Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now. 

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair. 

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

 

Mom Wars Need a Cease Fire

Each time I hear the morning traffic report, I thank the real-estate gods that I wound up living in the middle of Washington, D.C., and don't have to navigate what's known locally as the Mixing Bowl, one of the country's most heavily congested crossroads and a gantlet required of thousands who commute into town each day from the surrounding suburbs. What's especially baffling to me are those people who have chosen to own a mega-square-foot, high-ceilinged McMansion but then, because they're so far away from EVERYTHING, wind up living in their car. It might be a really nice, luxury SUV, but it's still a car. They eat there. They email there. They raise their kids there. And last week Sam noticed a driver shaving, a spectacle that he, at 6, pronounced "pathetic." But even living a few walkable blocks from the Metro, I could relate to this post on Burbia.com called "Mommy Wars Redux: How Simone De Beauvior Rescued Me in the Suburbs," by a friend of a friend named Delia Lloyd. 

Lloyd, who lives in London, writes that the dichotomy is not so much between women who work and those who don't but rather between those two types she dubs "Prissy mom" and "earthy-crunchy mom."

One of my favorite parts is this:

"I'm not nearly put together enough for the Women's Club set (my tennis game could easily qualify me for Special Needs). Nor do I fit in with the wholesome crowd (when asked to draw my ideal birth scene in my La Maze class, I drew an epidural)." 

She could be describing me. But actually, I see the mom kingdom (queendom?) divided slightly differently into those who pack a napkin in their child's lunch, those who forget the napkin, and those who forget everything and rely on the stuff that passes for food in the school cafeteria (i.e., hyper-organized, moderately organized, and a mess). Needless to say, I fall into the latter category, and I can add that I also forget to pay for the school lunches most of thetime.

But however you categorize us, we can be pretty nasty to each other--and equally hard on ourselves, like my friend in Atlanta who says she feels constant pressure to participate more in her kids' school activities but between three children and a sick father, she's maxed out. Last year when I was Sam's room parent, I could see the guilt and relief on the other parents' faces that someone else was making the royal icing for gingerbread houses, collecting money for teacher gifts, or arranging chaperones for a field trip. I recognized the look from how I felt the year before.

Who hasn't had an eyebrow raised about her deadbeat behavior by a fellow mom or raised her own harried brow? But I say that we should stop comparing ourselves to the overachievers; in fact, let's stop comparing ourselves altogether. "What's important,"says Lloyd, "is to engage with the world in ways that matter to you, regardless of what the others are saying or doing." Mothering, after all, is not meant to be a blood sport.