In the last few weeks, my son, now eleven months old, has blown us away with suddenly knowing the meanings of dozens of words, as well as the sounds and actions associated with them. We ask him what the lion says and he goes “raaaaawr”; we ask him to retrieve Goodnight Moon, and he will; we ask him what the alligator does and he opens and closes his hands like tiny snapping jaws. (That little trick earned him a sticker from the alligator docent at the aquarium today!) We’ve been using the ASL sign for “more” since we first sat him in his highchair and spooned soupy rice cereal into his toothless mouth last spring, and at last he’s signing back to us–well, his interpretation, anyway, tapping the heels of his hands together instead of the fingertips, which very well might be the sign for “Please stop, as I do not like these green beans, mother,” but I guess we’ll never know for sure, will we?, at least not until he starts forming complete sentences. Tough beans, kid! Maybe next year! (If I sound bitter, it’s because I suspect he’s been signing “milk” nonstop this week simply because he can and not because he’s STILL HUNGRY OMG MY BOOBS CAN’T TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS ABUSE SIMILAC TAKE ME AWAY.)

These new feats of personhood leave me proudly heart-swollen, of course (and also painfully chest-swollen), but they also make me go slackjawed with terror because, woah nelly, if he can understand “book” and “milk” and “shoe,” what other colorful four-letter words does he hear fly out of my mouth? My better half solidifies his better-halfness every time he catches me talking blue around our baby–”rats,” “phooey,” and “dagnabbit” will celebrate a revival in our house if he has anything to say about it–and although I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it this new church-lady language, I am trying (sometimes).
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The other day I realized how many women I know went to school to become nurses only to trade in their careers shortly thereafter to become full-time stay-at-home moms. My unenlightened knee-jerk reaction was to mourn the time and effort and money they spent going to school and jumping through hoops and suffering the trial-by-fire of on-the-job medical training only to end up doing something that requires no training, no degree, not even a basic skills test or competency exam. What a waste! And then I slapped myself upside the head because, hello, going to nursing school before becoming a mother is downright genius. What better background to have as a mom than expertise in bandaging wounds, bringing down fevers, and kissing owies (although I don’t think that last bit’s part of the standard nursing school curriculum).
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Growing up, I always knew I would work for a living, even after getting married, and even after having children. I got my first job when I was fourteen, and from that moment on I’ve taken pride in earning a paycheck, interacting with coworkers and customers, and applying my skills, even if I didn’t always love my job and some days the only skill I applied was deftly stuffing hundreds of envelopes with nary a papercut. When I got pregnant last year, returning to work after my son’s birth was never a question; I would work, I had to work, I wanted to work. I didn’t start questioning this non-decision decision until after I became a mother and I realized that, for all the good having a job does to my bank account and my psyche, it’s also really, really HARD.
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We’re smart women, educated consumers, technologically savvy, and always on the lookout for the quickest/easiest/most efficient way to do anything, especially if we think it will help us do what’s best for our kids. But can we all agree that we (the collective, consumerist “we”) sometimes get carried away? That we’re so over-primed—by the media, by our peers, by our own worst fears—to jump on the newest bandwagon and buy the latest gadgets that it’s starting to get a little out of control? This afternoon my better half directed me to this article from Reader’s Digest that pokes fun at some of the newfangled “must-have” parenting products available. The larger implication here—that companies prey on our insecurities, that marketers take advantage of our instinct to protect our families—is a serious topic and an important one, but today I’ll admit that my brain was just fried enough that I couldn’t muster even a modicum of moral outrage and so instead just read the article and nodded and laughed at what fools we mortals be.  
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I love being a mother at a time when there’s such widespread conversation and openness about the hard parts, the ugly parts, the unshowered-for-days parts of parenthood. Entire communities are built on such openness–this site being one of them–and it’s always a comfort to know that whatever I’m going through, I’m not alone. But sometimes I wonder if sharing the bad has made it hard for us to also share the good. Sometimes I feel that truth in parenting has come to mean we only dish about the dark side, that being honest only ever means exposing our worst selves, and that no one wants to hear about the time you kicked butt, took names, and did something awesomely, perfectly right. 

What do you think? Does it sometimes feel like we have to talk only about the bad stuff, the blunders, and the downright failures in order to be part of the motherhood sisterhood?
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Last weekend we took the baby to his first outdoor concert. The occasion was a free festival for kids, and although all of the main acts were definitely kid-friendly, only one band–the Sippycups–specialized in music geared directly to kids. This got us talking about the kinds of music we grew up with (me: Jerry Jeff Walker and Kenny Rogers; him: the Rolling Stones and the Who), and how much more memorable and formative that “real” music was compared to the tapes (and records!) full of goofy, sugarcoated renderings of those same-old, age-old nursery rhymes we all know. (Don’t get me wrong; the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” forever holds a piece of my heart, poor thing, but you have to admit that “Yellow Submarine” is far more provocative no matter your age.)
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We’re about to embark on a grand parenting adventure my own folks didn’t dare attempt until I was twelve: flying with a child in tow. There must have been some deep-seated fear behind their having kept the family earthbound for a dozen years, but I don’t know what it was, and the fact that I’m not the least bit panicked about flying with my own kid in a few days makes me think I’m missing something. Tell me the truth: Is this going to suck?
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When I was a kid, my mom went all out for the holidays. There were the homemade Easter baskets, the green milk and green pasta in my lunchbox for St. Patty’s Day, and a different Christmas advent calendar for every room in the house. I always knew I’d carry on these traditions when I became a mother myself, but already I’m realizing it’s harder than it looks. Time is short and priorities are always shifting and most of the time I don’t even know what day of the week it is. Heck, I might need an advent calendar for every holiday; nothing like a square of chocolate to help me count down to Arbor Day! 
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While I was pregnant I had a lot of people ask me if I was going to breastfeed. My answer, based on years of horror stories about low supply, bad latch, pain, fatigue, clogged ducts, mastitis, and just plain incompatibility, was always: “I’m going to try.” When it happened that my son and I were both lucky to find breastfeeding as easy and natural as I wish it could be for everyone, I thought we’d dodged that particular bullet and could happily close the book on the issue, dust off our hands, and move on to worrying about other things, like, oh my god, one day I’m going to have to give him the keys to my car and let him go out driving, alone, on the roads, where he could get hurt!  It turns out, however, that my relief was premature and I have a little more handwringing to devote to breastfeeding before I proceed to installing a GPS device in my car to track my boy’s every movement. Motherhood: Let the worrying begin (and never end)!
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I got my first job when I was fourteen, working a few hours a week as an assistant to a city planner to earn money for a trip to Europe that never actually happened. The whole job thing was a surprisingly casual arrangement considering I was essentially employed by the gov’ment: I showed up after school, made copies, filed business licenses, ran waste paper through the industrial shredder, and went home two or three hours later. I once spent an entire shift coloring toothpicks with a brown marker so they could be used as tree trunks in a scale model of a building project; after I got my drivers license, sometimes I got to run errands in the mayor’s Crown Victoria. The job was a piece of cake. At the end of every week I printed out a time sheet, penciled in the hours I’d worked, and then handed it to my boss (who incidentally eventually married my cousin and now sits across the dinner table from me every Christmas Eve). It was just the right amount of responsibility for a young teenager entering the workforce.

My next job wasn’t so laid-back…
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