All My Accomplishments Equal...

I’m sure by now you’ve already figured out I find parenthood to be an extremely frustrating job. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. In fact, I’ve had other jobs, working outside the home and I swear I would rather slit my throat than go work for someone else ever again. At the age of two, I find my daughter to be a far more intelligent boss than any other person I ever worked for (and if you don’t think a toddler is the boss in a home, you obviously don’t have kids!).

Still, there are moments when I look around in despair and wonder if I will die and be remembered only as the woman who stayed home to raise her kids. Okay, I can hear the screaming from other stay-at-home parents already. Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that staying home to raise your children is the most worthwhile pursuit a person can ever take on. But let’s be honest here. We live in a culture that measures success in tangible form, like say a paycheck, and I don’t know anyone who gets paid to raise his or her own kids. Can you imagine what mommies’ groups would be like if we did?

“Hey Judy, I got a raise last week after little Sally’s second birthday. Now that she’s two, I’m making 75 grand a year.”

“That’s great news, Lisa! I got a $500 bonus for completing little Bobby’s potty training six months early. It would have been $650, but we had a little bedwetting accident last week and that kind of counted against me.”

Yeah, right.

Speaking of potty training, in addition to the dearth of pay, parenting also lacks a defined set of deadlines for accomplishing its goals. The first word, the first step, the first tooth, the first time your child pees in the potty... In spite of all the published lists of developmental milestones, no one can really say when a child will reach them. And when your kids hit those milestones, can you as the parent really take credit for it? Heck, I didn’t teach Cassie to walk. She’s the one who did all the hard work. All I did was make sure her butt was diapered so she’d have something cushy to land on every time she fell.

So I can’t take credit for my child’s accomplishments and I don’t get paid for staying home to raise her. How, then, do I measure my success? In hugs and kisses? Yep, although that’s a currency best traded within the family. A child’s hugs and kisses are so valuable they’re priceless, but you can’t use them to buy a new car unless the salesman is the really unscrupulous type, in which case you’d get the car but probably wind up divorced. Best not to go that route.

There are moms and dads who do not need the new car though. These folks are so secure in their status as stay-at-home parents that they are content to live without the tangible signs of success. I’m not one of those people. I have to have something in addition to being a mom, work that I can definitely say is my own and that I might somehow get paid for in cash. There’s a whole bunch of us parents who need to work, not because we need the money (although many parents do and I salute you for busting your asses to earn a paycheck while you raise your kids) but because we need the accomplishment. We need the physical proof that we’ve done something with our lives. We need something more on our tombstone beyond “Loving parent and spouse.”

Which is why this past week has been so damn frustrating for me. At the moment I am currently working on two writing projects, one 3D graphics project and one animation project. Writing, animation and artwork are how I stay sane as a stay-at-home mom. I put in between 30-40 hours a week on my projects, mostly during nap times and the wee hours of the morning. It’s slow going. I’ve spent the past nine months on the same graphics project, experimenting with various ways to create skin textures for 3D characters. The last month, I’ve labored over a short story for an upcoming erotica anthology. I’ve been working very, very hard for a long time now.

Last week, all of those projects just sort of fell apart. I won’t go into too much detail about what went wrong. Let’s just say I developed a nasty case of writer’s block at the same time I discovered that my graphics experiments could not produce the results I desired. That’s a lot of work to go down the drain all at once. I spent every day last week fighting my failures, beating my head against the keyboard, crying, “I’ve got to make this work!” But it was all to no avail. Slowly, I realized that I’d been wasting a lot time, and time is something that I feel is in short supply. The deadline for the short story is not far off. I either write the story and hand it in or I kiss my chance of publication goodbye. As for the graphics... nine months, people. For nine frikkin’ months I have tackled the same problem over and over and over again. The last time I took nine months to create something, I ended up with a baby. This time, I got nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.

So I was feeling pretty down in the dumps last week when I was confronted with the hardest parenting job I have right now – potty training. Cassie has been potty training for the last seven months. She’s two and a half, and will sit on the potty and pee, but she will not sit and poop. That kid deliberately hides from me when she has to poop. If I find her in time and get her on the potty, she withholds it, shouting “No! Don’t want to!” Or worse, she’ll sit on the potty. And sit. And sit. Friday afternoon I took her to the potty three times. Each time she spent half an hour or more there. I about went nuts trying to coax her to poop. I read her stories, performed a puppet show with her dolls, and bribed the little darling with candy. Heck, I even took her temperature with a rectal thermometer just to get things moving. Nothing was working.

Finally, forty-five minutes into our third trip to the potty, I heard a tiny little splat hit the plastic bowl. Cassie jumped up and crowed. “I did it, Mommy! I poop in the potty!” And when I looked into the pot, there it was, a little dab of poop no bigger than my thumbnail. This was not the payload I was expecting, needless to say and the sly look in Cassie’s eyes told me she knew it. I wanted to bang my head on the bathroom floor and cry.

At six p.m., my husband came home and I handed Cassie off to him, with admonishments to keep putting her on the pot every half hour. Meanwhile, I laid down on my bed to brood over my recent failures. Everything I did had become such a trial, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that the only thing I had to show for all my hard work was that tiny piece of poop. Then Michael walked in, grinning from ear to ear. “Guess what Cassie just did,” he said, and he showed me the potty filled to the brim with toddler poop. “Hallelujah!” I shouted. Success at last

Of course, as I’ve already said, I can’t take credit for Cassie’s accomplishment. I can only lead her to the potty. She’s the one who has to learn how to use it. And if I can’t buy a car with hugs and kisses, you better believe I’ll never be able to buy one with the results of Cassie’s potty training. But at least I can say that something in my life is progressing. I can see my tombstone now – “Loving mother and spouse – she didn’t do much else, but she did eventually potty train her children.”

Addendum to blog entry: During the time it took me to write today’s entry, Cassie pooped three times... in her pull up panties. Oh well, at least I’ve broken through the writer’s block on my short story and have decided on a new direction for my foundering graphic project. C’est la vie!