Eleven
Survival Instinct

Please don’t leave, I think.

I’m watching Matt spread his suitcase out on the bed, prepping for another trip. He’s folding dress slacks and work shirts and talking through his meetings as I stand nearby. Please don’t leave me alone with these little people. What if there’s some kind of insurrection, and they overtake the house? I don’t say any of this, of course. I just smile with lips squeezed thin as dental floss, my arms crossed.

“Um . . . so, when will you be back again?” I lean into “when” like a woman about to fall over. “I mean, you know we’re good here. So, just, whenever . . .” It sounds totally casual. In opposite world.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be back Friday. You know I hate leaving.”

I’m sure he does. But I’m sure he doesn’t hate eating a steak dinner in peace while watching SportsCenter and then going to sleep in a bed that doesn’t contain a child.

How much would I suck at being a military wife with a husband deployed elsewhere? The answer is epically well. I would suck so well at it that it would look like I had an advanced degree in the subject of sucking. I tip my cap to all the wives and mothers who slog it alone. You are to be commended. It seems to me that, by now, you should have won something.

When Matt leaves, the last thing I am thinking about is the worth of what I’m doing. Rather, I’m thinking about how important it is to just make it to Friday alive.

It wasn’t always this way.

I once liked to believe that I would not only manage a heroic parenting interlude in Matt’s absence but I’d have the youngest reading and tying his shoes by the time Matt came back. I fantasized about field trips, healthy meals, and early bedtimes. Not only would everyone still be alive when Matt got back but they’d also be well advanced. These fantasies were free, so I spent them freely.

You know what wasn’t free? How much money it cost to keep everything under control. Like fast food when you’re returning from one kid’s whatever-practice and no one’s had dinner and they’re all ready to barbecue each other in the backseat. So much for making a Crock-Pot meal that would cook all day and could be fed to everyone ahead of time. It also cost money to have a babysitter come in for a few hours when the children were really little so I could get some writing done. I read once that Sylvia Plath, after separating from her husband, poet Ted Hughes, would rise well before dawn and begin her writing at 5:00 a.m. every day before her children woke up. I’d use this as a model except for two things: (1) I’m not a morning person (as established) and (2) we all know how things worked out for Sylvia.

Having lost a paycheck and benefits by giving up my out-of-home job, I found that the value of money changed for me. We’d overhauled everything about our spending and saving. There were painful moments when we realized the extent of what we’d financially sacrificed for me to leave work. It felt like moving to England where suddenly the pound is twice as valuable as the dollar, and you’re thinking, All I want is a sandwich! but it costs nineteen dollars.

One morning, as I was getting the kids ready for school, Grace and I stood at the bathroom sink while I brushed her hair. On the counter was what was left of my yogurt. Not more than a bite or so. There was also one tissue left in the tissue box. Each item cost approximately one dollar when full—a dollar box of tissues and a dollar container of Greek yogurt. Unfortunately, Grace had shed hair all over the bathroom counter and my yogurt had picked up most of it. Hair in food is a good way to get most anyone retching, so I reached for the last tissue in the box to pick it all up and toss it in the trash without having to touch the hairy dairy. Then I paused for the following calculation: Was the use of the last tissue, costing approximately two cents, worth shielding my gag reflex from the yogurt hair, if there was approximately ten cents worth of yogurt left?

This is what happens when you have kids. Because they do thing like use one-tenth the entirety of a tissue box for a halfhearted nose wipe when you’re begging them to stop sniffling and just go blow their nose. Then an hour later you find twenty-three tissues in the trash, some of which haven’t been used at all. It makes you want to tear your hair out.

When you have children, you find yourself thinking about things you never anticipated, fearing things you never envisioned, and being mad about things for which you thought you’d have infinite tolerance. Like those Donners, you find yourself scrambling for ways to survive.

On certain weekends, as is the case in most households, we stuff too much onto the agenda. The Perrys sometimes decide that they’re going to take a span of forty-eight hours and catch up on every playdate, couples’ dinner, and party we can possibly remember. What we think is the “thriving” of our family actually reverts things to simple survival. We do it to ourselves. Like we’ve eaten all our food stores two days into a nuclear winter and then complain about being hungry a week later. And sometimes all it takes are eggs made the wrong way to send us right back into the wasteland.

I will eat an egg in any form. I am not picky. Growing up in “America’s Dairyland” not only set me up for a potential appearance in “My 600-lb Life” (I’ve never turned down an entrée with cream) but also gave me ample opportunity to sample all kinds of farm-fresh goodies. I had the misfortune of discovering the hand-churned ice cream in the cafeteria at the University of Wisconsin during my first year of college, and my clothing suffered appropriately. The freshman twenty-five is evidently not a “thing.”

But Noah is picky. He prefers his eggs fried, sunny-side up, with enough runny yolk to make a mess of his plate. On this day, Matt started breakfast in the kitchen, and the eggs served at Café Perry were scrambled.

Which naturally should have been my first clue that everything that day was headed down the tubes.

Matt served the eggs with a side of toasted sourdough. Thoughtful of him, I thought. Maybe even cosmopolitan. To Noah, though, it was disgusting, and he weakly stifled a heave when his plate was served. Only moments before, a Minecraft LEGO project over which he had labored for an hour was nearly complete when he pressed too hard on a brick and the whole thing came down.

That’s actually how I woke up on this particular morning. Not the creep of sunlight into my room or the buzz of the alarm. No, I heard my ten-year-old losing his mind over LEGO construction gone awry in the bedroom directly below mine.

Noah had also come to the morning breakfast table off one of the most devastating losses of his life. What loss, you ask? His dog? A family member? No. The night before, Noah’s beloved Seattle Seahawks had lost to the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. To make it worse, they’d done so at the one-yard line with seconds left on the clock. And to make it even worse than that, they’d done it when, despite having the best running back in the NFL (Marshawn Lynch), Coach Pete Carroll had decided his quarterback, Russell Wilson, should throw the ball instead. An undrafted Patriots rookie named Malcolm Butler jumped the route and intercepted the ball to deliver the Seahawks the kind of crushing, endgame blow no one thinks possible.

My husband helped me write those last three sentences.

It was, some said, the worst play in NFL history. The wail that came from the TV room downstairs made the hairs on my neck vibrate.

In our house, it was the worst of everything. No, it wasn’t just the worst, it was breathtakingly bad. It was slamming and screaming and hitting bad. It was the howl of disappointment that comes from the bottom of your belly bad. It was the inability to distinguish yourself from your favorite sports franchise bad. In Noah’s mind he is the Seahawks. Their loss was a declaration of his own loser-ness.

Noah came upstairs to the living room where we’d watched the same play and fell to his knees, sobbing.

“I just can’t believe they let me down like that!”

The Super Bowl was the crowning event of another overscheduled weekend. Two birthday parties, one sleepover, soccer practice for Grace, a visit with my parents, a visit to see a sick friend in the hospital, grocery shopping, and dinner out. Seriously. The only place we weren’t seen was on the Jumbotron in Times Square.

This is Perry-typical. I am going to tell you I hate it, and might be met with flack once this account is read, but one of us (hint: not me) loves chaos. Said person is not discouraged but rather invigorated by it. This is because said person is so used to it. But said person is trying, and is aware of it, and we are working on it together. Because said person is awesome and worth the work. But also, he loves chaos.

In my own way, I appreciate the tension of commitment and have been known to follow suit. But only a little, and only when I am under the gun for a project. I remember distinctly a term paper I had to write in French on the life and works of Victor Hugo. We were given three months to finish it, and I started it the week before it was due. I remember late nights in the library hysterically trying to conjugate the word create, so that I could finish. One sparse, tortuous French sentence at a time.

Too much time is actually a bad thing for me. I will find a thousand things to do other than the one thing I’m required to do. I do fairly well under pressure. It’s quite possible that I find terror motivating.

But overscheduling and fear don’t, as a rule, help your children succeed in real life let alone manage a whole season’s worth of disappointment. No, chaos and pressure make our children feel as though they’ve had every available nerve plucked. It scrambles their brains.

On Monday morning, the eggs, Noah’s nerves, our hearts that ached for him, the LEGOs. All scrambled.

Matt turned to me in the living room.

“Do you think we should keep him home from school today?”

Notwithstanding the fact that Matt has called school “government-subsidized babysitting” (this is a joke and he really does love you, teacher friends!), he told me Noah needed the time off. Matt explained, “There’s nowhere to go for him today but down. We have to give him a chance to collect himself.”

I hated the thought of keeping him home on a “not sick” sick day, but Matt was right.

I told Noah quietly in the other room that Daddy and I had decided to give him a “mental health day.”

My darling child burst into tears for sheer gratitude.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” he choked.

The wisdom to keep Noah home from school came from God; it helped us give to Noah generously the thing he clearly needed (see James 1:5). There was an unexpected value in the loss of Noah’s team. Their losing made him lose it. In turn, we saw something we originally hadn’t—that our attempts at thriving, our trying too hard for too much, had sent us back into survival mode. We had to regroup.

Noah spent the day reading in his room, playing the Playstation, eating lunch with me, and asking if he could help with anything. And then we laid on my bed and watched the movie Bridge to Terabithia—a favorite book of both of ours—while he held my hand.

They say you can’t unbreak an egg. But I guess you can unscramble it. When you figure out how much is too much and you’re back to the basics on motherhood’s journey, then you can move cautiously past survival. One loss, one breakfast, one gain at a time.

It was February, and I was on the way to Patient First in the middle of an ice storm with Grace in the backseat. This is never how a good story starts, by the way. Unless Ed McMahon is waiting for you at Patient First with a giant check and a bouquet of balloons, nothing good can come of a visit to Patient First. They practically scream, “I waited too long, and now the pediatrician’s office is closed.” Which was the case.

A week and a half prior, Grace and I had been headed to the barn for her riding lesson. In her haste, Grace had slipped on a patch of black ice in front of our house and skinned her knee, tearing through her breeches and setting off a little avalanche of blood.

I gasped. “Ooh, Grace! We have to run back in the house and patch that up!”

“No!” she howled. “We’re already late! Let’s just go.”

This was a critical decision but the wrong one. It was wrong for two reasons. First, I had let an eight-year-old act as final authority between the two of us, particularly on a matter of health and welfare. Second, I didn’t just grab a spare pair of breeches before heading into an environment that was seething with foreign bacteria. Forty-five minutes later, my daughter was consequently kneeling near/around/possibly in manure as I chatted with the trainer and assembled her equipment.

A week later, her gashed knee wasn’t healing.

Well, duh.

I was washing and patching and applying Neosporin. But the wound got redder, and hotter, and finally full of pus. Which is when I sent a picture to my mother.

I would like to pause here to thank God and people way smarter than me for the development of the smartphone. Even when you’ve been a parent for eleven years, you may find yourself telling your child to hold still so you can get a good shot of some weird bump on their lip. My mother’s been able to call everything from incoming molars to fever blisters via smartphone, which she would tell you is a function of having had a nurse for a mother, and I would tell you is a function of the fact that she watches way too much Discovery Health channel. In either event, she told me it was probably a staph infection and I was going to need to get it looked at.

I told Matt. As is typical for him, he downplayed the idea of something “bad” so hard he was practically digging it a grave. This is a defense mechanism I don’t think he knows I see in him. Of course, now he’s going to read this book, and that’s that. When things are hard, as they have been for us (in weird, repetitive, pile-on chunks), I think Matt likes to tell people that it’s “nothing” because he’s terrified it’s actually “something,” and he thinks this somehow makes him better prepared to deal with it. He does this in the same way that I anticipate the worst possible outcome when I really want something, because I feel like it prepares me for disappointment.

This is actually the first time I’ve thought about us doing the exact same thing: he prepares for the best outcome while being afraid of the worst; I prepare for the worst outcome while hoping for the best. These are our survival instincts, and it turns out they are both crap. But at least we can say that, after a decade and a half together, we end up somewhere in the middle. It’s a weird way to find balance. We’re clearly perfect for each other.

Two days and a half teaspoon of pus later (ok, yes, this is approximate), I croaked, “That’s it! I’m taking her to Patient First!” This line-drawing-in-the-sand came on a Saturday after our pediatrician was on his way to Bermuda or something, and so I had to go to the quickie-doc. In an ice storm. On a Saturday. By the time we were finally seen, it was late afternoon. I may have come on a bit too strong for the doctor. I explained what had happened and then peeled off the bandage.

“I think it’s a staph infection,” I said.

I find that doctors generally don’t care what you think it is. That is because your fifteen minutes on WebMD is allegedly no match for their eighteen years of schooling. Allegedly.

The doctor didn’t say anything but made some notes in the computer while chatting with Grace. I may as well have been a box of rubber gloves for all the attention he gave me. He ignored my statement and continued his computer notations. I started to get agitated and tried to ask politely what he thought of the oozing wound on my daughter’s knee.

“Well, you know she just probably got some dirt in it and it’s irritated. You can keep up with the Neosporin.”

He was still typing. He had yet to turn around. I was getting antsy.

“Excuse me, doctor,” I interjected, “isn’t staph bacteria? I mean, we’ve been rinsing and changing bandages and using Neosporin for nearly ten days. It’s getting worse.”

This must have shaken him out of his self-impressed reverie, because he finally turned around.

“Well, yes . . . I suppose it could be staph too. I mean, staph can be found all over, and it can get in wounds—”

“Which would make them hot, red, and ooze pus? Which would prevent them from healing and actually cause them to get worse over time?”

Which is when he pulled out a prescription pad and wrote Grace a prescription for Cefazolin.

You know what surviving does? Surviving helps you realize the value of your own spine when you’re used to second-guessing your own decisions and folding in half when someone tells you the opposite of what you suspect is true. They call it “woman’s intuition” for a reason. They also call it “mother’s instinct.” I call it “possible hysteria,” but so what? I’ll let you think I’m overacting because I’d rather be wrong and look like a fool than be proven right and deeply regret not speaking up earlier.

On that icy Saturday, another of motherhood’s truths revealed itself. Surviving parenting meant believing in myself. It meant boldness and inner resolve. I had to accept that I was capable and act like it. Because it wasn’t just me needing to be intrepid for myself for the chance of a raise or a promotion; for the setting of limits or self-defense in the face of contrarian colleagues. It was no longer me, for my own sake, cringing at the heckling of a student or hiding in the parking garage when someone called me a nasty name. When you have children, the confines of your courage will be under constant stress. Every day requires boldness of varying degrees. But the value of their needing you? Of being the person on whom they rely for their protection?

It helps you value yourself too.

Breaking from parenting’s ever-present hard work is essential. I’ve found it’s possible to dreamily stroll the frozen foods section with a cup of coffee and feel downright euphoric when you get a few minutes to yourself. I have learned to invest in my own personal account and step outside the fray occasionally so that I can come back to my family a better mother and a better spouse, so that I can teach them the value of taking care of themselves in order to take better care of others. See, prisoners make shivs out of soap bars because they never get to leave the compound. I have heeded this as a warning to get out of the house on occasion. Which brings me to two more keys to survival.

Namely: (1) don’t get involved in a car crash and (2) make time to stop and smell the manure.

I was on the way to the barn yesterday. The barn outing was the last segment of a very full day. I was in full single-parent ops mode with Matt on the road. But I was so exhausted I’d slept through my alarm, an alarm dubbed “radar” by the good people at Apple. There are other alarms on my phone from which I cannot choose because I will sleep right through them. Alarms called “silk,” “by the seaside,” or “twinkle.” These are probably better for people with heart issues who will hit cardiac arrest with an alarm like “radar.” “Radar” is the sound I imagine a pilot hears when the dashboard in the cockpit is telling him that the plane is going down. I slept through “radar” yesterday because I was so tired I felt like my bones were melting out of my skin and into the mattress. I had exactly twenty minutes to get the kids to school. I managed to get teeth brushed, vitamins administered, bags packed, and kids out the door in nineteen minutes, with a five-minute window before the school bell rang. I gloated all the way back home.

However, as our landlords were in the process of prepping for an impending open house in a few days, they were all over the house. In the yard, on the roof, in the basement. I attempted writing while in the fishbowl of observation. By the way, I understand now why people go on “writer’s retreats.” You’d think that writing about your own life would be the easiest possible venture, but let me tell you, when four out of the five of you are convinced you are going to get it done but never give you the time to do it, you start thinking about a suite at the Ritz to get away from people. People you adore but who make you crazy with the interruptions. Plus, room service.

While maneuvering around my houseguests, I balanced the checkbook, did a few loads of laundry, ran the vacuum, and packed for the barn. I was prepping for a horse show the next day. Now, you may be thinking this is a ridiculous addition of unnecessary hardship in an already overfull life. You are probably right. But this horse show was part of something that is important for reasons I will discuss in a moment. I had to pack cleaning rags and leather oil. I toted equipment and a list of things to load in the trailer. And I was taking the kids to the barn with me because I didn’t have a sitter. This required snacks, tablets, books, and other sundries designed to occupy them while I prepped my horse and my things for the next day. There is so much leather involved in the sport of competitive jumping, and it all has to be cleaned.

I picked Noah, Grace, and Jesse up from school and squeezed them under my arms in a tight embrace. My having missed them so much was particularly notable on this day because two of them had been fighting over my face—yet again—in the predawn hours as they attempted to squeeze into the same space on the bed. It’s a wonder I wanted to see them at all.

See? Motherhood love is a crazy, sacrificial, eat-you-up kind of love.

As we began the thirty-minute drive, I rolled down the windows and passed out snacks and treats. We laughed. We sang at full volume to the songs on the radio. Then we approached a stoplight five minutes from our destination, at an intersection monitored by a red-light camera. We reached it in heavy traffic, at a crawl, when Jesse said something from the backseat and I looked up into my rearview mirror. For a split second. A split second was enough time to rear-end the car in front of me.

Thanks be to God, we were all buckled. The airbags didn’t deploy. No one was hurt. There weren’t even any spills. We weren’t hit from behind, and no one was hit in front of the car directly in front of us. All the other driver got was a dent to her hatchback. So small. Practically minuscule. My Honda, on the other hand, folded like a card table. We couldn’t even open the passenger-side door. Radiator fluid was oozing onto the asphalt and the grill was crushed.

“We were in an accident! We were in an accident! We were in an accident!” Noah yelled repeatedly next to me.

I spun around to look at the kids and put my hand on Noah’s.

“Is everyone ok? Are you hurting anywhere? Everybody talk to me!”

They were fine. Jesse barely looked up from his iPad to answer me. Apparently, Honda does this thing where they design certain models to crumple like paper so as to absorb impact. I learned this after the accident. While surfing the internet for things like “lawsuit against Honda Corporation following collision.”

After starting the wheels in motion with the state police and calling my insurance company, I got out to talk to the woman in front of me. Blessedly, she was alone. There were no other passengers to experience my idiot driving. I tapped on her window, and she rolled it down.

“Are you ok? Are you hurt at all? I have the police coming.” She turned to me with her little mouse-face and said in a meek voice, “I’m a little shaken up.” Tears welled in her eyes.

I told her I’m sure she was and that it was a terrible inconvenience and I wanted to make sure she was ok. I told her I knew how scary this was and asked if she needed me to call anyone for her. We exchanged some insurance information, and as we did she said, “We are supposed to be going to Disney World tomorrow.”

Oh no.

“Oh, wow . . . I . . . That sounds wonderful. Well, hopefully this won’t interfere with any of that. My kids are in the car with me, and I understand what it’s like to keep promises to your children. I’m sure you’re looking forward to that . . . I’m so very sorry about all of this.”

Words were just pouring out of my mouth. When I am nervous, I talk. A lot. There was so little damage to her car, it was obvious she’d be able to drive it home. But it was a heck of a way to start a family vacation. My own overcommitment, self-imposed, had imposed itself on someone else, and I felt awful. I had been doing too much and trying to do it all too fast. I was cramming everything into the tight boundaries of a few hours. This is a recipe for the hellish devolution of a perfectly good day, and my proficiency in this regard knows no bounds. When I was working and childless? Really, the only person I stood to inconvenience and exhaust was myself. If I wore myself out, it didn’t matter nearly as much as it did this day, when I pushed my kids to their limits too. My children were afraid, and I was the one to cause their fear. I was choked with guilt. Matt showed up ten minutes later, because as the Lord would have it his plane had landed early and he was already headed to the barn to meet up with us. When he arrived, I burst into tears on his shoulder.

I had messed everybody up. The passenger in the other car, the kids, Matt. Now we required a rental car, an exchange of vehicles, a body shop, and an insurance adjuster. The perfect syncopation of a day I’d planned down to the last minute was shot to you-know-where. There wasn’t a single person to blame but myself.

I was trying to survive in Matt’s absence, believing that the faster I worked and the harder I tried, the quicker I would get everything done and the sooner I could relax. Life does not work this way. I could have sacrificed something self-imposed. I could have pared down our commitments, and everyone would have been better off. Like the laundry, which has no deadline. (Unless the basket has cracked under the weight of the clothes you have continued to pile in it, and they are spilling out into the hallway. Which isn’t as much a deadline as a suggestion that you need to buy more laundry baskets. Which I have done.)

So, a lesson: don’t get involved in a car crash because you are trying to do too much and rushing to fit it all in. It is better to do a few things well than do a lot of things poorly. I knew I was frazzled with the kids in the car, and despite our great exchanges and laughter I felt like I was on the clock. Mind-set is essential to survival. I find now as a mother that the faster I move, the less careful I become. I have to make time to stop and smell the manure.

You see, manure comes from horses. Horses are my “thing.” I have a girlfriend who runs competitively, another who bakes, and a third who has taken up photography. A “thing” for every mother is of extensive and lasting benefit, though it may be initially hard to conceive. We mothers are prone to a certain insidious form of guilt that doesn’t plague those without uteruses of the “used” variety. Horses are the thing I do for myself, the pursuit that fills my bucket so that I can pour what I have into other people.

I was, as many little girls are, obsessed with horses. Horse posters, horse models, and horse books filled my shelves. I drew horses. I dreamt of horses. There was a short stint with riding lessons. There was no discernable riding talent. And we were a single-income family (my mother having given up her teaching job to stay at home with me and my three siblings). Single-income families don’t generally have the means to support an expensive riding habit unless one of them has invented the internet. I shook my fist at the heavens and swore that I would ride again someday.

When I started working as an attorney in Baltimore, I picked up the pastime again. That was many years ago. You would think that many years of practice at something would assure its proficiency. But I can be remarkably bad at it. I am a contradictory combination of control freak and adrenaline junkie. This is the worst possible combination for the pursuit of horse jumping, and my trainer knows it. But she never says anything about it, because she is a good person and I continue to pay her. Also, I have a really good horse. He is not just big and handsome; he also jumps beautifully. An added benefit? He doesn’t stop even when I pretty much stand up in the stirrups or get bobbled off the side of his neck after a jump because I haven’t been focusing the way I should, or I’ve grabbed the reins in an attempt to force him to slow down when really what he needs to do is speed up. Control freak plus adrenaline junkie equals my trainer dying a little inside after every lesson.

Without children, I had a life easily crafted around my own interests and self-care. I got regular haircuts and manicures. My toenails did not look like eagle talons. I replaced worn-out clothes. I went out to dinner, to movies, on dates. It is second nature to be self-oriented when there are not knee-high humans clamoring for basics like food.

But it is essential to make time for oneself when the little people come. Yes, “essential.”

I attempted “me time” early in parenthood but was overcome with culpability that sucked the joy right out of something as simple as going to the grocery store by myself and leaving the baby with a sitter. This guilt is unnecessary. I have learned that part of this parenting thing is working on yourself so that you can help your children learn how to work on themselves too. I encourage my children’s passions. I encourage their exploration. They explore a lot. Soccer, saxophone, gymnastics, lacrosse, football. I actually wish sometimes they’d just stick with something so I can stop dragging my sorry self to Dick’s Sporting Goods to try to find all kinds of nonsense like a “pocket girdle.”

Though sometimes? This exploration leads to unexpected benefits.

During long days, I carted Grace to the barn with me when Matt and I divided up the kids in an effort to lessen each other’s loads. She is an animal lover by nature. Also, by nature, she loves time away from her brothers.

Grace watched everything and asked lots of questions.

“What is that thing in Stuart’s mouth?”

“It’s the bit, honey. There are lots of different kinds, in different shapes and sizes. It helps guide the horse.”

“How high will you jump today?”

“Only as high as Ms. Laura lets me. We will see how Stuart does.”

“Why does Ms. Laura yell sometimes in your lesson?”

“Probably because she is afraid I’m going to kill myself.”

After the first year, Grace started asking if she could ride too. She was fearful, but her desire to ride overcame it. She insisted she ride the smallest pony in the barn and that the trainer stay by her shoulder at all times. But she did it. Not at my insistence, or anyone else’s, but because she wanted to. Grace overcame her fear without anyone’s help, other than a lot of silent prayer on my part that she wouldn’t nose-dive into the gravel. That was a year ago. Now my young daughter is jumping fences on her own and asking when her next horse show is. “Me” time has turned into “Grace and me” time. I still get to ride by myself most days, and this fills my bucket. But my daughter and I now get to spend summer Saturdays together, side by side with a horse and a pony, watching the other riders and eating pit beef sandwiches in the sun. We smell of earth and manure, and Grace has too many slushies, and she plays with our trainer’s Jack Russell, a little wind-up toy of a dog that goes perfectly with ponies and little girls. These are fairly perfect days.

This time with horses not only gives me the time and space to mentally refuel and be a better mother on my return but also teaches me about parenting. I have watched my daughter become brave. I have encouraged her courage and let her fly. I’ve even watched her fall. This stops my heart every time. I’ve skidded into the dusty ring next to her and held her hand as she cried, and have performed unqualified neurological exams. But every time, without my prodding, my strong daughter has mounted again and ridden on. Burgeoning boldness in a child is the precursor to perseverance in later life, perseverance that leads to character and hope (see Rom. 5:3–5). Riding and falling and riding again reminds her she can do anything with her Father’s help.

Riding also teaches me to trust, something at which I do not excel. This sport requires a point at which the rider must release her grip. It’s literally called the “release.” As the horse arcs high into the air, the rider has to let the reins go slack enough that the horse can stretch out its neck and make the best effort possible. In the same way, I trust God with my children. He sees the obstacles I cannot and the best way to overcome them. These are his children, after all. And so the parallels between my sport and my children are numerous and humorous. For example, smelling like manure reminds me of how often this mothering job requires dealing with poop.

Sometimes I sono sola—I stand alone. Sometimes I also have occasion to use that mostly impractical Latin I have rattling around in my brain. Sometimes pulling the parenting load singlehandedly is hard, and my guess is that military wives and single mothers use certain methods to survive. One of them is family, though I have none anywhere close. So as a substitute, I employ certain tactics in Matt’s absence. One of them is to neglect the filth. On any given day, a single square foot of kitchen floor space may boast a half-eaten pepperoni slice, a red Lite-Brite peg, bits of gravel, dog hair, and crumbs from lunch.

Realizing that there is no other grown-up in the house to appreciate it, I let certain things slide when Matt’s gone. Because really, how many times can you clean your son’s pee off the bathroom floor in the course of a day? The answer is three. You can do it three times before you start to feel like the not-fairytale version of Cinderella and realize no one is coming to give you a fancy dress and take you to the castle. Therefore, I have decided that zero times is better than three times. And guess what? The world keeps on turning. The world will not end because of your dirty house. And you can clean it later when Daddy is back and he’s taken the kids elsewhere.

Now, we don’t totally descend into squalor. Daily things are done: dishes, laundry, beds made. But the hardest part is actually letting my kids pitch in. Letting your children help is actually one of the quickest ways to determine if you’re a control freak. It is much, much easier to do it myself and do it right the first time than it is to stand over an eight-year-old and show her how she ought to hang the shirts in her closet. And it takes twice as long. First there are the initial screams of protest. Then there is the carrying of the laundry to the room. Next there is the gathering of empty hangers and the instruction on how to hang. Then there is the picking of half of it back up off the floor, because it all looks like a blind person has hung it with a rake.

Likewise essential to survival: buy the best washing machine you can afford, and preferably also a dryer with some kind of “wrinkle prevention” setting. Because you will tell yourself that you will get around to ironing and steaming mounds of clothes, and at some point you may. This impulse will eventually fade unless, for example, your child is going to be photographed for school pictures or stand front and center for his solo in the spring concert, where all the other mothers will be judging you based on what he’s wearing.

Motherhood benefits from increased volume. Not just from industrial washing machines or warehouse club memberships. Take the matter of your car. You can kiss your Civic or your Saturn goodbye if it seats less than six. Sure, it’s zippy and fun to drive. But you will get about two weeks into your three children lined up like dominoes in the backseat before someone’s head explodes from the screaming. You’ll have to cave and get some kind of massive people mover, which will not be fun to drive and whose weekly fill-up will roughly equal the gross domestic product of Swaziland. But this car will be necessary for both your kids and their many accoutrements for whatever sport/party/sleepover/camping excursion they’ve set you on.

Plus, there are moments when you’re also going to have to transport their friends too, which is double mayhem in a small car, particularly because the window seat is always preferred and your car has only so many windows. Your big car will always be dirty unless you pay two hundred dollars to have it regularly detailed, because bigger cars have more room for fingerprints and stale french fries.

And on the subject of volume, no one will be honest with you about the fact that your husband will count as an extra child. I got married and had a six-foot-one baby on the same day. He will be (almost) as messy as the kids. He may leave his giant, boat-sized shoes all over the house to be tripped on. He will not empty his suitcase after business trips. He will pile nine bottles and tubes on the bathroom sink and never put them away, which will surprise you, because it takes him all of ten minutes to prepare himself so what exactly is he using all of those bottles for? He will put his glasses right next to his glasses case and yet not put them inside. Then you will do it for him and he will wail that he can’t find his glasses. The toilet paper will always be installed the wrong way, the washing machine will not have been touched by his giant hands, and his illnesses will be the second coming of the plague. He will moan and twitch like he’s lying on a pallet of fiery coals, and you will have to force him to do grown-up things to get better, like taking an aspirin or pushing fluids. He will constantly ask you things like, “Am I running a fever?” in his most pathetic voice, and he will tell the kids not to bother him because he is “really, really sick.” You will have no choice but to let the kids bother you when you are sick, because there is some unwritten rule that a sick mother is still a fully functioning one, whereas a sick father is pretty much dead. When something like the stomach flu ravages your house, you will still have to strip the sheets and spray Lysol while you are holding back your own barf, because who else is going to make sure that everyone gets better? You will, that’s who. Because being a mother is not something you can quit.

Most days, though, scattered in between the work of motherhood and its repetitions, the magic of it will peek out at you from in between the mundane. When you sprinkle “reindeer food” made from oats and glitter on the lawn at Christmas. When your children burst into the house calling first for you above all others. When you have your youngest to yourself because your older children are gone for the day, and he leans over and whispers in his still-baby speak against your ear, “I’m so lucky to have such a good mommy.”

Pow. Straight to the feels.

Then the magic will straight-up blindside you when you realize the leprechaun was supposed to leave something on St. Patrick’s Day and is about to make a mess of longstanding tradition. Because the leprechaun is busy and thought everyone was past the leprechaun stage anyway. Because even Santa now gets the Spanish Inquisition.

Last year, in the middle of the chaos that is so often just a synonym for “us,” I was going to let St. Patrick’s Day slide. It was a minor holiday; who would notice? They all noticed, and the day before St. Patrick’s Day they all asked me—every last one of them, independently, like they were all in on some Dan Brown–level conspiracy—whether the leprechaun was going to come and whether we were going to put out something gold to try to catch him.

It was 4:53 p.m. on a Monday. I had dinner simmering on the stove and homework was spread on the table. The dogs needed to be fed and lacrosse practice was coming up. I bit the inside of my cheek just enough to prevent me from saying something stupid.

“Well, I guess I didn’t think about that. Does anyone remember where we put our trap?” Our “trap” is a coupon box set on its side, propped open with a straw, and baited with a shiny game token. Of course they remembered.

Jesse piped up: “I wonder if he will leave us a note like last year!”

Whereupon my brain started to melt. Because this note has traditionally been an elaborate limerick designed to entertain the kids and explain why the leprechaun can’t be caught. Their disappointment at a near-miss is tempered by candy or bubbles, something little to entertain them and perpetuate the idea of things enchanting and nearly true.

I looked at Matt in desperation.

“Um, honey, I think you should take all three kids to practice tonight. I think it would do them some good to run around.” I made a gesture behind Noah’s head of writing with a pen, hoping he would get that I was telling him I had to write the magic letter.

He did not. I tried again.

“They need some exercise, Matt. I’ll get out the leprechaun trap while you’re gone.”

My eyes were wide, and my mouth was a tight bow of frustration.

“Oh, ok,” he said. “Let’s pack it up, guys.”

Ten minutes later, after cleaning up the dinner dishes and making the lunches and coffee for the next day, I threw my purse in the car and sped to Dollar General. I would like to tell you that I was not speeding, but that would be a lie. It’s not that I have a permanent lead foot, it’s that I’m just permanently anxious. I therefore happen to drive permanently fast.

I grabbed bubbles, St. Patrick’s Day cookie pops, and stickers. On the way home, I began to compose a letter in my head, and in the twenty minutes that remained before everyone came tumbling back in the door, I wrote the following:

March 17 in the year of our Lord, 2015

I’ve paid you a visit and taken no gold.

For none I could find to steal or to hold.

So I took me some silver from places downstairs,

Stuffed it deep in my sack to take to my lair.

But as always, I left you three something behind,

Because you’re good children, despite all the cryin’.

Treats red, green, and blue to brighten your day,

But you’ll never catch me, no, not to this day.

So stick out your traps, your contraptions, your boxes,

I’m cleverer, always, than 10,000 foxes.

I’m faster of foot than a racehorse or hare,

So next time, try trappin’ me then . . .

. . . if you dare!

Signed,

Shamus O’Flannery, resident of County Offlay, Ireland,

under the bridge, to the right of the river

I printed the letter and decorated it with hand-drawn shamrocks and rainbows. When I heard the car doors slam and the kids came tumbling through the front door, I slipped it into my desk drawer and went to meet them in the kitchen. After they were showered, fed their snacks, and stuffed into bed, I set everything out and collapsed.

“Do you think the letter’s okay?” I pleaded with Matt. “I wrote it superfast.”

“Mmm?” Matt mumbled, his face half buried in his tablet.

“The letter.”

“Oh, yes. No, it’s good. You did a really good job.” He smiled at me and went back to his tablet.

I’ve felt the crush of real pressure at work. I’ve occasionally cut deadlines close, and in moments of mental dusk forgotten meetings or appointments. Yet not once has the prospect of disappointing a boss imbued me with the kind of terror that disappointing my children has. I have sat bolt upright in bed at 2:00 a.m. when I realized I forgot to move the Elf on the Shelf. I have called my mother in a panic and asked her to ship the gift Jesse wants for his birthday to her house instead of mine so it will be there in time. I have, after laying out a bonanza of gifts from “Santa,” sat down at midnight to write a letter full of clever rhymes and instructions for the kids to follow before they can get to the presents on Christmas day.

Every year, I fight the urge to write, “Merry Christmas. You can open anything you want as long as you let your parents sleep.”

This is another way in which the job of motherhood can be bewildering. The prospect of getting canned is scary. You may be passed over for a raise or a promotion if your performance lacks. There is an obvious action/reaction apotheosis in corporate America. But inferior parenting, forgetting or failing at important things, is terrifying not only for what it means in the present (Will they cry? Will they be angry? Will they ask me one hundred questions to which I don’t have an answer?) but also for what it means in the future. There is a real possibility that your children will grow to resent something as adults that you screwed up when they were kids. More disconcerting, there is a possibility that you will forgo the fleeting moment of pure ecstasy that illuminates the face of your six-year-old when he runs to the kitchen and finds bubbles, cake pops, and stickers from a leprechaun.

It will fade, though, when he says, “Bubbles? Bubbles are dumb. We have enough bubbles already. I thought the leprechaun knew that.”

Like your boss’s, your son’s critiques have their place too, I suppose. They certainly keep Shamus O’Flannery from getting too big for his little buckled boots.