Smashing things is anger management too

He will crush you

I just took an online parenting survey to help out with some Harvard child development research and, man, some of those questions made me feel like a real weasel. "I have never felt like smashing something in anger." Um, false. "I never get irritated when people express opinions different from my own." Yeah, false again. "If I thought I could sneak into a movie without paying I would do it." Well, yes, probably. I mean, I think so. I should try that, come to think of it.

My question is this: is there really a person on the planet who has never felt like smashing something in anger? Really? Never?

I bet even the Dali Lama has had his moments. He's having a bad day and then he gets his robes caught in an escalator and one of his monks laughs and then he spills his green tea all over his crotch right before he has to go on stage with Richard Gere and he knows everyone is going to thinks he's getting old and incontinent, and then someone raises their hand during the q&a portion of the program and asks a rambling question implying that he is really naive and not doing all he can to save the world and he's, like, totally jet lagged and celibate and he hasn't had time to meditate in days and, you know, it's just finally too much for one man to take. And somewhere in his huge and peaceful heart he feels like smashing something. You can't tell me he doesn't.

If you want to to feel like a weasel (or, what do I know, maybe you're an angel) you can take the survey yourself right HERE. Good luck.

Bless this mess

Since I seem to like airing a certain amount of dirty laundry online, I thought I'd share with you what my house looks like after three days of single-parenting (the Mister is on a very bromantic hiking trip until 5PM today).

I used to get so irritated at my mother's poor housecleaning when I was a kid. I would mop the kitchen floor and wipe down the oven doors just to satisfy my own standards of clean (oddly, laundry didn't concern me and instead of washing my clothes, I took to dousing them in Jean Nate and going to school smelling like a molding citrus).

But now I have a little more sympathy. In order to keep this place clean, cleaning is literally ALL I would be able to do. And frankly, washing the sippy cups, and cleaning up the wooden train parts, and folding the laundry, and vacuuming up the sand, and sweeping the crumbs, and putting the books away gets old real fast.

So, here you go, a before and after. Boy, will I be happy to see the Mister (and not just for his superior dish washing skills).

The house as it is normally (or a little better than usual)

living room

Our bedroom

The bathroom

The house after three days of going it alone.

The living room

living room (with diapers)

Our bedroom (Maggie peed on the sheets 48 hours ago and I haven't changed them yet)

The bathroom (why pick up the bath toys

when you're just going to get them all out again tomorrow?

The hall (sadly, you cannot see the grime on the rug)

The kitchen (this is looking pretty good, actually.

I recycled the paper and put the oatmeal bowls in the sink)

Riddle Me This

Our preschool does not allow "superhero" play. You can be a superhero (capes, super powers, and jet packs are okey-dokey, but you can't run around reenacting the last episode of Spiderman or shooting people). But that doesn't keep my kids from being very interested in the idea of super heroes ("they save people") and, even more intriguing, bad guys.

Today they were asking me about bad guys on the way home from school. I was trying for the life of me to remember what was so terrible about the Penguin (was it the scary waddle?), until I thought to ask them to tell me about bad guys they know. And here, for all you struggling comic book writers out there, is a list of the best bad guy names ever, courtesy of Oliver and Maggie. We want royalties.

1. Elias Battle (he'll lure you with promises of honey but then he'll "take your honey bunches")

2. Tiger Roseshoe (same thing, but with ice cream cones)

3. Horesey Tatorsey (not exactly sure, but he does have guns and a mean laugh)

I am woman, hear me dither endlessly

I just had my 80-minute Healing Hiker's massage (nyam, nyam) and although I do hate to leave my Four Seasons suite, I miss my family and am looking forward to a little three-year-old action. Plus, this desert air is murder on my lips; they feel like bark.

Flying over the Grand Canyon

Flying over the Grand Canyon

While I was off hiking the Grand Canyon and kayaking the Salt River and climbing the Praying Monk and dining on seared scallops with butternut squash ravioli, my kids were kind of missing me. Maggie especially.

The Mister told me this morning that she woke up at 1am last night crying and saying, "I need someone to talk to. I miss mommy." I know. The heart. It hurts.

I've always been a firm believer in taking a break. Being away from the kids for a few days always felt like a good thing, a much-needed refueling for me. But as my friend Vida pointed out to me long ago, your kids don't care about your success or your career or whether or not you need to refuel. They don't even care if you ever publish a novel. They just want you to be soft and loving and available.

This is the rub of motherhood, I suppose, the place where your sense of who you want to be and your sense of who you should be stand across from one another glaring and whispering cruelly. One says, "You cannot make anyone else happy unless you yourself are happy and fulfilled." The other one says, "Shut up you selfish twat and make me a pie."

It's a place where I feel particularly judged. I get a lot of raised eyebrows and disapproving comments disguised at declarative sentences. Things like, "Wow, you are so lucky. I could never leave my kids for five days." Or, "I just feel like I've lost a limb when I'm away from my little darlings." Comments that simultaneously fill me with guilt and murderous rage (I'm not even going to discuss the sexist double-standard here. Fathers, as we know, are pretty much free to come and go as they please).

I don't know what the solution is. I miss my kids and it pains me to know that they miss me. But I doubt very much that the next time someone offers me a free trip to, well, anywhere, I am likely to turn it down. Traveling is one of the great joys of my life. Free traveling is one of the great bargains of my life.

I am almost certain I am not doing my children any permanent damage by leaving them with their loving and capable father for a few days here and there. What that bilious combination of guilt, freedom, joy, sadness and self-recrimination is doing to my own psyche, however, I cannot say.

I could say this picture is about being on the edge

of something, but really I just want to show you again what a badass I can be

I did this today

Be the only girl in the group who makes it to the top of the Praying Monk? Check.

Happy weekend. May you summit a few things.

Why you should always put on a little lipgloss before getting on a plane

This photo has nearly nothing to do with the post.

I'm just fascinated by its origins.

Who bought him that shirt? Creepy Uncle Orlan?

There I was, minding my own business with the latest Us Weekly (Angelina is such a bitch!) when someone two seats away from me perks up and says, "Samantha?" And who should be seated with me in row 17 on US Airways flight 14 from SFO to Phoenix, but Heath H., the boy I thought I would surely die of love for at age of 14. He was the first boy my age to get a hairy chest.

Poor Heath. There was a time in 9th grade when I called his house every evening. Every evening. I could practically hear his sister rolling her eyes as she shouted, "Heeath." Not that I cared what she thought; my love trumped all other impulses, like dignity and self-restraint, for example.

Once he got on the phone I would open with "Hi." Then I would sit there silently all tied up with desire and self-consciousness, totally unable to think of anything else to say.

But he was so nice to me. He never asked me to stop calling. He never said one mean thing to me. Instead he sat on the other end of the phone trying his best to make conversation and get the hell on with his life without hurting my feelings.

Once, he invited me over to dinner and made me frozen pizza and a salad with large hunks of carrot that crunched excruciatingly as I chewed. I was almost too nervous to breathe. It was our first and last date.

When I saw him today he was still so nice. And I was still so awkward and twitchy. I think I have residual embarrassment about my extreme lack of cool back in the day. It's been 24 years since I masticated those excruciating carrot hunks in the presence of Heath H. and yet it doesn't take more than a second to transform me back into that horribly self-conscious girl neurotically wiping her nose of phantom boogers and robotically repeating "that's cool" like it were some sort of mantra.

Hello, 1984. It's been a while.

The Business of Being Born

My kids have already asked me what God is (not an easy question for a Jewish/Buddhist/Super-secular girl like me to answer), what it means when you die, and how babies get into their mommy's tummies in the first place (well, it happens when they are very, very, very tiny).

Yesterday, they finally thought to ask how babies get out of their mommy's tummies. Aha! An easy one.

Except that when you explain the birth process to a three year old they totally think you are lying. Oliver just looked at me with smiling apprehension and said, "Nahh." Maggie said, "Oh, yeah, they turn into pee pee and come out your vagina," in a voice meant to convey that while I was indeed hilarious, she could not be so easily fooled.

After a second attempt to convince them I wasn't kidding, I figured out that it was pointless and let them draw their own conclusions. Someday they will know the ugly truth about so many things.

Besides, that's not how they were born.

They were born under blinding lights, attended by masked men bearing scalpels. They were tugged from my body by gloved hands. The first people to hold them were nurses we will never know. They were whisked away to beeping incubators while I lay strapped down and prone and unconscious and the Mister stood pacing furiously outside an OR he had no access to. I didn't get to see them for ten hours. It left us all feeling powerless and incapable and totally blindsided.

"holding my kids" after their birth

Their birth was one of the most awful experiences I've ever had, and to this day I feel like weeping every time I think about it. When you tell people this, that you had a bad birth, they try to make you feel better by saying, "But you got two healthy, beautiful children." This is true. We did get two healthy and beautiful children. And for this I am more grateful than I can possibly ever express. It is a blessing and good grace that boggles the minds, and that, frankly, makes me a little nervous.

This is no way to first see the world

But the fact remains that their birth and all its attending medical intervention and bullying has left me with a bit of sadness and shame I am not quite sure how to shake.

It's been three-and-a-half years and the pure envy I feel for women who have those empowering, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar births is nearly unbearable.

And here's the thing: I know I would have been good at it. Under other circumstances, with a less complicated pregnancy, I would have gotten my wool-clad midwife to light some candles, sunk down in the birthing tub, and pushed those babies out like Ina May Gaskin herself. I would have worn braids. And planted the placentas under magnolia and olive trees.

Ok, maybe not the placenta part. But afterbirth fertilizer or not, it would have been, I think, a better beginning for all of us if it could have been a little closer to how God intended. Alas.

If you are a pro-vagina, groovy mom like me, you will probably have the same love/hate relationship with this movie that I do. I can't even watch the trailer without crying.