Harrington - Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words

For Walker and Hawthorne,

thank you for going away so I could write about how much I love you.

There is a deadline, always a deadline, for me to do anything and all things. Ive gone from someone who organized others to one who is organized by those around me, and my former self condescends to me always, Ohbrother, youre really going to take this to the eleventh hour, arent 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 faragainand maybe couldnt finish. And I would be so mad at myself, as I always am, when I realize Ive chosen pushing my luck over pushing myself.

Its not like Im 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 waya 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 dont 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 robins 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 didnt, and later your sister didnt. 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? Ive tried to be better but have oftentimes only been worse. Ive 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 weve always known ourselves to be. We are as uncertain as you are, but we cant let you know that. We understand life is finite, but we cant 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 youwhile I am healthy and herethat 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.

If you are a working parent, the time will come for a daycare artwork reckoning. The rivers of scribbles and oceans of finger paintings. The cotton balls and glitter, macaroni and beans glued to flimsy backing. Artwork assembled by teachers and wranglers, pieces children had only a marginal role in. Their names jotted in the corner or on the back, in someone elses handwriting. Not my kids. Not mine.

Last weekend the reckoning came for me. Five boxes and three bags stuffed full, a stubborn storage of paper memories moved from one house to the next. I fished out the drawings they did with me, on the weekends or on my weekly work-from-home day. The ones I remember as the beginnings of real drawing. From my son, a sad apple and an unimpressed banana. From my daughter, bunnies and scraps full of hearts. I search these first jabs at artistic expression, thinking about how well they represent the people they are now. Emotional storms and animal allegiance.

In the mix were daily daycare notes (She had a great day and played with her best friend! He saw a fire truck outside and ate all his apples!), preschool field-trip recaps, and informational sheets from the pediatricians office.

But one piece of paper stopped me cold. The List. I had forgotten all about The List. Seven or eight years ago, back when I was done needing it, I mustve thought this was something I had treasured and would want to see again. Maybe itd make me laugh, or bring me back to a specific time I had long since forgotten. Oh it brought me back all right. And my first thought was,

Fuck.

This.

List.

This was my morning out-the-door checklist that I had crafted for my return to work after my second maternity leave. It was everything I needed to have on, near, or with me as I busted out the door each morning. My son was a little over two years old and had only begun walking a few months prior. My daughter was three months old and never slept. My thoughts were like butterfliesfleeting, zigzagging, and completely impossible to catch.

So, The List:

• Bottles
• Lunch box (my sons)
• Breast pump (With a sublist of all the necessary parts, because nothing will make you crack like an egg spiked into the sidewalk more than realizing you forgot the one tiny part that makes your pump work.)
• Wallet
• Hat (Mine or his or hers or theirs? I have no idea now.)
• Their tote bags for daycare (full of changes of clothes and nap blankets and diapers)
• My bag (packed with nursing pads and deodorant)
• Makeup
• Phone
• Water
• Lunch (mine)

Im surprised I didnt condense the entire list into one word: brain. Try to remember your brain, lady.

Like a slap in the face, that list brought back everything that was intensely, nauseatingly hard about working more-than-full-time and having two very young children. I was expected to perform well at both and was doing so at neither. I was exhausted, emotionalmany nights falling asleep fully clothed as I nursed my daughter at 7:00 p.m.

The job I had returned to was stressful, most of the time unnecessarily so. We reminded ourselves regularly that, hello, we werent exactly curing cancer but instead creating catalogs, packaging, print campaigns, and posters for sugar-water manufacturers, shoe companies, and makers of diapers, cleaners, headphones, snowboards, and anything and everything you could wear, consume, or want (and many things it turns out, you didnt). Now that I think of it, maybe we were actually causing cancer.

Regardless, it was also the job I had worked up to my entire adult life. From my first days as an intern while still in college, through two advertising agencies and three design studios, this was the job I pursued and was succeeding at. I loved working and still do. A worker with a job has always been the sharpest and most cleanly defined part of my identity. While other girls were playing house, I was playing office. Working hard was my thing. Until living hard challenged it to a duel.