It is family visiting day at C’s day camp. T is away in China on business, so I definitely need to show up: the luxuries of the accidental mom schedule come in handy.

Z, of course, gets wind of family day and is begging to go. After all, isn’t he family? I am presented with two choices, either of which will make me feel guilty: if I leave Z, he’ll be devastated he can’t go. If I bring him, C will be devastated that he doesn’t get his own time with me. Plus, let’s be honest, I’ll have a 3.85 year old with me. I choose Z’s devastation and I leave him at his nursery school camp. It seems fair, but I’m also the loser since I can’t shake the guilt. Possibly one reason why I can’t have more kids is I can’t add any more guilt to my life.

After the 30 minute drive all the way to the other world of Staten Island, I make my way up to C’s “shelter,” or cabin, and immediately I remember why we shelled out the big bucks to give C this totally unique camp experience. The kids are all buzzing in the hive of their little shelter- picnic tables piled with backpacks and drawings and strips of lanyard and leftover snack. C hands me a card he’s made that says “Mommy” and “I love you.” Wow. I’ll look at that card three days later when we get in the biggest fight of our lives. He is just so genuinely thrilled to have me here. I always check myself when either of my boys shows all this reflexive love and pride. Wait. At me?

We do fun camp activities: meet the counselors, roast marshmallows, look at the lake where C catches frogs, inspect rocks, root through the lost and found, get our picture taken together. I watch C play and possibly cheat at Gaga, an Israeli dodgeball game, and then participate in some sort of structured activity involving foam swords; not really sure what the point of that one is. After lunch in the shelter, we head to the amphitheater to hear announcements and camp songs and Jewish songs.

Immediately, I’m right back at Hebrew school and at all the camps I ever went to, combined. I’m 8, I’m 11, I’m definitely not 40 anymore with a kid belonging to me nuzzling up to me (and totally only paying attention to the lanyard he’s stitching). There are people in this world who hate camp songs and people in this world who love camp songs, and there’s no question, I’m the second kind. I’m a joiner. I guess parenthood is indoctrinating your child into the rituals that you perceive to be important to you, even if you don’t know why. I love this place. I love camp. I love belonging, even if I never did it very well. I love it for my child.

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve updated the blog but guess where I am back – the doctor.

This time, it’s the hospital, for an opportunity for C to get his adenoids removed. C has snored his whole life. He’s always hacking, picking his nose, reading or doing Legos or watching movies with his mouth wide open. When we took him to an ENT in April over spring break, after waiting a criminal 90 minutes in the waiting room, C was treated to the “nose noodle” and we learned that his adenoids were huge and obstructing his breathing and I was like, begging the doctor to take them out right then and there.

But now that C is suited up in too-adorable-for-words hospital scrubs and I’m rubbing his back and we’re riding the wheelchair down to get him masked up for anesthesia, I wonder if we’ve made the right decision. Maybe this is just a modern day hoax, a ridiculous elective surgery whose sole purpose is to transfer cash from my child’s college savings account directly to the ENT’s child’s tuition fund. Or, maybe, as many anonymous moms on the Internet have told me, this will change my child’s life. He’ll be a new person. He’ll get a good night’s sleep. He won’t complain after he runs around the track. He’ll stop whining. He’ll never be grumpy.

The whole procedure takes 30 minutes and first we check in with the doctor, who has probably done 30,0000000000000 adenoidectomies in his lifetime, and then we check in on C, who is fast asleep from the anesthesia, groggy and helpless in his little bed. For two hours, he fights the grogginess and the nausea and we finally get him into the car for a not-heard-since-2-years-old screaming car ride home. C watches Ghostbusters which is apparently very restorative. The anesthesia has worn off so well that he doesn’t even go to bed that early.

He seems totally fine the next morning and I ship him off to school because the ENT told me I could send him to school the next day and I am just not the kind of mom who likes my kid lounging around the house. Yeah, I’m that kind of mom. But at 11:30 the school nurse is calling me to report that C is tired and says his throat hurts. I’m like, yeah, whatever, my throat hurts too sometimes, get over it. They know I work from home. They’re totally taking advantage of me. I take my time and when I go to pick him up he’s a bench in the main office with all the teachers streaming right by him, which is totally cruel if you ask me. I ask him, do you really feel bad? Are you really tired? Are you really sure you can’t handle school? Is it really that bad? You aren’t going home and watching a movie or playing with Legos. You’re going home and READING. The principal is 2 steps from me.

We leave school and in the end I take C grocery shopping and we eat a nice lunch on the roof of the grocery store (OK, it’s Whole Foods, which really doesn’t seem like a “grocery store,” more like a giant luxury box) and C doesn’t eat much and when we’re walking the aisles he takes my hand and says, Mommy, you think I was just trying to leave school because I didn’t want to go to school. But I LOVE school.

And then I feel bad. Doesn’t it so often end that way?

Yes, I am still the Accidental Stay at Home Mom. But I apparently so accidentally came to it that I do not fully know how to embrace it. So I took a serious hiatus from blogging; life had overcome me in a serious way. Two big things have happened to me that, paradoxically, invited more self-reflection but sucked away any time and energy to do it.

Last summer, around the time of my last blog post, I began working on A Book! It is the book that caused months of rejection and desperation. Finally, a publisher, a real publisher, wanted me and my co-author to write it. It still causes desperation and rejection and will continue to do so probably until it is published (April 2017, allegedly) and long after. But it is also consuming very much of my time and my mental energy, which were pretty limited to start with.

Then in February, my mom died. One day you have a parent — one day you are a mom with a mom, and then suddenly you aren’t. My mom’s health had been rocky for a while — first she had ovarian cancer, which was not symptomatic but involved literally hundreds of rounds of chemo treatment, and then she developed a severe blood condition.

One thing I learned from my mom’s ordeal is the limits of one’s ability to understand death until it happens. Yes, I knew that she was going to die. I knew that when her weight had dropped to sub-100 pounds and she had a hard time walking 3 blocks and the doctors said “acute leukemia,” there was only one way this diagnosis was going. But I don’t think human cognition can grasp the significance of death until after it actually occurs. My mom was just always around. The world without her phone calls, chit-chat, solicited and unsolicited parenting advice, planning conversations, silly and ironic jokes, trinkets for me and the boys, and her compassion, was simply a world my brain could not fathom. I had never considered the loss of all of those things despite the hours I had spent with her as her health declined, or the subsequent hours I spent with my other family members reviewing her condition and the meaning of it. So now I have that world, I am living in that world, that I had never considered.

I’m not a huge mother’s day fan and in truth neither was my mom, but this mother’s day I felt acutely the truth that now I am the mom. Sometimes when I hear my kids call “mommy,” I think they are actually talking to someone else. It takes a several-second recall – OK, a double-digit second recall – to remember who they are referring to. Sometimes I used to think they were talking to my mom, the Ur-mom. But now it’s just me. I’m the mom.

Anyway, I’m back.

I spend a LOT of my “free time” at the doctor. Wonder why I never go that freelance career off the ground? Two words: doctors’ appointments.

There is the matter of Z’s underweightness, a chronic condition that has no discernible diagnosis (genetics?) but that still nags. Then there were his purported enlarged adenoids. Throw in a few annual check ups and sicknesses, and of course, the allergies, and you’ll start to understand.

On Monday I take Z up to Mt. Sinai Hospital, aka the endpoint of the Earth, to find out if he has a peanut allergy. Z tested positive on a skin test and negative on a blood test for the allergy, so the only way to reconcile the two is to spend four hours in a medically-supervised environment force-feeding him two tablespoons of Skippy, an epinephrine shot nearby. The new medical science says I should have done this 2.5 years ago, but I’m late to the party. Since C is allergic to peanuts, I’m convinced that a.) Z is allergic too and b.) it doesn’t matter because I’m an old pro. Turns out Z hates peanut butter, and takes exactly 4 lollipops and 20 minutes of TV to bribe him to eat it, but he’s not allergic. I keep looking for the hives and the telltale itching, but there’s none. Case closed. The doctor sends us home after two hours of observation and a lot of cartoons.

The day is glorious, my mood is upbeat, and Z and I depart to nearby Central Park. We both eat hot dogs, I step in dog poop and we watch a middle-aged woman carrying an industrial-sized garbage bag full of something in her hands balance another industrial-sized garbage bag full of maybe the same thing on her head. I love Central Park. I am so glued to my small patch of Brooklyn, but when I leave I am reminded of why I used to live for travel, back when I could; here we are, just one borough away, and there’s a whole different beauty, the sun shines at a different angle on the grass; we can observe an entirely novel set of rich people. Z cons me into buying him a popsicle from a vending stand and a SpongeBob SquarePants one at that. Z cannot yet wrap his brain around the science of melting ice and so within three minutes he’s wearing SpongeBob SquarePants popsicle juice, necessitating so much washing-down that I have to rely on the kindness of strangers for more napkins (the vendor guy has cut me off, after maybe 20). Even after all those crumbled wet napkins, Z’s hands are covered in a neon orange tint, like he’s some child laborer working a toxic mine by day.

On Tuesday we are back to, you guessed it, Mt Sinai Hospital. C participates in a clinical trial there, aimed at curing or at least lessening his peanut allergies. The idea is to desensitize him to peanuts by escalating a dosage of peanut flour every two weeks. (I wrote about this trial last year). To me, it’s two hours of round-trip driving and a parking headache and a nod to my belief in the powers of experimental medicine; to the boys, it’s a chance to get spoiled by the nurses, eat chocolate pudding and watch SpongeBob SquarePants. Today is no different: a quick physical from the nurse, some marveling over C’s impressive growth (he and Z are opposites in so many ways), and then both boys eat chocolate pudding – C’s is spiked with peanut flour – and they settle into the television and argue over possession of the remote. This marks our second-to-last visit before the final dose in the trial. We’ve been at this for well over a year now, and the every-other-week visits are part of the boys’ and my regular routine: all the schlepping, the misbehaving in the hospital room, the tired trips. But there’s been remarkably little whining in this affair – most of it comes from me.

We know that at least by clinical measures, the trial has worked:  C’s tolerance for peanut flour is more than 20 times what it was when we first started. Whether it will make any difference in the real world – I have no idea. I like to brag about the trial because it just sounds so damn cool, but I do spend a lot of time wondering whether it’s been a gigantic waste of time. Was this the smartest decision I ever made for my kid? Or just another dumb parenting move, aimed at betterment, yielding nothing.

Perk #22 of being an accidental stay at home mom? Chaperoning field trips.

Taking a day off work to get on a school bus and was just not something I could have done when I was working a full-time job; when C was in nursery school I had to back out of a field trip to the circus at the last minute and it left an open wound. So now that I have no full-time job, I’m all, I’ll never, well, almost never, miss an opportunity to proctor 25 screaming children to the destination of the school’s choice.

Tuesday, April 21: The zoo. Field trip went like this: Parents (mostly moms) milled around school for 30 minutes as we waited for children. Children appeared wearing their designated field trip hats. Have I mentioned the lice that’s been making the rounds at school? Bus ride was filled with screaming children. Once at zoo, children got brief explanation of carnivores, omnivores and herbivores from an overly-smiley zoo educator who maybe also appeared not-so-secretly resentful that she’d pursued some sort of advanced degree in science only now to be spending her day telling kindergartners to sit on their bottoms. Children answered zoo educator’s canned questions regarding snakes and worms and one child (not mine) gave shockingly well-informed answer about how snakes kill their prey. Children fed sweet potato to meal worms and caressed snake. Children took bathroom break and yours truly entrusted three boys to use the men’s room on their own and then found yours truly entering the men’s room to yell at one boy, and then another boy, for entering the bathroom stall of another boy and disrupting his vital business. Children watched sea lions, dangling dangerously close to their waters. Children visited petting zoo, fed pellets of food to goats and then looked at baboons and turtles.

The trip ended on a bit of a sad note for me as C, who is sort of allergic to the world, wound up with a giant hive on his face and a sneeze-filled, energy-sapping allergic attack, probably from feeding the farm animals. (I guess if you are allergic to dogs and cats you might as well be allergic to goats too?) I spent most of the rest of the trip comforting C, who lost his enthusiasm to run through the prairie dogs’ area and play on the fake lily pads. In a matter of moments, he melted from an overly-energetic menace to a sad, needy little boy; I felt so lucky I could be with him.

Tuesday, April 28: The gym. I decide to help out while the school’s kindergarten and first grade classes visited a local community center gym so they could do what kids in the suburbs get to do every day: run around a track, do an obstacle course, learn some stretching and dribble a basketball. The kids were on shockingly good behavior; everyone looked happy, and, unlike the chaos I often see when I stop in at C’s classroom for family Friday, I didn’t witness a single fight or set of tears. Conclusion: school at this age should be more about jumping through obstacle courses than learning to read.

Thursday, May 7: The playground. C’s kindergarten class is starting a new social studies unit on playgrounds. I actually didn’t know they even did social studies in kindergarten. I’m not sure C did, either. The class is kicking off the unit with a trip to the nearby playground. It is a beautiful, stunning, sunny day and C’s teacher lets them run loose for a long time; no one, especially not even Mrs. B, is interested in a long lesson on this kind of day. The kids play many different iterations of tag and the moms chat with each other and Mrs. B and we’re all pretty much just having social hour during the school day, right as it should be. There’s a short lesson about playgrounds; I miss it because I’m shepherding a hurt kid back to school. By the end of the trip, everyone is pretty ready to go back, and I’ve concluded a few more things about kindergartners.

• They still play the same games we did; how does that happen? Did no one invent a better game of tag in 30 years?

• Some kids cry when they are out of place in line; social friction seems mostly to do with the upset of order.

• A lot of kids (including my own) pick their noses. And maybe eat it. Is there an evolutionary explanation for this?

• Everyone wants to be the boss of everyone else, except for some kids who are bossed on but don’t even seem to notice so I’m not sure it actually counts.

• Everybody else’s lunch looks better than your own, but whatever you have is seriously still worth bragging about.

It is family Friday again today and I leave Z with my mom, who is visiting, and go plant seeds in Dixie cups with C’s kindergarten class. C is on the approximation of perfect behavior and more or less correctly spells “red pepper” on the seed box and then goes to the reading rug with a friend and his dad so I help clean up around the classroom and then check in with his teacher about why C is still so confused about where to put his homework on Fridays. She has that meaning-to-talk to you look on her face, and leans in to tell me that C has been out of control in the classroom of late, characteristic for him at home, maybe, but not so much at school. He’s not listening. He’s lost that maturity he had when he started school. He’s following the other out-of-control boys in the classroom. Case in point is when the assistant principal came in to do an evaluation, he was the one bonkers kid in the class. Immediately I’m blaming Governor Cuomo, or maybe it’s the legislature, or our previous governor, or maybe Mike Bloomberg, because I am pretty sure they have tied a teacher’s compensation to a superior’s classroom evaluation, and I know C just sunk it… I know she’s compassionate and she’s not telling me C’s going to juvie, but I’m pretty much sure this is All My Fault, mostly because I’m a bad mom, and also because I yell at him too much and now he’s internalized all the anxiety I’m giving him.

Back at home Z builds houses out of Magnatiles but then doesn’t nap. He spends at least an hour pulling up stools to take forbidden items down from the kitchen counter top – things that were placed there because they were out of his reach: a Ziploc bag of screws, an expired Epi-pen, Valentine’s cards with lollipops; he pulls my hair when I take them away.

After C comes home from school we decide to make a calendar to count down to his birthday. While I’m getting some supplies there is a tremendous amount of shrieking, rather like a cat getting a bird, and I come out to the kitchen to find deep scratches on C’s face. I don’t get a straight story but it seems to have something to do with Z taking C’s dreidel and C taking it back. (Yes, I still have dreidels around the house. I know Hanukah was in December). We make C’s calendar but then C has a minor meltdown after he writes the countdown to his birthday in marker; it hasn’t occurred to him that number will change with each day. Z occupies himself by dribbling out glue on green paper. Seems good enough to me.

Meanwhile I’m preoccupied with what to do about The Book – the thing that was supposed to be my next stage in life but is slowly fading into evanescence. We have gotten a low offer for it; do we take the crappy offer and get it published, or follow the advice of our agent, who says to self-publish? I have become so overwhelmed by this decision – we must make it next week – that I cannot think clearly about any aspect of my life, and, every decision seems overwhelmed by the Big Decision and the Big Decision is really a choice between the lesser of two bad choices.

At dinner C suggests we read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day at story time. And we do.

It is mid-winter break, the kind of time I should relish because, back when I was working full-time, a week off school meant having to scramble to find a place for the kid(s). But seriously, who thinks it’s necessary to have a vacation in February?

So the truth is I’ve signed up C for three days at a nearby science camp; I drop him off, and we both know immediately that he’ll be happier there, amid building toys and messy experiments and other five-year-olds, than he’ll ever be cooped up inside with me for three solid days.

My parents are visiting, so they spend the morning playing with Z, whom they have suddenly become enamored of now that he speaks in sentences, says things like “guzenteit,” and cuddles up on the couch to read books. Z, being the second child, has never received so much unadulterated adult attention in his life. I actually read several articles in the New York Times. Then my parents spend a solid hour squabbling over whether they’ll take the train or rent a car to Washington in the impending storm. Apparently squabbling is an important aspect of the human condition, as I’ll soon learn.

Z and I go to pick up C, and he is all abuzz about the different layers of the earth, something I vaguely remember learning about and realize I need an instant refresher in. He produces three projects from the day; Z eyes them excitedly. Big brother’s art projects are always good loot. Then at home C shows off the “prize” he won for “being a good partner” on the “nature walk” and immediately I am cursing C for winning anything for any good behavior because Z goes ballistic over this tiny red flashlight and even though C says he’ll give Z his next prize I make C share this one because not sharing it means Z is rattling the baby gate and screaming and stomping and writhing on the floor. After a while I hide the red flashlight in C’s dresser but it doesn’t matter because Z stumbles on the gray ball of “earth” that C has brought home. Z takes the ball in and out of its container. C declares his ownership of the ball. Z pokes at the ball. C declares his pride in it. And then the ball becomes like some sacred religious object. The kind that starts wars. Z moves the container around the house, putting it in different perches, and C tries to reclaim it. C moves the container. And Z moves it somewhere else. And then I start to make dinner and I turn around and Z is slowly demolishing this little ball, this replica of earth, this token of hard work, and there are tears and two kinds of brooms and a change of clothes. The ball goes away. And after dinner Z rifles through C’s dresser looking for a pair of sunglasses (why not?) and stumbles on the red flashlight. Tomorrow, I tell C, I’ll keep your spoils in your backpack.

It’s been awhile. Among other things, I’ve been catching up on my reading.

All of a sudden, people are making a lot of fuss in the news media about people like me. We are educated. We had career paths. Then, we had babies.

And after that, kerplunk is the sound of your successful professional trajectory getting dumped in the toilet.

This pattern has been repeating itself for a long time, but somehow there’s been a burst of reporting on it. Maybe thank you Sheryl Sandberg? Thank you President Obama, who, six years in, mentions the issue in the State of the Union? Thank you derivative news media, which manufactures so many iterations of the same story, once it decides it is “the story.”

So here are some of the stories I’ve been reading recently…
-“Can the U.S. Ever Fix Its Messed up Maternity Leave System,” by Bloomberg, the place that actually gave me a very generous maternity leave (by U.S. standards).
-“What Stalled the Gender Revolution: Child Care that Costs More than College Tuition” in the UC Berkeley alumni mag.
-“Why U.S. Women are Leaving Jobs Behind” in the NY Times.

That Times story says that many American women are dropping out of the workforce – women’s participation peaked in 1999; in contrast, in Europe, where taxes actually pay caregivers to tend to their helpless offspring, more women than ever are staying in the workforce. Imagine that!

A Times/CBS News poll confirms that a lot of non-working women are “staying home” because of family responsibilities. My first impulse when I read this story is completely self-involved: What would I answer if CBS News called me up and asked if I identified myself as a homemaker?

I get scared, like they’re calling right now. Am I a homemaker? My house is always a mess, so I’m inclined to say no. If I make a home, I do it really badly. But do I work outside the home? Well, no. I spend a lot of the time caring for the kids. If I were called to jury duty, I’d surely ask for a childcare exemption (and I love jury duty). And to the extent I work, I have a home office. It’s right up there, upstairs, very messily filled with the books and papers I think are going to spark a career as a writer, but which in actuality I ignore. So no, I don’t work out of the home.

Can I just check “other,” for identity crisis?

Then another thing in the Times article, buried pretty deep, really hit me. It came from a professor, Pamela Stone, at Hunter College. At the ‘upper end’ of the economic ladder, according to Dr. Stone, “the rapid increase in hours ‘has made it tough, and at the same time we are seeing nearly unending pressures on parents.’”

Bingo! (And I am sure she is right about her assessment of the absurd and inhumane demands on women at the lower end, too – I am just writing about what I know).

Here’s the point I would like to make, except I’m not making it in the NY Times and I don’t have a PhD: you know why it’s so hard for so many working parents, and probably especially for working moms, who have so-called good, professional jobs, the ones that probably even give lip service to flexibility? Because at least in the corners of the professional world that I know about, work permeates everything. It’s really demanding – and I’m not just talking about for the hedge fund managers that get paid a gazillion dollars a year. I am talking about the friends I know who work, you know, midlevel jobs in media, architecture, non-profits, health care, education, government… These are people who are making good salaries but, c’mon, not THAT GOOD and who are just working WAY TOO MUCH. So if you divided what they made by the number of hours they actually put in, especially off-the-clock, their salaries would actually look a lot less good. Especially because women are making less than their male counterparts. And then you add to that that they are doing more work on the home front than their male partners (if you are even talking about in-tact, heterosexual households, which I guess for these purposes we are) you might understand why women are dropping out of the workforce, or going on the “mommy track,” or not gunning it for that managerial job.

I don’t have the empirical data to back this up, but I don’t think I am going out on a limb here to say that, over the past 10 or 20 years or so, the minimum expectation of work has changed. It’s high. It’s just too f—ing much. The people I know work way longer hours than my parents and their parents did. In my profession, newspaper journalists used to pack it up when the paper went to press, at 5 or 6 or whatever. Wire service reporters had shifts. Now it’s an all-the-time job: the web updates, the Twittering, the barrage of emails figuring out who’s going to cover this meaningless press release or that sixth update to the story. I have friends who are teachers who quit teaching, or quit working in the classroom, because they just couldn’t balance it – all that post-classroom work, like, for example, communicating with ever-demanding parents after-hours. Even my friends in academia, which I used to think was just the must luxe job in the world, have a million responsibilities. So it is hard to “balance family and career” because you are trying to balance two inherently inflexible variables and one of them pays you and the other one has a beating heart.

I don’t know what can actually be done about this, but I think that yes the government needs to start funding caregiver leave, and yes we need taxpayer-subsidized daycare. But even then, we, collectively, workers of the world (OK I guess I’m not one now), need to figure out how to reallocate our resources (time) from one source (work) to another (family).

And good luck with that.