Two years ago, I went through a phase that felt suspiciously like a mid-life crisis. I could no longer find joy in my husband, our three-year old son, or my work. I felt like the entire world was at war, and that I was powerless to do anything about it. Despair over not having published the book I’d been writing for six years pressed down on me all the time. I couldn’t get pregnant, either—we had been trying for fifteen months—and this failure took me into the darkest depths of self-loathing. On the surface, my life was busy and full. But I felt this immense pressure, as if in my efforts to strive for something called “balance,” I was just barely managing to stay upright.
“How was your sister’s baby shower?” I asked my friend Steph. She was gathering muddy clothes off the floor and wiping dried yogurt from the table while our 4-year-old sons hammered a plank of wood to bits in the front yard.
“Meh. All Jen wanted was one last hurrah as a childless adult. Instead, everyone talked about their kids and how they just ‘can’t imagine’ their lives without them.”
I’ll never forget when a friend told me a story about a mom she knew. “She totally yelled at her kid,” my friend said. “In public!”
I try to practice equal-opportunity parenting: be kind to my kid in private, be kind to him in public. I try not to do things out in the world that I wouldn’t do at home because it makes me feel icky. Kids, of course, don’t live by the same rule. Scratch their butts in private, scratch their butts in public; what’s the difference?
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 