Well it’s birthday month here in this house and I found this suitable birthday post in my draft file. If I’ve already published it, sorry, but I don’t think I have. It was mostly written in 2017.

How universal is the tendency to lament through a distorted lens? These days I like having cleared off counters and floors free of piles of clothing and slipcovers that are tucked in. Gone are the days when the kitchen was a perpetual mess and when shit was piled up everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

People would come in and if they were of a certain cheery mind announce, “Oh! You can tell someone creative lives here,” as if I wouldn’t know what they meant. Others would judge quietly and struggle to keep their eyes from roving about and cataloguing the mess.

I prided myself for being comfortable with chaos and it really wasn’t an attempt to rationalize my lax housekeeping. I genuinely considered it a strength and resented the fact that it was never gonna be a quality extolled by teachers in those parent conferences which were never a breeze and in fact were often excruciating. From the very get go. 

All those lectures from pre-school teachers about consistency, like that was ever gonna happen. Like it was the only thing that contributed to a child’s well being. 

“He’s angry.” They said when one boy was two and naturally implied that it was my fault. How was my tone of voice? Did I stick to my “no’s”? What were our routines at home? Did we have any? 

I came home stung, wringing my hands with self-recrimination convinced that one boy’s stubbornness and the other’s hyperactivity were my fault. There I was yelling. There I was completely strung out. There I was, pregnant and/or nursing and not getting a single good night’s sleep for five fucking years.

I once heard a woman say she’d given up nursing after three weeks because it interfered with her sleep and I almost fell over. Were we even from the same planet? I committed to on-demand nursing and while maybe we’d all have been better served by my being rested, I gave the boys that.

My mother died when I was carrying our second child. I keep talking about this, I know. My brother was on the West Coast. My sister was very active on her trajectory to self destruction about an hour north. And Ken’s sister, though nearby, had two kids roughly the same ages. Ken’s mother had been gone even longer gone than mine. We were so strapped for cash that baby sitters, vacations, and even pizza were out of the question for many years. You might yell too if you couldn’t find your keys.

Years later I’m not sure how much blame to shoulder. After all, society reflexively, maliciously, and systematically assigns fault to mothers. Perhaps a little refusal is in order? And besides, a little emphasis on NATURE in the nature versus nurture argument isn’t going to offend anyone at this distance.

Remember that wonderful advice of Don Juan’s in one of the Castenda books: stop taking sides with reality?

Instead of crafting memoir as prescription, how about letting it be? Which is a lot like saying, how about letting yourself be?

Like the day I mixed up cement to make stepping stones embellished with broken plates instead of cleaning the kitchen counters. Or like all the times I took the kids to the golf course for sledding instead of staightening the downstairs. There were trips to the Science Museum, the Aquarium, to the park in Brookline with the play structure shaped like a pirate ship. All those choices? Solid. Clearly better activities than picking up clutter.

Today, I’m going to act as if a blog post can affirmatively counteract a tendency to let memory warp in the direction of personal failing. Memoir as prescription.

There is so much that I did wrong or simply could have done better. It was hard for me to be consistent. My temper flared (not abusively, I hope – though yesterday I came across three-year-old C’s story about a mother who yelled and then threw her child in the river). Is it terrible that this makes me laugh out loud today?

The choices I made as a harried mother with very little support (and certainly no housecleaning services) weren’t always sound — but whose were?

During those hectic stressful joyful years, I consciously sacrificed housekeeping in favor of playing and making things and getting out to do stuff.

So many trips to Audubon’s Drumlin Farm! There’s one boy sticking his head between the rails to get a better look at the goats. There’s the other calling out to the pigs. There’s the hawk with the wounded wing in its temporary cage and here we are hollering “hello!” to the echoing dark of the big barn.

We didn’t limit ourselves to the well-peopled areas. Off we went down dirt roads behind the visitor center, walking along fields of corn stubble under a big bowl of sky. Look boys, there’s the drumlin! Let’s think about glaciers, about massive floes of ice with the power to move mountains. And remember, the big high mountains are the babies and the rounded-off low ones, ancient. Funny, right? Feel free to get muddy — what’s a little dirt, especially in a semi-kept house?

In warm weather, we’d stop at Dairy Joy on the way home. Soft serve dripping everywhere.

Remember that long plastic bin filled with ziti? It was the rectangular kind generally used to stow out-of-season clothing under the bed. Having quickly calculated how much better the entertainment value a few boxes of pasta were than say, a trip to the Science Museum, I liberally poured box after box into the bin. We were stuck home for some reason. The boys’ cousin was visiting. Let the contractors who were in the house look at me like I’m crazy. This was fun! Remember how happily they drove their trucks through mounds of rattling pasta? Remember the ziti necklaces we made before emptying the bin?

Also: Crane’s Beach, Loblolly Cove, Good Harbor Beach, the Essex Wolf Preserve, The Habitat (also Audubon), the Old North Bridge, Cold Spring Park, Newton Cemetery (for the ducks), Wellesley Town Center (also for the ducks).

We went to Acton to see dinosaur bones and to the Science Museum in Boston to look at snakes in glass cases and to stand agog in the lobby watching the story-and-a-half mechanism with its traveling ball and ingenious moving parts.

We went to construction sites to watch the trucks. We went on a whale watch out of Gloucester and saw a big one breech. We ate fried dough at the Topsfield Fair. Picked apples in Sherbourne and rode the serpent train at the Harvest Fair in town center.

There were sports:  hockey, soccer, T-ball, skating, more soccer, gymnastics, soccer, skateboarding, and track, track, track.

There were guitar and drum lessons. There were plays in elementary school and all those birthday parties.

I made dozens upon dozens of Christmas cookies each year and filled Easter baskets with candy and trinkets. For everyday, there were thumb print cookies and chocolate chip cookies. I knew the tollhouse recipe by heart.

There were doctors’ visits, learning disability evaluations, sensory integration interventions, IEP meetings (both boys), teacher conferences, medications to try, OT,  and calls from the principal (fortunately, only two involving the police and neither resulting in an arrest).

That shit was time consuming, I probably don’t need to tell you.

One son had a thyroid issue in middle school that required annual ultra sounds for a while. The other broke his left arm twice and needed surgery.

We didn’t go to restaurants much, especially in the early days. Once at the diner in Newton Centre, I asked out loud, “Why don’t we do this more often?” Oh look! There’s the little one writing on the mirror next to our booth with his hot dog! That’s why.

There were home-cooked dinners something like 340 nights a year. And while the boys did go through their white food phases (you know, that period when you almost succumb to the ideas that ketchup is a vegetable and pretzels are health food?), they did eat their salads. Yes, I served delicious salads with homemade dressing almost every night of their childhoods. There’s a routine, one I stuck to.

We read to the boys in turns, meaning we swapped boys and books nightly — which is how my husband and I ended up reading exactly half of the first five Harry Potter books. I might not have done so otherwise, but when the last one came out and both kids were prepared to read it on their own, I devoured it – because I could?

When other families went to Jamaica or Florida, we went sledding on the golf course over by the JCC and built snow forts in the backyard.

Speaking of the JCC, we were members for a few years – tumbling classes and fun in the pool (only the indoor one, alas – we could not afford membership in the outdoor pool). We belonged to our town lake, decidedly affordable, where there were swimming lessons.

We went to California twice (when they were young and later), Oregon (elementary school) and Colorado (high school). We went camping in Maine, Oregon, and all over Massachusetts.

We saw the Ringley Brothers Circus once, Cirque du Soleil, STOMP, Japanese drummers, Habib Koite, and during one misguided Christmas season, half of “The Celtic Sojourn.”

Movies not so much. In one kid’s film, thinking myself to be among people who were used to tolerating disruptive children, I let the young one run around the perimeter (he wasn’t yelling or anything – just running, round and round and round — did I mention hyperactivity?) A woman growled at me: “That child’s a MONSTER.” We didn’t try that again for a while.

We painted, knit, sewed. There were Lego and wood block creations in every room for a lot of years (and yes, that means I know how excruciating it is to step on LEGO bricks). There were Calico Critters and Play Mobil pirates and tons and tons of Beanie Babies. One American Girl doll.

We visited friends in Maine and friends on the Vineyard. There were lots of trips to grandparents in Schenectady, sometimes spiced up with Air Shows, a tour of the race tracks in Saratoga, or hikes in the Indian Kill Nature Preserve.

Happy Birthday boys! You’re the best things that ever happened for me!!