Last week I was sick. I lay shivering in my coffin, er, on my deathbed, er, on my couch and thought about the last time I was sick. It was nearly three years ago and I was a single mommy with three kids at home. They each went to different schools that began and ended at different times and had varying bus stop drop-off and pick ups. It was a logistics nightmare that afforded me 2.5 hours alone time, four days a week (not five!), to work from home. La di da.

It all went swimmingly until I got the Death Flu. No one else in the house had it. Just me. I was doomed.

For five days I dragged myself out of bed at 6-ish and croaked greetings to my cherubs while stuffing bagels in the toaster and hoping they had lunch money left over so I didn’t have to walk an extra four feet to get a $20 bill from wherever I was keeping extra cash. By 9-ish they were all gone and I collapsed in a heap on the unvacuumed floor. Three hours to be Dead Mommy. If I was lucky I fell near the remote so I could turn Curious George off, otherwise I’d be doomed to three hours of PBS Kids until Eric got home and I had to muster the strength to walk outside and collect him from his bus.

Eric, the littlest, arrived back at 12:30. You’d think that some snuggle time with a three-year-old would be possible for a Sick and Dying Mommy, but not this one. He had the will and the strength of a rhinoceros, a small boy capable of staying awake for days on end. And I had to keep an eagle eye on him — at three, Eric-with-Down-syndrome had the self-discipline skills of a baby crocodile. He could not be counted on to be entertained (and stay in one place without wreaking havoc somewhere) with a nice DVD. The other two, in 2nd grade and 6th, dribbled in by 4 pm and had the gall to want things like DINNER. And BEDTIME RITUALS. And CALLIGRAPHY PRACTICE.

Okay, so I lied about the calligraphy. And they understood about the bedtime thing (sort of). But dinner … well, the point is, mommies really can’t get sick. I thought about this last weekend as I lay in bed shivering for two days, knowing I had the luxury to lay in bed shivering for as many days as I needed. Some of you know that my kids aren’t living with me now, and I never realized until now that there’s an unexpected perk to this — I can actually be sick.

You can’t.

My mom was never sick. Not once. Oh, she had the sniffles from time to time. And once she tore a ligament in her ankle and couldn’t work for a few days. But she was never sick.

Was yours?

I know there are exceptions (there was a lovely mother to my kids’ classmates a few years ago whose long and graceful illness and eventual death was incredibly beautiful and touching for the entire school community), but culturally, there just isn’t the wiggle room for us to be sick. Work needs us, families need us, kids need us. Sure, daddies step in and do what needs to be done, but for Order to be Restored to the Universe, mommies have to be Well and Whole and Able to Read Bedtime Stories Without Coughing.

As kids get older, they can fend for themselves a little better, but what do you do when they’re too little to be on their own long enough for you to have a nice bout of Bubonic Plague? I’m sure you’ve faced this before. How do you cope? Or do you fight it off as best you can and pretend you’re not sick? (ha ha) And if we work outside the home and manage to drag ourselves to the office, how do we justify/balance/manage collapsing at home to recover, just when the second shift is starting and the cries of “Mommy’s home!” come from down the hall?

[Warning: rainbow unicorn bubble world alert.] I’m thinking of a time when we live in real community, where we step in for one another when needed like this. Wouldn’t it be great if there was always someone to care for our kids?  Without question?  I’d love it if as mothers (and fathers) we didn’t feel we had to suck it up and not get sick because there just isn’t anyone else. Extended families used to do this. So how do you make being sick work?

I’ll bet you a cup of delicious Pacific Northwest coffee (tall no-fat vanilla latte, thanks) that at least half of you have said, at one time or another, “I’ll never hit my child!” And I’ll bet you the maraschino cherry on my hot fudge sundae (no nuts, thanks) that a sizable chunk of you, whether or not you vowed not to hit, have spanked your kids anyway.

Yeah, you. I’m talking to you. The Dreaded Spank. It happens. Toddler on the loose, darting for that busy street for the 3000th time? Permanent marker decorating the walls and carpet? Poop anywhere where poop just shouldn’t be? Swats happen. It happens. One quick reaction before rational thought sets in. Besides, some of us were raised with spanking. It seems … familiar. And don’t diapers provide padding?

But listen to this: a new study suggests that early spanking — and we’re talking the prime of toddlerhood here, kids who are between one and two — has some detrimental effects. Kids who were spanked at the age of one were more aggressive at the age of two and performed worse on cognitive tests at the age of three. Whoa.
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Welcome to Bad Parents Anonymous. We’ll go around the room — please introduce yourself.

Hi, I’m Karen and I’m a bad mom.

Hi Karen.

I … [choke] … have competitive kids.

[shocked gasp]

I don’t know what it is, I mean, I played an old record of “Free To be You and Me” to them every day when they were babies. We only own non-competitive board games. Nobody wins. Nobody loses. It’s supposed to make kids happier, right? But they make a competition out of everything. Faster! More! Better! Who can stuff more raisins up their nose? BING! We have a winner. Who can whine the loudest? BING! We have a winner. And who cares about the stupid Snail Race game — WHO CAN THROW THEIR SNAIL THE FARTHEST?

Where did these kids come from, anyway? What did I do wroooong?!!
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Ooh. Just reading that title, “What kind of mother could give up her kids?” has an emotional sting, doesn’t it? It gets you right here — in the heart, in the gut. After all, whyever are we mothers, anyway?

There’s a provocative article in this month’s Marie-Claire that’s been making the internet rounds this past week. Yesterday it made the New York Times. I’m fascinated by the gamut of response to these pieces, often thoughtful, but just as often the response of what clearly hit a nerve. Motherhood is being threatened.

[insert bias here: a year and a month ago I moved 3000 miles away from my children. They now live full-time with their father after two years of joint custody and ten years of stay-at-home motherhood. You can read more about my journey over at Literary Mama.]
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I get most of my news from social media.  I’m sure this says something shallow about me, but yeah.  Twitter and Facebook are my sources for What’s Going On In The World (yes, I subscribe to 20,000 feeds in Google Reader but honestly, that’s a LOT of daily pressure that the “mark all as read” button does a lot to relieve).

I do more than just read the 75,000 tweets and the 60 Facebook updates — that’s PER HOUR, folks — that come my way.  Nope, like the good little hunter-gatherer that I am, I also think about what I read.  Put together connections.  Notice trends.  It makes me feel I don’t actually need to step outside my door, because, HELLO, all this action going on via the shiny bright rectangle of a Macbook I stare at 16 hours a day, that’s real life.

[Please insert a huge dose of "this is irony or something" right here.]

So what’s this week’s trend?  I’m so glad you asked.  Bad parenting.
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We’ve all faced this dilemma: it’s bedtime for your only child, age 10, when he says, “Mom! I need [fill in the blank] for school tomorrow.” You don’t have any [fill in the blank] in the house, your spouse isn’t home, it’s past 9 pm, so what do you do?

Maybe this is a bad example. Some of us would say, “too bad, so sad” and be done with it. Some of us are never alone with our kids in the evening, being blessed with partners who are actually home and who actually help with parenting stuff. And what stores open past 9?

Having spent years married to an airline pilot who was regularly away for days at a time, and then years after that as a single mom of three kids (plus years before that as a single mom of one), this kind of thing happened to me a lot.  Not so much the last-minute Mom-I-need-it requests, but the dilemma of needing to leave kids at home came up a LOT. And mostly, I didn’t. It was pretty much out of the question.

What worked (or didn’t) for me is probably different than what works for you. But here are my general rule(s) of thumb:
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This is my reality. Two of my four kids are computer literate. They have both joined Facebook. And they have both friended me.

I decided long ago to treat Facebook and other social media outlets like slightly more-fun versions of a resume, meaning, no, uh, language more “colorful” than occasional outdated surferism exclamations of “Dude!” and “Awesome!” and no TMI overly-revealing stories abut drinking binges or losing my panties in an elevator or photos of my piercings and tats (seriously, are you falling for any of this?).

But I was not prepared for the kid thing.
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Yesterday I got some advice: act like my 9 year-old daughter for a day. All day, channeling Serena.

Um. I’m not sure I can do it. She’s very different from me. When she’s hurt, you know it (so does the whole neighborhood). Me, I keep mine inside, or I try to. After all, how many of us are comfortable showing our inner pain in front of our kids?

And when Serena’s happy, you know that, too. Her whole body bounces, her eyes shoot sparkling diamonds, and the very air reverberates with her happiness. Me, happy? Hahaha. (I blog it).
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I remember the moment it hit me. My older daughter was about 5 and she was with me attending a PR party I had organized for my job. The party had hundreds of people and was held outside at dusk. There was a band, tons of balloons, lots of food, and wine. Not exactly the perfect place for a five-year old, but not bad either. That is, until she went near the swimming pool.

I freaked.

I was weirdly convinced she’d drown somehow, would just throw herself into the water for no reason at all. And not only was I suddenly scared for her, I also felt an urge to do whatever it took to be there for her myself. To avoid anything that might prevent me from being there for her (and for, later, her three younger siblings) and watch her grow up.

I got sort of boring.
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In the movie Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet’s character grabs onto the idea of just packing up and moving the family to Paris as a way of escaping the stifling social bonds and deep unhappiness she and her husband feel.  It’s the 1950’s and she’s willing—excited, even—to work full time so as to give her husband time and space to find out what he really wants in life.

It’s a fascinating premise, one that a lot of us can identify with.  I won’t tell you what happens if you haven’t already seen the film, but instead I invite you to think about your own life.  I’ve packed up kids and moved them from one end of the country to the other, twice.  I’ve sold everything I owned except what could fit in my car, and moved to another country.  So for me, the idea of moving to a really foreign country (mine was Canada, not so far away or exotic), is enticing.  It could even be an actual possibility.

But not everyone is mobile like that.  There are family ties.  Jobs.  Economic burdens.  Not everyone can really wrap themselves around the idea of selling everything, moving to another country (maybe even one where you don’t know the language!), and hoping that the six months’ or a year’s worth of living expenses you saved up will be enough to get you by until you find something else.

But, obvious immigration issues aside, would you?
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