The M word

I read "Our 'Mommy' Problem" a while back, and have been mulling over the implications of the issues it brings up. In fact, what I think about it has changed over the course of composing this blog post. It's not as simple an issue as it seems.

In fact, it's taken me so frickin' long to wrap up this post that I had the chance to read this before publishing. And I'm glad I did. At least one other person cops to the sorts of things I'm talking about here.

I suppose I should open with the fact that I began the mommy problem article prepared to be indignant about the contents. Being a mommy is pretty much my raison d'être. I tend to look upon people who say things like "I don't want to be just a mommy" as ungrateful at best, because I waited years to be a mommy and would love nothing better than to focus all my attention on the little people in my care. Honestly, I can't think of a job in the world more important than raising a member of the next generation. These people are the future of the human race. (At the very least, these people will be picking our nursing homes. Respect them.)

But then I read the article, and it makes some good points. Sure, I've rolled my eyes at the exact stereotypes the author calls out. I just don't think one's breeding status is the issue here. Rather, the use of "mommy" as a derogative term is the grown-up version of "like a girl." I grew up defying my femininity because of such thinking. And I know we've come a long way, but such sexism is still rampant. (I've conducted a few not-so-scientific experiments to see if my gender helps or hurts me, professionally and personally, and the bias is still alive and well. In women as well as men.)

To be a mother is to be female. And to be female is still not something to aspire to. It's scut work. In order to be admired these days, women have to "have it all." With great hair and a smile.

"Hell, send me back to the 50s," I've said on several occasions. (Okay, grumbled.) "If I didn't have to earn the money and manage the finances and stay on top of things like home and auto maintenance, I could easily keep the house spotless and have dinner on the table every night at 6. In high heels and pearls, even."

But those would be the kinds of things "just" mommies do. In order to get respect these days, you have to be a mother and a career woman and produce Pinterest-perfect crafts for your kid's class and volunteer -- all while looking ten years younger than you are, working out five days a week, and serving your family politically correct, nutritionally sound organic meals three times a day.

And you wonder why those mommies need a night out?

But I'm going to go a step further and say that we bring this on ourselves. We buy in to this idea. It's one thing to strive to do better; it's another to set standards no one could possibly meet. (The people who appear to? They pay people to do most of that.)

The issue is not whether or not a woman has a child. (Though I acknowledge that it's expected; childfree women are regarded with a wary eye, like they might suddenly turn cannibal at any given moment.) The issue is what we define as ideal womanhood, and the end result is no more realistic than a magazine cover. Even in my longed-for 1950s existence, life wasn't that simple. My grandmother did not have a dishwasher, a microwave, a Roomba. She did not have Netflix and the internet. What sounds like a productive morning for me took her all day. No, the issue is that the motherhood-related tasks are not glamorous. Men don't aspire to them, brag about them. They're girl things. And nobody wants to do things like a girl.

I grew up in a time of transit. Women worked, but it was still kind of a novelty. Their incomes were viewed as supplementary at best (even when they weren't), and their careers were ones that could be set aside for child rearing (even when they couldn't be). When I think back to career-oriented women in the 80s, I think Enjoli ads and Virginia Slims models. If you were a career woman, you could (and should!) also be sexy...but you likely weren't a mommy. The Enjoli jingle does not mention changing diapers and wiping runny noses while frying that bacon.

I think the reality was closer to my mom. She considered her career and her role as my mother equally important, and imparted that message to me. She wasn't perfect. She did some things better than other mothers, and others worse (or not at all). But she didn't try to do it all. She spent her time on the things that were important to her, and let the rest slide. As I imagine most moms did. We were a generation of latchkey children, and there were pros and cons to that. But did we really suffer from the absence of Mom in an apron with a plate of homemade cookies when we came home?

Apparently, we think we did. Except we've set our sights a little higher than homemade cookies. We still bring home the bacon, but instead of merely frying it up in a pan, we're molding it into mini-quiche crusts and feeding it to an intimate gathering of 50 close friends in our sophisticated, spotless, yet child-friendly great room that we cleverly remodeled and decorated over a couple of weekends with handmade, on-trend touches crafted from recycled pallets and twine. After working an 80-hour week in some high-profile career helping the less fortunate. Without mussing our salon-fresh blowout or wrecking our manicures, both documented in adorable selfies.

If that's the ideal, I'm proud to be an abject failure. I'm tired of being measured by someone else's ruler.

I consider it my job to give my child a realistic role model to look up to. Someone who screws up and drops the ball but keeps trying. Somebody who knows what is, and what isn't, important to her, and who makes choices instead of making herself (and everyone around her) crazy. Someone who doesn't require Red Bull and Ritalin and the misplaced admiration/envy of others to function.

I'm not the kind of mom you see in Better Homes and Gardens. I game. I'm into sci-fi and horror, not chick lit and rom-coms. I'd rather my gifts come from ThinkGeek than Kay. My clothes are more hoodies, less haute couture. What effort I put into my appearance is to please my daughter, who is more fashion-conscious than I remember being at 3. (Or 13.) Her father has longer hair than I do, and wears skirts more often. (Manly skirts, but still.) I am the sole income earner, depending upon my partner to provide child care, cook, and clean while I work full time, run a part-time freelance business, manage the finances, and keep everything on schedule. I clean and organize and cook and craft when I get a moment, but not at the expense of down time and family trips to the park. (Lately, naps are a high priority, because I am 6 months pregnant.) And I'll be honest -- I let a lot of stuff fall through the cracks. I do my best, but there is only so much I can do in a day.

No, this isn't the motherhood I pictured. And whatever the feminine ideal is these days, I'm not it. But I think I'm closer to the norm than the glossy lifestyle mags would have us believe. I don't know why we pretend otherwise, to be honest.

Especially when the end result is so inconsequential. Twenty years from now, nobody will remember if I miss a deadline or a bill payment. Nobody will know or care if my house was clean, my hair was frizzy, my cabinets full of orderly rows of neatly labeled mason jars. Nobody will give a rat's ass what my annual income was. But my child will remember if I made time for her. If I laughed a lot. If we took walks and made cookies and snuggled on the couch. Think back to your own childhood, and tell me what you remember.

That's what I thought.

"Just a mommy," indeed.

Helping my child find her words

I've known for a while that my daughter has trouble communicating verbally. If I were totally honest with myself, I've known something was up since she was a baby, and called me "Mumma" instead of "Mama." Babies say Mama. It's in all the books. But I thought it was cute, and chalked it up to the amount of BBC we watch.

Plus, she did say a few words early. Once, when she was 4 or 5 months old, as I kissed her goodbye to go to work she said, "Bye-bye, Mumma." She never said them again. But I was just amazed that she said them in the first place.

Still, though, when she started calling everyone, including me, "Dada," I should have spoken up. But my pride was wounded. I carried her in my body. I was the one who walked the floor with her for hours, until the pain from my c-section incision made me cry, when she had colic. I was the one who couldn't be parted from her for a few hours, let alone overnight. I upended my life for her, and she called me Dada.

Eventually, she did start calling me Mumma again, so I relaxed. But she didn't say much else. Her father was a late talker, though, so I let it slide.

For about three years.

There were signs, of course, that something was amiss. Doctors spoke to her like she could respond. (Why are you asking her? I'd think. She's a baby. She can't tell you.) A study we participated in diagnosed her with a verbal delay of a year or better. Kids in stores -- younger kids -- would talk to her in complete, coherent sentences. But Anya was silent.

Not that she couldn't understand us. She understood every word we said, sometimes when I wished she couldn't. Spelling words out in front of her didn't even work; she learned very quickly what C-A-N-D-Y and N-A-P spell. But she mostly communicated with us using gestures and grunts.

She's an only child, I told myself. Surrounded by doting adults. She doesn't talk because she doesn't have to.

She's been an overachiever and a perfectionist pretty much since birth (oh, the temper tantrums she threw while she was learning to roll over!), so I figured she was waiting until she knew she could speak perfectly before she even tried to speak. That she'd start out talking in complete, grammatically correct sentences.

They say Einstein was a late talker.

Still, red flags were starting to go up. Strangers were starting to treat her like she had some sort of developmental delay. Or worse, like she was just a brat. Other kids would shy away from her, sensing something was up. She started throwing tantrums when she couldn't make us understand her.

She's tall for her age. People are judgmental assholes. Those kids' parents took the "stranger danger" thing a bit too far. Toddlers throw tantrums all the time.

Then we concluded the study, and the researchers urged me to get her into speech therapy. The words "special education" were bandied about.

Stupid scientists. Kids are not machines; they develop at different rates. She's so advanced in other areas. So what if she's slow to talk? Her father learned how to talk without any special intervention, and now you can hardly shut him up.

But I couldn't ignore it any longer. My child was nearly 3, and just...didn't talk.

Also distressing to me was her attitude towards books. I've read to her since she was in utero. When she was a baby, she loved it. She'd listen to me read four, five, six books in a row, those bright, alert eyes never leaving my face. But as she got older, she started shying away from books. Then outwardly disliking them. Not just books, either. Flash cards, coloring books...anything and everything bearing the printed word elicited anything from disinterest to an outright tantrum.

I started speaking at 6 months. I learned to read at 3. I wrote my first story at 7. In high school, I wrote thousands of pages of fiction (all crap, but still). I've worked as a writer and editor since I was 25. I read Kindle books while I walk, even after editing for 10+ hours a day. Words are my thing.

I do not understand why my child tantrums at the suggestion of snuggling up with her mother and being read to. But she does. I do not understand how my child can say a word once, then be unable to repeat those same sounds, but it happens all the time. And it's terrifying.

So I made an appointment with a speech therapist, and she was diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech. Which basically means that while she has a vocabulary of hundreds, thousands of words, she doesn't say them because she has trouble remembering how to make the sounds.

I had never even heard of this issue before, but the diagnosis fit. She was talking a little more, but still tended to call everything "dat" (like she used to call all of the adults in her family "Dada"). The words she would actually say were more rote phrases (Mumma, Daddy, please, thank you, welcome, bye-bye, bless you) that she'd heard us say a thousand times; however, though she mimicked our inflections perfectly, she usually garbled the enunciation: "please" became "eese" and "thank you" became "dank oo." When she attempted spontaneous speech, it came out as gibberish.

Still, it wasn't an easy diagnosis to swallow. We really couldn't afford the therapy, and I'd just found out I was pregnant, to boot. But could I sit idly by, knowing what I now knew? Would she ever speak normally? Would the world ever see her as I see her -- sweet, brilliant, kind, fierce, beautiful -- or would they just see her as "special," with all its stomach-churning implications?

Part of me was tempted to just work with her myself. I am a communicator. I have two college degrees that say I know my way around the English language. Plus, I'm intelligent; I can read up on this stuff, the theories and techniques and strategies. Nobody is more motivated to help my child than me. But I still had that nagging doubt: What if therapy were the only thing standing between her and a "normal" life?

So despite my misgivings, she began twice-weekly speech therapy. And at first it was wonderful. She really clicked with her therapist, and looked forward to sessions. She didn't seem to be making a huge amount of progress, but enough that I couldn't justify quitting.

Then her therapist left the clinic, and we went through a series of substitutes until a new one was hired. But these sessions rarely went smoothly. She just didn't seem to click with these other therapists, any of them. She began dreading the sessions, and throwing tantrums that wasted most of the allotted time. Even more worrying was that she seemed to be backsliding -- losing words she'd acquired, and resisting our efforts to get her to talk. Finally, I couldn't justify the expense any more. Financial hardship that leads to improvements is one thing. Financial hardship that seems to actively be doing harm is stupid. I cancelled her standing appointments.

And then the most amazing thing happened: She blossomed. Overnight, it seems. Every day, she talks more and more, and the words are clearer and clearer each time. Not just single words, either, but complete sentences. Grammatically correct ones. It's still a little fuzzy around the edges, but it's speech -- speech that is in many ways more advanced than her peers.

Not that she doesn't still have some issues. Consonant clusters are hard for her: the lk in milk, for instance, and the pl in please. She usually just drops these syllables. But we're working on it. And she's working on it. It still comes as a shock when she comes up to me and starts talking; after all this time, it's incredible for me to finally know what's going on behind those gray eyes of hers. To hear her sweet voice. There is no sound more beautiful than that.

Such a wonderful feeling, to finally have a conversation with my daughter.

Bucket lists

Know how sometimes all it takes is one thing to throw a wrench in the whole works? You're running along full speed, and the toe of one shoe catches the heel of the other foot and you go tumbling down?

My grandfather died.

He died on a Saturday. The first of November. We found out on Sunday, drove up Monday, attended the funeral Tuesday, and drove back Wednesday. I've been chasing my tail ever since, trying to take care of the things I was supposed to do those few days. Which didn't really seem like that much until I didn't do it.

I haven't even had time to process how I feel about losing Pop. I'm awash in deadlines and bills and the holidays and busy work. It's all just frickin' busy work.

This is not how I want to live my life. Not that I want to do nothing -- quite the opposite. But to feel like I can't take a few days off, to grieve or travel or just hang out with my family a bit, without having to run double-time to catch up afterwards...well, it makes taking time off seem not worth the effort.

A while back, I wrote this:

So I just read this: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/15/forget-the-bucket-list-these-are-the-things-you-should-avoid-before-you-die.

Here's a list of things I still want to do anyway:
* Learn to play an instrument. (Actually two.)
* See Stonehenge.
* See the Blarney Stone. (Not kissing it, though, because ew.)
* Visit Paris. (Though it's not as high on my list as Stonehenge...or even the Blarney Stone. If I were honest, however, I'd probably be happier visiting a less populated area of France.)

Nothing else listed was on my list in the first place, or if it was, it no longer is. One of the nice things about getting older is you can be more realistic about yourself. (I would, for instance, hate Burning Man. I might not hate it quite so much if it were nearer to civilization and not out in the desert, but I would still hate it. Crowds are not my thing. The desert in the summer is not my thing. And camping? Forget it.)

There aren't a tremendous amount of trips on my bucket list. Because while I would like to see certain places, I hate traveling. Mostly what's on my bucket list are things I want to learn and do. And someday I'll get around to writing it all down.

But the bottom line is, I don't let lists like this inhibit me because we're all different. One person's dream is another's personal idea of hell.

I really meant to revisit it, polish it up and maybe expand upon the train of thought. But it never happened. Because I can't think that far ahead. Right now, my priorities are more like this:
* Make the minimum amount I need to pay bills next month.
* If  I do that, and still have time left before invoice, I try to make enough to maybe pay for some of the prenatal care fees.
* If I do that and still have time left, I try to squeeze in a little extra work so maybe I can buy Christmas presents.
* Spend time with my family.
* Take a nap.
* Maybe clean a little, wash a load of clothes.
* Go for a walk if I have the energy.
* Work on a project.
* Fret about all the things I'm not doing.

Long-term, I'm plotting how to afford nursery furniture for the baby, and trying to come up with ways I can cut corners financially so we can start saving up for a house; the kids can share a room for a while, but in a few years they will likely start to protest.

That's it. That's all the further ahead I can think. And all I can manage to worry about are the basics; bucket list items aren't even on my horizon.

Even still, things fall through the cracks. Like the letter I'd meant to send my grandparents, with recent photos of my child. I finally decided to hold out until I had the sonogram, and send those pictures too. My grandfather died the day after I had the sonogram, though, so that didn't happen.

But perhaps the point I should be taking away from all this is that I'm focused on life. My life, right now. My daughter's life. My partner's life. The life that's growing inside of me. Not what I want to do before I die, because I don't plan on doing that for a good many years.

I really don't have time for it anyway.

What I need to do is start finding ways to take care of the essentials that will leave me time to enjoy the stuff I want to do, too. Because there's nothing that makes time feel wasted like pointless busy-ness. If I were to die tomorrow, that would be my regret. Not the big things I didn't do, but the little things I missed.