I’m outside on my patio, cleaning up after the day’s fun, when I catch a glimpse of my daughter in the corner of my eye. I stop my day’s chores to watch her, spinning alone in the living room with a puppy and a monkey tied to an old string. She twirls and dances with her friends, oblivious to the fact that I’m watching her, absorbed in her own little world. Her face is full of wide eyed wonder as she watches the universe go zooming around her, and my heart is filled with admiration at this child that I too often fail to see for what she is…one child, a singular person, a creature of earth and of me and of God.

She moves uninterrupted in front of the tv screen, around the laundry basket, beside the couch, dancing to her own rhythm in a space that has opened up for her. No one is telling her to ohmygodmoveyouareblockingthemovie, no one is snatching the toys out of her hand because they’re not hers, no one is doing anything and she is wallowing in the silence. Her brothers have gone on vacation with their grandmother, and for the first time in her life, she isn’t the third child…she is the only child.

Our family has never had an only child. Our second baby came on the heels of our first baby; the only way I’ve ever seen my children is through each other’s eyes, and that is the most glorious way to come to know a person, by how they are perceived by the people who love them. Tonight, however, I watch her though the window, fancy and free, uninhibited and unrestrained, and I ache in my heart with the knowing that this child, raw and wild, is here every moment of the day, waiting for her moment to shine through.

The space she occupies is a vacuum that draws everything into it, helpless to resist her tiny little charms. The energy in the room yields for her, the air parts to make way for her dance, the dust that has settled into the crevices of our life joins her in raucous celebration of nothing. The void that is created by the absence of her brothers is merely her personal challenge to fill with grandeur and delight and unmitigated beauty. For two weeks, she will own her surrounds. She will know what is it that she can be when given the space, and I will bear witness to it from afar.

There is a difference between my children and my child. The difference lies in the way her blond curls bounce with the pounding of her feet, the way her waist bends when she has all the room in the world to spin it. The difference lies in the quiet moments they spend in their life apart from each other, allowed to find their own, unencumbered rhythm without scrutiny or consequence. The difference lies in the space they are given to spread their arms and just spin. The difference lies in their singularity, multiplied.

Each one of my children is also my child, unique to themselves. I can’t imagine my life without all three of them, and I can’t imagine their lives without each other. Having a family with three children is gloriously complicated and intricately unrelenting, and as I steal this private moment she’s having in the rarest of moments when no one is watching her, in the fragment of time when she is completely free, I am awe-struck by the simplicity of her perfection.

The first time I got on an airplane, I was an unaccompanied minor. Except that back then, there really wasn’t anything called ‘unaccompanied minors’ and I was accompanied by my older brother and my two very little siblings. Eddie sat way up somewhere else on the plane and I sat with J & J, making sure they ate their Kudos bars and didn’t spill their many airplane-sized cups of soda.

Eventually, they just gave us the cans. You can get anything on an airplane if you whine enough.

I never did fly with an adult in all the times I’ve flown back and forth, Philly to Denver, parent-hopping my way through my childhood. And that never seemed like an issue at all; I mean, it’s getting on a plane, sitting down for three hours and getting off the plane – not rocket science. I was 13 whole years old, I knew everything, and I found flying to be intoxicating.

Now, actually flying the plane is a little bit like rocket science, and since I always loved flying so much, when I had the opportunity, I learned how to fly them myself. I have yet to find anything as exhilarating and freeing and close to godly as piloting an airplane. Maybe I haven’t done much with my life, maybe I’ve never seen the world, maybe I’ve never even seen Detroit, but at least I’ve flown airplanes.

But the problem, for me at least, with knowing how to fly the airplane is that now I know every single thing that can go south, literally, when trying to keep a few tons of metal aloft. Knowing how to do it took the magic out of it for me, and made me the world’s worst airplane passenger. Learning how to drive made me the world’s worst auto passenger, too. Really, ask my husband. My complete inability to sit in the passenger seat and not completely freak the fuck out has almost driven that poor man to the divorce lawyer.

I think that if I’d just not learned how to fly an airplane, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now shivering inside while my husband sits at a gate with our sons, waiting to load them up on a plane and send them to Denver for two weeks. I wouldn’t be going through all the worst case scenarios in my head, if only I didn’t know what they are. I wouldn’t be worrying about whether or not they can get oxygen masks over their faces, or whether or not they will whine their way into cans of Sprite.

Or maybe I would. Maybe I would because those are my babies, and they’re going 1500 miles away from me, where I won’t be there if someone falls off a bike and scrapes their knees, where I can’t come get them if it turns out that they don’t still get along with the best friends they left behind four years ago when we left Denver. That powerless feeling I get every time I buckle my seat belt and put my tray table up for take-off isn’t much different from the powerless feeling I’m getting sending my sons into the world on their own for two weeks.

But I guess the best things in life are the ones that leave you feeling helpless – like motherhood, like launching yourself through clouds and over mountains, like letting go.  I never knew how to see the world until I saw it from a few thousand feet up, and maybe I don’t know how to see my kids for the little men that they are until I see them from a few thousand miles away. I guess it’s time to let them go. I supposed I have to let them go, and trust that I taught them how to put mud on a bee sting and ask politely for sodas and behave even when I’m not watching.

It took me a while, but I learned how to fly. It’s taking me a while, but I’m trying to learn how to give my kids wings, too.

13 years ago, when I found out I was pregnant with 1of3, my boyfriend and I had a talk. We talked about what kind of parents we intended to be. We talked about all the ethereal wide-topic things you think of when you’re first confronted with becoming someone’s parent…doing better than was done to us, making sure we get out of it on the other side intact, and so on. But we also talked specifics. We talked about what school districts we liked and which zip codes we deemed worthy. We talked about what we’d feed the kid, how we’d dress him, which sports we’d like him to play. And then we talked about who would be his primary caretaker. And that’s when I said, “I will stay home with him, because I’m not paying someone else to raise my child.”

Oh yes, I said it. Because I was 22 and stupid as a Bush rock.

And so we lived for the next 13 years barely getting by, making ends *almost* meet, never seeing each other because I had to go serve eggs and coffee to drunk doctors at 6 in the morning and then he had to go serve steak and wine to drunk gangsters until midnight. But we never once put a child in daycare. They were home, with us, being raised by two children who had hardly figured out who they were, let alone who this person that looked like them was trying to be.

And I don’t regret a minute of it.

I don’t regret that we lived in the wrong neighborhoods, in the crappy apartments, or drove the beat up cars, or ate macaroni and cheese out of a box more times that I’d care to admit. I don’t regret that our life was a struggle, that it tore us apart three times, that it was never easy and that we existed singularly, that we were always exhausted, because I had a plan, dammit, and I saw it through. We raised our children, just like we said we were going to.

I gave everything over to being their mom, and I don’t know if I did a good job of that or not. Only time will tell. But it was the only thing I knew how to do. I didn’t know how to raise children any other way. I didn’t know how to be more than one thing at the same time. I was mother, that was it, just like my mother, just like every woman I’d ever known my entire life. I couldn’t be wife, too. I couldn’t be employee, too. I could only do that one thing, so that’s all I did with any amount of zeal.

And then one day they put backpacks on and grabbed lunch-boxes and walked into a big brick building all by themselves with little more than a, “So long, and thanks for all the fish” and it was over.

That’s when I started to realize that I’d wasted a lot of time being something they may not have needed me to be. That they ultimately needed more than just a mom. That maybe I’d fucked it all up.

So I drowned myself in a PTA to feel useful, and then I fell head-first into blogging to feel productive (and also to increase my typing wpm, because it was coming close to ‘get a damn job’ time) (and it totally worked) and right when I started to dream of a career, or at least a goal, I had another baby.

The thing with circular patterns is that they don’t have an end, which makes them slightly goddamn impossible to break.

So I had that other baby and I fell right back into my nuthin’ but mom mindset for a while. But that other baby was a girl, and I saw something in her eyes that I didn’t see in my sons. I saw myself.

Every day with her reminded me a little more how unbelievably perfectly I was perpetuating the cycle that has propelled the women in my family along forever. I started to realize what I was teaching her; the same thing I’d been taught, that being a mother meant being ONLY a mother.

And the question I had to ask myself was this: Do I want these children to live my life? Do I want them to make the same choices and the same sacrifices I did, just to live up to some ideal that I put a whole lot of misplaced devotion into? And why exactly was I continuing to make these choices that I so strongly disagreed with when my mother made them?

I never could understand why my mother didn’t just belly up and get a fucking job so that we didn’t have to starve. I could never forgive her for just sitting there, waiting for her life to come to her. And yet there I sat, patiently waiting for the same thing. Why? Because I was afraid. I was afraid to fail, I was afraid to try. No matter how difficult something is, the fact that it’s familiar covers a multitude of sins. I knew how to be a guardian. I didn’t know how to a producer. I knew how to accept less, but I didn’t know how to let myself want more. I knew how to dream of being better than I was allowing myself to be, but I had not one fucking clue how to acknowledge that I could be anything at all.

The thing with the women in my family, all of them from my mother to her mother to my sister to my aunts, is that they all exist (or existed) contentedly discontent. They accepted their perception, they succumbed to their imagined limits, and the ones that aren’t dead now might as well be. The gave their talents and their dreams and their abilities over to the comforts of complacency. They stopped living the second they yielded.

I am no smarter than any of the women who have come before me. I am less beautiful, less imaginative, less inspired. But I am more determined than any of them ever were to believe in the power of wanting. Where they see (or saw) (and really, let’s just lay out that several of them are quite dead by their own self destructions and we’ll stop throwing tenses around) themselves genetically tethered to a prophetic destiny, I see something who’s ass I can try to kick. I see the lessons I’ve learned by watching them live and die as a big, rusty old axe that I can use to hack at these chains around my DNA.

Mostly, I just see my daughter, perfect and new, unattached to all that shit, a blank slate that I can scribble my history on or I can write a new one for.

And so I did the thing I was most afraid of. I dreamed that I could be more. I presumed that I had something remotely valuable to offer people who had higher than 5th grade education. I put my daughter in daycare and I got a fucking job.

I didn’t just get a job, I worked for a year freelancing in a position that I have not one day of formal training in, doing things that I was completely unqualified to do, faking it every step of the way, mostly scared to death that they’d catch on to the fact that I am one generation out of a dumpster with a high school diploma and a dream, and not much more, and after that year they did figure it out. And they decided that I wasn’t just good enough anyway, but that I was great and I was perfect for them and that I should have a job title that starts with Head…and doesn’t end with Job.

And so I had a choice to make. I started familiar in the eye and it started back. I could say no thank you, because I have this four year old and she still needs me for one last year before school starts for her. I could put my life on hold again, I could wait for those stars to align, for life to fall into my lap at just the right time, just like all of the women who share my last name do. Or I could admit that I wanted more for myself. I could admit that having a title other than mother mattered to me. I could change everything about the only life that I could ever imagine for myself and accept that what I thought was ultimately important is, in the end, a minor detail. I could concede to the notion that tugs at my heart late at night that it’s just as important for my kids to see me aspire as it is for them to see me parent.

And for the first time in my life, what I wanted won.

And only a few weeks into this, I am realizing that it isn’t paying someone else to raise my child, it’s paying someone to teach her things I don’t know and to give her experiences I never thought to and different perceptions of her life, all so that I can let someone pay me to do the exact same thing.

One day, a long time ago, my kids came home from school and asked me what the Underground Railroad was. They’d read some book in class and it just didn’t make any sense to them. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, either, I told them.

That was one of those moments when I had to choose between protecting my children and preparing them. I looked at those babies who never factored skin color into any equation, who I’d purposely taken out of the all white, all money school and enrolled in the 70% free and reduced lunch, 30/30/30 racially split school with the three classrooms dedicated to students with extreme needs so that they’d always know that life, she is the most beautiful rainbow, and I knew I had to make a decision. I had to let them think that the world holds hands and sing Kumbaya or I had to let them know what’s real.

I chose the latter.

I sat them down and started with slavery. I moved on to emancipation. I continued to civil rights, to Dr King and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. They wept, and I joined them. They asked, “Why, momma?” and I told them I didn’t really know. I told them that some people in the world will go to any lengths to be more than, better than, others. I told them that there is a whole lot of evil in the world screaming in our ears, and it’s our job to drown that out with song.

I explained to them that sometimes, weeds will grow so thick and strong in a garden that everyone can just start to accept them, even admire them. People can look at an over-run, weed infested garden and think it looks lovely and right, because that’s how weeds work. They bloom flowers that look pretty and grow in patches that look appropriate and they fool the people who aren’t paying attention. The truth is that they are killing everything around them, choking the ground, ruining the garden. They’re hard to get rid of because the take root so deep, so fast, and spread everywhere when you’re not paying attention. But sometimes, someone comes along who is paying attention. Maybe that person will plant a rose bush. That rose bush will start small, and it will struggle, but that person will tend to it and push the weeds away from it and make sure it has just enough light and air and soil, and that rose bush will slowly grow. Maybe someone else will see that rose bush, and they’ll come plant another one. Maybe another person will, too. In a city of people moving together, thinking collectively, jointly blinded by what is just there and what is just easy, maybe you’ll get three people who can see things for what they are, and those three people can make a rose bush grow tall and strong amid the weeds. And then one day, while everyone else was busy accepting the way things are, that rose bush has grown taller and stronger and more beautiful that anything around it, and then everyone will notice.

That doesn’t mean they’re going to come pull the rest of the weeds with you, but at least you’ve gotten their attention. At least they can see the weeds for what they are. At least you’ve shown them what their world could be, should be, if they just opened their eyes and ears and hearts and started digging.

My husband and I have been married for eleven years. Eleven years is a long time to do anything. We’ve seen our share of ups and downs, and that is the understatement of the year. I am not the easiest woman to be married to, for any number of reasons. I am grossly insecure and particularly needy and excessively sensitive. He’s got his things, too, but this isn’t about him today, it’s about me. I’ve made him work for this relationship. I change the rules on him constantly and expect him to just keep up. Example: When he met me, I worked three jobs, 19 hours a day, 6 days a week. Now I stay home and let him go to work for at least 12 hours every single day while I fail in every way to so much as wash the dishes. He does this with a smile on his face, or so I assume; it’s not like I ever actually see his face anymore. I’d like to say that he at least gets to come home to a hot little body waiting for him in lingerie, but what he really comes home to is a snoring wife wearing his sweat pants hogging his side of the bed who used to be a size -0 and is now a solid 12.

I make few apologies for this. It’s not like I knocked myself up with a baby that decided to make me gain 105 pounds in nine months, after all.

However misguided my feelings on the subject, I do feel a little bad that the 98 pound girl with a D cup you could stack plates on that he signed up for a life with has now turned into a National Geographic centerfold. I feel bad enough, in fact, that I, on occasion, will buy him pistachios and roses and have them waiting for him when he comes home in the middle of the night after the umpteenth night straight at work.

He reciprocates occasionally, coming home late from work on the nights he’s due in early, bearing gifts for me, too.

That is a gym membership, brought home for me last week, because apparently he wants a divorce. You leave a man enough times and he’ll start double-dog daring you to do it again, all for the low low price of $31/month.

To his credit, he did include all-you-can-eat childcare in the package. So now I can’t bitch about being fat, having no where to go OR having no one to watch my kid while I go there anymore. It’s like he’s robbed me of everything, including my lovely lady lumps. Asshole.

But I’m determined to use it, partly because I do want to get the fuck out of this house occasionally, and I would like to do it sans-four-year-old, but mostly because I’m sick people congratulating me and asking me when the baby is due. The best answer to which is, “Four years, three months and eleven days ago; thanks for asking.” So I went last night to try this thing out. I got the four year old ready to go and the nine year old announced that he’d like to go as well. So I put my gym bag down, huffed a little, and called to see if I had a two-for-one daycare special. Which I do. I grabbed my bag, my two youngest, and headed out the door when my eleven year old ran down the stairs in full gym gear asking if he could come, too. You know, to work out with me.

Seriously, I just started being able to poop without company. Will there never be a moment’s rest from these people?

So I put everything down, again, and called the gym, again, huffed, AGAIN, and lied about his age, again, and found out that I could bring him. So off we all went. 45 minutes after I was planning on getting to the gym, we had two kids checked into daycare and one magically-turned twelve year old on an elliptical next to me. Who beat my fat fucking ass, hard. Every spanking this kid has ever received in his entire life was repaid last night, in full. He pwned me.

Vengeance is a dish best served sweaty, with burning quads.

It’s not like I can let me kid out-work me. If he does 50 crunches on the ab-thingy, I have to do 50, also. If he’s barely broken a sweat after 20 minutes on the elliptical, I have to grin and pray silently for god to strike us all dead and spare me this humiliating torture. If he gets through an entire circuit and asks to do it again, well, I just have to do it all again. Even if I can’t stand upright anymore. Even if I’ve sweated out every drop of moisture in my body and am now replacing that sweat with blood. Even if my legs are jello and I can’t recall where my arms used to be. Even if I just want so scream that THIS WAS MY PRESENT AND YOU ARE RUINING IT, SHORT PERSON. I can’t do that, now can I? We’re having a bonding moment, right? One of those fleeting mother-son moments that will be over the second this kid learns what a Playboy magazine is. Which, thanks to him, I may be able to appear in someday.