*Some of the writing I’ve been doing lately is all stream of consciousness or Artist’s Way-Like in that I sit and try to get three solid pages out of me. Instead of sitting here with another blank page (Honestly, next month’s challenge to write every. single. day is scaring the bejesus out of me) I have posted what is below. Maybe it’s more honest than I’d like because it seems a great confession of failure on my part.

Hearing that old adage that women utter to themselves that made me stop and take notice of it. Not the first time I’ve heard it, of course, but that’s the one that made me question it. Made me grateful that I can hear a thing over and again and one time hear it and have the balls-out reply, “Well, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

If I do nothing else in life, then at least I raised children well.

It is not a mystical phrase. There aren’t mysteries surrounding it, but it’s far too common an utterance for it to be thrown about without some sort of defiance by those who hear it.

All I have ever done is raise children and try to do so ‘well’. My own career as a teacher took me to a job once because I wanted to be nearer my children, to have them at the same school as me and be able to join them for lunch or afternoon snack if I had a prep period that coincided with it. My youngest was at the day care part of the building, my middle child was in a classroom directly adjoined to my own, and my oldest was in my class at the time. Pardon the honesty here, but I couldn’t get away from the children. Not that I wanted to, but it occurs to me now that I never was. They were with me when I drove to work/school and they were there during the day with me as I was working at their school and they piled into the minivan after I was done with work/school and then we went home together to eat dinner and do homework and grade papers so we could all go to work/school again.

Then, I realized that I was very tired. My friend, Lisa, had stopped me one day outside my classroom as I was ushering in the students and commented that I looked as such, but that she certainly understood it because she always saw me as this fascinating, talented woman who had it all and could keep it together. Something in me decided to be just bare it all for her that early morning before she had her coffee and 10 mile run through the park only to move onto to decorating more of her house.

“The balls are in the air and I’m juggling as much as I can. You just don’t see all the ones I’ve dropped. Please. Don’t look down. You’ll count those balls and realize what a failure I am.”

What was I talking about? The inability to keep up with grading essays? Trying to determine which novel I would teach next? How could she have known to what I was referring if I myself didn’t even know? It was unfair of me to dump on her, but I kept looking at her life and it looked so fabulous and I wanted it. Fair or unfair, I wanted it. Something different than the work, work, WORK DAMNIT YOU HAVE TO MAKE MONEY AND SUPPORT THESE BABIES YOU KEEP HAVING than I was used to struggling with in my short 27 years on this earth.

At this time, I was also heavily involved in my church either teaching Sunday school or performing in children’s church or being in the sign language choir. When this mega-church started doing productions in the form of musical plays, I thought I had found my calling and could do this for the rest of my days.

But the weariness still was getting to me. Working for a private school was difficult in that many of the student’s’ families insisted on them being treated better than anyone else in life. They were privileged and saw this as an opportunity to show their children how one learns to become better than others.

A mixed bag if ever I saw one. This was the time I met my friend Allen and he challenged everything they stood for and I was grateful that he waltzed into my life wearing a QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker over his whole being.

So my thoughts about being a mom began to change and I longed for what I could not have: a stay-at-home-mom’s-life. I wanted to be more like those women who hopped in their SUV’s with their travel mugs in their hand while wearing their yoga pants and flip flops so they could kiss their babies goodbye and lead this glamorous child-free afternoon. They would shop for just the right blend of coriander because their gourmet dish was incomplete without just the right one. They offered their time at the bookstore where they easily dropped a hundred dollars on some magazines and cookbooks and perhaps something of the spiritual sort. They would laze about (wouldn’t they?) and try to have a check ready for the cleaning lady who would be there just in time for the house to be picked up before they returned to the schools to collect their children. Their husbands would come home tired and cranky but upon seeing the lithe bodies of their wives and the happy chubby children and smelling that meal would allow it to melt away and even he could continue playing the role of Satisfied Husband, Good Man.

I realized I wanted this world even if it was entirely fantasy. They still portrayed themselves as having this and I foolishly convinced myself that this was only a part of the life o f a stay-at-home mom that I wanted. So I began to work on my husband and tell him that I needed these things and that staying home with only the youngest child (since the others were school age, so technically I really WOULD be a stay-at-home mom because at least one of the children would be AT HOME WITH ME) was the only option and that I wanted to quit my job.

He wasn’t hearing any of it. He just wasn’t having it. I sought the answer (the answer, by the way, was not just “yes” to staying home, but “Yes, you deserve to stay home and you’re already worked very hard and yes, your husband will having nothing but support for you to do that so he will get a better paying job so you can stay home because yes, this is the completely right decision”) from my friends and co-workers.

Mostly, they obliged. Until they got to part where they saw my husband as supporting this. Then, they scrunched up their faces as if to say sourly, “well, you know… I can’t really see this happening for you.”

One of the teachers who only stayed for one year in that position comforted me. She was older than me and her children were in high school and beyond and she had, admittedly, already “done her time” by staying home with her little babies.

You know, Kelly. No matter what you decide, you will still have the Scarlet Letter. Every mom has it. It’s invisible, but we all recognize it when we see it. It’s the letter G and it’s carved right onto her forehead.

A “G”? I realized I was, as the English teacher, to get this reference, but I was sure Hester Prynne wore an “A” pinned to her chest.

Yes, a “G”. For “guilt”. No matter what you’re doing, you will have guilt. If you’re working at a school and leaving others to care for your children, you will have guilt. If you’re staying home with your son and not using your college degree for something worthwhile and giving back to society, you will have guilt.

The flippant part of me wanted to retort, “So, basically, I am destined for a life of guilt? I’m sorry. I call Bullshit on that one.” But I didn’t that day. I was still so young and my children were, too, and I was unsure if my husband would truly get what I was asking for and instead bawled in her classroom until I was curled up in her lap trying desperately to hold on to her skirt for dear life. I thought that if I let go of her skirt at that moment, the earth would swallow me up whole for my motherly guilt and I would have no one but myself to blame for it.

Stupid of me, but I have never thought I deserved much more than that.