Each morning the Plain Dealer is delivered to our doorstep. On school days, Hugo gets up at 5:30 am, starts the coffee, feeds the dogs and retrieves the paper. Because of his intense performance and rehearsal schedule, mornings are when Hugo does most of his homework. But first, Hugo reads the comics. Jules usually calls second and because Max is hurrying off to work, I let him read them before I do. Some days I don’t get to them until the end of the day and when that happens, I verify whether my horoscope panned out accordingly or not.

But now, on the dark mornings of winter break, the boys have been sleeping in and I read the comics while they still dream in their chilly bedroom over the garage.

On Monday, the comics dwelt overwhelmingly with New Year’s Eve and specifically with resolutions for the New Year. I had moved on to the other sections of the paper when the boys joined me one by one at the table with their coffee and cereal. “Have any of you thought of anything you want to do differently in the New Year?” I asked them. Nobody responded coherently and taking advantage of the relative silence, I went on. “We’ve had a wonderful year if you think about it: Claude has just finished his first semester of college, Hugo is doing well in Madrigals, band and school, Jules has just grown up in so many ways. We had Lyra this year, Max is in a good place at work, I’m writing regularly.” It would be fair to say that Leif has been tyrannical as a two-year-old, but kindly nobody did.

I also mentioned the dark events in the past month—the shootings in Newtown and upstate New York as well as the horrific rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in India. Violence and suffering are at the elbow of merrier holiday cheer this year. None of the victims could have predicted these events and taken preventative measures. Which means there is nothing to rule out similar events happening in our own lives. Thinking of the loved ones of victims of events known and unknown subdues my joy at what a good year 2012 has been for my family.

Less notably so too has the cold and flu season subdued our holidays. Often, I don’t catch the colds that the boys bring home and share with one another like a pocketful of tricks. I eat well, take my vitamins and wash my hands frequently. When I do fall to their viruses, I’m often last. I fell to the latest sinus virus two days after Christmas and, as Hugo says, it’s a hell of a cold. After talking with the boys about their resolutions, I took more medicine and by nine in the morning was back in bed. Lying there, I caught up on email with my phone.

When I go to bed, particularly in the daytime, I imagine a sonar implant going off in each of the children’s brains because within five minutes they start appearing in the bedroom I share with Max. The first to arrive on Monday morning was Hugo, still in his robe. “Go and get Claude and Jules, Max too, and tell them to come up to the bed,” I told him. Each Sunday, NPR sends me an email of the previous week’s most emailed stories, it’s a great feature and I highly recommend signing up for it. Once everyone had flopped onto our queen-sized bed, I read to them one of the top stories.  It was about a study of 9- to 11-year-old children who intentionally performed daily acts of kindness. These kids were found to be happier and more accepting of their peers than the control group. Furthermore, the piece mentions similar findings in studies on adults. (Random Acts Of Kindness Can Make Kids More Popular : Shots – Health News : NPR)

“You know,” said Max, “I heard on the news yesterday about someone giving a Starbucks barista $20 to pay for the people behind him in line. One of those people also gave money and for most of the day everyone’s drinks were paid for by someone else.” I had heard that report too but then Max went on to tell me something none of us knew, which is that he regularly buys coffee for the person behind him at Starbucks. Max has a long commute to work and many mornings he stops halfway for a cup of coffee. “It makes a lot of people uncomfortable and I have to tell them ‘No strings, just let me get your coffee for you,’ but last week there was a man who came up and said to me, ‘You probably don’t remember me, but once when I was having a bad day, you bought my coffee for me and it made a real difference.’”

So instead of generic New Year’s resolutions, I asked everyone to think about doing random acts of kindness for a day or two and then talking about them at dinner. On New Year’s Day, Hugo shoveled the back parking area without being asked. Jules made bacon and pancakes for everyone for breakfast. Claude shoveled the sidewalk by the street, which is difficult because the pavement is uneven and the snow, much of which was plowed off of the street, is crustier. Max fixed a small wooden bowl my grandfather had made and my grandma had given me, which had cracked and sat in stacked layers on my dresser for nearly two years. But I who had initiated this kind act challenge, found it difficult to find an act of kindness to perform. I think the word “intentional” has me hung up. It seems like cheating if in an impromptu situation I am nice as opposed to planning a kind act. By day’s end, I felt as if I’d been generally nice but had failed to produce a planned act of kindness.

Human history is woefully stuffed with tales of aggression. Last month’s headlines were horrific, but little different than any month previous when considering all countries and not just our own. And the past is unchangeable. I like the political mantra Think Globally, Act Locally. I recycle, buy locally when possible, consider how the food I put in my mouth was raised and prepared. I always vote, I volunteer for campaigns and I give money to local candidates. I wonder if, along with environmental and political issues, random acts of kindness fulfill the grassroots goal of local action affecting global outcomes? I think most often I am a local optimist and a global cynic. Is Think Globally, Act Locally just a placebo to feel better about an individual lack of empowerment to change the world’s problems? Occasionally one person, like Dr. Paul Farmer who is the subject of Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, is able to change a segment of the world for the better, but few of us have the ability or desire to be a Paul Farmer. The best we can do is facilitate the Paul Farmers we know while ethically comporting our own lives. (Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World: Tracy Kidder: 9780812973013: Amazon.com: Books.)

Back to the Role of Parent

I stated in my first post that I do not want this to be a just another mommy blog, that discussed in these posts will, yes, be my family, but also questions on life and politics. But so often, if not always, all points swing back to family.

Family Is Practice

My children have been raised as Shambhala Buddhists and so far continue to view their spiritual development within that paradigm. They all know how to meditate, which is in some ways the equivalent of prayer in other faiths, and ideally done daily. While I don’t monitor them, I’m fairly confident that nobody in this house can claim daily meditation practice. What I do hear is from all of us is a desire to meditate more. It’s hard. Finding  15 quiet minutes in a house where seven people live, two of whom are babies, is nearly impossible when the sun is up. Yet those same meditation interrupters are the best teachers. Being a good parent means regularly putting the needs of your children ahead of your own desires. You desire sleep, but you stay up with a sick child. You desire listening to the radio in the car, but you listen to a Kindermusik CD for the umpteenth time. You want to react to your teen’s anger with equal anger but you don’t, or if you do, you later apologize with sincerity like you’ve not shown in an apology to anyone else. And for these and so many more examples, a fellow Shambhala Buddist once printed up T-shirts with the phrase “Family Is Practice.” One needn’t be Buddhist to understand this.

I would like to say that I am actively raising empathetic children who are growing into compassionate adults who will approach life with mindfulness. As their mother, I question my objectivity to analyze my sons’ qualities. What I do see is three teens (okay, Jules is still 12 ½) who enjoy their younger siblings. They are patient with Leif when he throws tantrums, they play with him in ways that border the worlds of adults and children and which Leif loves, and they pay attention to when he needs something, including a diaper change. All of them hold Lyra like she’s the best bundle of goodness they’ve ever come upon, which she is, but they’ve figured this out on their own. And that means they are considering someone other than themselves. Who knows if they’ll take that out into the world of their adult lives? I don’t, but I hope they do.

No Easy Pieces

I told Max before my last post that again I hadn’t written anything light and funny. “You’re Scandanavian, you can’t help that you keep going back to you inner Kierkegaard.” I don’t know if it’s my heritage or my personality, but I do brood. I’ve been working on this post for several days, contemplating the richness of my personal life and the contentment I see, at this moment, in all my children and my partner. All of this contextualized in the dark events reported last month.

True Confession: I love Facebook. I have issues from time to time with the policies of the company, but as a tool for communication, I embrace the technology. Before Facebook, family and friends rarely saw photos of my kids, as I’m just not efficiently organized enough for printing and mailing hard copies. With Facebook, I have stayed in communication with people who have moved away or I don’t see regularly. I have rediscovered old friends and become better acquainted with people I barely knew from my childhood. I don’t friend everyone and rarely unfriend someone.

When I checked Facebook this morning I found the following post written by someone with whom I went to junior high school:

I have come to the conclusion the only reason there are so many stupid people is that it’s against the law to shoot them!

Besides being profoundly tone deaf to the news, I imagine the person who posted this does not actually wish to shoot, and by implication kill, anyone. I imagine that this person had a frustrating day. Perhaps the traffic was bad getting home from work. Perhaps the cashier at the grocery store was rude. And, yes, perhaps someone did something stupid. I’ve been frustrated on days when things don’t happen as I want them to. Sometimes I can look past it, but other times it can put me in a foul mood. I may yell at the kids to clean the kitchen when asking them would have gotten the same, if not better, results. I withdraw in my own home, wishing to be left alone, which I will categorically tell anyone who tries to talk to me.

I don’t assume this person meant shoot people with limited IQs, such as my daughter. I don’t assume this person meant shoot people who aren’t college educated, such as my parents. I don’t assume this person meant shoot people with high IQs who have learning disabilities, such as two of my sons. I assume this person’s definition of “stupid” in this context was “anyone who prevents me from having what I want when I want it.” We’ve all been there. I imagine the people being called stupid were also not the family or friends of the person who posted. Random acts of kindness are easier given to those we know and love. It is harder for those we don’t know and harder still for those whom we don’t like for whatever reason. If there is transformative power in being kind, I suspect it is even greater when being kind to a stranger or an enemy.

This person’s post provides the perfect illustration of a commonly quoted Buddhist slogan:

Desire is the foundation of aggression.

It also causes me to think of my own language. At times, I speak with words that would convey a violence I don’t intend. For example, I recently said I wanted to pinch Leif’s head off when he was in the throes of a full-blown tantrum. And

My Random Act

I haven’t committed one that is intentional. Perhaps I will stop before speaking and think of what my words mean before I say them. Today is a new day full of promise and opportunity for me to do so. I hope anyone who reads this will consider doing the same. According to the aforementioned study, it may make you happier. I can’t tell you it will change the world, but the effects can ripple beyond you and your day, just as they did for the person whom Max bought a cup of coffee. Maybe acting locally while thinking globally is a placebo. But for most of us, it’s what we have to work with. Just try it.

Max and I have a new fantasy for disposing of our extra furniture and belongings: buy a small house in Charlevoix, Michigan and haul it up there. We’ve picked out the house, it’s right next door to my step-mom and her husband and where we occasionally stay we visit. It’s small enough to be easily maintained and the kids can roll right over to Grandma’s in the mornings when we are there.

In our minds, we have already moved in. We know where the extra dressers will go, the three double beds we don’t need, the antique shelves, the 1950s dinette, the extra dishes, cookware and linens. Don’t forget the decorative objects, original paintings, coffee table books. All fit perfectly in our little pied-à-terre.

Never mind that the cottage is not for sale. Nor that we couldn’t afford it if it were. Nor that we already own three homes. And what about the fact that not only does the house we live in have a three car attached garage, there is an outbuilding that is the equivalent of a four car garage? All full, yet only the mini-van gets parked inside.

“We live like hoarders!” I plaintively whined to Max this past weekend as I listed the rooms stacked with boxes. We’ve been in the house just over a year and, as the demands of our daily lives overtook the formerly pressing need to unpack, we became oblivious to the boxes. So much so that now we blithefully trot the goatpaths between the walls-o’-cardboard. Yikes! We really are hoarders!

For every improvement, there is an attendant cost.

That sounds like a quote from someone historical, but it’s just me (I wish I could say, an equal and opposite cost, because it sounds catchier. But that’s generally not the case). I first struck on this notion when I was an undergrad and at the time was pondering computer software. Computers were beginning to make automatic corrections and, as someone who began writing in the days of electric typewriters, I wondered if grammar and spelling would degrade in younger generations. Looking at the writing of my teenaged sons, I think it has. Hugo especially has pervasive capitalization errors because he relies on auto correct to clean it up for him. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not.

The word “cost” sounds negative and sometimes it is.

Take for example, buying a house. You might improve your financial situation by paying for a mortgage, in sense paying yourself, rather than giving your money to a landlord. However, as the homeowner, you now must do the yard work and maintenance on the house. Maybe you love yard work and maintenance, so that’s great for you. But all homeowners have had those times when things unexpectedly break and you, not your landlord since you don’t have one, have to replace them.

When I divorced, I got the house. The same month I took sole possession the water heater broke. A few weeks later the dehumidifier died. Followed in short order by the refrigerator, the washer, the dryer, the oven and the garage door opener. I became well acquainted with Alan, a sales clerk in the appliance section at Home Depot.

I believed then as I do now that I had greater security for my children and myself by owning my home. But without Home Depot’s wonderful 12 months-same-as-cash programs, I would not have been able to replace everything that broke in a timely fashion. Even with interest free financing, my money was pinched making those payments.

In other cases, improvements may only seem like they have an attendant cost but as those cute t-shirts say, it’s all good.

In the first few months after I had Claude, my first child, it was impossible to get anywhere on time. Born in January, I’d feed and burp him, change his diaper and dress him in his little snowsuit. I’d put on my coat and as I picked him up to walk out the door, he’d poop. I’d take off my coat, his snowsuit, his pants and diaper, clean his butt and then rewind. Or he’d spit a belly’s worth of milk down his front, causing another adventure in tiny clothing. It was then that I realized I had lived a completely self-absorb existence pre-baby.

Six weeks before Claude’s third birthday, I had my second baby. I was better at getting a baby out the door and would often have wee Hugo bundled into his car seat before suiting Claude up for the cold. Still, anything that involved getting in and out of the car overwhelmed me. There is no dashing into a store when you have two small children. The stroller has to come out, the baby goes in the stroller and then the toddler comes out. Hopefully you don’t leave the diaper bag behind, because you most certainly will need it if you do. In those days when I would see a woman pushing a stroller with one baby in it and no other children around, I would think she doesn’t know how easy she has it.

Now I have five, count them, five children! The Episcopalian Church across the street from our home has a community dinner each Wednesday evening. We are not members of the church, but have many friends who are. One in particular has made it a point to invite us to come each week and who could resist? I don’t have to plan a dinner, the boys don’t have to do the dishes and we get to visit with friends. Best of all, the food is delicious!

“You know,” I said to Hugo and Jules as we walked over to the church last week, “there are five of us here right now, but it doesn’t feel like so many people.” I was holding Lyra and Hugo had Leif’s hand. Max had gone to visit his elderly uncle that evening.

“What are you talking about?” asked Hugo.

“Well, if you had told me when I was a young woman that one day I would have five children, I would have imagined some crazy scene, like kids running around all over the place. But I’m walking with four of you right now and it’s not crazy—it’s just us, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, well, we’re each other’s company, we’re your peeps,” said Hugo.

Granted, I don’t have five little kids, which would be far more chaotic than having a young man (Hugo) and an adolescent (Jules) help me with the two peanuts. As my mother’s only child, growing up was very different for me than it is for my own children. I spent most evenings by myself while my mother worked in bars and my stepfather traveled for his job. I cannot imagine having only one child. Or as Lena Olin’s character says about small families in the film The Polish Wedding, “You wouldn’t bake just two cookies, would you?”

I greatly appreciate the fact that the human population is growing at a rate many find alarming and I fail big time on the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra in terms of putting so many humans on the planet. But I am a better person for having become a mother. Perhaps only one or two would have done the trick. But I had five. And I have learned from my five kids both that I am not the center of the universe but it is paramount that I take good care of myself in order to take good care of them. Children have humbled me and taught me how to hold my seat as the boss. They keep me grounded by reminding me who I am while pushing me to be my very best and to reach, reach, reach. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s also how I raise them—it’s a symbiotic gig. My kids bust my butt better and more often than anyone else. And they believe in me more than most do or will. Claude and Hugo regularly tell me to publish my book. That they believe in my writing makes me want to be a better writer. Every day.

Sometimes it’s a no-brainer that what you lose is better off lost.

Leaving a soul-sapping marriage is always an improvement, no matter how difficult it is to do so.

For years, I complained about what I did not like about my marriage. Then one day I did something different: I declared what I needed. I needed a partner who showed up, both physically and emotionally, for the boys and me. I needed sovereignty and for my partner to be a real partner. To support my ambitions just as I supported his; to invest in our children just as I had done; to build a life that on most days meant being together was better, easier even, than being single. And I was no longer willing to accept IOUs for changes in our relationship. That bank had gone belly up.

I got what I wanted, but not where I thought I’d find it. My demands were too high for my ex-husband, which is neither his fault nor mine. We found the meaning of “irreconcilable differences,” the cause often cited in newsworthy divorces. Our divorce was not newsworthy, but rather followed a predictable pattern to the bitter end, routinely confirming just how irreconcilable our differences really were.

I got what I wanted when, a year later, I fell in love with my friend, Max. He hit everything on my list. I fell in love with him a second time when many months later, he stepped into the lives of my boys and filled a void. Not by buying them things or trying to impress them. But simply by showing up. Even when it is inconvenient, even for situations that simply aren’t fun.

A New Life in a New House

Max had just built a three-story addition onto his home in a northeastern suburb of Cleveland when we converted from friends to lovers. It had been the home of Max’s father, who had died almost ten years earlier. Many of his father’s things—furniture, art, collectibles, papers—were still there.  Before returning to Ohio and his father’s house, Max had lived for more than a decade in other states and had packed a household of his own into the 1930s bungalow. While the older parts of the house were as full as a funky antique shop, the rooms in the new addition were invitingly open. A new life accepted the invitation.

My house is in Akron where, in 2003, my children and I solidly rooted after years of moving. When my ex-husband moved away, he took with him many family heirlooms he’d inherited including three dining room tables and two hutches. Beautiful as they were, it was a relief to see them go for they made me feel like the curator in a museum. If the house felt a little empty, or refreshingly open, it quickly refilled with furniture like water pouring into a capsized boat. One friend gave me a couch; another gave me dressers. Max himself brought over a leather wing-backed chair, a cabinet and tables. Soon my 1909 four square was as full as it had ever been.

For three years, we happily lived in two homes. When we had our first baby together, Max decidedly began staying most weeknights at my house and on the weekends we pretended his house was our pied-à-terre. His two cats grew terribly fat and lonely.

I don’t recall when we started looking for another house. We certainly didn’t rush and had we not had the world’s most patient realtor (www.barbsnyder.com), we might never have bought a third home. Time and again, a house would look appealing online and appalling in person. We soon realized that as much as modern floor plans have to offer, we prefer old construction. Solid doors, brass handles, curves in the plaster, quirks in the design, windows wherever possible. We’d go months without looking at any houses.

And then, like at the end of Miracle on 34^th Street when child actress Natalie Wood sees the house she’s been dreaming of and makes her mother and (soon to be) stepfather stop and go inside with her where they find Santa’s cane in the corner of a room, we knew immediately when we had found our home. All other houses we had dashed through, knowing instantly that they were not what we wanted. In the house that was to become ours, we went from floor to floor, room to room, squeezing hands, whispering, “Look at this.” Because he was the most resistant to moving, we had taken Jules with us whenever we looked at houses, including that day. “Please buy this house!” he told us. That evening, Max made an offer. It was quickly accepted.

It took us six months to fully move in. First, we emptied and rented Max’s house. Then we did the same with mine. Things we had long housed were discarded. For Max, that meant many of his father’s things. What had once been hard became easy, as we built our future instead of holding onto another’s past.

But like archaeology, it has happened in layers. Since moving in, we have had garage sales, taken a truckload of things to Habitat for Humanity, sent boxes of art to Max’s sisters in Colorado, sold things in an auction, given more to the American Cancer Society’s local Discovery Shop. And the back garage is filled with furniture that doesn’t fit in the new house. Built in 1940, it calls for a mid-century aesthetic and we both came from Arts and Crafts homes. Our Arts and Crafts pieces of furniture look incongruous in the new home. We have loved them, but they don’t belong here.

I only have one piece I’ve yet to let go of (yes, other than books of mine waiting for shelves to be built, the rest really is Max’s stuff). An antique child’s armoir-dresser built of dark wood in Mission style. It was in my room until I was in high school. Years ago, my mother called and said she was going to sell it unless I wanted to pick it up. Hugo used it for several years, but doesn’t fit in any of our current rooms. Corralled in the back garage with the other outcasts, a man spied it at our last garage sale and insisted on buying it. He kept coming back to the house to offer me more money until I cried. I just wasn’t ready to let it go. Not yet. Soon. Maybe.

p.s. Max reminds me, and wants me to inform you, that we have more rooms without goatpaths (kitchen, dining room, living room and four bedrooms) than with (our two offices and the basement). 

p.p.s. The basement is really big.

Many of you have asked if I’ve talked to my neighbors who are, to my surprise, voting for Romney-Ryan. Briefly, yes. And then I followed up with an email asking them to read the New Yorker’s endorsement of Obama (The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker). Because it’s a magazine, and not a newspaper, the New Yorker can and does go into greater depth and detail about why Obama should be re-elected and why Romney does not deserve the presidency.

Also, the Newsweek piece by Andrew Sullivan that I cited can be found here: Andrew Sullivan on the Promise of Obama’s Second Term – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Finally, I forgot to add that in addition to keeping good (great) grades, Hugo obtained a job at a dog groomers just before school began. He never has a day where he has not a single obligation, be it choir, band, or work. And he seems the better for it. He has so far paid $400 of the $750 he needs to go to NYC in March with the choir. He has also had to learn to navigate with his boss a performance schedule that at times conflicts with his work schedule. We parents do our children a great favor when we neglect to save them. They are better off saving themselves. Or, as I tell them, I will always push you, but I’ve got your backs.

My family gets a daily newspaper delivered to our home every morning and, as we all stumble down and pour our coffee (everyone down to Jules, who’s 12, have a morning cuppa), we call out who gets the comics first, second and so on. The kids read most of the strips I don’t (or don’t often), such as Garfield. I read ones that they don’t, such as Doonesbury. I get it. When I was in college in the late 80s-early 90s, I had friends who read Doonesbury regularly, but I couldn’t keep track of all the characters and didn’t know their histories and it didn’t seem worth trying. That is until George W. Bush was president and was depicted as a floating and frayed Roman helmet.  I still don’t know the storylines of most of the characters prior to the Bush II administration, but I have continued to read Doonesbury daily.

And as I start this blog, my first that is not a class assignment or private loop to connect with other writers, but a put it out there public blog, many of Gary Trudeau’s latest strips concern a previously successful writer, Rick, who now finds himself blogging for free on Huffpo. His wife is a successful political operative, his ne’er-do-well son has a runaway bestselling (wholly fictitious) memoir, while Rick struggles to even gain access to interviewees. So blogging is like hitting bottom for writers, or traditional writerly types.

Which raises a question: Does anyone else in their 40s feel caught between the new and old? I wrote my high school, and many of my undergraduate, papers on an electric typewriter. We had to look things up on the card catalog in the library (remember how they smelled? Closed up trays of paper, exuding the possibility of anything you wanted to know), haul books home and search for the facts to back up our assertations. But computers and the internet came while we were still young enough to grab on and switch gears. Today my own children have to do something called “dialecticals” whenever they have a reading assignment in high school. Very busy work, in which students must cite usually 30 passages in the book and explain why they are important to the piece, which is designed to minimize oh-so-easy online cribbing. Are paperbound Cliff Notes even still published? I can no longer write with pen and paper for any length of time, but I agonize at the thought of publishing becoming an entirely (or mostly) electronic media. I once crafted an entire (Flintstone-esque) living room suite of furniture using all my boxes of books I had yet unpacked after moving. I had a couch that could seat four, a coffee table and a recliner. I should have taken a picture, which would have been with a camera containing film (sigh).

But back to blogging: Unlike the fictitious Rick, I don’t have a successful writing career in my past. I’ve written successful academic papers, grant applications, newlsetters and so on, but I haven’t received paychecks strictly for my writing. I’m starting at the bottom. Many of my big plans have shifted over the nearly 19 years I’ve been a mother. Most recently, Max and I decided to have one more baby so that two-year-old Leif would have a sibling to grow with at home after all his older brothers had gone off. We assumed that before this last baby was born I’d have fulltime employment with benefits–career employment. We assumed incorrectly.

So here I am trying to write with small children at my breasts and knees (at least my breasts aren’t at my knees, not yet). I’m not an overachiever, try as I might to be one, so blogging feels about right. And since I started Whoopsie Piggle, all of a week ago, I find I’m thinking once again like a writer.

My 18-year-old son is coming home from college this weekend and I plan to have him help me with the technical aspects of this new endeavor. Unlike the blogger in Doonesbury, my boy won’t make me feel out of touch. Of course, my boy hasn’t published a runaway bestseller either. Not yet.

Blogs, hmm, who does that?

I have found the few mom blogs I’ve viewed are often intimidating or annoying–who has the time to cook fresh meals from scratch (locally grown, organic ingredients), hand wash cloth diapers and start a charity for children and their families? Hippie Martha Stewarts. Right, except there is that fantasy lurking in the depths of my soul too. Clean, yet quirky home. Artistically talented, yet always polite children. Very accessible mom who also has a successful career. Whoa, so what I don’t like about these blogs is probably what I want but haven’t managed to manifest. I stopped looking almost instantly.

Besides, who wants to be boxed into a mom-blog? Ah, Doris Day in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies is told by her husband, David Niven, that she is so much more than a housewife. “All housewives are,” she tells him. That was in 1960. Does anyone call themself a housewife today? I doubt it, but the bill of goods my generation was sold was have it all–career, children and great style. And make your parenting attachment style. And your career creative and lucrative and your style flippin’ creative as hell. Yeah, well, it seems the sales force was setting us up for failure or at least abiding frustration.

Here’s my reality:

I’m a 46-year-old mom of four boys, ages 18 to two years old, and one daughter who is six weeks old. Truly, had the two-year-old been a girl, I’d have stopped there. But I just knew this one would be a girl (yeah, so what if I’ve been wrong before?) and when our daughter was born last month the first question I asked the midwife was, “Is there a vagina?” She told me to just look myself. Yep, the ultrasound had not lied, girl, girl, girl! Yippee! I held our girl and we looked at her. Bluish, alienesque newborn, as they all are when they first pop out, we quickly noticed some other things. “Her eyes look Downsy,” I told the midwife. She calmly told me she’d do a newborn exam in a few minutes. The skin on the back of her neck was voluminous, when she turned her head she looked like she had a handle of flesh back there. And her pupils were ghostly white.

Our girl was born with Down syndrome and bi-lateral cataracts. She has been the primary focus of life this past month and a half, but not our only focus.

My oldest son, the first three children are from a previous marriage, went off to the University of Michigan ten days after his sister was born. The second boy is in the throes of marching band season and puppy love with a young woman who lives in Montreal (we are in O-HI-O), the third boy is working through hard issues with his father while the two-year-old is just that, replete with tantrums and an explosion of language and ideas.

Claude, Hugo, Jules, Leif and Lyra. Until I was in my late 20s, I swore I’d never have kids. I was my mother’s only child and neither of my parents impressed me with their parenting. Frankly, I was afraid of becoming a mother. But the urge kicked in when I was in my late 20s (hormones perhaps, mixed with a crazy love) and now here I am, the mother of a family considered large by most American standards.

I’ve been looking for fulltime work for five years. I received my MFA in creative writing at the end of 2010 in the worst economy I’ve ever lived through (and unless you are 90+ or from Brazil, it’s the worst economy you’ve lived through too). Last year, I worked at the local Waldorf school, where my kids  attend(ed) but the cost of two babies in daycare is $300 more a month than I was making. So I’m telling myself I’m on Maternity Leave (italics make it more official). I’m figuring out what’s next as things feel like a new segment of life is unfolding. One child launching, one arriving with a genetic disorder. I love having a job, feeling useful, collecting my pay. But if I’m on Maternity Leave I can ease up on the job hunt and start this blog, clean some closets, maybe even read some books. All while learning what Lyra’s needs will be long term.

It was a month before Lyra was born when a friend suggested I write a blog. It was all I could do to not impolitely dismiss her idea out of hand. But the idea geminated and I was given encouragement by my partner, Max (who is Leif and Lyra’s father). Claude started a blog as part of his homework for one of his college classes using WordPress and said it was easy to set up. And other than getting past all the ways I can give WordPress money, it was.

So here goes (yeah, the first post is mom-blog-ish).