Author: Jenny

Like a magpie, I've always been drawn to things that have sparkle, from rhinestone-embellished housewares to gold lamé get-ups in second-hand stores or beetles whose metallic armors reflect in the sun. But in my interactions with the world, oh, how I can fixate on the not-sparkly stuff: ill-timed traffic lights, a web page that won't load, the impolite server. Post-pandemic, I took to saying, "Everything's broken, and nothing works." It's not good for the soul, and as a lifelong writer, I've noticed it's also not good for creativity. This blog is about redirecting my attention to what's good in the world -- seeking and finding joy in the same way I notice sparkly objects around me -- and writing about it. There is an old nursery rhyme about magpies, "One for Sorrow," which tells us a solitary magpie symbolizes sorrow, but two magpies symbolize joy. This blog is about looking harder for the good stuff. Here's to finding those second magpies.

Shifting (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 19, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

I am sitting in one of my favorite coffee/wine shops. Two women, upwards of 50, are arguing about real estate at at a table nearby. “Don’t tell me that!” one practically shouts at the other, a real estate agent with a smart teal coat and a ruby-red shirt, a boy peacock of sorts. The peacock is fanning out her feathers as she tries to interject comments about dual-agency representation.

“But, you–” she tries.

“I already know that!” shouts the frumpier one.

“Well, let me tell you how–”

“I’m a lawyer!”

The indignant one reminds me of Tracy Morgan when he used to do his Star Jones bit on Saturday Night Live.

As I sit here typing in my too-big jeans, hair not yet combed, mascara most assuredly smeared under my eyes, I feel a million miles away from these women. They have Day Jobs, careers that they allow to ooze into the rest of their lives until their lives seem inconsequential without their jobs. They have appointment books and toggle-buttons on their Talbot’s coats. Whatever today’s prime rate is, they know it. I am not like them anymore.

I have been out of the work force for more than five years now. My last job, running the publications arm of a vibrant agency in DC that aspires to building small-d democracy around the world, is foggy to me now. I can’t really remember what it’s like to have a day job, to have an alarm clock wake me at a designated time on weekdays, to sleep in on weekends. There are expensive clothes hanging in my closet, business cuts, that do not fit me anymore but hang as some sort of reminder of where I’ve been. I’ve no intention of putting them on again.

I have worked in cubicles. I have had an office with a door. I have boarded planes for assignments. I have ridden, coffee and briefcase in hand and feelings of dread in my gut, on too many elevators going up. But the last time I stepped foot on one of those rides, sporting my work hair (twisted on top, red pens stuck into it), it was going blessedly down. “I am never going to work in an office again,” I said out loud to my then seven-months-pregnant belly. Exhilirating.

Five years later, I am readying to become an earner again, if only marginally so, and I feel like a stranger in a strange land. The women near me today in the coffee shop remind me how a job can cause you to care so much, or think you care so much, about things that really do not matter in the grand scheme. If I had a nickel for every time I lost sleep over choosing a font face for a publication…

I’m really not ever going to work in an office again. And my journey back will be slow. I already do a little freelance writing now and again. I’ll find more. I’ll build up a client base. I’ll start knocking away at that book I’ve always intended to write. But I will never again look at a job as some sort of alternative to being a stay-at-home mom. It’s apples and oranges.

Sure, like all parents, I’ve had to make a choice between going to work and staying home. I’m just beginning to see that there’s a problem with the way we all talk about that: We talk about it as though having a job and staying home to parent are comparable somehow. As though, in some way other than that they usually take place during the same time of day, they are options in a shared category. As though we are choosing between caffeinated or decaffeinated, between living on the coast or living on the plains, between Catholicism or Islam. But it isn’t like that all, and thinking of career versus motherhood as though these are some sort of this-versus-that takes the value out of each, particularly out of the latter. Take a potato and set it next to a robe. Put a Latin textbook alongside a turtle. Just because you ask me to choose one over the other doesn’t mean the two have anything to do with each other in any other way.

Yes, I’m deconstructing to cope, because the thought of returning to work almost pains me somehow. Don’t get me wrong: I love to write. I want to contribute. It feels good to earn. But it’s the way the world around me has come to talk about motherhood versus job, the idea that’s been chiseled so deeply into my brain. This idea that a job can somehow fill that metaphysical place that parenting babies and young ones has created, that all-consuming place where the self is given over so deeply, where — where what? I don’t know. It’s otherwordly, and not really a place or a time at all. It’s like another dimension. And the idea that a job is going to fill in spaces created and left behind by this deeply complex experience in my life? That’s some kind of sacrilege.

I just have to untangle this idea that work is anything other than what’s next. It’s not in place of. As I untangle, I see a little part of what hurts: When it’s time to work, it means my children will be in less need of my constant supervision and hands-on care. It means they will be farther down that inevitable path of separating from me and becoming their own people. Good for them. And yet it means that I will have little to no use for all the things I’ve learned in these past five years, from diapering to breastfeeding to navigating and respecting the emotional complexity of preschoolers to the science of napping biorhythms. These are not easy things, not to me, not a one of them. Like a painting on a Buddha Board, these things will fade into past as the present takes its proper place at front and center. It hurts me to know it will all dry and disappear.

As for going back to to work, sitting down in coffee shops and arguing about font faces or deadlines? It will be about coming to terms with the notion that I have to return again to the world from which I’ve cut myself off for so long. It’s a world where news headlines figure prominently, where with spidering fingers, my life will stretch out from itself and the protective nest I’ve molded for and inhabited with my young children, to include things other than. It will include, once again, a space for the adult me and my now small-seeming ambitions that once propelled me to wake up each morning and answer to an alarm clock.

So, as I sit here in this coffee house, readying to look at freelance gigs, I will try to remember that things that matter so much less than whether my son is circumcised and whether my daughter feels valued, can still matter. They must still matter.

FIVE (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 9, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

While baby naps…

I asked you if you wanted apples or cheese for a snack.
You said graham crackers.

I asked you to be quiet while you went upstairs.
You tip-toed so melodramatically that you fell into the wall.

I told you I’d be down after I dried my hair.
WHAT!? you yelled at the top of your lungs, DRIND your hair!? DIRED it!?

I told you I’d play cats with you. And I did.
But then you quit because I wouldn’t talk for all the cats and the doll.

I tried to explain the art of negotiation to you.
And you picked your nose the whole time and stared off vacantly.

I asked you to be quiet while I put a little butter on the grahams.
Instead you yelled for the cat, as loud as you could.

You requested more crackers than I, because there was an odd amount.
You took five and gave me two, the broken ones.

I asked you to eat your snack at the table.
You started there but then wandered over to the couch.

I told you to eat them at the table again.
You started there but then wandered over to the loveseat.

I told you to eat them at the table again.
You started there but then wandered over to pet the cat.

I snarled at you to eat them at the table again, damnit.
You started there but ended up under the table.

“Hand them over,” I said, and I took every last crumb of your crackers and shoved them into the fridge as dramatically as if the fridge were my suitcase, and your crackers were all my belongings in this world. Then I put my wide open hand close to your eyes and said, “FIVE. I told you FIVE times to eat at the table.”

Yes, I know it was four, but I wanted to use my whole hand for emphasis. Because I’m seething. Because I’m so tired of age FIVE. Because FIVE doesn’t hear, and FIVE talks too much, and FIVE figures out how to lie, and FIVE can shoot you dirty looks, and FIVE just doesn’t love you back like FOUR does. Because FIVE is killing me softly. And I’m just so bad at FIVE.

So, could someone please phone THIRTEEN, and tell her I’m not ready, that I might not ever be ready for her? Can she skip me over for some other mom, one who knows how to roll with the punches?

Once baby wakes…

You called for help from the bathroom.
I found you on the pot, looking like the pistil of a flower with your fancy skirt pulled up around you.

I said it seemed like we were having a lot of bad days latey.
You said you didn’t like it.

I told you that things would be better once you started listening better.
You said it’s just that you wanted to eat the crackers under the table.

I started to say oh, never mind, what’s the point of talking.
But instead I remembered eating snacks under my bed when I was small.

I hugged you, zipped you, and said you could finish your snack now.
You said you’d rather draw a picture for me.

I said that would be nice.
You said you can’t wait for summer and going on picnics together.

Me, too, I said.
Me, too, said you.

advice · daughters · healthcare · motherhood · preschoolers

Psychobabble (from the Momplex Blog archives)

March 4, 2009February 27, 2023 JennyLeave a comment

This won’t be pretty. There will be blood, lots of it. Your hair is going to fall out in big clumps in the drain. You might become chronically anemic. It will be expensive, of course. And you’ll never sleep well again. Get yourself a good chiropractor and therapist. Vomiting is a given. So is diarrhea.

No, it’s not cancer, ma’am. It’s parenthood.

I make no apologies about being the one who made the call to the psychotherapist for my preschooler. Yes, I’m the one responsible for the hour we spent today in the tiny office with the soft chairs and the pretty dollhouse with the multiracial dolls wearing clothes that I could only presume covered anatomically correct bodies. I’m the one who decided it was time.

“I’m going to show you a sliding scale,” the doctor says to my tensed up child. “The top of the scale is the most scared you could ever possibly be, and the bottom of the scale is not scared at all. You move the slide to answer my questions. Ready?”

My daughter nods, clutching Cake and Frosting, her stuffed cats that happen to be wearing gorgeous Barbie gowns, a Mary Kay pink-daisy keychain, and various tacky scarves. I mean, they’re wearing the trash basically. I realize after we arrive that the therapist is taking in the whole scene of my daughter and me, and these annoyingly accessorized cats give a total irrelevant and false message about who we are.

“Okay,” the doctor continues. “What if I say the word shot. How does that make you feel?”

My daughter moves the slider up about midway and clenches her teeth. The doctor can’t tell, but there are tears being held back. Cake and Frosting are damn near being suffocated.

“What if you were to get a shot? How would that be for you?” she continues.

My daughter shoves the slider to the very top, making sure it can’t go any farther than where she’s pushed it.

“Okay. What if I were to just put a shot on the chair over here?”

My daughter moves the slider down just a smidge. It stays there for the remainder of the questions: What if we put a shot without a needle over there? What if I asked you to give Cake a shot? What if, what if, what if.

I explain about the wasp sting three years ago, how my daughter has come to associate it with shots. I don’t know why. Who knows why kids think as they do? I explain about the screaming when she sees a hypodermic needle, even in cartoons. I explain about the doctor’s kit that my daughter obsessed over for more than a year, how we didn’t realize for that long that she and her friend were giving each other pretend shots where — well, where they shouldn’t have been putting things.

“In their private parts?” asks the doctor, instructively.

“Yes, in their vaginas or thereabout,” I respond, instructively. “So, we realized my daughter had been trying all that time to work something out. I’d told her at some point, when she asked about it, that shots are usually given in the arm, leg, or butt. I didn’t realize that the meaning of butt wasn’t entirely clear to her at the time. To her, butt was the whole vicinity of the crack, front to back. So, basically we’re dealing with a fear rooted in a misunderstanding from when she was two, one that had her thinking shots feel like a wasp sting, and possibly in the vagina. That’s what’s up.”

“Aaaaaahhh,” says the doc. But she doesn’t really say it like that. I just think I hear her thinking it like that.

I like her actually. I like how funny she is, how she explains shots are given usually in muscles and then proceeds to demonstrate how the butt is a big muscle. I’d already explained this to my daughter, of course, but the doctor does it better. “When I squeeze it, I go up,” she says, rising a little off her swivel chair. “When I let go, I go down.” I’m in stitches, to be honest. She’s going to be great.

But then she asks my daughter this question: “Does your mom worry a lot? Is she a worrying person?” It makes my skin feel too tight. I’m not a worrying type. I don’t think I am at least. I’m careful, yes, and conscientious and protective, but not at therapeutic levels. I’m proud when my daughter says I’m not a worrier.

When the doctor asks whether my daughter sees me cry a lot, I laugh. This one doesn’t make me nervous. It’s part of our life. My daughter has seen me cry quite a bit, particularly when my husband was deployed. So, I’m amazed at the answer. “One time, when she was pregnant,” she says, “in the bathroom after she threw up.” (I’ve got a bipolar-spectrum disorder, people. My husband was gone for 15 months out of my daughter’s five years on Earth. Her apparent forgetfulness assuages.)

“Is she playful?” the doctor continues. She’s totally drilling. My daughter smiles and nods. “Does she hug you a lot?” WTF? I feel like I’m headed for the gallows for some reason. It’s like watching my daughter on stand at court, being questioned about the kind of parent I am. What face am I supposed to be making during this interrogation? Can I hold my daughter’s hand, or will that be perceived as manipulation here?

“You know what she does?” my daughter says with a burst of laughter. “She gives me a hug and says, ‘Let’s see if we can become one!’ And then she squeezes me really, really tightly, but then when we come apart, she says, ‘Awww, we’re still two.'”

I’m kind of proud watching her burst out of her shell with such a show, maybe even blushing. Don’t you know how it is? How you question whether you’re doing an okay job every day of your parenting life? How good it feels to get some affirmation that the good stuff is sticking? But then I see the doctor’s expression, and it’s not good.

“Mom,” she says to me, prescriptively. “She needs to be her own person.”

Here’s where you can picture a balloon deflating, a leaping gazelle being shot in the neck, or a space shuttle exploding just after liftoff.

You know what? I call bullshit. I’ve lost hair over this kid. I’ve bandaged her blood and cleaned up her vomit. I’ve lost sleep when she stole it. I’ve lost friends and time, too. But I’ve never been a smother mother. A let’s-become-one hug to make her laugh is not a metaphor for our relationship. It’s me trying to kill time between playing plastic horses. It’s lighthearted fun.

“She is her own person,” I say, refraining somehow from gesturing at my daughter’s ensemble, a garish swimsuit-fabric pink dress with gold detailing that would have done Mrs. Roper proud, paired with turquoise-and-gold argyle tights and broken green Crocs. “She just so happens to be a person afraid of shots.”