Great Mommy Power

I have been feeling so defensive lately about being somebody’s Mommy. It’s an odd feeling, because normally I love that—hearing Laura call me to ask me about something, or even when I’m in a different section of a store and Will’s with Chris and I hear him start hollering, and I can tell no matter how many other kids are yelling which one is mine. I have Great Mommy Power: I can pick up my crying child and he’ll stop. But you’re also not exactly a free human when you have Great Mommy Powers, and I seem to be a little prickly about that lately.

No doubt the cross country season contributes to this. Chris and I share the parent job pretty well, I think, although sometimes it divides up oddly and even a little unfairly for him; he has never cut the first kid fingernail, but he also gives most of the baths—certainly bathtime is more frequent than fingernail trims. I generally get sick kid duty, though, because my job is flexible. I flipped through Faulkner Fox’s Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child recently and stopped to read when I ran across a discussion of how she actually logged the parenting work both she and her husband did alone—when she was doing the bulk of that work, she created this system in which she built up Frequent Parenting Miles that she traded later for a week long trip away. My first thought: how bizarre. My second: could I do this?

I guess that since all year but fall Chris and I divide kid work relatively evenly, I get more frustrated with the less equitable divisions that occur when he’s coaching cross country. Practice doesn’t end until 5:30 every weekday, so I have to pick up the kids just about every afternoon, which means leaving work fairly early because of my commute. He does take the kids every morning, and I guess I should try to get out of the house early so I can add that time back in early, but despite all these years of rising with my children and the sun, I am still not a morning person and often don’t get into my full work swing until mid-afternoon, when it’s time to pack up and leave shortly afterwards. I had a work crisis Thursday and Chris was able to sneak out of practice early to get Laura and Will for me that afternoon, but most of the time I’m doing that Mommy driving thing—about an hour and fifteen minutes to get everybody picked up. Some Tuesday and Thursday nights the team has meets, and I swear it feels like they have a trip practically every single Saturday, even though that’s not the case. Certainly Chris is not an absentee Daddy, but I am alone with the kids a lot more during the fall.

Alone time has its pluses, but normal life generally doesn’t fall into that category. Cooking dinner, or checking homework, for instance—although Chris gets home in time to eat most nights and usually cleans up the kitchen afterwards. Taking the kids to the grocery store or Wal-mart alone before dinner is tantamount to hell on earth, and I generally come home complaining about being a single mom, which in saner moments I recognize is an insult to the many women who really are single mothers all the time, not just during Wal-Mart trips. How can an errand, such a small thing, be so overwhelming? I’ll be almost done with the grocery list when I realize I somehow missed lemon juice or whatever, and whatever I’ve planned for dinner that night invariably requires teaspoon after teaspoon of lemon juice, or heck, maybe it was whole cups. I’ll be standing there trying to decide if it’s worth going all the way back to Aisle 2, or should we just have cereal instead, when William will sudden notice he left his Scratchy in the car and needs it now or he’ll die. At these times, you’d think that perhaps I’d think fondly of my considerate husband and how rarely this occurs, how Chris happily keeps the kids so I can go, or how very often he’ll go grocery shopping instead, but no, I stand there fuming and hating sports. Emotional balance doesn’t seem to enter into the equation.

Shortly after Halloween last year, I hurt one of my childless friend’s feelings when he started romanticizing my wonderful life, my blissful marriage, my perfect children—because all I could think of was how much I wished I could go have coffee alone and read a book for hours without worrying about when I had to get home to cook dinner. In my own defense, my ex-friend Leon lacks social skills himself, and I was at least still trying to be nice in our email exchange when things turned ugly. I never wrote back—I don’t need that grief. Well, last week after a meeting, some friends and I went for coffee at Starbucks, one of my favorite rare—and always just a bit guilty­—treats, second only to having coffee in a bookstore completely alone. When as we were leaving, we ran into this old friend. I felt my face actually seize up as I tried to make nice. I think we’d exchanged about five words each before we were exchanging polite sniping conversation just like before—how lovely it was for him to be hanging out reading Candide alone, how on earth were my perfect children, and was his book finished yet? My worst self, just all hanging out. All I could think was How on earth can he not have finished writing his book in five years when he has no children? If I had had five years with no children and his teaching load—which is half mine—my God, I probably could’ve written two books.

I keep reminding myself that I thought I was busy before I had kids too. I never could get work done. I wrote slowly, and had the luxury of writing slowly. Now, on a Saturday morning even when Chris is at a cross country meet I can write a couple of paragraphs and wash clothes and print baby shower invitations at the same time, although at the expense of being a good mother, since I have to plunk Laura and Will down in front of the television to get it done. I wouldn’t give my children up for all the leisure time in the world—but I might loan them out for a few hours of it. Does this make me a bad person? It certainly in this world makes me a bad mother—although maybe that’s just because I’ll admit it.

The Back to School Bash at school recently brought it to a head. I got out of class and walked over to the games, where two of our junior faculty were playing with their kids. Both men’s wives had brought their kids over for a hour or so in the middle of the day. The Student Government Association had rented one of those inflatable obstacle courses, and Will and Laura would’ve given up even an afternoon of uninterrupted Disney Channel to play in there, but by the time I drove back home to pick them up and got us all back to campus, Will would’ve missed his nap. He’d have bounced for fifteen minutes, I’d have to turn around and take him home again so he could sleep, and I would’ve lost exactly half my work day for him and Laura to play for those fifteen minutes. My children are invisible on campus, an odd state of affairs since I was visibly pregnant with the second at this job for at least seven months. I went from embodying motherhood to being an invisible mother—I don’t bring them to school I can’t bring them and work. The visible parents are these untenured dads with their stay-at-home wives, who bring their kids around for visits. I watched those dads following their toddlers around the obstacle course, missing my own kids and knowing that they’d both be back in their offices in an hour working again, their wives and babies on the way back home.

I used to teach an essay called “I Want a Wife,” and I still think of it often. I couldn’t get it out of my head that afternoon. It’s not that I want a wife, because I’d sort of hate to do that to anybody, to tell you the truth. But that being a Wife, having Great Mommy Powers, is so consuming and exhausting. I found myself yesterday yelling at Laura because she wouldn’t help me—and well, that’s fair enough, she’s ten and certainly old enough to participate in our shared household life, which includes things like making sure you can walk in her room. But what angry yelling, so disproportionate to her piles of toys and laundry. I wish I knew why I feel so furious sometimes with people who certainly have no personal responsibility that merits being a focus for that anger—shouldn’t I just remind Laura again to clean up her room instead of exploding at her? Shouldn’t I want to support those junior faculty dads as they make parenting a visible part of their lives, not kill them because they have something I don’t? Maybe it’s just that questions like these have no real answers (and certainly not before breakfast). I guess the only thing to do is keep working at it, questioning the anger, worrying it over like an old bone, making sure the outlet isn’t my kids or friends or Chris. Maybe I need a voodoo doll for general cultural purposes, like whoever designed grocery stores to be such kid-unfriendly zones even though moms do most of the shopping? Who knows. But Chris bought us Krispy Kreme doughtnuts last night at the grocery store—maybe a doughnut that I didn’t have to shop for will help. Time for breakfast.