Which is to say, HE TOTALLY SUCKS AT IT.

This morning at 8:37 we left Rochester for our perch here on an 80-foot sand dune near the edge of the eastern United States. The Babyman commenced crying at 8:39 and continued uninterrupted for NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED MILES.

No amount of snack food or milk would soothe the beast, and as we sent Mr. C home Friday, I drove solo with The Poo and her brother. Poor little Poo, I lost my temper with her when The Babyman finally nodded off for the second time.

He fell asleep after our first pit stop, only to be woken after five minutes when my mother decided she needed to pull over and pee just 29 miles (yes, I counted) after her previous potty break. When she came out of the rest stop holding a giant Diet Coke I nearly killed myself.

About 20 minutes after Aborted Nap Attempt No. 2, The Poo decided she needed to tell me something RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW AND IN HER LOUDEST VOICE after being told three times to whisper.

I lost my temper.

About 15 miles after I lost my temper, I pulled over to our third rest stop, went to the bathroom by myself while my mom sat in my van, and cried in the stall while a woman next to me had a enormously stinky bowel movement.

We made it here, but of course my son, whose new nickname is Home Stretch, slept from 5 p.m. until we arrived at 6:45, making bedtime about as enjoyable as you’d imagine.

I see your eyes rolling back in your head. I know! I know! Why do I do this? To myself? To my children?

Good question.

Tonight I feel like a guest. We haven’t been here in two years; The Poo’s cousins arrived before us and laid claim to the two beds that have night tables. Her stuff is all over the floor, theirs is neatly stacked on their tables. There are diapers in my closet, diapers that The Poo wore the last time we were here. There is a hat sized for a two-year-old on my dresser.

My sister moves around the kitchen with confidence and a sense of ownership I don’t feel. I can’t find the soap or the washcloths. I am timid about using the washer and dryer.

And yet, I was the one who came up here when the house was just a shell, eight weeks after my father died. I was the one who walked the framed rooms and put my hands on the timbers: Outlet here, phone jack there, I instructed.

I was the one who stood in a shop for six hours with my mother, and helped choose the small, glittering glass diamonds that link the larger blue slate tiles. I was seven months pregnant, heavy with child and grief.

Maybe that’s why I do it. Because I was here when it was nothing but bones, this house by the sea. When it was just glimmering of what it would be. Maybe because I remember my father, gaunt and exhausted, rolling and unrolling the blueprints and hanging on to them, literally, for his life.

He lived just long enough to see them break ground.

So I come, again and again, despite the hurt feelings and the sense of being on the outside now that I’ve moved to Chambana.

I come, because I want my children to understand tradition, and legacy. Because this house built on a hill of sand is theirs, too.

I wish I felt more like it was still mine.

The Babyman has been here only twice before: In October we spent three weeks here, before his baptism, and again at Christmas, for just three harried days. The last time we were here, he was just four months old.

Yesterday, as we spend down the New York State Thruway, we listened to The Beatles on our iPod.

Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone’s
Hard earned pay
You and me Sunday driving
Not arriving
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home

My eyes filled with tears. No matter how fond I’ve become of Chambana and my life there, my heart will always be rooted in the terra firma of my hometown. I was wed here, buried my father here, bore The Poo here, christened both of my children here. My mother and my sister are here.

I grew up here, this is my home.

When we arrived, The Poo scrambled down from her booster seat and ran into the house shouting her grandmother’s name. The Babyman, woken from a hard-won nap, rubbed his eyes and looked around for just a moment.

Then he titled forward on the axis of my forearm, eager to explore the house. He seemed perfectly at home here.

I carried him into the kitchen after he tried to go up the un-gated stairs, and as I held him he reached out, grabbed a plump tomato from the counter, and took a big bite. Juice ran down his face as he slurped up the tender skin, all of us laughing as he ate.

I put him in his booster seat at the table, and he pointed at a shallow bowl of peaches. I handed him one, and he proceeded to eat the whole thing, all the while murmuring: Mmmmmm, good!

Those eleven months, some of which seemed like an eternity as we struggled through them, passed before my very eyes as I watched my baby eat.

It’s so good to be home.

I am not patient. I am, in fact, the opposite of patient.

It is more difficult, of course, to be patient on the road. The Babyman is cutting his molars, and his generally jolly disposition is clouded with pain. He grimaces, he whines, he refuses to sleep. I am sitting, right now, in a room with a piano, an organ, a desk and a crib.

The Babyman watches me, eyes round and glittery, from behind the bars. He rubs his face with his wee hands, wiping away the stray tear that rolls down his perfect peach of a cheek.

The crib has no bumpers; purchased years ago for The Poo, they never fit. The Poo was a sound sleeper then. Once she was out, nothing short of a nuclear explosion would rouse her.

The Babyman is her opposite in so many ways: The bumpers are not tied to the rails, because his nocturnal acrobatics render them lethal.

He sticks his ankle through the bars, moaning at me from behind them. I know this is a mistake, this vigil. I know he will come to expect it, and that I will have to disabuse him of the habit. I know he will weep, and that my stone face will not betray the pain in my heart when his wild cries filter through the door of the nursery at my mother’s house.

I can’t break him here. Too many people coming and going, too much chaos. Tomorrow, a family party that begins just as he should be taking his afternoon nap. What should I do? Shut us all up here in the house, because of nap time?

I can’t do that, as much as I would like to. There are some times when you have to bend the rules. This leg of the trip is the most difficult, but I knew it would be.

He’s laughing at me now, the whisper of a cry in his smile. He wears pajamas with monkeys on them. His bottle of water sloshes as he jumps around on the mattress.We play peek-a-boo, I laugh in spite of myself.

***

It took him two hours to go down, why I can’t guess. Teeth? The confusion of a new place? Rage at being confined when his sister was out for ice cream with daddy, her grandfather and his wife?

Perhaps it was all of it, everything. With his limited repertoire of words–night-night, mama, dank oo, mmm-good!–he is unable to tell me why he cries so raggedly.

My vocabulary is significantly larger, and yet, I, too am unable to communicate why it is that his small face over the bars, twisted with the kind of misery every child should be so lucky to experience, makes me feel so unbearably tender.

And patient.

We’re in someone else’s house, a house brimming with dangerous treasures just waiting to be discovered by a marauding Babyman. He eschews crawling almost entirely now; only when he is in a very big hurry or is very tired does he go down on all fours.

No, he is all biped now, smacking the flat of his palm against the tank, scaring the poor fish and sending them hither and yon inside the fresh, clear water. He smacks the glass again, yelling in triumph as they scatter, hoping to hide from this strange, blue-eyed monster.

Everyone slept late this morning, me included. It was a restless night, sharing a bed with The Poo. Thick darkness made an obstacle course of the floor, forcing me to feel my way to the loo in the middle of the night.

I never sleep well on my first night away from home.

I’m not sorry to be here; as Chambana fell away behind us, the ocean got closer with every mile. We’re still eight days out from the salt air, but my nostrils are twitching with anticipation, like a dog with its head hanging out of the car window.

The Poo is in her element, staying up late and playing so hard outside after dinner that her hair curls on her sweaty forehead, soft tendrils clinging to her earlobes. She talks and talks and talks, and she talks even as her breath slows. Maamaaaaaaaaaa, she says, her eyes fluttering closed, at last, well past her bedtime.

Naps and meals slide off the schedule; suddenly, it’s 2:30 in the afternoon and no one has eaten lunch yet. The Babyman eats pickles instead of green beans, and we all laugh.

Summertime is having it’s way with us–we’re off, in the most delicious way.

“Mom!” she yelled, even though I was less than 12 inches away from her.

“MOM! I have to go potty!”

I turned around, eyebrow cocked, assessing her. “You should have tried to go before we left the resataurant,” I told her. “We’ll stop as soon as we can.”

We were on that rare stretch of road that isn’t littered with bright blue signs announcing gas stations and fast food. “We have to stop.” She chewed her fingers; her ponytail, having escaped it’s mooring, dropped at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were wild.

“We have to stop now! I have to go POTTY.”

I took a deep breath. “Baby girl, we can’t st—” She interuppted me.

“Mom,” my daughter said solemnly. “I pooped in my pants. We waited too long.”

I closed my eyes and counted to 10, praying for patience and forebearance. “Ooooooooookay,” I said. “We’ll stop as soon as we can.”

“Mom.” She was whipmering. “It’s a big one. A really big one.”

My husband pulled over, and I carefully guided her to the side of the road, shielding her from the oncoming traffic with my body. Behind the van, on the scrabbly grass, I pulled her pants down, a wad of wet wipes in my hand.

She was clean.

“Whoops!” she smiled at me, palms raised toward the heavens.

My husband met my eyes through the passenger-side window. We laughed with our mouths closed.

***

Two new dogs joined the one poodle already in residence. They swirled and nipped at our ankles as we held The Babyman aloft. I bit my lips in order to stifle the sharp words on my tongue.

The house is too small; aunts and cousins and grandfathers and great-grandfathers bump shoulders like molecules. I step over this one and that one, the dogs tripping me as I gather pajamas and favorite bath towels from a laundry basket stowed in the bedroom my husband slept in as a boy.

“Excuse me!” I chirp, with manufactured cheer. “Beep-beep!”

As I step over a plastic toy school bus, my husband calls me wearily. “I need you,” he says, an edge in his voice. “The Babyman pooped in the tub.”

I wrap the baby in his hooded towel, the faux lion’s mane cockeyed on his head. One bright blue eye obscured, he grins up at me, cheekily. My husband meets my eyes as I leave the room, amusement and desperation competing for his face.

Babyman, Babyman, I whisper to him. Mama is so tired. Babyman, it’s time for bed.

PJs, medicine, TV shows, juice and bottles. They rest in strange beds, exhausted from the heady concoction of nine hours of captivity followed by a burst of joy and excitement.

I sit in a living room I first laid eyes on 12 years ago, and wonder where the road will take us next.

The Poo went to a soccer camp two weeks ago—every morning from 9 to 10:30 for a week. The clinic was part of a program that brings coaches over from the UK and travels the nation, putting on these five-day events all over the country.

We started talking in the spring about signing her up for something sports-related this summer. The Poo is an active kid, and she seems to have some athletic inclinations, despite her inherited clumsiness and some distinctly un-athletic DNA from her mother.

The Poo doesn’t dive into new things. It takes time for her to warm up, and despite her excitement over soccer camp, I knew the first day would be touch-and-go. Upon their return home that morning, Mr. C’s report was about what I expected.

She was anxious at first, but managed to get in there and play, too. The next day she struggled a little, balking at the rules, but she was also the high-scoring participant that day, kicking two goals.

I was proud; she was, too. But I had to pry the good stuff out—when I asked her how her morning was, she poured out all her complaints: It was too hot, she didn’t want to yell when she was told to, she got wet.

My girl, she leads with the negative.

As an adolescent, my parents loved to regale me with tales of my obstinate, glass-half-full escapades. “We called you the ‘I Can’t Kid,’” my father would say, my mother echoing his sentiments.

I quit baseball before I ever joined Little League, I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 8 years old, I hated math because I didn’t just “get it” the first time.

I gave up. A lot.

On the last day of soccer camp, The Poo and her father arrived home earlier than I expected. “How was it?” I asked, looking up from my spot on the floor with The Babyman.

My husband’s face was stony, the girl’s was streaked with tears. She stood before me, cheeks flushed, and announced: “I had a temper tantrum.”

The real story is that she refused to play. She got wet, she got dirty, she got pushed down by a boy. The final indignity was that she was assigned to a scrimmage squad that didn’t get to wear pinnies.

Her father was disgusted with her, and issued a consequence for her behavior. No TV for 24 hours. She stormed to her room, weeping all the while. My husband sat and wiped off his forehead.

He told me how he wanted to have a good time, and that he had high hopes. But that the girl would not cooperate. She could not be flexible. She hated everything.

“She could be really good at this,” he said. “But she just won’t try. She just wants to complain.”

His words hit me as hard as any blow. They are words that have been applied to me throughout my life, words that I dismissed as unfair criticism.

Words that are, if I am honest, accurate.

Later, after my husband left for work, I sat with my daughter on the couch and tried to coax out of her why she wouldn’t play, why she wasted the last day of her special camp crying and fussing.

“I just get so upset, and then I can’t calm down,” she whispered, burying her face in my armpit.

I held her, and tried to find the words to lead her down a different path. To tell her that she’ll taste bitterness, but it’s the sweet that matters. I tried to tell her these things, the sound of it ringing false in my ears as I thought of all the times I stood on a metaphorical field, refusing to step on the pitch for fear of failing.

Raising a child throws your own flaws into such stark relief. I do not want my daughter to see the dark instead of the light. I want her life to be mostly sunny, with just a chance of passing clouds. How do I do that when my own perspective is so often one that denies any silver lining?

All I can do is keep trying. All I can do is point out to her that if she never tries, she can’t succeed. This I know, first-hand. And now I know what it must have been like for my own parents. If my parents had said “I can’t,” I wouldn’t be here now, putting words on a page.

They worked their fingers to the bone to give me baseball bats and bicycles, and I accepted these gifts believing that I could never use them well enough to make up for the effort that went into bestowing them.

Now, I work so hard to give our children every opportunity to shine. But how can I expect my sensitive, empathetic daughter to walk lightly into the world with the heavy weight of my past on her shoulders?

I think this is what you call “payback.”

Mumum, Mumum!

I lean over the high rail of his crib to rescue him from a hot tangle of blankets and lovies. His brown monkey looks up at us as I lift the baby to safety. I press my face to his face, and his body shakes with sadness.

Mumum, Mumum!

In the next room, I hear the low rumble of my husband’s voice, and my daughter’s high, wavering counterpoint. They argue; she yells and begins to wail in anger. I hear him count to three, then the gurgle of water draining from the tub.

With my little boy still pressed against my neck, and I shut the door on the sounds of my oldest child’s despair.

I should go to her, but I want to hold this fleeting baby sweetness in the palm of my hand.

***

He plays with me, his bright blue eyes alight with the furious pace of his intellectual development. Throw Mama the ball, I tell him. He lobs the sphere at me with his left hand, hooting and grinning wildly. Walk to Mama, I tell him. He squats, pushes up with his knees and toddles over to me, tilting this way and that, as if he can feel the earth’s rotation beneath his feet.

I clap and giggle with delight when he collapses in my lap. Just for a moment, he lays his head on my chest, and pats my arm. The gesture is fleeting and a sharp pain flashes through me when he gets up again, on the move, discovering the world.

She stands nearby, arms folded across her chest.

Play with me, she says, her eyes both challenging me and pleading with me. Play Polly Pockets.

Baby girl, you know we can’t play Pollys when the baby is awake, I tell her gently. The baby pulls my pants and I laugh.

You don’t love me, she mutters, and flees the room before I can reply, and the moment passes.

***

I lay on the bed with her, the scent of soap and shampoo envelopes us. Her damp curls look as dark as midnight against the pastel pillow, and her satin princess nightie swirls around her perfectly formed calves.

She looks up at me with her hazel eyes and asks for one more story. I consent, reluctant to let go of her warm, freshly bathed body.

I hold her a little too hard when the story is over. I press her against me, yearning to make her small again, drinking in her girlhood. She looks up at me, parts her rosebud lips.

Mama, do you still love me?

My heart shatters as I tell her again and again how I love her, all the ways in which she makes my life complete. I praise her, I compliment her, I caress her soft forearm and kiss her fingers one by one.

You are my heart, my love, my firstborn, I tell her. You made us a family.

Over the monitor the baby wails. I get up and turn the volume down, squelching his cries. I return to the bed, for a forbidden third bedtime story.

That isn’t to say that I can’t be labeled. I am many things: wife, daughter, sister, friend, mother, partner, writer, worker, sister … the list is long. Many of the labels I’ve worn include “not”—not popular, not outgoing.

But when it comes to -isms, I just don’t think about them. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some kind of self-serving sermon about how I am above being labeled or how I’m just so cool and so out there that labels don’t apply to me. In fact, I am a very mainstream person. I like cable TV and J. Crew and the potato is my all-time favorite food.

No, it isn’t that.

Take feminism, for instance. Could you define me as a feminist? In the classical sense, no. But in the way I live my life, making choices that are best for me in terms of work and family, then yes, you could call me a feminist. When it came time for me to choose a profession, I made the decision based not on my gender, but on my passion.

I wanted to be a reporter. It never occurred to me to think about myself as a “female reporter.” Then I wanted to stay home with my daughter. So could you call me a SAHM? Yeah, you could, and sometimes I call myself that, too, because it is the easiest, most literal way to describe my life to outsiders.

I am a mom. I stayed home with my kids.

Now, I spend many hours of my week writing for money. So that makes me a WAHM, right? And that makes YOU a WOHM, right? And what if you work part-time? Are you a PTSAHM or a PTWOHM?

All this alphabet soup only serves to mire us in the very thing we say we seek so hard to avoid. We say we want to love and support one another. But we find new and interesting ways to point the finger at each other and pin these labels on our backs so that we can point with the power of a crowd behind us.

At what point do we let the crowd become a community?

At what point do we stop fighting among ourselves and act like the loving, caring woman—yes, women—that we are inside our hearts? When do we realize that words are powerful, and labels are among the strongest weapons in our arsenal, for good and for bad?

Words like retard and stupid and hate and ugly and fat are as hurtful as bullets. They wound, and the scars are tender for a lifetime.

Words like SAHM and WAHM and WOHM and hipster parent and helicopter parent and bad mother … these are all words that are at once meaningless and more profound than we can ever fathom. We use these words, sometimes thoughtfully, to provoke debate, and sometimes emotionally, because we are tired and frustrated and we just know the grass is greener over there, for that person wearing the label we covet.

***

She was a woman in a male-dominated corporate culture, the kind of woman who takes her earring off to talk on the phone. She had her colors done and charged it to the company as a “development opportunity.” She wore scarves in creative ways and had the kind of haircut you see on a certain kind of marketing executive who came of age during the second round of the feminist revolution.

This is the woman for whom the battle was fought. The marching and the protesting, and all the tears and sweat and blood of those early revolutionaries in fact created this woman.

She would do anything to get ahead. She would shake your hand while stabbing you in the back. Her every move was calculated to build the next rung on her ladder to the top. She called herself a “champion for women” and one day, she told me that I would move up a lot faster if I would only wear more make-up.

And a skirt wouldn’t hurt my chances, either.

If you give me the choice between working for a woman, and working for a man, I say give me the man. He and I both know how he is going to behave. He’s going to act like a dick sometimes, and we shake hands on that. Women are more complicated. We circle each other like wary cats, waiting for the first strike.

***

My daughter was sick last weekend, and I perfer to tend to the wee ones when they are unwell. I have so many memories of my mother’s cool hand on my hot forehead. I cherish those memories; they make me feel safe and cared for even now, when the dark middle of the night wraps its hands around my neck and I struggle with all the worries in my heart.

So I bundled her up, my little girl, and held her head while she vomited in a towel. I pushed her hair out of her eyes and fetched her cold water. Drink it in tiny sips, I told her. Mama’s right here with you, I told her.

She lay next to me, and she reached out with her hand. I took her small palm in my own and squeezed gently. “Mama,” she whispered. “You are the bestest mama of all the mamas. Bester than anyone else’s mama.”

And just like that, my girl, she labeled me. It is a badge I wear with pride, the only label that need apply. It is a label 38 years in the making, one delivered with the purity of soul that can only be achieved when your heart is new.

These are the labels that matter.

Then this happened:

So you’ll have to excuse me. I am at once ridiculously proud and ridiculously horrified. This was taken around 1 p.m. By 6 p.m., he was RUNNING.

No wonder I have a headache.