My Shameful Secret About Motherhood

Spoiler alert: I don't love every minute.

Hey, beloved readers. Today I’m sharing a really old piece that I wrote and sort of forgot about. But I’ve dusted it off as it comes at a pretty timely moment in my life of transition and struggle. I know I’ve been dancing around some heavy stuff in my summer newsletters, and I’ll elaborate a little more at the end of this post. (Yep, I just gave you a dangling carrot to read the whole thing. Wait, dammit, you could just scroll to the end! Oh, don’t do that!) Also, every time I see someone subscribe to this newsletter, it literally makes my heart swell and flutter. And sometimes I cry. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the support of your following my work, truly. It means the world. More on that in my post -script below.

I’m Back for Tea Time

“I’m back for tea time,” my three-year-old announces, galloping into the room in her nightgown. I sit on a pillow in my living room, color-coded index cards littering the floor surrounding my open laptop. She picks up a black cast iron Japanese teacup, a wedding gift from my oldest friend who I’m certain had not envisioned these future tea parties when selecting the blessedly unbreakable teapot and cups.

I pick up my water glass and clink it against her heavy teacup. “Cheers!” we announce together, beaming. My daughter takes a dainty sip, peering over her cup at me through a canopy of dark lashes. We hold each other’s gaze as we drink, and I feel that tingly magic of connection rippling between us.

She gently sets her cup on the coffee table and sprints off, bare feet padding away on the tile floor. I hear strains of laughter from the family room where she rejoins her eight-year-old sister. And I am alone again with my work. Mercifully.

A late season snow day meant that both of my daughters were home from school, and the classes I taught had also been cancelled. While I had been unsure what our day together would hold, the truth was that it was the happiest I had felt in weeks. I was in my zone, doing the meaningful work of organizing essays in an anthology about postpartum motherhood, virtually uninterrupted, while being graced with periodic glimpses of my children. I could gobble up the sweetness of them with my sense of agency intact, a rare and mythical combination for a mother of young children.

I frequently vented with other moms whose children were similarly, well, childlike, but only occasionally shared a hint of my shameful secret: I preferred to enjoy my children in small doses. I had never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom; I suspected that such a position would reveal me to be one of those angry moms, the kind who have no patience and say too many swear words and are embarrassingly incompetent at craft projects. But I also knew I would be depleted by a full-time job, arriving home empty and spent and likely my voice would become shrill as I struggled to find space for just my self in the few hours we all spent together.

And so instead I worked part-time and cobbled together a career of sorts that was hopelessly littered with hobbies that didn’t know what they wanted to be when they grew up. Tasks spilled over, and collided, and didn’t match. It was ugly at times. I found myself longing for the moments when my children were self-contained and I could retreat from them, back into the familiar vastness of my own thoughts, a comforting yet sometimes disorienting landscape where I had been getting lost since my own childhood.

Four days a week, I taught music classes for toddlers and their caregivers. After dropping off my youngest child at the daycare center across the courtyard from my workplace, I counted the steps until I crossed the threshold of my classroom. Every time, 87 steps. I focused on the pounding of my sneakers against the pavement, or the slap of my flip-flops, the quiet crunch under my snow boots. I inhaled deeply, sometimes crisp and biting air, sometimes heady and pregnant with summer. I found myself in that space, in the 87 steps between being a mother and being a teacher. That was all I would get that day until my children fell into bed and I became, if not myself, a wife. 87 steps.

I thought nearly daily of Glennon Doyle’s words about the Greek concept of chronos time—the chronological measurement of seconds and minutes—and  kairos time—the qualitative measurement of moments— and how I swung from one soul-bursty kairos interaction to the next above a swamp of tedious, aggravating, sticky chronos moments that seemed to drag on all day. I shamed myself into acknowledging that, in a small handful of years, I would trade all my color-coded index cards, carefully curated spreadsheets, and leisurely cups of espresso to rock in a glider with a sweaty toddler head on my chest.

And it’s true. Nearly five years later and unable to have the third child whose ghost dances around in my heart, I do long for tiny teeth and tangled hair and sweet morning breath on my neck. And yet I bask in the space that now exists for myself, the space I don’t have to sneak out into a dark alley during family game night to procure under the cover of night.

Although the pendulum has swung to the other side, if I am honest, I spend much less time craving the weight of a sleeping baby than I do savoring my time alone, working in bed with only the company of my dog. In a blink, my youngest is now eight, the age her big sister was on that perfectly balanced snow day when we enjoyed tea time every twenty minutes over the course of a productive and quiet morning.

During those bewildering trench years, Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting was my Bible. Now I have reached the point where I can tentatively whisper, knocking furiously on wood, that the scale has finally tipped back toward fun.

Vacations are often relaxing, require less frenzied planning, and consist of reasonably enjoyable activities. My children’s senses of humor have evolved past the lopsided 3-part knock-knock jokes of years past, and now we get the giggles frequently and have our own litany of inside jokes. I long ago abandoned any efforts to curtail my profanity around my daughters, and they often feel like co-conspirators in our daily adventures.

Most of my favorite parenting moments still occur within the sweet spot of mingled separateness and togetherness—sitting next to one another in bed while reading our own books; snuggling during movie nights, physically connected and yet left alone to our own internal interpretations and creative adventures. I try not to probe this awareness for an indication that this reflects badly on me, confirming my darkest suspicions that I am indeed a Selfish Mom.

I recently lamented to a mother of 3 under-5-year-olds that by the end of the summer, I was exhausted from the constant togetherness and couldn’t wait for my daughters to go back to school. “Oh, I love it,” she said earnestly, without any trace of irony. “This is exactly the way I want things.” I don’t believe she meant to shame me, but I instantly regretted showing my hand. These are the types of women who thrive with 3 or more children, I chided myself. This is why there was no third baby. You aren’t built for it.

I know that before I want it to, the balance will shift again out of my comfort zone, away from this era in which I am thriving and into the realm of more separation than I prefer. Soon I will become nostalgic for this fleeting phase as well, pining for any incarnation of “tea time,” even if it requires me to shell out $150 at a fancy hotel to bribe them to consume actual tea with me. But for now, I am content with the transient and fragile equilibrium I have discovered—room for myself and yet glorious togetherness with my daughters.

I sit by the side of the pool, unapologetically sunbathing while my children play in the water an appropriately safe distance away. They have made a new friend who appears to be about my youngest daughter’s age, and she suggests they have an underwater tea party, a timeless classic of little-girl pool games. My almost-teenager raises her eyebrows at me. “Go on, you’ll never have as much fun in your whole life as you will during an underwater tea party, “I encourage her.

From my solitary perch by the edge of the water, I watch the sunlight kissing the tops of their heads as they bob beneath the surface with their new friend. My oldest emerges, kindly remarking, “Nice tea party!” with a wryness in her tone only discernible by me.

I smile at her and agree. It was a perfect tea party.

***

Wow, you guys, I started writing that eight years ago and picked it up again three years ago, and here I finally am, giving it a home. I think it was hard to share my vulnerability with my admission that I preferred my children in smaller doses than other moms; being an ambivalent mom is a fragile thing that opens you up to judgment, and maybe I wasn’t ready to put it out there quite like that. And now, my girls are about to turn seventeen and twelve, and by nature, I already experience them in smaller doses: they spend time with friends, they like their bedrooms, they enjoy alone time (fine, let’s call it what it is: screen time). But I am also in the middle of a divorce, and I find myself faced with a reality that will inevitably involve maybe not smaller, but fewer, doses. And here I am, ambivalent again. And vulnerable.

I’m not going to elaborate on the experience just yet. Like my early childhood parenting revelation, it’s too fresh. I will share more when I can, and in the meantime, focusing on my work—my writing, my podcast, my memoir, the shows I produce—is filling me up and reminding me who I am at my core.

And one last thing. When I started writing on Substack, I was so pleased to see friends following me here by subscribing. But last month, without my saying anything, people started becoming paid subscribers. And it made me cry with relief and gratitude. I have never put it out there, ie “hey guys, you can become a paid subscriber,” yet somehow a handful of people voluntarily did it. And it filled my heart, restored my confidence, and made me feel braver at a time when I know I’m going to need to be even more creative to provide for myself and my girls. So that said, if any of you are in a position to consider a paid subscription and support my work, oh my, it would mean a lot. And it will give me a chance to consider the “bonus” pieces I will start to share with paid subscribers. Oh, my, the possibilities! Behind the scenes of writing a memoir? A detailed report on the Eras Tour concert I got to attend? More raw motherhood confessions? Guess I better get to brainstorming.

Swifties unite!

And if you are a free subscriber, please know that I adore you as well, and feel a flood of gratitude and delight when another reader joins me here. Thanks for reading, and giving me a much-needed push to be on here writing weekly. I feel like I’m home again.