Doing it right

Somehow Eli learned the song about the days of the week. This one:

He likes to sing it at the top of his lungs as we stroll to school in the mornings. Except he invariably skips Thursday.

"Sunday Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Friday Saturday!" he'll shout. Then he'll turn around to ask me: "Did I do it right?"

"Buddy, you skipped Thursday," I'll say. So he'll try again: "Sunday Monday, Thursday Wednesday, Friday Saturday! Did I do it right?"

"That time you said Thursday instead of Tuesday and then you still left out Thursday."

...you get the idea.

I love this routine with him. Not just because it's cute, but because it's easy. "Did I do it right?" is a simple question to answer when we're talking about the days of the week. Eli knows it, too, which is why he enjoys asking me like we're both in on the joke. "Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Friday Saturday! Did I do it right?"

If only Eli knew how many times I ask myself that same question, without being at all certain of the answer. After every meltdown, every negotiation, every outing that goes awry, I wish there was someone I could turn to and ask, "Did I do it right?"

This spring, Eli was spending the day with my good friend when she called to tell me that he had hit his head and it wouldn't stop bleeding. I didn't panic, but what I did was worse: I froze. Should she take him to our pediatrician? Or to pediatric urgent care? Would they see him if he wasn't accompanied by a parent? What about insurance? Should she wait until I got home? But what good was I going to be?

Was I doing it right? And who was going to tell me if I wasn't?

Sometimes it feels like I'm making dozens of decisions in a day. Should I let him eat this granola bar before school? Will he ever let me leave the room if I lay here in his bed for an extra five minutes? Am I ruining his teeth if I don't take away his pacifier? Am I ruining his hygiene habits if I let him watch Peppa Pig while brushing his teeth? Actually, isn't it time we started brushing teeth in the morning too? Why am I so concerned about his teeth when they're all going to fall out anyway?

Am I doing it right?

Phil would say these worries are good problems. After all, even the idea of being able to worry about whether or not I'm doing it right is a luxury. My kid always has enough to eat (even if he chooses not to eat it, or only eats the cheese and pasta out of it, or demands dessert to go along with it) and appropriate clothes to wear (even if he refuses to put them on, or take them off, or insists that he can't possibly pull them up himself).

But when Eli was a baby, somehow my concerns seemed more urgent, more immediate. Will he get sick if I give him this formula that's been sitting out for more than three hours? Do I need to call the doctor for this fever? What in the name of all that is good am I going to do if he does not take a nap?! I didn't worry about damaging his psyche because, well, he didn't really have much of a psyche, just more of a burning desire to eat every three hours and never, ever go to sleep.

But now that we've survived infancy, I don't worry so much about his health or his nap schedule as much as the kind of person he'll turn out to be. If I refuse to give in to his stalling at bedtime, does he learn that I've set limits, or does he learn that I'm inflexible even when he needs me? If I let him hang on to that pacifier forever, am I respecting his autonomy or just babying him? What decisions can I make that will help him become kind, curious, responsible? Am I doing it right?

Last night I was lying in bed with Eli when he whispered that he had a secret to tell me "at the very end." After I sang him his nighttime song, he snuggled in close to me. "I'll tell you the secret after you smile," he said, and I obliged. He reached up and adjusted his pacifier, his breath warm against my neck. "The secret is..."

I expected the secret to be "I love you," and I would have loved it. But what I got was even better. "The secret is: You're the mommy," he whispered breathily.

I laughed. "I'm the mommy? That's the secret?" I said. Then I had a sobering thought: I'm the mommy. I'm the mommy!

That's not a secret, but it is a gift. I am the mommy. I don't know if I'm doing it right. But I am doing it.

This morning, I took Eli for a run, which is my favorite thing to do with him in the morning before school. I tucked him into his jogging stroller with his fleece whale blanket and fortified him with a Trader Joe's granola bar — his new favorite treat. It seemed like it might be drizzly, so instead of our normal route we ran over to Burns Street to see the "spooky houses" decorated for Halloween. We ooohed at the ghosts and spiders and pumpkins and then we flew through the darkness back across Queens Boulevard. When we got home Eli jumped out of his stroller and hugged me tightly around the legs.

"I really love you," he said, sounding mildly surprised to be admitting it. Another secret. Another gift. And I didn't have to ask if I was doing it right.

Talk less, smile more

I taught elementary school — mostly 2nd and 3rd grade — for five years. Like many teachers, what I struggled with most in the classroom wasn't curriculum but classroom management. I'd try to be strict but come off as shrill, or I'd try to be stern and come off as mean, or I'd try to be flexible and come off as wishy-washy.

Now that I'm a parent, I have the same problem. When I talk to Eli about consequences, I try to make sure I always follow through, which sometimes leads me to wish I hadn't set limits in the first place (like the time in BJ's I told him if he kicked me from the cart one more time I'd have to put the monster pillow back and he kicked me one more time and everyone in the store had to listen to his 20-minute tantrum while we checked out).

There are moments when I choose wrong, when I choose to make a point that's more about asserting my dominance as the adult than about making the best decision for my child. This is about one of those moments.

Eli has a habit of getting really intensely involved in something right before we're going to walk out the door, no matter how many times I warn him that we're going to leave soon, and as I approach to get him to go he'll start yelling about how he has to just finish one more thing.

This morning, just as we were about to leave for apple picking, Eli was deeply involved with a big stack of magnatiles, protesting that he had to finish laying them all out in a rectangle pattern. "It's going to be OVER!" he shouted. (This is a phrase he got from me; I'll say, "It would have been over already!" when he's protesting and arguing about something that would take a hot second if he just let me do it already.)

I felt us slipping into the same old power struggle. I felt that same anxiety I used to feel in the classroom when things weren't going my way. Don't let students walk all over you! Take control!

Once all the magnatiles were laid out on the floor, Eli reached out for more magnatiles and started to say, "I'm going to use these — "

I sort of snapped. "We are finished playing with magnatiles now! It is time to go!" He tried to respond, but I cut him off.

In response Eli got more and more upset, but I wasn't really listening to what he was saying. I heard snatches of phrases like "Listen to me!" but I steamrolled right over them. If we were in a cartoon, I would have been swelling bigger and bigger while Eli shrank smaller and smaller, with my fat slimy words gliding over his small squeaky ones. I don't even remember what I was saying. It was just the idea that I am the grown-up! You need to listen to me! No more playing! 

Finally Eli yelled "I'm TELLING YOU SOMETHING!"

"I'm listening!" I retorted sarcastically.

He took a quavery hiccuping breath and said shakily, with tears rolling down his cheeks, "I'm going to use these magnets when I come home from apple picking."

In the cartoon, this is where all the air would come slithering out of my balloon. This whole time — this whole argument — this whole escalation — he had been trying to tell me how you he was going to use the rest of the magnets after our trip. Just trying to share proudly how he was responsible enough to know it was time to stop playing.

I had won the power struggle, but in the end we both lost. I felt like the worst mom in the world.

If the terrible 2s are terrible because 2-year-olds finally have enough of a sense of self to understand that they have desires that don't always coexist with their parents', then 3-year-olds are tough because there are so many more shades of emotion that they seem to understand and be able to manipulate: guilt, fear, shame. Lately when Eli can tell that I'm irritated with him he'll sidle up to me and coo, "Mommy, I like you." Which is cute, but what stops me in my tracks is when he'll do it while he's crying, like he needs reassurance that I still like him too, that I won't banish him into the woods just because I'm annoyed. Once, in tears, he asked me, "Mommy, can you smile?" as if he was worried I might turn into a mean, unsmiling mommy from now on.

It's an unsettling reminder how easy it is to scar him, to hurt his feelings with unkind words or hefty sighs or an irritated voice. It's a reminder to be gentle with him as much as I can, because he's 3 and I'm his mommy and I'm supposed to be the one who acts like a grown-up.

So, like a real adult, I owned up to my mistake. I told Eli how sorry I was. I told him I should have listened to him. When Phil walked in the door, he found us both on the floor, sniffling and sending each other telepathic messages like: We both said things we didn't mean, but we still love each other. 

And in the end, we had a great day. Eli picked apples and played in a giant vat of dried corn and walked through a maze and refused to feed anything to the animals (more feed for Phil). And even though I had warned him, quite sternly, several times that he should finish his breakfast because there would be no snacks in the car, when we returned from the orchard and he whined that he was hungry, I said that we could go get a treat from the farmstand.

His eyes light up. "Oooh! A treat! Treats are my favorite! Treats are yummy! Treats are the best thing to eat!"

Maybe it was some attempt at a balance — like I had already surprised him once with my unkindness and I seized the opportunity for a happy surprise instead. But I didn't do it because I felt guilty. I did it because Phil gave me a C'mon, loosen up look. I did it because WOLO — we only live once.

When you're a new teacher, you're often told that you shouldn't smile until December. But today I was reminded that as a parent I should take the advice Aaron Burr gives in the magnificent Hamilton: Talk less. Smile more.

To Eli on your 3rd birthday

Dear Eli,

I wanted you more than anything.

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of you at first. I'd always imagined you as a girl, but now it seems inconceivable that you could have been anyone other than who you are.

Even when you were a baby, you always seemed to know better than me. I wanted you to nap in your quiet crib; you wanted to nap in your stroller so you wouldn't miss a part of the busy, noisy world. I waited for you to crawl; you found your own way across the room by rolling and scooting on your back. I wasn't sure if I was inept or if you were wise, but I tried to trust you as much as I could.

Now that you are — in your own words — a "big boy," I look back on pictures of you as a baby and I recognize you in ways I didn't back then. "That's the face he makes when he's confused," I'll think, like I am just learning to know you all over again. As if now that I know who you are, I can make sense of all the things that stymied me when you were brand-new. Then, you were always the noisiest baby at every playdate; now, you are still the loudest chatterbox in any given room full of toddlers. Then, you were always a busybody scoping out everything you saw around you; today, you are...a busybody scoping out everything you see around you.

But sometimes I recognize new faces you make, too, and I realize with a start how independent you've become, how separate. I used to see every move you made, literally, and now you live a whole life outside me. Sometimes when we are in public places I will see you standing a little bit apart from me in earnest conversation with strangers, gesticulating at things with your hands, and I wonder what you are saying.

It's a little bit of a relief when you're talking to someone other than me, actually, because at home you never ever stop talking. At bedtime, you tell me, "Talk to me about my day," and you get very upset when I try to explain that I wasn't there during your day so I don't know what happened. Instead I have to invent what I think is the truth: Maybe you played on the playground with Joseph, I'll suggest, or you danced in the classroom with Ruby. When I tell you a story and say, "The end," you immediately rejoin, "That's not the end!" and you add a coda of your own: "Then we all hugged and went to the bakery," you'll say, or: "Then a scary monster came and ate us up." (You're very into scary monsters lately.)

Your latest obsession is "arts and crafts." "Arts and crafts time!" you exclaim when you wake up in the morning. You love coloring and gluing and cutting paper with your new safety scissors. You and Daddy create new shadow puppets using popsicle sticks and robot stickers. At school, you're crafting a hat out of construction paper for "Funny Hat Week" and your teacher tells me how creative you are, how seriously you've taken this endeavor and how much time you're devoting to making your hat just the way you envision it. (Something about a pipe cleaner needing to stick up at exactly the right angle — in this case I'm sure "creative" is also a euphemism for "extremely bossy and demanding.")

When I come home from work in the evening and you start talking to me, I wonder how you can seem so much smarter and funnier and older than you did when I left in the morning. One night at bedtime, you started sounding out words and telling me what letter they began with. ("Whale! W!") Recently at a restaurant — and I swear this is true — you pointed right at the word "pancakes" on the menu and said "I want pancakes" and then you pointed at the word "eggs" and said "I want eggs" and I said, "Can you read?!" but it turned out to be a fluke.

You have friends with whom you've developed real relationships, and I'm always amazed when I see you all playing together. Recently, we went to a birthday party with lots of kids from your class and watched you all cavort around together, giggling and whooping. You made up a game where you followed each other like lemmings jumping off a step and then collapsed one at a time into a big pile on the floor, wrestling and gasping with laughter. You love to make your friends laugh. When I bring you to school, you contort your face in anticipation while we wait for your teacher to open the door so that you can be poised with a funny expression as soon as you walk in. When I tell you we're going to play with Henry and Eitan, you ask if Gavin will be there too. But when I ask you who your best friend is, you smile and say, "You!"

You are not an easygoing child, and sometimes I wish you would sit still in a restaurant or chill out at the beach, or follow directions the first time I ask you politely not to do something. But you live your life big. You want to be first, fastest, loudest, strongest. You want to know everything and tell everyone you meet everything that you know.

You are goofy, stubborn, clever and fierce. You are energetic and enthusiastic (particularly, to my dismay, at 5 a.m.). You are brave and loud and lovely. You are mine.

Always,
Mommy

How The X-Files defined my adolescence

Readers. You've probably heard, but it bears repeating:

THE X-FILES IS COMING BACK TO TELEVISION.

This is, literally, a dream come true.

The first time I saw The X-Files was sometime in the summer of 1995, between 6th and 7th grade. My good friend Liska — who is now on her way to becoming a famous screenwriter in Hollywood, no doubt thanks to her early good taste in zeitgeisty television shows and also elementary school friends — had been pestering me to watch it: "You gotta see this show."

The first episode I remember seeing was an early first-season episode called "Shadows" (because yes, I know the names of all the episodes). Today it's critically unremarkable, but I remember watching David Duchovny's Mulder walk into a dark office — like an Office Space-type office — and as the music began to crescendo, office supplies rose up off the desk and bookshelves and started to swirl around in the air. We're talking staplers, legal pads, etc. Because the office was haunted, get it? By the spirit of the former boss who was protecting his young employee! ...obviously.

I was hooked. I already loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack!) and Rescue 911. The X-Files was like an amalgamation of all three, only with an added ingredient I never knew I wanted in my TV programs: Angst.

Angst was at the center of all truly great X-Files episodes. An episode could be cool or scary or gross but if it didn't have angst, it wasn't spectacular to me. And there was a lot of angst to go around on The X-Files: Mulder's long-lost sister (abducted by aliens, of course. or the government. or Mulder's shitty-ass father). Scully's abduction (by aliens, of course. or the government. or Mulder's shitty-ass "father").

There was a lot of angst going around in my own life, too. I didn't have a long-lost sister or a mysterious microchip in my neck or a nefarious government conspiracy shadowing my every move, but I did have deep feelings of sadness and meaninglessness I couldn't explain. (Today, we call those feelings "adolescence," but back then I just knew life felt sad and pointless sometimes and I didn't know why.) Mulder, in his own weird way, is a perfect mirror for a depressed adolescent: He doesn't fit in. His life careens between being utterly consequential to the fate of the known universe and being completely pointless. He's socially awkward and can't quite nail it down with the girl of his dreams. And also, he's obsessed with porn.

I was 12 when I fell into The X-Files; up until then all my favorite TV shows had been Full House or Saved by the Bell or  — when I started to get all sophisticated  — Friends. But adolescence is a dark time, and dark times call for dark shows: creepy shape-shifting murderers and monsters, rage-inducing parasites, psychotic cloned identical twins. (And that was only the first season. Also by "dark" I mean literally dark, like sometimes I had to sit really close to my small white television and squint just to see whether Mulder and Scully were entering a closet or an aircraft hangar.)

The X-Files was the first time I found myself immersed in a full-fledged pop culture obsession. So naturally, my parents were against it. Which in turn only made me more obsessed. Here was this thing, this intricate, beautiful, twisted thing, and my parents just didn't get it. Because they were parents. Who just didn't understand. It was the first time — other than the daily fights I had with my mother about whether or not my room was acceptably tidy (spoiler alert: it wasn't) — that I felt a widening gulf between me and my parents, a sense that I was growing somehow beyond them and the world we all inhabited together.

My memories of The X-Files are inextricably linked with two things: junior high school and the Internet, both of which had recently pirouetted into my existence. It was on the Internet that I tracked upcoming writers and directors for episodes (because they all had their own styles, and I knew them all), first learned terms like "spoiler" and "shipper," connected with other fans — some of whom I still keep in touch with to this day — and started reading fanfic.

"Fanfic" is short for "fan fiction," and it's exactly what it sounds like: fictional stories written about fictional universes by real-life superfans. Nowadays fanfic seems to be all about Twilight (did you know 50 Shades of Grey originated as Twilight fanfiction?) and Harry Potter (Draco Malfoy and Harry hook up!), but back in the heady days of The X-Files in the '90s, fanfic was truly something to behold. There was awful fanfic out there — Mulder marries Scully, Scully's mom marries Skinner, everyone's kids are named "Fox" and "Dana" — but there was great fanfic out there too, and I devoured it all. Sometimes fanfic was released in serial format and I was more eagerly waiting for the next installment than the next episode of the show itself. Fanfic was at its hedonistic peak during the long summer hiatuses (hiatusi?), particularly when the show had ended in a cliffhanger and you could imagine how it went a thousand different ways. How had Mulder escaped the burning boxcar in the desert? Was he faking his death or so despondent with guilt over Scully's terminal cancer that he really had committed suicide? What the F was up with those bees? Sometimes, particularly as the mythology of the show became bloated with complications, fanfic resolutions were better than the show itself. There was one particularly well-known fanfic called "Oklahoma." The Moby-Dick of fanfics, it featured a lot of poetry by T.S. Eliot, who quickly became my favorite poet.

Did I write fanfic myself? Hell yes I did. I liked to write fanfic that explored what Mulder and/or Scully were really thinking during an episode (because who would understand the inner thoughts of an FBI agent investigating the paranormal better than a 13-year-old Jewish girl from Queens?), or else what really happened after an episode (usually: Mulder made a broody confession to Scully and she cheered him up, but not in that way).

In the '90s, there was a heated division between fans who wanted to see Mulder and Scully romantically linked — these people were called "shippers," short for "relationshippers" — and fans who didn't want that to happen; these people were called "rational human beings who understood that this would ruin the fabric of the show itself."

No, actually they were called "NoRomos," which is short for "no romance," which, since that's basically how I felt about my own adolescent life, is the camp I was in. When all my friends were starting to act on crushes and date first boyfriends, I felt an aversion to coupledom I couldn't really explain. In seventh grade, Louis Miller threw a heart-shaped card at me in the Starbucks of our local Barnes & Noble (a cherished afterschool hangout) that he had constructed in French class; "Je t'aime!" it said. My response was the emotional equivalent of clamping my hands over my ears and chanting "La la la, I can't hear you!" I had had somewhat of a tumultuous transition from elementary school to junior high school and I was just beginning to become independent myself; it's no surprise I saw all too well the dangers of becoming too dependent on another, of becoming too inextricably linked with someone else's emotions. (Is it any wonder my favorite type of X-Files case was the kind where Scully would have occasion to say "Mulder, you're getting too close to this case!"?)

David Duchovny and I both outgrew The X-Files around the same time, but the show always stayed with me. Like a blankie, I went back to it for comfort in times of transition: During my senior year in college, I'd stay up late after working on grad school applications to watch one episode before bed; in graduate school, I even started writing fanfic again, kind of like Stephen King coming out of retirement to write more mature pieces. (Note: I did not publish this fanfic under my real name. Thank goodness.)

The X-Files was probably the single most defining factor of my adolescence. I was so embarrassed by my earliest attempts at fanfiction that I've long since deleted all traces of them, but now I deeply wish I'd saved them. You know how people when they're reminiscing will say, "It was a simpler time"? My time as an X-Files superfan was the opposite of that for me: a more complicated time, a time that was sometimes dark and sometimes full of possibility, a time when I couldn't quite visualize who I was or who I wanted to be. (Besides Scully, of course. A smart, brave, loyal professional woman with a smoldering hot and deeply disturbed partner, of course we all wanted to be Scully.)

If you think about it, The X-Files is a lot like adolescence: You start out thinking it's going to be a little hokey, NBD, and then you end up in its thrall, captivated, occasionally hugely let down. A lot of people behave strangely, and no one gets out unscathed (I, for instance, spent a lot of nights crying in the shower, and Mulder, well, died and came back to life).

In some ways the show's return to television is like getting to return to that murky, undeveloped time in my life, that time when you're allowed to be obsessed with a television show because adolescence is all about obsession: with fitting in, with standing out, with narrowing the gulf between who you are and who you wish you were.

It's been 20 years, and I still can't wait to see what will happen. 

Mom friends are better than mom jeans

It's birthday party season!

When Eli was born in August of 2012, I was lucky enough to connect with a network of other new moms. So most of my friends' kids have birthdays between June and December, which means throughout the summer and fall, we attend a lot of birthday parties.

One thing I didn't necessarily consider about having a baby was that it would open up a whole new social circle for me. Now in addition to work friends and school friends I had mom friends...a label I eventually shortened to "the moms" (as in, "Phil, I'm having dinner with the moms tonight").

Making mom friends is a little bit like dating. When I was on maternity leave, I joined every meetup group, every playgroup I heard about; I said yes to every playdate. Fortunately, mom friend relationships move a lot faster than romantic relationships: At the beginning of the playdate, you're shyly scrutinizing each other's diaper bags for clues (is that a bottle of formula? A Mam pacifier? Puffs, she lets her kid have puffs, that's a good sign); by the end, you're swapping birth stories and describing in graphic detail exactly what that last cervical check felt like.

When Eli was an infant, I relied on the women of my Google group to get me out of the house and give me something to look forward to. On Mondays, we did mommy/baby yoga at New York Sports Club, usually followed by a walk through Forest Hills Gardens and — if we were feeling daring — lunch. (Have you ever seen the look on a waiter's face when 5-10 women with strollers haul themselves into your restaurant? It's something!) On Fridays, we convened in the children's section of Barnes & Noble or at the park, laying blankets end-to-end to create a patchwork where all our babies could roll, spit, grab and faceplant onto each other.

We did stroller exercises and formed a book club. We glammed up for moms' nights out and brought each other pastries for day playdates in. We compared notes on solid food, sleeping through the night and teething. We traded horror stories about spitup and screaming fits. At night I would text them photos of my glass of wine sitting atop Eli's high chair — a perfect epitome for bedtime — or Paranormal Activity-style shots of the baby monitor in night vision mode.

Can I make a confession? When I went back to work, it wasn't staying at home with Eli that I missed, the day-to-day routine of changing diapers and playing peekaboo. It was all that socializing with "the moms" who had become my close girlfriends.

Now that our kids are older, it's not so easy to chat with other moms at the playground because our kids no longer stay in one spot long enough to get a good conversation going. ("So the other day I was at the — be careful on that slide — supermarket on Queens Boulevard with the — you have to get off the slide if someone wants to come down it! — guacamole and I noticed — no, we just got off the swings, I'm not putting you back on them right now — what was I saying again?") And it's interesting to see parenting styles develop and evolve from the days when all we all had in common was that we had new babies — it can be awkward when you find yourself at the playground with someone you haven't seen in a while and you realize, Oh, she's totally a helicopter mom and I bet she's judging me because I'm not paying enough attention to my kid! Wait a second, where is my kid?

But on the flip side — and this is where birthday party season comes in — another thing I didn't realize about becoming a parent was how much I would genuinely love my friends' kids, too. I love hearing about funny things they said or outrageous fits they pulled (bonus points if it makes me feel better about my own kid's outrageous fits). I love chatting with them (now that they can chat!) and watching them navigate playtime with each other.

When our kids were really small, before they had friendships of their own, I considered an invitation to a 1st birthday party an honor. After all, I reasoned, since the party was really for the parents, not the kid, and the parents were the ones doing the inviting, it must mean they liked us! So birthday party season feels, instead of a chore, like an affirmation: These are our people.

When you Google "mom friends," the top results that appear are all about how to make them: Why is it so hard? Why don't you have "good ones"? Poor Googlers. Am I allowed to brag about this for a moment? I have mom friends who have offered to get Eli from school for me when the subways were fucked and neither Phil nor I were going to make it to school on time. I have mom friends who I can talk to about poop and cervical mucus without blinking. I have mom friends I can drink bottles of wine in my sweatpants with and mom friends I can run for miles with (and sometimes they're the same friends!).

In family trees, children always appear as leaves growing out from the tree. But what I've been thinking about lately is that children are also roots, pulling us deeper and closer to where we are and to each other. At the first birthday party of birthday party season, I got to hold all these babies and I thought, I may not have another kid, but I hope someone will always lend me a baby to hold. I was walking to the subway on my way to work and a guy in a suit smiled and nodded at me — I have no idea who it was but I assume it was the dad of one of Eli's classmates. I've lived in Forest Hills all my life, but I've never felt more a part of the community than I do now that I'm "Eli's mom."

But when you have good mom friends, they become more than just mom friends; they become your community. I have friends who will text me to make sure I don't get on the E train if it's running slowly, and friends who will text me to make sure I walk Eli down 108th Street so we can see all the construction trucks. I have friends who tease Phil about how much he loves Legos and friends who chat with my mom in the bagel store. I was out of town during the most recent birthday party and someone texted me a picture of Phil and Eli riding around in a racecar; I sent it on to Phil, joking, "My spies are everywhere."

So that's why I love birthday party season. I love looking around at all these families I love whose kids have grown up with mine and thinking: We created all this. Three years ago, we couldn't have dreamed who these children would be. And how sweet it will be year after year as we get to see who they become.

When you're not mom enough

I'm a bad mom.

I grumble when Eli clambers into my bed at 5 a.m. I lose my patience when he won't stick out his feet so I can put his socks on or open his mouth so I can brush his teeth. On more than one occasion I have stomped away from him — my 2-year-old — and slammed the door while he stood wailing in the hallway.

But I'm also a great mom. I can get Eli from playtime to bedtime in 20 minutes flat and still have time to chat together in bed ("Talk to me about my day!" he demands). I let him ride his scooter to school and splash in puddles when it rains. I teach him about kindness and good manners and I hold back my flinch when he's sick and vomits all over me.

Some days I'm Supermom. Eli and I read books together and he walks companionably next to me. We share snacks and conversation and he'll say things like, "Great idea!" and "That's a good plan" and "Thank you, Mom!" I am like a generous benefactor, charitably bestowing gifts of screen time and treats upon my progeny.

Other days I'm unhinged and unmommed. Every other word out of my mouth is "no." We get into power struggles over whether he can do nonsensical things like sit on the bathroom stool while putting on shoes, or I refuse to give into his whining demands for "milk in a waaaaaater bottllllle" out of spite. (Why do you want milk in a water bottle, you tempestuous creature? It's a water bottle. Literally by its definition it is made to serve water!) Dreams are crushed. I am the meanest mommy in the world.

It's tempting to blame these incongruities on Eli — toddlers are, after all, mysterious and unpredictable, and what delights him one day may tick him off the next. (Earlier this week I was all jazzed to take him out for a morning run — I even sweetened the deal by offering to buy him a bagel on the way out, like the Holy Grail of breakfast foods — and literally on his way to get in the stroller he suddenly decided he wanted to stay home and eat string cheese instead.)

There's always a part of the day you're going to dread, when the gears grind uncomfortably against each other to bring things to a halt. I, for example, am spectacularly bad at getting Eli out of the house in the morning.

What I want to do: Get Eli to go the bathroom one last time and sit still so I can help him put his socks, shoes and jacket on.
What Eli wants to do: Run around the house like a madman, couple all his chuggers together, finish building a huge tower of magnatiles, take his pants and underwear off completely, hide under the table, beg for snacks, cry, find paci and soft blankie, request milk, refuse to go to school, et al.

Phil, on the other hand, is great at this kind of transition, because he specializes in throwing Eli a mini circus for each stage of the proceedings, which is something I refuse to do on principle because I am not a clown and I am not here to entertain you so I can trick you into putting your damn feet in your socks.

So every morning Eli and I do the same frustrating dance, in which I feel myself getting madder and madder — like a balloon slowly expanding with rage and the rage is ridiculously made out of the fact that my kid won't let me put his shoes on. This morning, in an epic parenting standoff of which I am the opposite of proud, I demanded that Eli pee in the potty while he wailed, "I wanna pee on the FLOOR!"

Obviously both of us have some growing up to do.

So what's essential — and yet so freaking difficult — for me to remember is that it's really in my hands; how can I expect him to be more mature when I'm behaving like a toddler myself?

So: deep breaths. I can be a grumpy mom, or I can be a great mom. What kind of mom am I going to be today?

(Not the kind of mom who consents to serving milk in a water bottle, though. I can tell you that much.)

In the house of tomorrow

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
—Kahlil Gibran

The other day, Phil jokingly said to me, "What's it like to look at someone and see yourself?" Because Eli looks like me, get it? We have the same cheeky cheeks and the same "face-cracking smile," as someone once put it.

Because Eli looks like me, get it? We have the same cheeky cheeks and the same "face-cracking smile," as someone once put it.

But later that same day Eli and I were walking to school. It was one of the first days where it was warm enough for him to actually walk, rather than sit wrapped up in his fleece BundleMe and hermetically sealed inside the stroller's weather shield. After a few blocks where he took advantage of his newfound freedom by zigzagging all over the sidewalk and I thought I would have to duct-tape him into his stroller, he calmed down and strolled companionably next to me, even deigning to hold my hand while crossing the street.

At one corner there was a construction worker wearing a hard hat and Eli struck up a conversation. "Hi!" he said, waving. When he didn't get a response, undaunted, he tried again. "Hi!" The construction worker smiled and nodded a greeting. "Hi! I'm going to school!" Eli called congenially.

I felt this weird spurt of pride flare up inside me. So friendly and social! Then I thought: Where'd he get that from?

I was notably shy as a little kid, hiding behind my mom and crying when we separated. Phil was known to announce "I'm not talking today" and was such a silent toddler that his grandmother secretly spirited him away to a speech therapist. (Diagnosis: He didn't feel like talking today.) 

But Eli has always perked up in the company of others. All those days I spent when he was an infant willing him to nap in his dark, quiet bedroom, all he wanted was to be out in the world where he could be the noisiest baby in any room he was in. The first time we brought Eli to Tot Shabbat, before he could walk, he crawled right into the middle of a large group of older kids and plopped himself down. He has always wanted to be part of the action — if not the whole dang center of attention. (Eli's teacher once told me that when some musicians came to perform at school, Eli effectively abandoned his role as "audience member" and launched directly into "performer" by getting up and dancing when he was supposed to be listening.) 

For some reason I feel occasionally jarred by this realization: My kid looks like me, but his personality isn't my personality. I am embarrassed when I have to talk to strangers and avoid it at all costs; Eli practically follows them down the street, calling, "Guy! Hey guy!" I'm a little cautious in new environments; Eli dives into them like an unleashed beast, hungry to explore every corner. At a Purim carnival, Phil and I lost him in the crowd at least five times, and every time we found him in a different spot — coloring crafts with a new family, trying to jump the line at the skee-ball game, attempting to sneak a Dum-Dum from the lollipop stand. (Why did we not panic when we lost him so many damn times? That's for another post on being the Worst Parents Ever.) 

Suddenly I think I know how my parents felt when they came up to visit me in my senior year of college and chatted with some of my friends about how I was running my first marathon. "She didn't get that from us at all!" I remember them saying, as if they felt baffled and maybe even a tiny bit betrayed by my newfound athleticism.

I think as parents, it's a natural instinct to look for the ways our kids are like us. Recently Phil took Eli out for a treat at the bakery and when Eli chose a chocolate mousse, Phil said, "That's Papa Dan coming through!" (My grandfather was a noted connoisseur of chocolate mousse.) That's why Phil keeps trying to get Eli to watch Star Wars with him and why we keep taking him to Mets games; we want him to like the same things we like. That's why when Eli grabbed my running hat and my keys and announced, "I'm going for a run" it was one of the prouder moments I've had as a mom. 

But I've been surprised at how much I enjoy those other moments, the ones that make me wonder, How can we be related? When Eli walks into a doctor's office and boldly tells the nurse, "I want a lollipop." Or when he monopolizes the attention of the mascot at a Brooklyn Cyclones game, jabbering away with the enormous seagull costume while all the other kids wait patiently for autographs.

It's a beautiful and terrifying thing when you realize the child you've created is a wild and mysterious creature, one with desires and dreams that are totally separate from your own. The first time Eli tasted a gummi bear, made a face and handed the bag back to me, I was shocked. But you grew inside of me, I thought. How can you not like gummi bears? 

It's boggling to me that, even though he's only 2, we can already have such a complex relationship. Can I really feel proud of the personality traits that are so different from mine — is that like taking credit for work that's clearly been plagiarized from a more outgoing parent? On the other hand, if I can be embarrassed by his tantrums (which believe me I am) why can't I be emboldened by his successes?

There are so many schools of thought on how to talk to your children about who they are and who you want them to be. Don't tell your child he's smart; tell him he tried hard so that you praise his effort, not his intelligence. Don't tell your child she did a good job helping; tell her she's helpful so you create an innate sense of being a helpful person.

Every day I find myself thinking, "Eli is so smart! So creative! So funny!" and then second-guessing whether I'm supposed to say that out loud. So instead I try to say this: "I love being your mommy." Because whether he's an extrovert or an introvert, whether he likes the Mets or...OK, there is no viable alternative there — that, at least, is always true.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.