My son is not strong.

He is, as the kids say, a shrimp. On the soccer field, the kids complain when picking teams, “But he’s so small.” When one of his good friends found out he was taking a sports class after school, he told my boy, “You suck at sports.” I imagine he’s probably right.

My husband and I were both late bloomers when it came to athletics. He found his stride on the Ultimate Frisbee field in college and I mine in my thirties, running on the bike trail. I reached my full 5’0” potential at age 12, and he was short until he spurted to a respectable 5’11” after high school.

Our boy stands no chance to get through grade school unscathed.

When I started Patricia Ellis Herr’s book Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure , I marveled at the idea of a five-year-old hiking 4-6 miles at a time. The idea of going on a serious adult hike with my six-year-old son is something I wouldn’t entertain for years. It’s amazing to me that this woman really attempted to do it 48 times in actual (if low) mountains with her daughter. My kindergartener has a heart of gold and enough energy to rock out in the middle of the kitchen, but I sometimes push him in the Sit & Stand stroller on the way up the hill from the bus stop. The boy down the street – just one month older  – can ride his bike up and down hills to town and to school, and mine isn’t even ready to attempt life without training wheels.

But he’s a solid kid – no waif – and he can hit a baseball and throw a Frisbee just fine. Normally, he’s healthy, just small and low on endurance.

This spring, though, is kicking his ass. He has allergies so bad that his eyes look like he’s been beaten up, his nose is running, he coughs at night, and this has been going on now for three weeks.

Forget about recess. The whole week before spring break – and this one, until it finally rains – he’s been kickin’ it with the admins, playing Uno in the office with some other poor sucker, a fifth grader named Alex. As a former environmental educator, it kills me that my kid can’t go outside.

Until his sixth birthday, he’d never had a dose of any conventional medicine. Around here, we turn to nutrition, homeopathy, bodywork (like craniosacral therapy), energy work and maybe some herbs to keep us well. But something is stressing his system just a little too much. One person said it was an overburdened liver. I don’t doubt it, knowing what he inherited from me, even though I tried to detox before he was conceived. I’d taken tons of allergy medication for years – maybe even decades – until I got rid of seasonal allergies through BioSET Allergy Elimination. I took him to that practitioner in the hopes that she could improve his situation. The jury is still out five days later.

My husband fed him a Claritin on his birthday at the beginning of this mess, and we thought maybe it helped him get through his party the next day, but the day after his second dose he looked worse than ever. So I said forget the drugs. We’ve consulted a bunch of other people and are now the proud owners of an IQAir Health Pro Plus air purifier, which is humming away next to his bed for the first time tonight. Fingers crossed.

Once this season has spent itself of its worse offense, I feel like I still have to figure out what makes him so damn sensitive and if there is anything I can do about it. It flies in the face of my paradigm of health to think that an otherwise healthy kid needs drugs to get through a month, but to look at him is to want to whip out your cell to call CPS on me. I do not want to dread cherry blossom time every year.

When I read my sister-in-law’s blog post about her daughter, my niece, seizing spring as though she is just bursting with sap, I got sad. I feel like a character in a Victorian novel who doesn’t see the foreshadowing on the wall that her child is going to succumb to consumption while everyone else is galloping off to greener pastures.

And yet, I know that he will probably be fine. I know that my fears are nothing compared to so many parents who have children with serious special needs or scary diagnoses or severe food allergies. But as a former wimpy kid myself who used to be grateful she hadn’t been born a boy who would no doubt be inept at such requisite skills as skateboarding and throwing things long distances, I feel sorry for my boy. He’s spunky, and he’s scrappy, but he ain’t strong.

Eighty degrees in March, and nothing is at rest.

The flowers are up, stretching their arms after nary a winter’s nap. The magnolia has exploded into blossom way before its time, dropping its once-precious petals onto the ground where they turn slipper and slimy like a million mini banana peels. After she sat down on our front steps, the petals left a smear of brown on my the puffy cloth-diapered bum of toddler daughter’s pale pink linen — in March! — pants.

Every day there is a new blossom or bird or piece of our house renovation next door to be the target of her chubby index finger and her catch-all “Whoa!” exclamation. If the warmth and too-early springing into green weren’t enough to rev us up, Daylight Savings Time’s extra hour has shifted our reality into a new gear, one that makes bed before 8 a near impossibility.

Leading up to last Saturday, when we lost that hour, I had managed to get little A to nap twice with help from the car on cooler days before the hammering began next door and then, by napping with her. After my doctor told me “I think you need three hours of rest a day,” I decided that I should just give up on productivity during at-home naps and rest my weary body instead.

That felt good, losing track of time and waking with a new lease on the day. The trick was to start early enough that I didn’t risk sleeping through my son’s afternoon bus pickup time. As long as it was cool, I found I could even get to sleep again in the evening. Finally, my cup was filling with rest. But it was not to last.

All that week, I tried to find slivers of time to fit in my homework for my Mother’s Self-Renewal class, reading and journaling. I’d already missed one of the classes, wallowing in self-pity at all the responsibilities pulling me in so many directions I felt I’d tear apart and lose my stuffing. This time would be different, I’d promised myself.

The plan was that my husband would take my son to gardening day at his school that Saturday morning. I’d have an hour or so of relative quiet in the house to make myself some grain-free “bread” and then nap with my daughter, say 11 to 1, have lunch and leave, fully rested, at 2:15 to enjoy listening to Studio 360 on NPR en route to Tenleytown for the 3:00 class. Also in the plan was for me to come home bursting with energy and joy, or maybe just be pleasantly calm that happiness and parenting and house renovation were not all mutually exclusive.

Then our fridge broke. Or at least got testy. We spent part of the morning moving important things into the new fridge in the shed, purchased on Black Friday for the home we’ll move into this summer. My husband searched around for a fridge that would fit our current smaller space. It ended up that I took the kids — both of them — to gardening day and he used my Sears card to schedule a Monday delivery for a new stainless number to chill our chow.

My son mostly just played with his friends while his sister, after an initial excursion across a muddy field, happily sat and dug at dirt while I weeded. It was a lovely spring morning, still chill enough to feel like the right season. But by the time I’d changed a diaper and nursed in the library, it was past lunchtime and I was tired.

So was the baby, but she was having none of nap. I thought she might fall asleep on the way home. No such luck. Then I tried laying her down, but she preferred instead to cry or crawl over me and push her chubby hand into my flabby belly or neck. I started to see my chances at “self-renewal” crumble.

Off I huffed to drive her to sleep. My husband didn’t stop me with any protestations about my not having the time to do that and go to my class, too. And I didn’t beg. My hopes were already dim.

By the time I pulled back into the driveway with a zonked-out toddler in the back seat, I was too hungry and too tired to drive 45 minutes for a class that I wasn’t very prepared for. I texted the teacher something terse about not being able to finish the session and came inside where my husband was holding the key to the other car so that I could ostensibly turn around and go to class. Points for trying, I guess.

But he doesn’t get that it’s just not that easy. Not for me. I had no snacks, there was no plan for dinner, and I hadn’t rested. I’d been out all morning and used up all my energy cards. This healing business means business.

So what did I do? I didn’t mope as long as I did the previous time I missed class. I resolved to make something out of the day; I took a few drops of Premier Research Labs vitamin B and set about to clean the house enough that it wouldn’t drive me crazy anymore.

The supplement and the sorting seemed to have a positive effect on me, but between the B and the late nap, the baby acted like I’d given her a triple espresso. Back when I was first trying to heal from adrenal fatigue in 2004, I did a couple of vitamin B IVs and National Integrated Health Associates. It’s quite a buzz, like liquid sunshine, warming and energizing you from the inside out. I’d venture to say that this is what my daughter was feeling from my souped-up milk.

At 8:14 p.m., when she should have been asleep, she was giddy and ready to party. The phone rang, and my friend Sarah was ready to talk with me about her journey through adrenal fatigue and the GAPS diet.

Little Miss Alert played with Daddy for a while as I took notes, and then I just nursed her through the rest of the conversation, which was a real turning point for me. To say I am grateful for Sarah sharing is like saying this winter has been on the mild side. Gross understatements. I know lots of people who’ve had lots of health issues, but where I am right now, hearing about Sarah’s journey and healing was nothing short of inspirational. She’s due to have her second child soon, and we talked about birth and recovery along with hard-core gut stuff. It was powerful to hear people on the GAPS diet talk about their experiences at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference and it’s educational to read the many wonderful posts on blogs like Cheeseslave, where author Ann Marie has answered my question about SIgA today. But still, just talking with someone who I’ve known go from sickness to health was so soothing and buoying.

By the time Jen Kogan, the teacher of the self-renewal class called to check up on me on Monday, I had made peace with the fact that this is just not the time for me to take it. The house renovation project needs my attention for the next three months, and my health has got to be the focus of whatever I have left (after, of course, taking care of my children and arranging for childcare and summer camp and whatever we need to keep us all sane and our hair intact). As much as I’ve been wanting to pursue career development, I have to accept that whatever writing I can get done for my own spirit has got to be enough for now.

The rest of week was a hot, sunny blur of contractor appointments and pollen. I felt like Vitamin B and Vitamin Sarah were still going strong well into Thursday night, when another friend at the Holistic Moms meeting told me she’d read my blog and that we had more in common than I’d known. “This is just the current season of our lives,” she reminded us both. When I got home, I was surprised by an email from a graduate school friend who has also gone grain-free after vegetarianism and is on her own journey to balance health and parenthood. To be thanked for my writing twice in one night was a gift.

It’s not lately been clear what literal season it is here, and I tend to want it to be everything all at once in my home life.

The season to mother well vs. to mother myself.

The time to embrace life as a stay-at-home mom vs. the time to publish, to volunteer, to network.

The time to just rest vs. to develop a serious yoga practice, or return to running.

The season to make all my food from scratch all the time and be strict enough to heal (necessary reality) vs. the season to be all done with that and ready to embrace and enjoy so many delicious things I haven’t had for so long, without fear of pain or illness.

I can’t tell winter to just chill out and be winter, and I can’t tell spring not to come. There is no use fighting whatever is. And even if I can’t figure out what today’s reality is going to be or predict tomorrow’s, I can choose to accept rather than fight.

The dirt doesn’t push back the flowers. Let the beauty reveal.

Stop and smell the hyacinths while they’re here. Whenever that is.

No one has to convince me not to try to be perfect. Okay, I do have perfectionist tendencies in some areas, but when I read about mothers having epiphanies that they don’t need to keep the house spotless, I feel like I am living on some other planet. One with lots of spots.

It looks -- and sounds -- pretty messy and conflicted around here!

My floors get vacuumed fairly often, but they are so dirty my daughter’s white socks are permanently light brown on the bottom. And that’s even with her taking them off and walking around barefoot half the time. There is always stuff on the floor.  “Done with it? Drop it!” appears to be our family motto.

Reading Chapter Five of Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal at first glance didn’t do anything to make me feel any better, or to inspire me to slack on my expectations. It actually made me feel kind of bad that I really don’t hold myself to very high standards – I let plenty go! – and I still feel frustrated!

Yes, I would like my home to be a lovely place of beauty. Yes, I would like my kids to grow up with respect for their toys and to learn to treat things with reverence rather than refuse. These things are about values, not because I feel like I have to reach for some externally-defined sense of perfection.

A large part of the desire to renovate the house next door came from an interest in re-imagining home: figuring out what doesn’t work and finding creative solutions to make it work when the template is closer to blank.

Yes, I would really like to get this right. But that’s so that I can actually enjoy the place I spend so much time because it looks pretty and feels calm. Not because I think I “should.” I know I can breathe better with space.

I seek beauty for its own sake, not out of some external sense of necessity. But still, beauty — living in it, creating it, appreciating it — proves elusive amid all the other things there are to do just to exist.

I make all my food from scratch, not because I fear the organic police will give me a bad consumer citation but because I will get sick if I don’t.

I live without caffeine and chocolate and chocolate, not because I’m depriving myself but because their negative impact on my health will be keenly and quickly felt.

Everything I do is purposeful, and yet nothing seems to actually get done.

Last May, when I wrote about the book Good Enough is the New Perfect, I felt freed by the idea that many things I saw as conflicts were not really conflicts. It was a matter of perspective. Yippee! I could change my reality by changing the way I looked at it!

Well, now these different pulls/commitments/desires/needs really do feel like conflicts. Because I simply have got to sleep more or I will never get well. That eats into time I could be pursuing another leisure activity, or meaningful work, or cleaning the home. And it’s hard to feel like doing any of those when your energy is so low. I know it’s time to seek another healthcare practitioner, but I haven’t been able to find the time or energy to do that research. One bright spot is that I emailed a friend who had adrenal fatigue and was on the GAPS diet for a long time, and she said sure, she could chat with me. And Ann Marie at Cheeseslave, having kindly already responded to a comment of mine on her GAPS Diet Myths post, wrote me this week that she’d soon post the question I sent her on an upcoming Sunday Q&A.

Really, I want some giant healing hand to pick me up and hold me safe while, with its other hand, it pushes a pause button so I don’t have to miss out on my children’s lives, my friends’ lives, my home project, my pursuits.

But there is only one now, and if sleeping and breathing and mindfully eating are tops on the agenda, that’s just what I have to do.

I need to be my own giant hand.

And my own pause button.

—

Share with me your self-care secrets!

This time of year is always good for smacking me around. Even on a sunny day like today, when the quince and camellia are blooming and you swear it can’t be January it’s so warm, winter is in my bones.

And my mom’s too.  Right around this time in 1995, while I was doing my student teaching, she fell in her kitchen and broke her leg so bad it popped through the skin. At the time, my father was on his always-dreamed-about trip to New Zealand. Travel was not an anomaly for him; he’s done plenty for business and plenty for pleasure, including a trip to Thailand after he fell in love with the cuisine. I’m told he went bird-watching in Arizona (I think) shortly after I (his fifth child) was born. To say that my mother does not share his love for travel is a grand understatement.

When I signed up to read the novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats for the From Left to Write book club, I hoped I would be able to reward myself with the novel read after finishing a volunteer project I was working on. But then I got more work tutoring in the last week of the semester at the boarding school where I help a few kids. And my children here at home kept needing a mommy. And their mommy needed more sleep. So she didn’t finish the book, but its tale of travel in search of a lost father is certainly intriguing.

Last week, I was on a high after the successful fundraiser, and I was pleased with how well I was feeling. And yet, I’ve also been reflecting lately on just when it is that my health gave me clues that I would have a challenging road. My mom has been wondering the same for years. Maybe that leg break was as bad as it was because she was (like me) celiac and didn’t know it, or because of some other health condition that weakens bones. The skin issues and digestive issues I’m having now are not new; they’ve been cycling through my body in various permutations for years. And even my mom has admitted that her body was not the ideal place to start a life, belonging to a stressed out (and a smoking) mother of four (ages 8-12 and up when I came along).

I bet she and I share more health issues than we are aware, though I hope that my discovering things at and earlier age and the newer research around these days will contribute to an easier road for me eventually. But right now, it’s a little challenging. The heaviness I feel around the time of a drop in my thyroid is knocking at the door like a canvasser who won’t disappear. And, even if this mild winter continues, it’s always tough to go into the month of February, recalling the death of my brother in 1987.

The year before he took his life, my parents and I went to the Bahamas for my seventh grade mid-winter break, a week that Michigan schools take off so that everyone can keep a little sanity. Finding green helps. The year before that, sixth grade, we went to Hawaii. My mom probably hated every minute of both trips. I loved them but wanted to do more activities and wished I had siblings closer to my age to join. When Pat died, I was on a vacation with a friend and her family on a small island near Barbados where we went on the most spectacular hike to a waterfall. A few days later — a week shy of my fourteenth birthday — I had to fly back home alone to the dreary Midwest.

Today, I still have my father’s zeal for adventure and his propensity to get and stay busy, but my body isn’t exactly keeping up. I’d like to join my sister-in-law’s yoga retreat in Costa Rica in March, but seeing as my thyroid really crashed just after meeting her family in Vermont for the Anusara Grand Circle and Wanderlust last June, and seeing as I have to cook all my food from scratch or face a lot discomfort, travel will have to wait.

I’m not even sure how I’m going to make it to Baltimore for even one day of the three-day Fourfold Path to Healing Conference this weekend. Although I fantasize about staying overnight by myself without having to wake to nurse my 18-month-old back to sleep, my not coming home Saturday night wouldn’t magically disappear all my issues. I’d still need to bring a bunch of food with me, and I’d probably want to pump. In order to reap the benefits of something that would be therapeutic, I have to make some sacrifices that might otherwise jeopardize my health (not to mention that of my daughter, son and husband, who I’m guessing wouldn’t have the greatest night of sleep since we haven’t done a dry run on the night weaning).

And what would they do all day Sunday if I stayed at the conference until it ends at 5:30, or would I leave at noon? How would my daughter react once I got home, and then had to go out after dinner to tutor? How would my body react?

Tonight, when my husband was trying to use playful parenting to get my son out of whining mode during dinner, he took on the voice of a train conductor. E didn’t understand the “sh-clunk” sound of the pretend hole punch. We realized our little boy, almost six, has never been on a train other than the Metro. Maybe my husband could take the kids up to Baltimore on a train partway through Saturday, and we could all drive back home that night, I suggested. “With both of them?” my husband asked, his eyes practically reflecting the shine of headlights. After a few minutes, he said he’d look into it.

Maybe the promise of adventure can somehow give me the space to pursue some healing without a whole lot of guilt. But probably just for one day.

—

How do you balance physical and emotional needs?

What did you inherit from your parents?

What pushes and pulls?

—

When Julia travels to Burma to search for her missing lawyer father, she discovers much more than she expected. Join From Left to Write on February 1 as we discuss The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker. As a member of From Left to Write, I received a copy of the book. All opinions are my own.

The instant I read the words, I regretted picking up my BlackBerry that one last time before going to bed. A well-meaning relative of mine had read my recent post about my health and my leaky gut problem and told me: “This is not the time to volunteer for things.” She intended to point out that there would be plenty of time later in life for me to pursue my interests when I didn’t have as many health challenges to face and when I wasn’t in such a busy time of motherhood with a kindergartener and opinionated non-verbal toddler.

I get her point. Really, I do. The problem is that her note assumes that volunteering is something that detracts from my well-being. Sure, it might have seemed that way in the post she read. I’d rushed to finish it and get it up rather than wait until who knows when I’d get a free moment to sit down again. I did, I realize, sound a little overwhelmed. And yes, balance is something I’m working on.

But I don’t regret my choices, and I don’t want them restricted. That wouldn’t help. If I weren’t busy with something that felt meaningful, that contributed to my priorities, that gave me joy, or that fueled me with passion, I would be, simply put, depressed. Staying busy and engaged in something bigger than myself is a necessity for me to stay mentally healthy without medication.

And staying off medication is something I feel is a physical necessity as well; I simply don’t think my body can handle being on anti-depressants. They made an amazing difference for two years, and then again for a year while I sought treatment for hyperthyroidism (Graves’ Disease).

But they are drugs. Even if I weren’t a true believer in the healing power of nutrition and energy work, my system has shown me it simply cannot handle anything artificial. As much as SSRIs helped, I’m also pretty convinced that they contributed to the mess I’m in now — a much smaller role than 30 years of eating gluten, probably, but a role nonetheless.

No amount of saying no to volunteer work is going to undo all the damage that was caused by decades of eating food my body couldn’t handle, to say nothing of mild but young substance abuse. What will help me heal is continuing to eat real food, pursuing what makes me happy, and cultivating a mindfulness practice. It takes a lot more time and energy than popping a pill, but I really don’t see that I have a choice if I have my long-term health in mind.

Until I got this late-night email, I was, I admit, stewing a little about the lack of time to do everything I cared about. But rather than push me to step aside, as was its intention, the note inspired me to remember why I have chosen what I’ve chosen to do and to be grateful that I have the opportunity to do it.

The fundraiser I was working on was a great success, both in money raised and in positive momentum and a spirit of community, which was probably even more valuable to this project about which I care deeply. Even as I wished for more hours in the day to proofread the program and organize the volunteer schedule, I remembered that I proposed this event because I believe in the cause and that I offered to head it up because it’s something I knew I could do well. I knew it could be a great thing, and I wanted to create that.

So I carried that purpose with me into the event and sincerely enjoyed it. I lapped up the kudos with nary a self-critical remark or “if only we could have” lament. It was just good, plain and simple. We can debrief and learn from it, sure, but the thing I am most proud of is just enjoying it.

And then, when I came home after being gone at the school 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and launched right back into domestic goddess mode, I took on that role without resentment. Sure, there was a smidge of “really?” in my brain when my husband said he was super tired, but rather than go to a place of bitterness, I just chalked it up to a confirmation that the job I usually do of managing house and home is, indeed, a tiring one!

I wanted the laundry and dishes dealt with, so I did them.

I wanted celery and other veggies for the next day and to not cook that night or ask my tired husband to rally, so I went out to the grocery store after picking up take-out.

I wanted to do yoga before eating in peace and quiet, so I waited until after the family meal and bedtime to get on my mat and then eat my own safe food.

Somehow, that email sparked — or stoked — a fire. What started as angry turned cozy and glowing. The email inspired me, in part, to take the Mother’s Self-Renewal workshop to explore issues of balance and honoring our many selves. That first session then gave me the sense that I am both not alone in my dilemmas about time and also that my process is one to honor. It is part of my mothering to model not perfection but an embracing of personal growth and inquiry.

So thank you, dear relative, even if noting you wish you’d gotten advice from your elders still doesn’t convince me that you weren’t being more judgmental than supportive. Regardless of their intent, your words helped me see through the messiness of internal conflict and to look toward something varied and beautiful.

When a two-hour workshop that requires almost an hour of driving leaves you feeling recharged like you had a nap, I’d say it lives up to its “self-renewal” title!

Today was the first meeting of a “Monthly Mother’s Self-Renewal Group” based on Renee Trudeau’s book, The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal. We centered, we talked, we drew. It was great! I can’t wait to start working on some of the exercises and sharing them here! What an inspiring way to start the new year!

Thanks to Lil Omm yoga studio and parenting counselor Jennifer Kogan for putting this together. I’m so motivated, I’m going to cheerily clean up the house while my husband puts the kids to bed, even if he has made at least two or three wisecracks about my taking three hours out of the day on a busy weekend to do this. It’s up to me to keep up my mama mojo.

And yes, I did notice that one of the other books Jen had resting on her yoga mat was Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family by Amy Tiemann. Next on the list!

Baby girl has been a little under the weather, so we’ve been spending more time together — less babysitter, no outings. There were lots of things I intended to accomplish in the past two days, but many of them had to just go out the window. Or, rather, she sat on my desk in front of the window while I sorted files of papers in my overgrown office.

At 17 months, baby A is still not talking much, but she sure does have opinions. And she does nothing half-assed. Every act is intentional, whether it’s putting a random tea bag into a new box, taking my credit card out of my wallet and sliding it under her booster seat, or inspecting the tampons she finds in the non-baby-proofed bathroom cabinet. (When you have nothing toxic lying around, it’s easy to get complacent about latches. And then really easy to get embarrassed when little o.b.s from 1998 end up unwrapped in unexpected and cringingly public places).

This child has a lot more hair in the back than her brother did at this age. It’s coming in straighter but the same color (red!) and in the same location as her brother’s: party in the back. She doesn’t get dressed much in girly clothing, and I was just resigned to her having the same homely mullet her brother had until he was two and a half. It just occurred to me that I could consider actually doing something with that hair.

Even though I feel like I model busy more than bodhi, she actually came over to my yoga mat the other day intent on doing down-dogs with me. Looking at her increasingly long red locks, I said to myself, “You have a girl. A daughter.”

Someday she’s going to care how she looks, and she’s going to be embarrassed by my clothes, if she isn’t already. Her brother recently asked why I looked “fancy” when I put on jeans and a 10-year-old ribbed turtleneck that flared out at the bottom “like a ballet shirt,” he remarked. “I’m not fancy, honey, I’m just dressed.” My husband reminded me that he was the one to pick out that sweater back when it was in style, and from Bloomingdale’s no less.

Without my fashionisto boys, where would I be?

By the time the girl is in the mom-sucks years of middle school, I may have taken frumpy to a whole new level. Or maybe I’ll be in my midlife crisis-cum-renaissance, but I find that hard to believe.

At any rate, the cute barrettes my daughter’s brother insisted we buy her months before she was sporting anything like enough hair to stick them in, finally got a trial yesterday. Each attempt to put them in lasted almost long enough for my husband to take these photos.

I think pretty soon we’re going to have a Pippi Longstocking on our hands.

—

How did you handle hair differently with your daughters versus your sons? Or how did you manage not to?

Yesterday there was no childcare or playdate. Just a lot of rain. I truly felt like a stay-at-home mom, like back in the day before I took on freelance work or started up a chapter of Holistic Moms.

Some of yesterday was full of giggles. Some had me wanting to rip out my hair.

I consider it a victory that: I did a few stretches at home, then made it to the grocery store and then to yoga. My daughter had a few fussy moments during Lil Omm’s yoga playtime (an adult class where kids can hang out), but for the most part, I got in a decent practice. Of course, I was going just on fresh juice (kale, carrot, lettuce, parsley, lemon, beet) and didn’t eat breakfast until 11:30 after I’d put the babe down for a nap.

It would have been nice if she’d slept more than an hour and if she hadn’t been so whiny during the time of just us girls. At least, after her insanely mammoth poop, she amused herself in the tub while I folded clothes. (Note to self: get replacement plug for tub since husband threw out the old one). And then, before we headed to the bus stop to pick up her brother, we both gorged on Artisana coconut butter.

The happy surprise was that after she rejected my attempt to nap her again while her brother, ravenous after a hard day at kindergarten, was eating a second lunch, she was in a great mood. The two of them played individually and together for a good long while, during which time I chopped vegetables, washed dishes, and read and wrote emails related to work, the house, school and weekend planning.

Last week, I caught a piece on NPR about a study in the American Sociological Review that talks about how much more multitasking working mothers do than working fathers — and how much more stressful the mothers’ multitasking is. It’s worth a listen. When your brain constantly is engaged in three projects, it can’t do any of them well. Our circuits get fried. It’s tiring and not rewarding for us. And for our kids who have only a small pie piece of our attention, it’s got to be annoying. I don’t advocate dropping everything to coddle your kid 24/7, but some more focus on words that start with h, c, f, and d might be nice, I’m sure.

So the time from 3:30 to 5:30 was more productive than it was glorious. I got to plug in while they played well, and I only had to wear the baby on my back for a small chunk of time. She perked up when I fed her pomegranate, and I actually bounced on the rebounder (a few different times, since she kept climbing up to join me) and did a little more yoga in the few minutes between dinner being ready and my husband getting home. The physical activity alone made this a banner day!

But, after my son came downstairs at 8 p.m. complaining that he couldn’t sleep, I felt a little guilty for not giving him more focused attention and for not getting us all outside despite the rain. Ironically, I was in the middle of writing about natural playgrounds and playtime at school when he toddled in his too-small red jammies into the dining room, blinking at the light.

After I led him back into his room and tucked him back into bed, I realized, “Oh, you probably didn’t go out today, did you? No wonder you’re not so tired.”

“Just for morning break,” he replied, acknowledging that lunch recess was indoors. “We always went out in the rain at my old school,” he said of his Waldorf school. “I don’t know why they don’t go out in the rain at my new school,” he mused, pointing a knife toward the heart of his mom who chose free public school with a full day over returning to the outdoor-enthusiastic but tres expensive half-day Waldorf school.

I asked if he ever missed his old school, and he said yes, a lot. When pressed on what he missed, he described in great detail the joyful experience of playing with the rain that dripped down from the gutters of the old church that housed his school.

And then he switched his gushing praise to the current state of affairs, where he can pick to ride a trike or scooter on the track at school (and where he’s previously said he loves the big playground, and the soccer games at lunch). The enthusiasm about the new place was heartening.

I came back downstairs, checked a few items off the to do list my daughter had scribbled on hours earlier, finished an email, and went back to pacing out the floorplan of the next door house we are going to renovate starting as soon as we can make our decisions and get drawings ready to submit for permits.

When the baby started crying at 10:10, I said goodbye to the day, knowing that in the morning — after I got juice, broth, veggies, egg and sausage made, lunches finished up and packed, newly washed (and dried in the dryer because they were still in the wash when I went to bed) diapers stuffed and a new one on my girl’s bum before she went to the sitter’s — I knew that I’d get to pretend for a few hours that I am my own person who can do one thing at a time.

Like write about being a mom.

Fall’s draperies have fallen and are mulching on the ground. The woods behind our house are quieter, the tall trees naked of leaves even as deer nibble the green undergrowth.

I am astounded by the light.

It pours in now, like sleepy eyes that have just awakened. It comes at funny times and at new angles, finding new crevices to creep into and casting tricks of shadows on the plainest of surfaces.

We are moving.

Moving into winter. Moving into a new season of emptiness ready for the filling. Moving out of babyhood toward opinionation. Moving out of little boyhood into large hands and strong muscles.

Moving, literally, next door.

Having accepted the rare gift of an opportunity to renovate a home at a cost we just might manage, my family is on the verge of beginning a renovation of the house next to ours, a nearly identical Cape in origin but one in need of much love and tenderness.

I intend to infuse it with beauty.

And intention.

As we embark on a new season of our family lives, we pore over design books and muse about forts and gardens in the bigger lot, I may heed the call to draw inward. While I remain committed to feeding myself and my family nourishing, real food, it may be time to break from following the news toward a time of looking at the light and seeing where we live within it.

If I am quiet, it is to think and imagine. To conjure home. This may take me toward other writing, toward writing about green in building more than the green in my morning juice.

Like everything else, it’s a work in progress.

But let the work be play.

Today my son stayed home from school because he looked like hell after our weekend trip to Dallas for the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference. He was beat. Shortly before we got home last night at about 8:00, he had a series of sneezing fits. I knew the prognosis for a child-free Monday was not great.

So we had a home day that was mostly okay but didn’t end until 9:45 p.m. after we stuck firm to our refusal to give him apple cider. I don’t know what happened, if it was the zinc I gave him or the epsom salt bath or what. But he was insane. He came downstairs I don’t know how many times. We both tried everything we could think of in the mode of playful parenting, empathetic listening, and sticking to our guns.

Whatever is happening in his brain right now, though, we were no match for it.

All day, I’d been reluctant to indulge him in a ton of mommy time so as not to give the impression that you can just stay home whenever and do fun stuff. A homeschooler I am not, as much as sometimes I might like to be.

So he might have felt a little ignored, but he just needed to have some chill time, you know? Rationalizing, yes, but also true, I think.

Still, tonight, as he was being a total spaz, I was feeling kind of guilty for having been so scattered and all “play on your own” and “sure, you can watch that French opera from your grandpa.” Husband guilt for the trip (since I had attended the conference solo leaving him to fend for himself with two kids) didn’t help either.

And yet. When I look at the leaves my little boy found and marveled over today with absolute joy and delight for nothing other than their beauty, I feel grateful and lucky.

Like maybe I am kind of a decent mom.