parenting

I know it won't be long until he can read the headlines before I can bury the truth. He will learn to read, and then to suffer. Words will haunt him.

I know it won't be long until he can read the headlines before I can bury the truth. He will learn to read, and then to suffer. Words will haunt him.

The Back to School season is just around the corner, and for many, it has already begun. For moms, this time of year tends to bring on a huge mix of emotions, whether you are sending older kiddos back again or sending little ones for their first day ever.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

For those of you just tuning in, my wifespouse wanted to go to this weirdo punk festival in the middle of nowhere, and I, a chronic pessimist, decided it would be a good idea to go as a family. That means me, her, our 1-year-old child, and one incredibly intense weekend.

[W]hen tickets went on sale for a DIY punk music festival that my wife had attended several times before we were married, and she lamented that there was “just no way” that she’d be able to go, a light bulb went off in my head. “What if we just all went together?” I said.

My son is particularly anxious about death. He’s generally sensitive — he’s yet to make it through a full movie because anytime there’s a minor conflict he gets too upset and we have to turn it off. We left Zootopia in the theater when the big animals were being too “mean” to the rabbit. We left a screening of Toy Story in the park because he got too anxious when Woody and Buzz got left at the gas station. (We didn’t make it to the genuinely terrifying broken toy hybrids.)

The reality is that any person I love, including my daughters, can deeply hurt my feelings. Does this mean that I hold my daughters to the same level of emotional accountability as my husband or my best friend? Nope, but for it damn sure doesn’t mean that I morph into some feeling-less version of myself because I’m a mother, either.