Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words PDF
Preview Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words
Dedication For Walker and Hawthorne, thank you for going away so I could write about how much I love you. Contents Cover Title Page Dedication First I Don’t Want to Be Dying in Order to Tell You These Things Jobs Fuck. This. List. Job Description for the Dumbest Job Ever The Super Bowl of Interruptions I Am the One Woman Who Has It All Undone Dear Stay-at-Home Moms and Working Moms, You’re Both Right Time-Out Just What I Wanted, a Whole Twenty-Four Hours of Recognition Once a Year “If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy”: Revised and Expanded Vows Tiny Losses If You Love Your Grandparents, Go Visit Them Let’s Have the Wedding Later It’s Complicated Time-Out Your Cute Wedding Hashtags Twenty Years Later Kids, It’s Time You Knew the Truth—Your Mother Is a Real Piece of Work Showdowns Overshare Thank You for Including Me on This Meal Train but Unfortunately I’m a Horrible Person Your Participation Trophies Are Bullshit September 17, 2010: The Day I Turned the Car Around The Ghosts of Halloweens Past Time-Out Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting? Are You Sure There Isn’t Something Else I Can Do Before the End of the School Year? Schools The Walls That Define Us Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure The Punching Season Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today I Don’t Care If You Go to College Time-Out What Do You Think of My Son’s Senior Picture That Was Shot by Annie Leibovitz? Anne-Marie Slaughter Is My Safe Word Bodies Who Does That? If You Can Touch It As Young as We’ll Ever Be Hot-Ass Chicks Ashes to Ashes Time-Out Fifty-One Things You Should Never Say to a Mother Ever Is There a Parenting Expert on This Plane? Freedoms Do You Have Faith in Me? Thirteen with Dudes Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should Last You Are All the Joy When I Die Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright About the Publisher First I Don’t Want to Be Dying in Order to Tell You These Things T here is a deadline, always a deadline, for me to do anything and all things. I’ve gone from someone who organized others to one who is organized by those around me, and my former self condescends to me always, Oh brother, you’re really going to take this to the eleventh hour, aren’t you? And so I think, dying would be an excellent way to write a book. The ultimate deadline, no extensions. I could skate it quite close, until I realized I had taken things too far—again—and maybe couldn’t finish. And I would be so mad at myself, as I always am, when I realize I’ve chosen pushing my luck over pushing myself. It’s not like I’m the first person to think death is the ultimate and most convincing of all deadlines. Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, professor Randy Pausch, and neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks delivered their final insights their way—a book, a talk, and essays that outlasted them. But I am not a dying man with a doctorate. I do not expect my death to be a bestseller. But I don’t want or need to be dying in order to tell you that when you were born my heart cracked right open. The dark things, the alone and sad things, they all slithered across the operating room floor and disappeared down the drain. I thought of ladybugs, of all things, the first time I held you in my puffy and confused state, afraid to look at my stitches and afraid to admit the body has a purpose other than as a place to hang clothes. Those ladybugs were a sign. Everything was a sign back then. I found an unhatched robin’s egg in our yard right around the time I found out you were breech, and the delight at its color and completeness soon dissolved into fear. Was this a sign too? Were you doomed to die inside me? But you didn’t, and later your sister didn’t. So now there are two of you, signs be damned. How easy it is to forget the racing to the hospital to check for heartbeats when before you and between you both there were none. How easy it is to forget that life-shortening worry now that I spend most of my time just wanting you to do your homework. How easy it is to forget there was a me before you both fully occupied all corners of my brain and fingers and guts, pulling and pushing, bruising. Do I have to be dying to tell you I did my damnedest to figure this thing out, this being-a-mother thing, this being-a-parent thing, this working thing, this being-human thing? I’ve tried to be better but have oftentimes only been worse. I’ve expected more of you than I certainly expect of myself, to be kind, to not gossip, to be inclusive, to not swear or fight. I love fighting. You will be disappointed to learn that parents, and adults in general, do not have all the answers. We do not know as much as we project, walking around in our heads and bodies and bluster like that. That for every inconsistency and misstep, unpaid allowance and canceled vacation, we prove ourselves to be the amateurs we’ve always known ourselves to be. We are as uncertain as you are, but we can’t let you know that. We understand life is finite, but we can’t bear to look into your eyes with that knowledge. We are left to outfox our fears and punch above our inadequacies. I want to tell you—while I am healthy and here—that for all my faults, and they would fill another book entirely, the one I do not have is not loving my children. Not perfectly, not selflessly, but in my own way, the best way I know how. I hope for the rest of your lives you will feel over and over again the love you have been unafraid to reflect back at me, your perfectly imperfect mother. I have done my best to learn from every hard thing that has crossed my path and every soft thing that has snuggled into my lap. I have done my best to not wish any of it away and to experience all the joy and heartbreak I could hold. I have done my best to write down what is often so hard for me to say with real, spoken words. Without making it into a joke. With sincerity. I have tried. And with that, this.
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