Mendolonium

I aspire to be great.

It’s a rather pretentious thing to say; it is, nonetheless, true.  I am searching for great and meaningful work to do in the world.  I think every day about what it means to be a great mother.  I would like to be a great chef.  Not Alton Brown, Christopher Kimball, TV-star great, but someone who makes consistently delicious, creative, and ethical food.  My problem, of late, is someone is always in the kitchen with Mama. I feel quite competent in the art of basic cooking with children;  I’ve memorized my favorite recipes to avoid having to waste precious time looking them up, I can do almost anything other than dice one-handed, and I have indoctrinated my three-year-old with a love of cooking so fierce he will turn down time outside/Legos/TV in favor of baking a pie.  Following recipes is not enough for me though.  Quite frankly, I couldn’t follow a recipe properly if I tried.  Jeff has shrewdly observed that I use recipes like a compass; simply to point me in the right direction.  So without even thinking I develop new dishes.  I would love nothing more than to spend hours upon hours in the kitchen, perfecting a recipe, feeding batch after batch to a willing army of taste testers, until I got it just right.  These days I am lucky if I get an hour or two a week to myself in the kitchen.  It turns out it is quite challenging to do anything great in an hour.   Even when the kids are asleep there is someone in the kitchen tormenting me, the incessant noise of the baby monitor, flooding the space with it’s staticy white noise until inevitably a baby cries out and I have to go soothe him back to sleep.

It’s a small microcosm of the greater challenge of mothering:  balancing one’s own dreams against one’s needs and desires to be with one’s children.  Right now that balance not in favor of greatness in anything other than mothering.  I tell myself that they’ll be older won’t need me nearly as much in only a few short years.  The baby will sleep soundly through the night just as his brother now does.  I try to to convince myself that living in these joyous sleep-deprived moments is enough for me.  It is true that my world won’t end if my butternut squash soup isn’t quite right.  It is equally true that I stay up late at night smelling the ghosts of flavors melding together, adding and subtracting ingredients in my head in search of the perfect chocolate chip recipe.  I think about the implications of proposed health care legislation for women or carbon emissions reduction as often as I think of creative ways to engage my sons.  Mothering is great; but it isn’t enough for me now nor ever.  I need to find my way back to a path that will lead to more great things.

Today that means I am going to concentrate on one recipe at a time; taking as many one hour chunks of time as I need to get it right.  It means we might eat butternut squash soup once a week for the next two months, but in the end what a great soup it will be.

Sometimes you spend years searching for the answer to a great question in your life.  You research options, weigh pros and cons, ask for advice, question your gut, and eventually you come to a decision.  Other times you go through everything only to find yourself still at a loss as to what to do.  You feel stuck, mired in indecision.  The unanswered question gnaws at your brain, a mental parasite, sucking energy from you in a tiny but constant stream.  And sometimes, if you are lucky, there is a perfect storm of thought and everything comes together with a strike of mental lightning.  The decision is made. You are at peace.

I’ve really been struggling lately; whereby lately I mean the past eighteen months or so.  I have alluded to feelings of depression before on this blog, but I’ve never been very specific.  It hasn’t been a matter of hiding it per se, more that I didn’t know what to say.  I have something to say now.  I have been depressed and one of the major triggers of that depression has been a deep dissatisfaction with certain aspects of my life – namely my job and the challenge of balancing my need to work with my need to be with my children.

In the months after Thomas was born Jeff and I began to talk seriously of moving.  It began with exploring the possibility of moving so that I would not have a long commute to work.  We went so far as to contact real estate agents and look at houses.  We came to the conclusion that such a move was not the best decision for us – thankfully, a conclusion that nearly three years later I believe was the right one.  Those conversations sparked a greater idea in both of us; the idea that we might make a big move – to another state, to new jobs (or no jobs at all).  We talk about the possibilities almost daily.  Where might we go?  What would we do?  Rural life or city life?  How much land do we want?  Always holding us back from truly committing to an intensive search for a new place has been our family, our friends, and our home here.   My sister is a mere 20 minute drive away and Jeff’s parents a one-hour car ride south.  My parents are a five hour trip north, but my dad, the intrepid road warrior, doesn’t consider this much of a hindrance and they visit us often.  It gives me great pleasure to see Thomas so comfortable and happy with his grandparents.  Henry, who is going through an uptick of separation anxiety will still settle happily into his grandmother’s (both of them) or  my sister’s arms when everyone else seems scary to him.  I never really knew any of my grandparents or extended family and it is priceless to see the closeness between my children and their kin.  I have wonderful friends here, women with whom I can talk about everything from sex to snot – friendships that have taken years to grow and find.  And then there is our house.  We bought our little piece of the American dream just after I turned twenty-four.  I scraped off wallpaper, pulled out carpet tacks until my fingers bled.  I found out that I was going to become a mother (twice) in our little bathroom.  I spent my labor with Thomas walking round and round our living room in seemingly endless circles.  Henry spent his first night on Earth tucked in between us in our bedroom.  Pasadena is home to me in a deep and profound way that no where else has ever been.

And yet…I want to live in a place where it rains – really rains  – with thunderstorms and lighting.  I want my children to be able to attend a decent public school; one where they are not two of eight hundred students in an overcrowded elementary.  I want to be able to afford an acre (or more!) or land.  I want to plant tulips.  I want to live in a place where our water, the most vital of all resources, is not imported from hundreds of miles away.  I want to live in a place where the local paper publishes real news rather than endless coverage of the entertainment industry.  I want to live in a place where we can live on one income and prosper.

Tonight I started reading a blog recommended by a friend of my sister’s.  It is filled with beautiful writing and photographs and I found it absolutely riveting.  I was struck by how the author seemed to feel about the place that he lives, Detroit.  Though his writings I could see that ,despite its flaws, Detroit is his place – how he cares about the city and belongs there.  And somewhere during the second hour of my devouring his blog it hit me like a moving truck.  Southern California is not my place.  While there are many things that make me happy here; it is not the place that does so.  If we stay here, I will never stop looking for another place – my place.  I have spent my entire life looking for a home and despite my thirteen years here my soul does not feel at home.  I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if the right place was out there.  I want to find our place, move there, and make a home .  That’s the epiphany and it feels wonderfully freeing to have come to a conclusion.  I don’t know where we’ll end up, what we’ll do there, and when we will find it.  But tonight I began to say goodbye to Pasadena and to start searching for what comes next.

I figured it out today:  work is like going to the mall.  Let me explain.

We lead a relatively low-consumption (for the average American, not for the rest of the world) life.  We buy a lot of things used and there are many things we simply don’t buy at all; we don’t frequent the mall.  But with Christmas and the baby needing some fleece sleepers (which I cannot find at Goodwill – I’ve tried) so that he doesn’t freeze into a Henrysicle, I’ve been to the mall several times during the past month.  Despite my anti-consumer stance I rather like the mall:  I enjoy window shopping and people watching, it’s fun to take Thomas on the carousel, and I do so love those mall pretzels soaked in butter.  But the mall is insidious too.  I don’t typically think about Kate Spade shoes or consider $300 a sane price for footwear, but if you walk past a pair of those pretty, shiny red flats enough you start to want them, and surrounded by all the other shoes and handbags costing hundreds of dollars they start to look almost reasonable.  Honestly, if I don’t want to consume then it’s better not to go to the mall, the temple of American consumerism, at all.

I’ve written before about how I sometimes detest my job and it’s lack of challenging and interesting projects, however, it’s not that simple.  There are somewhat interesting things for me to do in my current position and there are other, full-time, positions within my company that would be a great fit for me.  I would be engaged, challenged, respected, and great what I did.  Those projects and positions would all require returning to full-time status, frequent travel, and/or much longer hours than my current work arrangement.  I just wrote about how that is not an acceptable trade-off to me.  But that doesn’t stop me from wanting those new assignments – from wishing there was a way to have both a fulfilling career and enough time with my children to be their primary caregiver.

You see, it’s like those Kate Spade shoes – I want them – even though I know that the sacrifices they would entail (blowing our budget and guilt over spending so much money on an imported consumer product) are not worth it in the end.  Like I said, typically I wouldn’t even think of those patent leather beauties at all but for my trips to the mall to remind me.  And I wouldn’t even think of taking a Monday through Friday job with frequent travel and the expectation to work late, if I didn’t go to work at all.  This past week has been particularly tough.  I found out about a couple of opportunities which would be perfect for my current career; which a vice-president at our corporation encouraged me to apply for.  It’s like the saleslady at the store is enticing me to try on the shoes, telling me how good I would look in them.

I didn’t miss working during my two maternity leaves and I think that if I quit my job tomorrow I would be happy and fulfilled without it.   In some ways, it would be so much easier if I just didn’t have to set foot at work, didn’t have to interact with the people there.  For the foreseeable future, I have to work and so  or the foreseeable future I continue to be tempted by my ambition.  I think that the struggle between my professional abilities and ambitions and my passion for my children is one that is going to define the next few years (or more) of my life.  I don’t know yet how it will all play out in the end; if my children reach an age where I feel more comfortable spending more time focusing on my career, if there one job that I just can’t pass up.   The real truth is I want those shoes and I want that job in Washington D.C.

Y’all gave me plenty of material such that I don’t have to blog about poo, but as it turns out, I have a little bit of poo to talk about today.  As Thomas was doing his “business” this morning, he called out, “Do you want to see my poop?”  “No”, I replied emphatically.  “Are you sure?  It’s in the shape of a T-rex!” Thomas encouraged me enthusiastically.  All I could think to say was, “I don’t care if your poop looks like the Eiffel tower kid, I don’t want to see it.”

I have been struggling lately with whether or not to return to work full-time.  I’ve worked part-time, three days a week, since I returned to work in April 2007 after Thomas’ birth.  The basic dilemma is this:   In working part-time my children get to spend more time with me, than apart from me.  I have time to enjoy them and a fulfilling, slower paced life outside of work.  I rarely have to set an alarm clock, even on work days.  I have time to bake an angel food cake, time to take a nap while the boys sleep, time to prune the roses and then to stop and smell them (just a sample of today).   But in working part-time I also give up or am turned away from interesting assignments at work, I haven’t been promoted in line with my peers, and we only make enough money to get by – there’s no saving for college or for retirement or that used minivan we covet.

But I’m not struggling anymore.  Two weeks ago, on the airplane to an interview for a new job, soaring at 30-something thousand feet, perhaps above my old home state of Nebraska, I had an epiphany.  I am not going back to work full-time right now…not for a long time, maybe not ever.  I had been seeing my life in terms of an absolute choice between options A and B.  A:  work part-time at my current job, feel bored and held-back at work, but be happy in my personal and family life.  B:  work full-time at a new exciting job, but have much less time for my other enjoyments, especially my children.  What I realized is that there is option C:  lay on my cards on the table at my current job, let them know what I want to do and see if I can get to where I want to go from here.  Either I will make my job work for me on a part-time basis or I will find one that will.  I’ll apply for jobs that are full-time and if I am offered a job, I  will negotiate a part-time schedule or decline the offer.

And now that I have made the decision to stay part-time I am so much happier.  I am forging new opportunities for interesting projects and advancement at work.  I am more at peace at home.  Today was  such a good day.  Nothing extraordinary, but a day that couldn’t have been if I worked full-time.  I stayed in my pajamas until noon and the kids stayed in their sleepers until their nighttime bath.  We ate mac and cheese with homegrown carrots for lunch.  I got to hear about dino shaped poop.  The boys took simultaneous naps during which I wrapped Christmas presents, pruned the roses, and ate a brownie sundae.  We sang REM and tunes from “The Sound of Music” at the top of our lungs.   Both ovens were working roasting a pumpkin and baking an angel food cake.  It was a good day.  And the best part of the day was that I got to watch Henry enjoy his first full day as a crawling baby.   If had been at work I would have missed it and no promotion, no amount of money could ever compensate for that.