NEW BLOG SITE!

I've started a new blog site at wordpress. Check out http://savagewriter.wordpress.com right away!! New posts!! Excerpts from the book!!

Where Am I?

A friend asked me this question today....it's a good question, to which I feel I should have a good answer: a date, a deadline, a sure-fire reply with facts and figures to back me up. But I don't. If there's anything I've learned while writing my first book, it's that writing is a lot like parenting: you start out with a great idea--let's have kids!--but the ideas themselves take over pretty much within a week or two of having life--just like kids.

For me, writing a book is like peeling an onion layer by layer and finding a peach pit in the center so you have to take a look at all the layers and figure out where you went wrong. Or making a quilt, patch by patch, but the design for the quilt shifts when you're not looking. Pieces add themselves; others disappear.

Maybe it'll get easier the more books I write. Maybe.

For now, I do have a complete manuscript, but I won't call it "whole." I do have goals: get it whole, get it out to agents by year's end. And in between being a mommy and a wife and a friend and a human being who needs to sleep (apparently) and eat (probably not quite so much) and laugh (definitely), I am working.

I will finish this book. I will. I finally know where I'm going, I can feel it. But my biggest, most important goal? That my kids will not suffer for my ambition.

I've never managed to finish a book before, much less found the confidence to attend a writer's conference and actually pitch my project to agents and editors. All of the patience, the confidence, the "openness" I needed to get this far--I owe to my kids and my husband. They have taught me to stop, look and listen. To accept constructive criticism (hey, if I can be told five days out of seven that dinner looks "gross like cow farts" and still eat it with a smile on my face, I can listen to you completely pick apart my writing with a smile on my face) and most of all, to believe in myself.

My kids and my husband are my biggest fans--of me as a mom, and of me as a writer. They're not star-struck, wide-eyed easy fans--they don't always buy what I'm selling--but even when they don't like my decisions as mother, or where I'm going in a story, they hear something in what I'm saying or doing or reading that I only thought I heard myself before.

For them, my success is not even a matter of belief: it's a matter of knowing.

So, for them, I will not wear myself out so that I can't go canoeing with them, or have the energy to play Polly Pockets with my daughter or listen to my son tell me his latest ideas for his own stories. I will try to the best of my ability to put dinner on the table at least five nights a week--although that isn't exactly a strength, even without the writing interfering. I will blog more consistently when they return to school and, for the first time in eleven years I am home alone all day, and I will be able to work on the book consistently.

Until then, during then, I do the best I can.

Where am I? Still here: being a mom and a wife and a friend, laughing, writing when I can, balancing, living. I might take longer to get wherever I'm going then some, but I'll get there. I always get where I'm going.

Love is Blind

My daughter's room is a probably a fire hazard, but I will take it over the contentious relationship we use to have when it wasn't always like that.

After fighting some serious, awful battles over the tidiness of her room with her over the last several years (she's packed to "run away" on two occasions and asked for a new mother on more occasions then I can count), I realized a few months ago--belatedly, I fully admit--that the whole room "tidiness" issue is in the eye of the beholder. Life around here has been simpler, calmer and so much quieter since I stopped battling her. As an added bonus, our relationship has drastically improved. Some of it I can attribute to her own maturity in general, but most of I know, deep down, is because I've stepped away from what she so passionately cherishes as "her" space.

I'm no Martha Stewart when it comes to housecleaning myself, and our house is generally what I like to describe as "comfortably cluttered." We used to clean up every night before bed, but when my daughter in particular began constructing elaborate playsets, whether it be with blocks or legos or stuffed animals, we would let her keep them up for a few days. But then she began "collecting" things--anything from the homemade confetti she used to make once she discovered scissors and the usual kid stuff like rocks, shells, and party favors to the more eclectic: shampoo bottles, pieces of string she found, deflated balloons that she loved, seeds from apples she particularly enjoyed, a bucket of sand from the time we went to Ocean Shores on Mother's Day, a tupperware container of grass where she had kept a "family" of worms one summer, beads from a broken necklace, old baby clothes she "remembered" wearing and didn't want me to pass on....the list goes on and on.

I have never begrudged her the "collections." I am, after all, the mom who has a cut-glass bowl full of rocks as the centerpiece on our side table or a stack of notebooks--never used and therefore pristine in their beauty and possibilities--on the small counter in the kitchen. My empty vases hold seashells and seaglass, and the shelf that runs the length and width of the living room holds my "collection:" my grandmother's figurines, a a ceramic statue from a friend who went to New Mexico, replicas of Dutch shoes from my brother when he went to Holland, photos of people I have known and loved, places I have been, a metal rooster from Key West, unicorns and miniature beer steins from long gone friends who travelled places I have yet to go. As a kid, I had a long dresser with six long drawers, three on each side, and six small drawers all along the top. Most kids, I found out somewhere along the way, used those small drawers to separte socks from underwear, tights from tshirts. I threw all that stuff together, so that I could I use those drawers for my treasures.

I never liked cleaning up my room, either.

When I was around ten, my sister moved into my room while our dad renovated the upstairs to add on my brother's room. She was--and is--Martha Stewart. To my mind, obsessively so. She was constantly picking up my clothes, my books, demanding that I clear off my bed, asking me how I could sleep, get dressed, simply live, in such disarray. At one point, we had to draw a line down the center of the room. I wasn't allowed to throw my clothes or stacks of stuff on her side; she wasn't allowed to straighten up my side.

To this day I remain perplexed at the entire situation: surely I wasn't that bad, was I? I just didn't like putting things away. One never knows when something is needed again--and that goes for a pair of socks to that scrap of paper with half a poem written on it.

I've been thinking of this a lot, lately, whenever I am forced to peek in my daughter's room. Surely, I wasn't this bad, was I? When I ask my mother what she used to do with me, she laughs and tells me she just turned a blind eye. "It was your room," she said. "The only place, really, in the whole house where you had complete control."

I'm still not my sister, but living in small spaces in college taught me the value of "a place for everything and everything in its place." To a certain extent.

I wish I hadn't learned this at all.

Despite my happy memories of my own mess, my daughter's room drives me beyond sanity. Two days ago, I couldn't even get through the door because she had placed an upside down rattan footstool crammed full of her stuffed animals (they were on a boat) right inside the door and then closed it.

She leaves her clothes in heaps at the end of the day instead of putting them in the easily accessible laundry basket in her closet. She takes stacks of books down to read and doesn't put them away. Last week, she created a "sun" design on the floor with her collection of Disney books. In the middle, she set up some dollhouse furniture and her favorite dolls. She began to have a panic attack when I suggested we pick up her "design." She collects boxes from various places and turns them into houses or spaceships or boats or trains for her dolls or herself. Today I found a ziploc bag of clear liquid far back in the shelf where one of her drawers was supposed to go. The drawer itself, of course, was on the floor.

"What's this?" I asked her. "That's my experiment," she said.
"What is it?"
"It's water," she said. "Remember I told you I was keeping it to see what would happen?"

I had a dim memory of her talking about wanting to see what would happen to water if she kept it around for awhile. I wasn't aware that conversation was a request or even a statement of intent.

"Ah," I said. "So, why does it have to be here? Isn't the drawer supposed to be here?"
"But the cats might pop the bag," she said. "So it can't go on the floor. The drawer can, though."

Of course.

She's been looking for her DS--and mine--since we returned from San Diego over Spring Break. Today, I suggested we just "tidy" up her room, and maybe we'd find them.

"But I cleared a path last night," she reminded me. "I know," I said. She had, in fact, shoved everything to the edges of the room in jumbled piles. "But let's tidy up a bit more." There were six boxes of various sizes in her room, along with a two foot tall stack of books and mounds of clothing. In the "path," she'd set up her Polly Pockets and had been in there for several hours playing that afternoon.

When she is almost-41, and her daughter's bedroom makes her cringe, will she remember her own "mess?"

In the process of "tidying" up, she found 1)her slinky, 2)several of her horses she'd been looking for, 3)her Laura doll and Laura's furniture which had gone missing awhile back, 4)her Indiana Jones hat, which was "camoflauged" by the floor, 5)several books she'd been looking for, 6)her "tornado" bottle she made in science class, which is made out of two 2-liter bottles held together at the openings and, makes a tornado when the liquid in one is poured into the other, 7) her stuffed dolphin "Dolfinny," and 8)both DSes. One DS was in her "oven," which we'd made out of a cardboard box last fall. The other was in her drawer with her music and storybook CDs. "Well, it is electronic," she said by way of explanation. "And the box oven?" I asked. "I guess I thought it was a good place to put it," she said.

Having hid notebooks under my mattress, special pens in my pillowcase and money in my encyclopedias as a kid, I don't have much room to argue.

When she got into the bath, I threw out four box "creations:" all of which were falling apart, one of which I didn't recognize as helping her with, and none of which I had understood what they were supposed to be in the first place. I also threw out a pile of Easter grass she'd told me she'd already thrown out, but had apparently decided to keep under her bed instead.

Her room is neat and tidy and even accessible now. I don't expect it to last more then a few days. But I will bite my tongue and take deep breaths, be thankful her neat-and-tidy brother doesn't have to share a room with her, pray she will find a bit of organization in her future, and finally, do what my mother did with my room: close the door.

Cliff Diving

It's been awhile, I know but here's the deal: I've been writing a novel. A real, fiction, murder-type mystery novel. I even have a "contact" on the local police force, and a lawyer friend who helps me with stuff. To be perfectly honest, I started this thing over ten years ago, when I was struck with what would be a scene from the book while visiting a friend from high school. In an instant a character was talking in my head. Nothing new, really--I've got people talking in my head all the time. The difference was, she wouldn't go away.

Before we go on, a disclaimer: I am not insane. Really! I have a therapist, and he assures me I'm not insane. Creative, he says, and "tuned to a different rhythm," (whatever the heck that means), but definitely not insane.

I immediately went home and started writing. Although I knew, even then, that it was a novel-length thing, the idea of writing a novel terrified me. So, I tried really, really hard to squish my voice's story into a short.

It didn't work. I've spent the last eleven years alternately working on it, tearing it up, starting over, etc. etc. all while having babies and trying to manage a household.

Not to mention the whole husband-wife relationship in there.

Turns out, writing a book is haaarrrrdddddd. Especially when I'm supposed to be nurturing and naturing two kids, a husband, three cats, a dog, a gecko and fish, too.

For me, it's what I think jumping off a cliff must be like. My brother sent me photos of him doing this very thing when he was in the Air Force. Of course, there was ocean or a big lake below him, but still. The idea of diving off a cliff, of giving up complete control of your body, of giving over complete faith that you will land safely without crushing your spine or smashing your head on a rock.....for a long time, every time I started this book, I thought of his photos and tried to jump. It didn't work. I just couldn't take that leap, give up control of my life and the lives of those around me, give myself up to a faith that it would all be OK.

That I would be OK. Even if all I did was to prove myself NOT to be a writer, after all.

For the last year, I've been making steady progress, with the help of a good friend who made me give her weekly reports. I missed my first self-imposed deadline, and I will miss my second coming up here in three days. But I'm OK with that. I'm making progress: I have 178 pages and am 200 words short of 100,000. I know what I'm doing--well, more then when I started--and better yet, where I'm going.

Even though I have been writing steadily for a year and four months, it took me an entire year before I actually found the courage and strength to jump off that cliff. But once I did....it is like nothing I have ever experienced, including (shhh) seeing my children for the first time. It's not that I like writing over them. The two cannot be compared. All I know is...if I have the chance, the opportunity to write another novel, whether anyone ever reads that one or this one, I will take it. I can't imagine giving this up anymore then I can imagine giving up my children.

Of course, in the process of taking that leap, chaos has, as I suspected it would, ensued. All for the better, I think (at least, that's what I'm going with).

My children have become remarkably self-sufficient. My son gets most of his own snacks, and usually helps my daughter get hers, during the times I set aside for writing. They have also become used to my "Ummmm.......I forgot to take the dinner out of the freezer. Who's up for Breakfast-for-Dinner/McDonald's/Forage Night?" To their credit, they are good sports and happy to play along, although my son does has started asking me "What's for dinner.....in three days?" to help "remind" me. They have also been good sports about the whole grocery shopping thing, since I often choose not to do it when I can be writing, instead.

My daughter's response to finding out we are out of yogurt again (one of her main food groups) is a cheery, "That's all right, Mommy! We'll get some probably before I'm old."

Probably.....

My husband, also, has been a remarkably good sport, learning the nuances in my voice or facial expressions that tell him I am not in the mood to be a wife--in any way--that evening because
I have words in my head that need to get out.

I figure I must be doing a good job of balancing all that because otherwise he'd be complaining, or having dates with call girls or something. And I'm almost 100% certain he's not.

To be honest, I'm not sure I would care, right now. There was a time when I was driving this project. That time has passed, and this project is driving me.

It's 2:32 a.m. right now. I finished working on the novel half an hour ago. My fingers ache, and my eyes are crusty with sleep-longing. And yet, my brain isn't done. In the background of this blog, it's going on and on about the next step, the next twist and turn....

It might totally suck. I might totally suck. But I'm beyond caring. It's not for anyone else, anymore. I jumped off the cliff awhile ago. I will hit ground by March, if not before. And I'm already planning my next leap.

End Days: Part One (or T Minus 7 Days)

We are at T-7 days here until school starts. And while I had an awesome, tremendous summer with my kids, I think we are all ready for some time away from each other.

Tonight, my daughter exploded like a water balloon filled with liquid nitrogen. I know, from my self-imposed limited chemistry education, that you probably can't put liquid nitrogen into a water balloon. But let's just say you could. You manage to 1)gain access to some liquid nitrogen and 2)pour it into a cute little pink water balloon. Let's pretend the water balloon also insulates your hands from the cold the liquid nitrogen puts out (shshshsh!! Stop your brain from thinking right now, science people! We're PRETENDING) so you can hold the balloon in your hand and it's all soft and round and squishy and makes you happy, just to look at it.

Just like my daughter does for me, most of the time. Just the fact that she exists gives me this warmth down deep in my belly, a strange sort of amazement mixed with pride that I even had a part in her creation. Even if I hadn't--even if she'd been dropped on my doorstep one morning...most of the time, I am honored to be allowed in her life, and all I can think, when she is crying in my arms because she doesn't ever, ever want to get too big for me to hold, is "Oh, Lord, please don't ever STOP wanting me to hold you."

Then something happens. She wakes up tired. She misses her dad. She's bored. I told her to do something she didn't want to do. I was on the phone too long. I wasn't feeling well so I didn't play ponies with her. Most of the time, her anger stems from something I did or didn't do. She once told me, "I get mad at you because you're supposed to be my perfect mom."

(Yeah, I know, pretty cool she could verbalize it, huh? But still...)

She can be the happiest girl in the world and then I say "no" or tell her to finish her breakfast or answer the phone when it rings and BAM! It doesn't matter that I've been carrying her around with love and gentleness for the last few days. No matter my honest attempts to soothe her, to give her space, to catch her before she falls...she explodes. Unfortunately, she doesn't just spew standard H2O all over me. That, I like to think, I could handle. Water doesn't hurt.

My daughter, my liquid nitrogen water balloon, hurts. She's very, very good at it. Tonight, after exploding at the mere mention of cleaning her room, she called me a "mean mommy." A "witch." She said, "I hate you!" "I wish you would disappear!" "I don't love you!" "I want daddy!" "I don't want you to ever be with me again!" "You're a BAD Mommy!" She also called me a "dumb bitch," but I absolve her of that, since I know exactly where she got that one (sorry, Lady in the Camry in traffic....but really....turning left from the right hand turn lane? Even my fourth grader recognized it as Not A Good Idea.....)

Last month, my doctor burned off a wart on my thigh with a dab of liquid nitrogen on the end of a q-tip. A tiny amount. But it burned and stung and blinded my brain for the barest millisecond. I was thankful I didn't come into contact with the stuff on a daily basis.

Lately, my daughter has been burning and stinging and blinding my brain on a daily basis.

On a good day, during a relatively good week, I can handle it. I can look her in the eyes and tell her I love her, no matter what. I can turn away and let her rage at me and tuck the pain and burning away as inconsequential. I sense it coming, like the way I could sense thunderstorms growing up in the Midwest. And I prepare myself, as best I can. I remind myself she is full of liquid nitrogen, not just water. And I put on what I think of as my emotional HazMat suit.

On a long day, I can't sense her fear, her anger, her disquiet. I can barely sense myself. I can't find my own center, and I usually can't find my emotional HazMat suit. So, on long days, like today, in the middle of an even longer, worse week, when she explodes.....and she inevitably explodes.....I explode back.

We ended the day with her putting herself to bed. It wasn't so much punishment as self-preservation. For her and me.

The bad news is, the liquid nitrogen-filled water balloon doesn't fall far from the tree.

The good news is, tomorrow is another day. I do love her, and I like to think she knows that. Most of the time, I get my emotional HazMat suit on before I risk carrying around my little liquid-nitrogen-filled water balloon on a day when life plays hell with our schedule or she wakes up with that certain frown on her little face.

Most of the time, I like to think, I do OK. Even if I'm not the perfect mom.

Facebook Addiction and Parenting: Can They co-Exist?

Hello, my name is Elena, and I am a FB addict. I just can't help myself: when I should be doing other things, fulfilling other commitments, I just need my FB. I decide to go in for a quick look, a tiny peek, and then I get tangled up in statuses and profile pictures and applications that tell me what Starbuck drink I am. I lose time to saving the planet by sending people pretend flowers. I burn breakfast accepting friend requests and tagging people on my "Notes About Me" page. When a friend recently apologized for not accepting my friend request because he had been so busy, I wondered what on earth could he have been doing? It had been TWO WEEKS! I can barely stay away from Facebook for two days.

A year ago, I had no Facebook in my life. Was I happy? Was I content? Did I have enough friends? Yes, yes, and definitely yes. True, I felt very isolated some days. Being a stay-at-home mom is not the life of luxury I imagined as a kid. With newborns and babies, time is one long moment during which you might not speak to anyone else even close to your age for several days. Toddlers are a bit easier: you have a little more energy, and you start to take the kids places and meet friends for coffee…but then you decide, when your child presents you with a wilted dandelion after a very long week of Terrible Two temper tantrums, that it’s time to have another baby. And you’re back to Square One.

Since my eldest entered preschool, I’ve felt my days are bits and pieces, snips of comings and goings and clock-watching to make sure he was picked up even while making sure my daughter didn’t nap too long or miss her meals .

Now that my eldest is in elementary school, and my youngest is in preschool, some days I spend almost the entire day in the car, running back and forth, shopping for groceries in between dropping one off or picking another up, squeezing dentist appointments in between soccer practice or pony class.

Yes: now I do have time to have lunch with friends, or get to the gym or just sit and read, if I ignore the rug that needs vacuuming. Of course, doing any of that (even the vacuuming) means I also need to ignore the itch at the back of my neck that tells me I need to work on my writing projects every day.

So, am I really so bored that I need to give up fifteen minutes to the writing “25 Things About Me,” or five minutes to finding out what song I am?

Not so much.

But here’s the thing: I’m having the best time doing all of that, and an even better time having all my friends in one place. I always wanted to live in a place where I and my family and all my friends and their families—old, new, liberal, conservative, Lattes or Skinny Mochas—could co-exist happily. Sounds like a Peter, Paul and Mary song, I know. But that was my dream, and look! Here we are: in my own little cyberspace town, having a common bond, at the very least.

It’s not as if I’m choosing my kids over FB. Yes, I’ve burned their breakfast a few times because I was checking statuses, but the truth is I’ve been burning bacon for years without Facebook’s help. Bacon takes awhile to cook, and I get…distracted. Sometimes I even forget I am cooking bacon and start to take a shower (that only happened once, and I was tired that day).

My point is, my Facebook addiction isn’t hurting anyone. It helps me feel connected, it gives me somewhere to go for a few minutes when it’s difficult to get out, and I REALLY need to talk to someone who isn’t asking me where their book is or what do I have to eat THIS week. Some would argue it’s a one-sided conversation on Facebook. I see it as a conversation with a time lag.

No, I have to say: this is a much, much, much better addiction then when I was addicted to carb-free ice cream (and just so you know? Even though it’s carb-free, you can’t eat a giant bowl of it every night and not put on weight, or not have crying jags the next day from the artificial sugar giving you insomnia and mood swings).

So, never mind. I take it back. My name is Elena, and I am proud to be a Facebook-er.

Welcome to my little town.

Time Management 101

Lately, I've been wondering exactly how working mothers handle the whole time management and the guilt thing. I've been observing a friend who has a full time, stressful job at a high-tech company. She runs several committees on the elementary school PTSA. She's creating the website for her son's Cub Scout troop, and she--and her husband--have both gotten to our kids' elementary school early the last few months so as to help out with the shortage of crossing guards (we are a walking school).

And yet, I am pretty sure she's not neglecting her kids. They are both well-mannered, polite, good kids who don't appear to be the monsters that kids can be if they aren't getting the necessary attention. I've been at her house to work on PTSA stuff with her, and her youngest son is apparently perfectly aware that she is "working." He did sit in the room with us and work on his puzzle, but he didn't constantly demand her attention. He didn't attempt to sabotage her meeting with me because she wasn't giving him all her focus. It was obvious to me that she had drawn a line in the sand, and he respected it.

I have a difficult time doing this. Especially, it seems, with my daughter.

In terms of solitary play, my son has always been independent. True, he would cling to my leg like a terrified monkey whenever we went to friends' houses or the drop-in play at the kiddie gym, and he cried whenever I dropped him off at preschool for the entire first year (he was known as The Howler). But at home, he liked to play with me for a bit, and then he'd wander off and be fine on his own. For the last few years, since his sister has been able to actually play, he is happy to play with her for awhile, but then he's done.

His sister is another story. Perhaps it's because she's the opposite of him, and she wants someone to play with all the time. She gets sad and mopes if she thinks she's not the center of attention. She gets excited about going to school, and she wants to have playdates every single day, and sometimes twice a day. She loves birthday parties and people and interaction. She needs to be entertained, and she has a tendency to get very mad when no one will help her achieve that goal.

I also know I have not pushed her to be independent nearly as much as I pushed my son. If nothing else, he had to grow up when she came along. I was also very concerned about his lack of social skills, and I worked hard to help him feel comfortable being independent.

With her....I've started to push, on several things, several times...and then I let it go. "This is it," I think. "She's the last one."

Not thoughts I ever expected would influence my hard-headed logical self. But my children have found pieces of me I never knew existed.

So, it is my daughter who, last week on Veteran's Day, when we were all home and it was raining heavy like it does at this time of year, demanded my attention even after I spent all morning with them. Who cried and stamped her feet and sang her favorite litany ("Mommy doesn't love me, Mommy doesn't love me!") from behind her bedroom door while she threw her stuffed animals at the door. And it is because of those same demands why I am sometimes rushing to get my homework done or put together the my son's PTSA newspaper which I voluntarily edit, or even call a friend.

That same day, I had to call the president of the PTSA. It was all quiet at her house, and I remarked on this, wondering what she did with her kids on this rainy holiday. "Oh," she said, "we did our thing this morning, and now they're listening to their music on the computer and I'm doing my thing."

I was impressed and amazed and in awe. Imagine that: they did their thing together, then they did their own thing, apart. Not forever, just for a few hours. That was when I understood that the thing between me and my daughter could be fixed. Should be fixed.

I emailed the same friend and asked her for advice. She basically said she wants to talk to me about it in person--it's easier to explain and find out from me what's going on. But I'd already been thinking, and talking to my husband, and I already understood the difference: I didn't see any time as "my" time. When the kids were home, all time is "their" time.

The problem with that is twofold: 1)even if I had nothing else to do, ever, there is only so long I can play Star Wars guys, which includes doing a full range of voices for Clone Troopers, SuperBattle Droids and Darth Vader, and 2)I do have other things to do. Even taking away the PTSA work and my Facebook "work" and writing "work" and the whole talking-to-my-friends "work," I still need to come up with meals. Sometimes I need to pay bills, make phone calls to doctors and speech therapists and teachers, make travel arrangements, carpool arrangements, birthday party arrangements. Sometimes I even need to clean another room besides the kitchen (OK, that's so at the bottom of my list, but it would probably be good for the kids to see me clean just for kicks, and not because people are coming over).

And sometimes, the kids just need to play by themselves or with each other, and give us a break from being with each other.

But I feel like such a bad mom when my daughter looks at me with her big hazel eyes and holds my hand and tells me she loves me and really, really, really needs me to play Pet Doctor with her (this is before she has the temper tantrum if I say no).

And why do I feel like a bad mom? Here's the deep thinking realization part: because I don't really value anything else I do except be a mom. Nothing else I do seems as important, or as worthwhile, or as worthy. And, technically, it's probably not. Editing the PTSA newsletter is not worth losing my kids. Writing poems and stories that so far, continue to just get rejected from every magazine on the face of the planet is not worth giving up time with my kids. Updating my profile on Facebook is definitely not as worthy as playing Star Wars guys for a bazillion hours with my daughter (judging by the happiness she gets out of it, that is).

The problem is, all of these things are things I enjoy. They make me happy. They make me feel connected. They make me feel successful.

Raising children is the most difficult job in the universe. If you are successful, you don't necessarily know it until someone else tells you, or until your kid is 40 and says, "Thanks, Mom, for teaching me all that you did." And then, if you're 80, like I will be, will you really care? Will you even be able to hear them, much less recognize them? One can only hope, but the point is, raising children, you don't get a pay raise every year for doing a great job. You don't get bonuses. You don't get awards or community recognition or people wanting you to speak all over the world because you are so damn good at what you do (that's my husband).

A lot of the time, you get other people criticizing your methods. You get advice from strangers on the street. You get "looks" on the playground and in the airport. You get isolation from people your own age.

Sure, you get the "I need a magic kiss, Mommy, to make the owie better." You get the "No, YOU have to put me to bed." You get the "I miss you so much in school, Mommy," and the "Look what I made you, Mommy!" You get the love, and the love is definitely far better then all of that stuff mentioned above. But that doesn't mean it's any less hard, on a day to day basis, when you give all day long and just want one hour to yourself to send people Pieces of Flair on Facebook or write a story that no one else wants to read but your husband.

It doesn't mean that what relaxes you, what makes you feel centered and whole, is any less worthy then talking like Darth Vader to the delight of a little girl.

Today, after talking to my friend some more and talking to myself a lot more, I tried something new. I took the kids to the park for two hours. We walked down the hill; I even brought the wagon, at my daughter's urging, although I was very firm in letting her know I would pull her down in it, but she would have to walk on her own going up (we have the heaviest wagon in the world). I pushed them on the tire swing for half an hour, at least. We walked over to McDonald's and took food back to the park for a late fall picnic. We played on the tire swing until my shoulders ached. We played football. We played hide and seek. We started to play hide and seek freeze tag, but my daughter was sagging, and she got really mad for some reason or another.

I did not get on my cell phone. I did not keep looking at my watch, until the very end when Daughter was obviously worn out. I did not go to the bathroom for a very long time or find a really good hiding place (like my car) where it took them a long time to find me. I did not even use the fat lip my son gave me when his elbow slammed into my face on the tire swing as a reason to sit down. I did not suggest we go home until they were very, very ready to go home.

And when we arrived home, I told them very simply, very nicely, but very firmly, "It's time for you to play by yourself or with each other and it's time for me to do some work."

My son, who would have done this anyway, said, "OK. Sounds great!"

But my daughter....she was the one I was worried about. She is the reason I've thought about doing this before, but have never really done it because, can I say this? I am sometimes afraid of her. Strangers have noted she is a "spitfire," "firecracker," and "headstrong." They have no idea. I have been described as the same, my whole life (my mother just laughs when she sees us together), and yet I feel like she has bested me a thousand times over. The worst part is, I know she knows her...passion...makes me choose my words carefully. Today, on account of talking to myself in my head the whole time we were at the park, I was not afraid of her. I didn't consider all the negative reactions she could have. I didn't ask. I didn't really wait around for her to give me her opinion. I kept moving, mentally, so to speak. Once I said it, it was a done deal.

She looked at me for a long moment, and I could tell she was trying to find the cracks in my armor. I must have appeared whole, because she just said, "OK. But you'll play with me in a little while?"

"Of course," I said.

"OK," she said. "Hey, Brother, you wanna' play with me?"

It could, of course, have been an exceptional day. I could have spent so much time with them they were honestly tired of me. The McDonald's could have acted as an unspoken bribe.

Or I could have figured out that, if I feel my time is worthy, my kids will, too.