There is a slim gap in the fence at the corner, by my corn, where the dog snarls and menaces and thrusts his snout, sharp teeth protruding at the novice gardener mooning over the silky corn tassels. We spray him with water if we’re watering, and one day I sprayed him with spider spray. That was after he was so vociferous in his attack that he got a splinter in his jaw from the wood fence, which bled red dog blood all over, and stopped him not at all from his mission of denying us peaceful enjoyment of our domain, making us feel as if we are the encroachers, the invaders, the unwelcome.

So I called Animal Control last week, after marching next door for the third time in two months to talk to our neighbors, who never answer the door when I march over to complain. Maybe they are not home, I told the dispatcher, but I was pretty sure they were, since I hear them tapping on the window (which is not, by the way, an effective cease-and-desist command). I explained, repeatedly, that I didn’t want to make trouble for anyone, didn’t want to see them fined or anything, I just want to be able to gloat over my sweet basil in peace.

She asked if I was willing to sign a complaint, and after a swift soul-searching, I said yes. Yes, I am willing to sign my name to a piece of paper that may make the people I plan to live next to for a very long time angry with me. Because I have done enough to feel that a formal declaration is my only recourse. She said in that case she’d send out an officer right away.

As soon as I hung up I felt sick.

We are not perfect neighbors, after all. My girls squeal and laugh and cry and whine in the backyard. They jump on the trampoline and run through the squiggly sprinkler and fight over the swings. Sometimes their mother shouts threats from the kitchen window to them in a not-very-pleasant voice. We didn’t take over  neighbor gifts last Christmas.

But I hate that dog.

One day as I tried to pound in a stake to block the gap in the fence, it scared me into stepping back carelessly, onto one of my tender corn plants in the last row, the corn I planted months after my gorgeous, strong, might plants, baby corn plants that, instead of a serenade of growth-enhancing classical music piped in from a loving master gardener get the mean, angry, martial growl of the belligerent canine.

That was the day I called.

But as the sheriff stepped out of his conspicuously-macho county cheriff blazer and walked to my door in his brown uniform with large gun strapped to his hip, I blubbered. He stepped back cautiously as my voice quavered: I just want them to control their dog and make him stop attacking us, I said. I don’t want to make trouble. He was kind. He didn’t bring out a scary document for me to sign. He said he’d just go over there and have a talk with them, leave a note if they weren’t there, everything was going to be okay, please don’t start crying, Ma’am.

He was over there for a long time, and he came back the next day for awhile. The dog has been quieter this week. He still barks, but his owners seem to be more responsive, more aware. I don’t know if I’ll have to call again or if things will continue to get better.

Today as Susan and I walked to the gas station for a treat and a Mountain Dew, I told her about George Washington on her dollar bill. And I realized that the United States of America wasn’t exactly founded by people who were afraid to make a stink.

Those men and women, faced with a dilemma much more serious than mine, signed a document (okay, only the men signed, because the world ain’t perfect, even in America) that put everything they had and were on the line. I wonder if they felt slightly queasy just after the ink dried. Did they agonize over the outcome? Did they mourn for the dead who would surely follow such a treasonous declaration? I feel certain they did. And I appreciate them even more.

Jane

A few weeks ago a family from church adopted their second daughter from China. They went ahead with this adoption even after finding out they were miraculously pregnant with a son. Their daughter is nine, and until her new father arrived in the country, she had no idea she was being adopted, she spoke no English, and she had lived her entire life in an orphanage.

We learned twenty words of Mandarin, with the help of a local high school teacher, so that we could sing to her in her own language and let her know how welcome she is here. Here in her new home, here in America, here at church with us. We’ve wondered how she will fit in, and how this warm, loving family will stretch and swell to fit everyone who belongs in it now. We’ve prayed and pronounced words utterly foreign to us.

Every time we passed out the sheet music with the transliterated lyrics, I cried. Some Sundays I kept it to a discreet tear or two. Today, when we preached all our practicing, when she stood at the front of the room as fifty pretty-homogeneous Americans, all secure and well-loved, stable and confident kids and their teachers sang “Nihao, nihao” I saw her parents who had come in to check that she was doing okay, and her visiting grandmother who was holding her new little brother, I left the room.

I looked in through the glass, at the slender, shiny-haired girl, in her new pink dress, next to the other visitors in the special visitor spot, and I saw her eyes light up, her smile break then widen. It didn’t really sound much like the Chinese you hear on NPR or in movies. But some of the words must’ve been recognizable, and the simple sincerity of the children singing was as evident as their enjoyment of the loud echo parts and the untranslated ending hurrah.

I sobbed. Part of it is just me, crying at the very idea of Chick-fil-A’s sublime nugget-breading spices, and part of it is — What if every child in the world was this wanted, this welcome?

But. At the risk of sounding like a sheep, I would like to publicly declare that I love Stephanie Nielson. She doesn’t need my love in any way or know of it, but I love the blogging that she is doing, that she has been doing since she started blogging again after the accident. I read her and suddenly, what anybody says about me doesn’t matter. (Actually that’s a line from Some Kind of Wonderful, but you know what I mean.) I read her, and suddenly my kids smell better, my husband looks gleam-y eyed, and my doughy thighs that nevertheless function pretty darn well, even them I am quite grateful for.

I’ve been really emotional for the past couple months, and unfortunately it’s not because I’m pregnant, and I didn’t even know how badly I wanted to be pregnant again until the test this morning was negative. But my odd hormonal fluxes aside, read this post on Love and this Elephants and on Beauty and this one called A Mother, and then tell me you didn’t cry. A lot. In a good, cleansing-cathartic-reborn-renewed sort of way.

Stephanie is having a birthday this Saturday, and The Sweet Tooth Fairy down Provo-way is donating all proceeds from the sale of their vaNIElla cupcakes to the burn fund. I’m so cold and dead at heart that usually even fundraisers for good causes bring on a big Humbug, but I am going to be at the cupcake store buying cupcakes on Saturday. Tom and I have had these cupcakes, and though Tom says the frosting is almost too sweet (it isn’t), he really likes the cake part, which has an intriguing hint of nutmeg or cardamom (which I know aren’t that similar, it’s probably just nutmeg, but I have dreams that it could be cardamom).

If you don’t live in driving distance of the Provo, you can order cupcakes online, AND, you can enter to win a dozen cupcakes over at my friend Vanessa’s I Never Grew Up blog.

Amen.

As I walk towards the dirtiest red minivan in a lot full of Honda Odysseys, I breathe deeply of the summer air, protected from the harsh sunlit glare by my rose-colored prescription lenses, get in the toasty car, blast some Franz Ferdinand, and ride off past the orange construction cones dotting Highway 73, towards the ocean, and freedom.

Not that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.

(I loathe montages, those cop-out mishmashes set to thematic music that are supposed to take the place of pivotal transition action. The worst montage of all time, is, of course, the speech montage in that movie sort of inspired by J.D. Salinger — the one with the cute black boy and Sean Connery as the reclusive writer? In the climactic scene where Sean Connery (a famous, eccentric, brilliant writer) leaves his apartment for the first time in seventeen years to read a speech at the cute black boy’s school and as soon as he steps to the lectern to give his speech, a godless montage of camera shots and “inspirational” music takes the place of, you know, words.

It’s a travesty, basically.)

While The Proposal doesn’t commit that most egregious of all cinematic sins, it’s quite a letdown in other ways. From the tired orphan issues and daddy issues (Sandra Bullock’s and Ryan Renold’s characters, respectively) to the apology-to-the-family scene near the end that I think is actually identical to the  speech in While You Were Sleeping, it’s all-cliche, all-the-time, and not in a cheeky sort of way.

I’m really not much of a feminist (I mean, I stay at home, and only recently started mowing the lawn again), but the portrayal of Margaret as a scary boss strikes me as sexism of the worst sort. When she fires an underling who is demonstrably lazy and ineffectual, she says he has two months to find another job and that he can tell everyone he quit. And she never makes personal remarks or raises her voice. Sounds pretty fair to me, but what do I know? I haven’t worked in an office in seven years. Maybe male executives fire goof-offs by giving them raises and holding their hands in a purely platonic manner.

But the biggest strike against The Proposal is that it failed to convince me that Margaret and Andrew have any warmer feelings for each other than I do for tapioca pudding. I like tapioca, I’ll eat it, especially when my dad flexes his cooking muscles once every six months and whips up a batch in the microwave, but I’m not going to weep if we’re kept apart by a tragic blood feud, okay?

Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock are cute of course, and witty enough. They even have a kind of reverse-Sabrina take-a-break scene complete with Frenchy-artist scarf for Margaret and a consistent give-and-take comraderie, but they don’t fall in love.

My cousin was (understandably) disturbed by the nudey scene, but the truth is that I would gladly sit through raw footage of octopus-unicorn sex if at the end of the day I’m convinced that Miss Tentacles and Mr. Sparkly are going to happily populate the world with octocorns and enjoy seventy years of maritime bliss.

This taught me a lot about the good man who is my father, and that saying you’re sorry is important and best of all: that proving you truly are sorry by becoming something different, — that that is not only important, it is possible.

All that to say that I believe in saying “I’m sorry.” The words are important, because words are important. Whether it’s saying seven positive things to counteract one criticism or being grown-up enough to say I’m sorry when I am, I want the people who eat in my kitchen and model their behavior after mine to know that their feelings, and the words they hear — the words that circle in their heads like my parents’ voices circle in mine — that they matter to me.

I want them to know I value them enough to say “I’m sorry,” even though I’m the mom and they’re the kids, and even if they’re probably still young enough to not remember if I yell irrationally about the crumbs in the car.

There are lots of opportunities to practice “I’m sorry” online. Lots.

Last week I was a little bit appalled by a self-flagellating “I’m sorry” essay on the Motherlode blog. A blogger on momlogic had written about her three-year old son asking (upon being introduced to her coworker): “Mommy, why is her face brown?” Readers attacked her for not answering the question herself. Instead, she had turned to her colleague to see how she would like that kind of question addressed.

Maybe this particular firestorm was more an indication of how fraught race relations are rather than how we teach our kids and respond to their questions. Because allowing kids to interact with other adults without parental intervention is actually a good thing, an invaluable part of learning to converse. If a parent always jumps in to interpret, kids miss out.

So the first question is whether racial inquiries are in a category apart. Is it unconscionable to not immediately set little kids straight on the appropriate modes of racial discourse? How do you answer a question like that? Do you talk about skin pigmentation and the sun? DNA, genetics, the slave trade, family group migrations from continent to continent? Do you say that God created several different shades of skin because a rainbow wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting or beautiful if there was only one color instead of seven? Do you say skin color doesn’t matter, what’s inside matters?

(Perhaps a parent should always answer this type of question, because she knows her child and which type of answer (scientific, moral, metaphoric) would best satisfy her child.)

This mother, put on the spot by a fearless, unprejudiced three-year old, didn’t have a pat answer ready. Instead she turned to her colleague, who responded playfully and memorably.

So far, so good, right? Of course then the mother (made the mistake of blogging about it and) got attacked for doing it (parenting) all wrong.

Which is not surprising. The internet, especially strangers on big sites, can be cruel. I have seen too many good people torn apart by unthinking, uncaring strangers for the crime of being reflective and uncertain and honest to think that writers should accept such attacks as the whisperings of their own conscience.

But that was exactly what this mother did. There was too much sorry in her response to her critics. Too much mea culpa and cringing and “feeling ashamed at the cowardly way I handled my own son wanting his mommy to help him work through something in his head.” She said she “dropped the ball entirely” and worries that it wasn’t her son who hurt her colleague’s feelings, it was her. Of course by all accounts the colleague, who humorously and child-friend-ily compared her skin’s color to peanut butter, didn’t seem all that hurt. But the mother continued on about how she “blew her chance” and missed a teaching moment — a moment when it was she who needed to be taught. She concluded that she is flawed.

I don’t want to criticize this woman because she already seems too self-recriminatory (and also it sounds like she is a great, conscientious mother), but it made me think of other instances in which I have heard people — especially women — apologizing too profoundly for things that either a) aren’t that big a deal or b) aren’t really sins or crimes or character flaws, but rather mistakes or things that happen in the course of everyday life.

I see my sister over-functioning in her relationships, eager to overlook infelicities and mold herself into someone agreeable (loveable). I hear friends apologizing profusely for missing a husband’s phone call or a mother at the park apologizing to her child for the kid’s falling down when the mother wasn’t being hyper-vigilant every second of the day.

Women apologize for being sad about secondary infertility when they know that some women have borne no children or for not being ecstatic about a surprise pregnancy because some would be overjoyed. I apologize for  finding being a stay-at-home mom occasionally frustrating because I know some women would love to stay home.

My oldest daughter has learned to apologize when she spills the milk, and last night she tried to gulp back her tears when she banged her arm badly on the wooden leg of a chair, after a particularly spectacular gymnastic feat. I was reading a book, and she is aware and old enough to know how much I dislike interruptions. But her arm was pretty bruised up and I was happy to get her an ice pack and coo soothingly over her pain.

I felt bad that she thought she had to restrain her expression of hurt because it might inconvenience me, that she feared my impatience. I am here to comfort her and make things right in her world (even if my book was getting good right then). She doesn’t have to say “I’m sorry” for needing me; she doesn’t have to apologize in order to get my attention and affection.

And neither does my dad.

So last week Marian wrote me, wishing me a happy anniversary (11 years!) and telling me about her surgery tomorrow. She wrote that cataracts occur with the aging process and that UV/sun damage also plays a part, and that she has “had plenty of bright sunshine over the years.”

I don’t really have anything to add to that. I can’t say it any better, except to say that, as I turn thirty-two, I have had much bright sunshine over the years, and my wish is that by the time I have five beautiful grandchildren of my own, I, too will say that I have had plenty of bright sunshine over the years, even if I am having cataract surgery because of it.

(And good luck, Nana! We’ll be praying for you!)

I hope this explains (metaphorically) why I feel so strongly about appropriating and using the word Good rather than adopting Bad in reaction to the “Good Mother” stereotype.

Ugly Girl

What about the media stereotype of Beauty? If my daughter comes home from school crying because she has been called ugly, do I tell her that we should change the meaning of the word “Ugly” to “Beautiful” and that she should call herself an Ugly Girl with pride?

Or do I teach her that the media stereotype of Beauty is not only wrong, it is stupid, unhealthy, damaging, anti-feminist, and a construct of our particular time and place and not an eternal truth?

(and that she IS Beautiful, by the way.)

Do I call her my Ugly Girl or my Beautiful Girl?

Which word do I want ringing in her head?

I have a confession to make: I am a good mother. I know this comes as a surprise to many of you, because I have angsted over being a bad mother and hated being a mother and wished I could do anything else please by everything holy make the whining stop for five seconds so I can think.

But the truth is: I am a good mother.

Here are the facts:

I gave up caffeine for the first three months of my first pregnancy. Sally weighed over nine pounds, so I vowed to drink gallons of the stuff next time.

I breastfed, even when it was painful at first, and even when I sometimes felt like a human pacifier, back before it was trendy to complain about feeling like a human pacifier.

I daydream about going to law school or getting a masters in “motherhood archetypes in modern literature” or putting my kids in daycare so I can sit at Panera with my laptop all day, but I don’t. Not yet.

The TV hasn’t been on at all since summer began eight days ago. (For them. It’s been on after 9 pm. Oh, yes.)

Spot, at 2 1/2, can swim like an embryonic minnow and say words like “Rameumptom.”

Susan, at 4 1/2, can write her name, left-handed, upside-down, like the boy on Fringe who’d been sealed underground for years.

Sally, at 8, can choose a “Native-American” Barbie doll and answer the following social-awareness question correctly: “Which is more important — the color of someone’s skin or what kind of person they are inside?”

But that is only the good stuff, right? Of course I only tell you the good stuff, as a good mother, right?

Tell me — does anyone, anywhere, think that a Good Mother has only good stuff to tell?

Or that a good mother cannot tell anything at all, because she is too busy being repressed and dictated and obscured by niqab? In our western culture, with our free speech protections, are the “good” people those who are silent and dumb and unheard-from, or are the good people those who give voice to the obscure, the unpopular, the uncool? “Cool” probably isn’t even the right word, I am so far, far from embodying that trait.

I am a good mother, and I have bad to share: Like the time I whacked Sally on the head with a hairbrush because she wouldn’t hold still for a ponytail, and the time I yelled at Susan that I didn’t give a flying f&*^ if she didn’t want to wear her seatbelt because wear her seatbelt is what she had to do. And the time I ignored baby Spot crying in her crib because I just had to finish one more page of my trashy romance novel if you know what I mean.

Still, I am a Good Mother. I am not and never will be cool, sophisticated, or cynical enough to charmingly regale you with how proud I am to be a Bad Mother. I don’t let other people tell me what I have to do to be a good mother, either. Nor can I tell you whether you are a good mother or not (though chances are, if you try to be, and if you don’t do crack while you’re pregnant, you probably are).

The way I see it, being a good mother takes two things: 1) the desire to be a good mother: the earnest, chumpish, embarrassingly dorky, peasanty desire to be a good mother. And 2) the will to do those things that she determines to be important for the well-being of her children. Even those that require sacrifice, change of habit, or a lot of w-o-r-k.

For example, she can’t say “Of course nutrition is important, but I have to have a life too, don’t I? So I let my kids eat dingdongs for dinner yo-ho-ho, aren’t I fabulously way-cool?” Maybe nutrition isn’t important to her. Fine. THAT doesn’t make her a bad mother. Maybe she has great genes for winnowing the beta carotene from a cheese puff that she passed on to her kids. Fine (and can I get some of that?).

No, what makes someone a bad mother is knowing or believing that something isn’t good for her kids, and yet revelling in them doing it, whatever it is. And revelling in her own bad behavior (that she herself deems bad), whatever that is.

Being a good mother means wanting and trying to be a good mother. Why wouldn’t you want to be good at what you do or who you are? Do we wish to be friends with Bad People? Does anyone want their cancer treated by a woman proud of being a Bad Doctor? Would we like our country led by a Bad President? The difference here, of course, is that the Good Mother’s consituents do not include any other mothers or any other mother’s children. (My constituents are myself, my husband sometimes, and my children infrequently. Not my mother or mother-in-law or the internet.)

And here is the real problem: If a mother cannot shrug off the opinions of those who are not her constituents, this is not the fault of the term Good Mother, this is a weakness of personality that looks to others for approval. And, not seeing that needy reassurance forthcoming, rocks itself in a corner shouting intermittently, “Oh yeah, maybe I am a Bad Mother, but I LIKE it. So there.”

This doesn’t mean a good mother never questions herself, never worries or hopes to improve, of course she does, that is the whole point. A good mother seeks better ways to do things, just as a good doctor learns new surgical technique thingies. And maybe somedays she feels like a bad mother, because let’s face it, on some days the good mother is a real bad mother. It happens.

Thinking yourself a bad mother for falling short of your own goals is not the same as thinking yourself a bad mother because other people said so. One is a valid gauge of one’s progress, the other is just stupid.

And I know I said I wasn’t cool, but I do get that this whole embracing of the Bad Mother term is a linguistic reclaiming of the something-something-revolutionary-blah-blah-the-man-and-the-media-is-holding-us-down-and-making-us-feel-bad-about-ourselves-something-something.

But the truth is that bad means bad and good means good. They always have, and they probably always will. Instead of reclaiming “bad” I say we reclaim “good,” from both the sanctimonious and the self-satisfiedly-smug not-good. I do believe that would make us counter-revolutionaries, which, beat THAT for being better than bad.

I’ll go first:

Hi, my name is Jane (okay, it’s Shannon) and I am a good mother.

I don’t see David often anymore, in fact the last time I remember was when he stayed with us a few nights in Harlem on the way to one of his exotic adventures, before Sally was born. We took him to our favorite Indian restaurant and nodded when he explained the harm reduction needle exchange he was supporting.

David emigrated to New Zealand a few years ago and is homesteading with his new wife. I think he’s also going to law school or something. Maybe some sort of international program.

This summer, though, he thought of me because he  and Andrea are back in New York City, doing summer internships at the United Nations.

My summer is shaping up a bit different. I’ve got swimming lessons for my three water-babies and a first-ever garden that is teaching me how God must feel about his precious children. I’ve got stories to read and weary heads to cradle on my shoulder after hours in the sun and otter-pop-fueled hyper pony games.

I love summer. Summer is like New Years, only better. How serious can you get about making resolutions when it’s bleak and frozen outside? Summer is three short months of light and air and possibility, freedom from outside schedules and time to grow things, make things, become things.

I’ve got a bunch of goals for myself, and I’ve made a schedule for the kids and me. Schedules and goals, with daily three-hour siestas and plans for excursions and lazy days and accomplish-a-lot days actually feels freeing to me. It might sound appealing to plan to do nothing, but even there half the enjoyment is in the planning of the nothing.

We’re waking up earlier now than we did during the school year. Using an alarm clock, even. Because I’ve got a summer internship of my own. My own goals are important, and I’m not forgetting them in my focus on the kids, but I am determined to teach my kids two things this summer, or, get them in the habit of doing two things.

If they learn these two things this summer, things that probably should’ve already become part of them, but they’re young yet, and there’s still time — these things will go a long way to making next year, and all the rest of their years much better.

First, we’re reading scriptures every morning. The alarm clock starts ringing at 7:30, and by 8 or 8:30ish, we’re piled in my bed, reading from three different books, the real one, the one-for-eight-year-olds and the board book for toddlers. Yesterday we read about contention, and how it’s not a good thing. I wish I could tell you that our insightful discussion led to a bickering-free day, but the truth is the kids seemed to think that learning about contention was an excuse to practice it. We even prayed to not have contention in our home. Maybe next time we should pray that part silently.

Second, we’re learning how to work, and to not whine “Why do I have to do everything?” when Mom asks you to pick up your books from the living room floor. Susan and Spot are young enough that they take direction pretty well. Sally is old enough to know how to do some chores well without constant supervision, but unfortunately that means she is also old enough to argue about the why. We’re making some serious progress on this one, already. It’s almost miraculous. I’ve been slow at pushing this, because I was sure that it was just faster and easier to do things myself than to encourage and praise and fix and follow-up, and maybe it is, but if the goal is to teach them the value of work, and taking care of themselves, and someday even doing things for others without being asked or rewarded, then it’s worth a couple extra minutes (or hours) now.

Dick had a sick day on Wednesday, and he commented at the end of the day that our routine is impressive. Before when Dick was home, I’d feel resentful of his ‘work’ on the computer and things usually deteriorated from there. This week I was quite gratified that he thought we were getting a lot done, because it often feels like nothing gets actually finished. I cross “mow lawn” and “repair screen door” off my list and add “organize pantry” “shampoo carpets” and “read The Road and Julie and Julia and review The Bell Jar” to the whiteboard.

But maybe enough is getting done. My tomato plants are lush, my corn is tall and leafy. The girls set the table outside for dinner on the patio and put away their clean laundry. We read about Enos praying for himself, his family and country, and his enemies. I feel exhausted, and happy. It’s hot in the middle of the day, and almost-cold an hour after sunset, just as it should be. Throw in a short afternoon thunderstorm, and you have paradise.

And as for my summer internship? I’ll know it was an absolute success when my daughters are hardworking adults who pray for those who hate them, and then sign up to dig wells in Africa.

I have a good friend who has spent most of her life in Utah, and who doesn’t have very fond feelings for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), the church I belong to. I know how (unintentionally, I hope) oblivious we can sometimes be to the feelings and preferences of people who don’t belong to our church, especially in Utah, where many or most people do belong to the church. I think that my friend and I get along well because a) we don’t get to see each other very often, so when we do we have other pressing things to talk about and b) I’ve lived in several places where I was the minority, so I understand how she feels.

But today I want to talk about my little brother, and the two-and-a-half-minute address he gave at his high school graduation last Wednesday. I confess that there were a couple moments when I thought that, if my friend Laura had been there, I would have been worried to see how she was reacting to Ryan’s speech. I might also worry how Dick’s family (who are also not Mormons) would have reacted.

You see, Ryan talked about God in his Salutatory remarks. His English teachers, who reviewed all the speeches before they were given, told him to take out the references to God, and when my mom reported this heinous attempt at censorship, I was ready to organize a sit-in and a nurse-in (Spot could pretend) and a march on the school campus. But Ryan’s principal read over his speech and said that it was fine. I didn’t even get to tell Ryan to remember that his nieces would be in the audience and to not let them down. (Also that he is all set to attend BYU, like his four siblings before him, and really, what could those power-hungry demagogues do to him?)

Ryan spoke third, after a nice speech from the Valedictorian and an entertaining piece from his co-Salutatorian (both bright young women). His was pretty standard stuff: remember the lessons of the past, set high end-goals for the future, strive to be happy, and then he quoted from . . . no, not the Book of Mormon, or even the Bible, but from Benjamin Franklin (he also quoted the Scout Oath and Muppet Treasure Island):

I believe in one God, creator of the universe, that he governs by his divine province, that he ought to be worshiped, that the greatest service we can render to him is in doing good to his other children.

and later

That God governs in the Affairs of Men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?…Our Lives are comparable with the Empire Benjamin Franklin references. He continues, without his concurring Aid, we shall succeed in this political Building no better than the Builders of Babel.

It is often said that terrible things are done in the name of God, and I find myself too often apologizing for being a religious — or “organized religion” — type person. Maybe I don’t apologize verbally, but I wince or wish someone bearing testimony of Christ in a place where I don’t expect that sort of thing — I wish that perhaps they would just do it a little quieter, so that my friends and family who don’t believe as I do won’t think we’re so weird or so fanatical, or so, so irrational as to suppose that there is a Higher Being who concerns Himself with the affairs of the people on this earth and who also at the same time, allows such terrible things to be done in His name.

And here is what I have concluded, and what I hope Ryan has learned, and will continue to learn and practice and preach as he goes on to college and then to serve a mission for our church in a year.

It is right and good to be bold in the faith, for me to be bold in my faith, to proclaim, yes, this is what I believe, and I am not embarrassed to say that I believe in this faith of my youth, more with every passing year, in fact, even if that marks me as hopelessly unsophisticated. But, it is right also to be humble (even uncertain) about our personal righteousness, our individual right-ness, to be meek, and timid about ourselves, and repentant of our shortcomings and sins. Bold about Christ and retiring about Jane. Putting God first and on our sleeves, and not trumpeting our own accomplishments. Concentrating wholly upon the beams in our own eyes rather than the motes in others’.

I think Ryan is learning this, and I wanted to give him a standing ovation, but that felt a little over the top. If nothing else, the people gathered that day to commemorate graduation knew what Ryan believed. He spoke with such conviction, such earnestness that they would remember devotion to this “divine being” along with honor and integrity as they begin their adult lives. Who can argue, even the greatest of atheists cannot argue, I wager, against worship of a God who decrees that the greatest service we can render is “in doing good to his other children.”

I guess I could have figured this out sooner. The first two principles of our religion are faith and repentance. Some are called to call others to repentance. Ryan will be called to do that as a missionary. I hope he remembers to preach faith first, and to never forget his own repentance as he invites others to join him. He will be a wonderful missionary, because he is not afraid, and is not ashamed of Christ.

So I don’t really play with my kids. This is, in fact, why I had more than one kid, so that they can play with each other. You won’t find any cute posts here about me running through the sprinklers with them or playing Barbies or suffering through Candyland 500 times (though we do break out Old Maid on Monday nights. Sometimes).

But I am good at reading to them and, more than anything, I like to talk to them.

Today at lunch Susan and Spot were fighting. That is, Spot said Susan was fighting, and Susan rejected Spot’s overtures to introduce their plastic Ikea forks to each other (”Hello, my name is Sparkle Fork, what’s your name?). I suggested they not sit right next to each other at the kitchen island, but for some inexplicable reason, even when Susan expresses utter loathing, Spot prefers to be right next to her big sister.

I asked if they needed time-outs, and Susan said we should send Spot to timeout in Greenland because it’s really cold there. I wondered if she’d learned about Greenland this morning at her last day of preschool, but Susan reminded me of the evenings we spent at Grandma’s house this past winter, when she watched an old vhs copy of The Princess Bride multiple times. I didn’t watch with them, though I did wonder what a four-year-old found so fascinating about Fred Savage. Susan said that Sally watched with her once and explained, during the scene where Vizzini threatens Fezzik, that Greenland is a place where it snows all the time.

Today when I picked Susan up from school, her teacher said that I must be the best mom (oh, ye-deluded-but-don’t-stop-now flatterer) because Susan is always talking about how awesome it is to be the middlest child. Spot may be the littlest and Sally may be the biggest, but Susan is the middlest.

I’d feel bad about liking that scene, but my kids insist they love the part in Bambi where his mother dies and that they don’t think the part in Dumbo where Mrs. Jumbo is in solitary confinement and sticks her trunk out to cuddle her baby is very sad at all, either. Insensitive clods.

+++

Today we took the kids to the botanical gardens, one of my favorite places. Dick and I have been to botanical gardens all over — DC, Brooklyn, on an island in the Nile near Aswan, Butchart Gardens in Victoria — and the gardens in Utah (Red Butte and Thanksgiving Point) are not an embarrassment to our state. I think public gardens in general are a good sign for civilization. Maybe it’s just that we wish we worked with our hands more, or maybe it’s that a people who will dedicate time, money, and effort to something that is merely ornamental (yet ornamental to all the senses, and the spirit), are not irredeemably consumed with plastic toys and electronic gizmos.

(I don’t categorize the Internet under “unnatural electronic gizmos.” Surely if the Good Lord had wanted us to surf the waters of the great deep instead of the world wide web, He wouldn’t have invented roller skates.)

+++

Susan scraped her knee on the sidewalk outside the gardens. She wailed and carried on, tensing her body from any casual contact with the offended limb. She demanded a bandaid, which I had none. We showed our pass and made the required bathroom stop and passed out hats, all to the accompaniment of Susan’s wretched cries.

At the top of the hill overlooking the gardens, the crying suddenly ceased. I looked back and saw that Sally had taken the bandaid from her own knee (applied there myself not forty minutes earlier after an unfortunate bicycle incident) and cured Susan’s bleeding knee and bruised feelings.

+++

It is heaven to spend a couple hours walking among flowers with minimal whining about tired legs and only occasional demands for peanut butter sustenance — and no stroller! Why didn’t we get older kids sooner?

They’re not that old, of course. Spot’s newly-learned potty-training requires plentiful opportunities to practice, so she and I visited every bathroom in the place. At the third bathroom she showed me a wad of gum: “Look Mommy, I got some gum,” she said, and I recoiled. “You didn’t pick that up off the [gross, dirty, bathroom, cement] floor, did you?”

Oh, no, she assured me: “It was Sally’s.”

I’ve been working with a (talented, patient, spectacular) designer on my new blog header. Alma is worth every penny she charges, but I was lucky enough to promise Dick’s firstborn child (and some ad space on his blog) for most of the cost.

But poor Dick. He has been my whipping boy for blog-and-all-purpose technical help for a long time. I have gladly turned in my Independent Woman card in exchange for a man who will set up our computers, deal with the “router” and negotiate with those pesky pixels.

Interacting with a professional (almost-stranger), therefore, has been a real eye-opener for me. It has taught me a lot about design principles and styles and how to articulate what appeals to me visually, but most of all, it’s made me reflect on how different it is to deal with someone to whom you cannot offer exotic connubial favors in one breath and berate hysterically for “not getting it” the next. VERY disconcerting. (Also, I’m sorry, Dick. I’ll try to treat you like the professional you are in future.)

I am so pleased with how the banner turned out. My new name, Seagull Fountain, is a reference to the rural town we live in, and also to everyday life in America, sort of a Lake Wobegon thing and a Jane of Green Gables Seagull Fountain thing. (I know, I know L. M. Montgomery was Canadian. I’ve named two of my daughters after her, after all. Just work with me here.)

I tried to buy the domain Groundhog Day when I was ready for a change from What About Mom? I do love Bill Murray, but also, isn’t almost every day of our lives like Groundhog Day? Isn’t every day exactly the same, in the ways that really matter? Don’t we see the same people (or the same sorts of people)? Don’t we make choices about how to act or react, how to focus our energies and our times and our talents? Not on the big days that we give birth or do something heroic that saves a life or the day we discover Duncan Hines bulk brownie mix at the WalMart. But the other days. The going-to-work and taking-care-of-the-kid days are all the same.

I want to change myself, improve gradually, just as Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day, without needing the slap in the face of a cosmic wakeup call.

Anyway, Seagull Fountain is a small town, my blog is a small blog. My life is a small life, and I love every bit of it. Somedays I wish I could do something bigger, make a larger impact somewhere, do something about the women and girls in Africa who suffer so incomprehensibly. I hope to someday. For now I am called to spend most of my time and energy and care and thought on the four people I live with, and see every day. People who don’t change much from day to day, small challenges and triumphs that vary little but are no less amazing when viewed with love and humility.

Geez.  Getting a bit maudlin in here.

Where was I? Oh. The blog and related identity crises/name changes. I enjoy blogging because it adds to my life, especially to my relationship with Dick. He makes me feel that I, and my hopes/dreams/outlandish ideas are important, and interesting. This is all very self-centered and me-ish, but isn’t feeling important, and interesting, and necessary, just about the best thing a life-partner can give you?

Last night I was on a panel about Women in Social Media at the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City. It was fun, not least because I got a babysitter for the kids.

Wow, my teeth are pretty white! And my neck, is, uh, pretty fleshy!

Dick said he was worried about me as the introductions were made and as the first three panelists gave their spiels. Each of them had such impressive resumes and honors, he said. What would I say? (Thanks, Dick {shrugs wryly}). Luckily I blog, and attend events and twitter and meet new people and talk blogging because I enjoy it. I am blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) to not have much of an agenda when it comes to these things. I mostly find it all horribly intriguing and fun. And Dick does too, so then we have even more to talk about on date night.

(And I recently read Penelope Trunk’s great post about introducing yourself by telling stories, so my slim resume wasn’t too much of a handicap.)

Of course, the best part of blogging, no matter what your name or schtick is, is meeting people around the world. Like Kirsty from Australia. You can get a sense of who she is and why I think she’s fabulous (and revel in that accent!) by listening to Dick’s podcast with her.

So that’s it, basically. Love what you do and do what you love, or something.

And if you’d like to display one of my gorgeous new buttons, please do.

<a href=”http://www.seagullfountain.com/”><img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3554/3553932419_855a875c90_o.png” alt=”sfbutton1″ width=”125″ height=”125″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.seagullfountain.com/”><img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3553926315_96e7db3616_o.png” width=”125″ height=”125″ alt=”sfbutton2 125″/></a>

I don’t know Dick. What if their frustrated mother snaps the fifth time she hears “But I’m hungry” and starts pulling out toenails with a pair of rusty pliers?

Of course, being soft-hearted is not the worst quality in a man with three daughters. However, besides being a fine father, a delectable lover, my best friend, and something of a minor blogebrity in his technical writing niche, Dick is also a contender for the title of Mr. … Oblivious. I know, ladies. Your husband is probably a contender too. What man isn’t?

But let me tell you why Dick is in the finals this week.

On Sunday night I was whipped. I spoke in church that morning (post in the hopper, about ten down), and was tired and just not feeling very well (not pregnant, not yet). Dick put the kids down and was working on the computer upstairs in the loft outside their rooms while I read a book on the couch downstairs, and moaned occasionally.

We have always been very serious about bedtime and naptime, and our children know this. But whenever a new milestone hits, it seems we go through a couple weeks of reminding them just how serious we really are. Last week Spot learned how to climb out of her crib — at two and a half, she was the youngest to ever learn this most alarming skill. Before this, Susan had no incentive to leave her (well-lit) (filled-with-books-and-toys) bedroom because the only other free person, Sally, was invariably buried in a Trixie Belden book and completely uninterested in playing toys.

Spot, though. Ahh, Spot. She and Susan cannot get enough of each other during the day, what with the playing for twelve hours straight and the nonsensical screaming and the loving each other one minute and wanting to steal each other’s boyfriend on purpose the next. When I have discovered them playing together in Susan’s room after she has goaded Spot into escaping her crib, the wailing as I tear Spot from the bosom of her loving sister languishing from the consumption would make Louisa May Alcott swoon.

So on Sunday night, I yelled up a few times, helpfully, that Dick should lock the girls in their rooms. He declined. They all fell asleep eventually, and so did Dick. I dragged myself upstairs and stopped short at the sight of several brown curls lying on the floor of the master bathroom. And were those … straight blondish-red strands on the tiles?

Yes, yes they were — not to be confused, of course, with the short brown clippings in the sink from my latest go at my do-it-yourself ‘do. Just as a reminder, here is how my girls looked before the Great Hair Butchering of ‘09:

A great abundance of hair does not run in our family. We have been growing out Spot’s bangs for a year now, and she and Susan are both blessed to have much more hair than Sally did at those ages. Susan’s even has some body for Medusa’s sake. But while we may never look this good, things could always be worse. Right?

Right:

Susan says that Spot just kept cutting more and more and more. “She doesn’t want to grow her bangs out anymore, Mommy,” says Susan. And Susan, who the day before chose to grow her bangs out (meaning she has to wear pigtails for a year) over getting them cut again, chose to grow them out, so she merely cut the side of her hair:

The moral of the story is, of course: Never trust a Sicilian when death is on the line. Also, lock up your scissors, lock up your wife, lock up your daughters and run for your life.

I trimmed their hair up a bit, but maybe I should’ve just left it long with the bald patches:

It’s amazing how little kids can get a horse’s butt of a haircut and still be criminally adorable. I’d have to shave Spot’s hair with a number 2 guard to get it even. I might still do that. Because I am the m-0-m.

Susan has a pixie face and didn’t scalp herself, so she’s still cute. Just more pixie-ish, and her scar is visible, but I think that lends an air of mystery, don’t you?

I didn’t, because I couldn’t, get mad at the girls. Besides the fact that a bad hair month (or five) doesn’t compete with real tragedy, I have shaved my own head once or twice, and not at the innocent age of two-and-a-half or four-and-a-half.

I was too mean to Dick about this. I’m sorry, Dick. (I’m glad you’ve come around on the locking-them-in-their-bedrooms issue.)

As much as I love Susan and Spot’s basic innocence, I love when my daughters conspire together. I hope they never think of sneaking out together to borrow the car, because it might be hard to work up the necessary ire, so long as they are intending to go somewhere together. I also love that they are completely oblivious to any alteration in their looks. They think they are still beautiful, and they spend no time in front of the mirror. How do they know they’re still beautiful if they don’t spend any time in front of the mirror?

Finally, I cannot get mad at Spot for anything right now, because she is potty-trained. Here is what I know about potty-training after three kids: A) Wait till the kid is ready and excited about it. B) Find out what they want and give it to them as a reward. C) Go overboard on the praise; skip the criticism. For Spot it took princess panties and gumballs.

And sisters who are as maniacally enthusiastic about her new trick as I am:

Brother W. called me after church to ask me to speak next week. He first asked how my Mother’s Day was going, and I said, “Fine. About as well as can be expected.” And he said, “Oh of course, you’ve got some sick kids at home. How are they feeling?”

Now here’s where I would normally enlighten this poor, clueless male as to the complexity of my disdain for the Mother’s Day holiday, which starts with things as petty as a husband who is so righteously helpful to unload the dishwasher for once but ignores the stacks of pots in the sink and the clothes on the floor, and ends with the nagging feeling that, short of undergoing a personality transplant, I’ll never be exactly the sort of mother I want to be to my kids.

And in the middle is this great example of why Mother’s Day never quite works: My good friend Chrysanthemum had a rare date night planned with her husband the Saturday before Mother’s Day. She had arranged for a babysitter, and the date was simple: ice cream and a walk SANS KIDS. Then her husband was called to go help with the strawberry-chocolate dipping for the mothers’ gifts at church the next day. So instead of a date night with her husband SANS KIDS, she got to stay home and put the kids to bed by herself (a chore her husband normally does himself to give his wife her one break from the kids all day).

Now of course, the one redeeming part of that story is that Chrysanthemum is blessed to have a husband so faithful to the Lord that he would give up his Saturday night to do the service that the church asked of him, a service that was well-intentioned by all involved to show appreciation for mothers.

Still. You see why Mother’s Day is a bit fraught.

But, Gentle Reader, fear not. Before I opened my stupid mouth and explained all that, I remembered that Brother W. and his lovely, lovely wife adopted their first baby several months ago after years of waiting for a child, and I bet you –

I bet you all-the-potty-training-progress-that-Spot-has-made –

that she doesn’t hate Mother’s Day.

Dick didn’t like my Rory post, the post that gave me FITS. He said I didn’t make the epiphany part clear enough or engaging enough, and he hated the first paragraph and I should’ve included examples from the Reviving Ophelia book of what truly bad bullying looks like because to him the stuff I said Rory did sounded plenty bad.

So here was my point:

For years Rory was THE Bad Guy in my mind. Whenever I thought about boys teasing girls, or church youth activities, or riding the bus, or walking the halls of my high school in my bathrobe after swim class, or Survival, or juvenile espionage, or Sally entering junior high school, or about driving past the K. home on my way to see my parents, I always thought about Rory and what a terrible, awful, no good, very bad kid he was.

He was THE PITS.

Then Sally got punched in the face, and I stupidly provoked my middle school mean girls on Facebook, and my mom and my good friend from that same middle school recommended the book that gave me an incredible epiphany.

Which epiphany was this: Rory was actually not quite as terrible as I thought. In fact, compared to the book’s description of sexual harassment, the grabbing of breasts and pressure for meaningless sexual encounters and physical objectification and demeaning of mental aptitude and basically treating of young women as stupid, shopping-consumed, fluffy, inane, valueless sexual kleenex –

COMPARED TO THAT?

Rory was . . . someone I almost wish I had gotten to know when we were young.

Oh, fine, I’ll say it:

COMPARED TO THAT?

Rory was a nice boy.

And you might think, well, things have changed: that book is probably describing what goes on in schools today, so of course Rory’s hyper-juvenile pranks would look endearing and Wally-from-Leave-it-to-Beaver nostalgic.

But that book was published in 1995, the year we graduated from high school. Now, I know that not everyone experiences the sexual harassment-type bullying. I didn’t, not really. And trying to avoid it is one of the reasons we moved to a small town in Utah for our daughters to grow up in. I expect that if there are problems at school or church, I will know the parents of the kids causing problems, and I will have some say in how things are handled. (Oh, will I HAVE SOME SAY.)

Mostly, though, the point is that I would love for the neighbor boys to toilet-paper our house when my daughter is thirteen, and for the sex talk she hears when she is seventeen to be about NOT HAVING SEX ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT BUT JUST HOLDING EACH OTHER INSTEAD.

What mother wouldn’t want that for her daughter?

Thanks for reading!

Mean Girls and Bully Boys

I’ve been thinking about schoolyard bullies and schoolgirl meanness a lot lately. A couple weeks ago Sally brought home a note about an incident on the playground. She seemed just the same as always, but the note informed us that the second grade bully punched her in the face as she and a friend walked towards the swings. I inspected her mouth for knocked-out teeth and peered anxiously at the tender skin around her eyes. She was unbruised, her skin unbroken, and her feelings were fine too.

I was somewhat less than fine, somewhere between “you’re never going back there again” and “you know where to kick him where it counts, right?” less-than-fine.

Usually I worry more about middle school mean girl clique-y-ness when I think of the storms of schoolday melodrama. I even had a minor dust-up with my own mean girls from North Sevier Middle School on Facebook the other day. I felt so dumb after that self-induced reminder of things long-gotten-past that I finally read the book my mom recommended, Reviving Ophelia. The task of shepherding three daughters to womanhood often makes me fierce and fearful, and reading Reviving Ophelia didn’t help. Oh, it validated my concerns about tween-age girls (unfortunately) but even though it’s fifteen years old now, it details bullying and sexual harassment from boys that makes my heart tremble for my daughters.

They’re so innocently strong-willed and invulnerable to slights now, so self-sufficient and secure. Sally is almost callous in her friendships, returning effusive greetings at the park or the WalMart with nonchalant “hi”’s, shrugging it off when her erstwhile best friend decides to play with someone else for the day.

And as for the boys, this week Sally started riding her bike to school with three neighbor kids of the male variety. They come to get her every morning early, and off they ride. They walk their bikes up the big hill, and I imagine she forgoes the incessant “it’s too hard” whining that accompanies our family bike rides. The oldest boy, Mike, is the kind of boy I wouldn’t mind so much her dating in twenty or thirty years.

Unless he turns out like Rory, of course.

It seems impossible now that such a quiet, respectful boy could turn out like that tormentor of my early young womanhood, but I have to remember that Rory had a mother just as nice as Mike’s mother, and things are changing. Kids are growing up younger (whatever that means), and whenever I think of the — well, maybe I should just tell you what that boy was like.

Rory

My family moved in to the neighborhood when I was thirteen, at the end of eighth grade. Rory and his friends welcomed us by toilet-papering our house. My friends and I forked his lawn in return; we were pretty disappointed when we heard that Brother K. cleaned up the forks instead of leaving them for Rory, who was away for Boy Scouts.

Rory and I rode the same bus until we got our driver’s licenses. Those last few years of waiting for vehicular deliverance were excruciating, and the only alleviating factor was being old enough to command seats in the back of the bus. Naturally, Rory and his friends set up camp back there. But I was valiant, and fearless. When verbal threats didn’t work, those boys threw gum in my hair and poured Pepsi on my seat. While I was sitting on it.

One day, I think it was the Pepsi-on-the-seat day, I turned to Rory’s best friend and screamed, “Go to hell, Gavin.” I was long-suffering and patient, of course, but I wanted those boys to know that I’d had it. And even then they managed to turn the tables on me. Ever after that, every time I got on the bus, and every afternoon as I walked to my door, they chanted: “Go to HEAVEN, Shannon.”

(Stop smiling! It’s not funny. It was dang effective at the time!)

Things weren’t much better at our church youth camps. Sure, Rory and his friends usually got quiet and reverent at the final campfires and said things like “mumble-mumble-love-Jesus-my-Savior-mumble-mumble,” but by day they continued their campaign of harassment, the worst of which was the stink bombs they set off in our tent. One day we had a Learn-to-Cooperate-and-Trust-Each-Other activity involving a human chain and crossing a fairly swift-moving river. Rory disappeared (not being a fan of cooperate-and-trust, I guess), and later appeared, alone on the other side, peeling off a wetsuit he’d brought to the mountains for who knows what purpose. He always was a pretty big show-off.

I felt a bit miffed that Rory was president of the debate team in high school. I don’t want to admit to being intimidated out of joining the club, but it felt like debate was Rory’s domain, and I retreated to calculus and the Thoreau Society, despite my (vague, passing) interest in winning arguments.

Practically my last memory of Rory is the week-long Survival trip a bunch of us went on our senior year. I had Melinda with me, and Mark, who was all the protection I needed against my adolescent nemesis, but I may have been (slightly) glad that the boy who could produce a wetsuit in the most unlikely of circumstances was also there in the desert, with his well-oiled pocketknife.

I guess Rory wasn’t all bad, at least, not compared to the boys in the Reviving Ophelia book (or even compared to Sally’s second-grade bully). He never swore at me or said anything that made me feel stupid or ugly or inclined to be silent. Unwanted in the back of the bus, yes, but never unhappy or discontent in my own life. He never punched me in the face or hurt me or scared me. He never belittled me or made me question my femininity. He never made me ashamed of my changing body or feel like I should hide the brain I had. He never used sexual innuendo or said anything that made me uncomfortable that way.

I take that back. I did hear Rory talk about sex once. We were on a National Honors Society trip to Cedar City for a play. I don’t think Rory was a regular member of the Society, too nerdy for him, but he was dating Leslie, who was on the council. The girls were talking about sex, about how it was this big, scary thing, and what would our wedding nights be like? Would it hurt?

Rory said, “I don’t want to have sex on my wedding night; I just want to hold my wife.” I can still see his smirk –this big, fat smirk that crossed his face. What a funny guy! Who did he think he was kidding?

Rory’s Mother

Usually for Mother’s Day I write a tribute to my mother (who, like most mothers, is the best mother ever). But this year I keep thinking about Rory’s mother. I don’t have boys. I may never have boys to raise. Bringing up my girls, because I have some idea of just what they’ll face as they grow into their minds and their bodies, this is terrifying enough.

I think raising boys must be easier in some ways — they can’t get pregnant, for one thing. But good parents know that getting a girl pregnant is just as life-changing. Women who raise boys to be the kind of men I want my daughters to know are doing hard work.

And I’ve come to appreciate certain things I never thought I would, like Boy Scouts. I always thought it would be the worst waste of my time at church to have to attend pack meeting and bring salad to the blue and gold banquet. After all, my girls will never be involved in boy scouts. Then I hauled them (Dick was busy with his 11 year-old scouts) to my first pack meeting, and we watched the little nine-year-olds bringing in the flag. They were so serious and solemn in their miniature uniforms, so guileless about learning respect and order and taking oaths of honor and loyalty.

I haven’t seen Rory since we graduated. I know he served a mission for our church and works in his father’s business. I hear from my brother that he married a smart, beautiful girl we went to school with. Maybe he has children of his own now. I hope so. I hope he has to clean up after them, as his mom and dad cleaned up after him. (And my parents cleaned up after me, a time or two).

I hope he is as good a parent to his kids as his mom and dad were to him. I hope he teaches his sons that sex is something that happens (or doesn’t) on a wedding night.

I hope my daughters have tormentors as innocently mischievous as mine.

And so even though I can’t stop worrying about my daughters, and dreading the day when their father’s warm approval and genuine interest in their lives pales before the pull of a high school crush — even though mothering is not for the faint of heart, I am heartened.

I’m not saying I wish I had dated Rory, but maybe, even if Sally’s friend Mike down the street turns out to be just like him, maybe I’ll let her date him. When she’s forty.

Jane

—

Special thanks to Tara and Natasha for reading earlier versions of this. I labored mightily over it, and really appreciate their input, though any inelegancies remain my responsibility, of course.

After all, don’t I have kids? Don’t I know what it’s like to be looked at by people who don’t have kids? Don’t I know how frustrating it is to have to miss out on things simply because you’ve given birth to a needy infant?

Don’t I like to take my kids to the movies? (Yes, at the FAMILY DOLLAR THEATER TO SEE KIDS’ SHOWS.)

But really. People pay 8 bucks a ticket (or work hard enough in their careers to be given complimentary tickets) to attend a PG-13 movie on opening weekend, and you bring your crying baby, and sit right behind me.

And I? I have spent two hours of my Friday afternoon making calls to potential sitters, and shelled out twenty-five dollars of my hard-earned blogging money (which you know took me two weeks to earn) for a babysitter, and I’m out on the town on a date with my husband, without my kids, enjoying a fantastic movie, and you expect me to LISTEN TO YOUR FREAKING CRYING BABY THE WHOLE TIME?

Major fail, Mother with the crying baby, major fail.

Please stay home, or get a babysitter, before you give all mothers a bad name, and me a major pain in the hiney.