If Facebook and Instagram are to be believed, there are women in our country who have clutter-free, artfully decorated, visitor-ready houses at all times. I suspect Mary Poppins floated in on her black umbrella, sang "Spoonful of Sugar" in a full-throated soprano, and the debris of daily life magically marched into its assigned drawers and cubbies of its own accord. I'm still waiting for her to get to my house. I have two children under age 4 and a husband who works odd hours, so my musical experience is more like Jakob Dylan repeatedly singing the line "this place is always such a mess, sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn" from " One Headlight ." Toys and dog hair litter the floor, you can write cursive (if schools still teach it) in the dust on my bookshelves, and the counter tops are a veritable treasure trove of miscellany. One of the biggest collectors of stuff is the kitchen. Like the heart of the body collects cholesterol, the he...

Heading into the parent-teacher meeting, I was nervous. Was pushing for my son to keep Baby Doll with him at preschool a bad choice for his long-term emotional development? Am I fighting for the right decision? And what if my son's preschool teacher drew a hard line and said nobody keeps the comfort item, no way, no how ? What would I do then? I prefer everything to have a clear set of instructions. Unfortunately, parenting doesn't work like that. Without a map or guidelines, or even a glimpse of the bigger picture, we're all just guessing our way through a beautiful and dangerous labyrinth. Worry is my constant accessory, like a leaden heart-shaped pendant on a chain around my neck. All I had to go on here was what I felt, and what my kiddo felt, and some vague sense of moving forward.  Start here. "I can't go on the carpet!" my son told me emphatically. I didn't know what this meant, and the helplessness was agonizing. "Tell me what scar...

Standing under what should have been a warm, soothing shower spray, I had a sudden thought: What if my son poops his pants at school? And the school has to call me to come get him, but it's during the baby's nap time so I have to go upstairs and wake her, and I think it's easiest to take her infant carrier upstairs to plop her right inside in hopes she'd fall back asleep in the car, but then carrying her and the carrier I trip and tumble down the stairs and break my arm, and I have to call the school to say I can't come get my son because I have to call 911 and go to the emergency room and I don't know who is going to take care of either child while I'm there and my poor sweet son would have to spend an eternity standing in his soiled pants, in front of the other kids, wondering where momma was and why she wasn't coming to make this better. There in the shower, overcome with guilt and heartache and worry for my child, I felt lightheaded, hot, and v...

Oh, I was smug. I was haughty. I was positively vainglorious . "Mmm, yes, that does sound difficult," I would tell other moms. "I wish I knew what to say. My little cherub, heart of my heart, organic apple of my eye, is just a wonderful eater. He has fruit and vegetables with every meal . We just don't have those problems." Once upon a time, I had a child who loved food. Life was beautiful all the time. Sunshine and rainbows hung over my immaculate home. A unicorn grazed lazily in the front yard. And inside, my child was happily eating whatever I put on his plate. Green beans. Italian meatloaf. Ripe, red strawberries. Homemade three-cheese mac-and-cheese with cubed organic chicken and a crispy Panko crumble topping, baked in a cupcake tin to form perfect single servings. He was a red-blooded American male, and he liked to eat. For a while, anyway. It turns out that the older kids get, the more opinions they have, and the more they want to exercise thos...

Come closer, dear child. You have the most intoxicating aroma about you. It smells like new school supplies. That pack on your back has the pungent, stiff fragrance of new plastic -- the kind you find on character book bags, in pencil boxes, and wafting around action figures patiently waiting for you to come home and play. Those pencils smell like soft wood shavings, faintly cedar, and cool stony graphite. Your rectangular pink eraser, bright as bubble gum, has the essence of rubber and vinyl and the hope of getting it right on the third try. And this package of construction paper has a bouquet like cardboard, but far sweeter and softer. It brings to mind the creamy, faintly chemical smell of Elmer's glue. I bet you have some of that in there, too, just waiting to be globbed onto thirsty paper. You're going to take those redolent school supplies with you into a classroom, child, where you'll be greeted by more odors whose memory will stay with you well past your...

I hadn't been feeling like myself, or whatever fragments of my self are left at the end of each day. Where my sense of humor used to be there was a flatness; where formerly was a desire to get lost in a 30-minute TV program now was me mentally cataloging the things I would pack when I finally said screw it, I'm out ; where I used to have a creative drive was now me driving in the car aimlessly just to be alone for a few more blessed minutes. For more than three years, my life had revolved around the needs of one or two tiny, helpless, unpredictable humans. For the previous few weeks, I'd been suffering the slings and arrows of parenting a petulant 3-year-old and a teething infant at the same time. In any 60 minutes, I hated 59 of them (with the other minute being me sneaking off to pee alone). At any given time I was THISCLOSE to losing my shit, walking out the door, and strongly considering never coming back. This was more than just needing a break. It was me starti...

In the summer of my seventh year, my family landed in Southeast Texas. We had driven there in a distressingly orange Volvo station wagon with sticky vinyl seats and a "way-back." Inexplicably, my mom called her Betsy For a few years thereafter, each month during summer vacation my brother, my mom, and I would climb into the family car and head to town to go grocery shopping. (At the time, "town" consisted of three stop lights, three fast-food joints (the McDonald's didn't come until 8th grade), and one set of railroad tracks that separated us from the grocery store). It was 98 degrees in the shade and the car's air conditioning hadn't worked since the turn of the decade. Three miles with the windows down can seem like three lifetimes when you're not even 10 years old.