As much as I envy women with expansive wardrobes I know I could never be one of them. I don’t have the space, and even if I did it would stress me out to have a lot of stuff hanging around not getting used. I can’t remember if I was always this way (maybe? probably.) or if this stems from the insane amount of time I spent going through my mother’s belongings after she died. It was awful! Of course, when I was a little girl I was super appreciative of her tendency to hang on to clothes she no longer wore–the dress-up options were endless and amazing because she had countless furs and sequined cocktail dresses, fancy bags and shoes, and enough costume jewelry to adorn a small army. I wonder if I’ll be depriving my kids of some of the magic of discovering old things around the house by my constant cleaning out of things no longer used. Or am I modeling a healthy detachment from “stuff” by periodically getting rid of some of mine? All I know is that I rarely, if ever, miss the things I’ve let go, and there are only a few things I could never buy again if I felt I needed or wanted them. I’m thinking a lot lately about that William Morris quote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” and it feels like a good touchstone for “stuff” management. And yes I include wardrobe in the “stuff” category!

When I told Brian I had sold a particular dress he said he felt a bit sad because he had such sweet memories of me wearing it when we’d meet on a street corner in Dupont Circle after work to drive out to my father’s house in MD (we lived at my dad’s for a few months after we sold our apartment in DC and before we moved to Seattle). I also have wonderful fond memories of those times, some of the best of our lives because we got to spend a lot of time together and because we were almost totally unencumbered by belongings or responsibilities (funny what living in someone else’s house with all your possessions in storage will do for your psyche…hmmm…). That’s when I felt a tiny little pang of, well, not regret, but maybe uncertainty about my decision. And then I remembered something I’d read a while ago in reference to belongings and life:

The things are not the memories.

It feels good to let go of the things and hold tight to the memories.

Being a stay at home mom is the hardest job I’ve ever had. Partially because it is hard and partially because I make it harder than it needs to be. I recently realized that my to do list needs to be cut down by about 90% unless I want to walk around all the time feeling stressed and unproductive. I wonder, though, if that would even help, since I think I might have the personality type where you constantly feel overwhelmed no matter what. This is not a good fit for being a stay at home mom.

Lately I’ve been snappish and short-tempered with Dylan and I feel horrible about it. He is testing boundaries a lot, having tantrums, and is super emotional, all perfectly normal for his age but so frustrating for me, especially when I am trying to meet his needs and Mira’s needs simultaneously. Brian reminded me last night that we should protect and comfort our kids above all else. We are the people they’ll rely on to be their safe harbor, so when we are short-tempered or snappish or just straight-up mean, it’s the worst possible kind of transgression. I’ll admit I threatened to take Dylan’s stuffed animals away from him at naptime the other day. What was I thinking? To my credit I did say he could keep his favorite one, but seriously. Taking away the stuffed animals he sleeps with falls squarely into mean territory; that sort of behavior is off-limits for sure. I realized it right away and let him keep all his animals but I felt like a total jerk about it and still do.

At preschool drop-off this morning a mom who had her second child about five months ago asked me how it was going. I said, hard. She said, I know. She also said that one thing that helps her through the rough spots and long days is to focus on three things she is thankful for or that are making her happy at that moment. It’s kind of a no-brainer but that idea never occurred to me! So I’ll choose for now to think about how grateful I am that Mira is a pretty easy baby, that Dylan is communicative and potty-trained, and that Brian goes above and beyond to help me out and take care of me as much as he does our children. Something else that’s comforting is the knowledge that nothing, good or bad, lasts forever. Things are always changing, getting harder, getting easier, more fun or less fun, and I am going to try a little harder to ride the wave rather than fighting against it.

“All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education,all grown obsolete. Along with “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are”, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations–what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet,and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, “Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame.” The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded,”What did you get wrong?”. (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.

The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.”

Couple heaping Tbsp mayo
Heaping tsp dijon mustard
2-3 Tbsp white wine vinegar
2-3 Tbsp good olive oil
Small shallot, minced
Handful Italian parsley, finely chopped (fresh basil is an amazing alternative to parsley, I just stack the leaves, roll into cigars & chiffonade)
Sea salt & fresh ground pepper to taste

Whisk first four ingredients together and taste. I like it a little sharp because it mellows once on the cabbage. You want a good balance of mustard sharpness and vinegar sharpness. Adjust as necessary to get it where you think it’s good and then add the other ingredients. Taste and adjust again. You will probably want more salt & pepper than you think you do, just trust me on that. I prefer the pepper to be freshly ground and more on the coarse side. If using parsley, I often throw some extra chopped up parsley in with the cabbage, I like parsley. If using basil I’ll take the teeny tiny leaves and throw those in with the cabbage, they are hard to chiffonade anyway and look so pretty with the cabbage. Pour the dressing over the cabbage & mix well. It’s best if it gets to sit in the fridge for about an hour before you eat, but it’s also damn tasty served right away. Also amazing leftover, I particularly like it for breakfast with a couple fried eggs on top (I swear this is so good!).

1/2 C almond meal
1/4 C pecans, roughly chopped
1/4 C walnuts, roughly chopped
2 scant Tbsp lemon pepper
1 Tbsp dill
1 tsp paprika
~1 tsp sea salt (amt depends on preference and whether or not your lemon pepper has salt in it)

Mix ingredients in a bowl. If you are not sure about amount of salt err on side of less, you can always salt the fish after cooking. Prep a large baking sheet w/ foil and then oil the foil just a bit. Prep your defrosted (or fresh if you are so lucky!) fish by rinsing, patting dry, and brushing with thin coat of olive oil. Preheat oven to 400F. Spoon the nut mixture as evenly as possible over each filet. I do a fairly generous coat because I fear that it will just meld into the fish if the coating is too thin. I also try to distribute the nuts pretty evenly on the filets but I have some control/perfectionist issues, this step is really not necessary. Bake fish for about 20 minutes, it will depend on your oven but you obviously want the fish flakey and done and the coating should be a bit golden. If the fish is done but the coating still seems kind of raw you can broil it briefly but watch it! I have burned some nuts this way, the pecans especially seem to get burned easily. Serve with a hearty squeeze of lemon (mine & Dylan’s preference) or not (Brian’s preference).

A big part of my absence from this blog has been due to my desire to focus more on real life, on the tangible things that matter, like being present for and with Dylan. Not to say I’m giving up my own interests and shelving my creative impulses to be the best mom ever, but I’m making a lot of decisions lately by putting them through the “looking back” filter. As in, when I look back on my life, what do I want to see? What will matter? I have been trying really hard to just enjoy this time, because it’s going fast and someday soon it will be gone. So maybe that means I am not writing my blog, but maybe that also means that I am relaxing my standards a little bit and remembering that the purpose of life is to have fun, not to get to the end with a perfect grade.

An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin

Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

I also started Life by Keith Richards and I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley, but I couldn’t get into either one. I think Life is better suited to winter reading, though I’m not sure why. I kept it on my list to try again later. As for I Was Told There’d Be Cake…well, ugh. It came highly recommended by multiple people who tend to like the same kind of stuff that I do, but I found the author’s voice annoying. Or maybe it was the subject matter? Either way the book was way too self-indulgent for my taste (this coming from a huge David Sedaris fan) so I stopped halfway.

I am currently about halfway through Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes, which is awesome and I can already say you should read it, especially if you give a shit about family and community and living life on your own terms. Also on the bedside table are Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (this has been on my “to read” list for years; I’m very excited to read it especially because Outliers was fantastic!) and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (as a mom, how could I not read this?! Also, I’ve been on the waitlist for it at our library since January).

I wish I had something more insightful to say about these books, or a cute photo of my current reads stacked up on the floor next to my bed, but as I type this there are SIX sweaty men digging up the sewer line in my front yard and I am having trouble concentrating because I can physically feel the money being drained from my bank account. Also I have a headache (unrelated to the sewer line. I think). Here’s hoping that your spring is getting on well and that you are reading or otherwise expanding your mind and your horizons. I have lots to tell you about and hope to see you back here a little more frequently in the coming weeks!

* Thanks to Michelle for posting about this article!

Dylan has been up at night the past three nights. Not just waking up and we go in, change his diaper, and put him back down. Oh, no. He has been waking up and staying awake and getting all kinds of emotional if we try to leave him in his room. Brian has slept on the floor in Dylan’s room, with Dylan, for at least some part of the last three nights. Have I mentioned that the foundation of our house is concrete slab, and that the carpet in the bedrooms is laid right on top with just a thin layer of padding between? Our floors are hard. I guess this is just another of those little “phases” that babies go through, but every time we encounter one I feel blindsided. Like, everything was working so great, what did I do to cause this? I search my brain for the reason (daylight savings time? not enough outside time? staying up a little too late a couple days last week?), but I know it just is what it is and I hope that it ends soon.

I think a lot about this blog, one of my few creative outlets, and I still don’t know what I’m doing with it besides neglecting it. I have a lot of recipes in the queue and some posts on gardening and fashion and design, but in the spirit of cutting myself a break I am going to try not to worry about the drafts piling up in my WordPress dashboard. Right now what I need is less computer time, more productivity, and to shake up the routine a bit. I think part of my crank is coming from just feeling like we are in a rut of doing the same things, eating the same foods, bickering over the same stuff (we don’t even really know what it is, don’t you hate that? fighting and then stepping back and saying, hey, what are we fighting about? I think we are all just tapped out around here), etc. I also think I am missing my CrossFit! It’s been two months, thank GOD I am going back on Monday before my butt completely disappears. I am not 100% but definitely much better and the plan is to just modify and scale as needed. My ass needs CrossFit for sure, but after this break I am certain my mind needs it more.

The weather in Austin is amazing lately, kind of hot for the season but I’ll take it over the cold. I bought all the transplants and seeds for our spring garden (no such thing as a summer garden in Austin, really) and am working this week to get the garden prepped, planted, and outfitted with a new fence! We are also going to build a trellis for the tomatoes and cucumbers since we do square foot gardening and don’t have the space to let them spread out–they need to grow up up up! Maybe I will turn this into a photo blog and just post some shots from around the house and garden and call it a day. I dropped my iPhone on the patio yesterday but it still works so I still have my trusty everywhere camera. Ironically, I dropped it while trying to take a photo (and shoo away a mosquito, WTF, it’s only March!).

Also, unrelated, my house is such a mess and I want a maid so badly that when the across-the-street neighbor’s maid shows up on Tuesdays (I am watching her unload her cleaning supplies right now!) I just want to cry. In my future life of riches and leisure I will have a maid. Just putting that out there now so the universe can work on it for me.

What are you all up to? Gardening? Spring cleaning? Traveling? Exercising? I think a lot of us get a little funk or a little bug to change things up around this time of year, so what’s doing?

I’ve started this year off pretty well, it’s only March and I’ve already finished four books and am almost done with two more. I got something great out of all of these books, and isn’t that the thing, really? To spend your time and not feel as though you wasted it? I think that’s my goal in life (or one of my goals), to feel like I made the right choices. I’ve decided that I am going to keep track of all the books I read this year here on Goodbye, Small Heart, both for myself and for you, in case you are looking for some reading material.

I should note that I get almost all the books I read from my public library. We’re on a budget and I don’t like owning books unless I will refer back to them often. Every once in a while I buy something if I can’t get it at the library or borrow it from a friend, but then I usually put it into circulation among friends or sell it. I recently sold a big bag of books and made $6! Woohoo! That’s almost enough to buy a burger at our local burger joint (Phil’s Icehouse in case you are wondering, and I mention this only so I can tell you that Brian refers to it as MILF’s Icehouse because it is a popular lunch spot for the hottie stay-at-home-mom crowd. Ha!).

Anyway, without further ado, here are the books I’ve read so far this year, all highly recommended:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen