NOVEMBER 2003

The FALL Issue:
Click here to download the entire November Issue as a pdf document.

• Fear of Falling -- Lizbeth Finn-Arnold
• Another Country -- Regina Walker
• Diving Deep and Resurfacing -- Joanne Detore-Nakamura
  
• Down Time With Nancy -- Gerry Di Gesu
• Falling Down -- Susan Krushenick
• Motherhood As A Curse -- Elizabeth Ross
• Yes, They're All Mine -- Elizabeth Katkics-Thompson
• Mothering Without A Net -- Michelle Kennedy
• A Caterpillar in Heaven -- Cheri Winterberg
• Crossing -- Joan Fiset
• First Flight -- Tracy Baginski McGinnis
• Haunted -- Inez Hollander Lake, Ph.d
• Learning to Fly -- Tracey Rotman
• The Locked Glass Door -- Carol Zapata-Whelan
• The Martha Complex -- Lara Shecter
• Mocking Marriage -- Karen Vernon

Fear of Falling

I recently returned with my family from a trip to Las Vegas and Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where we were visiting my in-laws. My children, Olivia (7) and Jared (4) are experienced fliers, having already flown on airplanes to Las Vegas (four separate times), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and North Carolina, And in June, we are planning to fly to Seattle for a friend’s wedding.

It is obvious that my husband and I like to take yearly vacations. And even with kids, we aren’t afraid to fly. Not that it’s easy flying with kids. We’ve been puked on during take-off and had to sit on a six-hour flight with a car seat that reeked of said puke. We endured one of the worst flights ever during what was perhaps one of our shortest flights. Flying back from North Carolina, (airtime less than two hours) Jared cried from start to finish. The steward kept asking us if “everything was okay.” We were seated directly behind the first class seating, so I’m sure the steward received plenty of complaints from exhausted businessmen, accustomed to making the short flight several times a week without disturbance.

But generally, our flights have been without incident and the passengers around us have even commended us. “They’re so well-behaved,” our relieved neighbors gush as my husband and I breathe a sigh of relief at the end of a flight.

As the kids have gotten older, it has gotten easier too. We no longer have to lug car seats, diaper bags, and strollers with us through crowded airports. Last time we sat in the very last row on the airplane and our kids could even get up and go to the bathroom — alone. There’s probably nothing worse than having to change a stinky diaper in a cramped airplane toilet. It is a nightmare that every flying parent remembers well. And it might just be the ultimate test of patience, understanding, and humility.

If truth be told, my kids are probably better fliers than I am. At least it comes to them more naturally. They flew before they turned six months old, and so they trust it. I personally never stepped onto an airplane until I was a 23-year-old woman. Back when I was growing up, family vacations entailed packing eight kids into the station wagon and driving to nearby scenic and historic sites in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or Virginia. While I can’t imagine that driving with eight kids was a smoother traveling experience, it certainly avoided the complications of flying.

And so even now, while not afraid to fly , I do continue to be uncomfortable flying. I’m one of those people who gets very dehydrated and needs to constantly drink water while flying. I usually get a headache and sometimes suffer excruciating ear pressure and pain, especially when my sinuses are congested (which is often). I also hate waiting on lines. And I get anxious just thinking about having to sit in one place for several hours trapped between wriggling, restless children. And I detest jet lag. It sometimes takes my body weeks to readjust after a cross-country flight.

With all these complaints, you might wonder why I fly at all. And the simple truth is that all the discomfort is worth it, because the payoff is so great. Flying has allowed our family to have amazing experiences and to visit new and exciting places that we’d never drive to. It also allows us to reconnect with family and friends who are separated from us by distance.

So no matter how much I might dread the thought of flying, I suck it up. In the end, I know that I’ll be all the better for having done it. Which is why I can’t help but think that people who are afraid to fly (or don’t have the opportunity to fly) are somehow missing out.

My 71-year-old mother has never been on an airplane and swears that she never will fly. That my mother doesn’t trust air travel is ironic, because my father was an aerospace engineer. This fear keeps her grounded and limits her ability to visit her children that live in Houston, Los Angeles, and North Carolina.

But my mother is clearly not alone with her fear of flying. According a fact sheet on the website for Anxiety and Stress Disorder Institute of Maryland (ASDI), as many as one in five Americans identify themselves as “fearful fliers”. The Institute states that these people aren’t only afraid of airline crashes. They also fear “feeling out of control” and they may suffer from associated fears, such as claustrophobia.

The Institute points out that air travel is ridiculously safe. In the United States there are an average of 40,000 fatalities from automobile accidents each year. But annually there are, on average, only 100 passengers killed in airline crashes. According to the Institute, the “risk of fatality by airline flight is comparable to the risk of fatality by taking a bath.” The odds of being killed in an airplane crash are 1 in 4,600,000 (From What the Odds Are, by Lee Krantz).

The ASDI points out that there are risks associated with everyday activities, and that in general most of us recognize what are “acceptable risks.” But the media coverage of airline disasters often overload our senses with visually compelling images that somehow convince us that air travel is a lot riskier than it really is.

As mothers, many of us approach motherhood with a dread akin to “fear of flying.” We think that we can avoid “falling” by overprotecting our children or never allowing them to spread their wings. We fear making fatal maternal mistakes, and so we never venture up into the sky. But stumbling, falling, and making mistakes are all apart of motherhood. And most of us do rise from a fall. Sometimes, we even rise for the better.

The “fear of flying” then is really a “fear of falling.” We’d all like to soar 30 thousand feet above the earth — if only there wasn’t that risk, no matter how slight, of crashing back down. I have my own fears as well. But I try not to fear things I cannot control — and things with such little risk.

And therefore, I no longer fear the fall.

***********************************************
Copyright 2003 Lizbeth Finn-Arnold

Another Country

Five years after I got married, I fell in love.

In some ways it felt sudden and unexpected, but in others it was a foregone conclusion — One that I anticipated for as long as I could remember.

When I first found out I was pregnant with a boy, my mind swirled. I grew up the youngest of four daughters with no brothers. I remembered as a young teenager always wishing I had an older brother; someone to protect me, watch over me, and (when puberty took hold in earnest) have friends I could possibly date. I also went to an all-girls high school, And I was raised primarily by my mother.

But I was going to be the mother of a son.

Anticipating parenthood is always a surreal exercise but it was further complicated by my belief that I was truly entering uncharted territory. I was now going to be part of a world in which, though I always had wanted to participate, I had never really been a part of. I had no knowledge how to navigate this world.

Boys (and later, men) were a mystery to me. My first real boyfriend was in college and though I fell for him completely, I never did understand or know him fully. He thought differently than me, felt differently than me, and in some way it seemed I could never really connect with him meaningfully. Men, I determined, were another country.

When I first learned I was pregnant, I hoped I was going to have a daughter. Not because I preferred a girl for any real reason, but because I erroneously believed I would somehow be better at mothering a daughter. It was familiar. Something, since I grew up in a world of women, that might come more naturally to me. But when I did find out midway through my pregnancy that my fate was in the minuscule hands of a boy, a certain amount of anxious enthusiasm grew within me.

Zachary was born two weeks early and proceeded to pee at me at every diaper change. He was magical and scary and “Other” to me for many months. For a long time he was less a gender and more an energy that was uniquely and forever a part of my destiny.

And I fell in love with him. I fell in love with him in a way I never did before and in a way I could not have imagined possible. It began with him being an intimate part of me and then becoming a separate entity — another country.

Zachary is 7 ½ now and he and I have gone through a lot of changes and adjustments in our relationship. He covers his eyes when couples on TV kiss, but he hugs and tells me he loves me unabashedly. He averts his eyes when anything Barbie-related enters his field of vision, but he still tells me he plans to marry me. He holds my hand in public only when we cross the street but, he will spontaneously kiss me when we are reading together.

Zachary, it turns out, is a mystery to me as well. But what was once a world of mystery where I felt excluded from — has become a place in which I live and belong.

Motherhood is now a place where I can dwell, if only for a time.

*************************************

Copyright 2003 Regina Walker

Diving Deep and Resurfacing

“How was your summer?” colleagues asked me cheerfully over and over again during the first week back at my college teaching job. The summer didn’t go well for me personally, and I didn’t know how to respond to what was perhaps a rhetorical question.

Professionally, I had several poems accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals; a paper presentation accepted for a conference; a poetry reading arranged at a national venue; and two book chapter proposals accepted. A book, Fractured Feminisms, in which I had a chapter on feminist pedagogy, was finally published in July.

In sharp contrast to my professional successes was my personal failure. I had had my first miscarriage. I tried not to think of it as “my failure,” but no matter how I tried not to punish myself, I kept reliving every last minute of the month or so, trying to detect the ways in which I was culpable.

My miscarriage bought me a ticket into a greater arena of women, a very uncomfortable place. I entered a dialogue with thousands of other women, including my mother and grandmother. I never believed that a “miscarriage” would happen to me. When it did, I realized how tenuous and fine the thread that connected life and death was.

This miscarriage was made all the sadder for my husband and me because we had tried to have another child, on and off, for the past three years—as soon as my daughter had turned two. At age 37, I planned my last effort so that my pregnancy would coincide with my academic year, more or less. I bought all the ovulation kits and kept careful track of my basal temperature.

After a missed period, I scheduled a blood test with my doctor, and she delivered the best news. We were expecting and I was due March 1st.

My husband brought home a huge bouquet of flowers and a toy surprise for our daughter to include her in the good news. My parents, who live close by, were elated as well.

But two weeks later, and after light then heavy spotting, I miscarried. The male doctor on call at the hospital tried to console me, telling me that his wife had a miscarriage too but later had given birth to four healthy children. “This isn’t your fault,” he said. “You did not cause this. You will have another.”

Maybe it was my Catholic guilt, but I felt that my miscarriage had to be my punishment for waiting so long between children. Perhaps I had missed my window of opportunity and my biological clock had just struck 12. Maybe, I struck out.

After my miscarriage, I sank into a funk, a depression from which I didn’t surface for more than a month. I started thinking about and understanding, for the first time, the struggle of the unnamed narrator of Margaret Atwood’s book, Surfacing, to cope with a lost child no matter how it had occurred. I understood the metaphor of submersion and how apt it was to describe this type of depression.

My professional and personal life seemed suspended. I could not motivate myself to get a proposal together to send to a book publisher, which was, ironically, about working mothers and childcare. My daughter caught me crying and urged me to “cheer up.” Thankfully, though, I had my mother close by.

For the first time, I talked with my mother about her own miscarriage. She said that she hadn’t wanted any more children after my sister and me, so she was a bit relieved when the doctor told her that she’d miscarried. Afterwards, she says she felt guilty and also blamed herself. She had been a class chaperone on my class trip when I was in the fourth grade and had spotted all that day. She hadn’t known she was pregnant at the time. Still, she wondered if there wasn’t something she could have done to prevent the miscarriage. Her doctor assured her that there wasn’t.

I also discovered that my grandmother had given birth to a stillborn baby. The doctor discovered that the baby had died in the womb during her eighth month. My grandmother had to wait to deliver her dead child. I couldn’t imagine how devastating that would have been – that whole month of waiting and knowing that there was nothing for which to look forward—no cooing infant to cuddle. My grandmother told me that she didn’t like to think about it and that soon after, she had gotten pregnant with her second child, a son. We held hands, cried and then hugged.

I surfaced partially from my funk, bought more ovulation kits, and in two months, I was pregnant again. This time I felt a growing distance, trying to protect myself from what could be another miscarriage. When I got the blood test results back, I braced myself for bad news. After some spotting, I went in for my first obstetrics’ appointment. My HCG hormone levels were much higher this time and things looked good for a while.

I went back to work hoping that the stressful beginning of the semester would not negatively impact the pregnancy. I had the added stress of my daughter, Emily, starting kindergarten. I didn’t expect this to be so monumental. Emily had attended preschool since she was three, but the struggle of getting her ready on time, with everything else, was more difficult. Moreover, Emily hated her new public school. It was overcrowded with almost 30 kindergarteners, an overwhelmed teacher without a full-time aide, and a lack of discipline. My very shy daughter, who loved school, cried every day at lunch and began to hate school. I scoured the neighboring cities for private schools, and interviewed principals and teachers, always with my mother, my faithful sidekick. Thankfully, I found a wonderful private school and decided that I would figure out how to pay for it later.

I was spending long work days on my feet, and worrying about my daughter. And I started spotting almost every day. I called my midwife and she told me to rest, to call in sick at work. Once the bleeding subsided, I returned to work. The following week, I had more spotting. It continued for four days. I went into work anyway, thinking that if I were having a miscarriage again, there was nothing that I could do to prevent it. Besides, I couldn’t afford to miss more days of work. My mother urged me to call my midwife again. The midwife scheduled an ultrasound right away — to see if the fetus was still viable.

I told my boss that I was pregnant. She was very understanding. In fact, she had sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers when she learned that I had miscarried over the summer. She told me to leave work early and find substitutes for my classes. “This is more important,” she said.

I picked up my mother for support and headed for the doctor’s office. The waiting was excruciating. I watched women with huge bellies squeeze themselves into the waiting room chairs.

New mothers played raspberries and peek-a-boo with their precious newborns — while I waited to hear if my baby would ever be. When it was finally my turn, my mother and I followed the ultrasound technician down a narrow hallway to an examination room. I braced myself as the technician looked for the tiny fetus inside my uterus. I saw what looked like a tiny peanut, floating in a dark hollow space.

“There it is,” she said.

“Is it … all right?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

She zoomed in a flash of blinking white light. “There’s the heart. It’s beating.” She turned on a speaker and I heard the tiny swoosh of the heartbeat. “It’s a good, strong heartbeat,” she said.

She took some pictures of my little peanut, labeling the parts for me, which were indistinguishable to my untrained eye.

Afterwards, the doctor told me that the bleeding was caused by a low-lying placenta called placenta previa. The condition might correct itself in several months, but I needed to take it easy. Anything could cause bleeding – a bumpy ride in the car or even a bout of coughing.

During those summer months and into the first months of my pregnancy, I dove deep into depression over a miscarriage and again over the possibility of losing another child. I didn’t realize the depths to which I would fall or the amount of effort it would take to struggle back to the surface — were it not for the buoyancy of a new pregnancy.

Now, I look forward to my second trimester, appreciating more than before the sometimes difficult and treacherous journey that is motherhood.

****************************************

Copyright 2003 Joanne Detore-Nakamura, Ph.D.

Down Time With Nancy

“Come on, Mommy, I can take care of you. Please get up.”

The gentle tapping on my shoulder grew more insistent. I turned in bed to face my grinning daughter. She was absent from her Kindergarten class with a lingering cold and I was nursing a case of laziness.

“OK, Hon. Let’s go down and make a cup of tea.”

Today the mess I passed through in the living room didn’t faze me. Newspapers, books, and snack plates were piled in the corner. Someone else could pick them up later. The thought of piled up laundry and empty grocery cabinets didn’t upset me either. I didn’t feel like doing anything.

I turned on the gas under the tea kettle when the phone rang. The last thing I wanted to do was chat but remembered someone might be sick and need a ride home from school. My son’s guidance counselor was calling to confirm an appointment.

“Your dresser drawer is messy, Mommy. Can I clean it out?”

Oh, no. Nancy had been investigating while I was on the phone. My usual reaction would be a curt —“Stay out of my room” — but it was a junk drawer and she was careful and considerate.

“Sure, Honey, go ahead and have fun.”

Her blue eyes sparkled and I got a big squeeze. I flopped down on the kitchen chair with my tea and opened the morning paper. A long time passed before she reappeared.

“I got all dressed up, Mommy. Don’t I look pretty?” Attired in a Raggedy Ann sweatshirt and red jeans, she had somehow managed to wiggle her blue flowered bathing suit on over them. Two strands of multicolored beads hung from her neck to her knees and she clopped along in white, furry snow boots.

“And Mommy, how do you like my eyes?” She had found glittery blue eye shadow and applied it deftly. She sparkled and smelled good. Perfume. My daughter would be feminine in spite of me.

She disappeared down the cellar stairs and I cleaned up the kitchen.

“This is Chris’ old paint-by-number picture and he didn’t finish it. Can I?” Again tempted to say no, I thought –– what’s the difference. It would only get thrown out eventually.

“Go ahead and finish it Honey but bring it up here.” She brought up the picture and set it on the kitchen table.

Soon she was blobbing colors together, swirling her brush around, singing loudly as she worked. “Aren’t I doing a good job, mommy? This is so much fun,” she bubbled.

It was delightful to just sit and watch her. Why was I always too busy? Doing what? Going to meetings, helping with Girl Scouts, and conferences. Was all the running really necessary?

I try to spend some time with each of my children every day, but never seem to find or make time. “MY boys” were already in their teens and I was afraid they would share little of their feelings with me in the future. I didn’t want to let my daughter slip away — because I was too busy to listen.

I watched her, fascinated by the changing expressions on her face as she worked diligently, experimenting with colors and shapes on the paper.

“I’m done, Mommy. Isn’t it beautiful? I’ll put it on the table for Daddy so he can see it when he gets home.”

The bright family room looked warm and inviting as I passed the doorway. An unseasonably warm day with brilliant sunshine streaming in provided us with a perfect spot for lunch. With little direction Nancy made sandwiches, bustling around the kitchen –– feeling important and gaining self-confidence. This time I didn’t stop her with “Hurry up; I’ll do it myself.”

We watched the squirrels repair their nest in the birch tree. Gray tails twitching, they put on an acrobatic show for us, jumping from tree to tree, bobbing on the springy branches, stealing their lunch from the bird feeder.

“Why do their tails wiggle? Why don’t they fall off of the branches? How do they keep warm?” I had time to answer the questions that tumbled from my daughter.

In the cemetery abutting our backyard, a funeral procession had entered and stopped down the road where we could see the mourners through the trees. I tried to answer Nancy’s questions about death, hoping that my answers would convey my belief that death is a continuation of life and nothing to fear, and that God was her best friend. She seemed satisfied and snuggled closer.

“I feel tired Mommy. Let’s take a nap now.”

We burrowed down on the couch; the warm afternoon sun provided a blanket for us. I hugged my daughter to me. Not tomorrow. Today was the day to enjoy my children.

********************************************
Copyright 2003 Gerry DiGesu

Falling Down

The thing about a panic attack is that it lets us know we are in over our heads; our nervous systems are screaming for us to stop and take a moment to breathe. But as the saying goes, “Easier said than done!”

I had my first, and hopefully only, panic attack last month — in the middle of the grocery store, for cripes sake.

I had no idea what was happening to me, and because I am a writer with a fertile imagination, I was certain I was dying; about to bite the dust; buy the farm; kick the bucket.

It all started a year ago when I noticed from time to time that my heart was racing, nearly pounding out of my chest. As the palpitations grew in frequency and intensity, so did my imagination. By the time I walked into the grocery store that day, my heart was out of control and stars were twinkling around me.

I placed my order at the deli counter and headed to the meat section. All of a sudden, I could not breathe; my hands, toes, feet, and lips went numb. A sharp pain shot through my head and I could barely lift my legs. "This is it," I told myself. "It's the big one." It never occurred to me that I would share my last few minutes on earth with a pound of boiled ham and a pound of Swiss cheese, imported Swiss, that is.

So there I was, positive I was suffering a heart attack, stroke, or had a brain tumor. I labored back to the deli department and clutched onto the arm of the poor guy standing next to me, who was just trying to get himself a tuna on rye and small tub of potato salad. This nice fellow (who probably wished he had gone to Subway) sat me down on the shelf under the bagel case. The next thing I know, the paramedics race in, place an oxygen mask on me, hook me up to an EKG monitor, and off we go to the ER. By this point, I was praying it was serious; otherwise, I just made a complete ass of myself.

It turns out, my heart and brain are okie-dokie, fit-as-fiddles. What I had, said the cute, curly-haired P.A., was a "classic, straight from the textbook, panic attack."

Great, I thought to myself — frigin' great. Here I am, hooked up to this blasted machine, the top half of me nearly exposed, showing off my breasts that look like two watermelons in a down hill race, and Mr. Cutie-Pie with a body more fit than my heart, is telling me, I momentarily fell off my rocker! There were only two words fitting for my situation: “Fuck Me.”

I left the ER, humiliated, shaken, and with a prescription for Ativan-the same drug my father had an endless supply of. Those same two words flew around my brain again, only this time I added "royally". It seems some children inherit their parent's intellect, creativity, straight, chalk-white teeth. Me, I inherited my dad's worrywart gene. Here come those words again.

I am feeling better now, thanks to an anti-anxiety medication. However, I am also spending time thinking about how and why I fell down — literally and figuratively — that day at the supermarket.

Sure, heredity played a role in my collapse, but is only part of the reason. I'm living in a world where I am expected to course through life at ninety-miles an hour, only my vehicle prefers to run around forty-miles-an-hour. I am happiest when I can take my time and set my speedometer to a pace that allows me time to think and reflect on where I am at, not where I am going, or where I should be headed.

Trying to live my life perfectly as a woman, mother, writer, and wife has finally taken its toll. Lately, my brain keeps singing the 70’s jingle —”I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never let you forget you're a man. Cause I'm a WOMAN."

What bunch of horse dung! Yes, I CAN do all that, but not all at the same time. The burden is too heavy, not only for me, but for all women. I watch my friends racing around, bleary- eyed and frustrated as they try to keep with the status quo. It's as though, as women, we are forced to run the gauntlet, where we must duck and weave all the blows that seek to tell us, "See, you women are too weak to handle the pressure".

Maybe I am paranoid (great, thanks again Dad) but I often wonder if our workload is some sort of punishment for demanding that we be treated equally to men. I'm not male-bashing here. I'm only saying that as I struggle to make my footprints in the one life I know for certain I've been granted, I've come to learn that I cannot do it all.

As for that stupid jingle, how could women possibly let men forget who they are? After all, as long as we women continue to bear the full load of our familial roles as taxi driver, nurse, housekeeper, laundress, accountant, social director, seamstress, chef, nutritionist, psychologist, secretary, wet nurse, human tracking device, events planner, gardener, and bacon provider (whether it’s a whole slab or a few strips), there should be no question as to who’s the man and who's the woman.

Wouldn't it be great it someone invented a human radar gun that buzzed each time we went over our personal speed limits? I suspect this would reduce our crash and burns. I also suspect the drug companies would suffer a sharp decline in sales.

*********************************************

Copyright 2003 Susan Krushenick

Motherhood As A Curse

I remember an old college professor of mine saying that, “It is a tumultuous world out there, amongst the purveyors of the written word. Beware of the pitfalls, and hopefully you will not fall into a niche that will leave you destined for mediocrity from sheer lack of material or enthusiasm.”

This seemed such an arrogant and cynical comment to a late teenager trying to glean just a speck of brilliance from a literary guru in a tiny world. Now I have no choice but to agree with the old man, and hope that I have the wherewithal to pull myself out of the very thing he warned me about.

I am a mother who writes, or an author who happens to be a mother. Lately I have been wishing that more editors I have been dealing with would agree with the latter as opposed to the former. This is a purely professional preference, not intended to discount the importance of being a mother.
As a freelance writer, whose main occupation outside of writing is being a mother, it is very difficult for me to sell what I have to say to editors because of some anachronistic belief that many of them seem to have about what motherhood is really about.

The first assumption I think many of them make is that I can only be literate on subjects directly dealing with motherhood. Of course, it would be in bad form on my part to try to engage them in a fruitful debate about political or philosophical theories, to prove that I am not unfamiliar with the higher theorists of our time.

This inaccurate view of what mothers are capable of is obviously not limited to just the gatekeepers of the publishing world. It was most disconcerting to me to find that a young man at a public pool who saw me with my youngest son, and then saw me reading a book by Nietzsche, found it necessary to comment that the book seemed a bit too cerebral for a mother. I bit my tongue, and just smiled, even though I had distinct suspicions that he had never read what I had in my hand.

There is no doubt that this attitude is a direct descendent of the image of the full-time mother created by our own mothers, and the first mother of sitcoms, Donna Reed. The end result is a societal complacency that assumes that the life before children disappears, and life is centered only around children for mothers who don’t work outside of their homes.

Now I am expected to write just about my life as a mother, and quirky little advice pieces for mothers who have lives outside of motherhood.

The terrible niche of mediocrity is staring me in the face like a dragon from a fairy tale, poised to burn my brain to a crisp. My only choice is to sharpen my nails and claw my way free of this nonsensical vision the publishing industry and society has of what I am.

I only wonder how many other women writers out there aren’t choosing to fight this manufactured curse, and what great writings our world may never have because of it.

*********************************************
Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Ross

Yes, They're All Mine

By Elizabeth Katkics Thompson


“Yes, they are all mine.”

This is my standard answer when approached by absolute strangers in the strangest of places asking me if the four children, strategically grabbing onto any part of my body or clothing at any one time, are mine. The answer may be the same, but my response varies, solely based upon said strangers’ approach.

Allow me to give you an example. Today, just a few short hours ago, I took my cataract-suffering father to visit my grandmother at a hospital 30 minutes from my father’s house which is 20 minutes from my house. As usual, I had my four children — Holly (9), Heather (7), Glen (4) and Hope (2), in tow with the additional thought that they could cheer up their great grandmother who has been in the hospital for six weeks now.

They have this keen sense of being able to make anyone feel that much darn better with not only their hugs and kisses, but with the funny things that just seem to come out of their mouths. They remember the hospital as, “The place where Papa got his new knee. What did they do with the old knee, Mommy?”

After dealing with the trials and tribulations of a hospital parking lot, any parking lot really, we head to the hospital’s main lobby. The two older girls want to use the escalator, and I am reminded for the ten-thousandth time how really old they are now, and how unhappy they are to be reduced to using the stroller-friendly elevator.

Unfortunately, it is the first of many elevators they sadly realize. Now it’s a matter of who gets to push the buttons and I immediately begin to calculate the number of elevators and possible buttons requiring to be pushed versus the number of children doing the pushing, as I am a just and fair mother, after all. By the time we get to the next to last elevator, I have grown quite tired of saying, “You pushed the last button, it’s so and so’s turn,” while holding back the fingers that have already done the pushing.

The said same fingers are eagerly pointing out the button of the moment requiring the pushing, and I hear the eventual, “Oops, I pushed it by accident!”

Ironically, my father finds this to be all too funny. Let me tell you, as I quickly reminded him, this kind of act would not have been tolerated a few decades earlier of my then much younger finger.

As our amusement ride of the moment comes to an end and the elevator doors open, a nurse nearly collides with my stroller-pushing father. She gives him a smile. The look of endearment for a grandfather pushing a cute cherub-like precious woobie-sucking child quickly changes to one of pure disbelief as she hears and then sees more than three children arguing over the elevator:

“You pushed it already, it’s my turn.”

“ No, I pushed it by accident. I get to a do over.”

“The baby didn’t push, it’s her turn.”

“She can’t reach it to push it, you dummy.”

The woman doesn’t dare ask what exactly was being pushed, but does manage to ask, “Oh my, are these all yours?”

Pan camera to mom’s facial expression (you fill in the blank here).

I answer, “Yes, they are all mine — and so are my teeth!”

***********************************

Copyright 2003 Elizabeth Katkics Thompson

Mothering Without A Net

By Michelle Kennedy

The click of the door handle is entirely too loud as I pull it to peer in and check on my three sleeping children. They are all breathing. In fact, they look peaceful, sleeping there in the back of the station wagon, under the yellowy light of a street lamp.

I smooth the curls on my daughter's face and gently close the door. Walking through the back door of the kitchen, I look back once and then, all right just once more. I smile at the cooks -- they'll keep an eye out the door for me -- as I rush through the kitchen and grab the food for my customers from under the warmers.

My last table leaves after 11 p.m. I thought they would never finish. Oh, to have that kind of time to linger over a meal. It's been so long since I've enjoyed that kind of freedom. I carefully place the wine glasses in the bus tub next to the dessert plates and haul it all down the stairs. My mother would tell me to make more than one trip, but I'd always rather make one, long, painful trip than two or three.

I tip out the bartender and head for the small parking lot behind the restaurant, where, I am told, my children are still blissfully asleep. Again, I open the door, ever so carefully, and collapse into the front seat.

"Hi, Mom." Startled, I whip around to find Matthew, the eldest, who is 5, blinking his eyes awake. "How was work?" he asks.

"It was fine," I reply. "Very busy. It's late, though, you should go back to sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

"OK." �Within seconds he is out again.

Living in the car doesn't seem to faze him. Oh sure, he asks why we have to keep sleeping in the car, but my answer -- plain and simple -- that I don't have the money yet to get us an apartment, seems to suffice, and he doesn't whine about not having a television. Well, we do have a television, actually. It was a graduation present from years before and it's tucked in front of the passenger seat. I tried to sell it, but it wasn't worth much, so I decided to keep it. A last vestige of middle-class life. I was a middle-class housewife once upon a time.

Unfortunately, being middle-class only suited me and the children. My soon to be former husband wanted to live in the woods. I was game for a while. I had grown up on a farm, so the outdoors was not foreign to me. But our ideas of living in the outdoors soon clashed -- hard.

"I found an awesome cabin," he said to me over the phone one day. "Pack up the kids and come up. It's a nice town; you'll love it."

I stayed behind to store some of our unnecessary, much hated "material belongings" in my mother's house. Then, always ready for an adventure, we headed up north. Very north. The far north of Maine. A place where the majority of accepted currency was Canadian.

Pulling up to the cabin in the middle of the night, I felt my stomach drop to my knees. The cabin was a tarpapered, uninsulated shack with a small wood stove. There was no electricity or running water.

My husband has lost his mind, I thought to myself. Ever cheerful, though, I unloaded the kids and we began our adventure. I should have known that it was to be one of many.

Tonight I wince as I start up the car (I need a new muffler); I don't want the kids to wake up. My plan is to stay down at the beach tonight. The police know me -- I wait on them all the time -- and they let me park here as long as I leave early. On the weekends we stay in the campground, where there's a playground and a shower included in the deal. We also cook out and roast marshmallows (a truly cheap source of entertainment at 79 cents a bag).

I pull up alongside the beach so I can look at the water. I always wanted a house on the water, I joke to myself, and now I have one -- my bedroom overlooks a lovely beach.

Cramped in the fetal position in the front seat, while the kids are stretched out in the back, I look out the windshield and yell at God in my head. But what's He going to do? There are far bigger problems in this world than our living in a car. We are healthy, we are strong. So I yell silently at my ex-husband instead, without expecting a lot of help there either. I fall asleep with my head on the steering wheel, waking up a few hours later to read by placing my head on my jacket in the passenger seat, the gear shift jammed into my stomach.

Although we are living in my old Suburu wagon, I feel reasonably fortunate. My daughter is well, after a horrible attack by an untamed husky -- just one relatively small part of the "Up North Experiment," as I have come to call it.

The dog, a neighbor's overanxious sled dog, bit her face, arms and shoulders -- actually, tore apart would be more accurate. Of course she was terrified of dogs after that, but my ex-husband chose to keep his sled dogs after the accident. That was the straw that broke the camel's back -- not the lack of water, not even the fact that he refused to get a job. ("Thoreau didn't have a job," he would say.) It was his choice of dogs over children. I couldn't believe it.
After that final blowout, I packed up. With about $50 in my pocket, tips saved from bartending at a local nightclub, I headed to the beach. I knew life had to be better at the beach. And it is. I don't always believe it, but it is cleansing and terrifying all at the same time.

The cooks leave the kitchen door open and help me watch the kids while they sleep. When they're awake, I split my tips with a couple of college girls who've agree to help me out. The girls take them for walks and to the beach. It's summertime here on the coast of Maine, and the weather is nice. When it's slow or rainy, my boss lets them play in a separate dining room.

Because I wait tables, I have the day free to take the kids to the ocean, the library, the laundromat. We walk around town and people smile at us. They don't know how poor we are. They don't know we live in our car. I applied for food stamps, but I don't qualify. I make too much money.

Sometimes I think it's more expensive to be poor than to be rich. I don't have a refrigerator, so I can't buy things like concentrated juice for $1 and make a pitcher to last for a couple of days. I have to buy individual servings at a $1 apiece. The kids have developed a taste for water.

I found a truck stop that will let me fill up my water jugs. It has showers for the truckers and I pay for one so that we all can take one communal shower. We go there first thing every morning.

I am absolutely committed to getting an apartment by the time my oldest is set to start kindergarten in a couple of weeks. The pile of cash in the videocassette box in my glove compartment is growing, and with a little luck it will be enough for the security deposit and first and last month's rent. The apartments I'm looking at are around $550 a month -- quite a bit in a one-horse town like this. There isn't a lot of industry besides the tourist trade, although there is always canning fish and working at McDonald's.

I would settle for a smaller and cheaper apartment, but most landlords won't consider letting four of us live in a studio or one-bedroom. So I have to find a bigger one, even though I can't afford it. What a Catch-22. I can afford a smaller apartment but no one will let me live in it, but my car, for some reason, is just fine, even though it's smaller. At least the car is paid for, although it's not insured. I helplessly hope that if I ever get in an accident, it won't be my fault.

While I am optimistic for the future and set on getting through this (there's a reason for everything, right?), I cannot contain my anger sometimes. Sitting on an old log, watching the kids play in the surf, I am almost shaking with pain and fear and rage. How is it possible that this is what my life is supposed to be like? I went to American University, damn it! I worked in the U.S. Senate! I am smarter than this -- I have to be.

But maybe I'm not. What kind of mother would put her children through a life like this? What kind of parent would make her children endure a life without ... without what? Without television? Without electricity? Without space? Just without. I am sickened by my selfishness. How dare I think I could provide a better life? I'm a loser, with or without my nifty credentials. There are people who didn't finish elementary school who provide better lives for their children.

I am ready to pack it in, ready to go, ready to be done with this esoteric little experiment in the human condition. I want this class to be over and I want to go home.

"What's the matter, Mom?" Lydia pops up from behind me and throws her arms around my neck.

I trace the scar on her forehead with my finger, studying its jagged edges.

"Nothing. Just feeling a little sad."

"I'll be right back," she says and she runs off to the sand castle my two sons are creating. They return and sit before me, the youngest, just barely 2, imitating his older brother and sister. He looks like a little Buddha with his big belly laying on crossed legs.

Lydia crawls up into my lap and looks at me thoughtfully. "You need an adventure, Mom," she says. "I think you're bored."

So we plan an adventure, elaborate and daring, once more.

*********
Copyright 2001 Michelle Kennedy
Originally published at Salon.com
Reprinted here with permission of author.

A Caterpillar in Heaven

By Cheri Winterberg

Back in the fall, my husband Doug encouraged our son, Owen, to take in a caterpillar as a pet. Now I realized that this was a trainwreck waiting to happen, because Owen hadn't yet had to deal with death. And I couldn't imagine a caterpillar surving long under the same roof as a certain aggressive toddler, who shall remain nameless, but let's call her "Rage."

The caterpillar, nicknamed "John Stinky," surprisingly lived several months. Doug would argue that the caterpillar lived longers, but I had to convince him that it really died, and wasn't just cocooning. I don't think caterpillars grow mold when cocooning. Thus, I had the death discussion with Own. I felt somewhat prepared, having attended the "Talking to your children about death" session with Reverend Susan.

I told Owen just a few facts: John Stinky had died and gone to heaven, where he'd be well-cared for. We should be happy about the few months he lived with us.

The next day. I heard Owen talking to a friend. "John Stinky died, but now Kevin is taking care of him. I don't have to worry because Kevin is a good boy and will do a good job," He said.

I racked my brain, trying to think of all the Kevins I know. The only one that came to mind was my friend's brother, who died a few years ago. I quickly came to the very-rational conclusion that, of course, Owen was now TALKING TO DEAD PEOPLE.

Wanting to tap into Owen's psychic side, I asked him, "How do you know Kevin?'

He replied, "YOU told me about him."

I did? Then it occurred to me. Owen had gotten the word "Kevin" out of "heaven". And so, in the world according to Owen, heaven is a little boy who takes very good care of caterpillars.

Crossing

By Joan Fiset

When I twisted my ankle in the Evergreen State University parking lot I viewed it as a failure, a loss of balance -- fall from grace. The next week I thought I’d share the experience with my senior English class, a personal anecdote admitting my humanity, told with wit and light-heartedness.

“Would you like to hear about my latest fall?” I asked, and then proceeded to explain. But their faces floated before me. I felt off balance again, unable to finish the sentences I’d lost control over. I was falling for real this time.

Actually, I’d been reeling for days since saying goodby to Christopher. More than ready to leave for college, he’d exhausted what home had to offer him. For now my work is over. The silent house keeps telling me this. And I want him to be where he is. In my intellect I know this, but my feelings are less convinced.

For the first few days after he left I felt upset. Seasick almost. Off kilter and blurry. As long as I stayed on course I made it through the day. But if I strayed and gave the feelings a chance to take over, I was in danger of falling.

I don’t know if my students were aware of this that morning. They listened respectfully. I think I was leaning toward my desk, and somehow finished the story without ever telling it.

The truth is I did fall and turn my ankle just enough for the walking tour of the Evergreen campus to be uncomfortable. Now that it’s over, I see it as making enormous sense. It was a ritual of sorts, for me to limp upon entering my son’s new world.

When I was nine I saw The Greatest Show on Earth, a movie about the stars of The Big Top from behind the scenes. Jimmy Stewart played a sad clown who never removed his make-up, and Charlton Heston’s strong jaw firmly clenched as he pulled on the ropes undoing the circus tent where Gloria Grahame had moved with ease among elephants.

But most of all, I remember Cornell Wilde, the handsome trapeze artist. Defying gravity, he flirted with falling as he somersaulted through the air without a net. Eventually he fell, and for the rest of the film hid his crippled arm and hand under a cape. His hand looked like a frozen claw. When I think of the movie, I think of his hand.

But the aerial maneuvers that took place. He flew very high many times before the final fall.

Icarus flew too high. I imagine his handmade wings--their feathers thick as a chieftain’s headdress secured to his shoulders with wax. He made them work, but flew too close to the sun. You cannot fly with unsteady wings, and he fell through the clouds, sky, rain, or whatever the weather was that day, downward to the sea.

His ascent was cut short by bad judgment. Most falls seem to come about without our being aware of what went wrong up there.

Back to the parking lot. I know mothers who can’t let go. They demand letters home, phone calls, visits--mothers who just don’t want to stop callingthe shots. And I’ve had my own struggles, not always realizing my son knew when to wear a coat.

Last year, when such reminders made themselves known, they met with a “Yes mom,” like you’d say to someone still behaving in an outmoded way you find somewhat amusing, if slightly annoying.

I think my fall at Evergreen was a way of understanding he is on his own now. This is his life and welcome to it. That doesn’t mean I have to believe it entirely all at once. A little at a time, the way I’ve seen birds outside my window bringing twigs home to their nest.

First Flight

By Tracy Baginski McGinnis

I recently visited my mother who lives 700 miles away in New York. The distance makes it difficult for us to get together as often as we'd like, so I planned a trip hoping my son and his grandmother could get to know each‑other better.

I had flown plenty of times before and never felt the anxiety and despair that had set in after I ordered my ticket. My husband reassured me that my reoccurring nightmare of our plane going down in a large red ball of fire was unfounded and that indeed it was safe to fly. But as our departure date drew closer I was seriously debating canceling the whole trip and staying home, where it was safe!

Packing for the two of us presented me with new challenges. I soon realized that the highchair, strollers, bed, and car seat, along with one suitcase devoted only to my son's clothing, diapers, bibs, food, and toys would exceed the amount of luggage I was permitted to check.

Maybe I should call the airline to ask for some sort of "special baggage allowance." After all, I was a new mother, and they would understand that all of these things were essential.

As the days grew closer my pile of "stuff" started pouring out into the hallway, I realized I hadn't even started to get my own things together. With only two days before departure I needed to reevaluate my plan. So I did what any put together, with it mother would do. I called my mom.

In tears I told her how stressed out I was and that I didn't think I would be able to make the trip because there was just too much to transport! Not to mention my anxiety about flying was reaching astronomical proportions and just the thought of stepping on a plane made me nauseous.

After I calmed down my mother went through my list and concluded that indeed I was trying to pack away the entire house and no wonder I was stressed. She checked with a friend and arranged to borrow a highchair and car seat for us. She also suggested packing less clothing and doing a load or two of laundry at her house.

I started to tackle the mound of clothing one pile at a time, choosing clothing that could be mixed and matched for multiple uses. Rummaging through stacks of bibs and washcloths I minimized my pile by packing samples of one‑use bibs that I'd been receiving in the mail. No money spent and I can just throw them out when I'm done. They should make clothes like that too!

Now it was time to move on to my carry‑on diaper bag, this was about as difficult as the suitcase. I hid the toys that my son loved to play with most a week before our trip. My thinking was, instead of letting him play with them all week; I would surprise him on the plane when he got cranky. (Which I assumed would definitely happen).

The first time I packed my carry‑on, it weighed more than my son and I realized I would have to make some adjustments. Diapers and wipes were a must, but a full bag of them may have been excessive. Bottles, finger foods, his favorite blanket, all had to come along!

Haunted

By Inez Hollander, Ph.d

With my husband, Jonathan, far away in Denver, our newly‑bought house felt especially dark and lonesome at night. The house, an old ramshackle storybook cottage in the San Francisco Bay Area, was cold and creepy: the heater did not work, the roof leaked and rats would come out at night and prowl my kitchen. In the evenings I usually retired upstairs with the kids because it was a place where the rats did not come.

When I walked into the old bathroom upstairs to give William (4) and Caroline (2) a bath, I despaired. The lavender bathroom still smelled of the former owner, Ada Shaeffer. She had lived for years in the home’s decaying splendor like Miss Havisham, the eccentric old lady in Great Expectations. In my despair, I decided to ignore the purple tub and take the kids to the Jacuzzi, which had just been placed in our backyard.

Although the wind was whistling around the house, the El Niño showers seemed to have tapered off that night. I dressed the kids and myself in terrycloth bathrobes and walked them through the dark of the wet and windy garden. The moving tree branches made long and sinister shadows on the lawn. The little French doors in the back of the garage clapped with a vengeance. The doors were the entrance to the old studio of Neill Shaeffer, Ada’s dead husband.

“At night I see him everywhere,” Ada had told me just before we bought the house. I do not believe in haunted houses or the sensationalist shows on Network TV, but Neill had died in the daybed in the kitchen. He insisted on dying at home, just as he had insisted upon his wife never selling the house. So... shall I say it; do I even dare write it down? I saw someone in my peripheral vision once or twice; I felt a funny draft occasionally and William talked about seeing a ghost (he was also watching a lot of Scooby Doo at the time, so who knows).

Once when I was cleaning the bathroom cabinets upstairs, a little picture came fluttering out of nowhere. Having seen Neill on pictures in Mrs. Shaeffer’s house, I recognized the young man on the picture. It showed a tan and handsome Neill in a swimsuit. Memento Mori? For the longest time I did not dare throw the little black‑and‑white photograph away. It was as if the old man was watching over my shoulder.

After I lifted my blue‑lipped toddlers into the steaming bubbles, I let my own tired and naked body slide into the stinging water. While the kids were playing with their plastic cups and ducks, I tried to relax my tense muscles from another day in the trenches with the kids. I closed my eyes. The wind, the squeaky doorjambs of Neill’s studio and the innocent chatter of my kids faded into the background. If I relaxed a bit more, I could fall asleep. Sleep had become my new partner.

Every night, shortly after I put the kids in bed, I crawled under my covers with a book. The book and the sleep that followed it were a better world than the one I lived in. As I was nodding off, I suddenly heard William’s voice:

“What’s that man doing in our house?” he said innocently.

“What man?” I sat up and panicked, thinking I should have squeezed my voluptuous body into a bathing suit after all.

“Where? What are you talking about?” I asked as I looked at the cottage. The house, with its pointed gables and undulating roof, was the perfect backdrop for an Elizabethan tragedy. I just did not want to be in it.

“Where?” I asked again, gazing intently at the house.

“Over there, in the playroom,” William suggested.

Putting his little teapot down, he looked at the house again.

“Oh, now he’s gone,” William said, almost disappointed.

All of a sudden the warm water did not feel so good any more. My heart was pounding. Had I locked all the doors of the house? Were we dealing with an intruder, a burglar, a stalker... or was Neill paying us a visit again?

“Are you sure, William... or is it because Halloween is around the corner?”

Caroline caught the word Halloween and said, “I see a ghost...”

“Okay guys, cut it out.”

“Yes,” William said nervously, “There is no such thing as ghosts ‑‑ right mommy?”

I always have problems answering that question ‑‑ ruling out ghosts is akin to denying an afterlife and being as afraid of death as I am, that is the last thing I want to do. So as the wind was howling through the trees and the French doors inside the garage rattled with an empty sadness, I hesitated and then... felt a cold fear clutch at my heart when the light in the upstairs bathroom went out. It was not a power outage because the light downstairs was still on. William noticed it, too.

“Mom... someone switched off the light. Maybe it is the same man...”

“Oh, William dear,” I countered, “the lamp probably burned out or maybe it’s a fuse..." As I was saying this, the light went on again... and off ... and on.

“Shit,” I said out loud, no longer able to appease my children with my own hollow rationalizations.

“What is going on, mom?!” William asked. There is nothing worse than not knowing the answers to your kids’ questions, especially when you find yourself naked in a hot tub, while a burglar is being frivolous with your lights inside the house.

“Let’s hide,” came Caroline’s suggestion, a stock reply whenever there was a lull in a conversation or a quiet moment in her games for the day. Granted, I felt like hiding but we had a potential intruder on our hands and this was not the time to play peek‑a‑boo.

I considered my options, and then took action. Once, my widowed grandmother, who lived alone in a dark villa in the Dutch dunes, heard someone mess with her front door in the dead of night. She opened the window over the front door and yelled at the guy who, surprised, took flight. I figured resolute action might solve the mystery, if not the burglar.

After taking the protesting children out of the Jacuzzi, I barged into the house, making lots of noise. When I reached the bathroom, the light was still going on and off and the phantom intruder had mysteriously disappeared. And, I remembered. I had screwed in a bulb rather haphazardly, so that the light switched on and off as it made and lost contact inside the fitting.

This, however, did not explain the man that William had seen. So I inspected the entire house. Like a frightened child, I checked under the beds, in closets and behind drapes but found no one.

Maybe the house was not haunted, but my soul surely was. Jon’s absence during the week, the endless rain, the rats and the demands of small children had worn me down. On a good day I tried to escape in a novel. On a bad day I considered jumping off the Golden Gate. Since we had just moved, I had made few to no (local) friends, so there were no shoulders to cry on, let alone have coffee with. I was slowly reaching the point of a near‑nervous breakdown and rather than seeking medical help, find a priest or chase the blues away with an inordinate amount of St. John’s Wort, I escaped, once more, into reading.

Through Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full I revived my interest in the Stoics and their advocacy of a simpler life. From the boxes of books that I had not unpacked yet, I pulled out Seneca: “Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance,” he wrote in his letters to Lucilius.

That did not help, for I felt like I was doing penance for a crime I had no knowledge of committing. I read on: “Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope,’ Hecato says, ‘and you will cease to fear.’” I could relate to that. After all, what kind of appearances was I trying to keep up? If my children could be happy in a house that my brother ‑‑upon his visit‑‑ had referred to as a “garden shed,” I could or at least should be content, too.

This, however, did not stop me from writing a tearful letter to my former thesis advisor. I told him that my doctorate in English had neither prepared me for a career in the Academy, nor had it, in any way, qualified me as a general contractor for the remodeling plans of our run‑down house. The letter must have been a lot darker than I had realized, for upon receiving it, he called me, concerned I might hang myself from one of the rafters in the house.

The crisis of the cottage seemed to bring out the crisis within: after starting out as an academic with a book to my name, I was going nowhere professionally. I had opted for my children when they were born, thinking naively that the tenure‑track positions would be delivered on a golden platter to my address, after I was done changing diapers.

At a Thomas Wolfe Conference where I spoke as an independent scholar (read: a mommy who thinks, in spite of it all), I apologized for maybe sounding out of touch with my field.

“Women change after childbirth,” I told the audience, "my friend tells me that the ejected placenta, after the baby is born, is not really the ‘afterbirth’ but your brain.” As always, I tried to cover up the real drama in my life with a crude joke. But for me the humor had long since gone and the laughter had died out. I was unhappy as a full‑time mom and the dump that we called our house brought out the gathering disillusionment within.

Also, nurturing two kids, I was simply not ready to also nurture a house back to life. I could not convey my sadness to Jonathan but, in my mind, I was frantically running from the dark hole that was about to swallow me whole. Coffee mugs will point out the cliché that attitude is everything in life and while I, at first, hated those mugs for pointing out this platitude, my attitude was sorely lacking. I have always loved this country for the way in which people can re‑invent themselves. Obviously, my European rigidity held me back from renewing myself.

When I read my journal of those agonizing days now, I see a recurring theme: a real sadness over wanting to write creatively all my life but never living up to that ambition. “Write what you know” is the standard advice of every creative writing class. All I knew was ear infections, dirty diapers and a bone‑numbing fatigue at the end of every day. Why would I want to write about that? Who would want to know? Who was I to impose myself on the blank page?

Searching for answers (and a topic), I took a screenwriting class and wrote a black comedy about a woman dying, yet finding life in love. The screenplay had characters that were disguised versions of myself. The heroine, a struggling writer, had a way of wisecracking herself out of any difficult situation and her remark that “art does not pay but it sure does take the sting out of suffering,” became my mantra as well. The writer’s close friend was Carla, a mother of two young children, like myself. In order to transcend the wearisome routine of scraping her kids’ breakfast off the floor and picking up her husband’s dirty socks every day, she had long “conversations” with the magnolia tree in front of her house. She was a wannabe poet and dreamed of doing a magnolia‑version of Monet’s series of the Reims Cathedral.

Both women “survived” because they wrote and looking back on them now, it was my unconscious desire to be like them that created them in the first place.

Alice Walker once said that for people who are depressed, writing can be like the ladder out of the pit. Writing was my ladder. It made me happy, fulfilled and worthwhile. I returned to an abandoned novel that was as grand in scope as The English Patient. When the ambitious outline turned me into something of a mental patient myself, I ditched it and groped around in the dark, still in search of a topic.

Jokingly, I told my friends that “some day” I would write about our house. I would pen a quasi‑philosophical and engaging memoir like Frances Mayes had done about her Italian villa Bramasole in Under the Tuscan Sun. With the house’s fumigation still fresh in my mind, I was going to call my book Under the Termite Dust or Bramasole Gone Bonkers.

But “some day” is never a good day. Why not today? My topic, after all, had been in my face and I?! I was not writing. I was watching Oprah. That is, Oprah’s Book Club: I would be green with envy when yet another writer was pulled out of obscurity and destitution by Oprah’s almighty seal. So I started a memoir and thus avoided an uncertain relationship with Prozac and an expensive therapist. I felt reassured. Weren’t all the great writers manically depressed?

Through writing I could take distance from the house’s bad vibes and before I knew it, I was coming back into my own. And thus, the cottage, in all its decay, was the embodiment of my own mental stagnation and decline; but as the house was coming out of its long winter of disrepair with a new roof, a fresh coat of paint, new windows, new decks and an extensive remodel inside, so was my life being renewed and enriched. As the house was being patched up, so was my soul made whole again by the healing act of writing.

The home’s metamorphosis became my own‑‑ the cottage, ready to go under when we bought it, saved me from going under myself and thus became a beacon of hope and potential. Although the rats were still feasting in our crawlspace, I had found my way out of the black hole.

Learning to Fly

By Tracey Rotman

It was three days passed my due date.

"Well, looks like we'll see you for next week's appointment," the doctor said. "Not even slightly dilated --probably just Braxton Hicks."

So, back home we went. Scott went to campus for his next class, and I decided to take a nap. Just before dozing, my belly tightened up again. "There goes another," and off to sleep I went.

An hour later, I woke up to the sensation of another "contraction". Each cramping would start at my lower back and then move its way around to the front. "You know what," I thought, "I am going to keep notes of this because something tells me this is the real thing." 3:07 > 3:15 > 3:24 > 3:32 > 3:45 > 3:51 > 4:00 > 4:08.

Once Scott got back from class, he took over the charting so I could concentrate on practicing breathing and muscle control. Tucked away in my closet, I neatly kept an Alice in Wonderland deck of Tarot Cards hoping that someday I could learn more about how to use them for myself and on others. As I slowly began to teach myself, I would practice on situations surrounding me.

When we decided to try to have a baby, I shuffled the deck and asked in what month we would become pregnant. Turning over the top card, I was shown the number seven in the upper corner. Seven--|July.We were in Florida that coming July for a close friend's wedding, and, when she returned from her honeymoon, I thanked her over and over for picking that specific date because taking a vacation to be there for her special day is what opened our lives to becoming parents. We were pregnant!!!

Our due date would be April 1^st - bittersweet.Three months earlier, I was a few weeks pregnant with our first baby. I wasn't feeling very well on one particular day and deep down knew something was wrong. I left work early and noticed strangely that three crows were following alongside my car as I drove down the highway. We traveled at the same pace until, in an instant, they criss-crossed at the nose of the hood and then took off into the sky.

"The crows," I said out loud. "They took the baby."

Scott took me to the doctor right away, and as we left his office, rain began to drizzle its way through the clouds to mix with the tears that fell from our eyes. "It's true," I thought, "You would not be coming home with us." I miscarried. It was April 1st.

Walking over to the car, something called out from above. It was a little black bird who sang out a tune that seemed especially for us. "Look at me! Look at me!" We were entranced. It began to flitter its wings, shaking the mistlets off each feather. Stretching its neck high, it tilted its face to the sky and sounded out, "I have wings! I can fly!"

Scott and I looked at each other and smiled. Now we knew where our little one had gone. "Look at me! Look at me! I have wings! I can fly! Look at me! Look at me!"

As we drove away, I watched that little bird stand on the tallest branch of the tree, continuing in song reassuring us that it was okay. Our baby was fine and so shall we be.

"Maybe if he wasn't a bird first," Scott said, "he'd be afraid to fly."

The "contractions" were going pretty steady by now, and Scott kept record of each one -- starting time, length of each one in seconds and location (front only, backside only or both) - while I followed through with my plan to make chocolate chip-peanut butter chip-oat cookies to take to the hospital whenever these Braxton Hicks became real. THEY'RE REAL!!!! With cookie dough covered fingers, I squatted to the floor, “Hhhuuhhhoooo--Hhhuuhhhoooo,” breathing through the pain. "COME --FINISH THE– COOKIES!!!"

Scott laughed. I did too, later -- much later.

Just after midnight, I couldn't take anymore. Scott called the doctor on-call whose response was, "Uh - most of my patients are at the hospital by then. Get over here!!!"

We brought our stuff downstairs. Scott called our friend who was going to check in on the dogs for us. "Hey, Kevin! How's it going?|What did you do tonight? Sounds good"

"GET OFF THE PHONE!"

"Oh, uh we're going to the hospital. Check in on the dogs. Talk to you later, Bye."

Now, Scott knew how much I wanted to deliver naturally. "No drugs whatsoever," I reminded him in the car. "No matter what I say, don't let me take drugs." Scott agreed.

Four hours later, while lying on a hospital bed at about six centimeters, "GIVE ME DRUGS!!!" The contractions were way too intense for me, and I lost complete ability to concentrate on controlling and/or relaxing any muscle in my body. Drugs are good. Drugs are very good. In came the Anesthesiologist - out went the pain.

Watching the monitor show my contractions rise in intensity without the slightest physical sign to me was pure joy, which helped ease me into a good stretch of four hour sleep.

I woke up a little after 8 o'clock, as the nurse was checking on my charts. She did a quick exam and said, "Not long from now," and went to call our doctor.

I reached ten centimeters at about a quarter to ten, at about the same time I overheard the nurse say to another that she was still trying to find our doctor. He wasn't answering his pages."Don't worry," she said, "We'll get you started and he'll be here any minute."

She had me get into the stirrups, and I began to push - luckily the epidural was still going strong. In minutes, my doctor showed up, and after three more pushes, "What's that? It feels like like a cantaloupe."

"That's your baby's head," the nurse laughed. One more push and out he came. Scott was allowed to catch him, and when he lifted this beautiful baby up for me to see, his little arms and legs were stretched out in such a way that he looked like he was flying.

Our little bird was home.

The Locked Glass Door

The Martha Complex

By Lara Shecter

Poor Martha. With all this nasty insider trading business, it must be awfully difficult to focus on glue guns and hand-painted Easter eggs. Martha Stewart's recent run-in with the SEC, however, confirms something most mothers suspected all along: maintaining perfection at work and at home is about as realistic as having a toddler who changes his own diapers.

While they grew up with the mantra "You can have it all," many women are realizing that being a loving wife, a wise and gentle mother, and successful business woman is more than they can handle. Unlike their mother's who struck a blow for feminism by joining the work force, the most recent generation of mothers finds itself trapped in a web of feminist ideals and feminine pursuits.

Old-fashioned values are all the rage with countless magazines and television programs detailing how to make absolutely everything from scratch. Gone are the days when a working mother could pat herself on the back for managing to get a TV dinner on the table to feed her hungry brood. If it isn't a gourmet meal made from organic vegetables grown in her garden, today's working mom feels strangely inadequate. If Martha can make her own Christmas ornaments, and seventeen kinds of cookies while running a business empire, the underlying sentiment seems to be, why can't I?

With Martha's public stumble, however, mothers everywhere can breath a collective sigh of relief. Perhaps when it comes to juggling work and family, perfection is only an illusion and women can cut themselves a little more slack. Remember, it's only "a good thing" if you have the time and energy to enjoy it.

Here are 5 ways to break the Martha habit:

1. Take your kids to the store, let them choose a bag of cookies, and don't look at the ingredients. Once at home, give a cookie to each child and have one yourself. Pour a glass of milk, and revel in the fact that your kitchen is not covered in flour and that there are no dishes to clean.

2. Get your blood pumping once a week. No offense Martha, but while making your own truffles can be divine, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time to stay in shape. Try an activity that will make you feel like a kid again, like line-dancing, Hip-Hop or Yoga.

3. Despite the hype, most crafts aren't cheap or easy. If you feel your blood pressure rising when you contemplate the amount of time and money you've spent on a project, you should reconsider the whole endeavor. Next time, accept that a candle from the dollar store burns just as brightly as one you've molded yourself.

4. If your child is in more than two after-school activities, think about canceling them. To stop over-scheduling yourself, you must first stop over-scheduling your children.

5. Take a team approach. Your kids would prefer a pinata of a lopsided fish to a perfect replica of a Disney character as long as they got to squish the papier-mache through their little fingers. It doesn't have to look perfect to be perfect as far as kids are concerned, so relax and get them involved in what you're doing.

************
Lara Shecter has been working from home since having her first child in 1997, and she has learned a lot about what it takes to be a mompreneur in the process. Her first book, The Memory Maker - A Scrapbook for School-Aged Children, was inspired by her desire to keep things simple and fun for busy families.

Mocking Marriage