Draft 2021

I spotted it as I headed out for a walk. And I smiled with delight. There, in the lawn between the sidewalk and our front yard, it stood, proudly swaying in the breeze. And I felt a surge of pure joy. My house sits on a small hill which made mowing difficult, so in the years since we moved in we've slowly been seeding the entire front hill with perennials - cone flowers, black-eyed Susans, day-lilies. It's kind of wild and overgrown most of the time, but I love its riotous disorder, the birds and butterflies it attracts, and reducing the need to mow. But try as I might, my husband has refused to pull up the grass in that space and plant it to flowers instead. So imagine my utter delight when I spied the small black-eyed-Susan bobbing merrily smack-dab in the middle of this space. I could hardly wait to tell him how happy it made me that not only had the flowers seeded themselves there, but that he hadn't mowed them down. It almost makes up for the time several years ago whe

So I came across a piece of writing a few weeks ago that upset me quite a bit. Someone was extolling his at-home do-it-yourself treatment of his child's near-crippling anxiety disorder and declared it a success. Apparently it was successful primarily because this was "accomplished' without "labeling" the child with an official diagnosis. The parent read a bunch of books on OCD and anxiety and used the cognitive behavioral therapy techniques described in them. I just don't get this whole idea that a diagnosis equals a "label" of some sort that is harmful to the child. Any diagnosis I've ever received, for myself or for my children, has been a huge relief. A relief, that is, coupled with appropriate medical care. No one worries about "labeling" a child with diabetes, or a a birth defect, or any of potentially thousands of other diseases or genetic conditions. What makes a diagnosis of mental illness or learning disability somehow detrime

Yesterday I was reminded of one of my mothering failures. I saw a photo of a mom baby-wearing not just one of her children, but two. One in front, one in back. Holy cow! Talk about Supermom. This amazingly beautiful photo took me way back to my early years of motherhood. A little more than 26 years ago, my second son was born. He was a sturdy little guy, weighing 8 lbs.13 ounces at birth. He was in the 99th percentile for height and weight all through his infancy, quite a change from my firstborn who was always 99th percentile for height but barely made it to 50th percentile for weight. I remember dressing my second-born in his brother's hand-me-downs and not being able to snap the top snaps! So, as the mother of a toddler (2 years old) and an infant, I figured I'd give baby-wearing a try. I bought a sling, of sorts, but couldn't get the hang of it - and Zachary hated it! We also had a backpack-type carrier my sister had given us, so one day I decided to try it out on our d