From childhood, I’ve been wary of magic.

Our culture and media trained me to be. Look at what happens to the prince in Disney’s Princess and the Frog when he goes to the voodoo man to try to get riches. Or there’s the queen in Rumpelstiltskin who almost has to give up her child in exchange for help landing her man. And even in Snow White, it is the magic potion in the apple that almost kills her.

In all of these stores, the message is clear. Magic comes with a price. You don’t get what you expect in the end. It’s better to be honest, do the hard work, and don’t rely on magic shortcuts to get your end rewards.

So you can see my hesitation with parts of modern medicine, especially pills. I mean, there’s always some side effect when you take medicine. So, if there’s a way to tough it out, change my diet, add more exercise, or get more sleep, I’d rather do that than some kind of chemical intervention.

All this got challenged when my daughter started kindergarten and began having trouble in school.

Over her first three years of school, we watched a pattern emerge. She would start the school year excited and engaged. Then, as the year progressed, the novelty wore off, and the reserves of strength built up over an unstructured summer got worn down, and we would hear from the teachers.

“She’s not completing her work,” they would say. “She doesn’t seem to be progressing. She’s not playing with the other students. She wiggles out of her seat. I just can’t get her to pay attention at all.”

Some of it I could understand. She had very asynchronous development. Intellectually, she was like a kid in a candy store with an unlimited budget. She could recognize every letter of the alphabet at 17 months old and multiply two digit numbers in her head at six years old. She could create stories in her head with the complexity of a multi-level video game at six. Yet her awareness of her body in space (which I have learned is called proprioceptive awareness) was delayed. She could not keep track of where her feet might need to be to keep from tripping over something, she wiggled incessantly, and you could forget dribbling a basketball.

Despite knowing these things, I didn’t know how to understand what the teachers were telling me. It had to be that she was just young. It must just be that the teachers weren’t trying hard enough to engage her. After all, it couldn’t be that something was wrong with her.

But my husband and I didn’t want to rule out a need for some extra help.

So, we went through rounds of specialists: pediatrician, occupational therapist, neuropsychologist, developmental optometrist and finally neurologist. We heard different things, “sensory integration disorder,” “extremely bright and gifted,” “written expression disorder,” “dysgraphia,” and finally “ADHD, predominantly inattentive type.” Through occupational therapy, writing therapy, applied behavioral therapy, in-class intervention, vision therapy, nutritional supplements, a gluten-free diet … we tried almost everything to help her. Except medication.

None of it helped her pay attention in school or do her work any faster.

But still, I did not want to put stimulants into my daughter. “I am NOT putting my child on medication,” I said multiple times.

Was it fear? Was I was afraid of some of the effects that I’d heard other kids go through: the pain of coming off the pills, addiction to stimulants, not knowing how to regulate herself when she’s older, bad drug combinations when she’s a teenager, feeling generally weird and not like herself, losing her wonderful imagination, anxiety, lack of appetite, lack of sleep?

Or was the part about not wanting to take the shortcut? Did I think that it was cheating to do it with the meds? Did I think that she would lose out on learning to self-regulate if I gave her a pill?

Or was it a third thing? Was it denial? Did I just not want to believe that my daughter really couldn’t do it on her own?

I think it was all the above.

But, one particularly difficult day, after a very talented and understanding teacher told me my daughter was having trouble staying present through a four-sentence conversation, I watched my sweet girl struggle to pay enough attention to her math homework to even write the number 6.

And I said, “This is enough.  It’s too hard on her.” I called her neurologist’s office and said, “It’s time to try medication.”

So they gave us pills. They gave us an extended release version of a fast-acting stimulant. The low dose is metabolized over the course of 10 – 12 hours – just long enough for my daughter to do her schoolwork, but not so long that it’s still in her system when she’s trying to sleep. And there’s no need to use it on weekends or vacations.

I skeptically tried it, watching carefully for side effects. All I saw the first day was my wonderful, playful daughter who maybe had an easier time finishing her thoughts when she spoke.

But at school, her teachers told me it was a radical difference. She did her work without redirection. She stopped rolling around on the floor during carpet time. She expressed opinions without being asked. She began socializing with the other kids and working well in a group project. All in the first week.

I am sure that this little pill really isn’t going to solve all her attention problems on its own. We still have to work on some other skills. As she grows, we will have to change dosage and prescriptions. And sometimes she won’t like it as much as she does right now.

But in the meantime, it’s making me rethink my position on magic.

Because magic isn’t always dark and dangerous in those stories. Sometimes there’s good magic that’s used to counteract the bad magic. And that’s always the magic that comes from a place deep inside of us.  A place that comes from the most true form of love.

And I’m hoping that this turns out to be that kind of magic pill.

About the Author: Jenn Amock is a former marketing professional turned Mom and freelance writer.  She lives in Texas and has two daughters.

I’ve always been interested in brain development, but having two teenagers has driven me to learn more. Like any mom, I want to provide them what they need—and figure out how to make them into the people I want them to be.

So at 5:30 a.m. every school day I’ve been getting up to exercise on the elliptical trainer in my living room and watch the latest DVD installment of a 36-part Teaching Company series on neuroscience. At 6:15 I finish the lecture and start my mom day: knock on my son’s door and my daughter’s, make her a cup of sugar-free non-fat hot cocoa, and put it on the bathroom counter so she will unknowingly build critical bone mass while applying thick black eyeliner. I make lunch for the kids—sandwiches and organic apples—and watch the clock to keep our carpooling commitments. And in the midst of all this nurturing, I think about neuroscience.

I got off to a good start with this course. In one early episode, the lecturer, neuroscientist Sam Wang, talked about the Mozart effect, a concept that infants who listened to Mozart became more intelligent, creative, and focused than those whose neglectful mothers—like me—played mostly rock. The Mozart effect was all the rage when my kids were babies, and some women in my newborn’s play group looked at me like I belonged in mommy prison when I turned down the chance to buy the CD, the book, and the video. Dr. Wang dismissed the Mozart effect as sense- less hype. From then on, he had total credibility with me.

There were other reasons to listen to him: he’s an associate professor at Princeton, coauthor of a bestselling book about brain function, and the winner of some major awards in his field. I had to remind myself of his credentials just a few episodes later, when I felt tempted to write him off after his teachings put me in the maternal doghouse. Turns out, I should have taught my kids to speak a foreign language before they turned three. I should have played specific games designed in the clinic to build their intellectual and social abilities. But now it was too late. I had doomed them to being outpaced and humiliated by all those kids whose parents had trained them properly. I crept off the elliptical at the end of that lecture, chastened. Why had I not carried out extensive research and acted on the latest findings when they were infants? What could possibly have been more important?

I returned the next morning grimly determined to hear the worst. Dr. Wang was going to talk about personality, heredity, and environment. I thought for sure that this lecture would unleash a withering internal blamestorm. But I was wrong.

Dr. Wang informed me that heredity determines between 30 to 50% of personality and intellectual potential. No blame here: I got my genes without choosing, and passed them on the same way. And since their dad contributed the other half, I’ve decided only to claim the qualities that I like. When they show artistic gifts, I remind them about the artists in my family. If they later develop any tendencies toward addiction or depression—well, those could have come from anywhere.

Environment shapes the remaining 50 to 70% of personality. I perked up. Though I’d have to take the blame for everything they do wrong, I could also claim credit for some of their accomplishments. Good grades—well, who reviewed all those flash cards with them? Self-confidence and poise—who sent them to drama camp? Who always encouraged their dreams, praised effort but not accomplishment, and linked actions with logical consequences to help build strong characters? That would be me.

But Dr. Wang wasn’t dishing out either blame or praise. He said that though parents love to think they can make a difference, children have innate tendencies that are very hard to influence—which I have to admit I had already noticed. In fact, he said, parents have relatively little influence over how personality develops.

As with all the most important teaching points in the lecture, the words appeared on screen. “Parents have relatively little influence over how personality develops.”

The most influential factors are pre-natal health, environment, the presence of siblings, peer groups, and chance events. Parents, not so much.

At first this seemed like bad news. Bad, as in, “I’ve wasted the past 16 years.”

The lecture ended and I automatically went about my cocoa-making, door-knocking, and sandwich-stacking, mulling it all over. If parenting has “relatively little” influence, let’s say that’s about 10 percent of environment. Environment is the shaping force for only 50 percent of personality, which would mean parenting style has about a five percent influence on my children’s personalities. And since my children spend half their time with their father—who raises them with near-total disregard for my input—that cuts my influence on them in half, to a mere 2.5 percent. The smallness of that number, its ridiculous insignificance, might have tipped a more conscientious mom into an existential tailspin. But in my shock I saw the upside of buying into that number: If my children drop out of college, fall in with a bad crowd and become criminals, or never master the basics of personal hygiene, I’ll be able to say it’s really not my fault.

For the first few days after this revelation, knowing that I just wasn’t that important was freeing. So what if my kids turned projects in late, did sloppy work, or wore wrinkled clothing? Their victories and failures were their own, nothing to do with me. And just to make sure my fellow moms knew that I was not to be judged by my kids’ actions, I spread the word about the 2.5 percent. Every time, it was like instant Botox on furrowed maternal brows.

But before I took this point to its logical conclusion—buying a one-way ticket to Costa Rica to wait out the rest of their adolescence in peace—I looked again at the categories and realized something key.

News flash for those statisticians out there: “environment” doesn’t just hap- pen. Baked into that bland term is all the work that parents do every single day to raise their children well. It takes me and all the moms and dads on my street hours of work each day, both inside and outside the home. It takes our silent competitiveness, our parental arms race of checking what the other parents are doing, what scores the other kids are getting, and how our kid comes off in a group. Those “environment” numbers submerge my nutritional nagging and card-flashing into the bigger pool of my fellow camp-sending and homework- policing parents, but my individual contribution counts for my kids—way beyond 2.5 percent.

So instead of waking to the sound of monkeys and jungle birds, I still start each morning with my alarm clock. I make cocoa, nudge my teens to eat right and exercise, check in about homework, set boundaries, and ask whose house they’ll be at that afternoon. It’s what they need me to do. Still, I find myself longing to make a difference to my children, in my own particular, individual, slightly off-beat way. Two point five percent suggests that would they be pretty much just the same if one of the other moms in the carpool raised them.

I told my friend Varda about the 2.5 percent. Varda has always seemed supremely confident and happy about her four “fantastic!” grown children and her three grandchildren. She smiled and brushed past the surface topic, getting right to the heart of what was troubling me.

“You know the moment when I knew I was a good mom?” she asked me.

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine her ever questioning whether she was a good mother.

“It was when my kids were very young—between four and eight—and the doctors told me I had cancer and would be dead in two years,” said Varda. “That’s when I knew that nobody—nobody!— could raise my children like I could.”

I understood what she meant. Maybe my unique contribution is only 2.5 five percent different from all the things any mom in my socioeconomically homog- enous neighborhood would do. But look at any recipe: 2.5 percent could be the vanilla that makes a sugar cookie not just sweet but delicious, the yeast that lifts the loaf, or the chilies that transform, define, and even rename an otherwise bland bean stew. It can make all the difference.

Author’s Note: Several times a week, at least, I remind myself—with gratitude and relief— that I have only so much power to shape the direction of my children’s lives. Freed from the crushing sense of complete responsibility, I can focus more on that elusive 2.5 percent. I ask myself, What do I value about myself that I want to show my children in this moment? And the beauty of it is, it’s usually the fun- loving, whimsical part of me that emerges in response to this question. I think we’re all richer as a result.

About the Author: Anne-Christine Strugnell is a mother of two teens and a self-employed professional writer whose personal essays have appeared in MORE, SELF, Christian Science Monitor, and three volumes of the Cup of Comfort anthology series. Although learning about brain science didn’t help her to transform her teens, she still enjoys starting her mornings with scientific, philosophical, and historical lecture series from The Teaching Company.

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It begins, as usual, with a frozen waffle. It isn’t toasted properly; it is too crisp, too soggy, not hot enough, or burned, according to my high school sophomore (let’s call her Nicole). Today, a Friday, the waffle is insufficiently warm.

My face reddens and I sense the upward surge of a normally low blood pressure when the complaint registers. I always prepare it the same way: first toasting it on “light,” and then, when I hear Nicole padding down the upstairs hall to the bathroom, heating it a second time, carefully spinning the gauge to the machine’s “perfect” mark. The toaster lies. There is no such thing as perfect.

“I did what I do every day,” I snap at the disgruntled teen, whose blue eyes have barely opened enough at 6:00 a.m. to see the thing.

“It’s not hot at all,” she responds, fidgeting with sleep-mussed hair.

My voice pitches high. “Eat your waffle.”

“Stop! Just sto-o-o-o-o-p,” Nicole then says, stretching the “o” sound to infinity.

On cue, I start to cry. “I love it when you tell me to ‘stop!’ every morning,” I retort, whining like a two-year old. “It’s a great way to begin the day.” I think, but don’t say, that I’ve raised a spoiled brat. The sobbing comes next (mine, not hers). “Just because you stay up too late doesn’t mean you have to take it out on me.”

“Overreacting,” the only child mutters, lowering her eyes.

I blubber something argumentative, but unintelligible.

“Overreacting,” she repeats, as she cuts the crusts off the waffle and nibbles calmly on the lukewarm center.

She’s right. I am overreacting, but months of near constant physical pain in the neck, head, and foot have taken their toll, and having a fit is my normal response to stress these days. The word “stop” from Nicole has become a trigger that sets off rampages I can’t control. Embarrassing tantrums from a middle-aged mother who remained unruffled through all of her daughter’s previous crises—injuries to the dog, squabbles with friends, failed acting auditions— even undercooked waffles.

“You’ll make your own breakfast starting next week!” I scream, unaware that a hurricane will ravage the area on Monday, that there will be bigger worries than waffles. I’d likely have forgotten by then anyway. In fact, the entire incident will be relegated to the past by noon, except for the self-reproach. That will remain, strapped to my back like a too-heavy pack, further aggravating the already sensitive spine.

My psychiatrist told me that unwarranted violent outbursts are signs of a deep depressive disorder. We were talking about my 86-year-old father—he’s been raging without end at the staff of his senior citizen residence—but I recognized the symptom in myself as well. My father has been overly needy since he left his house several months ago, forced to relocate by my mother and me out of concern for his safety. He calls daily, often before dawn, and generally in a state of frenzy. He demands numerous visits, including weekly rides to have his nails cut, multiple trips to the bank (he’s unaccustomed to using the telephone for business matters), and endless grocery runs, especially for chocolate, cookies, and Diet 7-Up. He claims that the cleaning staff interrupts him on the toilet and accuses the aides of stealing his blankets. He is exhausting, his life a perpetual string of crises, emergencies, and absurdity, a tragicomedy starring a hunched-over old man with his crazed daughter in a critical supporting role.

When hysteria washes over me, tsunami-like, and cannot be contained, I worry that I’ve inherited his predilection for drama. A family member (it might have been Nicole) recently pointed out a sliver of spinach that had caught between my teeth at dinner. Ordinarily I would have plucked the offending strand from my mouth. Done. On this evening, I spun into a childlike frenzy. That casual comment felt as hurtful to me as hearing “no” can be to a youngster, and I morphed into that bawling stomping toddler in the mall, the one that insists on ice cream—the parents apologizing with horrified looks—that drives other patrons away. When the vocal tempest ended, I stormed upstairs, slipped into bed, and wept great pools of salty tears. About spinach.

Nicole knows that I’m seeing a doctor for feelings of sadness. We haven’t dis- cussed depression, but she witnesses the constant crying and fits of temper. The observant 15-year-old has undoubtedly reduced it all to one easy-to-understand word: overreaction. Our quarrels, however, are normal. “I’m a teenager. This is the time we’re supposed to be fighting,” she insists. She often rewards me with hugs and declarations of love after- wards, but they don’t compensate for my humiliation. I wish that depression were a life stage, a sort of midlife crisis, and could be ended by simply climbing a mountain or buying a shiny red convertible. I wish I didn’t feel responsibility for symptoms I can’t rein in.

Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the bizarre blow-ups and typical parent-teen bickering. Would a non-depressed mother erupt when a daughter rolls her eyes or refuses to start her homework or help around the house? In calm moments, I recognize that it’s a matter of degree. Every parent must be tempted to yell, maybe shout at a youngster on occasion, but my tirades are grossly out of proportion with Nicole’s offenses. Think waffle.

Parents avoid certain actions in front of their children: cursing, drinking to excess, speaking ill of others, and losing control. We’re supposed to be adults, after all. I’ve been successful at refraining from swearing, unless you count calling the occasional bad driver an idiot, and Nicole hasn’t seen me abuse alcohol. I try not to gripe about my father, even when he’s acting foolish, which happens often. It’s the sniveling and wailing, the roaring, the storming about, and the general instability, much like Monday’s hurricane that felled hundred-year-old trees, pulling them out at the roots, some lifting the ground on which they stood, that’s scary.

I despise it, this illness. I want to rid myself of a disease I don’t discuss openly, the disorder that threatens to crack the foundation of our family life. I wasn’t always an unbalanced terror. Until recently, I could restrain unnatural emotional responses. The culprit is obvious. The unrelenting pain started the witch-like behavior, pain that first aggravated and annoyed and eventually became unbearable. Pain that continues, despite foot surgery each of the last three years, and a cervical spine fusion in January.

Pre-pain, I relieved stress through marathon running and an entire identity was tied to the sport. The vanity license plate on my car says IRUNALOT, but I refuse to replace it, a small act of defiance that will never recover what is lost. Now I can barely walk three miles and I shriek at my teen and become overly frustrated with my father and rely on my husband to keep it all together. Not one of us is happy.

It would require a simple keyboard click to unsubscribe, but I still receive Runner’s World magazine online Quotes of the Day, inspirational sayings that once motivated, but now irritate me, like this morning’s from Ben Logsdon: “There is no time to think about how much I hurt; there is only time to run.” I’m sure he’s talking about pain that a marathoner experiences, the type I was accustomed to, like racing 26.2 miles in freezing rain with a sprained ankle. He’s right. It’s possible to ignore almost any discomfort if the end is in sight, even 20 miles away. But when—despite the efforts of a medical team that recommends new sneakers, more supportive orthotics, a variety of pain meds, multiple steroid injections to the foot and spine, anti-inflammatories, physical therapy, surgery, and more physical therapy—there is no visible conclusion, and each day and week and month is a dizzying migraine of pounding, stabbing, and throbbing agony, whether of the foot or neck or head, there is little time to think about anything else. It is all consuming. Work, household chores, and errands play a distant secondary role and parenting the way I’d like has become impossible. That is the pain that causes insanity.

To most people, I look normal, and behave as I always did. Doing my job. Getting by with minimum effort and an abundance of take-out. My family suffers the misery, mostly in the evening when we’re all grumpy, and the affliction is at its worst. By day’s end I bawl if that rare home-cooked dinner is a failure or Nicole casts me a disapproving glance. When I imagine myself in full tantrum, I see a 52-year-old graying-blond toddler, face scrunched and crimson, as if I’m looking into a fun- house mirror where mother inexplicably becomes child.

Medication regulates my mood. Usually I function in neutral, not unduly joyful, but not particularly sad either. (It’s a good place to be, the physician assured me.) The pills haven’t been effective at reducing the number or force of the outbursts and I fear the impact of such volatility on my teen. Will she, too, flare up for no rea- son, like her mother and grandfather before her? She’s remarked that we’re alike, and that’s why we argue. I’ve also noted a new testiness and wonder if, inadvertently, she’s mimicking my behavior. Instead of sympathizing if I complain that a headache is particularly bad, she’ll mouth off, “NOW you’ll be cranky.” The temptation to lash out is overwhelming, until I realize that she’s probably acting like a typical teenager. Or maybe not. In my delicate state, it’s challenging to differentiate regular teen sass from bad behavior.

At the coffee shop where I write after the recent hurricane, the patrons share tables, power cords, and conversation, and the manager puts me in charge of answering the phone during an early rush. “May I help you? Yes, we’re open,” I repeat to each caller. “Yes, we have WiFi.” When an affable young man in a costume walks in, I remember that it’s Halloween, a holiday I’d nearly forgotten. Suddenly I notice the calm community that has developed in this customarily frenetic place. With schools closed, Nicole is asleep in our dark and unheated home. I wish she could wit- ness the friendliness of people pulling together under duress. She should see me as relaxed as I am now, telephone receiver and decaf coffee in hand. I want her to experience the old me, an energetic and spontaneous mom who doesn’t fall apart for random reasons. The mom who takes her and three friends to an amusement park and rides with them on Down Time, where we scream happily through the entire 185-foot drop. The mom who drives into a blizzard to visit the Crayola Factory so that we can avoid crowds. Not the mom who is angry, unmotivated, and requires afternoon naps. Does she remember that better person?

Earlier this week, when the misery became intolerable, a specialist again injected my spine with steroids. The doctor said that if this treatment worked, there could be residual discomfort for up to two weeks. I’ve done this all before and wasn’t optimistic, but the neck and head torment have begun to diminish. Naturally I’m now more conscious of how much my foot still hurts. It’s unclear whether this partial fix will lessen the depression, but there are positive signs.

Nicole complained about her waffle this morning, the one she would have toasted herself, had I recalled my pre- storm threat.

“Sorry,” I replied evenly.

She continued to eat. “There must be something wrong with the toaster.”

There isn’t, but I didn’t argue, and the meal remained peaceful. It was that easy. A normal mother and her teenager survive the morning routine without incident. (Some days from now I will learn how to toast the waffle to my daughter’s satisfaction, a skill that, unfortunately, will not last.)

By 7:00 a.m. Nicole is on the bus, and I decide to try a short jog. My father calls as I’m getting ready, leaving a message on my cell phone, but I disregard the interruption, lace my sneakers, and set off. It’s my kind of running weather, an early bright sky with a chill in the air. Without thinking, I begin what used to be a regular route. I start slowly, measuring my body’s response, observing the surroundings. Despite the massive pines that were felled by the storm, it didn’t tear all the leaves off the deciduous trees, as if to remind me that fall hasn’t yet ended. My toes cramp a bit, but not badly, so I speed up in the second mile, avoiding downed wires and tree limbs at the sides of suburban streets. Even with workday noise, it’s peaceful. The rhythm, the pounding. I smile as I break into a sweat, remembering other miles when layers were shed and turtlenecks felt too snug. Breathing rapidly, I take a quarter mile walk break and then run again, walking and running at intervals until I complete the loop, 4.2 miles. A feeling I had missed returns, barely recognizable. This, I believe, is contentment.

Still glowing, I listen to my father’s pre-sunup message. He called to say “hello,” nothing more.

After school, Nicole and I share news over a snack. She says that her day was fine; I tell her about my run. Nicole looks hopeful and asks if I’m feeling better, perhaps pitching for a trip to buy jeans at the mall. Although the question is simple, I sense its importance and think before answering. “Yes,” I finally respond, “I am feeling better.” Later I inform my husband that Nicole was in a good mood. “For a change,” he replies with a grin, having tolerated the months of drama with steadfast grace. On the edge of sleep that night it comes to me. I had a good day too, not quite, but almost perfect.

Author’s Note: When I began to craft this essay, I feared revealing weakness, worried that I’d be expelled from carpool duties. Yet as I chatted with friends, I learned that some of them too suffer from depression. “I’ve been taking Prozac for years,” one said, laughing. That alone freed me to write openly. In recent weeks, while storm cleanup continues, my doctor and I have cobbled together a more effective mix of medication. At the same time, Nicole has decided that difficult-to-botch breakfast sausages are vastly preferable to waffles.

About the Author: When not shuttling her teenager or father around the suburbs, CHRISTINE RITENIS writes, runs, and knits recycled plastic totes. She also serves as New York Arts Correspondent for Connoisseur magazine. In 2010, she was a finalist for the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize and her essays have appeared in Still Crazy, The Fiddleback, and The Writing Disorder. Christine earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

I am sitting in a large, rectangular dance studio with other parents. They’ve put chairs around the perimeter of the room, and we’ve all squeezed in. It’s parent watch week—a time for us to see what our children have been practicing, and get a sneak peek at the recital number. As I watch the girls tumble, some doing somersaults, others perfecting cartwheels, a horrible thought creeps into my mind. She’s getting fat.

I am looking at my own child, and my immediate reaction to the thought is to beat it back with the mental witches broom I’ve created to banish invasive, negative thoughts.  I vigorously club the thought until it retreats to a corner, a defeated spider. But then the rest of it crawls from the shadows. Just like I was. The words hover there like smoke, start to spread. Instead of bringing out the broom again, I switch off the light. I look at the other girls, laugh when they laugh, casually chat with the other parents. But later it comes back, and I allow myself to face it.

My daughter looks so much like me it is painful. Painful because it is disarming to see such a copy of oneself, and imagine this other self, this self I love—this wonderful, complex little human being—having the experiences I had, experiences that often hurt and harmed. I want to spare her that, but how? How, when even I, her own mother, have such thoughts about her?

As she’s grown older, her hair has become thicker and straighter. As a very young child, she had a mass of loose, dark blonde curls just like my own. The same round blue eyes, the plump, apple cheeks, a dusting of freckles across her nose. People often exclaimed, “Oh, what a beautiful little girl!  She looks just like you!” Then there would be an awkward pause where I mentally brought out the witches broom (because I couldn’t be beautiful), and finally managed to say, “Thank you.” 

My daughter is not fat. She is within the normal range for her height and age, though at the upper end. Just like I was. My father put me on a diet when I was eleven. I am sure he was trying to help me, to spare me the humiliation of the looming teen years as a fat girl.  He wasn’t mean, but I was required to weigh in every week. I was allowed one sugary treat per week. I remember going to a sleepover and stopping at McDonald’s for ice cream. Only I’d had my sweet for the week. I told my friend I was allergic to ice cream, because I had no idea how to articulate why I couldn’t have it without being embarrassed. 

I don’t remember if I lost weight, but I remember how I felt. I take up too much space in this world. Too fat. My body is not the way it is supposed to be. It was the beginning of a lifelong struggle against my natural body type. As a teen I was extreme. I became hyper-aware of every calorie I consumed, every exercise I did, twice a day without fail. I remember being ill once (I’d missed school), and I asked my mother if she thought it would make much difference in my weight if I skipped my exercises that day. She insisted I stay in bed.

I grew thinner and taller (though I stopped at an average 5’5”), but I was still larger than most of my female peers. “Big-boned” my grandmother said. After years of trying and failing, then trying harder, I finally made the cheerleading team at my small, rural high school for 10^th grade. People reacted with surprise. When I went to have my uniform altered, the seamstress asked, “Are all the girls as big as you are?” For all that effort, it still wasn’t good enough. I was the thinnest I had ever been, ever would be. The holy grail of female beauty was forever unattainable for me. I cheered that one year, then quit the team.

As an adult, this in an endless loop that plays in my mind—this body image gallery. I can see some pictures clearly and objectively cast them off. They no longer have power. Others have a distorted form; they sneak away only to pop up again, raging. I have tried embracing my full figure. I’ve had boudoir photographs done. I wore a sleeveless top last summer. I’ve decided to (gasp) try a two-piece swimsuit, though the warmer it gets, the less I feel like going through with it. I exercise regularly, though not obsessively. I have re-learned the joy of dance with Zumba classes. I think I might like to try belly-dancing next.     

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, “Damn!  I look hot!” Until the shadowy thoughts creep in. This would look so much better if you weren’t so fat. I bring out the mental broom, sweep it away, try on other outfits until I’m satisfied. Sometimes I can’t sweep it away, and I just decide not to go out after all. I don’t want to burden my daughter’s psyche with any of this. When I look back at pictures of myself from childhood, I don’t see a fat child. I see a big child, yes. I see a healthy child. I see a happy child. Just like my daughter. 

Compared to her peers in acrobatics class, she’s a tad taller than many, thicker in the middle, with muscular legs. Solid. She is broader in the chest and shoulders. I smile when I think of how she grabbed one of her smaller friends around the waist and lifted her off the floor, both of them laughing. She is strong. She might become good at acrobatics if she wants to stick with it.

I tell myself things are different these days, better. So many places for a girl to fit in and excel. So many things about my girl have nothing to do with her size. She is artistic, she is bossy, she is an incredible story-teller, she is quick to anger, eager to speak her mind.  She is not just like I was.

Later in the backyard, she practices her cartwheels. She runs back and forth, comfortable with the movement of her body, not questioning the way she looks, sometimes skipping, dancing, singing. She pretends she is the teacher, and she has a class of acrobatics students. “That’s pretty good,” she says to the air. “Keep trying. You’ll get it.” I take her words deep into myself, a panacea for my critical heart.

About the Author: Lorri Barrier lives in North Carolina with her husband and three children.  She teaches at Stanly Community College in Albemarle, NC.  Her work has appeared in Mothering Magazine, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and Brain, Child.  Women’s issues are of particular interest to her.  Her blog is available at lorriann16.blogspot.com.

Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

“I love my friends! We are friends forever!” My daughter sings this tune, listing the names of her preschool friends while I bring groceries into the house. She’s twirling, her mess of blonde curls swiping her cheeks with every spin.

Lilly is a carefree spirit, having a typical moment for a 4-year-old. But the song has shaken me out of my routine. I stop walking, feeling my eyes water. I’m unable to wipe away the tears because my hands are weighed down by canned tomatoes and boxes of crackers.

I smile anyway, not wanting her to see any despair. “That’s a nice song,” I say.

She keeps on dancing, continuing her display of pure happiness.

Part of me is jealous I don’t remember what it feels like to be so free of worries. But mostly, I’m amazed by her innocence, that she doesn’t yet realize friendships rarely last forever. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’ll love you back. And just because I’m her mom doesn’t mean I’ve loved her forever.

“One day you won’t let me kiss you,” I say to her during another typical moment. She’s sitting on my lap in between bites of Special K as we talk about what we’re going to do over the next few days. Tuesday is preschool, Wednesday her grandmother comes over, Thursday is preschool again.

“You’re just kidding!” she says, using her favorite new phrase. “I will always kiss you!”

I shake my head but she insists. Maybe she is years away from spurning my touch, but I have been dreading that time ever since we found out her gender. When the ultrasound technician said, “You are having a girl,” what I heard was, “You are having a teenage girl who will hate you.”

Like most teens, I pushed by mom away during my high school years, creating a fissure that has never fully healed. It began soon after my father moved out and around the time everything outside the house became more enticing than what was inside it, including boys and the concept of adulthood.

My momentary disappointment about having a girl was my first realization that I would be entering a lifetime of letting go. Parents are in constant grieving of what once was, as they fulfill their duty to develop independent beings.

After Lilly was born, two nurses, two doctors, and my husband got to touch her first before she was returned to me. I wish I had held her first, as soon as she entered this world, when she changed from her status as “Lemon,” the faceless inhabitant of my belly we had nicknamed, to a munchkin replica of us.

When my water had broke hours earlier, there were signs of meconium. The nurses had told me a pediatrician would have to look at her immediately to make sure she was breathing properly (in case she had meconium aspiration, or had been breathing her poops). It turns out she was perfectly fine, born as a lady, who would never consume feces, even her own.

By the time she was in my arms, I didn’t know what to do with her. She squirmed and I squirmed, setting off a lifetime of awkward and tension-filled, mother-daughter episodes. In those first few weeks, when relatives and friends came in and out of our house to meet Lilly while I was exhausted and detached, nearly everyone talked about this instant love that I somehow had missed. “It must have been love at first sight!” “Didn’t you just love her as soon as you laid eyes on her?” I nodded, going along with the farce, hoping and trusting that I would somehow come around.

And I did, eventually. Now fully in love with my daughter, I grieve for the 1-year-old, 2-year-old, and 3-year-old version of her, with more versions to come. But I don’t miss the newborn phase at all.

Did I resent her when she was born because I was in defense mode, afraid she’d hate me once she exited the womb? Or was I just a new mother who had very little experience with babies?

“Do you want to hold her?” the nurse asked.

Mothers-to-be eagerly wait for that question, which in most cases doesn’t require an answer. It’s usually YES in neon letters. In the middle of the night, though, exhausted by the late hour and pushing, I gave a quiet answer, aimed at my husband, Phil. “You can hold her first.”

After all, I thought, I had held maybe two other babies in my life. I had no idea what to do with this baby, even though she was mine and I had carried her everywhere I went for nine months.

I didn’t have to tell Phil twice, and I can’t blame him. He was eager to get his hands on his little one. Having watched the birth, he had had more time to let the reality sink in that a new human had entered our lives. For me, five hours of labor went by too fast to feel real.

Letting Phil be the first of us to hold her was a concession during this era of co-parenting, when men have manned up to share diapering duties and are not a rare species during drop-offs and pickups at daycare. In retrospect, though, that was a moment where motherhood should have trumped any symbol of equality. I had earned that “first.”

Instead, my husband wears a hole on his sleeve like a fatherly badge of honor. About the size of a dime at the end of a faded blue shirt, the hole serves as a sloppy reminder of his first (tiny) sacrifice as a dad, when he first held Lilly.

She nestled in his arms, swaddled in a hospital-provided blanket. He stared at her and was – there is no other word – beaming. Feeling hot but terrified of disturbing her, this creature that just a few minutes before had been a wailing, slimy mess popping out of his wife, Phil leaned forward to push his sleeve up with his teeth. In the process, he ripped a hole in his shirt.

I have more permanent (stretch) marks than an old shirt to show I’m a parent and have made sacrifices too. But I wish I had the same memory of his when he first locked eyes with his little girl and, by all appearances, naturally took over his new, lifetime role as a dad.

Those first moments he had with her let me procrastinate my motherhood role for another half hour or so while I was cleaned up. I lay there in a daze while my husband got a head start on bonding. “What should we name her?” he asked. How could he talk so casually at this monumental moment, I wondered. Why did he look so at peace, while I felt ravaged?

As time progresses, I think of my missed moment with Lilly. It comes to mind whenever she acts like Daddy’s girl, even though I realize she may have been Daddy’s girl no matter who held her first. She’s strong-willed, girly, and when things aren’t going her way, I get the brunt of her discomfort.

“One day, Mommy won’t be with us,” she said one night after we all went for what I had thought was a nice walk.

Hurtful words make me remember the fleeting time when I didn’t like her, during her first few weeks of life. I was a dutiful mom even though I didn’t feel like anyone’s mother. I fed her and rocked her, but I felt miles away from her. I didn’t see her as a baby. She was an expensive warm doll that I kept telling myself I would one day love. Maybe that first embrace in the hospital, if it had gone better, would have sped up the bonding process. Then again, adoptive parents find their way to their children without being the first ones to hold their children.

To make up for it, now, I cuddle with her as much as possible. Sometimes, though, the duties of motherhood get in the way.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” she says.

“Just a minute, Lilly,” I answer, sighing at her impatience and having already said I would get her a cup of milk.

“Mommy!”

Standing in front of the refrigerator, about to grab the milk but thinking about the long to-do list in my head, including what I’ll be cooking for dinner and giving myself a mental note that we’re running out of paper towels, I make myself stop the mental babbling and look at her. “Yes, Lilly?”

“I love you!”

I repeat the words to her and give her a hug, making up for the one I didn’t give her four years ago.

About the Author: Sarah Johnson is a freelance writer and editor. A mother of two, she lives in Massachusetts. Follow her on Twitter @SGJComm.

I sat on the living room floor with my one-year-old, three brightly colored balls atop a plywood box between us.  Perched on my elbows, I watched him raise that little wooden mallet as high as his tiny arms would allow and then bring it down with a satisfying thud onto one of the balls, sending the ball down through the box and careening across the floor.  He reeled at his newfound success at this baby-sized whack-a-mole game, giggling so hard at the commotion he had created that it nearly threw him off balance.  I happily retrieved the ball each time it went flying.

His joy was infectious.  I caught myself reflexively wearing one of those stupid love-struck grins, reveling in the purity and simplicity of his happiness, and thought, “This. This is it. Moments like these are why people have children.”  I almost couldn’t get enough.

And then we played the game another 10 minutes. And I had definitely had enough. The repetition had become simply tedious, and my mind wandered to other more stimulating things I could be doing with my time. Like the dishes.

Not only did I feel my mind starting to numb, but I felt trapped. I knew if I tried to escape, he would cry.   And, anyway, wasn’t this my job as a mother?  Shouldn’t I be enjoying it?  Or at least hanging in there for more than a few minutes?  How did I go from euphoria to bored, trapped and guilty in 10 minutes flat?

Perhaps my impatience was the result of living in our fast-paced, hyper-connected, Insta-Google-face-gram  world, whose myriad distractions were preventing me from being wholly present in any given situation.  Maybe all this was at odds with the slow pace of motherhood.  Even so, I had dreamt of these tender mother-child bonding moments from tweenhood on and was unsettled to find that they could become joyless so quickly.  I had the nagging sensation that my impatience was some kind of indication of my failing as a mother.  We’re made to feel communing with our children is the most natural thing in the world, fueled by the very spirit of motherhood, and so when boredom creeps in so does the guilt.  But is playing with our children the “most natural thing in the world?”

No.  Not really.

***

I learned this shortly after we moved from Boston to a small border town in Western Kenya – the kind with one main road flanked by small dukas (shops) and ramshackle hotels, cutting through a patchwork of small farms.  We moved to start jobs with an organization that studies anti-poverty programs and with a toddler in tow, the only non-African kid in town.

My first month was set aside for “settling in,” making sure our 20-month-old son was adjusting and finding childcare.  Each day I’d set out, hand-in-hand with our son Caleb, taking in our new surroundings.  We’d walk carefully on the craggy paths, making a game out of stepping over the stones while dodging oncoming livestock.  But generally, I was at a complete loss as to what to do with myself and my son for 12 hours of daylight.

There were no playgrounds and the concept of a “playdate” was as foreign as flavored coffee.  Typically, by 10 AM, we had already had four hours of coloring, reading books, building with blocks, putting together puzzles and I would grow increasingly panicked about staving off a meltdown.  For either of us.  It was around that time, we’d set out to explore our new town.  I wondered: what did local mothers do to occupy their own restless children?

The answers were not readily apparent on our walks.  I saw no other mother similarly looking to find entertainment for her child.  I saw plenty of children.  They would be playing with a makeshift soccer ball, cobbled together with plastic bags and string or walking together with jerry cans on their way to fetch water.   There were mothers all over the place but none visibly attached to these benign Lord of the Flies-like gangs of children, and certainly none directing their play.

The mothers I saw on these walks were often chatting with each other in the shade of a storefront overhang or plaiting each other’s hair.  Others were hidden behind walls, preparing ugali, the local staple, or washing clothes in large plastic buckets and setting them in the sun to dry.  I did see plenty of mom-child dyads — moms at the market with babies strapped to their backs and moms riding matatus (mini buses) with toddlers on their laps — but no mother appeared tethered to the whim of their toddler the way I was.  Their daily rhythms were set by an intertwining of chores and relaxing with other adults, and they seemed, at least from the outside, to be enjoying themselves.

We eventually found some remedy for our boredom with our morning visits to little Isaac and his mother.  Isaac was born the same week as Caleb and his parents owned a duka just across that one paved road.  While his mother was tending to customers and asking me polite questions about America, indulging my nascent Kiswahili, Caleb and Isaac would run around in front of the duka and play together.  They became quick friends despite the language barrier, and a ball or a couple of toy cars would keep them occupied for hours. Every once in a while a man would come along and scoop up Isaac in his arms and give him those universally fun-making rides favored by uncles everywhere.

“Is that Isaac’s uncle?” I’d ask.

“No.” Isaac’s mother would respond, settling the issue.

“But who….”

“Oh. That’s Fred. He just brings the bread twice a week.”

In fact, all of the customer and purveyors of their small shop seemed to know the family.  I don’t know if they saw it as a duty, a ritual, a pleasure or if they even thought about it at all, but each person would tease or scoop up little Isaac or give him rides on the back of their bicycle.  Caleb, as Isaac’s new playmate, benefited from this informal web of uncles and aunts too.  And I simply sat back and sipped my chai.

***

As my work start date approached, we found a woman to look after Caleb when I crossed the road to head to work.  Rukia was reassuring and warm and had already raised 4 children of her own.  She seemed to possess a protective instinct, constantly worrying if Caleb was stepping too close to a ledge or running too close to the road.   Of course, not having observed a lot of mother-child interactions, I was a bit nervous about how she would entertain him all day.  I showed her the toys, the crayons, the chalk, the books, and told her which ones he preferred most.   But I had no idea how she’d fill those long hours.

I got my answer that first day, when I came home from work to see 8 or 9 children playing happily in our living room.  Caleb was running around beaming.

“Mama mama!  Look see dat!” Caleb declared, pointing a tiny finger to an older playmate who managed to make something relatively sophisticated out of Caleb’s small set of Duplos.  The child looked over at me and smiled shyly just as another child rammed a plastic truck into his knee.  They both ran off laughing, Caleb giggling and following after them.

As happy as Caleb was to see me come home and to fall into the security of his mother’s lap, his face fell when his new playmates left the house.

It turned out I didn’t have to worry too much about how Rukia would play with my son.   Rukia saw it as her job to feed, bath him, find him playmates and make sure he didn’t fall on something sharp.  But not necessarily to get down on the floor and draw chalk pictures and do puzzles with him for the better part of a morning. She simply found people more suited to that task.

And that’s when it all came together: Maybe modern parenting is asking too much of mothers.  We’re their constant companions, playmates, disciplinarians, teachers and main source of affection.  We’re the entire village. It’s draining on us and probably not always the best for them.  Maybe it’s OK to spend more time tending to a mother’s other duties and even pleasures as long as there’s an extended web of loving pseudo uncles and a gaggle of mixed-aged friends to run around with.  It might even be better.

We’ve since moved from that small border town to the Provincial capital.  We live now in a compound of townhouses protected by a guard hired by the landlord.  But we’re still in Kenya, so the guard acts as a favorite uncle, taking my baby from my arms and kicking the ball around with the older kids; and the neighbor’s kids run freely in and out of our houses.

Recently, I came downstairs after my Saturday sleep-in to see my second son, Emmet, playing that same wack-a-mole game and delighting, just as his brother had, in his success. Just as before, I happily ran after that escaped wooden ball and relished in his wonderment at his emerging ability.  But when his interest started to outlast my own, I, without any guilt, left the room to make some coffee, confident that any one of the 3 neighbor children playing on the floor next to him would provide interest and distraction.  When I returned, coffee in hand, I saw Sylvanos, a 12-year-old boy who adores Emmet, carrying him to the window to point at the bright yellow weaver birds just outside.  When I returned, I could be a better, maybe even more playful, mother.

About the Author: Kim Siegal lives in Kisumu, Kenya with her husband and 2 sons. She chronicals her experiences living and raising children in Africa in www.mamamzungu.com.  She has written for the Huffington Post, Inculture Parent and is an editor and contributor at www.worldmomsblog.com.

Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

My daughter is a nudist.  Greeting the Chinese take-out delivery man in a yellow turtleneck, she is not quite three and completely bottomless.

Mortified, I watch my husband pay for our dinner while I say in a loud whisper, “Come inside.  You don’t have any…pants on.”

“I’m just standing here next to my daddy,” she says, while I worry what the delivery man must be thinking about our American culture.

Amy tries to spear rice grains with the tip of a chopstick.  She’s having a great time, even though her bare rear is getting imprinted by the pattern of a cane seat.

We are not weird or perverted.  We are simply trying to toilet train our toddler. I teach; Amy resists. Child-rearing gurus advise parents to delay toilet “learning” until after the defiance of the terrible twos settles down. Given my daughter’s strong will and a case of terrible twos that began at eleven months, I may be waiting until Amy goes to college.

Today’s method is to get those disposable diapers off your child–she’ll never feel the urge to “go” when her butt is padded by super absorbency fibers.  In the homes of young children you’re sure to see a lot of little tochis flashing around.

My mother toilet trained my brother at eighteen months.  She had no choice, or should I say hehad no choice: with another infant to care for, my mother wasn’t going to hand wash two sets of cloth diapers.

Experts today adopt a laissez faire approach, lest the children turn into anal retentive adults. Hence my bare-bottomed girl…and if you need proof how far she is from anal retentive, all you have to do is take one look at the condition of her room.

Months pass.  Finally Amy agrees to start sitting on the potty. She smiles, saying, “I hear it.”  But I hear nothing.

“I hear it!” Amy says, but it’s all in her mind, rather than in the bowl.

“I’m finished,” she announces, wiping herself needlessly in the wrong place.  She flushes and is off.

Someday she will “go potty.”  But the more I see 4-year-olds in diapers, the more I wonder if my mother had a better idea.

I try behavior modification.  If I can “hear it,” she can hang one sticker from an array I’ve purchased. Perched on the edge of the bathtub, my usual observation spot, I finally hear it. I jump up and down, cheering.  Before her feet touch the ground, I dial Grandma in Florida.

“I made peep on the potty all by myself!” Amy screams into the phone.

Then she demands her reward: five stickers.

“We agreed on one.  One for each pee-pee.”  I can’t believe I am actually uttering such words.

“Four,” she says, a fierce negotiator, holding up the appropriate number of fingers.

“Okay…three.” All the money I thought I’d be saving on diapers goes into my sticker budget.

My mother calls from Florida.  “In the middle of my bridge game,” she reports, ” I told three eighty-year-old women that my granddaughter finally peed on the toilet.  They looked at me like I was nuts. Told me to finish bidding.  They might not care, but I’m awfully proud.”

So am I.  A year of reading Everyone Poops has finally paid off!  We buy a dozen pair of “big girl pants”—Amy appropriately selects Pooh.  What a deprived childhood I had, a bland world of only white underwear….

She refuses to put on her big girl pants.  She still insists on being bottomless, or else she wears leggings around the house with nothing underneath.  What have I created?

“When you’re ready,” I say, “you’ll wear big girl pants.” Every two seconds I inquire, “Do you have to go potty?”

“No,” she says, annoyed.  “I alweady went potty yesterday.”

Why do I feel competitive that Amy is the last one in preschool to still wear diapers?  I take comfort that her language skills are high; I don’t think any of her college applications will question the age she was potty trained.

The turning point arrives when Amy puts Pooh underpants on her cherished stuffed puppy.  When I check on her before I go to bed, I find her asleep, mouth ajar, hugging a golden retriever in underpants.  I find this image adorable…until the next morning, when she decides to wear Pooh underpants to school for the very first time.  Puppy goes to school identically.

Amy holds up Puppy in triumph, all fur and underpants. People giggle.  I feign nonchalance.  When you’re the mother of a three-year-old who peeps on the potty, you must pretend that nothing embarrasses you.  It will be decades before we learn whether allowing toddlers to make decisions for themselves will empower them or send them to shrink’s couches with the complaint, “My problems began when my mother was too casual about toilet training.”

On the way home from school, I tell Amy, “I’m proud of you.”

“I’m a big girl now,” she says.

Minutes later, in the grocery store, Amy holds up Puppy in his underwear and boasts to a captive audience, “I’m wearing Pooh underwear too.  But Mommy’s big girl pants are black!”

There is a hush.  People stare.  I smile wanly and reassure myself that this will all seem ludicrous when more challenging times arise.  Such as explaining the facts of life.  I can’t wait.

About the Author: Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Parents, Salon.com, Babble.com, The Chicago Tribune and several anthologies. She is Associate Professor of Writing at The New School in New York City.

 Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

The sun hung low in the sky, shining its golden light through the trees and down on the children.  There were five of them–my three plus two of my friend Cheryl’s children–all wet from a late afternoon swim in the pool, the water dappling their August-brown skin like mermaid scales.  Cheryl and I sat at the end of our lounge chairs, perched like cats ready to pounce at any cry for help.

I kept a close eye on my Oliver, the youngest at 14 months, as he padded softly around the patio, watching dark footprints bloom beneath his chubby feet.  My gaze flitted back and forth from him to my older kids–Sam, the oldest of the group at seven, and his 5-year-old sister, Ellie–who were more active, daring each other toward the deep end, emboldened by the life jackets that swaddled them like brightly-colored cocoons.

Suddenly, there was a cry.

“Mom! Mom!” they all seemed to shout simultaneously.  “There’s a frog in the pool!”

Cheryl and I stood up and bent low over the children to investigate.  Sure enough, a small, green frog had gotten trapped in the square drain of the pool, kicking its webbed feet furiously in a futile break for freedom.

“Can I bring him to school tomorrow?” Sam asked me at once, and the undisciplined side of myself, the side that wants to adopt the pit bull mix at the local animal shelter, yearned to say yes.  But my rational side–or, perhaps more accurately, the side that imagined his teacher’s reaction when he marched into school the next morning carrying a frog in a bucket–searched for an alternative.

“How about,” I began slowly, the plan taking shape as I spoke the words, ”we take a picture of the frog and then let him go in the pond down the street?”  My voice sped up.  “That way you’ll have something to bring to school tomorrow and the frog will be free!”  I was almost shouting when I reached the end of the sentence.

The plan was accepted by all parties.  With surprising ease, Sam plucked the frog from the drain and the group of us headed down the street to the pond that sat on Cheryl’s property at the end of our cul-de-sac.  Sam held the frog gently between his fingers, the younger children following close behind him, everyone excited to take part in this impromptu rescue mission.

“He is going to love living in that pond!” I told the kids with a cheerfulness bordering on the insane.

“But it’s so yucky in there,” said Ellie, wrinkling her sun-kissed nose.

“Well, the frog will love it because there’s so much algae in there for him to eat!” I answered with conviction.  Where was I getting this from? I grew up in Manhattan.  What do I know from algae?

When we reached the edge of the pond, I took several pictures of Sam holding the frog and then turned my attention to the murky water.  The children were bubbling with excitement as a group of angelic-looking white ducks gathered near us.  Who says motherhood is static and dull? I thought, taking in the beauty of the ducks, the pond and the children in the waning summer afternoon.  Even the frog was kind of cute!  Here I was, creating a beautiful and spontaneous teachable moment, reacting to circumstances given to me by the universe, teaching my children to love the world and all its creatures.

“Won’t the ducks eat the frog?” Sam asked me, his fingers tightening around the frog’s plump middle, his brown eyes big and serious.

“No!” Cheryl and I said in unison, our voices ringing with the certainty only a mother can muster and only her children will believe.  And so Sam tossed him in.

The fight was over within seconds.  Instead of plunging into a life spent getting fat on algae and pond scum, the frog was snatched by a duck’s quick beak before his body ever touched the water.  He put up quite a fight, struggling and writhing so much that the duck almost gagged on his muscled body.  The other ducks chased alpha duck around the pond, trying desperately to grab a piece of the frog.  After a minute or two, the wriggling subsided and the surface of the pond was once again glassy and calm.

We stood on the grass, the seven of us, stunned and horrified.  Our rescue mission had gone terribly wrong, and a frog had paid for our mistake with his life.

Cheryl and I shot quick looks at each other.  How would we position this?  I looked around at the children, all of them frozen and silent.  Who would speak first, and what would they say?  Would there be tears?  Outrage?  Cries of betrayal?

Ellie peeled her fingers away from her face, squinting into the sunlight.  Cheryl’s boys looked to her for guidance and she smiled cheerfully, as if this had always been the plan.  Sam shrugged his shoulders, speechless but resigned, a scientist in the making.  No one said a word.

After a few quiet moments, during which the frog and his fate seemed to be digested and forgotten, we headed back up the road, home for baths and dinner.

“Wow!” I said, my voice rising again.  “I didn’t think that would happen!  I guess we didn’t make the frog’s life any better, but we sure did make the ducks happy!”

“That’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all day, maybe even all week!” Cheryl added, definitely on my hyper-perky wavelength.

So, goodbye frog.  We meant you no harm.  As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “All stories end in death,” and I guess this one is no different.

About the Author: Daisy Alpert Florin lives and works in Connecticut.

My three pregnancies were so full of win. I read the books and ingested only nutritious things. I tried very hard, but also remained calm and serene so as not to stress the baby. I did everything exactly right almost. It was the last mile that got me.

With my first pregnancy, I learned that birthing a baby carries with it a possibility so awful that they shroud it in jargon and run-on sentences, then tuck it deep inside the very last session of childbirth class. But I was young and still felt it was possible to know things, so I parsed our teacher’s language until its light dawned:

“During the final stages of pushing,” she told us as if it was nothing, “it’s not unusual for a woman to push so hard, using the same muscles she uses for a bowel movement, that, if her rectum is full, she may evacuate. Depending on the mother’s position, some fecal matter may end up on the baby’s face, but this is quickly and easily dealt with by the OB or midwife.”

I looked, shocked, around the classroom. Everyone else seemed to be taking this in stride, nodding and jotting notes. Sooo sophisticated, my classmates. At the next break, I accosted my husband.

“Did she just say I might shit on our baby’s face?”

I knew even Anthony was rattled when all he did was parrot my words back at me.

“Yes. It’s possible you might shit on our baby’s face.”

“I can’t believe this. My first act as a mother, the very first thing I do?”

“Yes.” he said. “Shit. Baby’s face. You.” Then he got all prim. “I would never do that.”

But Eldest was born and her face stayed unsoiled. Three years later, so did my newborn son’s. But by five years after that, my perfectly clean record must have made me complacent. The possibility of messing things up from the get-go didn’t even occur to me this time around.

Then, two days after her birth, my tiny Youngest was still pinkly screaming her resentment at being in the world when Anthony approached me nervously.

“So, um, Linda got it off.”

I was confused. Our midwife got off? While I was in labor? Good for her I guess, but it hardly seemed appropriate.

“No, got IT off. The, um, poop. On the baby. You know.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“It wasn’t that bad. Really.”

But I had tried so hard! I did everything right almost!  (Almost: the gap where the guilt gets in.)

I felt terrible. And mommy guilt makes me defensive and blamey, which makes me ridiculous. Shortly after Anthony confessed my crime, I produced the following gem of rationalization: “It’s just, she came so fast! I’m sure I wouldn’t have pushed that hard if the baby herself hadn’t been so pushy. Don’t you think?”

I wallowed for a little while, but honestly: If there’s a better object lesson for striving for perfection and messing things up anyway, I can’t think of it. (And if you can’t make a little lesson out of pooping on your baby, why bother?)

The wisdom borne of this Incident should be obvious, but I’m a slow learner and require a lot of repetition: No matter how well I set out to be the perfect mommy, the perfect daughter, the perfect partner. No matter how good my intentions or how hard I try, I will shit on my baby’s face, and there’s no way I can undo it. And every minute I spend wallowing about the poop thing is a minute I’m not admiring tiny fingernails.

Some of my mom-crimes are worse than others, but all of them are forgivable. Yep, Youngest, I did that. I also nursed you and read to you. I drove you places and kissed your owies and lost my temper and said the wrong thing and kept forgetting to sign you up for dance lessons even though you really, really wanted them and you would have been really, really good. I’ve made you a few fancy and complicated birthday cakes and many frozen burritos.

As your mama, all I can do is my best, clean up my mistakes as quickly as I can (or allow other people to clean them up for me, thanks), and then move forward, taking care not to do it again. In this case, I can probably guarantee it.

About the Author: Margot Page lives with her family in Seattle, where she also writes and works full time. She’s just completed a memoir of the year she hauled her family to Costa Rica. Read more of Margot’s work at www.margot-page.com.

“We’re just covering our bases,” we said when we decided to make the appointment. “Just a formality, just in case. Probably nothing.” But we knew it wouldn’t be just a formality or just in case.

When my second child was about three months shy of three years old, I took him to a private speech therapist. I had waited, per my pediatrician’s suggestion, to see if he would grow into his speech. He seemed to understand everything just fine, and he talked an awful lot. But I was his primary caregiver, and I couldn’t understand 90 percent of what he said.

I asked his preschool teachers how his speech compared to his classmates’ in his two-year-old program. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just comparing him unfairly to his verbally precocious older brother, who seemed like he spoke like an adult (if a very irrational adult) from the time he came out of the womb. At first, they said no, they noticed nothing different. I relaxed. About a week later, the lead teacher pulled me aside. “You know,” she said, “after you mentioned it, we started noticing that he actually just doesn’t talk in class … really, at all.”

That was how I found myself sitting in a small room, in a small chair, watching my son play on the floor with well-loved toys while I filled out The Forms. So many forms. It was a booklet. The questions were endless, and the questions were relentless. They asked me about his birth. They asked me about his infancy. They asked me about his toddlerhood. What were the circumstances and details of his birth? His birthweight? What was his first word, and when? When did he roll over? Crawl? Walk? Had he experienced any trauma? When? How? How many of these fifty words would he recognize? How many does he say? How often does he say them? What foods does he eat? When did he start eating them?

I stared at the pages. I felt as if I was on trial. I knew the purpose of these eight zillion questions was just to gather as much information as possible, to help diagnose my son’s issue and more importantly, to help my son. All I wanted in the whole world at that moment was to help my son. But answering those questions, I felt as if every second of his life was under a microscope … and with it, me.

I felt especially keenly aware how little I remembered. Was I supposed to know all of this by heart, off hand? I had two babies 21 months apart. The preceding four years had been a crazy blur of sleepless nights, pregnancy, and diapers. I had no idea when he rolled over or when he crawled. I had no idea when he started talking or how many of those words he knew. The letters blurred together and swam on the page. I would reveal myself, right there on those very official forms, to be a completely unobservant, negligent mother who really hadn’t paid attention to my second baby’s babyhood. No wonder he couldn’t talk.

It’s my fault, I heard in my head as I wrote down the circumstances of his birth. He stopped moving in the womb at 37 weeks. I sat in triage a whole day, waiting for him to move. Finally, we had to induce him, unable to determine why he was so still. He was born a healthy 8 pounds, 9 ounces, his umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck, but not blue. He nursed well, he grew well. He slept early and often, the complete opposite of my first newborn.

I paused at the question about trauma. When he was nine weeks old, my mother was carrying him when she lost her footing by stepping in a divot in the pavement on a road. She fell to the ground, dropping him on his back and the back of his head. It was almost kind of a release to have one of my worst new-mother nightmares come to fruition: someone actually dropped my baby. After a horrific ride in an ambulance with my nine-week-old strapped to a board, X-rays and examinations declared him fine. My heart was not. Two years and change later, I had to write the scene out again on those forms, and the doubts began creeping back. Was he not fine? Did something stop working when he hit the ground that day?

By the time I finished the pages and pages of questions, my shoulders had long since slumped in defeat. I was demoralized. I was convinced I had somehow failed my baby in utero. I was convinced he had brain damage from falling on his back at nine weeks old. I was certain a better mother could answer the questions about his milestones confidently and easily. This is where failures bring their children, I thought. Failures fill out The Forms.

I know it’s not true, of course. I wasn’t a failure. I was weary, a little battered, a little worse for the wear after a few years of sleep deprivation and hormonal roller coasters. I was deep in the trenches of motherhood, not yet able to see a horizon line beyond Baby Einstein and nap schedules and time outs. But as any mother who has ever sought an evaluation of any kid for her child can tell you, The Forms just seemed to cement every slippery doubt, every nagging worry, every small neurosis that had ever kept me awake at night even though my exhausted bones screamed for mercy. They’re insidious, the forms. They’re brutal. They’re unforgiving. They’re poker-faced. They’re merciless. They convince you that your child is not okay.

And sometimes he isn’t. Sometimes, the doubts are right. Sometimes, it’s not until you sit in a small chair in a small room with a toddler playing at your feet — your world still for the first moment that day — and stare at the pages of questions you don’t want to answer, that you acknowledge that you already know that he’s not okay.

For us, two and a half years of speech therapy yielded a child who can speak articulately, if not completely perfectly. He can speak well enough to tell me when he hates me and when I have failed, but also whisper that he loves me before he closes his eyes at night. We still do not know why he had articulation difficulties and mouth weakness. Now, when my friends tell me they are going in with their children for evaluations — any kind of evaluation — I nod my head silently. I know the first hurdle will be The Forms. They’re awful. But they are the first step toward something else: Hope.

About the Author: Allison Slater Tate is a writer and mother of four children. She also writes regularly at www.allisonslatertate.com and Huffington Post Parents as well as Facebook (www.facebook.com/astwriter) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/allisonstate). She hopes her writing will make up for a lack of completed baby books when her kids grow up.