The Unvarnished Mom

My oldest child, who is in 10th grade, is in the process of applying for board positions of the various clubs at her school, as well as for summer jobs, internships and grants for trips abroad. Over dinner tonight she regaled us with tales from the over-complicated application process; one requested her to “write a haiku about your favorite historical event.” (We had a little fun with that: “Underground railroad/Ferried slaves from south to north/Hare-yet Beecher Stowe” or “Students in Berlin/ Chipping paint-flecked bits of wall/Communism’s dead.”) Every single application asks what she considers the worst question imaginable: why are you interested in this trip/program/position? It’s tantamount to asking kids to lie, she says, since everyone knows the only honest answer is, “because I want to get into a good college.” Surely not the answer they’re looking for.

Taking care of an infant is incredibly boring. The feed-diaper-rock-sleep routine is tedious and unrewarding, at least until you get those first gummy smiles at around four weeks. But nobody ever talks about that. I remember sitting there in dank London in February, my scrawny firstborn permanently attached to my breast, thinking, “This is it?” She was the calmest, most delightful creature on the planet, and yet each day stretched before me like a vast, featureless landscape, my husband’s arrival home from work the only bright spot. If someone had just warned me that I would be bored as well as enamored, at least I could have been prepared. Surely I wasn’t the first woman in history to experience new motherhood as monotony, but it felt that way. That’s why I’m starting this blog. My firstborn is now 16, and with each new phase I’ve noticed there are a lot of things about parenting that people won’t discuss. I will.