How to Apologize

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000005989 StartFragment:0000000457 EndFragment:0000005973

Apologies are rare things to make the news, yet this week one did with Dharun Ravi's apology to the Clementi family for his actions that led Tyler Clementi to take his own life. I have followed this case the way I follow much of the news, in that I listen to NPR in my kitchen in the morning. Thanks to the iPhone, I check headlines and my favorite writers throughout the day. While I think Tyler Clementi's death tragic, and Ravi's actions that contributed to it abhorrent, I didn't obsessively follow the court proceedings. I didn't weigh in at Ravi's potential deportation or jail sentencing. Though I often have quite a bit to yell back at my kitchen radio about, I didn't yell about this case – or I didn't until I heard Ravi's apology this week.

Except that I don't know that we can call it an apology. Mostly, it was a statement read by his lawyers. When Judge Berman asked if Ravi had anything to say to the family about his actions, he said nothing. Given that Ravi made extensive attempts to cover up his actions, many commentators and Op-Ed writers concluded Ravi didn't feel remorse, or that if he did, it was only remorse for getting caught.

There is an art to apologizing, and it's not really one that is often taught. We think we are teaching our children to apologize: any time our toddler goes to a play ground and grabs a toy that isn't his, the knee jerk reaction is to demand s/he say their sorry. While this tells children they are expected to tell people they are sorry when they do something that upsets someone else, it doesn't teach them about responsibility for their actions or about being accountable for the repercussions of those actions. So, what we often end up with are people who say they are sorry, simply because it's expected of them to do so. And this is what Ravi's apology sounds like: his advisors standing over him like his parents used to do at the playground, “Now. Say you're sorry.”

Tyler Clementi's family was right to reject the apology and say that it was insincere. They were right to say that “a sincere apology is personal” and to point out that “it included no words of sincere remorse, compassion or responsibility for the pain he caused.” Because it didn't. An effective apology requires compassion and the ability to see the damage done from another point of view; the apologizer has to be able to understand why the other party feels wronged.

Instead, Ravi's statement allows that he just made a thoughtless mistake. He writes, “my behavior and actions, which at no time were motivated by hate, bigotry, prejudice or desire to hurt, humiliate or embarrass anyone, were nonetheless the wrong choices and decisions.”

If Tyler Clementi were my son, I'd give Ravi's apology a no pass too.

I too would ask for some authenticity, or at the very least, I'd ask, if your actions were not motivated by the desire to hurt, humiliate or embarrass someone, what were they motivated by? Because sticking a camera in someone's bedroom when they have a date coming over, and then inviting all your friends to watch is actually a pretty clear attempt to humiliate or embarrass or laugh at someone. Anytime we stick someone into the position of “other” or “different from us” we are hurting them. And anytime we seek to look good or feel included at the expense of someone else, you are bullying.

An actual apology takes courage. It takes courage to acknowledge one's hurtful actions and those it impacted, but when doing so, it shows the other party that you understand the cause-effect nature of your actions, and that your actions have repercussions that you didn't anticipate.

An actual apology also requires an explanation for why the offense happened, what motivated it, what led someone to take a considerable amount of action to hurt someone else. An explanation for the behavior has others see that you understand the damage of your actions and that your behavior is worth changing. Injured parties want to know that the wrongdoing won't occur again; an effective apology reassures them that it won't.

Often, effective apologies also make reparations. In Ravi's case, the court has assigned these in hours of community service. Still, it wouldn't have hurt Ravi to ask Clementi's family about what they wanted him to do or if there was anything he could do that would ease the pain he caused. It's thoughtful.

Everyone does things that hurts other people or at the very least bothers other people, but it takes vulnerability to admit that you were wrong or that you did something that really hurt someone else. On the playground, it is nice to apologize, but it doesn't mean anything if it's just out of expectation, and not actual compassion.  

What I Want For Mother's Day

Two weeks ago, my sister asked this season's first, “what do you want for Mother's Day?”

Mother's Day is a big business. Greeting cards, brunches, champagne toasts, jewelry, spa treatments, flowers, mugs from the paint-your-own-pottery place. The intention is valid, even admirable: to honor mothers and the work we do raising children.

Except this year, when my sister asked what I want for Mother's Day, I did not think of the potential flower arrangements, necklaces with children's birth stones, or sappy greeting cards that were supposed to celebrate the hours and attention I give to my children. It's counter-intuitive, really, given that raising children can be exhaustive work, with emotional fulfillment as its only reward. But raising my children is not what wears me out.

No, what I find exhausting is the 944 provisions introduced in 45 states in the first three months of this year that would limit women's reproductive health and rights. Arizona law now declares that pregnancy begins up to two weeks before conception, “from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” So in Arizona, life begins before an egg is even fertilized, which by extension then means every woman in Arizona is pregnant the first two weeks of her monthly cycle. This is purely to limit abortion rights, but it just made Sex Education taught in public schools that much more confusing. No matter though, because while the most effective way to reduce teen pregnancy and abortion is through education in the public schools, several states introduced bills that would forbid anything but abstinence education or stipulate that certain “facts” must be taught, even if these “facts” aren't facts at all or have no medical or scientific basis. Abstinence education (as we know) is very good at telling women not to have sex or get sexually abused or raped. It's also good at perpetuating sexist and traditional gender roles. When an unplanned pregnancy happens, it's the woman's life impacted and her education that gets derailed. Abstinence education is lousy at educating or empowering men to take responsibility in preventing rape, sex abuse, or unwanted pregnancies.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker repealed the comprehensive sex education laws only to replace it with an abstinence only platform. He signed legislation to restrict abortion rights in health care exchanges and require doctors to “investigate women” seeking abortions to make sure they aren't being coerced (because it's such a big decision – surely a woman can't work this one out by herself). Then Walker signed a bill to nullify enforcement of the federal Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay for Women Act. Walker's form of government is typical of so many around the US, and decrees unplanned children must be born and legislates a higher likelihood they're born into poverty and the ensuing cycle of disadvantage. It's like they're breeding dependents on the states on purpose.

I also thought of how many friends that since becoming mothers were passed over for promotions and raises – all because of the perception, that their family life made them less “available” or “committed” or “reliable” or “serious” at work, even though all solid evidence points to the contrary. Not to mention, that men who become fathers rarely face this perception in the workplace. Or the women who receive inadequate maternal leave and go back to work after two or six weeks, as if they were out for vacation rather than the life altering process of having or adopting a baby. I thought of how women, on average, make 77 cents for each dollar that men make, while that number drops to 73 if a woman is a mother. If that mother is single, the number drops further to 60 cents. Mothers are also 79% less likely to be hired compared to non-mothers with the same education and experience. Given that having a baby is one of the leading causes of poverty for a family in this country, it seems we might want to put our attention on empowering women to provide for the children politicians are so adamant they should be having.

Then I thought of how every 90 seconds a woman dies from a pregnancy related death. This translates to 1,000 women a day. 90% of these are preventable and 50% of these happen in the first 48 hours after delivery. The US ranks 50th in the world for maternal health, yet ranks first for defense spending. With the US spending 30 cents of every dollar on the military, it spends only 4 cents for education. So while the US has figured out how to monetize the killing of people, and even the incarcerating of people, we haven't figured out how to monetize the raising and education of people, and therefore, it falls to the bottom of the financial priority list.

I could go on about the recent injustices aimed at mothers and women, but I don't know that I need to. You get the idea. There's an average of over 10 provisions per day for the first three months of the year. We live in a country that so actively limits the rights of women and mothers that it makes Mother's Day feels like a last-minute-cheap-drug-store-bought consolation prize of an acknowledgment.

A champagne toast brunch is a tempting way to spend a May Sunday morning; a boat ride on the lake in Central Park is an exquisitely tempting way to spend a morning having my mothering energies acknowledged. But I don't want it, because it's meaningless in a culture that only pays lip service to its values of mothers, women and families.

No, what I want for Mother's Day is to live in a culture that values women and mothers and empowers them to be the best mothers they can be, and that means empowering them to decide for themselves when and how to give birth and how best to provide for their families, instead of leaving it up to a bunch of white guys to decide for them. Until then, I have no interest celebrating a holiday that essentially is a band-aid for the rest of the year.  

The Frustrated Mom

A year ago this April, Lashanda Armstrong loaded her four children into her minivan and drove into the Hudson River. Her oldest son, aged 10, was the only survivor after he rolled down his window and swam to the boat ramp in 45 degree water. Her other children, ages, 5, 2, and 11 months all died.

By all accounts, Armstrong was a good mother doing the best she could on limited means and with limited emotional support. She was estranged from both of the fathers of her children and for all intents and purposes a single parent. She mentioned in passing to her children’s daycare provider that she was “tired and all alone.” After a fight with the father of her younger 3 children, it seems she felt even more so as that was when she piled all of her kids into the car and drove them down a boat ramp into the Hudson River. 

Armstrong’s story is tragic, and still, when the topic came up in parent discussions on playgrounds or over dinner, parents talked about it in that distancing fashion that we save only for the most uncomfortable of topics. By the distancing fashion, I mean, the “I can’t imagine doing such a thing” or “Who could do such a thing?” or “It’s unnatural. It’s irrational – the urge to kill yourself and your children.” (as if we were unclear or thought that suicide and infanticide were well reasoned, thought out and rational courses of action). It’s the judgmental distancing thing we do when we’d like to think that the kinds of people who do these kinds of things are a completely different species of human being than ourselves.

I saw this again this last week, when a Chicago mom, Michelle Feliciano, 23, was arrested on child endangerment charges after her 11 month old baby was found with multiple injuries including bleeding on the brain, a broken clavicle, marks on the neck, and puncture wounds on his feet from toothpicks. Feliciano explained the injuries; she said they happened in a “bout of frustration.”  Her oldest child, between the ages of three and four, is now staying with a relative, while her baby is in stable condition in the hospital.

The comments on Feliciano’s debut into the papers sound like the things I remember reading about in the history of the Salem Witch trials or a Dickens novel. Feliciano is an immoral monster who should be hung in the town square. She should be sterilized without her consent or anesthetic. Her crimes inspire even the most collected and enlightened of onlookers to think of the most barbaric and medieval of punishments.

Yet, Feliciano’s case, while profoundly disturbing, I think deserves some degree of compassion. She is another young mom trying to raise children on limited means. There is no mention of a father being present. While Feliciano had family close by and it was a family member who noticed that something was wrong when the 11-month old baby couldn’t hold his head up, Feliciano obviously didn’t feel like she could call them for help when she found herself frustrated.  In the moment, dealing with two children all by herself seemed so overwhelming, that somehow hurting one of them seemed to make sense.

Child abuse is inexcusable, period.  But to assume that Armstrong or Feliciano are unlike other people is a mistake. Rather, they reveal the shortcomings of all of us.

Parenting, as one of my friends says, is unrelenting. Consequently, it can bring out anger and frustration that most of us didn’t know we had. Despite being raised in an angry household where my parents often yelled (generally at each other), I didn’t consider myself an angry person. I didn’t usually yell or throw things or kick things or throw tantrums like people who were angry people did. Even when I had a child I didn’t do these things.  When I had my first child, if anything, my patience, compassion, and tolerance increased. But something happened after the birth of my second. Since the birth of my daughter, and the increasing independence of my son who is 3-going-on-15, I have found myself profoundly and ridiculously angry. By sheer coincidence, I have also found myself profoundly and ridiculously tired.

And, I beat myself up all the more because my children are happy, easy to be around, healthy little people. Unlike Feliciano and Armstrong, I am educated and not young (and not there’s anything wrong with young parents, though studies show child abuse drops as people have children later in life, but to be clear, to have more than one child by 25 – the age when our own brain just finishes its development – is young) and I am not trying to raise my children on limited means. My children’s father is an active partner and parent; we have a solid marriage with pretty great communication skills. We fight and yell, but we also love and laugh and keep talking. My sister lives around the corner with her awesome soon-to-be husband. When my husband works late, I can crash – with my two kids in tow - dinner at their house. Yesterday, I came home to find my almost brother-in-law in the backyard working on our chicken coop and watching my son play; my husband had to run out for a work call.  I also have help; we can afford a housecleaner and I have a nanny part-time, so while I get up insanely early to get work done, I also have a few hours in the afternoon when she comes. I have her help for whatever I need: she can hold the baby, while I hold my son during his allergy tests at the doctor’s office or his teeth cleaning at the dentist. 

For all intents and purposes, my parenting experience is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Feliciano and Armstrong. Nonetheless, I have had days since the birth of my daughter, where I felt emotionally and physically exhausted, drained, isolated, angry and even violently so. I have had moments where I have imagined doing terrible things to my children and myself and horrified myself. I have had moments where I didn’t know I was going to make it through the end of the day. I have moments where when someone said, “it only gets worse” I have thought, “well, then, I am not going to make it.” I have had moments where walking into traffic seemed like a reasonable course of action.  I have thought there was something terribly wrong with me.  I have felt hopeless; because my own parents were so angry, I have spent years working on my personal development, so I didn’t follow in their marriage and child-rearing footsteps. And as a result, I do live a very different life than my parents did when they were my age.

Then one day, my son asked for sliced cheese and when I gave it to him, he cried that he didn’t want it and without even thinking, I became my mother in 1976 and picked up the cheese and threw it across the room and into the trash and said, “well, then don’t eat it.” Horrified by the instantaneous transformation, I instantly picked him up, apologized and we cried together about how I scared both of us.

When I tentatively brought up the topic of my own parenting anger in a group of friends and my favorite fellow parents, I was worried I would get asked to leave. But nonetheless, I had to ask, “I know we all want to be gentle parents, or conscious parents or whatever the terms are  - I know we all want to be the parents our parents weren’t, but does anyone beside me ever just lose it?”

I wasn’t shunned. One friend said, it’s going to happen, and it’s what you do in the moments after that make the difference. I realized that this is true, that my own parents told me I had it coming, so I always felt wrong even if I wasn’t. Whereas my children and I ended our bad patches, with me apologizing, and us on the couch snuggled together and reading, that this had the effect of my outbursts passing like my kids’ outbursts. Once we expressed the emotions and accounted for them, we could move on without carrying grudges forward.

Another friend wisely said, “I think we have to be like Gandhi, where we just keep taking hits from the British.” Then she added, “But I don’t know that Gandhi was as tired as we are.”

So while I’d like to pretend I can’t fathom how people like Armstrong or Feliciano do what they did, I can; I have felt the emotions that lead to those kind of actions. And like them, and like my favorite friends, and like my wise-Gandhi-citing friend, I - and most of us - weren’t taught how to deal with frustration or anger. Many of us were actually taught that expressing anger or throwing temper tantrums was nothing more than being manipulative or trying to get away with something. But this only leads to bottling emotions up until we can no longer stand it and we explode, often taking it out on those around us.  Not many of us had parents that got down at our eye-level and said, “I get you’re angry and that’s a valid emotion. Do you want to talk about what makes you angry?...Oh? What else?” Most of us grew up in households where expressing emotions like anger was considered misbehavior.

Except that it’s not. Alfie Kohn famously writes that every act of misbehavior has at its core a valid complaint. The trick is to give kids – and ourselves – the skills to express that valid complaint in language. I know for myself that when I act out, I too have a valid complaint at the source, whether it’s that I feel unsupported or overwhelmed or that I need a break and am unable to put my children on “pause” while I take a nap. I suspect if we asked Feliciano and Armstrong if they had a valid complaint at the source of their “unthinkable” actions, we would find they did. I suspect we would find, that, in a country we consider advanced, they felt the struggles that come with not enough support.

We can imagine Feliciano and Armstrong as monsters or unnatural. Or we can consider that like many of us, they didn’t have the tools to handle the wide range of emotions that come with parenting. Like many of us, they found themselves overwhelmed with frustration.

Talking About Work

Before last week’s Rosen/Romney exchange about work, my son and I had been talking a lot about work. When we go out and about in the city, much like a Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers episode, we talk about the various people we see working, from the garbage man, to the masons building a stone wall, the construction workers fixing the sidewalk with the cement mixer, the mail person, or the sushi chef at our favorite bodega. We talk about what various relatives do for work, how Abuela teaches teachers how to teach children, while his aunt designs couture wedding dresses and his uncle takes pictures. Most mornings after his dad leaves for work, he loads up an old MacBook Pro box (that he calls his briefcase though neither my husband nor I have ever carried such a thing) with his toys and announcing that he’s going to work.

When our nanny comes a few afternoons a week, I tell him that I too am going to get some work done, but I think my work of writing confuses him a little, because the lines that define it are a little more blurry. For example, I still keep his baby sister with me, while I do it. I also tend to sneak in writing a line here or there when I am with him, or let him sit on my lap while I write, which works as long as he sits still.

Most days, however, when my husband walks out the door or when my husband is on his computer in the morning, my son is clear that my husband is working while I am with him. He’s even said, “Daddy’s working. We’re not.”

I have pointed out that play is children’s work. I started to say too, that to be clear, I was working while spending time with him, that the care taking, activity organizing, snack packing, art & dance class researching, preventing one child from harming the baby as well as any form of tantrum and schlepping both kids to and from the city via subway was indeed work.

But given that often one connotation of work is that it’s arduous, strenuous, and unsatisfying struggle, I didn’t want him to think that I found spending time with him an arduous, strenuous, and unsatisfying struggle. Until I watched him spend his morning packing his MacBook Pro box with toys and announce to me that he was going to work and he’d see me later, did I realize that he didn’t connotate work with being arduous, unsatisfying or strenuous at all. He thinks work is fun; after working with his dad and uncle in the back yard, hauling bucket after bucket of sand from the front of the house to the backyard sandpit, he thinks its something you do with people you enjoy spending time with. When he types on a book pretending its his computer, he also thinks he’s working. He finds it satisfying, and I realized that I too found it satisfying, and that many days my work as a writer is similar to my work as a mother; some days are fun and great, and some days suck.

After the Rosen/Romney exchange, I found myself thinking a lot about work as I watched age-old arguments resurface as if they were new ideas, whether women (parents really – this includes fathers) should take time off and stay home with their children or they should stay working and can we consider the work of parenting in the home the same as working outside the home (and isn't it odd that we call mothers who work outside the home "working mothers" but don't call fathers who work outside the home "working fathers"?).  No, the work of raising children isn’t paid. When a parent chooses to stay home to raise a child, they give up not just their career (for a bit – most SAHMs and SAHDs aren’t staying home forever), but their Social Security credits and retirement earnings. Many defend this, as Leslie Bennett writes for the Daily Beast, “All mothers know that motherhood involves a lot of hard work, but let’s stop pretending that that’s the same as working for a living. It isn’t. When you’re a stay-at-home mom, somebody else is bringing home the paycheck.” This is true, but that doesn’t make it right. One of the sticky points is that being a mom, and especially one who stays home is unpaid labor. And as Bennetts writes in The Feminine Mistake, many SAHM moms have a rude awakening about how much they did give up when they chose to stop working, that re-entering the work force is rough, or god forbid, if she finds herself getting divorced, or facing any other kind of economic hardship being an economic dependent will only work against her. The laws are not in favor of anyone who contributed the unpaid labor of the home.  This is also true, but again, that doesn’t make it right.

We often assume how things work is the only way things can work, so clearly, those who stay home with children shouldn’t be paid because it doesn’t currently work that way. But what if we imagined something different? In The Price of Motherhood, Ann Crittenden writes, “women may be approaching equality, but mothers are still far behind. Changing the status of mothers, by gaining real recognition for their work, is the great unfinished business of the women’s movement.”

Indeed, as we now have Mitt Romney’s proposal that women receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) should go back to work after their child is two, so that they may know the “dignity” of work. Somehow he doesn’t have to explain how the person providing daycare is also working and knowing the dignity of that work, while doing that same “work” yourself doesn’t provide the same dignity. He also doesn’t explain the rather class based assumption, that poorer mothers especially need such dignity (they must somehow lack it being on TANF? being poor? Maybe their lack of dignity and pride in themselves is what landed them on assistance in the first place?). While middle and upper class women either don’t need that dignity or they already have it, because of their class – I don’t know, and it’s odd he was having his wife answer for such things, but she was curiously silent on this one. Nonetheless, he’s rather frank about his view, that choosing to stay home with your children for the lower classes shouldn’t be a choice, and it’s work outside the home that gives us dignity.

I admire the work of other countries here, countries like Norway where a mother can take a year off work and have her job held open by law, and the government sends her a check of 80% of what she earned at her job. This check is like a paycheck, as income and social security taxes were withheld and she earned social security credits for her time home with her children. (And isn’t this novel – to give women a year off, coincidentally the same amount of time that so many organizations recommend a mother breast feed her baby? Could we possibly see an increase in breast feeding rates if maternity leaves actually lined up with the medical recommendations for new mothers?) France too offers families subsidies for the raising of children, including free health care, housing subsidies and high quality free preschools.

I know the standard response is coming. Americans supposedly aren’t interested in paying for the kinds of socialized services that other countries provide. If Americans want to take time out of the workforce to take care of an aging family member, a new baby, young family, or a special needs child, they do so at a cost financially and personally, with others judging their work as undignified and not nearly as valid as the work they did in the workforce, simply because it’s personal. Yet the personal is social. What we value personally should be reflected in what we value socially and what we value with our tax dollars. American politicians  - like Norway politicians – love to talk about their strongly held family values; Norway just supports their values with money, because they feel that the raising of a child is real work and it’s work that provides value for all of society. As a friend told me over the weekend, what goes on her resume for her time spent with her children? Grooming the next leader.

Parenting isn’t paid, but not because it’s not dignified or not valid or doesn’t deserve space on our resumes. It’s not paid because we haven’t found a way to pay for it and we haven’t valued the work of it enough to deem it worthy of our financial attention. 

Granted, many argue that it shouldn’t be paid or receive compensation, even Social Security credits, because it’s our children. The emotional reward should be enough, plus it can be really fun. Parenting is fun and rewarding, but it’s also stressful, and sometimes more so than the work outside the home. And I say this after talking to people have taken time off from being public school teachers, politicians, neuroscientists, doctors, professors and academics, lawyers, advertising executives, and so on – people who found their work fun, rewarding and stressful. There are many days my husband comes home from his work and tells me about his hard and stressful day, but he always ends it with, “it was hard, but not as hard as what you did today.” I appreciate that he’s aware of this, and I take it as an acknowledgement (the same way I take my 3 year-old saying, “Thanks for cooking dinner, Mom.”). In the current culture of work and family values, where parents are penalized for taking time off from working outside the home, it’s all I’m going to get.

A Quick Rant on NPR's Quick Edit of Mara Liasson

Last week's mama drama with Hilary Rosen’s comment about Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life put the politics of mothers on the kitchen table so to speak. Until I read Rosen's comments here, I admit I was part of the brouhaha, but not so much against Rosen oddly, but against the comments of people who felt that Ann Romney represented the typical stay at home mom, or that because she had chosen to stay home, or because she had staff, she had no skills that could be translated to employment. I'm not an Ann Romney fan, but I had to disagree; suggesting that just because she had staff she had no concerns or skills is ignorant and classist. Having staff working for you on a large estate, in the workplace, or in the home requires managerial skills, which last time I checked, were respectable and practical skills. I also resented the people who suggested that women who stay home with their children have loads of spare time. I don't know who these people are, but I don't think they actually have children or spend time around children or know children.

To be clear, I do agree with Rosen that as far as economic advisers go, Mitt Romney could do a little better. 

Yet I do have to say what I appreciated about last week's mama drama in the media is that it revealed a lot of how people perceive not just SAHMs, but mothers and women. It revealed a lot of the underlying bias that people aren't even conscious of thinking, hence the remarks that SAHMs have plenty of spare time, little stress, are out of touch, ignorant, live in a bubble, are spoiled so on and so forth. (Though granted, SAHMs are a diverse bunch. There are plenty who probably do fit this description. However, to be fair, I also know a fair amount of working mothers who fit this description. I also know of working and non working men who fit this description.)

Cut to Sunday morning, and me having my morning coffee at my kitchen table with my family. Like every day, we were listening to NPR's Morning Edition. Rachel Martin was talking with Mara Liasson about the Presidential campaign, Ann Romney and Mitt's issue with women. Liasson then clarified for all of us listening (and only those of us listening because NPR would later go back and edit the transcripts) that "Mitt Romney doesn't have a problem with stay-at-home-moms, he has a problem with educated women." 

Oh yes. She did. 

Within minutes I was at my computer leaving a comment on NPR's site asking, "Did I just hear that?" (For my comment, the other incensed comments and the edited transcript you can go here). Needless to say, Liasson, like Rosen before her, made a rather poor choice in words. 

Later in the day, when the transcript was up, I checked for any acknowledgment from NPR about Liasson's slip of the tongue (if we're just going to give her the benefit of the doubt). 

Nothing. Except an edited transcript. 

And now I'm a little disappointed in NPR's Morning Edition - Sunday. When This American Life retracted a story, they did a whole episode on it. I thought they handled the situation with an amazing amount of integrity, responsibility and authenticity. Morning Edition's stunt in comparison just looks cowardly. One person who commented called for Mara Liasson's termination. I don't know that she should be terminated, but an apology wouldn't hurt. As I wrote NPR, do I really have to point out in 2012 that SAHM moms are a diverse and educated group? We have Ph.Ds, MAs, MBA and all kinds initials that follow our names. The vast majority of us have college educations and have had careers and for a variety of reasons have chosen to stay home for a bit. To assume otherwise is ignorant.

What Are Mothers Not Saying?

A few months ago, a dear friend and her husband visited my husband, children and me in New York City. We met them for a lunch of lobster rolls on the Upper East Side. After hugs and cheek kisses, we asked how each other were. My husband said, “We’re good!” just as I said at the same time, “we’re hanging in there.” My friend laughed knowingly, of how it’s tiring with a new baby (even if we are all sleeping through the night), while the men understand that for months after giving birth, women are tired, without really knowing just how tired we are. Our husbands played chase with my son. My son instantly claims any kind man as his play gym, even if the last time he saw the man was when he was baby. My friend took the baby from me, as I threw our coats, hats and gloves over my son’s stroller.

My friend took the natural segue of our greeting and began telling me her three worst moments of motherhood. Often the worst moments, people say, are the ones that make you laugh when you look back at them. Nonetheless, my friend still had a moment – when she kicked her 8 year old out of a car on a city street and made him walk the rest of the rest way home after he called her names – when she caught herself thinking, “Crap. This just became a Social Services issue.” She then stopped the conversation and asked, “Why am I telling you this?”

I was listening rapt, as if she had been telling me about her personal encounter with aliens that landed in her yard.

“Because no one talks about these things,” I answered. I had just thrown my first temper tantrum in front of my son that week. I had just had my first experience of wondering if I had crossed into Social Services territory. I had just had my first realization that there is a whole other world of parenting that people don’t talk about. Or at least I don’t hear them talking about this underbelly of parenting - the days we think about sending ourselves to the looney bin, the days we don't want our children to crawl into our laps because we're tired of them touching us, the days our children disappoint us, but we don't say so because we think we're supposed to be accepting and free from expectations.

My friend's son walked home. And now, when someone in the car puts down his mother, he says, “We are too far from home for you to be talking like that to her.”

My son survived my temper tantrum too, and now greets my exasperated groans with, “You’re frustrated, Mom?”

This week, I was talking with my neighbor who, like me, is adjusting to life with two children. Her second child is three months old. We wondered at how some parents sail through the adjustment, while we found it so exhausting and so much work.

She then said, “I don’t enjoy motherhood as much as I thought I would.” She looked at me, “I know. I’m not supposed to say those things.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Not all of motherhood is enjoyable.”

But I know why we don’t usually say these kinds of things. When I’ve mentioned in conversations our adjustment growing pains, I’ve been advised to just take better vitamins. I’ve been on the receiving end of that stern matronly that says: “Woman! Make an effort!” I’ve been told that if I had my own interests, it’d be easier (I swear.). I’ve been asked if I had Post-Partum Depression.

No, I said, but thanks for the reminder that the thinking of the Victorian era is still with us, that if a woman finds mothering hard, she must be sick.*

I’ve also received notes from friends wondering how to stay on top of it all, or if they made a mistake in having children, or friends who love their careers, but find their children drive them crazy simply because they are worn out from work. They have it all, but if they admit their exhaustion, some one tells them to quit complaining. There’s a recession.

It’s had me think, if motherhood is so hard, why is it so taken for granted? Why is it so undervalued? Why are women feeling guilty and isolated for not loving it as much as they think they should? Social Services exists for a reason, but should we fear its existence on our bad days? And why are women such harsh judges of each other, when we do open up about the raw, ugly, and authentic moments of parenting? What are mothers not saying about mothering?

*Please don’t get me wrong: I greatly appreciate that women can talk about having Post-Partum Depression openly and we can know it strikes any one from Gwyneth Paltrow to the young woman in the Walt Whitman Projects who threw her baby down the trash chute. Being able to talk about it makes a difference for women, their partners (especially now that we know men can also suffer from Post-Partum Depression), and their children, and we’re also now dealing with a kind of backlash – that if we take too long to recover from giving birth, or have too many hard days or what have you, we must be depressed. Rough spots don’t necessarily mean illness.

A Sunday Morning Story

1. Our new fridge was delivered first thing this morning, however, we discovered they sent the wrong fridge. It's a third smaller than our old fridge, so most our food doesn't fit inside.

2. Because most our food doesn't fit inside the fridge, Fyo used it as building blocks on the kitchen table.

3. On a side note, Fyo found the Moses action figure. He deduced rather quickly that Moses is like  Jesus and that Jesus and Moses could be friends. (Let's be honest, in a facebook world, Moses and Jesus would be friends. The fact that they lived hundreds of years apart from each other and figured prominently in two different books is besides the point.)

4. Jesus and Moses used our food as a pretend mountain for this morning's sermon. Husband tried to explain that Jesus was busy in a church in Texas, while Moses was hanging out in Williamsburg, but Fyo thought they played nicely together despite all this. Until Moses smote Jesus and kicked him off the mountain.  (Didn't quite know what to do on this one. Moses is Moses, but we have a very clear No Smiting rule in our house.)

5. Thankfully, it's cold enough outside that our uninsulated pantry is working as our back up fridge, and Jesus and Moses are napping during Fyo's self declared resting time. Happy endings abound.