My Plight as a SAHM

This is as old as dirt.  Or feminism.  Or World War II.  

The struggle between working vs. stay at home moms.  We call ourselves SAHM, as if by abbreviation, it becomes more important.

“Important?”  I can hear you screech.  The indignation comes through the computer at me.  “Mothering is the most important job on earth.”

The SAHMs know that their work beats that of being a doctor, a sales rep, a designer, lawyer, chiropractor, teacher, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. They are sure and I count myself among them, so why aren’t I as sure?

I’ll admit it right here: I am intimidated by anyone who can hold a job.  I don’t care what it is.  If you have worked the register at Walgreen’s for the last twelve years, I hold you up in admiration.  If you’ve gone through school, gotten graduate degrees and hold what can be counted as a profession, I can’t even look you in the eye.  I defer.

Yet, I am the sole daytime responsibility of shaping two lives.  Not just any two, but two who were imagined, conceived, wanted, and loved with a ferocity only known to parents (even if it is copyrighted and claimed by an Alaskan politician.)

I draft legislation on my home front, and enforce it with consternation of a corrections officer (most of the time.)  My kitchen, stocked and decorated by me alone, awaits the craft studied at snooty cooking schools and competed for in reality shows.  I make and keep more appointments than the administrative assistant to the busiest CEO, tend to the sick, cheer goals and grades, and make up stories that might tickle Dr. Seuss with green.  

Yet, that Walgreen’s lady, there every time I need a glue stick or a prescription, to develop my pictures, or pick up a pack of gum, unhinges me.

As my daughter approaches the freeing age of kindergarten, when the walls rise and my day will be filled with delicious time, I tell myself that I will get a job.  Join the workforce.  Be one of them, and feel fulfilled.  

I am more than just a mother, I tell myself.  I am capable of SO MUCH MORE.

So I should enjoy it now.  And I do, the coffee klatches with the other moms as our daughters practice ballet, the bonding chitchat while I wait for my son to move up to his next karate belt, the play-dates, class parties.  I like going to the homes of the other moms, bringing munchkins and talking about the kids, the hardships, the disciplining.  I like to check out their houses and take stock.  Their kitchen is bigger, but I like the way I decorated my nursery better.  I’m more or less happy with the way our lives match up, pretty close to my own, and I feel the panic quell just a bit. 

Until I meet that one mom, the one who sews homemade clothes for her girls, who makes meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potato “frosting.”  My sister-in-law feeds my niece beets for dessert, and she begs for more.  I know moms who don’t own television,  and others whose children have written musicals, started foundations for poor Africans.  And the intimidation rises again.

Maybe I want to work, not because I think I’m better than a stay-at-home mom, but because I’m afraid I’m not.

Is a princess ever just a princess?

http://sahmanswers.com/news.php?readmore=2287I’ve been thinking a lot about issues of femininity, especially since having my daughter Anna and watching as she’s grown into a pink and sparkly preschooler.  I look at her and I beam with something akin to pride at her girlishness if only because it so obviously and defiantly is something of her own.  It has not been inherited from me.  We are opposites in that way.  Anna would live in her tutu - not the plain, pale pink one I bought in Target in preparation for her first ballet class, but the other one.  The one my husband bought in Marshalls about a year ago.  The garish pink and purple striped one with the sequins sewn into the tulle.  

I took ballet as well, though I lasted quite a bit less than she has.   Even though she is only three and a half, her dancing hours have outpaced mine already.  Ballet was the first girlish thing I quit in shame, not fitting in.  I didn’t speak the language or understand the code gained through osmosis for the other girls.  One of my first lies was born out of ballet class.  Mortified and determined that I just could not go through with the class one afternoon, I faked a stomachache and a headache.  (I wanted to cover all of my bases.)  My mom bought it.  Swathed in relief, I got to skip it one afternoon.

I knew I couldn’t push my luck, so I attended the next one, savoring the power of pretend illness.  It was my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, but I had to be meticulous in how I used it.  Yet what awaited me in that next class was worse than anything I could have imagined.  Miss Cindy, the sleek and perky pony-tailed teenager who taught the class bounded over to me as soon as I came in.  She knelt right down to my height and told me that since I missed a class, I wasn’t to worry one bit.  She had her appointment book and was going to schedule a make-up class right then and there.

It was too much.  The punishment didn’t fit the crime.  One measly lie and now I was going to have to wear make-up.  The injustice of it all!

Miss Cindy didn’t understand the tears that sprang from my eyes and wasn’t able to console me.  Phone calls were made.  My mother came to pick me up.  I never told her why I wanted to quit ballet - it was my deep dark secret.  If I’d learned anything from my older sister, to whom I looked (and still do) to unlock all of the secrets of the feminine mystique, it was that you were supposed to fight to wear make-up, not to avoid it.

Anna, however, has constructed her own “keepit box” in her room where she holds her most treasured possessions.  Nail polish and lipgloss abound.  It tickles me, in a kind of where do you come from? way.  And it makes me proud as it’s a sign of her individuality, something all her own.  And just as I stood alone in my non-girlish way, someone different, and I though, separate from my mother and sister, I don’t want this to open a chasm between us.  So we celebrate it together, even if I can’t bring myself to prefer pink over black, and we figure it all out together.

I read an excerpt from Peggy Orenstein’s book Cinderella Ate my Daughter today and it gave me pause.  She writes about the saturation of princess marketing that has taken over the little girl population and asks whether us mothers should be so glib as to indulge in it unquestioningly.  

Is it possible that my celebration of Anna’s individuality that I have been marking with tiaras and Pinkalicious cupcakes is false?  It may not be individuality at all, but the fact that the princesses got to her before I could pass on my own brand of un-girly girliness.  Her personality has been co-opted by Disney before I could exert my own influence.  Could Anna be a case of culture over both nature and nurture?

Check this out and tell me what you think: http://peggyorenstein.com/

Teach Your Children

I have a confession to make -- when I first saw in the 20-week sonogram that my second child was missing a male appendage, I was upset.  Disappointed.  I had a boy already, and I knew the outrageous, almost supernatural love that comes from the first wisps of motherhood.  I wanted to experience the same exact thing - again.

But the tech assured me that we were having a daughter, and while my husband wept at the prospect of a daddy’s little girl, I sat there stone-faced.  How was I going to get through this?  I don’t even know how to make a French braid. My attempts at eyeshadow make me look like a drag queen. 

I had never questioned my preparedness for having a son.  I know about math and science, the basics of driving car, that the World Series was for baseball and the Stanley Cup for hockey.  Any rollover that I couldn’t cover would be answered by his dad.  A girl, however, would need a more knowledgeable teacher.

The younger of two sisters, I declared myself the smart one after losing the battle for the prettiest.  My sister instinctively knew about things like shoes and pocket-books, and that they were supposed to match each other.  I am not a girly-girl.  And now it would matter.

Anna spent her first winter in her brother’s blue blanket sleepers, her blond curls rebelliously peeking out of her hand-me-down hat.  She declared pink as “my color” at eighteen months old, and own it she did.  The mornings before nursery school were fraught with tantrums if I dared to hold out a pair of pants for her.  “That’s not a beautiful dress!” she would scream, in a voice so shrill it could cut glass. So a beautiful dress it was.  With tights.  And shiny Mary Janes.

Then last week, something happened. Anna’s ballet instructor informed us waiting moms that the girls’ recital dresses were ordered.  They would be pink and purple sequined, with a teddy bear in *gasp* matching dresses.  I clapped my hands together.  God help me, I squealed.  Here it was, the culmination of all the instruction I had been unwittingly been put to in the three years since Anna was born. 

I’ve learned to be a girl, taught by the most knowledgeable 3 year-old on the planet - my daughter.  

Sick in Love

If I could do it all over again, I’m sure I would have made a different choice.  But they looked up at me with those big eyes, those impossibly long eyelashes only bestowed upon the very young.

“Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese, Mommy?” They even added, “Please?”

And I caved. I’m not proud of it, but I did. And that’s how I ended up in a sea of blinging, flashing lights, rings, dings, noise, screams of happiness and in tantrum, being pushed, prodded, stamped, and slimed by gooey hands covered in cardboard pizza cheese.  Chuck. E. Cheese on a Sunday. Welcome to Hell.

Unless you’re six and three-and-a-half, respectively. Then you are in an overstimulating, germ-ridden paradise.  

And if you think that granting two kids such a generous, awe-inspiring gift of an afternoon would buy two parents a ride home in relative peace, a calming quiet over the house as they play quietly and cooperatively to compensate for such fabulosity, then you are either not a parent, or your children are not six and three-and-a-half, respectively.

And I knew it. I knew as soon as Jacob refused dinner, then lay his head down on the couch that it was already happening. That all of the Purell that we had obsessively and fastidiously applied to their four little hands was no match for the disease that is Chuck. E. Cheese.  Just a few short hours later, after baths, teeth-brushing, stories, and Motrin, I was positive that I put to bed a child sick with Strep throat.

But I was wrong.

I had put to bed one child with Strep and the other with a stomach bug.  The kind that makes one throw up all over one’s bed after several sheet and pillow-case changes in a night.

This morning was a show in desperation, as Jacob tried to convince me with a croaking voice that he was okay, just fine, to go to school.  He didn’t want to miss his Valentine’s Day party.  Anna has a brand new tutu with little red hearts all over it. I didn’t want her to miss school. Not today when I was sure to win the Mom-with-the-cutest-kid award, let alone miss out in those precious, delicious, two-and--half hours of alone time. I had booked a pedicure as a Valentine’s gift to myself. We all sat with our uneaten heart-shaped pancakes in front of us, disappointed.

Eventually, we moved over to the couch.  Jacob to my left, Anna to my right, each with a heavy head on my shoulder, Phineas and Ferb on the television in front of us.

And then Jacob, with a hand hot from fever, reached over to where Anna’s lay.  He clasped it and held it in his.

“I love you, Jacob,” she said, one hand free to curl her hair, her eyes never leaving the tv.

Best Valentine’s Day. 

Ever.