I still remember it like it was yesterday. I went home from the hospital with kid #3 the afternoon after her birth. Her father left for work that night, to be gone for 2-3 days and leaving me alone with a newborn, a 4 year old, and a busy teenager. From baby Serena’s two-day doctor visit we were sent home to nurse round the clock to wake up this sleepy, dehydrated baby and avoid the ER. The next day — at this point I’m going on three days without sleep and still not recovered from an intense birth — we returned to the doctor (a 40 minute one-way drive): me, Serena, and Nathaniel, 4.

Relieved that my all-nighter was going to keep my baby from the ER, I strapped the kids in the car and we drove home. After about 20 minutes Nathaniel piped up. “Mom, I’m not seat belted!”

I had forgotten to buckle his car seat. I was driving around with a potential human cannonball inside my car. Any sudden stop on this high-traffic road filled with bad drivers would send my son hurtling through a window to his death. Shaking, I pulled over and fastened his belt, but not without a big hug first.

It could happen to anyone. That’s one of the main things I took from this New York Times Motherlode post about kids dying in hot cars. But the issue is more complicated than that.
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Recently I had cause to re-read almost every entry in my old (now defunct but still standing) blog, Lion and Magic Boy. I wrote there near-daily for three years, choosing to leave it behind when I left Pennsylvania to move west two years ago this month. I was surprised to remember that there is some great writing there (and a lot of near misses and wild swings). But most of what I found there was heart.

I wrote about my kids, mostly. Heart.

Kids, cats, riding my bike. And a lot about me, of course, but always there with my kids. My heart.

And the overarching theme? About my kids? Was that I wanted, more than anything, to see and know that I was making the right choices that would help make their lives good. And happy. I questioned myself constantly, not out of self-doubt but out of soul-wrenching love for my children. More than anything, what I wished then was to know they were going to end up happy.

(I think that’s what we all want.)
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Hey there. Let’s take a trip to Sweden! If you go I can promise you a blond minimalist coffee table and a bag of frozen Ikea meatballs. You in?

Awesome. Let’s go.

The first thing you’ll notice in Sweden is the large number of dads pushing sleek Eurostrollers or wearing flaxen-haired Hanna-clad infants whose legs resemble gaily-colored dangling Swedish fish strapped to their father’s’ chests in Baby Bjorns. (I live in the Pacific Northwest and daddies pushing strollers are an oddly common sight here, but they’re usually wearing plaid, have a five-day beard growth and look unemployed.) It’s a growing number. Why? Because Swedish daddies stay home.

They have to.
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Don’t get me started about Lois. Lois was the secretary I shared with two peers and our collective boss. She was awesome. She scheduled my life, reminded me of stuff I had forgotten to do, took my messages, typed all my correspondence and reports, ran interference when necessary, and DID MY FILING. Plus she gave me advice on my single-mom status (whether I wanted it or not) and even invited me to join her bowling league. We all loved her and knew that she ran the place.

Lois was maybe 5 years older than me. But we all called her “Mom.”

Is there an Office Mom in your office? (Is it you?)

I read this blog post at Mothering21.com recently on how we shouldn’t mother younger colleagues. At first I thought, Okay, point taken. Reaching across the conference table to wipe a bit of jelly off somebody’s chin with your spit-wetted napkin IS a bit much.
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When I was growing up, it was pretty clear what my parents did. My mom was a teacher. I knew about teachers — I even had to suffer through being taunted with cries of “Teacher’s Pet!” as I walked down the hall to her 4th grade classroom every day. Fun. And my dad was a physicist, which meant he left early in the morning with w briefcase to fly to Nevada and blow things up (later he became a Master’s student, which meant he stayed home and baked bread). Like I said, I knew exactly what my parents did.

Teachers grade papers and complain about parents who don’t care about their kids.

Physicists blow things up.

My kids know exactly what I do, too. Once they showed me. We were playing a game in which I’d call out “Be a tree! Be a spoon!” and they’d imagine themselves into treeness or spoonness. We were all laughing so hard! I took it further and had them be one another. And then me.

Uniformly, the two who were playing sat down with imaginary laptops and told imaginary children to be “Quiet! I’m writing!”

Ugh. Also yikes.

Is is possible that our kids don’t really know what we do because we don’t really show them?
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