As my father was packing up his car when he left the family, his parting wisdom was this;

“Never become financially dependent on a man. Jus look what it did to your mother."

My mother was residing at the time in a locked ward on seventy-two-hour hold for suicidal threats.

His words still haunt me today, forty years old and financially dependent, with two kids under five.

Today, my husband winced at the pile of Costco party supplies I just came home with.

"We already had plastic cups."

"They’re giant and red,” I say. “They’re too big for punch.”

He looks at me, I look at the floor. We both sigh, all contained hostility.

"We're not making enough to match what we spend... atf all now," he tells me.

I am ashamed and angry. I turned down a job working in the county jail because I realized I just couldn't work there once I felt the despair pour into me while walking among the locked units. Somewhere, after having kids, my past armor has disappeared. But we are both angry at me for not taking that job, despite our verbal assurances to each other that it was the right decision.

We need money, and my private practice is not bringing in enough yet. Financial dependence and wanting my kids to have their mom and a great preschool is right, in my mind. My gut differs. We're going broke and I am panicked and embarrassed. I want to see it differently, that I should be supported for being available to my baby while she is small, but I harbor backlash beliefs that I should be bringing in the money that will take the stone partly off my husband's back and give me the self-esteem that seems to have escaped along with my six-pack abs and taut skin.

I remember my father's words and how I lived by them, aggressively independent and hard-working.

Terrified, really.

There is something to grow up here with, another perfect lesson in losing my position of invulnerability thanks to choosing children. This tight-fisted nausea itself is where I need to stay for today, and hope for a little faith to open.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, Costco, daddy, financially independent, hard-working, party supplies, self-esteem, six-pack abs, suicidal threats

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I’m a mom who’s ready for school to start up again. Not elementary school -- dental school. My husband’s on break for a week before he starts quarter number five of his twelve-quarter program.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that he gets to hang up his shirt and tie and spend some time with us -- especially since during the school year I’m relentlessly on duty at home while he’s relentlessly on duty at school or studying.

During this break, we’ve been able to do some meaningful activities together; camping at the ocean, riding bikes along the bay, cutting out paper coconut trees in our son’s kindergarten class, drinking homemade lattes on the sunny porch.

He’s gotten to do some meaningful activities for himself, too; tuning our bikes (which I had no idea needed tuning), organizing his tool box (which of course was spread out for several days over said sunny porch), and surfing the Web a lot in his underwear.

But when our kids pulled off their shirts and pants on Saturday to run around the house in their underwear yelling, "I'm Daddy! I'm Daddy!" I felt we’d all seen enough of him for a while.

I found myself eyeing that shirt and tie, happily looking forward to another kind of break.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Angie Reynolds, bikes, daddy, dental school, elementary school, husband, lattes, mommy needs a break, need a break

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I have a favorite picture. It’s lost in someone’s basement. Probably my Dad’s, possibly mine. I’d always thought I’d be more organized than my Dad. Nope.

It’s a picture of me as a two-year old in a field of bursting yellow dandelions in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I’m on my Dad’s shoulders – piggyback, which I now appreciate, as a mom of three, as quite a test of strength.

My body starts aching after the first 100 steps, with a little twenty-pounder on top. How did my Dad do it??

We’re hiking. Dad’s in his black and red L.L. Bean lumberjack, wool shirt. I’m in some hand-knit ‘70s vest -- a hand-me down from my big sister, perhaps? Or maybe a Christmas present from some crafty Great Auntie.

A colorful testament to the colorful times.

I think it’s a picture of us from behind because I don’t remember our faces. I remember my Dad’s shirt and my fuzzy, blonde pigtails poking out of the side of my head like little fountains of cuteness. And I remember the dandelions. Hundreds and millions of dandelions.

The sun is coming up over the hill in front of us, filtering through my pigtails, making them glow like little Tinkerbelles next to my head. It means it’s either morning time, when the birds are twittering about, eager to find that early worm. Or it’s an evening hike, just when the sun is heading down over the Aspen trees and rows of Evergreens, getting ready to tuck itself in for a good night’s sleep.

My twin girls are just now turning two-years old. And I was caught completely off-guard the other morning when, as I walked into the kitchen to get my good morning snuggle before an early meeting, both of them had their heads full of bouncing and wiggling pigtails, courtesy of my dexterous and brave husband.

A lump in my throat, an ache in my heart.

How could these flops of hair bring about such an emotional reaction? An innocence, I suppose. They bring back a memory of my life when it all was about riding on my Daddy’s shoulders before I knew that I’d need to support my own shoulders, keep them thrown back, and make it up that big hill on my own.

Step-by-step.

I must remember to call my Dad to thank him. And to show him a picture of his gorgeous little granddaughters and their pigtails. But, most importantly, I must remember to thank my own little girls for the gift that they have given me -- their pigtails.

By Annie Yearout

Labels: Annie Yearout, Colorado, daddy, fathers, granddaughters, L.L. Bean, pigtails, Steamboat Springs

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My husband’s return from work every evening at seven-thirty p.m. infuses our home with new energy.

Olivia needs to eat a second dinner on Daddy’s lap, while Mateo suddenly develops a hankering for cheese sticks. Then, everyone needs a Popsicle, followed by a tickle session, and, often as not, some kind of group dance performance that involves music, the louder the better.

This frustrates me because I’ve spent the previous three hours wrangling my children through the dinner, bath, pajamas, tooth-brushing routine. My goal is to settle them down, not rev them up.

“Your arriving sooner or later would be easier for us,” I tell my husband. “Either sit down for dinner or wait ‘till they’re asleep.”

But no.

Seventy-thirty is what works for him, and besides, it’s the only real time they have together during the week.

Last night the garage door went up as I read "Good Night Moon." My son was drowsy enough that I knew he would fall asleep, but Olivia opened her eyes wide and gasped, “Daddy’s home!” before sliding off the bed and disappearing down the hallway.

A few minutes later, as I transferred a sleeping Mateo to his crib, I smelled the unmistakable odor of microwave popcorn. Following the scent, I opened the door to the den, where my husband and Olivia were sprawled on the sofa in front of the TV, a big bowl of popcorn between them.

“We’re watching the game,” Olivia said, with the practiced ease of a diehard football fan.

“Don’t stay up too late.” I kissed them both before closing the door.

I was the third of five children and have few memories of time spent with my own father.

Once, I was in first grade and it was parents’ night at school. My father wore a green tweed coat flecked with black spots, and afterwards, we ate an orange and vanilla Creamsicle.

All these years later, if I close my eyes, I can feel the nubby tweed of the coat, taste the vanilla sweetness of the Creamsicle.

By Jessica O’Dwyer

Labels: By Jessica O'Dwyer, daddy

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My daughter had a bruising day yesterday. From the moment she woke up, her emotions were overheated, misread, and dragged her behind them like a freight train.

Nothing sounded good to wear, to eat, to play. No one seemed to hear her anguished plea for the world to be the way she desperately needed it to be.

I was cast as the brutal, unyielding bully mother at every juncture. I felt abusive, insisting she wear boots instead of sandals that she had to eat protein if she wanted dessert that she could not make her sister go away.

Being 4 is a vicious time. Children floating comfortably in fantasy fall perilously into reality. Death exists and is permanent, stories are suddenly understood as unreal, other people control many of the child’s choices and consequences for their actions exist and persist across time. Time itself opens to them, an expanse with a permanent record rather than a slide across a projector, there and gone at their will.

And I have to play her bad guy, emissary of limits, bedtimes, manners, and overall prohibition.

So, to this mess of tears and a tiara sobbing on the floor, watching her friend get to eat vanilla ice cream she cannot have until she eats some dinner, I can only offer to hold her and start again. It doesn’t work; she kicks me, and cries the most serious of rejections:

“I want my Daddy! I just want my Daddy” she wails, alone in her pile of misery.

When my husband arrives on the scene, she clings to him with both hands, looking back at me as though I am a marauding hyena. Her shoulders hunched, eyes wide, sniffling and begging Daddy to be alone with her in her room, she leaves.

I understand this terrain, the ill-fitting blustery rage that descends when we can’t have things be as they are. When it is too painful to maintain a connection with someone telling you that you may not have what you know you need to feel better.

To be powerless, and awkward. To endlessly love and need people so much who prevent your desires from finding satisfaction. To start to understand that you are indeed not the center of the universe.

Beginning to understand that everyone else is as big a planet, not chunks of stone orbiting you. What grief. I hear my daughter crying to my husband, “Mama didn’t understand. She was confused about what I needed. I needed her to only put everything the way I like it.”

Then just tears.

I can hear in her language her attempt to forgive me for not telepathically receiving and fulfilling her wish. She is starting to understand that we are separate, no matter how much I love her or how hard I try.

I go to bed and feel tearful at how painful this is, growing up, even in full confidence of being loved, having to become a person: only sometimes successful, affected by others, gripped by competing wants.

It’s not too far away, when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer, when a lawsuit takes a loved one down into hell, when babies aren’t born healthy. Four is my own bitten down grief at apparent injustice, feeling helpless to bigger forces.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: daddy, four-years old, guilt, mommy, tantrums, tears

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