A brief aside, and then I’ll begin: Where are all the 20-something moms? Some of my best friends are 30+, I’m not knockin’ it. But at 26, I feel like the only person in the whole world who had a child before she hit the three-oh.

OK, now we can start. Y’all read Mamazine, right? I know I’ve plugged it here before but another time never hurts. Well, in addition to recognizing the awesomeness of 60bugs, Amy’s dug up a bevy of thought-provoking links.

After nosing around, these two quotes really resonated with me and with what I’ve been feeling for the last 14 months, since I’ve become a mother.

Parents on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Salon.com, 2003:

I used to be a fairly easygoing person, but becoming a mother threw me into a state of low-grade but chronic anxiety. I fretted over my two sons’ refusal to eat vegetables, their sibling battles, their taste for violent cartoons. Problems seemed to be evidence not that my children were normal flawed human beings but that I was a bad mom for not fixing them. I was frazzled when they misbehaved but remorseful when I yelled. If I let the boys play in front of the TV set while I grabbed half an hour of peace — OK, God help me, an hour — with a cup of tea and a magazine, I couldn’t really relax. I feared I was dooming them to lives of, well, I wasn’t sure exactly what, but I worried about it anyway.

A truce in the Mommy Wars:

Everybody is a unique kind of mom, but there’s no message out there, anywhere in American society, that you are a good mom.

Every last thing I do, from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, hovers in the back of my mind, waiting to be judged.

Should I not have fed Owen Breyer’s brand yogurt? What if it has too much sugar in it? Should I not let him watch that stupid Hi-5 DVD when I shower in the morning, or when he asks for it at night? Should I not write on the internet that I think his Hi-5 DVD is stupid, because he might read it in 10 years and feel hurt? Should I be feeding him organic foods and have I really, truly, punished myself enough for not breastfeeding him longer? Should I have yelled yesterday when that final “nnnuuuuuhhhhhh!” drove me over the edge as I was trying to get us both ready to go to work/day care? Should I have packed him something different to eat? Is he gaining enough weight? Is he going to turn autistic because I let him play by himself? Is he going to grow up to be weak and dependent because I carry him around all the time? Is he going to by stymied and atrophied because the only vegetable he’ll eat is canned green beans?

I know it sounds silly, but these are real, gripping thoughts. I actually think this way, on some sublevel of my mind. I’m worried that Murphy’s Law will prevail and the horrible outcome will be all my fault. Sometimes I have a real handle on things, and sometimes my anxiety just eats me alive. Two weeks ago Owen fell off a chair in our living room and landed on his head. Later that day, he came down with a fever while he was at day care. I was called at work to come get him. Luckily it was a Tuesday and not a deadline day, but it boffed up my hours and the production flow anyhow. And of course on top of everything I was unshakably convinced that he had a slow-developing concussion from falling off that chair, and that I had doomed him to a life of mental retardation because I dropped him off at day care like usual instead of driving him immediately to the hospital.

The sane among you might note that fever is not a symptom of concussion; that Owen did not, in fact, have any of the symptoms associated with concussion. Yeah, well, that didn’t matter to me at the time. In fact, as I rocked him and sponge-bathed his feverish forehead, I was on the phone to my mother, sobbing and hiccupping and unable to speak for fear, guilt, and shame.

Let me remind you: KID HAD A FEVER. IT HAPPENS. But in my mind it was so much more than that, it was trauma, it was catastrophe, it was Armageddon, and it was all my fault.

I have no point. I don’t know where I’m going with this, aside to say that the anxiety, she is crippling. It’s not crippling every day, but it is there every day. Guilt over working is just one more finely sugared layer on the parfait of my neuroses.

I think a weighty part of my anxiety is living eight hours away from my family and my close friends. Moving around was a good thing when I was younger and single, or even when we were married. There was all that drinking to do, for starters. But now that I have children I just don’t want to fuck around, you know? I love my Baltimore friends, but — well, it’s not the same. The people we were before kids are not the same people we are after kids. I think that’s true for anybody.
I don’t have any answers. Although I did just finish reading “Confessions of a Slacker Mom” and you know what? Wow, did that ever resonate. It’s my manifesto for the month. Muffy Mead-Ferro put into words what I had been trying to articulate, the kind of parenting style I wanted to own: The low-key love’em and let’em live style of the generations preceding mine. Life will happen, both to me and to my son. Not only that, but shit will happen. He’ll fall down. He’ll refuse to eat vegetables. He’ll watch television and throw toys and hear me swear and witness me eating Cheeze Doodles for dinner.

And what I have to work so hard to remember is that this is not child abuse. He will not suffer from the kind of lifestyle I’m giving him, the one with a roof over his head and clothes on his back and food on the table and two parents who love him, and each other, stupid-much. Shit-tons of love. He has these things and I have to keep reminding myself over and over and over again that he will be OK, that I can be a real live person with flaws and vices and he will survive that.

But that is so damn hard to do.

OK. Phew! I didn’t expect this entry to be so, y’know, cathartic! Um, and neurotic. Wow. Fun trip, wasn’t it? All right. We can move on, a little, beyond the borders of my mind. Might be healthier for you, anyway.