Joe gave me a great anniversary gift this year: he arranged for a day off for both of us to spend together; and I’m thinking that this may be a new, bi-monthly solution to our date night difficulties.

As everyone with a child knows, pretty much nothing is as much of a rare, precious, desperately yearned-for resource as time for yourselves. So for my gift, Joe planned to take a Friday off from work during my maternity leave and paid for Neve to spend the day (in the baby room) at the same place where Lily would be in pre-school. Plus, as a bonus, he arranged for his parents to come over and feed Lily dinner, and take care of Neve, while we ate dinner at a restaurant.

So after dropping off the girls, Joe made a lovely, Cheerios-free brunch while we read the newspapers; then we went for a bike ride and attended a matinee screening of the last Harry Potter movie. (We’d hoped to do more outdoors, like canoeing, or going biking at Kensington, but that Friday turned out to be kind of overcast and crummy.) After picking up the girls and spending some time with them, Grandma and Grandpa arrived, so we left for a quiet dinner at Sweet Lorraine’s.

You know. A dinner where we weren’t begging/ordering Lily to focus on dinner and eat, with Joe trying to fork food into his mouth while cradling Neve, who suddenly wants to be held.

We did another “date day” for Joe’s birthday in December, and I plan to ask for another in February, when my birthday comes up. It’s a lovely, occasional respite that we can look forward to.

On this particular anniversary, I’ll confess that I feel a strange lightness – an appreciation for the life and family I now have. And I have no regrets. Because you started making a point of saying “I love you” at the end of visits and phone calls once you were diagnosed (thank you for that), I’m not haunted by what wasn’t said; and since we’d visited you and Dad only weeks before, at Thanksgiving and at Christmas – despite the logistic difficulties of traveling by plane with a 7 month old baby – I’m wholly at peace that we got to spend some reasonably “normal” time with you before everything spiraled out of control, and that you got to spend as much time with Lily as was possible before you died.

Lily, sporting her distinctive fashion style in the summer of 2011

Yes, she can be stubborn, of course (she was bound to get that trait no matter what, with me and Joe as parents), and she’s demonstrated already that she may well possess Joe’s temper and capacity for volume.

But there are nonetheless these moments when I nearly burst with love for her. For instance, when we were returning home from visiting Dad at Christmas, she sang and ran and skipped down the airport’s multiple moving sidewalks, wearing a sparkly red tutu over her purple pants, with her long, ragged braid bouncing off her back. I was the one chasing her with our bags, while Joe stayed with the baby in the stroller, so I got to see the faces of all the people we passed light up with smiles as they watched this sprite of a girl – this little being that Joe and I somehow created.

Moments like this are why Taylor Swift’s song “Never Grow Up” makes me weep nearly every time I hear it now.

And these times are some of the most enjoyable ones in parenting, of course. You can witness the same kind of excitement in this video of Lily (dressed as Cinderella this year) running between houses in our neighborhood on Halloween, yelling “Trick or Treat!” with her friend.

She’s now at this age where she can entertain herself for good, sometimes long stints of time, but you nonetheless have to discipline yourself to keep checking on her – or else you find out she’s done something like cut her bangs off, or colored her pajamas with green marker (on the same morning, no less).

Here’s her recent hair handiwork; and you should note that when I told her that she has a cousin who planned to study how to cut people’s hair, Lily said, “I already do that.” Touche, little one.

Missed a few, but really cut pretty straight on the diagonal, didn't she?

But she loves stories and books – one of my favorite times all day is when I get to read to her before bed – and she loves art. For quite a while now, we’ve been letting her paint on newspapers on the kitchen floor, and we often join her for this activity.

For Hanukkah, though, we got Lily an easel, which is now in the basement toy room. She loves it; and when she’s painting, pr singing, dancing, pretending to write, or acting out entire stage plays with her dolls – well, these are the times when I feel like maybe we’re not doing such a bad job as parents.

Lily started taking dance lessons this past fall, and I loved seeing her dress in tights and a leotard and dance around our kitchen in her tap shoes. After a couple of months, though, she started telling me that she didn’t want to take the classes anymore, which made me a little sad, but I pulled her out and instead signed her up for an art class that we’re about to start. (On the up-side, Lily told me she wanted out of the dance class just as a crazy-high costume deposit was due, so if nothing else, I’m thankful she told me this news when she did.)

It’s been a year of a lot of changes for Lily. After moving out of her crib to a toddler bed earlier this year – and telling me the morning after her first night in the bed, “My baby brother or sister can have the crib” – she just recently, on the cusp of the new year, made the switch to a twin bed. (One you’d recognize, actually, since it had been mine as a girl.) To encourage her to make the transition, I made what I consider a very Mom move: I put Rapunzel sheets on her Christmas list. Susan got them for her, and I got her a Rapunzel comforter, and sure enough, Lily never looked back or thought twice about the switch.

Finally, Lily’s been an absolutely fantastic big sister. Though I was worried neurotically about this, and prepared myself for the worst, Lily is crazy in love with Neve, and she constantly wants to hold her, play with her, make her smile, etc.

And the love is reciprocated. You should see them together. Lily will flit about the room, and Neve’s gaze will follow her; or Lily will repeatedly say something silly-sounding – like “Google” or “chickie” – to Neve, and this alone will make the baby giggle (despite the fact that she’s otherwise a tough nut to crack, laugh-wise – like her mom).

Neve just turned 6 months this past weekend – the same time her first tooth broke through her bottom gums. (She’s been drooling like a crazy person since she was 3 months old, so we’re surprised it’s taken this long to spot something tangible.) She’s not super cranky about the teething, but because she’s not comfortable, we’re not getting much sleep of late.

Weirdly, though, I seem to have adapted so that most of the time, I can just push through the day anyway. Some days it’s harder than others – I have recently fallen asleep repeatedly in the middle of the day while making up stories for Lily, and while singing a song for Lily – but Joe and I generally do our best to rescue each other when one of us is flagging.

Neve is now getting to the point where she can sit up while leaning forward on her hands. She started smiling in response to things at about 6 weeks, but I saw what her smile would look like on the day she was born; as she slept, all these expressions would cross over her face, and this big, Joe-like smile was one of them. I got the sense right then that she is a strangely self-possessed, “old soul” baby, and that impression has only deepened in the months since.

She looked almost exactly like Lily at first, but she’s now getting to be her own little person. (Joe’s worried, by the way, about Lily having his nose, and he fears she’ll have a miserable adolescence; but I think she’s a beautiful blend of us both, of course. Not that I’m objective.) Neve’s middle name is Rashana. Per Jewish tradition, we took the first letter of the name of a family member who’d died – namely, you – and although the name is Hindi (meaning “creation”), it sounds like it could be Jewish, doesn’t it? And I liked giving her an Irish name, too.

I’m taken aback by how much I love this baby. Truly. I know I hemmed and hawed for a good while about having a second child, but now I can’t imagine not having Neve. She is definitely our last child, by virtue of our age and other factors; but she’s so sweetly tolerant, and laid back in a roll-with-it way, that if I were younger, I just might be tempted to venture this way once more.

And I’m surprised as anyone to hear myself think that. When my friend Carol talked about “enjoying the baby stage” more with her third child, I thought she was nuts. The baby stage was primarily something to be endured, right? But I get it now. Neve’s given me the gift of drinking in this time while letting go of the self-doubt and judgment that plagues you the first time around. Then, every time the baby screams inconsolably, it feels like it’s because you, an insecure first-time parent, don’t know what you’re doing. But now that I have my bearings about me, there really is a simple beauty to the baby stage. It’s just pretty impossible to ever reach that zen place with your first child; so I’m thankful to get here now.

Early in December, for example, I was giving Neve a bath one morning and listening to the Indigo Girls’ “Holly Happy Days” album when the song “It Really Is (A Wonderful Life)” came on. I sang it to Neve as I rubbed soap onto her skin and ran a warm washcloth over her body, and as she stared up at me, I cried a couple of quick, happy tears and felt like I was experiencing one of those rare, perfect moments when you fully realize the blessings of your own life.

Here’s the Indigo Girls performing the song. It’s one of my new favorites.

Lily’s recent musical moment, meanwhile, involved her first preschool holiday concert, which you can see a clip of here:

All of her teachers, in the days leading up to the show, told me that Lily was “the loudest” (I know, shocking to hear this of Joe’s child), and that “she’ll either pass out or go hoarse before the concert comes.” She wasn’t as loud at the actual performance, but I can hardly blame her. It’s like a Hollywood premiere when the kids come in, with flashbulbs going off like crazy, and there are a LOT of people packed in a small room – so it can all be a little overwhelming to a 3 year old.

But you’d love her to death, I know, just as you would Neve.

This past summer, I took Lily out to see the moon one night before she went to bed. Out of nowhere, she said, “I’m so glad you’re here, Mommy,” and I hugged her more tightly to me. It’s like this tiny moment held an existential breakthrough for me. For what all of us want, what all of us need, is to feel like we’re here on this earth for a reason; and she – and Joe and Neve – give me that and so much more.

Now I know that in spite of your many strengths and good qualities, you also had your flaws and tough moments – I vividly remember hearing you cry through a closed door after you had to punish one of us – and this comforts me, too, on the toughest days of parenting. For I know that none of us always feel like we’re doing it right; most of what we do feels like a shot in the dark, doing the best we can under difficult circumstances.

Joe – who’s a fantastic father, you won’t be surprised to learn – was really tested by Lily last night, for example. But as we were both lying awake in bed hours later, unable to sleep, I told him: “If there’s one thing these past few years have taught me, it’s that when kids are this young, each day is a clean slate. No matter how much you or I might feel we’ve messed something up, or made a bad judgment call, Lily is going to wake up and be the same chirpy little girl she usually is, and all will be forgiven. We get chance after chance after chance to do better, and there’s grace in that.”

So while I pause on this anniversary to remember you, and provide a kind of ethereal update, I’ll end with a link to the song that you sang with Dad and Joe’s parents – the only time all four of Lily’s grandparents were gathered together – while having lunch in our dining room days after Lily was born. (“Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo.”) Joe and I had never heard the song, but from that point on, we learned it so that we could serenade Lily with it ourselves. Each time I sing it, I think of that moment, and it makes me so thankful that we all got to be together in that way at least once.

Thanks for this memory, and for the billion invisible things that I now know that mothers do every day. We miss you.

Love,
Jenn

p.s. Lily asks about you often lately, and I’m clear-eyed and straightforward in answering her questions (which makes me think you’d approve). This line of inquiry began in earnest when I was pregnant, and Lily was doing figuring out precisely who had once been in whose tummy. I’ve shown her quilts you’ve made, photos of you, and pictures of you playing with her as a baby. “She got sick,” Lily tells me now when you come up in conversation. “That’s true,” I tell her. “But she sure loved you like crazy, kiddo.”

Movies I actually got to watch in a movie theater for work assignments (thank goodness this is actually part of my job sometimes):
“Scream 4″
“Win Win”
“Cedar Rapids”
“Ides of March”
“Answer This!”
“Clash of the Wolves” (a 1927 silent Rin Tin Tin film, which was screened as part of a book promotion event with Susan Orlean)

Movies I watched in a movie theater when NOT on the job:
“Rio”
“Mr. Popper’s Penguins”
“The Muppets” (Are you noticing a pattern here?)
“Crazy Stupid Love” (anniversary date night)
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 2″ (a weekday matinee watched during one of my and Joe’s patented “date days”)

Movies half-watched when rented On Demand, due to a child waking up or one or both of us falling asleep:
“Sex and the City 2″
“Bridesmaids”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1″ (we finished watching the following night)
“The Hangover” (watched solo, in pieces, during my maternity leave)

Movies I can nearly quote by heart now:
“Tangled”
“Toy Story 2″
“The Sound of Music” (admittedly, this was true before Lily was around)

The Tony Awards made me anxious to see:
“The Book of Mormon,” of course
“The Normal Heart”
Norbert Leo Butz in ANYTHING (Sutton Foster, too, though I previously got to see her in “The Drowsy Chaperone”)
New York City again, in general

Live shows that led us downtown to the Fox Theatre
An awesome live taping of “A Prairie Home Companion”
Barney’s Birthday Bash

Books half-read – usually because I needed to start reading a different book for work:
“The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman
“Here Comes Trouble,” by Michael Moore
“Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” by Susan Orlean
“Lastingness: The Art of Old Age,” by Nicholas Delbanco
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Of the books I managed to finish, my favorites were:
“Bossypants,” by Tina Fey
“Poser,” by Clair Dederer
“This is Where I Leave You,” by Jonathan Tropper

Favorite shows during maternity leave:
Lots and lots of “West Wing” episodes on DVD
“Up All Night” – Duh. It’s like watching our life, but with sharper dialogue.
“Modern Family”
“Parks and Recreation”
“30 Rock”
“Daily Show” and “Colbert Report”
Occasional forays into “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful” while eating lunch. The actor that plays Ridge on “Bold” is so painfully bad that I started to wonder if it was some kind of ironic performance art thing, a la James Franco on “General Hospital.”

Things I love about watching “Sesame Street” with Lily:
The opening sketch; dance-oriented bits; and songs like will.i.am’s “What I Am,” Hunter Foster’s “Lever Lover,” and one of my comedy faves, Ricky Gervais, singing Elmo a lullaby.

Things about “Sesame Street” that make me want to run into traffic:
Abby’s Flying Fairy School – the theme song alone nearly sets off my gag reflex these days. Twinkle think about that.
Elmo’s World – the segment that never, ever seems to end.

Hosts of my favorite “Muppet Show” episodes from the first 3 seasons, which Lily has been watching on DVD:
Harry Belafonte
Gilda Radnor
Roger Miller
Chloris Leachman

Things that keep stacking up on the DVR, but I never, ever seem to watch:
“The Office” – after Jim and Pam got married, it just felt over.
87 episodes of “House,” from various seasons, all slammed together.

Purchased CD by a band I love, yet I have yet to listen to:
Foo Fighters, “Wasting Light”

CD that, four months after I bought it, I listened to for the first time:
Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now”

Song I’ve heard a million times, and that continues to be played as if on a loop, because Lily likes to dance and sing to it, though it now makes Joe want to pierce his eardrum with an ice pick:
Michael Buble and the Puppini Sisters’ “Jingle Bells”

How the last moments of 2011 were spent:
For the first time this past year, we watched an On Demand movie in its entirety in one sitting – Woody Allen’s wonderful “Midnight in Paris” – while drinking champagne, and then we watched the ball drop, and finished up the night with the last scene from “When Harry Met Sally” (my request). About as nice of an evening as we could hope for, really.

I got a cosmo, Joe got a beer, and we ordered burgers. As we talked during the meal, I said, a couple of times, “Wow, my burger is REALLY GOOD,” and I ordered another cosmo. Now, this was the most I’d had to drink in one evening since before I was pregnant with Neve, so I was feeling pretty tipsy, but I was also really enjoying myself.

And I had a great time with Joe and friends at the concert, so it was a fabulous night overall. But for days and days afterward, I’d think about that burger, and my mouth would water, remembering how good it was.

“I don’t know what it was,” I said to Joe one night, “but that burger I had before the concert tasted amazing to me. Were the burgers that good?”

I’d questioned this afterward, because the place wasn’t a cult local favorite for burgers – just a run-of-the-mill bar in an advantageous location. And my suspicions were confirmed when Joe said, “They were good, but not that special.”

So I finally figured out that although I may have had cosmo goggles on that evening in regard to the food, the main thing that was heightening my enjoyment was the sense of freedom I felt (or “tasted,” as it were). Freedom to have a couple of drinks; to spend time with Joe and some dear old friends from college, listening to music that I love; freedom from absently, mechanically shoveling food down in order to feed an increasingly disgruntled baby or comfort a sensitive 3 year old; freedom to re-visit the person I had been before I became “Mommy.”

It was such a relief, and a release, to find that I could still locate that person within myself. But the opportunities are few and increasingly hard to come by.

On Thanksgiving weekend, for example, Joe and I had tickets for the Michigan/Ohio State game, and Joe’s parents (who live in Ann Arbor) were going to watch Lily and Neve. Perfect, right?

We’d spent the night at my in-laws’ house, so after a relatively leisurely morning, I went to the bedroom where Lily was playing and told her that her Daddy and I would be leaving for the game soon. We’d done this three times before (we’d split our season tickets with a friend) without incident, so I was surprised when Lily said, “I don’t want you to go to the football game.”

This is disconcerting, I thought – she hadn’t exhibited much in the way of separation anxiety with me for the past year or so – but she was calm, so maybe I could talk her through this, I thought. “Sweetie, it’s the last one for a long, long time, and it’s just a few hours. Daddy and I will be back later this afternoon.”

“I want to go with you.”

“You can’t, sweetie. We only have two tickets, and besides, I don’t think you’d like it.”

I gave her a kiss and headed downstairs to get my coat on. We called her down to say goodbye, and as she stood at the top of the stairs, her face was in full-blown misery mode, pouty lip and all. She whimpered about not wanting me to go, weeping and wailing and grabbing onto me with heartwrenching desperation.

As every parent does, I pulled everything possible out of my bag of tricks. I tried to lure her with promises of the fun things she’d do with Grandma and Grandpa; I told her she couldn’t come with us, because we would be getting a surprise for her; I reminded her that we do a lot of stuff just for her (a Barney show, the zoo, etc.), and there were some things that were just for Mommy and Daddy; I told her Neve would be sad without her big sister; blah blah blah – you name it, I tried it. And the scene only intensified until my in-laws had to literally pull her off of me – screaming and kicking and raging and clenching at me with her small fists – and flush me out the front door.

By then I, too, was in tears and feeling terrible and selfish. Like I was the worst parent in the world for wanting to go to a football game.

But I made myself get in the car, and I cried as we drove away. “Well, this is going to be a great time,” Joe muttered.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But that was pretty horrible. You think I should just be able to turn my feelings off?”

“Actually, yes!” he said. “But if you are going to be miserable, and you want to go back to the house, fine. We’ll watch it on TV. But I don’t think you should have to have the permission of your 3 year old to go somewhere.”

I told Joe to turn around and take me back to his parents’ house, and that he could go to the game on his own. He instead practiced selective listening and kept driving.

“It’s just – why can’t I get a break?” I said. “I work really hard. Why aren’t I allowed to take four f***ing hours off every once in a while?”

“If you want a break, you have to just take it. You can’t just do it when it’s OK with Lily.”

I hate when I’m justifiably upset and Joe makes perfect sense. So annoying in a spouse.

“Besides,” he continued, “I go through less intense versions of this when I take her to preschool. She’ll get over it, and she’ll be fine.”

I hadn’t known that. Since just before Neve was born, Joe had been dropping off Lily at preschool (ah, the lure of a crossover vehicle with a DVD player, if only for 2 blocks), and he’d never mentioned the return of this separation anxiety. OK, I thought. If this is part of a pattern of her recent behavior, this makes a little more sense. I knew that, as a 1 and 2 year old, Lily got over my leaving within minutes at daycare. And I also reminded myself that kids can’t, and honestly shouldn’t be, happy all the time. So I grudgingly tried to take baby steps out of my funk.

My first step was pointing to a space in the parking structure that had a steel beam in the center, and a “compact cars only” sign on the wall. “That would have to be an extremely compact car,” I said. And from then on, I tried not to look back.

Of course, the game was exciting, close, and profoundly satisfying, since Michigan FINALLY won, and I had a great time watching it. But because it was close, it took us a while to get out of the stadium, and took even longer to get out of the parking structure and across town to Joe’s parents’ place.

Once there, I saw Band-aids on Lily’s big toes, and learned the reason why: after we had left, she screamed and kicked more before announcing she was going to follow us. She opened the front door and, barefoot, ran down the sidewalk until her toes bled. Oy.

Her grandmother talked her down enough to go back into the house to soak her feet, which she liked, and put on Band-aids. She was still set on following us, so Grandma offered to draw a picture showing how far the house was from the stadium. And from then on, things had gotten better.

Oh, I said. Of course. Fantastic.

I tried to shake it off, and tell myself that what was done was done. We packed up our stuff and got in the car to go home.

Neve, at this point, lost it and began to scream her lungs out.

She continued to do this all the way home, which wasn’t the usual half hour, thanks to football traffic, but more like an hour.

“Thank God we won the game, or this wouldn’t have been worth it,” I yelled to Joe.

“I agree,” he said over Neve’s frantic, angry cries.

Indeed, though Joe had gotten tickets (as a birthday present) from his parents for a Canadian Brass concert the next day, Joe called later that night to tell them there was no way we were going. Enough was enough for one weekend.

At this point, though it’s hardly politic to say so, I think we all must acknowledge that while children have a great capacity for adding joy to one’s life – holidays are often way more fun than they once were, and in one case, an annoying travel day was rendered tolerable by way of Lily’s cheerful attitude and presence – they also have the inverse ability to suck the joy out of certain days and experiences as well.

I’d wager, or at least hope, that we end up on the plus side overall, but on the toughest days, it’s hard to keep sight of the big picture.

So really – is it any wonder that I keep thinking about that burger with deep longing?

What’s the big deal, you may ask? Previously, when I’d put her in the Jumparoo, she just kind of hung out, or swung from side to side. But seeing her actively bounce in it – that is, seeing her really start to PLAY – was one of the first tangible indications (witnessed by me, anyway) that she’s becoming a more sentient little person.

Yes, she smiled in response to things at about 6 weeks, and at 4 months, she started giggling occasionally. (Like her mother, she’s a tough crowd, comedy-wise – you really have to nail it to get a laugh.)

But this Jumparoo moment wasn’t her responding to something; it was her initiating something. And that was strangely, surprisingly moving to me – an initial preview of the playfulness to come.

And since then, she asks me nearly every day, “Do I have dance class today?”

So color me shocked when she came out in the middle of her most recent ballet/tap lesson – dressed in her pink, skirted leotard, and this week’s appointed class “leader” – and asked to go home.

Huh? Did I miss something?

Oh, yes. I had no idea in the moment, but yes.

This all really began during the class’ transition period, when Lily’s supposed to come out to the waiting area and change from her ballet shoes to her tap shoes. (Ten minutes earlier, she’d come out claiming to have to go potty, but the trip yielded nothing, and I didn’t think much about it.) So while I’m seated with Neve on my lap, ready to help Lily with the switch, she came out and said, with a hint of a whine in her voice, “I want to go home.”

“What? Why?”

“I miss Daddy. I want to see Daddy.”

“Aw, sweetie. We’ll see him really soon. He’s just making dinner for all of us right now. After you tap dance for a few minutes, we’ll all go see him.”

“But I’m hungry, and I want to see Daddy.”

I pause, processing this. “How seriously do I take this?” I wonder. She’d had a snack on the way from preschool to class; and she pretty consistently eats very little at dinner. But still, there’s not a mother on the planet who isn’t deeply vulnerable to her child’s claim of hunger.

Nonetheless, I tried to convince her to stay. “We’ll go home really soon. Let’s put on your tap shoes, and as soon as class is over, we’ll go see Daddy and eat.”

“I don’t want to wear my tap shoes.”

OK, the first request was strange, but this one is downright bizarre. Lily wants to wear her tap shoes all the time at home. She loves them. What on earth is going on? (Since there’s only a small window through which to watch the class, I’m not able to observe much of the class for myself. So that option was out.)

“Do you want to just keep your ballet shoes on?”

“Yeah,” she nods.

I shrug. “OK. I don’t think it will matter that much.”

So after this odd exchange, she finally runs back into the studio, and I hope whatever that was about is behind us.

Nope.

Just a few minutes later, the door opens, and Lily’s back out in the waiting area, sitting on the floor and saying that she wants to go home, and that she’s tired.

“Sweetie, there’s only a few more minutes left in class.”

“My legs are tired. I just want to sit down and watch.”

My impulse is to say, “Maybe the teachers will let you do that,” but I stop myself. That’s probably not right.

“I want to go home. I’m tired. And I want to see Daddy.”

With Neve still on my lap, I came down to the floor to look her in the eye. “Are you sure? The class is almost over.”

“I want to go home,” she repeats.

Sigh. Of course, I’d gone through all the logistic craziness of feeding Neve at daycare, getting Lily changed into her dance clothes, packing everything we might need, and carting everyone to the studio. And I knew Lily had previously adored her dance class. Nothing about this made sense.

But then I remember, two weeks earlier, overhearing another mother in the studio waiting room who mentioned that her 4 year old wanted to quit dancing, but the parents were making the girl finish out the year. Though, in retrospect, this is likely because the parents paid for the whole year outright, in the moment, I thought to myself, “Why make a kid stick with something they don’t enjoy? There’s so many activity options out there. If they don’t like one thing, move on to something else.”

So my own little moment of parenting truth had come (conveniently, it arrived moments after I cut a check for this month’s lessons). And when faced with Lily’s insistent pleas to leave, I spoke quietly with her on the floor for a few minutes, trying to figure out what might convince her to stay, before saying, “All right, then. Put your tennis shoes on, and let’s go.”

She did, and we stepped out into the evening, pushing Neve in her stroller toward home.

Lily perked up immediately, on to the next thing. “Is it nighttime, Mommy? It’s dark out.”

“Yes, it gets dark early now, because it’s fall,” I said, my voice tight and deflated. Not just because it appeared Lily’s love affair with dance might be over (though that in itself was a bit of a bummer, since I’d loved watching her flit about the house in her leotard and tap shoes); there were lots of other activities (soccer? gymnastics?) that Lily could try. No, I found myself mostly frustrated because her 180 on this issue was confusing and whiplash-inducing, and I had a sense there was a better way to handle it. It was just eluding me.

“I think the moon is following us,” Lily chirped, happily.

I was wracking my brain when it hit me: the one thing that made this class meeting different from past lessons was that at the start of class, the teacher announced that it was Lily’s turn to be the class leader.

Exactly what this meant, I don’t know, but I suspected it meant she was the first to try various steps they were teaching. So as we pushed Neve’s stroller across the street, toward home, I asked, “Lily, was it being the leader? Did you not like that?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

While you’d think that solving this riddle would make me feel better, I felt strangely more flustered and angry. Even if we turned around and explained things to the teacher, the class would pretty much be over. And what was I teaching Lily by getting up and leaving? That when things get difficult, you should just quit?

Again, this was a situation where there was no clear answer or solution. Each choice I had seemed dangerously booby-trapped with potentially bad consequences. And this drove my stress level through the roof.

“Sweetie, I don’t understand. If that’s what was bothering you, why didn’t you just say that when I asked? We could have told the teacher you didn’t want to be the leader, and the problem would have been solved.”

“Because I didn’t want to,” said Lily.

I set my jaw as we turned into our driveway and entered the house. Lily ran up to the door, bounding in to greet Joe, while I muttered and brought Neve inside. I knew I needed to keep it together and not lose my temper, because I knew, in part, I was more angry with myself than with Lily. Why weren’t my instincts better? Why didn’t I figure out right away what was going on? Why is it that, in so many parenting situations, every answer seems equally wrong and damaging? Why couldn’t I ever, just for once, feel competent as a parent?

We sat down to dinner, and I curtly told Joe what had happened, making it plain, to him and to Lily, that I wasn’t happy about the whole thing. “She lied to me,” I said. “She told me she was hungry, even though she’d had a snack; that she was tired, though she seems not remotely tired now; and that she missed her Daddy, though it would only be a few minutes before she saw you.”

I had to leave the room to feed Neve, but I overheard Joe carrying on a calm, rational conversation with Lily. She confirmed that each of the initial things she’d told me weren’t true, and Joe explained that lying to us wasn’t OK, and as a result, she wasn’t going to be allowed to watch her 30 minutes of “Sesame Street” that night.

Lily moped about this for several minutes, but when she pulled herself out of it, she came to me and asked if we could read books together. We curled up together in our big yellow armchair and snuggled while reading book after book after book. And just like that, the wound was healed.

But the second guessing came even then: would punishing her only make her hold faster to her lies in the future, rather than coming clean? Did she even mean to lie, or was she just trying on various excuses because she didn’t know herself what was wrong?

Ugh. It hurts my head, the circles we drive ourselves in as parents. There’s no end to the questioning of every micro- and macro- judgment you make, every day, because the stakes seem so ludicrously high.

And this particular issue is one I know I’ll probably have to face again. The likelihood is that Lily will try lots of things she doesn’t particularly love. And how will I handle each of these? Will I try to talk her into sticking with some of them? Or let her flit about, delving lightly here and there?

This is partially hard for me to grapple with because I was never much of a quitter. (I started playing trombone at age 11, for instance, and I still play now.) The only thing I remember consciously making a choice to quit was my Girl Scout troop, which I thought was kind of lame, in fifth grade.

I remember that my mother made me promise go to the first organizational meeting that year, because she thought I should stay with it. I knew my mind, though, and after the meeting, I said, “I still want to quit.”

My mom gave me the cold shoulder that evening, clearly not pleased with my decision; and I’d never quite understood why. I’d thought, I know with bone certainty what I want. And it would only make her life simpler, since she wouldn’t have to drive me to meetings. What did she care?

But I understand a bit more now. That particular year was the probably the loneliest, toughest one of my childhood, and my mother was probably pretty worried. My body was developing far more quickly than I could handle or understand; this, combined with my less-than-stellar hygiene regimen, resulted in B.O.; and I had few to no friends. I’m sure my mom saw the Scouts as a positive, simple means of keeping me circulating in my little world, so that I didn’t just close myself off in our house, watching television and reading books – which is precisely what I did, of course.

So I get it. When it’s your child, every tiny shrimp fork in the road gets blown up to exponential proportions, and we’re paralyzed by decisions – because none of us feels we know what we’re doing. The reason parenting books seem to contradict each other is that every choice has its good points and bad points. So sometimes, everything you do, despite your good intentions, feels wrong.

Which sucks.

So this past week, when Lily has said she doesn’t want to go to dance class, I’ve said, “Well, let’s just see how you feel on Tuesday.”

On Tuesday morning, I mentioned it was dance class day, and Lily jumped up and down and said, “I’m going to dance class?”

And in the middle of this week’s class, when she came out to change her ballet shoes to tap shoes, a friend of hers in the class told her mommy, “I want to go home.” And minutes later, Lily said the same thing to me. Who knows what’s going on. For all we know, all this could be the girls repeating what someone else in the class is saying. There’s just no telling.

“Lilybug,” I said, “all that’s left of the class is about 10 minutes of tap dancing at this point. Could you just go back in for the last 10 minutes?”

“OK,” she said, neutrally.

And she did. On the walk home, I asked her what her favorite part of class was, and she said tap dancing. I said, “Well, it’s a good thing you stayed for the last part, then.”

“I don’t like the first part,” said Lily.

“Then maybe we should find a class that’s just focused on tap dancing for you when you get a little older. Does that sound good?”

“Yeah,” she said.

I almost felt competent – for just a minute there. But where things go from here, of course, is anyone’s guess.

My long-haired, sweet nemesis

Lily is just now getting her first experiences with money. At a neighbor’s suggestion, we recently encouraged her to help us pick up sticks in the yard, and we gave her a penny for each stick. After a while, she’d earned $3, so we took her to the nearby CVS and told her she could pick out something that cost that much or less. (She chose glittery gold nail polish, naturally.)

Plus, a couple of weekends ago, I took her to Toys R Us to pick out a present for a preschool friend who was having a birthday party. In the past, in similar circumstances, Joe had also let her choose something small for herself, so I did the same. But the first thing she gravitated to was a Rapunzel doll that costs $20 (“Tangled” is probably her favorite movie). I told her it was too much money, and she didn’t cry, she didn’t throw a fit. She found other things, and each time, when I explained they were too much money, she put them back without a fight and looked for something more appropriate. We finally settled on a lower-key doll that was $8 – more than I initially intended to spend on her thing, but she’d been so good about all the “nos” that preceded it that I cut her some extra slack – and I told her that Hanukkah and Christmas were coming up, so maybe she’d get the Rapunzel dollie then.

“Rapunzel was too much money,” she said several times on the drive home, lovingly stroking the red hair of the doll we actually purchased. “But maybe I can get it for Hanukkah. When is Hanukkah?”

“Well, it’s several weeks away yet,” I said, looking at her in the reariew mirror. “But if you’re a good girl, like you usually are, I think you’re chances of getting a Rapunzel dollie are good, sweetie.”

OK. A lovely experience, generally, and I was proud of Lily. She hadn’t acted like an entitled brat in the store, and she seemed to be in the early stages of learning the value of money. All good.

Then, last Wednesday night, I’d wished I’d never had this conversation with her.

Lily had been a little sensitive and whiny that day when I picked her up at preschool. (This wasn’t helped, of course, by the fact that as she was climbing back to her seat in my two-door car, I popped my seat forward to get Neve’s seat in, not knowing Lily was still leaning on my seat, and she fell down hard. I kissed her repeatedly and apologized several times on the rainy drive home, feeling awful, but also feeling like she was milking things a bit, too.) When we got home, I called Joe so Lily could talk to him on speaker phone while I fed Neve, and Joe told her he’d order pizza for dinner to cheer her up.

In the interim, Lily watched a little more than her allotted 30 minutes of “Sesame Street” (a rule that’s been in place for quite some time now). Joe came home at about the time that the pizza arrived, so before the often-lengthy “Elmo’s World” portion of the show began, I turned the TV off and headed to the kitchen with Neve, saying, “Let’s eat dinner, kiddo. Pizza’s here.”

“No! I want to watch ‘Elmo’s World,’” Lily shrieked.

“Lily, I let you watch a little more than 30 minutes, but your TV time is up, and it’s time for dinner.”

She came out to the kitchen and just stood there, shrieking ad nauseum.

“All right. Go to your room,” I said, pointing upstairs.

She made no move, but continued screaming, so Joe swept her up, carrying her on his hip like she was a rolled-up yoga mat.

As usual, this escalated Lily’s sense of rage, so we were all suddenly stressed out and sad and angry while our dinner grew cold on the dinner table.

Joe took the bullet first, monitoring Lily’s attempts to leave her room until finally stationing himself inside her room, blocking the door. She continued to wig out for several minutes, screaming for me (“Mommy! I want Mommy!”) with a desperation that still tears my heart out.

Joe remained impressively patient at first, urging Lily to breathe and calm down. But she was having none of it, crying herself hoarse and repeatedly yelling for me, with no end in sight.

And it’s this moment that kills you. Rationally, you know a child can’t go on like this forever. But in the middle of these tantrums, it sure seems like they can go on for a long, long time.

Eventually, I came into Lily’s room with Neve in my arms and knelt down to talk to her. “Sweetie, you have got to calm down.”

And that’s when it began.

“Rapunzel dollie,” she said.

I pushed her hair off her face and said, “This has nothing to do with the Rapunzel dollie. This is about you screaming at us when we turned off the television and asked you to come to dinner.”

“I want a Rapunzel dollie,” she said, weeping.

“This has nothing to do with the Rapunzel dollie. It’s because you were not nice to us.”

“But I want the Rapunzel dollie!”

I held her jaw and said, “Sweetie, focus. Just look at me, and listen to me. I’d said that you need to be a good girl to get a Rapunzel doll for Hanukkah or Christmas, and this happening doesn’t mean you won’t get one – “

“I want one!”

Eye roll. “I know, Lily. But you’re going to have to behave better than you have tonight for that to happen.”

“Rapunzel dollie.”

Sigh. My own patience was growing thin. “Lily, I love you, and I want to get through this so we can all eat dinner together and stop fighting. But so help me, if you say the words ‘Rapunzel dollie’ to me one more time, I can promise you that you won’t get one.”

“But I want a Rapunzel dollie.”

I dug my fingernails into my palms and gritted my teeth. “OK, kiddo, let’s try a different tack. You want to go downstairs, don’t you?”

“Yes. Downstairs.”

“So let’s go downstairs and eat some pizza, OK?”

Still whimpering, with her breath catching, we walked downstairs hand-in-hand, and I sat her at the table.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Joe said. “She hasn’t calmed down.”

Red-eyed, Lily looked at me and said, “Mommy, I want a Rapunzel dollie.”

“Lily, you have got to stop saying that. Seriously. You’re driving me crazy with this.”

And in the whiniest tone possible, she said, “But I want a Rapunzel dollie.”

“That’s it,” Joe said, scooping her up to whisk her away to her room again. And then his frustration crashed down like a tidal wave.

Still in his suit from work, Joe yelled, growing hoarse almost immediately, about how Lily wasn’t listening, and that I’d asked her nicely several times to quit talking about the dollie, and how, if he could, he’d go to the toystore right then and set every Rapunzel dollie there on fire so nobody ever got a Rapunzel dollie again. (We’ve all reached this point of over-the-top irrationality in our worst parenting moments, so don’t judge.)

“No!” Lily yelled.

He also yelled that he’d only gotten a pizza because Lily had felt sad and called him on his way home and said she’d wanted it, and how he’d gotten up at a quarter to six and worked hard all day, like he does everyday, to earn the money to pay for things like pizza, and our house, and … you get the idea.

Lily, to the exclusion of all else, now was screaming, “I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

During all this, I rocked Neve in my arms in the next room, frozen with indecision about what to do. If I intervened, I undermined Joe’s authority, which I didn’t want to do. But listening to the exchange made me shake with empathy for Lily, too. So I stroked Neve’s hair and looked at the two of us in the dresser mirror, feeling that no matter what I did, it would be wrong – an unnerving, and unfortunately common, part of parenthood.

When Joe ran out of steam, I came in, handing Neve off to Joe. Joe looked at Lily and said, “Now you be nice to your mother, and you listen to her, or I can promise you that you will never, ever get a Rapunzel dollie, or any other kind of dollie.”

Joe left with Neve, stomping down the stairs. And you’ll never guess the first sad little words out of Lily’s mouth.

“Rapunzel dollie.”

Oh my God. I was in hell. I held her face in my hands again, and I looked deeply into her eyes.

“Please, sweetie. I’m begging you. Please, please stop saying that. Can we just forget about the Rapunzel dollie for a while?”

Lily finally fell into my arms, still sniffing. “Why?”

“Because when you say it, you’re making it clear to both me and Daddy that you’re not listening to us. And we really, really need you to listen to us.”

“I am listening.”

“You are now, which is good. Just stop saying Rapunzel dollie. Because that’s not what this was about. Daddy and I don’t want to fight with you. We hate fighting with you. But when you don’t listen, and you scream at us, we have to do something to get your attention.”

This went on a bit longer before we finally headed downstairs to eat our stone-cold dinner. Lily told Joe she was sorry for screaming at us, and Joe apologized, too.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you, either, sweetheart, and I’m really sorry I did that. That wasn’t right.”

And just like that, Lily was back to being her sweet little self. While we ate, Joe complained about the shoulder that’s been bothering him for months now, and this prompted Lily to get up from her seat and kiss the back of his shoulder, asking, “Is it this one, Daddy?”

Joe and I exchanged glances while melting.

Meanwhile, this first post-tantrum moment had caused me to start crying a little. “Come on, Gorgeous,” Joe said.

I waved him off and swallowed hard. “You had your opportunity to vent already. This is mine, and it will pass. Just give me a minute.”

“You have water in your eyes, Mommy,” Lily said, then came over to give me hug.

She drives me nuts sometimes, but God, I love this little girl.

The next morning, I entered her room, and she sat on her bed and looked me in the eye. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’m not going to say ‘Rapunzel dollie.’

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, feeling like a gigantic heel. “You can talk about the dollie. It’s OK. It’s just last night, I couldn’t get you to focus on what was happening, and I got really frustrated. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ever talk about it again. OK?”

She nodded, but I haven’t heard her mention the doll again, and it’s been about a week.

If nothing else, it was gratifying to learn that although it didn’t seem like Lily had heard a word I’d said throughout that whole “dollie debacle,” she obviously had. It just took her a while to calm down enough to process it.

All of this made me think about how, when I was pregnant with Lily, I often joked with Joe that I was tired all the time because “building a person is hard work.”

And I was right. But building a person once she’s outside your body is ever so much harder.

Neve, about to leave for her first official day at daycare

Joe and I didn’t decide that one of us would take both kids to the daycare center two blocks from our house; or whether we’d stagger it with one kid each in tow. We played it by ear, trying to be flexible while seeing how things naturally played out.

And despite our lack of planning, the day started idyllically.

Neve slept through the night, waking at 6:50 to eat. After I fed her, she went back to sleep, and a while later, Lily got up with Joe (as has become the norm since Neve’s birth). I spent a bit of time with Lily before she left with Joe for pre-school, and then I got things ready for my day as Neve snoozed in her room. At 9:30, after Neve had had nearly 12 hours of sleep, I woke her (she was still deeply asleep), fed her, and changed her (pooped-soaked) diaper. With all this going for her, she was nothing but big, flirty smiles and coos as we walked to the daycare center and I handed her off to one of the women who’d taken care of Lily when she was the same age.

I drove to work in Ann Arbor, plowed through more than 800 e-mails that were waiting for me (using the delete function liberally), used my breast pump there and at home, and then went to pick up the girls from daycare. (Joe and I feel so weird saying “the kids” now; it’s as if we weren’t really defined yet as suburban parents until we had a second child and started having to use the plural instead of just saying “Lily” or “our girl.”)

I decided to check in at Neve’s room at daycare first, since Lily often tends to be the Norm Peterson of pre-school (wanting to play and stay until closing time at 6 p.m.), and I was anxious to find out how Neve had done on her first day.

Neve was perched on a caregiver’s lap, but she looked a little hangdog – which made sense when I learned that my usually sleepy baby had napped very little during the 7 hours I’d been gone. Yes, she’d been her laid back little self all day, so she hadn’t been crabby; she’d just either not been comfortable enough in a new place to sleep easily, or had been too excited by all the new people and toys around her.

Still, the guilt reflex was immediate. Some part of my brain was hoping that I’d come in, and she’d be just as wildly smiley and happy as when I left. But that’s not what happened. And when I learned they hadn’t given her her last bottle, I asked if I could feed her in privacy in the next room, where the babies nap.

I settled into one of the gliders and stared at the half-dark room of cribs, reminding myself that it was the first day, and that it was only natural that Neve needed a little time to get acclimated to a strikingly different place and routine. She needed to get to know and trust the women caring for her there – to get used to looking in their eyes and knowing she’s OK.

I also internally repeated the mantra of all mothers who work outside the home: a happy mom is a better mom, and if your work fulfills you and makes you happy, then you keep doing it, despite the rough spots.

That evening was one of them. Neve was restless and fussy – again, not like her – so I walked around various rooms, cradling her in my arms, while Joe made supper and Lily watched a portion of “Sesame Street.” Not only was I struck with fear that my sweet little baby felt abandoned and betrayed by me, but in that moment, I also felt I was shortchanging Lily, with whom I also wanted to spend time. A lose-lose situation, really.

Joe ended up holding Neve as we ate dinner (he seems better at eating one-handed); I fed her again; and then Joe swaddled her and got her to sleep, and she was down for the night.

There was a relief in this, of course; moments of quiet and peace had finally been restored to our little house. But my first thought was, “I miss Neve.” Yes, I’d spent some extra time with her in the morning, but the time later in the day was a wash, since she was either eating or fussy. I’d gotten so accustomed to spending all day, every day with her – and it was actually relaxing the second time around – that the transition back to work was more difficult than I expected.

When returning to work from my first maternity leave, there was a sense that I’d fought hard to reach a kind of finish line, and that now, people who understood babies better far than I did would be in charge of Lily for several hours each day. “Lily will be happier with people who know what they’re doing,” I’d told myself, “and she’ll enjoy being around other babies, and all those toys.” And she certainly adapted pretty quickly. But because I now have my bearings regarding baby care, I felt more competent during my maternity leave with Neve, and wasn’t quite so anxious for my time with her to end.

Yet the 3 months flew by. And while Neve’s second day at daycare went a bit more smoothly, the third day nearly broke me.

Not because of Neve, though. Once again, she was hungry when I arrived, so I fed her in the babies’ nap room. When she was sated, I walked down the hall to retrieve Lily, whose class was outside on the playground. But just as I walked into the room that leads to the playground, one of Lily’s teachers opened the door, spotted me, and said, “Lily, your Mommy’s here. Maybe she can help.” It was then that I heard Lily crying.

She came into the room, weepy and red-faced, and Miss Crystal explained that Lily had had an accident a little earlier, so they’d recently changed her into the extra pair of pants we’d stored in her cubby. Lily had reportedly wailed about this and claimed the pants were too tight (which they weren’t); and as I heard the story, Lily yanked her pants and underwear off like they were on fire, crying harder.

Miss Crystal took Neve from me while I knelt down to talk to Lily, now naked from the waist down, as other parents straggled in to pick up their kids (presumably having a “there but for the grace of God” moment). I gently held her arms and tried to get her to look at me, but she just kept screaming “They’re too tight! They hurt me!”

I told her she had to wear something, and that we couldn’t walk home while she was almost naked. But frankly, as all parents do in this “pick your battles” world, I was considering what would really happen if I did just walk home with her nearly naked. It was only 2 and a half blocks. Sure, we’d get some funny looks, and strangers would temporarily pass judgment on me. But really – we wouldn’t get arrested or anything, right?

At this point, Lily was lying on the ground, screaming and trying to roll up the long, mat-like rug over herself. Huh. Where did this idea come from?

I continued to try to talk to her, to ply her with incentives. (“If you get dressed, we can go home and get you some juice and a snack, and you can watch ‘Sesame Street.’ I think you’ll feel better.” “No! I won’t feel better!” she said, as if she’d make sure of that.) We seemed to be making zero progress.

Other kids started coming into the gym, and a sympathetic fellow mom offered to hold Neve for a few minutes while I continued to try to work this out. But I was stumped. “Why don’t you have a snack?” I suggested. “Do you want some graham crackers?” Nothing. Miss Crystal asked Lily if she might wear something else – maybe some extra clothes that the pre-school had on hand. When a cute little denim skirt with a pink ribbon was unearthed, Lily finally nodded and said, “Yes. That.”

“OK, but we need to put a Pull-up on you first,” said Miss Crystal. I got Neve back, we all went into the next room, and Lily finally accepted the graham crackers from me. She was still waist-down naked then when she said something I considered rude to Miss Crystal – I don’t even remember what it was – and I grabbed her arm, then on its way to her mouth with a cracker – and sharply said, “Do you know how nice Miss Crystal is being to you? You need to be nicer to her!” Graham crackers fell to the floor, Miss Crystal picked them up, and I turned red with shame, embarrassment, helplessness.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Miss Crystal. “You clearly have more patience than I do.”

She kindly said something about having to deal with these kinds of situations every day, and how that made her more immune. But still I burned. Partly, because I felt like I’d learned nothing. If, during the weekend, Lily did this random pants-freak-out all over again, I would have no better understanding of what the hell I could possibly do. There’s no chapter in parenting books on “spontaneous, willful stripping while senselessly wailing.”

Plus, I was angry at myself, because I was afraid that I lashed out at Lily more because her behavior reflected badly on me than because it was out of line.

So when she finally started to calm down and asked to stay and play a while, I sheepishly said yes.

“What took you so long?” one of Lily’s friends said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“We saw you coming with the stroller a long time ago,” the girl said.

“Well, I had to feed Lily’s baby sister Neve first,” I said. But then I thought, Oh, God, was this a contributing factor to Lily’s freak-out? That she expected me after spotting me walking to the preschool, and was disappointed and angry when I didn’t show up right away? How do parents of more than one child strike this balance consistently between them?

“Carry me over to the dollhouse,” Lily said in a pathetically weepy voice. The dollhouse was on the other side of the gym.

“I can’t, sweetie. I’ve got to carry Neve,” I said.

Lily began to lose it again. “No. Have Miss Crystal hold her,” Lily said.

“Lily, it’s not Miss Crystal’s job to hold Neve. She was very nice and helped me with her a few minutes ago, but she’s got other kids to take care of.”

“Please carry me, Mommy!”

And in a moment of flustered decisiveness, when you know you’re doing something really stupid, I scooped up crying Lily, who weighs 40-some pounds, and tried my damnedest to carry both her and Neve across the room. Halfway there, Neve’s upper body swerved away from me, and she started to cry, too, as I crumpled into a heap on the floor.

It was as if the universe was intervening, handing me this symbolic moment as if to say, “Did you really think you could take care of two children and not make them miserable and still work? What hubris! You can’t carry this load. You’re incapable of it. Others have more than one child, but you’re simply not built for this. You’re not strong enough.”

So I had a little breakdown on the floor of this daycare center’s gym, where I briefly cried with the two girls I’d pushed out into this world. But I tried to pull myself together as quickly as possible, worried about being a little too dramatic and emotionally naked in such a public place, where parents were still coming in to pick up their little ones. What on earth was the matter with me? I’d always thought of myself as a grounded, rational person; but becoming a mother has seemingly chipped away at that.

Day by day, though, we’ve made it through the first two weeks of my return to work. I’m still struggling to figure out how to balance spending one-on-one time with both Lily and Neve, but that will be an ongoing issue, I’m sure. I got to run a 5K, which ended with me touching the Go Blue banner in Michigan Stadium. And work provided me with the opportunity to speak to a terrific writer I’ve always admired, as well as the chance to see/review three theater productions and have lunch with my work-girlfriends. So the things I most love about work have now come back into my life.

This past weekend, I took Lily to another preschooler’s birthday party at a bouncy house wonderland. While there, I chatted with a mom of a four year old who was expecting her second child in the coming weeks. She told me about how her mom would watch the baby while she took classes to train for her new career in electronic medical billing. She said she wouldn’t place the baby in daycare, because she didn’t want strangers raising her baby.

I bit my lip and tried to nod politely, as I was taught to do (my apologies to those who wish I would have spoken up). But I saw red, of course. What a thoughtless thing to say, I thought. Everyone’s circumstances are different. I make a point of never judging someone else’s childcare choices; there’s no solution that uniformly fits every family in the same way.

“Let it go,” Joe said later that day. “This woman doesn’t matter. She said something stupid, and you’re letting it get to you.”

He was right, of course. And I remembered then how this same mother once tried to herd Lily to where many of the other kids were playing, despite the fact that Lily was happy as a clam going up and down a big slide by herself. Fortunately, Lily stood her ground and disregarded that mother’s admonishments to do what she thought Lily should do – an act of independence that made me smile.

So I need to follow my smart little daughter’s lead on this, I think. Our family’s not perfect. We have our breakdowns and moments of rage, frustration, and bad judgment. But that same evening, after it had gotten dark, I sat in a chair in our house’s front room, singing “Lida Rose” to Neve as she fell asleep, and I watched, through the window, the silhouette of Joe hoisting Lily up over his head, making her fly around our front yard while she giggled excitedly. And my eyes welled up with contentment and a sense of validation.

Lily and Joe, enjoying a leisurely game of chess

So like Lily, I’ll quietly, doggedly stick with what I know I want, rather than what someone else thinks I SHOULD want.

“What did you get?” I asked Joe, who’d picked up various items at the Franklin Cider Mill the night before.

“A pumpkin pie. For you.”

I popped open the plastic container and cut a slice for myself, resuming my place at the table. The candles were burning down, the world was rainy and dark outside the windows, and the littered, abandoned battlefield of the dinner table, which I would soon need to clean up, lay before me.

But then I tasted the pie and thought of my mother.

She usually made the crust herself, pinching the dough around the glass pie plate’s border (and the leftover dough, cut away from the pie’s circumference, was then draped in long pieces on a cookie sheet, covered with cinnamon and sugar, and baked in the oven). There’d be an emptied can of Libby’s pumpkin filling on the counter, and even though the smell of the pie baking was wonderful, it mostly made me look forward to the time when the leftovers would be refrigerated, and I’d grab a cold slice of pie after dinner for a few days to come.

I loved these pies so much that, at age 6 or so, I ate nearly half of one by myself (and consequently got really sick later that night – I remember going into my parents’ room in my pajamas and not quite making it through the sentence “I don’t feel good”).

My mother wasn’t a master chef or anything; she made relatively simple meals, using old, classic cookbooks, or the recipes found on the label of a bag or can. And I’ve had some terrific pumpkin pie since her death in January 2009. (My grandmother-in-law, for instance, makes a fantastic whipped pumpkin pie that’s light as air.) But I’ve never again tasted pie that was like hers: shallow and dense, with nothing on top (to please the picky eaters in her own family), and a thin crust that was subtle, allowing the filling to be the star.

Was it the best pumpkin pie I ever had? No. But it’s the one I find myself yearning for nonetheless, because it tasted like love and comfort. It tasted like home. (It’s a cosmic irony that just as I was having my first experiences with the endless, all-consuming, and often externally invisible tasks of childrearing – Lily was 8 months old when my mother died – I lost the chance to convey my gratitude to the person most engaged in those same pursuits while I was growing up.)

As a child, I occasionally helped my mom make the pies, but I’ve never attempted to make one myself. I generally resisted learning to cook, because even at a young age, I figured out that if I mainly just “got by” in a kitchen, no one would expect me to host and prepare big meals. And frankly, I just wasn’t interested in cooking.

So although I enjoy good food as much as the next person, the whole “foodie”-frenzy thing is a bit lost on me – something summed up well by Dominique Browning in her recent memoir, “Slow Love”: “By the time I’ve gotten through all the preparations for cooking – the scrubbing and scraping and grating and chopping and rubbing and coating and whatever else is required – I feel like I’ve been playing with my food for an hour. I’m tired of it. I’ve lost my appetite. And I find it appalling to see all my hard work, sometimes hours of it, disappear down people’s throats in two minutes.” Indeed. (Fortunately, Joe doesn’t feel this way; though this was more true before we had children, the process still, to some degree, is a means of winding down from the work day for him. Plus, his love of food easily outweighs my own.)

And staring down the sisyphean task of cleaning up all the pans and dishes used to prepare a meal only discourages me from joining the cooking ranks even more.

But every once in a while, I bake a batch of snickerdoodles, drawing the recipe from one of my mom’s decades-old cookbooks, which now sits on my shelf. Or I make chocolate chip cookies, making the two key adjustments my mother always did to the recipe found on the crinkly yellow Tollhouse package. And both come pretty close to tasting the way my mother’s did.

Generally, though, I tend to focus on the experience I had last Christmas. Each December, my mom would always make a recipe called Ethel’s Sugar Cookies, along with homemade icing that she’d split up into four bowls, adding food coloring so that we had green, pink, yellow, or white icing to choose from for the cookies, along with various candied toppings for decoration. We sat around the kitchen table and helped her ice and decorate them as kids, placing each completed cookie on a sheet of wax paper, and in recent years, the grandkids had learned to perform this task with her, too.

In hopes of keeping up this Christmas cookie tradition, this past year, I mixed together the recipe’s ingredients, used the same tin cookie cutters we’d used as kids, and baked the dough. The cookies themselves were fine, but the icing recipe I used didn’t achieve a product with same consistency as my mother’s. It was more clear, and didn’t harden and thicken in the same way.

Maybe I had used the wrong icing recipe; or maybe it just didn’t turn out so well my first time, and it will get better. But I thought then that ultimately, my goal isn’t to duplicate my mother’s efforts. No matter what, my own execution will stray from hers a certain degree, because we’re not the same person. And that’s fine. My mother is gone, and so it simply makes sense that the distinct tastes that she created throughout her life are gone, too, leaving only elusive traces, the way the objects she created or owned or love do now.

In the same way, because I’m her child, I necessarily share some physical and non-physical characteristics with her; but we weren’t really even close to being the same person. I am a mix of her, my father, and various other external factors, and therefore, my own creations won’t be like hers, but will rather build loosely on the foundation of what she made. Genetically, as well as in the kitchen, some of her ingredients and methods will live on in me and sisters, and we’ll bring some of our own to the table.

I thought about all this as I sat on my own family’s porch, eating the (quite good) pumpkin pie Joe bought at the cider mill, after we had celebrated the Jewish New Year – a time of clean slates and renenwal. I listened to Lily sing while drawing, and watched Joe rocking Neve in his arms, and thought that if there is such a thing as immortality, that’s the closest we can come: single strands of those who came before us being braided, and enduring, within the souls of our progeny, carrying a few little pieces of each of us forward into the future, to be mixed with yet more pieces.

Yes, I miss the distinct taste of my mother’s pumpkin pie. But that craving is ultimately a cause of both grief and joy: grief for what’s lost, but joy in the occasional jolt of otherwise forgotten memories that instantly arrives whenever I place a bite of pumpkin pie in my mouth. It made me think of the last part of Donald Hall’s poem “Maple Syrup,” wherein he and his wife discover a jar that his long-dead grandfather had tapped:

Today
We take my grandfather’s last
quart of syrup
upstairs, holding it gingerly,
and we wash off twenty-five years
of dirt, and we pull
and pry the lid up, cutting the stiff,
dried rubber gasket, and dip our fingers
in, you and I both, and taste
the sweetness, you for the first time,
the sweetness preserved, of a dead man
in the kitchen he left
when his body slid
like anyone’s into the ground.

In the end, before re-joining the chaotic hubbub of my own family, I cut a second, small slice of pie, sat back down in my chair, and gave myself permission to linger in memory for just a few minutes more. Such opportunities are rare these days, so the moment had the feel of a New Year’s gift to myself.

And when the moment passed, I blew out the two candles and started clearing the table, taking care of my loved ones in one of the small ways my mother taught me to.

On one occasion, a neighbor, after peeking inside the sling to see our then-sleeping new addition, admonished me and Joe to “cherish this time,” because we’d never get it back, and it would all go so fast.

We nodded gravely, but Joe and I exchanged subtle glances that conveyed that we were both mentally circling a pointed finger aside our heads in a “cuckoo” gesture. Was this guy meshugge? Having your sleep constantly and randomly interrupted; being screamed at for long stretches, and feeling absolutely helpless to soothe your child; being shat and spit up upon regularly; and not being able to eat a meal together in peace (let alone eat a meal, or take a shower, when flying solo with the baby) – this was the apex of parenthood? Seriously?

Joe and I shook our heads while walking back to our house, agreeing that, from what we could tell so far, the baby phase was something to be endured rather than “cherished.”

Now, of course, our family lineup has changed, and we have a boundary-pushing 3 year old as well as a newborn in the house. And this long-past, casual conversation with a neighbor has come to have far more resonance for me.

This is partly due, surely, to the fact that Neve is a low-key, sleepy, easily comforted baby, and I’ve enjoyed the baby phase much more the second time around (when the anxiety is generally lower, anyway). But I think the primary reason I’m recalling this exchange lately is because I’m realizing that handling a newborn, despite its challenges, is relatively simple when compared to the self-doubt/guilt/misery spiral involved in disciplining your average, volatile 3 year old, who’s prone to operatic, irrational tirades.

During the past two evenings in a row, one of us has carried Lily, screaming at an ear-splitting pitch that I WISH only dogs could hear, up to her room for a time out; but once there, the tantrums only seem to escalate as she screams and cries louder and longer, and Joe or I strain to keep our own patience in check and talk her down. We repeat ourselves, telling her to take a breath and calm down, but she doesn’t hear us at all at these times, saying over and over again that she wants to go downstairs. (And, in one of those moments that would be funny if you weren’t in existential agony, she shrieks, “I’m calm! I’m calm! I’m calm!”)

One recent shriek-fest kicked off when I asked her not to do something, and not only did she continue to do it, she made a spitting sound toward me in response. Another began when, after she weepily complained of soreness in the Pull-up region of her body, I’d applied Desitin, only to have her wail and frantically wipe it off with her hand, claiming she didn’t want any medicine applied, while also kicking and throwing the new Pull-up to the ground; and the most recent came about when she held a pom-pom over Neve’s head and face. I asked her to please refrain from doing it again, and when she ignored me, I took the pom-pom from her. She screamed for several minutes, begging to get it back, and then, in anger, threw her arm between me and Neve, whom I was feeding at that moment.

In each of these instances, I’m the one who snapped and pronounced Lily “over the line” in terms of what was acceptable behavior, thus sealing her “time out” fate. And for this reason, I’ve struggled, for several days now, with feeling like I’m both too harsh AND too lenient with this little, developing person I adore. It’s maddening, and I lately feel like every instinct I have, and thus every choice I’ve been making, is dead wrong.

While kvetching about this with Joe, and asking, “Have I been overreacting?” he said that lately, I seemed to have more of a hair trigger temper with all this than I normally would, and that it seemed like I had something to prove.

“That certainly could be true,” I said. “But to whom? To you? To Lily? Or to myself?”

The answer likely combines all three. Joe, too often, feels like the heavy, the perpetual “bad cop,” who comes in second place with Lily in the end, even when I’m the enforcer. Lily drives me bat-crazy when she disrespects me and my authority (or lack thereof) – often while smiling at me and laughing. And finally, I want Lily to know that Joe and I stand together in disciplining her. And because I hate that Joe feels like the villain in all this; and because I fear that my own lack of backbone and aversion to confrontation will result in raising an out-of-control, spoiled brat, proving something to myself may indeed be the strongest underlying motivator.

Hopefully, we’ve just hit a bad patch, and things will get better soon – at least until we hit the next bump in the road. But the issue is literally keeping me up at night, even when I get the chance to sleep.

One of the things in my recent, heated exchanges with Lily that drives me crazy is what I call the “I can’t” defense.

For instance, when Lily was in time out last night, she spit on the hardwood floor in her room (this spitting thing seems to be a recent, unfortunate lesson from her pre-school peers). When she calmed herself enough for me to go in, hug her a few minutes, and talk with her, I got a tissue and asked her to clean up the spit from the floor. (I certainly wasn’t going to do it.) In halting, crying breaths, she kept saying, “I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I can’t.”

“That’s nonsense. Of course you can.”

“I can’t. You do it.”

“No. Absolutely not. You’re a smart, capable girl, and there’s absolutely no reason you can’t do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Please try.”

The sublimely frustrating “I can’t” defense usually comes into play when she’s asked to calm down, and when she’s asked to apologize to her father or to me. (Normally, though, she does eventually say that she’s sorry.) She tries to make the case that we should apologize to her, actually – God help us, she’s a little budding lawyer already – and sometimes, we concede, if there are legitimate grounds. But generally, my hope is that by stressing that she’s a smart girl with agency, she’ll soon get over this whole “I can’t” thing.

The other really difficult thing to absorb is the fact that inevitably, when a 3 year old moves on from a rage-filled tirade, it’s suddenly ancient history to her. Like the whole thing never happened. The parents, meanwhile, stew in their own miserable juices for the rest of the evening, quietly seething and snapping at everyone around them, suddenly sporting the thinnest of onion skins around their writhing emotions. The child has let it all go in a heartbeat; the parents, however, simply don’t have the ability to do so.

So when Lily did her usual, control freak, 3 year old thing at dinner (post-tantrum), whining that she didn’t want ketchup on her plate, I roughly took the plate, noisily cleared it off, washed the ketchup off, and tossed it back onto the table. When she said, with irritation in her voice, that she didn’t want a fork, I threw it down hard on the far side of my place setting, onto the table. And after consuming about one bite of food, Lily said, “I ate a good dinner. Could I have candy or chocolate?” Joe sighed and said, “I want to shoot myself,” to which I replied, “Join the club.”

Shortly thereafter, a kind of martyrdom face-off occurred, wherein Joe held the baby while loading the dishwasher, which is normally my chore. “Please let me do this,” I begged him. “Why?” he asked, annoyed. “Just – please. I need to do something,” I said, unable to articulate anything more sensible. And later, though he didn’t need to, Joe did some work on the computer after Lily went to bed.

I think we were both so desperate to feel competent again – competent at something that had a straightforwardness and a simple logic to it – that we retreated into ourselves and these chores.

On evenings like this, it’s only too easy to see how couples with young children come apart, through no fault of their own.

Which is why, when we finally got to bed, I made a point of curling up next to Joe for a few minutes, even though our conversations had generally been tense and strained all evening.

I think I need to remember to keep making the effort to re-connect with Joe throughout the tough times of parenting. Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to close myself off when I’m scared and upset, rolling myself into a ball of self-pity and gloom. And I’ve been doing that a lot lately, obviously. But if Joe and I are going to get through the next several years of this together, like I obviously want us to, I need to keep reaching out and humbly asking for the help, comfort, and reassurance that I need to push through, while providing the same for Joe.

Yes, martyrdom may FEEL virtuous; but it also seems to produce some pretty miserable, lonely parents. I don’t wish to join their ranks.