I could call myself a domestic engineer, like my sister-in-law did. But if I knew anything about engineering, I’d be able to open and close the playpen without stifling more four-letter words than you hear in an episode of “The Sopranos.”
Domestic engineer is far too supercilious a title. Mention it at your husband’s office holiday party, and people might ask where you got your degree. After a few eggnogs, you might reply, Episiotomy U. or Postpartum State. The next day at your “office,” your responses won’t seem as clever—except to your mother, who holds master’s degrees from those institutions.
Stay-at-home mom sounds benign enough until you’ve spent three straight rainy days trapped inside with a two-year-old who thinks Nancy Reagan coined “Just Say No” for him, and a one-year-old who chews on shoes—including the pair you’re wearing. Then you’d realize that stay-at-home mom is an oxymoron.
A stay-at-home mom stays home only when Dad drags the kids to the Home Depot (thank God) or when the governor declares a state of emergency. Otherwise, she’s at a Moms-and-Tots meeting, the supermarket or the mall, dropping quarter after quarter into the Batmobile ride.
Full-time mom is another misnomer, because it implies that working mothers are part-time mothers, and that’s just not true. Anyone whose Day-Timer reads “Marketing report due,” “Pediatrician appointment” and “Make eighteen cupcakes for preschool party” on the same page is not only working full-time at motherhood, she’s working overtime.
Besides, “full-time” doesn’t even begin to cover how much time I spend at my job. Most full-time workers put in forty to fifty hours a week. I put that in by Wednesday. In my job, I’m on call around the clock. Add family vacations, where I bring my work with me on a very, very long car ride, and full-time becomes all-the-time.
Homemaker is a quaint title, but inappropriate. I haven’t made any homes, though I’ve seen enough construction videos (thanks to my sons) that I probably could build a decent cabin—or at least a nice shed where I could hide. But really, I’m not making a house so much as I’m trying to keep my toddlers from tearing ours down.
In some ways, homemaker sounds worse than housewife. To me, a homemaker does all the same things as a housewife, but with a warm smile and a meatloaf she whipped up between craft projects and Christmas carols. She certainly doesn’t have a toddler throwing a tantrum on the kitchen floor because she won’t let him have animal crackers for dinner. A homemaker? By five o’clock, I’m too exhausted to make dinner, let alone a home.
I wish I could think of a better title for the toughest job I’ve ever had. But no matter what I come up with, my accountant will likely just put housewife on my tax returns anyway. And the Social Security Administration will keep sending me reports with zeros on it. Perhaps that’s just how society values what I do.
But the next time someone asks, “And what do you do?” I’ll just say that I do what my mother did, and her mother did. I’ll say it’s such a hard job, my husband wouldn’t want to do it, and my father wouldn’t know how. I’ll say my kids are very proud of what I do. And they should know, because they come to work with me every day. And then I’ll go chat with the septic-tank cleaner.
Jennifer Singer
The Littlest Girl Scout
I admit it. I’m not cut out to be a soccer mom.
I’m not class mom material, either.
I don’t bake homemade chocolate chip cookies. I don’t even boil water. In fact, when my daughter, Alexa, was in kindergarten, as part of a “Why I Love My Mommy”
Mother’s Day project, her teacher asked her to name her “favorite dish” that Mom cooks.
“I don’t have one,” she said.
“Oh sweetheart, there must be something your mother cooks that you love. A special dinner? Your favorite dessert?”
“My mommy doesn’t cook.”
“She must make something,” her increasingly desperate teacher insisted. “Jell-O?”
After lengthy consideration, my daughter listed “cereal.”
So it was with much trepidation that I recently learned Alexa wanted to be a Brownie.
I am a mom who is great at making up stories, singing off-key songs at bedtime and remembering the names of every Pokemon. But with three kids, a dog, a rabbit, a parrot and a veritable aviary of finches, life in our household is disorganized at best. Dinner is a haphazard affair, clothes always need ironing and shirts missing buttons are given safety pins in their stead. I flunked home economics in high school. Clearly, I did not have the makings of a Brownie-badge-earning mom.
“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to mask my dread. Her delighted “yes” sealed my fate.
I made it through the camping trip, even through crafts—though our potholders were decidedly ragged-looking. Then came the year’s highlight: the cookie sale. Mentally, I counted my immediate family. I figured they were good for about ten boxes. I’d buy a few as well. That brought Alexa to a total of fifteen boxes or so—not too shabby.
Her dad picked her up after the cookie sale meeting. Horrified, I watched as they struggled through the door with six CASES of cookies. Cases!
After coming to, I managed to sputter, “What’s all this?”
“Her cookies,” my husband answered. “Each girl is assigned six cases to sell.”
“But what if we can’t sell all these?”
“We bring them back,” he said. “No big deal.”
“Oh no, Mommy!” Alexa cried out. “We have to sell them all. We just have to! The troop will make fun of me if I don’t. One of the other Brownies told me that last year, not one girl brought back any cookies.”
Apparently, we were going to be hitting up Grandma for a lot more than the four boxes I had mentally sold to her.
After ten days of ferocious selling, we had managed to sell a case and a half. Cookies were stacked in my home office from floor to ceiling—or at least that’s how I remember it. I dreamed at night of Thin Mints chasing me down dark alleys.
After four more days of selling, we still had four cases of cookies.
Then came one of those days that happen to moms like me—moms whose kids never have matching socks and whose kids’ toothbrushes end up being chewed by the dog or falling into the toilet.
On that particular day, the dog jumped in the lake after a duck. The duck escaped, but my dog resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon. One dog bath, one muddy mom and thirteen towels later, the dog was clean. But my two-year-old son had been suspiciously quiet during the whole ordeal. In fact, all the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. Even more than kitchen pot-banging, TV blaring and loud bickering, all moms dread “the silence.”
You know . . . that silence.
“Alexa,” I said, emerging from the bathroom, mud clinging to my hair, “where’s your brother?”
“I dunno.”
I went tearing through the house. Was he coloring on my bedroom walls again? No.
I raced to the kitchen. Spilling cereal on the floor? No.
He must be in his room. Was he climbing on top of his dresser pretending to be Superman again? Not there.
“Nicholas!” I called out. Then, fearing my computer keyboard was being covered in apple juice, I ran to my office.
There sat Nicholas.
Surrounded by sixty-one opened boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
In fact, he had the cellophane for the next pack in his teeth, attempting to bust open another box. Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Buddies and Shortbread Dreams, or whatever the heck they’re called, were splayed from one end of the room to the other. Cookies were crushed beneath his chubby little feet, and crumbs covered his rosy cheeks.
“Cookies!” he squealed.
As I wrote out a check for over $250 dollars worth of Girl Scout cookies, I came to the realization that I am most definitely not a Brownie mom.
But my son? He’s the hero of Troop 408.
Erica Orloff
Off the mark by Mark Parisi
www.o
ffthemark.com
Reprinted by permission of Mark Parisi. ©2003.
Lost and Found
This is how it begins: One night in early September, while watching TV, you decide to make some popcorn. So you go into your kitchen to dig out the old popcorn machine, but it’s nowhere to be found.
Then, a week or so later, you feel a chill in the air and decide it’s time to get out the portable space heater. But after an hour or two of searching you turn up nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
The pace begins to quicken.
Over the next fortnight, you search for, and fail to find, such items as your hair dryer, Mr. Coffee machine, tea kettle, kitchen shears, assorted luggage, extra-large bath towels, hair mousse, Chinese wok, sewing kit, desk lamp, portable phone, electric blanket, transistor radio and electric blender.
As the mystery deepens—and the list of missing items grows—all kinds of scenarios run through your head. A cat burglar. Early senility. A friend who borrowed your luggage. A blanket deposited at the cleaners. The phone left at the beach house.
Then, before you know it, it’s the middle of October—the time when parents of college freshmen traditionally visit their kids on campus—and suddenly the Mystery of the Missing Household Items is solved: They are all residing in a room on a distant college campus—the one occupied by your college-age son or daughter.
Why is it, I wonder, that nobody warns parents that when your kids go away to college, so do all your small appliances?
And why is it that none of the child experts—not even Dr. T. Berry Brazelton—sees fit to include this developmental phase in their books on raising children: “At approximately the age of eighteen, the average, college-bound teenager goes through a period of relocating household appliances. A general rule of thumb is that after each visit home, the student takes at least four additional appliances and/or household items back to college.”
My own first encounter with this developmental phenomenon occurred while walking across a campus on freshmen parents’ weekend. From a distance, I spotted my son. I recognized him, in fact, by the sweater he was wearing— an intricately patterned ski sweater I purchased for him in Norway.
However, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that while it was, indeed, the aforementioned sweater, it was not my son.
“He lent it to me,” said the young man who was not my son. He then directed me to my son’s dormitory.
And what a pleasant surprise it was, upon arriving at the entry to my son’s room, to be greeted by an old familiar friend—the “Welcome” mat that had disappeared from my very own front door just a month before.
Inside, I was made to feel equally at home. There, reclining among the batik-covered pillows from my den, I sipped a pineapple frappe from my blender and marveled at how many wonderful patterns could be formed just by stacking up assorted pieces of my luggage in an interesting way.
And the climate control in the room was excellent. My space heater going full blast in the bathroom produced, I thought, just the right temperature, even on a day when it was eighty-five degrees outside. Another plus about the bathroom was that I got to use my own towels again—the monogrammed ones that had been given to me as a wedding gift.
I also enjoyed seeing my white, pearlized wastebasket and matching soap dish again. I’d forgotten how attractive they were.
To my surprise, I felt equally at home in the room across the hall. Invited there by my son’s friend, I noted how attractive my desk lamp looked sitting next to my portable phone. And what good reception my radio got, even up here in the hills of the Berkshires.
From there, it was a movable feast over to a room occupied by another of my son’s friends. The popcorn made in my popper never tasted better, and I must say that my old patchwork quilt looked mighty good thrown across the back of his friend’s futon.
In fact, I was so impressed with this recycling of household goods that at Thanksgiving I scarcely minded when the sleds disappeared from the garage, or after Christmas break the disappearance of an Edward Hopper poster, a small side table and a bedside reading lamp.
At spring break I minded even less when a number of sheets, pillowcases and pillows—along with a small desk chair—vanished. Actually, the house was beginning to look more spacious, less cluttered, somehow.
What I did mind, however, was that awful day at the end of the school year when the son arrived home with a U-Haul trailer. I think you know what was inside.
Alice Steinbach
“Sorry. I thought you were ready
to be kicked out of the nest.”
From The Wall Street Journal. Reprinted by permission of Cartoon Features Syndicate.
A Long Day at the Track
Time is never more relative than when stretched across the full span of childhood. When my sons were toddlers, sticky and close, omnipresent and ever needy, my days were measured out in two-hour intervals between meals and naps and baths and stories. As our lives moved forward in these minute increments, I did not think it possible they would one day be leaving home “before you know it,” as innumerable friends told me. After serving them some twenty thousand meals, lowering the toilet seat thousands of times, issuing countless reminders that cars need oil to run, how could a mother so centrally engaged in their growth not know they were growing up?
Can a woman really forget cooking two and a half tons of macaroni and cheese? Can she forget playing solitaire until dawn on snowy nights, waiting for the sound of tires crunching into the driveway? Can a mother really not notice that her former baby’s life has changed completely when he receives, among his high-school graduation gifts, a pair of purple silk boxer shorts and a scented card written in a dainty script? No, I think a mother always knows these small incidents are adding up to Something Big. We just understand, like the fans who come faithfully to the Indy 500 every year, that it’s going to be a long day.
Lurching and stalling through the early years, time moved slowly as the rookie drivers tested their limits, learned to take the curves and conferred with their pit crews. I got used to thewhining noises and oily fumes, paying only half-attention through each repetitive cycle until a warning flag or frightening accident snapped my mind back on track. Then, in the riveting final laps, time suddenly accelerated. Fixed solely on the finish line, convinced they knew all they needed to know, my sons put the pedal to the metal and ignored any further signals from the pit. They barely stopped home long enough to refuel with a favorite pot roast.
While they forged ahead with a speed that bordered on recklessness, I found myself falling back in time, seized with a ferocious desire to remember everything about this long day at the track. As twenty years of effort compressed in those final laps, I felt the stirring excitement and lumpy throat I often get in movie theaters. Living with two jocks has undoubtedly had a profound influence on my imagination, because the musical score that kept playing in my head as I watched them fling themselves into the world was not Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto or Pachelbel’s Canon, but the theme song from Rocky. I know I should be far beyond the moist, sentimental lumpiness of motherhood by now. But as it turns out, I’m not.
In those months before Ryan and Darren left home, a familiar gesture or facial expression would trigger a sudden onslaught of memories, I would see the faces and hear the voices of all the children in the family album, all the little guys who used to pepper my life but who have now disappeared. Whenever I caught a certain provocative smile, a long-suffering frown, I would be suddenly infused with a peculiar clairvoyance. I would travel back and forth in time, remembering the first time that look appeared, knowing how often it would return to delight or haunt me. I was swamped by one of these mind floods in a shoe store last August, as Darren tried on a pair of loafers in a size that could have comfortably fit both of my feet in one shoe. I remembered the first time I saw those astonishing appendages eighteen years earlier then attached to the smallest, most fragile human legs imaginable. Once more, I was standing woozily next to his
crib in the preemie intensive-care nursery, leaning against his incubator for support as I watched his labored breathing. This impatient son, who had crashed into being two months before his due date—very nearly killing us both—lay unconscious amidst his tangle of wires and tubes while I tried to suppress fears about underdeveloped lungs and heart muscles.
He was tininess itself, his delicate pink form stretched nakedly under sunlamps to cure his jaundice, his skinny limbs covered with dark, prenatal fuzz—cilia hair for the amniotic sea he was still supposed to be in. I watched him take a wet gulp of air and then, suddenly, stop breathing entirely. My own throat seized as the line on his heart monitor flattened. The nurse jumped up when she heard the alarm and rushed to his incubator, flicking his tiny heel a few times until the rhythmic beeps of his heart returned again.
“Apnea,” she said, sighing with relief. “They get so tired they forget to breathe.” She then went back to her paperwork at the nursing station, little Darren Oliver went back to sleep, and I worried about brain damage for the next five years.
Darren’s traumatic birth was my first encounter with the reality that motherhood was not, and would never be, entirely under my control.
The young rookies eventually morphed into grown men, putting thousands of laps behind us. The repetitious and monotonous routines of our past do accrue into Something Big, with time and patience and a whole lot of luck.
Mary Kay Blakely
The Kiddie Garden
It was a major event, moving into our first house, a cracker-box rambler in the suburbs south of Minneapolis. What an adventure to look out our very own living room window at our very own driveway, our very own front yard with lush green grass—a heady experience for a young married couple expecting their first child. What a change from the apartment living we were used to.
The back yard had not yet been sodded, but I assumed the builder would be coming soon to finish the landscaping. Wrong. So excited about moving into my new house, I neglected to read the fine print where the builder contracted to sod only the front, leaving the back yard full of weeds and clumps of dirt.