Last night Darling Hubby and I were out running errands, and I commented on the fact that the world’s population has hit the seven billion mark. Earlier in the week, we had discussed news stories that as recently as in 1800 the world population just topped one billion. In less than 130 years, it had doubled. In just the last 12 years, the planet added another billion residents, and some scientists estimate that 10 percent of all of the people who have ever lived are alive today. Such numbers have sent my head spinning and sent me into periods of pondering the implications for the future and for my kids.

However, Darling Hubby summed up the implications best last night when he said, “And you just KNOW that every single one of those bastards are going to end up in line at Disney World.’

I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of enough when it comes to the kids. We are back in the maelstrom of back to school and facing a barrage of requests for our collective time, money and energy.
This year, both ladies are participating in weekly hip-hop classes, after school art and after school science club. In addition, Cat signed up for viola, chorus and volunteering in the classroom of the developmentally disabled kids. Each activity requires a time commitment both for the activity and additional practice, numerous checks, and lots of energy to support.
On top of that, there is the school booster fundraiser, the birthday book club program, book fair, classroom volunteer time, and field trips, now complete with two background checks.
Oh, and there is the year-end dance recital, complete with two days of performances, mandatory ad purchase in the program and costume costs. More checks, more stuff for the calendar.
Cat’s chorus group has the opportunity to perform in the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade – for the investment of more money and time during the holiday week. Break out the checkbook and the calendar again.
Still, I felt we were riding the activity waves fairly well until the big one came along. The girls’ dance school announced that the school is participating in an event at Walt Disney World next summer wherein the girls (and about 998 other dancers) can perform in a parade at the Magic Kingdom. Upon hearing of the opportunity, the girls went wild. “We’ll be FAMOUS,” Cat yelled. “Maybe a Hollywood producer will be in the crowd and will see us and will give us a show and you can represent us Mommy,” she continued.
“Honey, I hate to break it to you, but it will likely be hot fat tourists from Indiana and Illinois who watch you while eating an ice cream,” I replied.
Fanning away reality like a pesky mosquito, she was undeterred. Hearing that the costume involved sparkly red shoes sealed the deal – she wanted in. Her younger sister, normally more reticent to participate in group activities, was even more excited.
“On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being that you will die if you can’t do this, how important is this to you?” I asked.
“Eleven,” she promptly responded. “This is the opportunity of my lifetime.”
If we go, and it is still an if at this point, it would mean more checks, more time, lots more energy. Though I am a known Disneyphile, even I am generally not insane enough to go in late June. It will be hot. It will be crowded. It will be expensive. The lines will be insane. We would be using a substantial portion of our vacation time and budget to go stand shoulder to shoulder with other pudgy tourists, sweating like hookers in church, in order to try to pick out my two in a crowd of 1,000 red sparkly-shod hoofers marching down the middle of Main Street, U.S.A. That doesn’t sound magical. That sounds maniacal.
This is merely the latest parental quandary in nearly a decade of choices. Bottle feed or breast feed? Day care or not? Private school or not? How many activities lead to a well-rounded child and how many lead to exhaustion? Summer camp or not? Tutoring or not? Disney on vacation or not? Family trip or runaway with a good book and a swim-up bar (and maybe Darling Husband, if he promises not to need or want anything).
Like many parents, I ardently want to give my children the world. I want to give them everything they want and more. I want to give them everything I had, and much much more. I want them to have opportunities that weren’t available to me. Yet, I also want them to understand the value of hard work and that you can’t always get what you want.
Where is the line? What is enough? What is the right amount of activity, advantage, and sacrifice to the interest and whims of tiny people with boundless appetites? Where does Good Mother stop and martyr begin? Does a good parent give their all and more in support of their child’s developing interests or does a good parent teach limits?
When is enough, enough?
I don’t know yet what we will do about the Disney parade. We need to decide soon but I can’t worry about it tonight. Tonight we have viola practice, test prep, homework and a special project that is due tomorrow. And for tonight, that is more than enough.

Every now again, a friend will pay you a compliment so genuine and unexpected that it makes you laugh and touches your heart at the same time.

I received a kind message in response to my last blog post from a dear friend and former neighbor who has celebrated some of my greatest joys and calmed some of my biggest fears. Her message was sent at the end of a string that she had sent two years ago about a dinner party I was planning. Just like the day I received it, it made me laugh out loud.

While she may not be Mark Twain, I thought her wit should be shared nonetheless: “One of the brilliant things about our friendship, I think, is our willingness to challenge the capacity of each other’s liver.”

Cheers.

I have a confession to make. Up until this year, I did not enjoy my children.

That’s right. For the first nine years of my motherhood experience, I didn’t enjoy much of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my children. Completely. Utterly. Devastatingly. They are my north, my south, my east, my west. They are, without a doubt, the center of my universe.

It’s just that, until fairly recently, I didn’t enjoy them and my role as their mom.

Some back story is clearly in order here. I was never going to have children. I had resolved early on that I was going to stay single, maybe get a dog and devote myself to my career. Thanks to a boatload of early childhood trauma courtesy of my biological mother and stepfather, the kind that make Augusten Burrough’s childhood look like “Father Knows Best,” I resolved that I would not have children and hence would not risk inflicting the kind of harm on someone else that had been inflicted upon me.

I made it to age 29 with my plan pretty much working, except that I had two dogs instead of one. But I was childless, which to my mind meant that no child would have the affliction of me as a mother. I was certain that I was a carrier of the “Mommy Dearest” gene and hence it was best for all concerned that I did not procreate. I liked children. I loved my friend Karin’s daughter Kate and found her enchanting. But because I loved children, and because I was certain that I was fundamentally defective, I decided not to have kids.

The plan worked great until my dad’s birthday celebration 10 years ago when a combination of ribs and too much Pinot Grigio overcame my better judgment, and my then-fiance and I engaged in the requisite acts that resulted in a positive pregnancy test a few weeks later. Darling Hubby to Be was ecstatic. I was petrified. The first time I threw up was not from morning sickness; it was from terror.

I spent my entire pregnancy in a panic. We had copulated without me being on prenatal vitamins. Certainly I had hurt the baby as a result. I drank Cokes. Certainly I was hurting the baby. We discovered that I was a carrier for cystic fibrosis. Certainly I had doomed her to a difficult life due to my faulty genes. I didn’t follow the “What to Expect” diet regime. Clearly she would be starting life at a deficit.

Darling Hubby likes to tell the story of the first time we ventured into Babies R Us just to get the lay of the land. We had been in there about five minutes when I started to feel hot all over. Then I started to feel dizzy. Then I went into a full-blown panic attack followed by a crying jag right in the middle of the store. If I recall correctly, I ran to the ladies room and vomited. He still looks back on that incident as “sweet” because his interpretation of the events is that I cared so much about being a good mom, that it left me feeling overwhelmed. I look back and remember distinctly the feeling that the Boppies, and sterilizers and bottles and other baby supplies were there merely to highlight my complete ignorance and lack of preparation to be anyone’s mother. How could I be a mother when I didn’t understand how a Diaper Genie worked? The baby could get cholera because I couldn’t figure out the damn thing.

It became worse when Cat was born. From the moment I looked at her, I was fiercely determined to protect her from all harm, real and imagined. My quandary was how to do that when clearly the biggest threat was me. I had no maternal instinct. I had a poor initial role model. I had post-partum depression and a high stress job and no clue at all how to be a good mom to her. I desperately wanted to be one; I just had no idea how to do it. I read dozens of books and articles but failed to find one that covered, “How To Be A Good Mom When You Are Fundamentally Deficient.” My only certainty was that my good enough was nowhere near good enough.

And hence, I would blindly stumble forward, doing my best and then hating myself because my best didn’t measure up to my self-imposed standard. I didn’t breast feed and then took that as Exhibit A in the indictment of myself as Bad Mommy. I went back to work after six weeks of maternity leave. Exhibit B. She had colic. Exhibit C. I gave her cereal in her bottle to help her sleep. Exhibit D. She refused to sleep on her back so we let her sleep on her tummy. Guilty on all counts.

Somehow in the midst of all of this self-loathing, I became pregnant again. My deficiencies didn’t double, they seemed magnified by an order of 10. Now, I was doing everything badly in stereo. Now, my desire to do right by the girls was doubled, but my failures were quadrupled. I was a serial offender now. Two children were afflicted with the life sentence of being my daughters. I would sometimes wish for my own early death so that they would be paroled early.

And hence another seven years went by. I decided that if I couldn’t BE a good mom, I could mimic one. And so I threw myself headlong into trying to do all of the things that good moms did. I read to them every night. I would try to smile when they puked on me. I filled their closets with the cutest clothes I could find and their rooms with educational, safe, age-appropriate toys. I sang Wiggles songs until I wanted to be struck dumb and listened to other kids tunes until I was sure my ears would bleed. I only sent in sandwiches cut in fun shapes. Every waking moment of every day was spent in service to giving the girls the best life possible and protecting them from me.

Every moment I spent with the girls, I spent second-guessing myself. God forbid that I had an actual human reaction like yelling or becoming frustrated. I was sure that those were signs that I was ruining them. Whatever I did, I was sure was wrong, or could have been done better, or should have been done cheerier. I loved them as much as I hated myself.

As you can well imagine, one can only keep up that pace of activity and self-loathing for so long. Eventually, something has to give. First I tried meds, but I felt like a bad mom for needing them. I tried exercise but felt like a bad mom for taking time away from the kids for myself. I tried just crying it out but I felt guilty for needing to cry it out given how fantastic and lovely and spirited my girls were. After about 7 years of white-knuckle parenting, I started therapy.

Fast forward to a recent conversation with my therapist, Todd, a kind, mellow, patient guy. We have spent over two years now talking through my magazine rack of issues and he recently said something that hit me like a thunderbolt. We were talking, yet again, about how I didn’t want my girls to have the same kind of childhood I did. I was telling him (again) about my anxiety-fueled determination to ensure that their experiences did not remotely mirror my own.

And then Todd said something to me that changed my life. “Tanya,” he said, “You are standing on the shore of a placid lake. The sky is blue. The weather is warm. The waves are lapping gently on the shore. All is beautiful at the lake. And you, my friend, are marching up and down the beach scanning the horizon non-stop for a tsunami that you are sure is coming but that will never arrive. You can end the patrol any time. The tsunami isn’t coming.”

I thought about his analogy for a few weeks. I realized that before I was 5, my parents were divorced. Darling Hubby and I will celebrate our 10 year anniversary this fall and he appears to have signed on for a lifetime mission (clearly he has mental health issues of his own). By the time I was nearly 10, Cat’s age, I had lived in at least 7 different addresses and had attended four different schools. The girls have had only two addresses, the most recent for five years and have attended two schools – their preschool and their current school. By the time I was Cat’s age, I had been exposed to cult members, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and mental illness, to name a few. The girls live in a bubble of annual trips to Disney, swim lessons, sleep-overs, and doting grandparents. Their definition of a traumatic event is not having televisions in their bedroom.

In looking at the differences between the worst of my childhood and the worst of theirs, it dawned on me, for the first time, that maybe, just maybe, their lives were this good, not in spite of me, but maybe because of me. Maybe, just maybe, I was able to take the best from my childhood – my Dad and his irreverent humor and focus on education, my Grandma Alice and her unconditional love, my now-Mom, Liz and her willingness to let me make purple cakes and paint windows at Christmas, my friends who told me I was funny and lovable, and others who helped me to survive and thrive- and pass that on to the girls. Maybe I didn’t poison them by exposure to me. Maybe I have strengthened them by it.

And when I realized, at long last, that my children’s lives are not worse for me being in it, and in fact that maybe they are better for it, I was finally able to exhale and enjoy being their mother. I know now that they have stability, they are connected, they are much-loved and they are flourishing.

Will they need a Todd of their own someday? Probably. But, they will also have me, their Mom, with them every step of the way, and now we can actually enjoy the journey together.

200-odd kids graduated from Bristow Run Elementary tonight. Every name was called for each class, as well as for the approximately 7000 awards they gave out. (I think I mentioned a couple.) SEVERAL requests were made that everyone hold their applause until the end of whatever class/award was being featured. ALL requests were ignored. Certain parents just couldn’t resist screaming at the sound of their child’s name. I have a couple questions for said parents.

Do your children think the rules don’t apply to them? Because you obviously think that. And how is that working out for you? Because my children know the rules apply to them, and they still ignore those rules most of the time.

Maybe you just wanted to stretch out the ceremony in the hot cafeteria, where approximately a third of the people are forced to stand. Cheer on then, by all means!

Also, do you realize this is 5th grade graduation? 5th? Guess what — everyone got accepted into middle school, yay! Or perhaps this is as far as you thought your child would get, education-wise?

You people drive me insane!

Ah – but maybe that was your objective all along?

Tommy had his 5th grade graduation this evening. It should have been a wonderful cap on a fantastic 6 years of elementary education, but it was kind of spoiled when Tommy ended up in tears because he didn’t get 2 specific awards: Award of Excellence and Principal’s Honor Roll. No matter how many times I tried to convince him he did well in school and he’s a smart kid, he is completely focused on those awards he didn’t get. And if I were him, I would react in exactly the same way.

It’s not that he didn’t get the awards, it’s how close he came. He got pass-advance on every SOL except one, so no Award of Excellence. He got straight As all year, except for one B, so no Principal’s Honor Roll. Really, should a 5th grader be this worried about perfection? No, but it’s what I would have done. (I told him his Perfect Attendance Award said he was perfect. He didn’t find that amusing AT ALL.) No matter how much encouragement I give him, I also gave him my genes, so he’s pretty much screwed.

Luckily, the girls don’t seem to put that kind of pressure on themselves yet. And I’m sure that will drive me crazy too.

I was shoveling out Cat’s bedroom this evening and came across a bin of Barbie dolls. All but one of the dolls was completely naked, including the lone male doll, an extremely well-developed park ranger doll given to the girls a few years back by their grandfather. The bin looked like a Barbie orgy had occurred with clothes strewn everywhere and all of the dolls looking disheveled. There was even a Barbie bikini top laying across a Barbie lamp.

Lately, the girls have engaged in the time-honored tradition of locking themselves in their rooms and whispering and giggling loudly while they simulate one of the Barbies and the lone male engaging in relations. I know they are doing this because I walked in on it once (they never remember to lock the entry from the bathroom). They looked up, slightly embarrassed and scared until I said, “Barbie and Ken are getting funky like monkeys, huh?” Then I put away the laundry and left.

I’ve wondered since then if I should have something more, or different. I’ve had “the talk” with the girls at various points. It’s more of an on-going conversation. I’ve explained the basics and from time to time they ask for clarification or additional information. Hence, I didn’t interrupt Barbie and Ken’s romp for a teachable moment.

Anyway, this evening I was looking at the Barbie debauchery wondering at what age one explains orgies to one’s daughters and deciding that I am too young for that conversation. I also realized that my parents are apparently too young for the conversation as well and that I am perfectly fine with that. Grimly amused, I started dressing the dolls but then stopped when I noticed something even more disturbing. The boy doll was missing half a leg. The bottom half was in one of the Barbie purses.

Simulating Barbie sex is one thing. Simulating Barbie as a brutal murderer is something else entirely. I could just hear Darling Hubby’s lecture on how this is all due to the fact that I let the girls watch “Law & Order” reruns with me from time to time (never SVU or Criminal Intent and never when the crime is against a child – just your garden variety NYC homicide, and in my defense, I try to shield their eyes from the actual killing if I can time it right.)

Go ahead judge me harshly, I deserve it. I should have known things were out of hand when Bubba, our Rottie, accidentally killed Sparky the hamster, and they asked if we could put crime scene tape around the playroom. They also asked if I would defend Bubba in court.

Cat wandered by, checking my progress on unearthing her room and pulling me out of the conversation I was having in my head with Child Services. “Cat,” I said, “What happened to the boy doll?” I asked. “Tate broke it while we were playing by accident,” she said. “Well, you know I don’t think I can fix this based on how it broke,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it Mom,” she replied. “We have already issued him a service dog, so it’s all good.”

I laughed and returned to the pile of clothes on her bed. Apparently, at age 9, “Dogs 101″ has had more of an impact on her imaginary world than “Law & Order.” Now I am just waiting for the news that Barbie and Ken are expecting puppies.