Chronicles of Chaos

July 15, 2009 | Print

Why I Haven’t Won the Pulitzer

As I’m collecting little bags of dog poop from the yard so I can carry them up a flight of stairs and then a steep hill to the garbage can, Michael shouts at me from his perch at the kitchen counter where he’s reading the newspaper, scanning email and having his morning cup of tea.

“Sweetie, have you seen this Motherlode blog on The New York Times? You should be writing for this.”

I pause, glaring at a pile of leaves on the patio. I could be touched that my husband believes in my abilities to such an extent that a paycheck from The New York Times seems plausible.

Instead, I bark, “Yes, if I weren’t shoveling dog shit, washing your underwear and driving to piano lessons, I bet I could.”

A pause on his end this time. Then he offers softly, “I’ll send you the link anyway.”

I slam the back door and make my pilgrimage to the trash cans. At the top of the stairs I feel hot tears on my cheeks. I’m confronted unexpectedly with my struggle to combine adulthood, which includes my career aspirations and basic eight hours of sleep a night human health needs, with parenthood as I’ve defined it.

These self-analysis potholes are everywhere. A few years ago, a college friend who wasn’t working at the time asked if I’d heard that a classmate of ours just won the Pulitzer. “And she has kids.” The full sentence is really “and she has kids like us,” which translates into: she has kids like us and she’s winning the Pulitzer, what’s wrong with us? Why haven’t we managed to combine motherhood with our own version of a successful career?

It’s not about winning the Pulitzer, it’s about falling under the weight of motherhood.

To borrow a few themes from undergraduate women’s studies papers, one might argue that moms who have the choice and don’t work have dropped our feminist teachings and retreated into the domestic sphere. We may not see it that way, except when faced with the success of our peers or questions about whether that graduate degree was worth our parents’ money.

It all depends on which looking glass surveys the landscape–to get an honest view, the window must be personal to our own experiences, choices and desires. If we use our window to look at someone else, we may judge them as well as ourselves to make sense of the differences. Staying at home with the kids is not checking out, while at the same time managing the kids and the house can swallow years of a woman’s life. The middle ground is combining motherhood with our individual interests, whether it’s a job, volunteering or something else, and not bending under anyone else’s opinion of what makes us good enough (which is a challenge from personhood that just gets carried over into motherhood). If we’re doing our thing, then we can observe and be thoughtful when we hear about someone else doing her thing.

My tears at the top of the driveway let me know that I’ve got an imbalance–and I made some changes. I signed Oliver up for one more day of preschool a week and started working on a new project that I’d been mulling around for a few months. I still feel engaged even with the challenges of summer’s bouncing schedule. For right now, my answers are subtle shifts in time and focus.