The Clothing Situation

Shortly after the birth of our fourth daughter, with a brain grown mushy from sleep deprivation and a newspaper column deadline looming, I posted a plea on Facebook asking people to send me their questions, particularly questions about life in Vermont. I received a variety of responses, which I answered in the subsequent column.

But one astute reader sent this comment: Four little girls so close in age made me think about hand-me-downs.

Clearly this person understands. Because a major, daily facet of life with “four little girls so close in age” is The Clothing Situation.

You may assume that I’m talking about laundry.

Although laundry has now become something I do daily without thinking, like brushing my teeth, I am not talking about laundry.

There are two components of The Clothing Situation: Input and Storage.

INPUT

Let’s say you have a baby. Chances are that you get a large, up-front influx of clothes for that baby. These clothes come from friends and family as baby shower and “Welcome, Baby!” gifts. Some may also be hand-me-downs. All of this is great; you need baby clothes, and the apparel flood usually slows after a month or two.

But the grandparents keep going. If you’re lucky, you have some loving and generous grandparents who continue buying clothes for your child on a regular basis. This is helpful, because 1) your child keeps growing and needs new clothes long after the baby clothes are in storage, and 2) clothes are expensive.

So far, so good. But complications arise when you have the next baby. And the next. And the next.

Because with the birth of each new baby, you will again receive an influx of clothes (though fewer each time, it’s true) from well-wishers who say, “Thought it’d be nice for baby to have some clothes that aren’t hand-me-downs!” The grandparents will continue to buy clothes for Child #1, but they’ll also buy clothes for Children #2, 3, and 4, despite the fact that these children are all receiving hand-me-downs from the ones who came before. You can try telling the grandparents that Child #1 — the oldest — is the only one who needs new clothes, but they’ll ignore you and buy new clothes for everyone, “because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”

Now let’s assume that all of your children turn out to be of the same gender. Good news! That means they can all wear the clothes you’ve been receiving since Child #1 was born. You see where this is leading? By the time Child #4 comes along, she has four babies’ worth of clothing in her wardrobe!

Around this time, people with slightly older children of the same gender as your children will start to take notice. Hey, Faith and Erick have four girls, they’ll think. That means they’ll be able to use our hand-me-downs FOUR TIMES! Because you offer such good bang-for-the-buck, bags full of fantastic, gently-used clothing will begin arriving on your doorstep. (**We love these friends, and we’re genuinely grateful for these clothes!)

You may be thinking: But surely, by the time clothes trickle down to Child #4, a good many of them can be discarded due to wear and tear. It’s true that some of the baby clothes — particularly those worn around the time solid foods are introduced — become irreparably stained and have to be tossed. But if your children are anything like mine, each child tends to rotate through only four or five favorite outfits, and those favorite outfits are different for each child. So despite the clothing needs of four children, there are plenty of clothes in every size that have never, ever been worn.

To put it succinctly: We have a lot of clothes. And that’s where the storage problem comes in.

STORAGE

When Fiona was born, we bought a small bureau with a changing table on top. Simple and efficient: we stored her clothes in the drawers below, and changed her diapers above.

Then Campbell was born, and it made sense to store her clothes in the bureau, since we’d be changing her diapers on top. What to do with Fiona’s clothes? There wasn’t space in their small, shared room for another bureau. Also, Fiona was beginning to select her own clothes, which I wanted to encourage without having to deal with bureau drawers left open or pinching little fingers. My solution: I went to Target and bought some cloth bins — one each for tops, bottoms, pajamas, socks, and underwear. The bins fit perfectly into the bottom shelf of a bookcase, where Fiona could easily pull them out to grab her clothes.

When we moved to Vermont, the clothing storage problem followed us. Because our girls all share a room, they got the largest room in our new house — the former master bedroom. Because our girls all share a room, however, there still wasn’t space for additional bureaus. No matter: this room included one of the biggest closets I’d ever seen. I decided to continue my strategy of baby’s clothes in the bureau/changing table, big girls’ clothes in cloth bins.

So now we have one child’s clothing in the bureau, and three children’s clothing in bins on the floor. Which is why their closet looks like this:

Mind you, those are just the clothes they’re wearing right now. What you don’t see are the storage bags filled with clothes that don’t fit anybody at this moment, or the garbage bags stuffed with hand-me-downs that are waiting for Fiona to grow into them.

There is no bigger point here; The Clothing Situation isn’t a metaphor for anything more meaningful. I freely admit that this is a very minor first-world problem. It’s just one of those things that I never anticipated when I signed up for parenthood; who knew that closet organizing would be such an important life skill?

I do have hope that things will improve. After all, we’re finished having children — and to make sure of that, I’ve already started donating all of our maternity and newborn clothes. As the girls get older, they’ll be able to stay in each clothing size a little longer. Before too long, all four of them will probably be able to share the same clothes, and then we’ll just have to deal with screaming clothing battles every morning….

In closing, a warning to any local friends who recently had/will have baby girls: I will be dropping garbage bags full of clothes on your doorsteps in the near future. Be prepared.

My Way

Last month, I went to the dentist for my semi-annual cleaning and check-up. I always feel a little smug about going to the dentist, because I have great teeth. I’m not bragging, that’s just the truth. Much to my disappointment back in middle school when everybody else was getting braces, I never needed any orthodontia. I also take good care of my teeth. Not as good as Erick, who is a total tooth nerd (he brings his toothbrush to work with him, and the first thing he does when he gets home at night is rush upstairs and use his water pick), but I brush at least twice a day, floss every night, and visit the dentist twice a year. In my entire life, I’ve only had two cavities, both of which were of the minor, “we’ll just fill it before it becomes a problem” variety. So visiting the dentist is usually an ego boost for me, because everybody makes a big deal about what great teeth I have.

This time, I had six cavities.

You read that right: SIX CAVITIES.

I don’t even know how it’s possible to get six cavities in the six months since I last saw the dentist. I didn’t slack off during those six months: I used a Sonicare electric toothbrush daily and continued to floss every night before bed. Yet somehow I ended up with SIX cavities. I’m now a cautionary tale for dental health in our house. “Brush your teeth,” Erick tells the girls, “You don’t want to end up like your mother with SIX CAVITIES!”

Six is so many cavities, I couldn’t even have them filled all at once. Instead, I had to make two separate appointments, each of which was longer than an entire episode of “Today with Kathie Lee and Hoda.” But as much as I’d usually consider laying in a dentist’s chair watching “Kathie Lee and Hoda” a mini-vacation, I couldn’t hear Kathie Lee OR Hoda because I had a drill vibrating in my head. That, and my dentist tends to hum the entire time he’s working. When I finally made out what he was humming, it turned out to be “My Way.” Which seems like it must have some significance.

When this ordeal was over, I asked my dentist (out of the side of my mouth that still had sensation) how I could have possibly ended up with six cavities. He dismissed all of my theories (pregnancy, non-fluoridated water, UFOs), and said it probably boiled down to this: I’ve been pregnant so much that they haven’t been able to take dental X-rays for over a year, which is how they ultimately found the cavities. Also: AGE.

Yes, age. Despite all of my efforts, my dental health is crumbling because I am getting old.

That’s not a bid for flattery, it’s a statement of fact: I am actually getting old. Last month, I turned 38.

[exhale]

I am 38. That’s very hard for me to admit. I never expected to be embarrassed about my age, but somewhere after 30 I started hiding how old I was. I don’t include my birth year on anything unless required, never volunteer which birthday I’m celebrating. I’m sharing the truth now because I believe in honesty, and because I need to get over this. I try to be confident in who I am as an example for my daughters, and that includes throwing off my vanity about age.

Now, 38 may not exactly qualify as OLD; not unless you’re ready to start calling Angelina Jolie old (Yup, me and Ang, hanging out at the shuffleboard court). But it is objectively middle aged. It’s very, very close to 40, which is a big number.

I’ve hidden my age because I don’t feel 38. I’m not quite sure what it means to “feel 38,” but I suppose I expected to be a little further along by now; to be “together,” to have a better grasp on who I am and where I’m going. And I’m afraid that if I share my age with others, they’ll be disappointed when they find out how confused and insecure I still am.

I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom as a 17-year-old, listening to Stevie Nicks sing “Landslide” on the radio, and feeling time start to speed up. Before too long, I thought, I’ll be where the person in this song is, and I’ll really KNOW what she’s singing about. That was half a lifetime ago; I just heard “Landslide” again, and I feel exactly NO different from that 17-year-old.

Time makes you bolder, children get older, I’m getting older, too.

I think this new year of my life is about accepting my real age, and accepting my real age involves embracing this truth: You can be good and take all the precautions in the world, but everything’s going to break down anyway.

That applies to my teeth, obviously. Also to my body as a whole; barring a major act of God, Abigail will be our last child. That’s not only because four children is a lot (although it is!), but also because this pregnancy was rough on me; my body has let me know that I’m done. And this year, suddenly friends my age are getting sick, really sick. They’re too young, and I’m praying that they all make it through. But it’s a fact that illness and infirmity are going to strike more of our friends — and us, too — in the years ahead.

This might seem depressing. I won’t deny that there are things that make me sad about being 38: knowing that I won’t have another baby, knowing that I’ll start losing family and friends, knowing that I’ll probably log more hours in the dentist’s chair. Then again, there are things that stink about any age; I wouldn’t want to return to the self-centered anxiety of my 20s, for instance.

So I’m choosing to embrace middle age as a new normal: to accept the limitations of aging, and to continue to grab the joys that are always present at every stage of life. That’s what I’ll be trying to do this year, and in the years to come.

I may even be humming “My Way” as I go.

Remembering to Breathe

I wish you could sit with me on the couch in our sunroom, looking out at the woods. That way I wouldn’t have to use words to describe what I see: the tapestry of leaves, most still the dark green of late summer, but with patches of early fall color bursting out — new colors appearing each morning. The golden afternoon sunlight that filters down between the trees, making the ground look like the ocean floor every time the wind blows. The shadows moving over the rocks.

I live with this view every day, but of course it’s only occasionally that I see it. Today was one of those moments, with two girls napping upstairs and two girls running errands in town with their father. I sat on the couch for twenty minutes of uninterrupted quiet. It was so quiet, and so still; the only action was what was happening between the leaves and the wind. Do you know how rare that is, in this house?

I sat there thinking about how, almost exactly one year ago, I learned that I was pregnant with our fourth child. And how I spent that year wishing to be where I was right now: When I’m through the first trimester….When the baby is born….When Erick gets back from Africa….When the oldest girls start school again…. It was a crazy, crazy year, a year I felt had to be endured, gotten through, in order to reach a place of — what? Peace, I suppose. A place where I could sit on the couch in quiet, and breathe deeply, and think to myself, Well, we got through that, and it’s all okay now. No more babies, no more puppies, half of the kids in school. From here on out, it’s just smooth sailing.

I probably don’t have to tell you that “smooth sailing” is not what I was feeling on the couch.

I’m gradually coming to accept what I already know to be true: that there IS no final peace in this life, no point at which you’ve gotten through everything there is to be gotten through, no smooth seas from here to the horizon. I don’t exactly understand why that is. Why are we allowed so few moments of unadulterated joy? It seems like even the happiest moments are marred by troubles, like a gorgeous cake with a fly stuck in the buttercream frosting. Maybe there’s a law of spiritual gravity: there always has to be some bitter mixed with the sweet, or we’d just float away with the joy of it all.

So, for all the challenges of the past year, and for all the joys that have been given to our family, I’m still firmly tethered to the ground. Down here there are postpartum hormones to contend with, and daily screaming sister fights under our roof, and friends and family in pain, and permission forms to sign, and contractors to call.

I sat there on the couch mourning the peace and joy that I’d assumed the universe owed me.

Then I remembered to breathe.

About a decade ago, I started taking yoga. And what really made an impact on me after my very first yoga class was the feeling that I’d never actually breathed before. I mean, of course I’d breathed, because I’d been alive. But yoga made me pay attention to the action of breathing: taking in as much air as I could and then releasing it fully, and continuing this mindful breathing while moving through various poses. The contrast between yogic breathing and my everyday, utilitarian breathing was dramatic. I realized that I’d lived most of my life holding my breath, stomach clenched with stress, taking in only the minimum amount of air needed to sustain life.

It’s impossible to feel stressed or rushed if you breathe the way they teach you in yoga class. If I could REALLY BREATHE like this for the rest of my life, everything would be okay, I thought.

Of course, I don’t breathe like that for most of my life, but every once in a while I remember. Sitting on the couch was one of those times.

So I sat, and I breathed, and I looked at the leaves and the sunlight, and for that one moment, in the middle of life’s drudgery and heartbreak, I felt grateful just to be alive: to be breathing, to be witnessing the dappled beauty of those woods. It wasn’t the ultimate peace I’d expected a year ago: In another few minutes the girls would wake from their naps and start bashing each other over the heads with My Little Ponies, the dog would bark hysterically at a passing car, and I still had to have six cavities filled the next week (SIX cavities! More on that later….).

I suppose we never get to stop enduring; life rarely awards us the long stretches of unadulterated joy that we think we deserve. But there are these moments when we remember to breathe — like spaces in the forest where the sun breaks through.

One Evening in Late September

Our family rarely goes out to eat these days. It’s not so much a matter of expense (although that’s certainly a factor with six mouths to feed); the expense of eating out is counterbalanced by the benefit of having a break from cooking. My economist husband would put it in terms of “opportunity cost:” a few extra dollars may be worth it if it saves you the time, energy and stress of preparing a meal.

No, we eat at home because taking four young children to a restaurant sounds something like this: “Okay, we’re leaving in TWO minutes! Get on your shoes, everyone. Get on your shoes! Where are your shoes?!? Into the car! C’mon, we’re leaving! Into the car!!! NO, you can’t have your sister’s car seat if she wants to sit in it! NO, you can’t have a snack, because we’re going to dinner! Sit DOWN!”

And that’s all before we’ve left the driveway. In terms of opportunity cost, by the time the evening is over I may as well have cooked a banquet.

But one Friday night in late September, our family went out for dinner at Sama’s Café in Middlebury. Click here to continue reading this latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Teenage Wasteland

"Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!" — “Happy Sweet 16! Here are your wheels!”

Our fourth daughter was born this summer. We now have four girls, aged 5, 4, 2, and 3 months.

Which means that in 13 years, we will have four teenaged girls.

I didn’t consider that scenario when we were planning our family, for the very simple reason that we didn’t plan our family. It all just happened, fast and furious, and when the dust settled this past July we suddenly had four daughters staring at us.

But I’m reminded of our teenaged future almost daily now, because whenever I venture into public with my daughters, someone will inevitably look at us and say, “Four daughters?!? Wow, that’s going to be interesting when they’re all teenagers!” And instead of “interesting,” they sometimes use words like “challenging,” “crazy,” or “horrible.”

Click here to continue reading at On the Willows.

The War on Fruit Chews

We’re almost a month into Fiona and Campbell’s school year, and the update is: it’s been the BEST back-to-school experience in our family’s history. This year, there was no Second Day trauma; everything went as smoothly as we’d hoped and prayed for (Please don’t hate me; I know I’m lucky and it’s probably just this year. But of all years, with a new baby at home, I’m grateful that the universe decided to kick an easy transition our way!)

I was never particularly concerned about Campbell. To start with, Campbell barely notices where she is as long as there are toy animals to play with. Also, she was returning to the same preschool she attended last year, for the same three days a week.

But Fiona started Kindergarten at our town’s public elementary school. That seemed like a BIG DEAL: new school, new teachers, new kids, new routine, and riding the school bus home. She loves all of it.

And we — Erick and I — love it, too. Whenever someone asks us how Kindergarten is going, we respond in unison, “We LOVE Kindergarten!!” I realize that they’re probably asking how Fiona likes Kindergarten, but whatever. As far as I’m concerned, Kindergarten is the best invention on the planet, and I don’t know why nobody told us earlier.

Get this: Kindergarten takes my child all day long, five days a week! And they return her to me filled with newly acquired knowledge! Just the other day, Fiona asked me to play school with her; she was the teacher, I was the student. And out of nowhere, she writes on the board: 17-0=17. My jaw dropped. Yes, ma’am, that’s MY daughter doing double-digit subtraction! Where’d she learn it? Not from me — from Kindergarten!!

The thing about Kindergarten is that I feel much more distant from the classroom than I did when Fiona was in preschool. I had to drop her off and pick her up from preschool, so I was in her classroom twice a day. I’d exchange greetings with her teacher and hear immediately if anything notable had happened.

Now that Fiona’s in Kindergarten, Erick drops her off on his way to work in the morning (it’s on his way, in the opposite direction from the preschool where I drop Campbell), and she takes the bus home in the afternoon. Fiona does a decent job of reporting on her day, and her teacher sends home a weekly newsletter, but that’s all I have to go on.

In the middle of second week of school, Fiona came home and announced, “I can’t have fruit chews in my lunch anymore.”

I’ve written before about fruit chews: small packets officially labeled “Fruit Flavored Snacks,” known to most non-Gong children as “gummies.” I’m not quite sure how fruit chews became a staple of my children’s diet, since I never ate them as a child and wouldn’t have purchased them on my own. I’m guessing they were introduced to our girls by friends, or even (gasp!) grandparents. I feel vaguely shameful about giving my children daily fruit chew snacks, since I’m aware that they’re probably bad for the teeth and have little nutritional value. But I’ve continued to buy them because my daughters have to eat something, and I figure that if you can’t eat a little junk when you’re a kid, when can you???

I was baffled by this anti-fruit chew edict that Fiona had proclaimed, but far be it from me to show disrespect to her teachers. Instead, I remained calm and mature, and asked, “Okay…why can’t you have fruit chews in your lunch?”

“Because,” she said, “the teachers want us to have nutritious food in our lunches, and fruit chews are just a little bit of fruit juice and mostly colored sugar.”

BAM!

Okay, so it’s quite possible that I’m not getting the full story from my five-year-old. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that she’d misunderstood something and given me information that was slightly off. I’m choosing to believe that’s the case here, because…

WHY, out of all the nutritionally-challenged lunchbox options, would the teachers choose to pick on fruit chews??? Certainly they’ve seen worse, right?

In a good faith effort to determine how bad fruit chews really are, I took a closer look at the box. Right there on the front, it said: “Made with Real Fruit Juice*”

That’s right: an asterisk. Uh-oh.

But that asterisk just leads to a statement that these snacks are made from fruit juice concentrate, and aren’t supposed to replace actual fruit in the diet. Well, duh!

So here’s the skinny: Fruit chews are mostly artificial colors and sugars, including corn starch. But they’re also only 80 calories, and they provide 20% of the recommended daily value of Vitamin C.

That’s not great, but it’s not terrible. In a lineup of snack foods, fruit chews strike me as fairly innocuous. Which begs the question: If you ban fruit chews, where do you draw the line? What about fruit chews’ flat cousin, the Fruit Roll-Up? Potato chips and Fritos? Cheez-Its and Goldfish? What about those “Pizza Fridays” in the school cafeteria? What about a cookie for dessert? (Fiona tells me that baked desserts are okay, but not chocolate bars — another fine line, it seems).

But let’s assume the teachers are okay with their morally ambiguous food restrictions: WHY wouldn’t they draft a letter to the parents informing us of what’s on the banned list? I never received any written instructions as to what I could or couldn’t pack in Fiona’s lunch. Which leaves me, now, in the anxiety-prone position of having to second-guess whether the lunches I pack meet some unknown nutritional standard.

Do I seem overly defensive here?!?!

I suppose I am. In truth, I’m embarrassed that Fiona’s teachers have seen my shame and refused to look away.

That, in a nutshell, is probably the biggest challenge for parents entering this new world of school: We’re sending out our most precious things — these little beings in whom we’ve invested so much of ourselves — into a larger world where they’ll be judged according to standards that are not always clear or fair. And we have no control over it.

If we don’t watch ourselves, we may end up getting defensive over silly things like fruit chews.

Jump in a Lake

One of my favorite things about living in Vermont is that my daughters have become lake swimmers.

I was raised with the belief that the world is divided into two types of people: lake people and ocean people. My mother, who grew up spending summers at her family’s camp on New Hampshire’s Merrymeeting Lake, is a lake person. My father, who grew up escaping industrial Lawrence, Massachusetts, by packing into a car with friends and heading for the New Hampshire beaches, is an ocean person. Since as a daughter it was my job to reject everything relating to my mother, I grew up proclaiming myself an ocean person.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

Little Women

Since the birth of our fourth daughter, several people have made the comparison between the four Gong Girls and the four March sisters — protagonists of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, Little Women. It happens that our daughters are familiar with Little Women (in the form of an abridged version by Usborne Books), and the comparison is not lost on them. “Which one is Georgia?” they’ll ask whenever I read it to them, “Which one am I?”

Louisa May Alcott divided the March sisters into easily identifiable types; the types you might expect based on the conventional wisdom of birth order. Meg, the oldest, is responsible and steady, with a weakness for fashion. Second-born Jo is the tomboy, a temperamental writer. Beth is sweet, sickly, self-sacrificing, and prefers quietly playing her piano. The youngest, Amy, is a spoiled, petulant, artistic type.

In families with multiple children, each sibling tends to carve out a distinct role. But when we read Little Women and they ask, “Which one am I?” the most honest response would be: “Not the one you think!”

Our girls don’t conform to the sisterly types created by Louisa May Alcott. Sure, the Gong girls are still in the process of becoming, and Abigail’s still an unknown quantity, but I’m fairly confident that our family has no sweet, quiet, sickly Beth. Most days it feels like we have four Jo-Amy hybrids: independent, temperamental, outspoken bundles of energy.

The thing is: None of my girls is turning out to be whom I thought she’d be.

Like most parents, I brought certain expectations to the table based on my own upbringing, the birth order archetypes I’d learned in college psychology classes, and sibling characters like those in Little Women. But I’m finding that one of the most fun and rewarding parts of parenting is setting those expectations aside and watching as my children are gradually revealed to me. I know that some parents never let go of their expectations and force their children into molds of their own making. To me, parenting feels more like archaeology: My children came to me already themselves, like fossils embedded in rock, and it’s my delight to gently chip and brush away the extraneous dirt to uncover who they really are. (And hopefully instill some manners along the way).

Take my first- and second-borns, for instance. Fiona: a sweet people-pleaser with a strong dramatic streak and a love of all things pink and princess-y; I’d pegged her for the shy, girly girl who’d gravitate towards dance and theater. And Campbell, who’s always been a little bit of a rebel, who loves yellow and lions and seemed tougher than her older sister; I assumed she’d be the outgoing, sporty one.

It looks like, in both of these cases, my first assumptions were totally wrong. Fiona is definitely the classic firstborn responsible people-pleaser, but she’s not particularly shy. And she’s not interested in dance or theater; her love is sports, something I never saw coming. She’s already a solid swimmer, she’s proud of her fast running and will race anything that moves, and she’s looking forward to playing soccer next year (although apparently, despite never having picked up a racket, she’s “mostly interested in tennis.”)

Campbell has little interest in sports. She’s certainly independent and “tough,” in the sense that she doesn’t care what others think of her. But she’s also the most introverted of all my daughters. She loves animals and nature: She’s happiest playing ponies by herself, or picking a bouquet of flowers. and her career plans at the moment vary between veterinarian, florist, artist, and mountaineer.

And then there’s Georgia. It’s hilarious that Georgia is the one in the “sweet third daughter” position, because she bears absolutely zero resemblance to Louisa May Alcott’s Beth. Georgia is a fireball: She’s outgoing, never stops talking, fiercely independent, afraid of nothing, and she loves to eat. She’s only two, so it’s still hard to separate the essential Georgia from the terrible two-ness, but she seems inclined to grab life by the neck and throttle it. (Or maybe the frequency with which she bites her sisters is really an indication that she wants to take a big bite out of life).

The poet Sylvia Plath wrote in “Morning Song:” “I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand.” I used to think Plath had a detached view of motherhood because she was depressed, but now I understand that line differently. I don’t know where these kids came from. Sure, there are certain aspects of their personalities that I recognize as coming from me or Erick, but there are other, HUGE parts of who they are that I can’t even relate to. One of Fiona’s favorite parts of kindergarten is P.E., which was exactly what I dreaded for my entire school career. Where did THAT come from???

Of course, my girls are still very young, and all of the things I’ve just written about them are subject to change in the coming years. The essential point remains, and here’s an illustration: Now that Campbell and Fiona are attending separate schools, Campbell is emerging from her big sister’s shadow and into her own. This mostly means horrible fights, but the other day when Fiona was getting a little too bossy, Campbell looked at her and said: “I am NOT you! I am A DIFFERENT PERSON!”

And that’s just the thing about parenting: Our children are, and always have been, different people. That’s either scary or exciting. At the moment, I’m choosing to focus on the exciting.

Secrets and Truths

Shortly after this picture was taken, I imposed a “bottoms must be worn at all times” rule in our house. (Because really, you never know when the Queen might drop by).

When I feel guilty as a mother, it usually stems from the vast distance between the parent I thought I’d be, the parent I’d LIKE to be, the parent I present myself as in public and on Facebook — and the reality. I know I’m not alone here, but because I try to keep certain parts of my parenting under wraps, it sometimes feels like I’m alone. In an effort to correct this, here are some of my guilty parenting secrets:

-We have a drawer full of Barbies in our living room. We also have Barbie books, and the girls check out Barbie movies from the library on a weekly basis. I don’t love this, but I’ve allowed it.

-Speaking of the library: I live in fear that someday our local library will be able to trace all of the books that are repaired with packing tape back to our family, and we’ll have our library cards revoked for life.

-While I make feeble attempts to provide a variety of healthy food options, my daughters essentially live on a diet of Cheez-Its and what I optimistically refer to as “fruit chews.” Every non-Gong child I know calls “fruit chews” “gummies,” which is a more accurate term, since these processed snacks contain absolutely no natural fruit products.

-My daughters drink a lot of water, and each one has a personal water bottle — a stainless steel bottle with a plastic flip-top and rubber straw. I tote these bottles around in our diaper bag, and if you were to take one apart you would probably be appalled at the musty odor and visible mold on the rubber straw. I blame Thermos for creating a water bottle that’s a pain in the neck to clean, but I also credit Thermos with my daughters’ hardy immune systems.

-I have an iPod, but it’s no longer really mine; it now contains more Tinkerbell, Sesame Street, and My Little Pony games than my own apps. That’s because the only way I’ve been able to get my oldest daughter to stay out of my hair while her younger sisters nap is to hand her the iPod. She probably spends way too much time on it, and I’ve had to limit her to downloading one new game per week. But without that iPod, this blog wouldn’t exist.

-We don’t own a T.V., but the portable DVD player we received last Christmas has saved my sanity many times — and not just during long road trips. In an attempt to be a good mother, I limit the girls to 30 minutes of daily “screen time,” watching DVDs they choose at the library. This means that, especially during the summer months, they almost always watch 30 minutes of videos per day. How did anyone cook dinner before videos existed?

-I usually forget to give Abigail her daily vitamin D drops. She rarely gets daily “tummy time.” Abigail spends most of her time in her carseat or in the Moby wrap.

-On the first day of school, when every other parent is putting up Facebook posts about how they cried while dropping off their kids, I am gripped by the fear that I don’t love my kids enough. I have never once, not EVER, even become mildly choked up when dropping my kids off on the first day of school. Instead, I fly out the door with arms spread wide yelling, “FREEEEDOM!!!!” (Then I buckle the remaining 2 kids into their carseats and go grocery shopping).

-While we’re on the subject of school attendance: On those rare days (thank you, Thermos!) when a daughter is sick and can’t attend school, I don’t feel sympathy so much as I feel wrathful and vengeance-seeking.

Well, it felt good to get THAT off my chest. Who’s with me?

A Cure for August Annoyance

I once heard that Facebook, the social media site originally founded as a way for college students to connect, has found its target audience in a new demographic: 30-something stay-at-home moms. That certainly rings true to me; on those days when we don’t leave the house and my only adult conversation happens after my husband returns from work, it can feel like a refreshing little escape to log on to Facebook and see that there’s a whole other world out there: a world of friends, my age, who are eating ribs RIGHT NOW!

I’ve been logging on to Facebook more often than usual this summer. The major reason for this is that we have a new baby, which increases the number of days when we don’t leave the house. I’m spending about 12 hours a day feeding the baby. Half of the time I’ll feed the baby with one hand while with the other I cook dinner. change another child’s diaper, or repair the transmission on our minivan. But that still leaves almost 6 hours when I’m feeding the baby in peace; the perfect time to check Facebook.

I’ve particularly needed the escape of Facebook during August. Why? Well, as of the moment this post publishes, there is one day until school starts. Want to know how many hours? 19! Anybody else counting down to the first day of school? Can I get an “Amen!”?

Yes, in August we entered the “Countdown to School” portion of our summer: that time when summer starts to lose its glow, when we’ve all spent too much time together, when the girls are bickering constantly with each other and driving me nuts.

The first week of August was the worst, because my two oldest girls spent every morning at an outdoor nature camp. They loved this camp, and then they’d come home filthy and exhausted and be terrible people until bedtime. One daughter chose this same week to become obsessive-compulsive about her clothes; she’d change outfits 20 times a day until we finally responded by moving all of her clothes to the basement. There was eye-rolling and door slamming and angst; nobody warned me that adolescence starts at kindergarten.

I was grouchy and annoyed with my kids. I sought solace in Facebook.

The thing is, that wasn’t a very happy time on Facebook, either. For a couple of weeks, I couldn’t log on to Facebook without encountering some tragedy, and all of these incidents involved parents or their children. I won’t go into detail here, because these are not my tragedies to share — they involved my friends’ friends or family: toddlers dying, newborns dying, parents dying in childbirth or just prior to the birth of their children. The kind of things we like to tune out, to pretend don’t happen anymore in this time and place. The kind of things that remind us of how we’re all walking around with pianos dangling over our heads, and it’s just a matter of time until the rope snaps. That could have been MY child. That could have been ME.

One afternoon, I logged on to Facebook during naptime as an alternative to clawing my eyebrows out after a particularly frustrating encounter with a daughter. I found myself choking back tears while reading the account of a baby who’d died days after birth. Then it hit me:

It is a LUXURY — a BLESSING — to be annoyed by my kids.

Annoyance means that they’re here, and I’m here, and we’ve had the gift of enough time together to really get under each others’ skin.

I’m still counting down the days, hours, and seconds until school starts. I don’t expect that I’ll stop feeling annoyed with my kids anytime soon. But when I do, I will remind myself that annoyance is a by-product of time, and time is a gift that not everybody gets.