{Originally posted on Whiskey in My Sippy Cup}

I’ve talked before about the craving we as parents have to mold our children into little mini-mes, to see some glimmer of ourselves behind those big, beautiful eyes. I’ve talked about how hard we both have striven to avoid doing just that thing, for the sake of our kids’ sanity. We were both pushed and pushed perhaps a bit too hard as children. We both spent most of our lives trying to live up to some unattainable ideal of perfection that our parents had laid out for us. We both had an absent parent who we alternately tried to garner the love of and spite with our over-achievement.

We both have parent issues. We try to not share them with our kids.

For me, not pushing them to be me is simply a matter of not letting them slit their wrists and not pushing them to get straight A’s all the time and reading them something other than Douglas Adams. For The Donor, it’s a bit more complicated. He was that kid. I have scrapbooks on scrapbooks full to the brim with newspaper clippings and accolades. I have cases of ribbons and pins and trophies in my basement. I have a wall full of plaques and a closet full of uniforms waiting for a child who needs them. For a child who will follow his father’s footsteps. And I have a very tired father here, too, one who never got his childhood because he was too busy being pushed to be the fastest, the hardest, the leanest, the best.

And so I’ve read them other stories (thank you, Dan Brown) and he’s let them dip their foot in a pool with an instructor rather than with him, and he’s put them in soccer lessons with any other coach, and he’s sat back and waited. I’ve seen him dream. I’ve seen the hope well up inside of him like a fire and I’ve seen that flame extinguish time and time again, mostly because he’s an athlete and I’m a nerd and nerds don’t push their kids to hit balls for a living and athletes don’t buy their kids Mensa Mind Challenge books for fun. Our kids will be neither of us, it seems. At least not by our doing.

He’s actually been trying his hand at their sports of choice a little lately, and let me tell you that a 37 year old man on a Ripstick is damn near the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Especially when he does a double-backwards-aerial-somersault and lands flat on his ass. That man was never a cat, in any life.

{Originally posted on The Hip Mom’s Guide.}

When I was a girl, I used to spend a couple of weeks each summer with my grandparents. Most mornings, after making me breakfast, my grandmother sent me outside to play while she began her daily chores. It seemed like she was forever folding laundry and vacuuming her living room floor. There weren’t many other children in the village where she lived, so I spent long hours figuring out how to amuse myself. One of my favorite activities, on a hot summer afternoon, was to gather my books from the library and read in the shade beneath the giant oak tree at the entrance to her neighborhood. I loved to watch the cars go by; I remember wondering who all of those people were and where they were all going. Did they wonder about me, too? Thirty years later those memories are strong: I can still feel the cool grass under my bare little legs and see the sun peeking through the thick leaves above.

By the time my children came along, kids’ summers were filled with camps of every sort. Basketball camp, swim club camp, any-activity-you-can-name camp. What startled me about all of these choices wasn’t really that they existed, but how many children were enrolled in them from the youngest of ages. At first I resisted the peer pressure, partly because in addition to my three-year old, I also had an infant; partly because these camps cost a lot of money; and partly because it just didn’t seem right to book my three-year old son’s summer chock full of organized activities. Didn’t he get enough of that during the pre-school year?

But slowly, and surely, I started down the slippery slope of enrollment. “Oh, what’s one little camp,” I thought. “His friends are all doing it; he’ll love it.” And he did. But one camp turned to two, then two kids turned to three, and before I knew what hit me I found myself living out of a mini-van and shuttling three boys from ocean camp to soccer camp to crime-science investigation camp. A mini-van was most definitely not where I wanted to spend my summer.

And so I decided: our summers will be different. They will be slow. My children will be bored. They will have to learn to play b-o-r-e-d games with one another, even though the youngest can’t add yet and the oldest insists on proper rules. And I will have to practice patience, again and again, while explaining once more why they aren’t enrolled in the Greatest Camps on Earth. But the trade-off is that they get to enjoy summers like I did: figuring out fun for themselves. They get to take long walks in the woods, check out hundreds of books from the library, and gorge themselves on s’mores roasted over the firepit during our summertime outside movie extravaganza.

{Originally posted on Poot and Cubby}

Dear Elliot,

One day when you are older, I will tell you about the day I rode the subway with tulips in my arms. I will tell you how people gave me sideways smiles thinking that someone had bought me flowers. But they couldn’t know what I really held in my hands – that I was carrying fairies to my four-year-old.

A few weeks ago you told me that a fairy lived inside every tulip. And that if you placed the flowers in your room and made a wish, the fairy would grant your wish while you slept.

So today, I brought you fairies, believing that you were incapable of coming up with an ungrantable wish – that anything you muttered before you said goodnight would be chocolate-related or something equally easy. Instead, you told me you were going to wish for wings.

In the morning, I will wake up holding my breath. I will hope that the absence of wings sprouting from your back won’t convince you that beside your bed stand ordinary tulips. I will tell you that the fairies are so magical, that they gave you the power to imagine your wings as if they were really there.

Then we will look into the center of a flower and if we squint hard enough, we will see one. Tiny and covered in glitter. Able to hear only the voices of children who might wish for wings or candy or decent splashing puddles. Her ears too small to hear the too-big wishes that someone older might have – to reverse the irreversible. Cure the incurable. Create the uncreateable.

{Originally posted on From the Cheap Seats}

I was hunched over, my hands on my knees and my breath escaping in small bursts. I looked up and watched her as she continued on. She was like a machine, her arms and legs moving forward in a silent rhythm.

“She’s an elite runner, you know,” he said. His gruff voice forced me up. I held the heaving breaths and busied my shaking hands by brushing the snow from my sweatshirt. The pains in my side subsided, pushed out by an undefinable shame.

I wasn’t good enough.

I was a runner in grade school and high school. Running drove me, it fed a need I never quite understood. I had such a passion for the feel of sweat dripping down my back, the heaving of my chest, the tightness in my legs. I felt alive. And when I crossed a finish line, taking the #1 stick or reaching for the first place ribbon, I was alive. I was most definitely good enough.

College was different. I wasn’t the superstar runner. I was a struggling freshman who had no idea what she was doing. Who packed on extra weight, got a first boyfriend, lost her first boyfriend all while navigating the campus as a socially awkward entity waiting for a clue.

But that’s just an excuse. The truth–I simply wasn’t good enough.

“Some people are just born to run,” my coach continued as the snow began to drift across the track. “You’ll be a good running partner for her. Once you get into shape, ” he added smugly, mercilessly. My eyes followed her as she ran passed us, the snow politely parting for each footfall.

It was one of our very first practices of the season. My coach had already lost faith in me. I had lost faith in myself. Suddenly, I didn’t want to run anymore.

But I did. I ran because I had to. I ran because he said I wasn’t good enough. I ran because I had to show him that I was.

Every day I ran. Before practice. After practice. Weekends. I pushed my body until it begged for a reprieve–and even then, I pushed harder. There was little doubt that I was improving. But coach never noticed. He was working with the elite runners. And when his eyes did drift over in my direction, I knew what he was thinking, “Why does she even bother?” Some days, I wondered the same thing.

Short of drinking a raw egg, I was Rocky. Theme songs bumped around in my head, forcing me to push my aching body just one more mile. Just. One. More.

Trying hard now
it’s so hard now
trying hard now

{Originally published on Is There Any Mommy Out There?}

I’ve been obsessed with time lately and how it passes. What a trickster time is, the way he seems to hand me moment after moment of joy and love and life in slow, lazy procession until I pause to look back and I’m cut down by how far I’ve traveled. All the tiny incidents add up to the whole year that my oldest children were three and my youngest was one and my last baby was thought of and conceived. I want to yell at him for the subterfuge, but he’s handing me new moments so fast that I can’t take the time, I’ll miss something important. I’m dropping the present and it’s shattering on the floor, gem by gem as I gaze backwards. I refocus on the moment in my hands and it all slows down again, to that disconcerting, tricky lull.

I tell time I know his game, I’m onto him, but it’s inevitable that I’ll forget until I look back once more. It makes me mad. I wish he’d leave me alone, stop stealing my moments and let me have them for mine. Maybe I’ll keep them in a carved wooden box on my dresser, magpie-like, the way I kept little bits of life in high school, a note, a charm, a worn braided bracelet.

I want to keep the way Quinn walks, steady but unsteady, on his toes, his fat little belly proceeding him. I want to keep the way Garrett laughs, mouth wide open, head back, his round baby face lit from within. I want to keep the way Saige runs to me at preschool pickup, the way it feels when she wraps her little body around my middle and wraps her arms around my neck. I want to keep this baby’s first tiny kicks, barely felt today, miniature popcorn popping inside my uterus.

Determined to stop his constant theft of my moments, I set a trap for time. I know if I turn and pounce quickly enough I can catch the decrepit old man. I wait for a slow, easy moment, a little lull in time’s flow and I spin faster than the earth, outside of time, grasping with both hands.

Then I falter in disbelief, caught off guard that I actually hold him in my hands and that the arm I hold is strong and young. He is timeless, handsome and confident with twinkling eyes and a devilish smile. “You got me,” he raises his hands in mock surrender. “There’s not much time. When should we go?” He leans forward, feverishly eager, “what should we change?”

Go? Change? I don’t really understand, not yet, I want a glimpse, that’s all, to steal some moments back and save them forever to visit at will. But I have this chance and time is staring at me, waiting. I don’t want to blow it. “What if I’d taken the other job out of law school?” I blurt at him quickly. “Would I have loved it? Maybe stayed an attorney? Maybe I’d have a big career now?”

{Originally posted on The Busy Dad Blog}

I’ve written and re-written this first paragraph 4 or 5 times tonight, hating everything that I put on this screen. How can you capture the feeling that washes over you when a beautiful sweet little girl who just a few weeks ago made you smile for no reason other than her flashing you a “who the hell are you?” look is suddenly taken away from this world? I’m pissed. Pissed that it happened to such a pure soul. Pissed that a mother and a father now have to live through the heartbreak of it all. And saddened to the core.

I didn’t know Maddie, Heather or Mike that well, and I only met them once at a gathering recently at their home (of course Maddie won me over right away – who could resist a smile like hers!). But I’m a parent. And that is all the commonality I needed to share with them to feel a stab in the heart when I found out about this last night. If you are a parent, I don’t need to go on. You understand.

If there is any ray of positivity at all that I can squeeze from this, it’s that Maddie’s smile is in the hearts of hundreds if not thousands right now. Her smile has manifested itself in an outpouring of generosity from people like you and me, donating to the March of Dimes in her name; mobilizing to walk as one in her memory; and using our collective voices online to keep that smile alive across the internet.

{Originally published on It’s My Life.}

“I am so tired.” She said, “why don’t they tell you about this?”

“Bu-uh-ut,” I stammered. “I did tell you.”

And I had, over and over again, for at least the last four months of her her pregnancy.

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “I just didn’t realize that no sleep, meant really no sleep.”

I thought back to all the times I’d tried to warn her and I knew I was partially to blame. It’s true. We don’t tell our pregnant friends everything, not because we don’t think they can take it, not because we don’t think they’ll believe us, but because it hurts to relive it and it’s easier to joke about sleepless nights than to go into details about how hard it really is.

So, my dears, here it is, the dirty dirty truth. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

No one tells you that you will stand in the shower day after day and sob because you can’t stand the thought of getting out and facing your baby again. No one tells you that some days you stand in that shower and it takes all your willpower not to curl up into a ball on the ground under the pelting shower stream. You don’t let yourself because you know that you’d never get up again.

No one tells you that with every lost hour of sleep you go slowly a bit more crazy and that the middle of the night is the darkest, scariest, and loneliest time. That you will dread the dusk because it’s the signal that night is coming and you just don’t know if you can survive another night.

No one tells you that you will grow to hate being touched and that some days it will again take all your willpower not to scream when someone places a hand on you, even as a gesture of love and support. By the same token, no one tells you that you will grow to hate sex or even the promise of sex and resent the person requiring it from you. Sex becomes just another chore at the end of a long and tedious day of tending to people’s needs. A chore that requires a lot of touching.

No one tells you that spending all day with a baby is boring. Mindnumbingly boring.

No one tells you that you will feel like half your brain has up and left you. You will forget everything. You will lose the ability to multi-task. You will lose the ability to form a coherent sentence.

No one tells you that you will resent, and even sometimes hate your kids, for many, many things like destroying your body and stealing your brain.

{Originally published on Is There Any Mommy Out There?}

We have started to talk about it recently and it inspires in me a dark, deep-down fear. Your brother looks at the picture on this blog and chirps brightly, with grave knowledge, “That Darrett. That’s Darrett in Momma’s tummy.”

“And Saige,” you chitter, “and Saige in your tummy.”

Garrett nods gravely. You do every thing together. It is all you know. You are far too innocent and unsullied by our boring world to look at each other’s skin and question that it was not always so. That the bond does not stretch back to that quiet water-filled place. Unlike those we meet every day, the jaded masses who know in a glance that you didn’t sip from the same uterine cup.

“No babies,” I correct again, “not Saige. Saige grew in her tummy mommy’s belly, in Haiti.” I wish to just say yes, to keep it simple for you for a short time, while you are simple, but I’ll never lie to you about this for my own comfort. Not even once…

{Originally published by Susannah at Petunia Face.}

When I was born my name was Amanda. But my brother was already Andy and my parents didn’t want people to call us Andy and Mandy so the birth certificate was changed, and I was no longer Amanda.

I wonder what my life would have been like had my parents kept the name. I think my eyes would have been bigger, softer. I would have looked good in blue.

Later on I told people my name was Heidi. I wore my hair in braids and pretended the very slight hill leading up to our house on Scenic Avenue was an alp in Germany. My cat Dumb Darrell Chicken Liver Whip Whap Sick Sack was a goat. After that I was Penny from The Rescuers, then Jo from The Facts of Life which was about the time I tried speaking with a Brooklyn accent even though I had never even been. Later it was Samantha, again from Brooklyn, this time from Who’s the Boss. She had sharp eyeteeth and bitchin’ big bangs. Meanwhile I had a space in between my front teeth and frizz.

I no longer go by different names. I am Susannah and I don’t look good in blue. But at times I am a mommy, other times a mother. I am an employee, a friend, a daughter, a wife, a sister, the anonymous person in line behind you at the supermarket. I am the bitch who cut you off on the freeway. I am one name but a thousand different people when earlier, when I was young, I was many different names but one single me. Even when I spoke in an accent that was not my own. I was me no matter the name.

{Originally published by ConverseMomma on Ordinary Art.}

When I was having the first of three miscarriages, sitting on the couch stuffing ice cream in my mouth, and sobbing at all the EPT commercials on television, a bloody maxi pad tucked between my legs, I got a phone call from someone close to me. She was pregnant, young, scared, and about to have an abortion. She wanted me to console her. She wanted me to wrap my arms around her and rock away the regret. I remember wanting to slap her. Instead, I spoke calmly through clenched teeth. I told her it was going to be okay, assured her that I loved her, even as I felt the soft spots of my heart, that once she had claimed, hardening against the impact. It was not fair of her, of me, of circumstance. But, this is how it was.

Two miscarriages, an oncologist office, and a handful of “experts” later, they told me I would never be a mother, not in the traditional sense that I had always imagined when I was young and reckless with the way I used my body. Instead, I pinned my hopes to adoption, on an 18 year-old girl. She wore a tiny bikini the weekend that we met, and swam beside me in the hotel pool. She just knew she could never have an abortion, not with all those couples eager and waiting. She wanted, instead, to give a gift. I thought about her capacity for bravery, and all I could do was hug her, go back to my hotel room, and cry.

When my son was born, and the nurses called me Mommy, the woman who carried him for nine months and pushed him out into this world, lay weary in her bed beside us. The beginnings of her loss were already creeping across the hospital room. I just could not see it. I did not think her choice was anything but noble, me being on the receiving end of it. We celebrated with popsicles sticks that left our fingers sticky and blue, and I tried not to see the way her mother had to hold her up, her unsure legs too shaky for the long walk to the parking lot, unassisted. In the months that went by, her grief only grew. It became something large and imposing, threatening the fragile bonds that we had established all those months that she had been convinced the choice would be an easy one, but turned out never to be. My son is a gift she gave me, but at what cost to herself? That is the question left unanswered between us.

I did not want to acknowledge the loss. I just wanted the simple celebration that I thought should be my right as a new mother. For a long time, I was so thankful for my son’s birthmother’s decision that every time I heard the word abortion I considered it a slight against the blonde-haired child that I held in my arms, and sang lullabies to against the backdrop of silence, in the nursery with the walls I had painted in blue. I felt abortion was a kick straight to the empty damaged uterus that I carried inside my body. How could a woman be selfish enough to have an abortion when adoption was an alternative, when couples waited years to fill their homes with the pitter patter of little feet, when my son was alive and growing strong because of his birthmother’s choice?