Flying Rodents and Nudity

When I was junior in college, I did a 6-month study abroad program and got back in June, at the end of the school year. What this meant was that while all my friends were sorting out their housing arrangements for the coming (and presumably final) school year, I was off trying not to get malaria and getting a lovely staph infection instead. So largely via email--which, in 1993, was not the fun and user-friendly experience it is now--I tried to set up living arrangements long distance.

Thus it was that I arrived, the following August, at the house I had agreed to share with four other girls. One of them, I knew; she had shared an apartment with another friend of mine, so I'd seen her pretty often. One, I had never met and knew only as the quiet and kind of scary friend of the other girls. One, I had known for a while and she was a pretty good friend of mine. (Of course, just to show that I'm not always great at picking friends, what I didn't know was that over the next few months, she would have many screaming tantrums, repeatly get engaged to a friend of ours and then break it off, and finally she would move out, leaving all her things and a big hole in the rent check for several months until we got a new roommate.) And the last girl was someone I'd gone to high school with but hadn't really known until college. Between shared friends and a shared hometown, Stacy and I had grown pretty close, and she was mostly the one that I was looking forward to living with.

The house had been split at one point, and there were still two doors--one upstairs, one downstairs--that could be dead bolted shut to split the house into two apartments. There were two bathrooms, five bedrooms, and two kitchens. It was an odd setup but it worked well for us. What didn't work well, from the moment I arrived in the house, was the bedroom that had been assigned to me while I was away. Of the five bedrooms in the house, I got the one with no windows, the one literally under the stairs, the one that was only a bedroom in the sense that a bed would fit into it if you tried. I was pretty unhappy that this decision to give me the crappy bedroom had been made without consulting me, but when I got to the house and saw it, I was just exhausted. I had been driving all day, all my things were still in the truck parked outside, it was late, and I just wanted to go to bed. Fortunately there was a bed already in the room, so I borrowed a blanket, took out my contacts, stripped down to my t-shirt and underwear, and crawled into bed.

A couple of minutes later, I heard a strange sound in the room. It was a sort of a flapping, whooshing sound. I didn't have my contacts in and my glasses were in the truck with the rest of my worldly belongings, so it took a moment for me to identify the weird little flying shadow. But when I did, I leapt into action. Well, figuratively leapt. Actually, I wrapped the blanket around me, including my head, and I dropped to the floor. I scurried out of the bedroom and up the stairs, whimpering all the while. Finally I made it to Stacy's room, and I knocked on the door as politely as I could. When she answered, I threw open the door and cried, "Stacy, I can't see, there's a bat in my room, and I'm not wearing any pants!"

And bless her heart, she just scooted over on the bed and said, "Hop in."

That year probably did more than any other to change my life and turn me into the person I am now. It was full of independence, romance and foiled romance, academic achievement and frustration, and the realization that soon enough, we were going to be expected to do something with our lives. And through it all, I had these amazing people who, no matter what, were always willing to move over and make room for me, whether or not I had pants on.

Stacy and I have seen less of each other in recent years, though we try. It's hard, as your lives change, to keep in touch as much as you'd like. But there's something about the changing seasons, school starting, watching my own kids grow up and make friends, that makes me miss her terribly. I want to stay up late playing (and drinking) gin, talking about everything and nothing. I want to hear all about her job, her house, her love life. I want to show her my kids, my projects. I think I'll email her, see if she's free sometime soon just to get together and remember why we were friends in the first place. And to remind her that, no matter how much time goes by, there's always room for a good friend.

The Day I Almost Ran Away

Yesterday we had to have the garage door replaced. (And as an aside, I can't believe how much of a difference it makes to have something in your life function, when you've grown completely used to it broken. The garage door was plastic, somewhat transparent, and made a sound like a jalopy being strangled every time you used it. Now it actually works, and strangers walking by can't tell whether there's someone inside. It's the little things.) So since the garage door was being replaced, I had to move the car out of the garage.

I told the kids I was going to move the car and would be right back. Now, moving the car in our case is a little cumbersome. I grew up in a second-tier suburb in a housing divison that had been built in the '70s. We had an attached garage that opened right into the living room. Now we have a house in a first-tier suburb, just a few blocks outside the Minneapolis city limits. The house was built in 1958 (and a lot of it is original, like the harvest gold sink in the kitchen--but I digress.) It has a detached garage and an alley. So I had to go out to the backyard, into the garage, and take the car out of the garage and down the alley. As I got to the end of the alley, all I had to do was turn, drive half a block to our street, turn onto our street, and pull up in front of our house. But just for a moment, I thought: What if?

Now, I stay at home. And I don't just mean I'm a stay-at-home mom, because technicially I'm not really that either. I'm a day care provider, which means that I have an income; but it also means that I can't (ever) leave the house during the day. A little stir crazy? Too bad, you're watching 8 kids. Slept badly and thinking you'd do anything for a fancy cup of coffee? Well, unless you're willing to take all three of your kids with you and get back by 7:30, when the first kids show up, it's going to be Folgers with milk and sugar for you. Thinking that the kids are driving you absolutely over the edge and you'd really like to just have a bath and a glass of wine? Well, it's not the day care preventing you from doing that (at least I hope other stay-at-home parents aren't getting baths and wine at 9 AM), but you still don't get to do it.

And I don't get to leave home after 5 PM either. My husband, God bless him, is a creature of habit to the extreme. His evening routine is predictible almost to the minute. And it takes him all the way up to 6:30 in the evening, at which time kids have been fed, probably bathed, and are ready for a video, juice, and some quiet time before bed. If I want to go somewhere (to the bank to make a deposit, to Target just to wander around and listen to the music for 5 minutes, to the liquor store for the aforementioned wine), I'm probably taking at least one kid with me. Or else I'm going after 8:30, when they're all in bed. My 3-year-old, by the way, can identify the liquor store when we drive by and announces that "That's the liquor store where we get suckers." (In my defense, it's on a corner we drive by all the time, so it's not like we're driving across town to the liquor store every day.) All week, I look forward to grocery shopping, because it's an hour or so that I only have one kid with me (I take the littlest one, since she's really too young to bug me and ask for stuff yet) and I get to do more or less what I want, like talk to strangers about their preferred brand of canned corn.

So when I say "I stay home," I mean it. I'm always home. Standard parental disclaimer: I love my kids, and I obviously chose to stay at home with them. I know I'm lucky not to have to commute and to be here with them all day every day. But all that being said...

When I got to the end of the alley yesterday morning (you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you? There's always a mental map of what I'm talking about), just for a moment, I thought: What if? What if, instead of turning right and then pulling up onto our street, in front of our house, going back inside and making breakfast and changing diapers and refereeing, what if I turned left? I could go to the coffee shop. I could go to Walgreens and get a new lipstick. Hell, I could just keep driving. They wouldn't even realize for a while; two of them are still sleeping. And at that point, of course, I thought, Holy shit. What kind of person thinks that? And I turned right and pulled up in front of the house and went inside and made breakfast and changed diapers and did everything else I do all day. And I did it partly because, really, I do love my kids--more than I could ever find words to express. And partly because I was scared to think that I was a person who, even for a second, had that thought.

But that's the thing about staying at home. I used to have friends, and I used to bounce ideas off them and get a sense of what about me was more or less normal. But now many of them have dropped away, because I'm married with kids and they're trying to decide whether to just go off the grid for a while; we don't have a lot in common. And the ones with kids, well, they're trying to balance kids and jobs and houses and families, and they just don't have a lot of free time for answering questions like: Am I a total crazy person for the thought that just popped into my head? I was at book club the other night (yes, I do get to leave once in a while) and we were talking about The Shack. Somehow this led to a lot of talk about families and kids and our own histories and things that have encouraged or challenged our faith. And before I knew it, I was telling this group of women (only one of whom I knew before that night) about my miscarriage--about how it happened, how I felt, what it was like to experience a D&C, and how I now feel about that little person who was, so briefly, a part of me. I don't know why I did it, other than the fact that extreme social anxiety and a single beer seem to combine to make me unusually chatty. But when I was done, several of them thanked me for being so candid; they said that though we all know at least one person who's been touched by miscarriage, no one wants to talk about it. It's like we're afraid to admit that we once failed at the one thing we're supposed to be able to do perfectly--bring a pregnancy to term. But when we start talking about it, we realize that we're not the only ones who've been through it, and other people have been holding back just as much as we have, trying not to admit their failures.

So I hope that I'm not the first (non-certifiable) mom ever to think, just for a moment, how great it would be to run away. And I didn't, of course. And I never would. But I'll fantasize about it again, I'm sure. And I hope that someday, when I've managed to make some friends again, that they'll admit that, once or twice, they had the same thought.

Who Do You Think You Are?

I've been thinking a lot lately about identity. I'm sure that for some people, they think of themselves first and foremost in terms of their profession. "I'm a lawyer." (I guess that when you spend that much money to become something, it better be a pretty important part of your personality when you're done!) And I hear other people describe themselves in terms of their hobbies or interests: I'm an avid read; I'm a volunteer; I'm a passionate fisherman, or whatever. And of course, a lot of people describe themselves as parents. And I do the same thing. I mean, to most of the people who know me, I'm Z, E, and M's mom. But a few years into parenting, especially if you're a stay-at-home parent, I think you have to start to wonder if you're ever going to be anything other than your kid's mom again.

There was a time when I was widely considered to be smart; when people actively sought out my opinion about things ranging from punctuation to politics. There was a time when I had an active social life and knew which places to frequent when, depending on the kind of crowd you were up for that night; when I knew how to make a martini and how to drink one and still usually chose beer. There was a time when I had all kinds of friends, all ages, all interests, all backgrounds; when we used to get together and just see what was going to happen that night. There was a time when I was considered funny; when I used to say witty things and people would laugh. And let's not forget one of the fundamentals: There was a time when I used to spend all my time with people who were totally, completely potty trained--people whose poops were no one's business but their own. Those were the days, huh?

Now I'm considered an authority on how to get babies to sleep, on how to stop fights from getting out of hand, on how to handle diaper rash (there are several schools of thought on all of those, just so you know). Now the places I go rarely vary: the living room, kitchen, and E's room for most of the day, occasionally interrupted by the TV room and bedroom. Once a week or so, I venture out to the bank, and on Saturday I usually make it to the grocery store. Once every couple of months, I make it to book club, and I'm trying to make it to PTA once a month. I remember only that you shouldn't put too much vermouth in a martini; but I'm very good at mixing a bottle, even with that tricky, crazy thick formula. I still usually drink beer, but now it's always at home. I haven't heard from most of my old friends in years. We lost touch when I got married and had kids and they didn't. I had birthday parties and day care, and they had budding careers and new relationships. Now they may have the birthday parties and day care, but too much time has passed, and we just don't connect anymore. We try to email or call occasionally, but it never lasts. And new friends are hard to find when you never leave the house. No one thinks I'm funny anymore, unless you count my 10-month-old, who laughs when I stick out my tongue and wiggle my finger at her. And very few people in my life are potty trained. Let's face it: poop is now a major player in my life/

I'm not complaining per se. It's not that I would leave my kids and go off to some sparkling new job all day if I could. I love getting to be here with them, and I love the kids I stay with. (Both genuinely true and the "standard mom disclaimer," as my sister calls it.) But I think in addition to the isolation that comes with staying home with kids, which is another post in and of itself, it really calls into question who exactly you are; if you're not all the things you used to be, who are you instead? And have all the previous dimensions of your personality been replaced by "my kid's mom"? I try to do things--this blog is an example--that remind me and everyone else that I am more than just the person I appear to be from day to day. But I wonder how everyone else handles it. And how women have handled it for hundreds of years. Because I do wake up most mornings wondering, now that things have changed so much in the last 5 years or so, just who I think I am.

Welcome to the Blog, My Dear

The time has come to join the technology generation. Now that I'm the mother of three kids who will all grow up with cell phones, PDAs, mp3 players, and other technology that I haven't heard of yet but which they will all positivly die without, I guess it's time for me to try to keep up.

A little about me: I'm 32 and grew up in Minnesota. I met my husband the day after Christmas 1999, and we were married in Itasca State Park in September 2002. Our oldest son, Z, was born the following August. In December 2005, our second boy, E, was born. And this past March, we had our daughter, M. Until E was born, I worked outside the home, but since March 2006, I've been doing day care. It's been a phenomenal way for me to stay home with my kids, though I do get a little nuts for grown-up talk sometimes. I crave adult conversation and have recently joined a book club and the PTA mostly to get to talk to grown-ups. I swear I used to have actual friends, but between the kids and staying home and my old friends sort of disappearing, I'm pretty much down to my sister and a few "virtual" friends. Not that I object to "virtual" friends--they're a damn sight better than nothing. But I would love some more actual people in my life--you know, people who are potty trained.

Things get stressful and you start looking around wondering if this is where you really expected your life to end up. That's when you start blogging, I guess, sending your thoughts out into the universe to see if anyone else out there has any insight, or whether your thoughts are even worth anyone's time. We'll see.