubt about passing along the “right way” to do things.

This is all really good stuff—the loss of one right way to be a mom, to be a woman. No one is arguing for a way-back-machine for motherhood. It just has this side-effect of lonely "old" moms and of new moms living with anxieties that could be lifted with more support from other moms.

After my second kid was born and I had to admit something was seriously wrong, I started going to a postpartum depression moms group. I remember the first time I went, telling my story, sharing what I felt like were confessions that I was a total failure as a mom, crying my eyes out. A few years later, I still go to that group, because moms with depression and anxiety need support and that’s where I found it.

There’s a group of women who are called “veteran moms” in the group who sit and listen to those crying new moms on their first visit. And this will sound like an exaggeration, but I have seen it enough times now to know it’s true. When they tell their story, and the veteran moms echo them, “Yup. Been there. Done that,” I swear you could do a scientific study: 50% of the weight is lifted. You can see it in their faces, hear it in their breathing—they are not alone. And the hard work of mothering is easier when we do it together.

Old moms are good like that. So, how do we rebuild a village of old moms, one that works for this world today? This world where women have more options and we’re glad for it, but also this world where parents have more anxiety and we need to do something about it?

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