Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  Dedication

  For Walker and Hawthorne,

  thank you for going away so I could write about how much I love you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  First I Don’t Want to Be Dying in Order to Tell You These Things

  Jobs Fuck. This. List.

  Job Description for the Dumbest Job Ever

  The Super Bowl of Interruptions

  I Am the One Woman Who Has It All

  Undone

  Dear Stay-at-Home Moms and Working Moms, You’re Both Right

  Time-Out Just What I Wanted, a Whole Twenty-Four Hours of Recognition Once a Year

  “If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy”: Revised and Expanded

  Vows Tiny Losses

  If You Love Your Grandparents, Go Visit Them

  Let’s Have the Wedding Later

  It’s Complicated

  Time-Out Your Cute Wedding Hashtags Twenty Years Later

  Kids, It’s Time You Knew the Truth—Your Mother Is a Real Piece of Work

  Showdowns Overshare

  Thank You for Including Me on This Meal Train but Unfortunately I’m a Horrible Person

  Your Participation Trophies Are Bullshit

  September 17, 2010: The Day I Turned the Car Around

  The Ghosts of Halloweens Past

  Time-Out Radiohead Song or Accurate Description of My Parenting?

  Are You Sure There Isn’t Something Else I Can Do Before the End of the School Year?

  Schools The Walls That Define Us

  Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure

  The Punching Season

  Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today

  I Don’t Care If You Go to College

  Time-Out What Do You Think of My Son’s Senior Picture That Was Shot by Annie Leibovitz?

  Anne-Marie Slaughter Is My Safe Word

  Bodies Who Does That?

  If You Can Touch It

  As Young as We’ll Ever Be

  Hot-Ass Chicks

  Ashes to Ashes

  Time-Out Fifty-One Things You Should Never Say to a Mother Ever

  Is There a Parenting Expert on This Plane?

  Freedoms Do You Have Faith in Me?

  Thirteen with Dudes

  Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

  Last You Are All the Joy

  When I Die

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  First

  I Don’t Want to Be Dying in Order to Tell You These Things

  There is a deadline, always a deadline, for me to do anything and all things. I’ve gone from someone who organized others to one who is organized by those around me, and my former self condescends to me always, Oh brother, you’re really going to take this to the eleventh hour, aren’t you?

  And so I think, dying would be an excellent way to write a book. The ultimate deadline, no extensions. I could skate it quite close, until I realized I had taken things too far—again—and maybe couldn’t finish. And I would be so mad at myself, as I always am, when I realize I’ve chosen pushing my luck over pushing myself.

  It’s not like I’m the first person to think death is the ultimate and most convincing of all deadlines. Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, professor Randy Pausch, and neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks delivered their final insights their way—a book, a talk, and essays that outlasted them. But I am not a dying man with a doctorate. I do not expect my death to be a bestseller.

  But I don’t want or need to be dying in order to tell you that when you were born my heart cracked right open. The dark things, the alone and sad things, they all slithered across the operating room floor and disappeared down the drain. I thought of ladybugs, of all things, the first time I held you in my puffy and confused state, afraid to look at my stitches and afraid to admit the body has a purpose other than as a place to hang clothes.

  Those ladybugs were a sign.

  Everything was a sign back then.

  I found an unhatched robin’s egg in our yard right around the time I found out you were breech, and the delight at its color and completeness soon dissolved into fear. Was this a sign too? Were you doomed to die inside me?

  But you didn’t, and later your sister didn’t. So now there are two of you, signs be damned.

  How easy it is to forget the racing to the hospital to check for heartbeats when before you and between you both there were none. How easy it is to forget that life-shortening worry now that I spend most of my time just wanting you to do your homework. How easy it is to forget there was a me before you both fully occupied all corners of my brain and fingers and guts, pulling and pushing, bruising.

  Do I have to be dying to tell you I did my damnedest to figure this thing out, this being-a-mother thing, this being-a-parent thing, this working thing, this being-human thing? I’ve tried to be better but have oftentimes only been worse. I’ve expected more of you than I certainly expect of myself, to be kind, to not gossip, to be inclusive, to not swear or fight. I love fighting.

  You will be disappointed to learn that parents, and adults in general, do not have all the answers. We do not know as much as we project, walking around in our heads and bodies and bluster like that. That for every inconsistency and misstep, unpaid allowance and canceled vacation, we prove ourselves to be the amateurs we’ve always known ourselves to be. We are as uncertain as you are, but we can’t let you know that. We understand life is finite, but we can’t bear to look into your eyes with that knowledge. We are left to outfox our fears and punch above our inadequacies.

  I want to tell you—while I am healthy and here—that for all my faults, and they would fill another book entirely, the one I do not have is not loving my children. Not perfectly, not selflessly, but in my own way, the best way I know how. I hope for the rest of your lives you will feel over and over again the love you have been unafraid to reflect back at me, your perfectly imperfect mother.

  I have done my best to learn from every hard thing that has crossed my path and every soft thing that has snuggled into my lap. I have done my best to not wish any of it away and to experience all the joy and heartbreak I could hold. I have done my best to write down what is often so hard for me to say with real, spoken words. Without making it into a joke. With sincerity.

  I have tried.

  And with that, this.

  Jobs

  Fuck. This. List.

  If you are a working parent, the time will come for a daycare artwork reckoning. The rivers of scribbles and oceans of finger paintings. The cotton balls and glitter, macaroni and beans glued to flimsy backing. Artwork assembled by teachers and wranglers, pieces children had only a marginal role in. Their names jotted in the corner or on the back, in someone else’s handwriting. Not my kid’s. Not mine.

  Last weekend the reckoning came for me. Five boxes and three bags stuffed full, a stubborn storage of paper memories moved from one house to the next. I fished out the drawings they did with me, on the weekends or on my weekly work-from-home day. The ones I remember as the beginnings of “real” drawing. From my son, a sad apple and an unimpressed banana. From my daughter, bunnies and scraps full of hearts. I search these first jabs at artistic expression, thinking about how well they represent the people they are now. Emotional storms and animal allegiance.

  In the mix were daily daycare notes (“She had a great day and played with her best friend!” “He saw a fire truck outside and ate all his apples!”), preschool field-trip recaps, and informational sheets from the pediatrician’s office.

  But one piece of paper stopped me cold. The List. I had forgotten all about The List. S
even or eight years ago, back when I was done needing it, I must’ve thought this was something I had treasured and would want to see again. Maybe it’d make me laugh, or bring me back to a specific time I had long since forgotten. Oh it brought me back all right. And my first thought was,

  Fuck.

  This.

  List.

  This was my morning out-the-door checklist that I had crafted for my return to work after my second maternity leave. It was everything I needed to have on, near, or with me as I busted out the door each morning. My son was a little over two years old and had only begun walking a few months prior. My daughter was three months old and never slept. My thoughts were like butterflies—fleeting, zigzagging, and completely impossible to catch.

  So, The List:

  Bottles

  Lunch box (my son’s)

  Breast pump (With a sublist of all the necessary parts, because nothing will make you crack like an egg spiked into the sidewalk more than realizing you forgot the one tiny part that makes your pump work.)

  Wallet

  Hat (Mine or his or hers or theirs? I have no idea now.)

  Their tote bags for daycare (full of changes of clothes and nap blankets and diapers)

  My bag (packed with nursing pads and deodorant)

  Makeup

  Phone

  Water

  Lunch (mine)

  I’m surprised I didn’t condense the entire list into one word: brain. Try to remember your brain, lady.

  Like a slap in the face, that list brought back everything that was intensely, nauseatingly hard about working more-than-full-time and having two very young children. I was expected to perform well at both and was doing so at neither. I was exhausted, emotional—many nights falling asleep fully clothed as I nursed my daughter at 7:00 p.m.

  The job I had returned to was stressful, most of the time unnecessarily so. We reminded ourselves regularly that, hello, we weren’t exactly curing cancer but instead creating catalogs, packaging, print campaigns, and posters for sugar-water manufacturers, shoe companies, and makers of diapers, cleaners, headphones, snowboards, and anything and everything you could wear, consume, or want (and many things it turns out, you didn’t). Now that I think of it, maybe we were actually causing cancer.

  Regardless, it was also the job I had worked up to my entire adult life. From my first days as an intern while still in college, through two advertising agencies and three design studios, this was the job I pursued and was succeeding at. I loved working and still do. A worker with a job has always been the sharpest and most cleanly defined part of my identity. While other girls were playing house, I was playing office. Working hard was my thing. Until living hard challenged it to a duel.

  After my second maternity leave, I felt hollow and split, trying to blend back into the world I used to know, as if I wasn’t still getting used to the way my new clothes grabbed at my hips or were taut at my chest. Or pretending my milk wasn’t letting down at the most impossibly boring moment of a meeting that ran too long. Yes, I always hug my chest like this, so by all means, please continue. I’d like to think if the men (and let’s face it, it’s largely men) who create family-leave policy in this country suddenly found themselves back at work with new bodies, rampaging hormones, and a not-small risk of spontaneously ejaculating every time meetings ran long, things would change. (It’s not a perfect analogy, I know. They’d probably just schedule more extra-long meetings).

  We need to rethink how the return to work should be done. And when it should be done. My workplace was not the enemy, not really. I had a paid twelve-week leave, the best I could reasonably hope for in this country. And I had a private place to pump. But there is no mistaking: the world of work was not created by women for women, because it doesn’t work for us. It celebrates the births of our children with flowers in our hospital rooms and a baby gift sent home, but expects us to snap to and be on our game twelve weeks (or less) after delivering another human being into the world. It subtly—and not so subtly—pressures us to get our shit together, be like we were before, and Jesus don’t talk about the kid all the damn time.

  I don’t look back and regret returning to work. Nor do I think I should’ve stayed home full-time with my kids. That’s not what I wanted to do, period. I was fortunate to work from home some of the time. I was fortunate that my husband’s employer allowed him to work four days a week so he could spend every Friday with our kids until both of them were in elementary school. I just wish I could’ve stayed home longer without risking losing my job. I wish I didn’t need that list because my brain was such a pile of garbage that I couldn’t remember the most basic of items in the morning. And I wish I could’ve worked less initially. But what I was doing was working fifty to sixty hours a week, right out of the gate. It’s impossible to recommend that.

  I also wish these conversations — about different choices, when a choice is even an option — didn’t automatically devolve into a pissing match between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. We can’t all stay home. And we can’t all work. We don’t all want to stay home. And we don’t all want to work. Most women have to work. And a select few never will. Let’s embrace that your team will never contain all the women on earth. And neither will mine. Let’s embrace the idea that people (that includes women!) are different, with different goals, different measures of success, different skills and talents and pain points. We all make different choices. We can’t all make the same choice. So let’s embrace that and then let’s move the fuck on.

  While I recognize all the work I did back then during those long, hard hours, weeks, months, and years allowed me to have the career I have now, I just look back and wonder — did it really have to be so hard? Did the choices need to be so stark? And did I need the added pressure of having to act like it wasn’t the biggest clusterfuck of all time? That I wasn’t being ground to dust?

  While we’re at it, can we please stop making fathers feel guilty for fully taking their meager paternity leaves? Or expect them to check in, be on e-mail, or even work while they’re at home with their new baby?

  My husband is a carpenter, and you can’t work from home as a carpenter, thankfully. I needed all the help I could get, both times, all the time. So when I returned to work and was shuttling layouts and notes home to my coworkers while they were on paternity leave, I felt like a part of the horrible machine. I knew it was wrong. Because if someone had arrived on our doorstep with work for my husband during either one of our leaves, I would’ve slapped that shit right out of their hands. Leave us alone. Is that too much to ask?

  The early days and weeks and months of a family are sacred. That’s what I’ve come to believe all these years later. They aren’t easy, not by a long shot. But they should be untouchable. The time should be longer, our focus less fractured. We have the rest of our lives to be pulled in a thousand different directions. Give us this time to heal, to get to know each other. Give us more weeks and, yes, months to create a foundation we can all launch from.

  Give us more time. We all want more time. We’ll be better for it when we return.

  When I was preparing for my second maternity leave, I wanted everything to be as buttoned-up as humanly possible. I made lists upon lists, copying my teams on every little detail, all in an attempt to disaster-proof my three-month absence. An impossible task to be sure, but for my own peace of mind I couldn’t start my leave feeling I had left a single detail unmolested. As I entered the homestretch, I had one last meeting with everyone to review projects and provide status updates along with a list of the freelancers I had lined up to cover for me. And, of course, a list of backup freelancers for those freelancers. I was grilled, a lot, and more often by my female coworkers than the men. Sometimes other women will make your life harder than it really needs to be.

  After work I put my head in my hands and mumbled to my husband, “I wish one person would be big enough to say, ‘Everything will be fine.’ Just one.”

  On what
was close to my last day, in what was close to my last meeting, I sat with a designer I had worked closely with and I again rattled off everything I knew — the lists, the next steps, the backups to the backups, just everything I could shake out of my brain before it morphed into a postpartum blob of jelly. He nodded. He didn’t seem that concerned. And then, to my amazement and relief, he said exactly what I had wanted to hear all along, “Everything will be fine.” If I could’ve heard that more. If we could all say it more. If we could all show it more, through our actions, with empathy, with patience, and, hey, how about with our policies?

  If you’re returning to work or preparing for maternity leave or just wondering how this will all shake out for you, let me tell you right now: Everything will be fine. You will make it. You will survive.

  I just wish survival wasn’t where the bar was set. I wish it didn’t have to be so hard or the time so short. I wish we weren’t made to feel somehow indebted for policies that are among the very worst in the world. I wish this wasn’t the best we could do. Because it certainly isn’t. Fuck that list.

  We deserve better.

  Job Description for the Dumbest Job Ever

  Title

  Mother

  Summary

  This position manages to be of the utmost importance and yet somehow also the least visible and/or respected in the entire organization. You will enjoy a whole bunch of superficial attention and lip service from culture, advertisers, and politicians but will never receive a credible follow-up in the form of a concrete plan for advancement, support, benefits, or retirement. Please note: although you will coordinate, plan, and do almost everything, you should expect to crash face-first into bed every night feeling like you’ve accomplished basically nothing. Welcome!