Anyone who has ever been on an airplane could probably recite the flight attendant’s opening spiel.  (Unless we’re talking about Southwest, because they tend to recite their spiel in anything from rap to iambic pentameter.  You don’t buckle your seatbelt on a Southwest flight.  You buckle your S to the E-A-T Belt.  It’s weird.)  Anyhow, say it along with me: “In the event that the cabin loses pressure, oxygen masks will automatically descend from the ceiling.  Grab the mask, secure it over your mouth and nose and breathe normally.  If you are traveling with a child, secure your own mask before assisting with theirs.”

Secure your mask first.  Why is that?  Isn’t it your job to protect your child at all costs?  Isn’t it selfish to put your own mask on first?  How can you let your child go one moment longer than absolutely necessary without oxygen, Bad Mommy?  Why wouldn’t you want to make sure your child’s mask was on first?

Because you are of no use to your oxygenated child if you are unconscious, that’s why.  In the event of an emergency we are instructed by those who are trained to keep us alive (all of us, not just the children) that we are to prioritize ourselves.  We are to take care of the caretaker so that we can tend to those who depend on us.

Why then, is there an unspoken expectation that to be a good mother means to back-burner our own needs? Why should successful parenting be equated with giving absolutely everything of ourselves to our children?  We already sacrifice our bodies, our manicured hair and nails, our clean clothes and clean countertops and clean armpits.  Some parents sacrifice their careers, their friendships, their hobbies, and even *GASP* their delicious cocktails to the Cause. If we are expected to sacrifice our very well being in favor of our children’s, then what happens when we’re spent?  What is my child to do when all there is is left of his mother is an ill, angry, unkempt hobo crazy lady? If I’ve only gotten him this far by making sure that I never spent any energy or attention or TLC on myself, then this is as far as he goes, because I’ll be too busy counting ceiling tiles in the local nut house to teach him to read.  Not to mention, what am I teaching my boy about what parenting is?  Our children follow our example, not our advice, so if I’m showing him that the needs of a parent are insignificant, then aren’t I condemning him to the nut house if and when he’s lucky enough to become a father?

My child deserves better than that.  My child deserves the very best me that I can provide.  My child deserves a mother who is as centered, calm, and capable as she can be.  My child deserves a mother who allows herself an episode of Burn Notice while he plays in his jumper.  My child deserves a mother who doesn’t feel guilty that Mommy and Me class got skipped so she could take a shower AND shave her legs.  My child deserves a mother who feels worthy of a weekend away, to do whatever the hell she pleases.  My child deserves a mother who reads for pleasure or does sunrise yoga or takes in the new summer blockbuster on opening night even if that means his sheets don’t get laundered today.  My child deserves a mother who is fully oxygenated and ready for whatever insanity today brings.  And he deserves to know that his importance doesn’t fade with age or circumstance.  He and his needs will ALWAYS be important, not just in childhood.  He’ll know that because his mother knows that.

In the event that the cabin loses pressure, don’t you worry about a thing, little boy.  Mommy’s got her mask on and she will take care of you.

Damn straight.

Oh my poor, sweet girl.

You’re having a bad day.  It’s okay.  Breathe.  Having a bad day doesn’t mean it will turn into bad week into a bad month into a bad rest of your life.  And it doesn’t mean that you are bad mother.  Or that your boy is a bad baby.  It’s just a bad day.  You remember what Alexander’s mother tells him on his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  Some days are like that.  Breathe.

There are a few things I want you to know.  You are doing a good job.  No matter what kind of job you are doing today, you are doing a good job raising your boy.  No one has ever been a better mother to that boy, and no one ever will be.  Breathe.

I know you love your boy.  Even when you swear you’ll sell him to the gypsies, I know you love him.  Even when you get so angry at him it scares you, I know you love him.  Even when you question, in the darkest part of your heart, if you even want to be a mother anymore, I know you love him.  Even when you wonder if you even love him at all and hate yourself for it, I know you do and I love you for it.   Breathe.

I know you’re shocked at how easily you can spin out on a day like today.  I know you have never felt such a lack of control over your emotions in your entire life.  I know you’re scared that this experience has shortened your fuse (that lovely long fuse that burns so slowly and is so easily put out and that you are very proud of) and made you into an impatient, snarly, teeth-gritty version of yourself.  It’s okay.  You’re still you.  You are the youest you’ve ever been.  You’re just a stranger in a strange land, learning to adapt.  You are learning on the fly a game that has no rules.  (And you’re winning that game, by the way.) You can’t know what you don’t know until you know it.  Apply that lovely long fuse to yourself.  Give yourself some more time to adjust to the emotional and physical chaos.  And when you think you should have gotten a handle on all that by now, give it more time.  Breathe.

I know on a dark day like today, you sometimes worry that all the changes you are going through mean that you aren’t the girl your husband fell in love with anymore and that he’s going to wake up any day now, out of love.  That is poppycock, plain and simple.  You know it, I know it, the American people know it.  First of all, of course you aren’t the girl your husband fell in love with.  That girl was eleven years old.  He’s loved you every single day since then.  That kind of love is here to stay.  Secondly, love is fluid and elastic and can take a beating.  Keep talking to him.  Tell him you’re worried he won’t love you if you get angry and frustrated and sad.  Then watch him laugh in your face and kiss your tears away.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

See?  Breathe.

I know you really, really scared yourself when, at the end of your fraying rope, you were too rough with the baby.  It’s okay.  He’s okay.  I forgive you.  You learned a valuable lesson on where your limits are and next time, you’ll put him in his crib two minutes earlier.  You can let that go.  Seriously.  Let it go, girl.  Breathe.

I am so proud of you.  I am proud that you are a living example of how powerful and important a sense of humor is.  You show your boy every day that a day without laughter is a day wasted.  I am proud that you are filling his childhood with music.  You have tasked Mozart and Bach and Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hall and Oates and so many others to paint the soundscape of his life. What a lucky boy! I am proud that you are reaching out for help when you need it, that you are casting aside the destructive illusion that because you are The Mother you have to have it all figured out on your own.  You don’t have to be the perfect mother.  You just have to be the mother who has kept her son and herself alive and well for another day.  The rest is gravy.  (And yes, you will figure all the gravy out, too.  But that’s for a brighter day than this.)

The sun will set on this terrible day and you will have won the great battle of Being a Mother vs Figuring Out How to be a Mother.  Remember that you are not alone.  You have an army of support behind you, cheering you on and ready to throw a shoulder to the yoke just as soon as you ask.  Most importantly, remember that you always have the strongest weapon in your arsenal…. me.  When you need to be the you that is small and scared,  I will be the you that is strong and sure.  I will see you through this.

Tomorrow will be better.  Pour yourself a cocktail.  And breathe.

Expectant mothers get metric tons of advice.  Anyone from their mothers to the lady who lives in an alley and eats her hair will offer up little tidbits of what they think are absolute pearls of wisdom.  Sometimes the advice is so bad, it’s not only unhelpful, but you walk away thinking, “Did the grocery store check out lady just call me stupid?” And sometimes you get a piece of advice so solid, so sure, so exactly what you need that you vow it will be the piece of advice you offer to any expectant mother who asks for the rest of your life.

Just before my son was born, my friend CDC wrote to me and said, “I don’t want to scare you, but you should know this.  You will need this.”   Her advice saved my sanity and kept me from throwing my son out the window on more than a few occasions.

When you ask yourself (and you will) “Is this hell the new normal?” remember that the answer is “No.”

I remember laying in the hospital bed, my tiny son tucked into the crook of my arm, feeling completely overwhelmed and exhausted and wondering, to my horror, “Oh God, what have I done?”  It’s a scary thing to think that maybe you regret this thing you’ve spent nine months preparing to do.  It’s even scarier when you remember that you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.  And it’s the scariest thing in the world to think that there is something wrong with your maternal instincts.  I mean, how could I even think I had made a mistake?  Why wasn’t I filled with joy and love and light and unspeakable beauty?  I’d just had a baby, after all!  Where was my glow?  Where was the sense of relief I expected (and deserved!) after a 35 hour labor and eventual c-section? I thought to myself, “This sure does feel like hell. Is it always going to feel like this?” But there were those words, a safety net breaking my fall.  “Is this the hell the new normal?  No.”  So I reminded myself that the feeling was fleeting and I just had to find a way to wait it out.

Everything that was “supposed” to come naturally, did not.  Not one bit.  I went a week over my due date, so I had to be induced.  I labored for days, making little to no discernable progress for hours at a time.  The doctor on call, who had the bedside manner of a Ukrainian wet work team, made me feel like I was refusing to dilate on purpose.  After throwing every ounce of strength and stamina at pushing that melon-headed kid out, his (or my?) “failure to progress” meant that the doctor would need to go in and get him.  Then came breastfeeding.  Anyone who says it’s the most natural thing in the world ought to be forcibly hooked up to a dairy milker.  Just to experience the “natural” experience themselves.  Hell.  But not, after all, the new normal.

Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”  Hell is no place to stick around.  Get moving.  Put one foot in front of the other and get the fuck out of there.  I mean, make like a bread truck and haul buns.  Breathe in and out.  Do your very best.  Ask for help.  And one day, it’ll be four months later and you’ll marvel at how far you’ve come, how much better you feel, how much you’ve learned. (You might even reread a piece that you wrote during that awful time and think, “It wasn’t really that bad, was it?” and be really, truly, astoundingly grateful that enough time always dulls the sharpest edges of pain.)

Motherhood has the steepest, wickedest, most intense learning curve of anything I have ever tried to master, and I’m certain the future holds many more moments of unspeakable difficulty.  But it won’t be hell.  Not forever.  In those first hellacious days and weeks of my boy’s life, believing there was a way out was my greatest tool.  Finding my way out was my first great success as a mother.

Thank you, C.  For being my lifeline and my friend.

You can do it! You are a rockstar! You are a warrior! You are Mommy!

Before I launched this blog I had a little stockpile of entries.  I’ve been polishing, tweaking, adding, and editing these pieces, most of which I wrote in the very throes of the emotional tidal wave that was devastating my little world.  In doing so, I’ve been reliving those moments in the HD detail I didn’t realize I was recording at the time.  While that’s been much more difficult than I predicted, it’s also been a wonderful learning experience because it illustrates just how much better things are now that the waters of that tidal wave have receded.  It’s also been a good reminder to pay attention to the glorious moments, no matter how small, because they are the diamonds that all this pressure creates.

Today, I am not reaching into my stockpile because oh, did I have a moment worth sharing this morning!  I watched the opening number from Sunday night’s Tony Awards.  It is the perfect thumbnail of exactly what makes Broadway so important.  It’s inspired, it’s fun, it’s raucous, it’s so energetic you feel out of breath just watching it and it blows your mind to think that these warrior performers are SINGING their way through this marathon of awesomeness!  It is creativity set on fire and the conflagration will light the kindling of a hundred new ideas.  It was also my first dream, to perform on stage like that.  And, having left the shores of that dream for the grand, oceanic adventure of a different dream, the sting of what might have been sometimes abraids my heart on such occasions.  It’s what makes watching the Tonys less fun for me than watching the Oscars or the Golden Globes.  If you’ve been playing along at home, readers, then I bet you can guess how I reacted when this fabulous number ended to thunderous, on-your-feet applause.

I wept.  I mean, girrrrrrllllll, I WEPT!

There I was, sitting in front of my computer, bouncing my boy on my knee, and teetering precariously on the edge of Ugly Cry Gulch.  As I struggled to gain some breath and reign in this out-of-control mustang of emotion, my husband came in from his run, bolted into our room and, with an understandably dumbstruck look his face asked, “What??  What is it?!”

“H-h-how c-c-can anyone think that art and music aren’t important t-t-to education?” I sobbed.

“I don’t know,” he replied, wiping the tears off my face and the top of our boy’s head.  (Even if he didn’t know what I was talking about, he knew what I was talking about.  I love that about my husband.)

Once I got a grip on myself (I managed to avoid plummeting into Ugly Cry Gulch, but just barely) I thought about what that reaction meant.  It’s not new that a musical number made me cry.  What is new is that my emotion came not from my performer heart, but from my mother heart.  I wept for the state of education (a first) and for this great loss to our children and their chances at well-roundedness.  I wept for my son who (had he been born to different parents) might not come to know how art and music colors in the lines of math and science.  I raged at how it could possibly be decided by anyone in a position of power that the arts are less worthy of our time and dedication than any other subject.  Why should education be black and white when the world that that very education is preparing our children for is in brilliant, dazzling color?

(In the midst of this micro-meltdown, I did manage to rejoice in the fact that my son’s parents are an actor and a musician in their hearts, and so our boy will have art in his blood, in his breath, and in his fingers or toes. Which probably means that his dearest desire will be to crunch numbers for the IRS.  Whatever.  At least he’ll have the full buffet to choose from.)

This thunderstorm of thoughts and feelings that erupted in my mind and flash-flooded out of my face gave me a little peek into how my perception of the world is changing now that I am a mother.  My first instincts are shifting away from myself and toward my child. Without any conscious effort, I am making decisions about what is important for my son and I am, apparently, taking those decisions extremely seriously.

I have Neil Patrick Harris and the entire casts of every show on Broadway to thank for showing me what’s happening in my own head.  The purpose of playing after all, first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature. (Okay thanks to NPH, all of Broadway, and Shakespeare, too.)

Click here to watch the Opening Number. Do it. It’s amazeballs.

As hard as you think it will be, you’ll wish it were that easy.

So, I’m paraphrasing Terms of Endearment, here.  I can’t find the actual quote anywhere, and this isn’t damn high school, so I’m letting my citation slide.

When my uncle reminded me of this quote, I was instantly dumbstruck, because this is EXACTLY how I felt about the first six or so weeks in the motherhood trenches.  There are no words to describe how hard it is, because every time I try, all I can come up with are clichés or words that have previously been used to describe early motherhood, and somehow, the familiarity of those words makes them seem less powerful.  No words seemed to accurately describe the combination of exhaustion, frustration, and confusion that I so desperately wished I didn’t have to face.  Because I wished it were the fairy tale portrait that I had projected for myself.  Not that I thought it would be sunshine and butterflies all the time, but I guess I had just deluded myself into thinking that the “hard parts” would be as innocuous as the musical montage of “hard parts” in a movie like Look Who’s Talking.  (Oh, that silly Kirstie Alley!  She’s so tired she poured coffee in the baby’s bottle!) Something that was really inherently funny, even though it was difficult.  Come to find out, this is no joke, man!

The first time I called my squalling, screeching, unceasingly unhappy son a “motherfucker” I realized that motherhood is far less PG than I thought.  I wasn’t proud of myself, but I wasn’t ashamed, either, because in that moment, it was either name calling or worse, and I made the right choice.  That was also the moment when I realized how a mother could shake her baby too hard and do unthinkable, but unintentional damage.  A girlfriend of mine told me that she used to punch herself in the thigh to keep from punching her screaming baby daughter.  The end of your rope is a dark, dark place, and sometimes good mothering is just finding a way to cling to the last shred of inner calm in a maelstrom of external chaos.

When I was pregnant, I found it really frustrating when people would say to me, “Just wait.”  As in, “oh you got to sleep in?  Well, those days are numbered, just wait.” It’s so obnoxious to be told (by people who think they are you a favor) that whatever I’m feeling now, don’t get used to it, because it’s gonna get bad/worse…just wait.  It’s not only totally pessimistic, but it’s utterly unhelpful.  I am a fully grown woman, thankyouverymuch, and I realize that raising children will be hard.  My level of frustration with the “just wait”ers was so high, in fact, that I was not expecting, once my little bundle arrived, to feel as though no one had prepared me for how hard it was going to be.  I was flabbergasted at the thought that friends, family, even strangers felt it terribly important to make sure I knew that having a newborn meant getting no sleep, but nobody took me aside and said, “Look, I love you, and I don’t want to scare you, but there are a few things you should know about what is about to happen.” (Except for CDC, whose advice to me saved my sanity and my son’s life and will appear in a post of its own.)

Now that the tincture of time has healed the deepest of The Dark Days wounds, I think I realize that there are two likely reasons why very few people will honestly and directly warn a pregnant friend of what’s to come.  One, time is the Great Healer.  The further away you get from hard times, the more they fade, leaving the glistening good times basking in the light of selective memory.  I have found that the longer it’s been since a woman was a new mother, the more romantic her memories of that time.  By the time a woman is a grandmother, she’ll tell you that her babies slept through the night at six weeks and never pooped.  This is where “enjoy every precious moment” comes from and why those words make new mothers homicidal.  Secondly, there really aren’t sufficient words to describe the raw, pants-down, deer-in-the-headlights, oh-shit-oh-SHIT reality of new motherhood. You can’t read about it.  You can’t take anybody’s word for it.  You have to live it to know it.  But I think Larry McMurtry (who wrote Terms of Endearment) might have come as close to hitting the nail on the “crying-screaming-bleeding-butt-throwing-up-should-we-call-the-doctor-where’s-the-binky-for-fuck’s-sake” head as anyone.

As hard as you think it will be, you’ll wish it were that easy.

True story.