If mom folds five loads of laundry, goes grocery shopping, washes dishes, and bathes the children and nobody is there to see it, did it really happen?

Before we get started you should know that the Mister is out of town for a week and I am not at my best. This was my bedtime conversation with Oliver, who is very upset, missing his dad, and having trouble falling asleep.

Oliver:

It's just hard because dad makes all the fun and you just do, like, some things in the house and like, you're kind of boring because you're writer and all you ever do it write books and stuff.

Me:

pretending to be very neutral participant in this conversation

I play sometimes. I just have a lot to do.

Oliver:

I guess sometimes you're not blogging. But dad plays games and plays, like, the matching game and builds towers. But its hard to have two kids because we're always like, "Mommy do this, mommy do this."

Me:

It is hard, but it's great too. I love having two kids.

Oliver:

Well, I just wish you weren't so boring. It's hard.

The conversation continued in this vein for quite a while until I sang one last song and insisted he go to sleep.

Obviously I am horrified in about 27 different ways, not the least of which is because I spend so much of that time when I am ignoring my kids and supposedly writing books lurking on Facebook and trying to find the perfect pair of pumps online (they have a square heel and a square toe).

I am bothered too because this is the beginning of that age-old pattern of fun dad/task-master mom. He plays airplane, I insist on hair-combing. He builds towers, I limit the cookie intake and remind them to say "thank you."

I am chagrined by the sudden knowledge that my kids have heard me bitch about motherhood. At some point Oliver learned that I think having two kids is hard and that is not something he should really have to take on at the moment.

Mostly I am bothered because he's right. I am not a great player. I am sort of grouchy and boring. I'm distracted. I put them off. When given the choice, I almost always choose making dinner over playing with the kids while the Mister makes dinner.

I am often exhausted by simply maintaining basic order and getting everyone out of the house on time (for the record I don't even care if the shoes are on the wrong feet or if the outfits make a bit of sense), but also, I find playing boring.

Go Fish, restaurant, family, pirates—these are all games I am often asked to participate in. Sometimes simultaneously. And I do. For about five minutes. Then I notice that the floor needs sweeping or I feel like checking my email or I just zone out and forget to call Oliver "matey." I adore my kids ferociously but in all honesty, I prefer the company of adults.

Which was all fine and good before my kids got smart and perceptive and developed the power of speech. Now I can't ignore them and pretend they don't notice. They tell me. They think I am boring. They've caught on.

12 good things that have happened in the last 17 days

photo from here

1. The birds found the bird feeder. Finally.

2. We took the kids to their first Giant's game.

3. The Mister caught a foul ball.

4. I discovered (and devoured) Breaking Bad

5. I had this conversation about marriage and child rearing with Oliver:

Me: Do you want to get married?

Oliver: Oh, yeah.

Me: And what do you think marriage is?

Oliver; It's just like you get to be with your friend forever.

Me: And do you think you want to have kids?

Oliver: Yeah.

Me: Why?

Oliver: I think I will be a really good dad. My dad is the best dad.

Pause

Oliver: Actually, maybe I won't have kids.

Me: Why not?

Oliver: Well, taking care of kids is really hard work.

6. Maggie proposed to me (three times). I said yes. Then she reminded me that I'm already married.

7. My kids discovered photography.

8. My dad and I found two perfectly good nandinas on the street, took them home and planted them in my garden.

9. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer finally came out. I read it in galley months ago and I've been waiting to gush and now I can. It's tremendous. It's important. It's amazing. Read it. You won't be sorry.

10. We went out for pie. In the middle of the day. For no reason.

11. I signed up for a recording and interviewing workshop with these amazing ladies.

12. I bought tickets for this.

Martha Stewart is the devil on my shoulder

A few days ago, as I was artfully sticking my homemade "Please take me home" stickers on the gift bags I put together for my children's fourth birthday party, I had a familiar feeling. I was sort of enjoying myself, getting a certain satisfaction from the Martha-like perfection of the goodie bags, but underneath lurked a simmering resentment and impatience, a little throb telling me that my cutsie-pootsie project might not be the best use of my time.

As I stuck the stickers I started to suspect that such things, these bourgeois arts so trumpeted by women's magazines and Martha Stewart and a thousand design blogs, were just a giant diversion of creative energy. I imagine that no great artist, and certainly no one who has ever really changed the course of the world for the better, has expended much time or effort into making perfect goodie bags, or butterfly cakes, or wallpaper-covered file folders.

I'm all for an uplifted environment, by which I mean that I appreciate design and believe aesthetics make a difference (you should see my new faux bois rug--OMG). I get as much pleasure from a piece of beautiful Indian craft paper as the next girl. I adore a nice leisurely stroll through Design Within Reach or Etsy or Ikea. I even sort of like Real Simple.

I must admit, I'm sort of proud of my butterfly cake

But I also notice that men make and get credit for most of the "great art" of the world. Ditto on great scientific discoveries, adventures, environmental milestones, and feats of engineering. Meanwhile, women are encouraged to make the world a little cuter one scrapbook at a time. (Again, I appreciate a good scrapbook, but they are not the building blocks of a greater civilization, as least not as we currently view it.)

And the spaceship cake.

Of course not all of us were meant to design bridges or write the Great American Novel or become the next Beethoven. Most of us were meant to live decidedly less dramatic marks. And there is something to be said for doing something out of love, without regard for the praise or attention it might garner. All this magazine-style cuteness—wrapping forty presents, or making a spaceship cake, or laboriously calligraphing the place cards—might all be seen as acts of love. There is nothing wrong in wanting to delight someone else with a small effort toward beauty.

Still, I wonder. All this presentation is so fleeting and so fickle. Today's gorgeous cupcake tower will most likely be tomorrow's pineapple candle salad. Adorable goodie bags get torn open and disposed of with barely a glance. Spaceship cakes take 4 hours to make and ten minutes to eat.

I think of it this way: there are a million aspiring novelist in the country and I bet none of the male ones spend hours of their precious writing time making delightful goodie bags for four-year-olds.

Then again, I don't watch sports on TV, so maybe we come out equal.

P.S. The party was a complete success and much fun was had.

April is National Poetry Month, after all

This weekend we enjoyed some spontaneous, on-demand street poetry. No corrections. No revisions. First you pick out a scrap of paper. Then the poet asks who you are and what you like and gets tapping. It takes about two minutes and it is sort of amazing. You should hire this Silvi for your next big party.

When asked what they liked, my children answered "mako sharks," and "cribs."

I had this one written for my friend Hilary, who likes to swim way out to sea.

I wrote this one just now. You should try it. And please send me the results!

Street Fair

If your sticky frantic kids are stopped in their tracks

by the tapping of an old red Royal,

a girl with a bob

Stop and buy them a poem.

Then get some kettle corn

You are learning to enjoy yourself with every step.

Samantha

4-26-10

San Francisco

Mark Fiore is more inspirational than Oprah

Did you hear about my friend Mark Fiore (he's the one who got Dengue Fever at my birthday party)? He won the Pulitzer Prize last week. The Pulitzer Prize, people! That's, like, the most colossal and public pat on the back a journalist can get.

I did the voice for this one. It earned him death threats!

I have dealt with my pride and excitement by working the information into as many conversations as possible. I run into a parent preparing snacks in the preschool kitchen and say something like, "Man am I tired; it must be because my really good friend Mark Fiore just won the Pulitzer Prize." I'm out to dinner with some work friends talking about learning to make Chinese dumplings and I say, "That reminds me of my really good friend Mark Fiore, who just won the Pulitzer Prize." An acquaintance mentions she just got back from New York and I say, "Oh, my really good friend Mark Fiore will be going to New York to accept the Pulitzer Prize he just won."

Ahem, I did the voice for this one too

But seriously, I am really proud of him. I tried to make a toast at a party in his honor earlier this week but because of my weeping problem (it prohibits all public toast-making and reading of poetry), I couldn't do it. What I wanted to say was this: I am proud and happy for him not because the Pulitzer is a big deal, super-prestigious prize, but because he was justly rewarded for following his passions.

I got a book when I graduated from college called Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow. This, of course, is the kind of soft-minded pap that makes me dislike Oprah (I jumped off her bandwagon around the time of The Secret). But the first part of the title, the part about doing what you love, has some merit. Mark Fiore has done what he loves, regardless of whether the money was following or taking a totally different route. He worked hard, super hard, at doing it well. He invented a form (the online political animation) and he found success. It's positively inspirational.

Mark helped us build our chicken coop. What a stand up guy.

I was waxing thusly to my dad the other day when he reminded me that talent plus hard work does not always result in success. Lots of people do what they love and find neither money nor notoriety. Lots of good, smart people toil away at what they love in anonymity. My dad, by the way, is perhaps the least sentimental person on the planet. He's also right.

But this doesn't mean I can't get a little lift from Mark's reward. Just because in the end very few of us will win venerated awards, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to remember to pay attention to what moves us, to work hard, to practice discipline, to ignore the bullshit, and to follow what we love. That could be pretty rewarding too.

Congratulations, Mark! Woot! Woot!

Why not just practice the rhythm method and see what happens?

from here

A lot of my friends are currently trying to decide whether or not to have a second baby. Actually, they are writhing in a sort of tortured late '30s angst trying to decide whether to have a second baby.

I get it. Here you are, you've got your mate and your career and your one completely, ridiculously doted upon offspring. You still get to go out with the girls every now and again. You're having sex once or twice a week. Your body is more or less back where it belongs. You've got it worked out. Why mess it up?

It's not a bad question to ask yourself. But I find that I have little patience for the dithering. Maybe because giving birth to twins knocked me off my axis so profoundly that I never really got to the part where I felt like I had it all worked out. Maybe because I'm jealous.

I imagine life with one baby as a kind of gauzy, pink-tinged Gerber commercial in which you have hours a day in which you are required to do nothing more than suck on perfect little infant toes. If I only had one baby, I tell myself, I would never lose my temper, or yell, or say things like, "when you learn to cook your own dinner, you can start complaining about the food" to three-year-old children.

I suppose what I am saying is, I am not the person to ask when you are considering having a second child. I always knew I wanted two children. I was wholeheartedly committed to the idea of two from the beginning. But that's not why I am not the person to ask.

I am not the person to ask because there are many times when I want to grab my friends by the shoulders and shout, "Don't do it." I want to tell them that it will indeed mess everything up in all the ways they suspect. I want to warn them about never really being able to enjoy a lazy Sunday, or eat an uninterrupted meal, or have twice weekly sex again. I want to tell them about that weird shrewish voice that will come out of their mouths when their children are bickering, and how the idea of going out to a restaurant with the whole family will seem like an impossible dream.

Half the time.

The other half of the time I want to tell them to quit their hand wringing and get knocked up already. Join me in my messy, wonderful suffering. Enlarge your heart. Join the human family. Get in here and root around a little.

Mostly I don't say any of it. Mostly I shrug and say I don't know. Because, of course, I don't. If you are waiting for the right answer, forget it. There is no right answer.

I am of the best-guess-and-no-guarantees school of decision making. Go with your gut and hope it works out. That's how I approached my marriage and my career and the decision to become a parent in the first place.

And really, the big decisions are just a mixed-bag of emotions anyway— moments of despairing defeat and moments of profound and blissful joy. And in between lots and lots of moments of folding the laundry or watching crap TV or running out to the all-night Safeway to buy milk. Sometimes you are the luckiest girl in the world, and sometimes you look over and think, "This? Really?" And there's probably nothing more we can ask for.

I sound AMAZING in my car

Last night I went to a rock and roll concert, stayed out too late, and witnessed my first doobie smoking in a long time. As souvenirs I have a fading "Over 21" stamp on my hand and an exhaustion headache that probably has a lot to do with drinking three glasses of the Fillmore's house white, served in plastic tumblers.

But it's all worth it because Patty Griffin was a revelation. I didn't just love her, I lerved her, which is like love, but with extra feeling and much welling up.

Here she is, singing Heavenly Day (which, by the way, should totally be your first dance song at your next wedding).

I spent most of the concert fantasizing about being able to sing. I sometimes think people who can really sing must never be sad. I've spent a lot of time thinking this about Aretha Franklin. I mean, why cry when you can belt? Of course, history does not bear out this philosophy. A lot of people who can sing are tortured and depressive and end up choking on their own vomit. So, there's that.

Still, I wish I could learn this song so I could sing it to the Mister on our upcoming 10th anniversary. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't you just get all choked up? Not on vomit. In a good way.

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Next time on Up Mama's Wall : Should you have that second baby (or please join me in the exhausting chaos that is my life).