Category Archives: motherhood

Last Night in the Refugee Apartment Complex

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I love that when I go to the apartment complex where the refugees live, everyone is outside talking on their porch to their neighbors. I took my oldest daughter, Noelle, to the apartments where many of our artisans live to recruit kids for a special project my college English class is doing this Saturday. We had permission slips in hand and we went from place to place asking kids if they could come. Some of them are old friends; some are new. It’s been a few months since I walked around these buildings and I love watching my daughter in action.

Five is a remarkable age, when she’s just independent enough to want to make new friends and stand away from me, but still wants me to be in sight at all times. She’s so comfortable here–while I talked to the moms, she played with Mary and ran around with Paw. She hit it off with a 9-year-old Kachin boy named Tom, who was not too boyish to be embarrassed hanging out with a little girl. They’re not far from the same height and they walked chummily together, swapping stories and laughing over jokes that are only funny if you want to giggle.

When Noelle fell and gashed her knee, I told her to cry a little bit, then try to be tough. We looked at it together and it seemed at first like it might be fine, but a small, determined trickle of blood ran down her shin and the sight convinced Noelle it was really, really painful. Finally we asked a friend for a band-aid and we went into their house to doctor it up.

The women we’d been talking to in one apartment had moved to another and without batting an eye, they made room for us, their children commiserating with my crying child. In a circle of refugee children and adults, we cleaned it with alcohol and band-aids. The children kept talking to her while I cleaned her knee. The scrape was deeper than it looks (it turns out the knee is pretty bad–not bad enough for a doctor, but a fairly deep scrape) and it hurt while I was cleaning it up. While her friends were watching, she tried to be brave, but when it became too much, Noelle buried her head in my neck in a futile effort to hide her tears and just wailed.

Every mother knows the difference between the dramatic cry and the real cry and it broke my heart to hear the depth of that pain for her little knee. We hobbled over to one more house and she was brave for a moment, but the knee started bleeding again and it all became too much. Almost in tears myself, I picked her up and carried her the last of the way to the car.

I can’t fix every boo-boo. I can’t cure every hurt. Today was the day we took her to register for kindergarten and the reality of that move hit me like a ton of bricks tonight in the car ride home. I’m so sorry to all of the mothers who have gone before me whose pain I didn’t quite get (c’mon, it’s kindergarten, not college! I would think). But it’s not that your child is leaving for school or that you need to control every moment of your life, it’s that this is the first separation, the first step in a life of leaving. And, while I’m so grateful for the independence and the grace that my daughter is developing, it’s mind-numbing how fast these days are slipping through my fingers.

On the way home, she started crying in earnest. We sang songs to cheer her up. She wanted me to sing the “Fruit of the Spirit” song over and over again; it’s one they’re performing in her preschool program this week. She kept coming up with silly things for me to substitute (“the fruit of the spirit’s not a ___”). Fourteen renditions later, we had established that the fruit of the spirit was not a variety of real fruits, nor a longhorn, a light, a big truck, a fence or a toothbrush. She was ranging wider and wider, eager to be distracted from the knee.

I looked back at her in her car seat and the look on her face was so familiar. Half the time I can fast forward in her life and imagine her at sixteen rolling her eyes in the same impeccable arc. This look, however, was pure six-month-old baby, staring earnestly at me with eyes that were piercingly blue because they were red-rimmed from crying. Her lashes were wet, but her smile was delighted. Despite the fact that, when we marched into kindergarten this afternoon she had turned down holding my hand so she didn’t look like a baby, now she was my baby, clinging to my every word, glued to my expression, watching me to see how to respond to this pain.

If I could, I would scoop her up forever. But those days are already fleeting.

I took her hand and held it while I drove and began the song again for the fifteenth time.

Confessions of a Recovering Perfectionist

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My name is Jessica, and I’m a recovering perfectionist.

I had a perfect day once. I woke up early to work out. I made a healthy breakfast. I read books to my daughter for an hour. I played the piano while a bird came and tweeted on the fence outside the window (really). I ate lunch with a friend. I came home to put my daughter down for a nap and made a delicious dinner, which we ate leisurely. We all went to bed at a reasonable hour. There were no fits, not crises, no angry-Mommy-tirades. It was a dreamy day.

It happened in June 2007. My oldest daughter was six months old. Now she’s five.

Enough said.

I want to do things right. I want to be more patient. I want to be more whimsical and spontaneous. I want to play educational games with my kids instead of watching TV. I want to serve gourmet meals instead of heating up chicken nuggets.

I also want to spend time laughing with my friends over drinks while wearing sparkly earrings. I want to write a brilliant dissertation. I want to be the best part-time grad school instructor ever. I want to run a non-profit that quietly changes the world.

I want my life to look like this:

Source: The Container Store

Instead, I feel like it looks more like this:

Source: Houston Press Review of “Hoarding: Buried Alive”

My wise friend Caren told me when our daughters were tiny, when we first started visiting refugees, that she was a recovering perfectionist. (She has a gift for mantras.) The power of that statement grew on me slowly, like wasabi that you barely taste at first and then explodes in your mouth.

I decided then and there to join the club, to take the pledge, to start the twelve steps–I was tired of being a victim of my addiction to perfection.

Being a recovering perfectionist has changed me as a mom. It means I have to watch myself around certain places, like an alcoholic who walks regretfully away from a bar. I can’t spend too much time on Pinterest, that glittery land where perfectionists rule. I barely go there at all. When I do, I can feel the tension rising in my neck, the twitchy fingers aching to execute that cake or that sock puppet or that cereal box organizer. It means I limit my friends–I can’t be around people who might lead me back into my old life of guilt over my own unmet standards. I like best the people who are real, who don’t have time to judge, who couldn’t care less about comparing our lives.

It means I have to accept myself for what I am–a loving, devoted, active, engaged, flawed, impatient, learning mom.

Being a recovering perfectionist has changed me as a grad student. I admit this is hardest for me, because I work in a field where perfect is the accepted measure of work. To be anything less than a highstrung, obsessively devoted scholar and writer feels like a failure to me. I feel pressure to be the job, to live, sleep, eat and breathe the job. Except I don’t and I can’t. Though sometimes I still stare at a blank page, paralyzed by my inability to write dazzling prose at the drop of a hat, I’m learning that getting it done is more important than getting it right.

It means I have to accept that perfection doesn’t come instantly, but is the result of revision and great editing, whether in my dissertation or other types of writing. No one ever writes anything perfectly the first time.

Being a recovering perfectionist has changed me as a non-profit director. In this, I’m so blessed to work with Caren. We walk away from things ALL THE TIME. We don’t walk away from people–that’s why we’ve started this tiny non-profit despite kids and part-time jobs. But we do walk away from all of the “shoulds” that people keep throwing at us: how we should grow, how we should change, how we should sell products in this shop or that boutique, how we should streamline our process, how we should be doing what we do but better and more. We admit that we’re doing this poorly much of the time–neither of us can do basic math, for heaven’s sake. Our artisans are impeccable and driven and would make endless amounts of products if we’d let them, but we stop ourselves constantly so that our growth is sustainable and empowering.

It means we have to set limits and stick to them and accept that we are less perfect than many of the bigger, flashier or more influential examples we see. Slowly, inch by inch, we’re growing a non-profit that is rooted in relationships with our artisans, with our kids and families, and with each other.

Being a recovering perfectionist has changed the way I view myself as a woman. My hair is grayer and my eyes more wrinkled every year. My body is flabbier than I’d like it to be. No matter how many sit-ups I do (OK, not many), I still have to suck my belly into my jeans some days. My skin is pale and vericose veins form elaborate roadmaps behind my knees.

It means I accept that I am poweful and gorgeous and spectacular. Even when (or especially when) I don’t look in the mirror and see the ridiculously perfect and totally imaginary woman our society values. My body has birthed babies, my eyes are marked by thousands of grins and giggles, my gray hairs go along with the experience I have earned.  I value these hands that pat sleepy backs when I tuck in babies, these arms that are only muscular because I pick up squirming toddlers and stacks of books, these feet that have walked grooves in the nursery floor. I find beauty in this voice that sings lullabies, this hair that is usually back in a hasty bun, these unplucked eyebrows, these fading blue eyes, these dark circles that show that I work on things I adore while my kids are sleeping, these chipped fingernails that tap-tap-tap on my computer with an intoxicating rhythm. I see perfection in this body, lovely in its quirky imperfections.

Being a recovering perfectionist means that when I look at the future, I stop trying to predict what will happen, when my next baby will fly home with us from China, what job I’ll get when I graduate that will let me earn money while living out my crazy callings, what schools my kids will go to, what trips we’ll take to get away, what friends we’ll make, what house we’ll live in, what our lives will look like tomorrow and in ten years and forever.

I’m tempted to do those things; sometimes I do. I worry and I fuss and I guilt and I judge. And I also regret and get back on the wagon. Because living a life free of addiction and comparison and impossible standards is more important to me than being perfect.

Taking a Minute

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Sometimes in the mad, mad rush of my daily life, giving my babies my all and squashing the rest in the tiny margins I leave, I  breathe in and am grateful.

It’s not easy, but I’m doing this thing. I’m raising these babies with this intriguing man who fascinates and pushes and engages me daily and who loves us enough to hold two girls in his lap at lunch so I could finish my taco in peace.

I’m writing these words. I’m teaching these students. I’m loving these women with whom I’m forging a beautiful and unlikely community.

I think that if little Jessica could have known those many years ago when she worried where she’d end up, she’d be pretty glad.

Walking down this gorgeous hallway outside my cube, in the cool of a spring evening on my way to teach, I felt deeply, deeply grateful to be this girl in this life with these people.

April Showers Bring “Meh” Flowers

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This week I’m double-blogging here and on our Hill Tribers blog. I’m excited to share with you the stories of some of my favorite moms as we get closer to Mother’s Day.

We’re going to be featuring a few of our mothers in the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day. While many of our artisans have small children they stay home with, I want to start with Meh, one of the matriarchs of our group. Meh is standing on the right with her arm around her daughter Say, who serves as a translator for us, and occasionally as a model. Because she is both smart and gorgeous.

Meh's daughter Say models some of our favorite products

To the left of Meh and Say are two women, both named Oo. The one on the far left is Meh’s sister, the one in the middle is their sister-in-law. To keep them straight, we call her Oo the Second. They’re all part of a large extended family that moved here together–most of them have Meh as either their first or last name, so we call them the “Mehs.” Their family is part of the Karenni hill tribe, one of the many tribes targeted in Burma and systematically persecuted till death or exile. Meh is the oldest girl in a family with nine children; all but two brothers live here in Austin. They buried their father last year. Their mother is still alive, a tiny wrinkled woman who greets me with a large smile every time I walk in their apartment. She winds the yarn for her daughters while they weave.

Meh is a widow, the mother of five children. Her baby is still in high school. The oldest two daughters, Say and her sister, support the family. They are responsible, helpful, kind and communicative. They are the type of girls I want my own daughters to grow up to be.

I love the above picture of Meh because you see a glimpse of her as a mother. She is affectionate. She is loving. She is funny. She is also fierce. In the long trek through the jungle, while being chased by the junta across land-mine infested land, Meh had to help her sister deliver a baby. They stayed behind the rest of their fleeing family, just Meh, her sister Koe and Koe’s husband. In an abandoned hut in another ransacked village, Meh helped Koe bring a daughter into the world. The next day they ran together to Thailand and relative safety.

Meh brought her five kids up to be the people they are today. She showed them the kinds of sacrifices a mother makes in the face of adversity. She has been like a mother to her many nieces and nephews. She weaves every day in her home, like her mother and grandmother before her. Say and her sisters and brother still have a sense of who they are through the work of their amazing mother. Her artistry connects them to the past, giving them the roots from which they will grow in this new culture.

This week we honor Meh, as one of our favorite and fiercest mothers. We hope you will join us in honoring her too.

momsdaypromo

Raising Dirty Kids

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We took our girls over to play at their cousins’ house the other day and they had a blast. It’s not because there were all kinds of toys and playground equipment in the backyard–it’s because the five oldest kids spent as much time as they could playing in a pile of dirt. They poked it with sticks. They moved it around with shovels. They saved insects and found roly-polies. By the time we were ready to go, my girls had dirt on their hands and dirt between their toes and they were as happy as two little clams.

I remember hot days playing outside until it was too dark to see, running barefoot through my neighbors’ yards, climbing trees and building forts. I remember the feel of unfettered freedom, of summer afternoons when boredom led to the most elaborate pretend games I could create with some carboard boxes and a handful of markers. I remember dust and bugs and skinned knees. I want to raise girls like with the same kind of dirt-in-my-fingernails childhood I enjoyed.

It’s become increasingly rare to find neighborhoods where kids on bikes ride anywhere they want. I don’t see many kids dangling from trees from their knees. I don’t come across pick-up games of soccer in the street.

Except when we go to visit our refugee friends. There, in some of the lower-end apartment complexes in Austin, I find kids hanging off of porches, yelling at each other in soccer matches, running to their friends’ houses, playing with chalk on the sidewalk, laughing, talking, and playing in a tumble of childhood that is really, really appealing to me.

I want my kids to be like these kids. I want them to know how to be dirty. I want them to be friends with people that look different from them. I want them to fit right into the sweaty, childish bunch.

And yet.

Many of the words these children yell are not the words my kids hear at home. The way their friends talk to each other is not in the same tone my sheltered pre-schoolers are used to. The subject these kids bring up are sometimes too adult for six- or seven-year-olds to ever be discussing, much less around my beloved and sensitive babies.

There are certainly times when I’ve intervened, and I watch my little girls like a hawk while we’re there. But I still let them run and play ring-around-the-rosy or hopscotch or paint their nails. I let them climb all over refugee apartments, hiding from their little playmates who watch them for how to play this new American game. I let them wander and get sweaty outside with their friends, some of whom are their age and some of who are much older both in years and experience. And, on occasion, they hear things they might not otherwise hear.

My goal isn’t to protect them from everything that could hurt them. It’s to teach them in age-appropriate ways how to enter the muck and the mire of the world, to see those who are dirty and different, and to be comfortable being their friend.

I want to be really clear–I don’t think the children we are around when we go to these apartments are dirty, or that their houses or dirty, or that their lives are dirty–I mean that things have happened to these kids I want to protect my babies from. War, divorce, poverty, drug use, abandonment, loss, pain–these are the things that have touched the lives of my kids’ precious playmates. These are the types of things no child should know.

In the last year, our oldest daughter has gotten particularly sensitive about this. There are a lot of times when I wonder whether or not we’re teaching her too much about the injustices in the world, but I’m not sure how to tell her about some things and not others. She’s obsessed with governments, who is “grumpy” (like Burma) and who is not (like the U.S.). She’s worried about our translator’s wife, who is still stuck in Malaysia because of bureaucracy, and wonders if that’s going to happen to her parents. We assure her it won’t, but she, like her mother, is probably always going to be stuck in the deep end of the pool. It occurred to her one day that all of her Hill Triber friends had to leave their country because of their grumpy goverment. It hurt her heart, but in a sweet way that’s made her want to help her friends even more.

While I would love to protect her all her life, I can’t, so I want to begin now teaching her how to deal with a world that is full of so much dirt. She will face it soon–elementary school begins next year. If time keeps racing ahead like it has the last five years, in ten more minutes she will be standing at a graduation ceremony with a lifetime ahead of her without us there to guide her every moment. Our time together is short and we are making the most of it.

Because when she stands there, I don’t want her to be a precious hothouse flower who has spent her childhood being sheltered from all of the things that make up life. I want her to be a hardy, outdoor plant who can spread her roots deep in the soil and weather a storm well. I want her to be independent, imaginative, confident, well-traveled, full of experience and ready to take on the world.

To do that, we have to get dirty together.

Dumptruck in a Disney Bag and a Clean-Up Dog

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Our little Joy turned three last Saturday. Joy is a great name for her because she is so completely full of giggles. For her birthday, we went to San Antonio for the weekend because a family get-away sounded more fun for everyone than a party. We’re lucky to have a big family in town who get together for birthdays and have enough children to be a ready-made party, so we’ll have cake with cousins at the end of the month. We went to Sea World the day before her birthday on what was the weirdest cold and rainy day we’ve had in months–I love Texas. Of course it was 45 degrees on March 9. We went to the Rain Forest Cafe for lunch on her actual birthday and the waitress told her she was the jungle princess right before they sang “Happy Birthday,” so she’s been telling me she’s a jungle princess as if it’s a real role she has to work hard to fill.

When she woke up on her birthday, Joy just started giggling and she didn’t stop. She’s asked for two things for the last several weeks: a dumptruck and a clean-up dog. As far as I can tell, a clean-up dog is her own invention. She wants a real dog that will clean all her toys up with its mouth and vacuum for her (don’t we all?). In desperation, I took her to a toy store to give me a clue what she meant and immediately, she fell in love with this little creature:

Which of course makes sense, since the dog looks just like a dust buster. I bought her the cute broom and dustpan set and put them in a box. When she opened the Disney bag that held the dumptruck and unwrapped her weird little clean-up dog, she was so excited. I love her at this age–she knows exactly what she wants and she’s happy as a lark when she gets it. I only hope every birthday is as successful as this one for our quirky, adorable little girl.

My Own Privilege

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To round out my seek of identity posts based on “The Awakening,” I just want to add that my education and my background and even my skin color give me privileges that I need to be aware of. So often I see blogs about being stay-at-home moms that don’t recognize the economic privilege that we have that enables us to spend most of our time at home with our kids. I work part-time, a luxury I choose because my husband has a lovely flexible job that enables him to also be with our children, and we make enough money to afford a home that, while pretty small by US middle-class standards, is enormous and decadent compared to most places in the world.

The first part of privilege is identifying it. I need to be able to say that I realize that staying-at-home, even part time, is not a choice most of the women in the world are able to make. And as a Christian who feels called to make a difference, I think I need to do something with my comparative wealth and privilege. That’s part of why we started Hill Tribers. It’s part of why we’re adopting. It’s also part of why we struggle to know whether we’re doing enough. Because while we look at the white privileged culture around us and think we might not be doing enough to “keep up with the Joneses,” in reality our lives are very, very cushy. And I don’t want to feel guilty about it, I want to feel proactive.

Identifying my privilege allows me to resist the desire for more and better and pushes me to use what I have to bless others.

Mommy Identity

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I hadn’t thought about losing or reclaiming my identity when I entered into motherhood. We just wanted a baby. But in the years since I became a mother, I’ve been shocked by the depths of the identity crises I see around me. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

But it’s not just motherhood that impacts my identity. In the last ten years, I’ve been a graduate student, non-profit director, writer, English teacher, missionary, editor, and stay-at-home mom, all while being a wife, daughter, sister, friend and Christian. Each of these roles have been attached to a specific culture with clearly understood cultural values and identity markers.

And we live in a culture where we identify ourselves daily. We write and shape the narrative of our identities by the clothes we wear, the events we attend, the way we update our facebook, who we follow on Twitter, how we blog about ourselves. How we present ourselves has never been as important as it is in our media-saturated, wordy world.  Navigating the roles in my life has wrung me out.

This is not about self-esteem, and it’s certainly not about post-partum depression, which is a unique and discrete category (a clinical diagnosis shouldn’t be confused with identity issues because of change, even if some of the language is the same). It’s about having to choose between multiple identities that I find most stressful and most interesting about my stage of life. I truly had no idea five years ago, when I was a few months away from having my first child, that I would have to stake out this identity for myself.

None of the books really covered that part.

What to Expect When You're Expecting Cover.jpg

What about you? What issues of identity have you had to wrestle with? Has it been stressful? Freeing? Both?

A Skinny Girl, Sitting on a Train, Going Someplace

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I adore my children fiercely. I cannot imagine life without their precious, precocious, hilarious antics every day. And the moment I blogged about yesterday, in the Cracker Barrel parking lot, was certainly not the worst or the craziest thing my kids have done or will do. It wasn’t the worst diaper or the worst fit I had faced; Noelle threw a bigger fit about taking a bath that night.

The frustration I felt was at a deeper level, triggered by, but not really about, my children’s diapers and fits that day. I framed my frustration in terms of identity, which is something that has stood out to me over the years in the many moments I’ve felt that way. In the Cracker Barrel parking lot, I didn’t think to myself “I can’t believe they’re acting this way” or “I hope those people don’t think I’m crazy.” I thought, “I don’t want to be this girl.”

I was in what is one of the most difficult periods of new motherhood, in my experience. The baby was four months old, which meant I had lost some of my baby weight, but not most of it. I didn’t look like I expected to look when I saw myself in the mirror. I was in the middle of a maternity leave from graduate school, which meant it had been months since I’d felt like an adult in an adult world. For six months with Joy and eight months with Noelle, I moonlighted as a true stay-at-home mom while dealing with post-partum exhaustion. I was trying to stay showered and sane, but there had been times when I had been smart and confident and I felt that girl slipping away from me more and more.

I knew who she was though, the ”girl” I always wanted to be. I summed it up to my best friend a few weeks later, when the baby had not slept for what seemed like days and we were in the middle of the summer doldrums: “I want to be a skinny girl sitting on a plane going someplace.”

I had been that person once, the kind of girl who could pack for an international trip in two hours, who looked forward to train trips because they meant intriguing people, a good book and some coffee. I wore the same clothes I’d had since high school and they still fit. I thought things to myself and wrote them down in a notebook, important and deep observational thoughts. I curled up in a corner of the train seat to take a nap because I was sleepy. I was young, curly-haired, skinny and alone.

I know who I am, what I love, and where I want to go. Like pictures in a scrapbook, I can recount the times I’ve felt most like myself:

–I woke up in an overnight train in Thailand and caught my breath at the wonder of the sun rising over water-filled rice fields.

From visualtourist.com

–Once, after I was married and living in Brazil, I had a conversation with four of my favorite Brazilian girls in the world in which no one listened to each other, and everyone talked as loud as they could, and used their hands as much as possible—I laughed so hard my sides hurt and Portuguese flowed from my lips like honey.

–Also in Brazil, I can see myself teaching twenty children’s home kids, hearing my English phrases repeated back with enthusiastic if horribly wrong pronunciation.

–Every cold day in a city reminds me of the many, many solitary walks I took in Santiago, Chile in the winter when we lived there and Jonathan worked all day. I found an English bookstore once that had a used copy of Francois Mauriac’s compiled writings that I bought and devoured in two days straight.

This picture, from the wikipedia entry on Santiago, looks identical to the view from our apartment–those nightclubs, like the “Boomerang,” used to keep us up EVERY NIGHT. The mountains over the city were gorgous, though.

–My second class teaching at the big university where I work, with the first day jitters behind me, we had a rocking discussion in my class and I began to have some inkling of how deeply I loved teaching.

–Walking across campus every time after I teach is euphoric; I have a sense of purpose and peace I never have in any other time.

That is the “girl” I felt like I was losing—bookish, relational, traveling, teaching, writing, thinking, me.

And then, one winter when my friend Nyssa visited, I added another memory to my favorite identity scrapbook.

–It had snowed, which is rare in Austin, and I dressed the girls in their warmest clothes. We went to meet Nyssa’s new baby at the hotel where her little family was staying while they were here. Waiting for the elevator, without my asking them to, on either side of me, my small girls reached out and took my hands. We held hands all the way up the elevator, through the hallway, to the door of Nyssa’s room.

The simplicity of walking with my children holding hands in the hallway took my breath away. I am also this “girl,” and she’s a mother, and she’s doing just fine.

Tomorrow: I’m not the only one who struggled with identity issues.

Being “That Girl”

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This week I’m blogging along with my English class as we’re reading “The Awakening.”

It was the baby pooping out of her second diaper in three minutes that sent me over the edge. I was taking my first road trip alone since having our second daughter, on my way to Dallas to go see my sister, who was moving to Ohio, and my best friend, who was moving to Thailand. I was teary just thinking about saying good-bye to them.

I may have been more than a little keyed up, then, when my oldest daughter, Noelle, screamed in the car seat. I thought she had been stung by a bee. I almost hit the car next to me. When I could make clear to her that shrieking didn’t make sense and she had to use her “big girl words” (one of the many phrases that I used to think were ridiculous and now roll off my tongue with ease), she screamed that she had to go potty RIGHT! NOW!

She was two-and-a-half and just starting to potty-train. She is an intense, dramatic child (I have no idea where she gets it) and she potty-trained like she does everything else—with all of her energy and verve. There would be no distractions, no waiting. Either she would pee in a bathroom or in the car seat. I pulled into the parking lot at Cracker Barrel. We were only twelve minutes into our road trip.

Like any wise young mother, I checked the baby’s diaper while we were in the bathroom and changed it. Feeling set and ready to go, I held the squirmy four-month-old with one hand, gripped my two-year-old tightly with the other, successfully navigated the landmine of breakable goodies in the Cracker Barrel country store, and congratulated myself on my calm demeanor. What were detours like this for a mother who was in control? I smiled kindly at the man who held the door open for us, using my best Mommy-In-Public voice, “Noelle, please say thank you to him for holding the door. I love that you’re holding mommy’s hand so well. Thank you for using your big girl manners.” I walked confidently to the car. That was when I caught a whiff of the baby.

I will spare you the details. I’ve never understood why some mothers revel in the goriness of their children’s diapers. Let us suffice to say: on a scale of 1 to 10, the diaper was an admirable 8.5. All the way through her clothes with extra points for somehow getting all the way up her back. I will admit now that, as soon as I’d cleared a space to change her diaper in the back of the overpacked Subaru and plopped the 2-year-old next to the baby, the first thing I did was wipe my own arm off and make sure none of it got on my clothes. My outfit was cute.

I tried to keep Noelle entertained while grappling with Joy, who wanted to take the opportunity to roll onto the asphalt. I sang songs, asked questions, my Upbeat-Mommy voice become higher and higher pitched, edging more and more toward hysteria. “Do you see the color yellow? (Where is an extra outfit?) What color are mommy’s eyes? (Where is that extra outfit?) Can you count to ten? (Why is this stupid diaper bag stuck?)” In a moment of desperation, I reached away from Noelle toward the promise of a clean outfit in their packed bag. Noelle saw a balloon in the parking lot and before I could stop her, was turning over to jump out of the car. Holding the poop-covered baby by one hand, I grabbed Noelle by the other and yelled, “Stay right here! Mommy just needs one minute! I told you not to go into the parking lot and I mean it! DON’T MOVE!” She started to cry as loudly as possible. As I tried to block her in with my leg in order to pay attention to the wrestling match with my baby, whose goal in life in that moment was either to smear my car with poop or fall head first onto the pavement, a group of older women rolled past me.

There were five or six of them in matching t-shirts, with red visors, and identical badly permed white hair. They were a formidable force. I glanced up at them briefly, holding everything in place with elbows and knees while I dug for clean clothes. I guess I thought we’d share a glance that would acknowledge the “Hey, I’ve been there” universality of this mothering moment. These years are tough, they would think. My own granddaughters did this once. What an amazing job you’re doing, Mama! You are keeping it all together with grace and pluck!

Only I didn’t see that at all. One woman tutted (I didn’t really think people did this in real life, but she did—“tut, tut”). Another shook her head. Another squinted, confident that at the very least I was verbally if not physically abusing my children. A man came up to their group, a son of one of them by the look of him, and I could see his mother looking pointedly in my direction.

In the full glare of their judgment, I realized the ridiculousness of my position. Alone in a parking lot with two rowdy, rambunctious children, one squirming and covered in poop, one held to the back of the car by my knee while she cried at the top of her lungs, I had become something I had never aspired to be. The reaction was instantaneous and visceral—like a punch in the stomach, I thought to myself, “I am not this girl.”

Later, after the baby had been changed and I’d strapped both of them back in the car, when we’d driven three more hours with four more potty breaks, I told this story to my friends and we laughed at the crazy predicaments that came about from mothering small children. I repeated the phrase “I can’t believe I’ve become this girl.” I felt like I had gone through a rite of passage, like I’d overcome some essential mothering moment.

I’ve returned in my mind several times to that moment in the Cracker Barrel parking lot. It wasn’t the judgment of the women that bothered me. It is even possible, despite my memories, that they were sending me looks of sympathy and compassion that I misread. (Though I can’t really explain away the “tutting.”)

The thing that has stuck with me was that I associated that with my identity. Because it’s not as if I didn’t want to be a mother or as if I didn’t realize what being a mother of young children would entail. My husband and I had been married for several years before we had children; we’d spent time with lots of our friends with children. I knew the craziness, the frustration, the reality of what we faced.

I didn’t want to stop mothering my children, I wanted to stop being “that girl.” I think most mothers, especially young ones, feel that way. We love our kids, it’s the identity of “mommyhood” that is difficult. I think it’s important to talk about–what happens when you put down one identity and take on another?

Tomorrow: The “girl” I wanted to be.