I dreamed on Sunday evening that I had mistakenly sent out two sets of e-mail invitations to Isaac’s sixth birthday party: one inviting a group of kids over from 11 AM to one, the other inviting a bunch of kids from one to 2:30 PM.

Of course, in my dream I had actually completely forgotten about both birthday parties until I arrived at my house (an entirely different house than my actual one, by the way: some kind of rambling Gothic mansion that we had just moved to, so why not throw a dream housewarming party at the same time as the dream birthday parties? What a totally great idea!) and found it populated with a dozen rangy children and their judgmental parents. I had nothing to feed any of them except for some raw pizza dough, and nothing to entertain them with, so they just bounced around the Gothic mansion as its rooms continued to unfold and expand like we were in some video game. At one point in the dream, I hid in the pantry. I kept trying to dream-text Rachel, asking her to please get home already and help me out, but of course I couldn’t make the keyboard work properly, or couldn’t finish typing a message before being waylaid by another crisis in miniature, another wave of tiny guests, and so of course she never got the message.

All of which is by way of saying that I am solo parenting this week.

I am pleased to report that things have gone much more smoothly than my subconscious may have led me to believe. In fact, it’s been fairly easy-going. Rachel left on Sunday and returns on Saturday and in between the two what with school and soccer and playdates and the like I’ve barely seen my children. And when I have, they’re nothing I can’t handle on my own — it’s the usual joys and bumps, the getting dinner on the table and cycling through laundry and reading. I’m even managing to relax a bit, to talk myself down from the OMG! SOLO! PARENTING! MODE! I can sometimes get into, wherein I feel that unless I have premade five lunches and neatly lined up five casserole dinners in the freezer and laid out all the clothes and baked fresh croissants for breakfast each morning THEN WE WILL ALL DIE of the JUST! ONE! MAMA! Like it’s some kind of disease, instead of actually just fine with a few more or different details to consider, a little less sleep.

Like it’s not something that millions of women (not to mention a sizable number of men) —and I salute you all — do every single day. Get over it, Goldberg.

“Do you miss me?” Rachel asked me from the phone in her hotel room this morning. “It doesn’t sound like you miss me.”

And it’s not that I don’t miss her, it’s just that doing this stuff on my own, fitting in my work around the extra days of early school pickups and soccer practice and dinner-making and bedtime routines (and, of course, Angelina Jolie — on Tuesday I did eight CBC syndicated interviews in a row, commenting on the BRCA1 genetic mutation and what it was like to get tested for it. Eight rounds, five minutes apart, of going through that story, like some kind of emotional boot camp.), means moving from one thing to the next in a way that demands that I focus only on the present moment.

“It’s not that I don’t miss you, exactly,” I told her. Is it just that there’s not much space to miss her, to account for what’s not here when there’s already so much here to account for.

Two more sleeps, and she’ll be home. And I will be happy to see her when she gets here.

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I feel as though I’m neglecting this blog this week — probably the net result of my jaunt to LA (more on that anon, but the short version here is that it was fantastic, and not just because I made it to the reading(!), which was populated by a group of uniformly excellent writers). Yes, Los Angeles, and also the necessity of Writing All the Other Things. Including but not limited to my third draft, which has been quietly humming along. I have finished a really intense readthrough and am now attempting beginning the process of actually revising. As Yoda says, there is no try, there is only writing with a timer sitting next to you until it beeps. Or until your eyes bleed, whichever comes first.

Of course, this kind of work requires its own amount of healthy procrastination. Today, that involved clearing off the top of my wardrobe. Here is a photograph of all the long, pointy objects I found there, objects I have confiscated from small boys over the past few years and secreted way up high. They’re all back up there now — I’m no fool. Well, unless you count that part about trying to write writing a novel.

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Second time’s the charm.

* * *

Look, I’m just going to write this post and fling it out there to the powers that be to do what they feel best with my karma.

Some of you may recall that day last July I spent holed up in Pearson airport, pacing the departures gates and watching the hours tick by until there was no way I was going to make my reading at Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center. I had been so excited, so optimistic. I’d written a cheery, optimistic, post about my excitement: my second reading at Bluestockings and how lucky was I to be part of an event launching Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort’s anthology Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage.

I never made the reading. My flight was seven hours’ delayed, and I showed up, gutted, just as the last folding chair had been folded, the last few audience members straggling out.

But. Maybe there are things such as second chances, and if there are, I’m cautiously optimistic that I may get one. Here’s the deal: Here Come the Brides has been – obviously! — nominated for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award. There’s going to be a reading for West Coast nominees at the West Hollywood Public Library this coming Saturday, April 27, from 3 to 4:30 PM. And, through a series of fortunate coincidences, I’m going to be there, making up in some small way for my Bluestockings debacle by reading from my essay in the anthology.

So. Karma cooperating, I will fly in the day before and hopefully show up in plenty of time for what is, for me at least,  a long-overdue event. If any Angelenos (that’s what you’re called, right?) are reading this — come! It’s free! And say hi!

(Karma: cooperate. Or I’m putting you in a serious timeout.)

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“It’s the journey, not the destination.”

How many times have you heard those words as a parent? A lot, I bet. If you’re anything like me, I bet that you’ve muttered those words to yourself as you tried to get a toddler to go just about anywhere. I bet you’ve “journey-not-destinationed” yourself through homework or toilet training or the grocery store or sleeping through the night or any number of child-related milestones.

But you know? Sometimes, Zen as it is, that little “journey not destination” mantra can get, well, a wee bit onerous. Sometimes, having someone chirp at you that, “Oh, ha ha, you should just enjoy what’s happening right at this very moment because life with kids is all about the journey, not the destination” can make you feel like punching that person in the throat. It’s tantamount to saying that if you were just a better parent, a better person, you would truly embrace, say, your toddler’s insistence upon stopping to drop pebbles down every single sewer grating on the way home from daycare, thus turning a 10-minute walk into a 90-minute odyssey.

Because here’s the thing: sometimes, no matter how wonderful a person or a parent you are, it’s about the destination. Sometimes, sure, it’s important to be here now. But sometimes, you just want to get there, already. Fast. And with as little screaming as possible.

Nowhere is this more true than on road trips with children.

So, let’s debunk this whole myth of “journey not destination,” shall we? Let’s put to rest once and for all that we are somehow lesser as parents if we feel on occasion that the less time spent in moving vehicles with our children the better. Let’s stop judging ourselves and each other by the degree to which we look forward to and enjoy strapping small, high-energy beings into five-point harnesses and hurtling off into traffic for hours. Because while there while there are undoubtedly lots of excellent things about road trips, there are also lots of rather tedious things.

Sure, there will be moments of pure beauty. You will see a pair of deer standing for a split second at the side of the road and your four-year-old will say, “Mommy, that deer looked right at me!” And you will say, “Yes, she did, honey.”

You will stop at a perfect beach for a picnic lunch and spend an hour skipping stones with your children, and one of them will lean back into your lap and look up at the sky and point out how that cloud looks just like a rabbit. Eating a Chihuahua.

You will prepare a cooler filled with fruit and vegetables and healthy snacks and your children will eat all of those fruits and vegetables and healthy snacks without complaining and you will sail right on by the fast-food chains, drinking tea out of your reusable travel mug, feeling smug virtuous.

You will bring E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web on CD and your entire family will listen, entranced, to the entire story, and you will weep together at its ending.

You will bring a big pile of your own pillows and stack them between your children so that they cannot easily hit each other, and they will make little nests with those pillows and both fall asleep at the exact same time. And while they sleep, you will drive as fast and as far as possible, all the while talking to the other adult in the car and listening to — squee! — your own music on low.

But for all those times, and more, there will also be the times where the kids are too busy scratching at each other in the backseat to notice the scenery and when you go out of your way to visit the World’s Biggest Nickel they will refuse to get out of the car. They will eat only ice cream and deep-fried things for days on end and insist on listening to Diary of a Wimpy Kid or One Direction on repeat. They will clamour for electronic devices and grunt and not look up as you point out, say, the Grand Canyon. They will insist that they don’t need to pee during the rest stop and then have to pee the moment you pull onto the open freeway. The baby will scream unremittingly for the last half-hour of the day’s travels and then fall asleep as you pull into your hotel parking lot. And not one bit at night.

These things — and more — will happen. They are part of road trips. And no matter how good a parent or a person you are, there is no earthly reason you should enjoy those moments. During those moments, your job is to grit your teeth, stick on One Direction and toss your emergency stash of chocolate and the backseat, and drive as fast and as far as possible. Because you’ll get there eventually. I promise.

This post is part of BlogHer’s Family Fun on Four Wheels editorial series, made possible by Mazda CX-9.

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The thing about blogging is that when you miss a week or two it’s hard to figure out how to ease your way back in. We’ve been gone for 16 days, arrived home late Sunday night.

(We weren’t supposed to arrive home “late” Sunday night, but that’s what happens when circumstances that are all largely within your control collude so that you miss your first scheduled flight and end up on the 8:10 PM version thereof, oddly grateful that the stern woman behind the desk at the airline finally agreed to waive the $600 change fee when you whined and complained and begged and cajoled the way you might if you were, say, eight years old and your parents had just taken away all your screen time for the day for making some poor behavioural choices. That’s what happens — and thank God for the near-to-the-airport friends on whom we descended after a volley of desperate texting to hang out for our newly unscheduled afternoon, and who fed us dinner and plied us with chocolate and tea and Manhattans, and set up our kids in front of their television. All in all an entirely pleasant way to spend an afternoon, other circumstances aside.)

But. We arrived home late Sunday night after 16 days away, in Toronto and in Florida, and it feels somehow disingenuous to jump right in to the present moment and gloss over those days, as though I am supposed to provide a “what I did on my winter vacation” summary for you all. At the same time, the idea of providing such a summary — not that anyone has asked me to — seems as tedious and unappealing as I imagine it must be for the many schoolchildren being asked to perform that precise task right now.

Memory is a funny thing — what did we do and did we have a good time? We did so many things: played tourist in Toronto with visits to the CN Tower, Casa Loma, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Science Centre. We saw movies, visited with friends and family, had Christmas dinner with my cousin and her family at Lee Garden on Spadina (“Was it worth the wait?” I later asked my kids about the trade-off of standing in line for an hour versus the food — oh god the food — and the camaraderie. “Yes,” said Rowan, unequivocally. Isaac, who nearly fell asleep in Rachel’s lap after copious bowls of wonton soup, was less sure: “I like the restaurant where you get your food right away,” he said, in reference to the buffet his grandparents took them to in Florida, where there were hotdogs and matzah ball soup and shrimp and ice cream for the taking, no lineup required.) (Also: “Were we this terrible?” I asked my cousin, as our collective five children shoved and pinched and bickered and kicked at each other on the sidewalk as we waited. “We were worse,” she assured me. And I think she might’ve been right.)

(Also: Of course, my children, like countless generations of children before them and countless generations of children to come, laughed and laughed at the name “Spadina.” “Like vagina, Mom,” Isaac told me, “like, on a girl’s body!” Just, you know, in case I might not have known where to look.)

In Florida, we played by the pool and mini-golfed and built sand castles. My dad took Rowan to the driving range and both kids picked up tennis racquets for the first time. We saw different sets of cousins, met new babies and new boyfriends, saw old friends and new movies. We ate ice cream and went to the zoo and played solitaire and Pokémon (some things you don’t get a break from) and took advantage of grandparental babysitting and generally managed quite well, even in the absence of the notable breaks provided by school and day care.

This list is not exhaustive.

Memory is such a funny thing: What did we do and we have a good time? We sat around the swimming pool late one afternoon in Florida, after some glorious outing or other that had been bracketed by children who resisted going and then resisted leaving (this is an ongoing theme, apparently…). And we were feeling, perhaps, tired. Put upon. The kids were being loud, making fart jokes and living on the razor’s edge between torment and pleasure in each other’s company. We were trying to let them be kids take to the extent that we could, always cognizant of the few other people around the pool with us — in this case, a man and a woman who must’ve been in their 70s, give or take.

Having anyone watch you as you parent can be stressful, but having people my parents’ age watch me parent is its own kind of stressful. You know? You know. But these people were fine, were lovely. The man in particular watched my kids and their antics with a grin on his face.

“You’re lucky,” he said to me and Rachel in passing.

And we both paused for a moment, and then, just like that, we were. Lucky.

The man went back to his condo after a while, and his wife packed up her towel shortly afterwards. And I debated with myself for half a second before getting up to speak with her before she disappeared.

“I just wanted to ask you to thank your husband for what he said to us,” I told her. “You know when you have those days or moments when maybe you’re not feeling so lucky? And then you realize you are?”

She smiled at me, quite seriously. “I’ll tell him,” she told me.

And then she asked The Question: “So, whose is whose?”

And I said, “Oh, they’re both ours. We’re partners, and they’re our kids.”

“Oh!” The smile that broke across her face was dazzling, wiping away any trace of seriousness. “That’s wonderful!”

And, in that moment, it was.

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I’m back. I haven’t spent more than four consecutive nights in the same bed since July 21, a feat of bed-hopping I don’t think I have matched since, perhaps, fourth-year university  (joking!) the summer I travelled around Europe in 1993 with my friend Julie.

(Coincidently, in this recent spate of bed-hopping, I spent two nights on Julie’s pull-out couch in the lovely borough of Queens, New York, where I slept quite well. Julie, however, did not, poor thing: her 15-month-old daughter, it seems, has some very strong ideas about exactly when and where she will and won’t sleep, and it seems that the hours between 2 and 4 AM are currently designated Not Sleeping Time.)

But. Now. I am home, from journeys that took me from Thunder Bay to Toronto and back again, to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and then Queens and then South Orange, New Jersey, and then the Manhattan Hilton and BlogHer ‘12 and then back to South Orange, and then Toronto (and another not-sleeping toddler), and then Thunder Bay to wash my clothes and pick up my family and then to a tent in the Sleeping Giant Provincial Park and home, and then to Duluth, Minnesota, and then to the Wisconsin Dells (oh Lord, the Wisconsin Dells — where Vegas meets water. And a vengeful God. And Republicans. And bumper stickers that say things like “I don’t believe the liberal media.”) and then Minneapolis and then Duluth again and then home, where I intend to stay put for a good long time if I have any say in the matter.

Because, frankly, I have things to do.

Chief of which is to make a to-do list.

I am a list maker. I like lists. I need lists. I feel unmoored without one, purposeless. I need to know that there’s a place where I can record every single task, books to read, movies to watch, blog posts and pitches to write, client jobs, phone calls to make, things to renovate. I scribble things down on scrap paper, cross them off, add new pieces of paper, consolidate the items onto fresh sheets, clip the lot together on the clipboard I’ve had since I was 13. This last spate of travel ended Saturday night with me furiously scribbling items onto four different sheets of paper, collating things I had typed into my phone, going through old to-do lists, X-ing out outdated or done items, running through the house with a toothbrush in my mouth to add just one more thing. And then one more.

(Do I count as the liberal media? Just wondering.)

The idea is that I will eventually dictate the entire list into a Word document and print it out, and there it will be: a blueprint of my life, the plan, perfect, just like in Getting Things Done. In reality, it rarely if ever works that way, and I end up with my various scraps of paper, written with different pens, half outdated, never completed. And while I continue to hold on to the fantasy of the finished to-do list, the ordered life, I may also be starting to let go of it, the idea that I can capture it all in one place, that for even one brief shining moment I will know what it is I have to do with this one perfect life, line item by line item until I am done.

(How do you to do?)

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Begin at the beginning.

It’s a basic tenet of writing. It’s what I told my writing students. It’s what I tell my clients: begin where the action begins. Begin when the stakes are high, at the moment on your tippytoes where you are poised for action and there’s no going back. There may be a thousand different beginnings, but pick one of them and start there. And if it’s not the beginning, hack away at the words you have written until you find it.

Which is why, back in January (oh God, has it been that long?) I started this post, this way: “Our friend is dying.”

She was. She was dying of ovarian cancer; died, in fact, the day after I wrote that post. And her death was so many things, most of them awful but a scant few joyous. I had so many feelings and so many thoughts about the whole process but sometimes it just comes down to the simplest way to say it, four small, raw, certain words. Our friend is dying.

Of course, it was a hard sentence to type, even if it was the only one I could form in my head. But writing it was easy compared to reading it out loud. In Manhattan. To 5,000 women. (Or, for that matter, in New Jersey, to two women.) When my post was chosen for BlogHer’s Voices of the Year, I was — obviously — thrilled. But when the thrill wore off a little, it occurred to me that I would have to read a post that opened the way that post opened, and that I would have to lob my opening sentence out into the crowd and that those four words would fall like boulders through the floor.

Our friend is dying.

Shit.

The night before we headed into Manhattan from New Jersey, Vikki and I read our posts in Deborah’s kitchen and I confessed my fears to them, and they were sort of helpful, in the sense that after nodding and clucking sympathetically for a bit they — and I — started to get a bit giddy about the whole thing, a bit giggly, the giddy and the giggly turning into downright silly, about the intensity of my opener. We began to try it out the sentence in different cadences, different voices, a variety of international accents, emphasizing different words, taking dramatic pauses between the “is” and the “dying,” taking the words to their furthest extreme and gasping for air in the hilarity of the process. It felt slightly sacrilegious, insensitive — gallows humor but maybe a bit too close to home.

And then, during the VOTY rehearsals, as she and her fellow VOTY wrangler Shannon Carroll took us through our paces, Polly Pagenheart suggested that, after we were introduced, we walk up to the podium, take a deep breath, find a spot high above the audience’s heads to focus on, and meditate for a moment on the person for whom we had written the post we were about to read.

And when she said that, tears rushed hot to my eyes and I wondered yet again how on earth I’d be able to get through that first line.

And then, the next day, sitting in the gallery watching the real thing, I remembered another basic tenet, this one about performing: you need to enjoy yourself up there. People like to watch people who are enjoying themselves on stage. Even if it’s the saddest thing imaginable, you have to find the joy and somehow telegraph that.  And maybe it was watching Elizabeth Jayne Liu kick off the evening with her crazily funny open letter to the person who stole her Taco Bell Gordita Fund, but something inside me switched. Something inside me suddenly, fleetingly, caught a vision of just how joyous this moment was: to be here, to have written this piece about at least two people I love, about the extended family and community that surrounded them, to get to share it with a room that had gathered to hear it, to be able to have a life in which I can write and think about the writing process, to understand that one sentence – four words — can encompass so much, from the sublimely miserable to the sublimely ridiculous, that if I were at all lucky I might be able to communicate at least some of that out to the world.

And I walked up to the podium — I was eighth, positioned, I figured, smack dab in the lineup of readers for maximum sadness — and I took a breath, and I thought of my son, and I thought of my friend, and I began.

At the beginning.

I know that Vikki and Deborah were somewhere in the audience, holding their breaths, waiting for me to get through that first sentence. And I did get through it, just fine. And I read the rest of the piece. And even though so many women came up to me afterwards and said, “You made me cry,” I knew that at least in my own head I had found the joy of it all too. And when I finished the piece, and the applause washed across the room, all I could think was, “Helen, my friend, you would have LOVED this.”

* * *

By the way, if you’re new here (or even if you’ve been here for a while), perhaps via that very VOTY reading, I would love it if you would consider “liking” this blog’s Facebook fan page. Even just a little.

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If it had been a movie, I would’ve made it. If it had been a movie, I would have weaseled my way onto a different flight or sweet-talked some zillionaire with a private helicopter. In the movie version, I would still have shared that cab from the Newark airport into Manhattan with that sweet goat cheese–farming couple from Lindsay, Ontario, but the cab would have gone faster, the little old lady driving it like a speed demon through the streets of lower Manhattan, skidding up ramps and over fruit delivery trucks, the doors popping open and the crowds carrying me on their hands into the doors of Bluestockings just in time to read to the tearfully appreciative crowd.

But it wasn’t a movie. It was real life, and in real life, there was Weather. And when there is Weather, there are flight delays. And so I sat at Pearson Airport in Toronto two Saturdays ago now, watching my departure time get pushed back further and further, cycling like some social media junkie between Facebook and Twitter and e-mail updates, trying to keep abreast with what was happening, trying to calculate backwards the time I had, the time I would need, to get from Newark to lower Manhattan and just how I might bridge that distance. If I read last, if the next time we boarded we boarded for real and didn’t turn back off the tarmac again, if there was no traffic, if only I hadn’t checked my luggage. I moved through the various stages of grief: from late but I can still make it to will I make it to I don’t think I’m going to make it to I’m not going to make it. Make it, that is, to the launch of Here Come the Brides! and the beginning of my Manhattan adventures.

So I sat there, in the airport, glum and stunned, watching all the angry travelers pretty much accuse the gate agent of lying to them, as though if they badgered her long and hard enough she would finally break and admit that the plane was there all along and — ha ha – there was no inclement weather and really they just wanted to fuck with us, and why don’t you just climb on right now and we’ll get you to New Jersey just as fast as we can? I sent a final, dejected, round of messages to the various people that needed to get them — my editors, my host, my wife — and tried to take my emotional pulse, all the while thinking all Zen-like, Oh well. Nothing you can do about this anymore, so there’s no point in being upset. And I more or less believed that until I actually phoned Rachel from the airport t lounge, and she asked me “How are you?” and I began to cry.

The goat cheese farmers and I pulled up in our cab to Bluestockings just as the last few readers straggled out of the bookstore. I burst in with my suitcase as the staff folded away the remaining chairs, and locked eyes with Stephanie Schroeder, to whom I had been frantically texting from the cab: On my way! A block away! Could still make it! But no. She hugged me, and I had to concede that I had indeed lost my opportunity for that second reading at Bluestockings.

The evening redeemed itself a bit in the form of a lovely gathering afterwards with HCTB editors Michele Kort and Audrey Bilger, as well as many of the evening’s readers: Stephanie, Joan Lipkin, Kim Reed. And the week redeemed itself even further as the BlogHer adventures began (of which, more to follow as I sort out exactly how to pare down the overwhelming amount of sheer experience into a few coherent paragraphs).

In the movie version, I would have read that night at Bluestockings and it would have been phenomenal. In the real-life version, I missed it, and that sucks. But I’m still optimistic enough to think that there may be a few more opportunities yet.

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She says this more or less casually, but also with the knowledge that this could be one of a very few times in her life — possibly the only time in her life, but she’s not quite ready to give up that dream yet — where she will be able to utter that sentence out loud: I’m having a book launch in New York. You should come.

I wrote that a little over two years ago, when my anthology came out and Chloe and I launched it at Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center way down near the bottom of Manhattan. To a full house of friends and family, some from way back, some I had never met before.

And now, here I am, staring down maybe 23 hours between me and all the things I have to do before getting on a plane tomorrow morning. And that plane, that airplane, it will fly to, well, to New Jersey, but then I will make my way (via Bushwick, Brooklyn) back to Manhattan, back to Bluestockings, where I will have the great pleasure of being part of another anthology launch. This one’s for Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort’s Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage, and it’s gonna be a doozy: me, yes, but also Kim Reed, Joan Lipkin, Emily Douglas, Stephanie Schroeder (who is lending me her couch, no less — and it will fold out!) and cartoonist Jennifer Camper, in a night of story and celebration.

And if that weren’t enough, the following Friday evening will find me onstage with 15 other bloggers (and, I am sure, no shortage of stomach butterflies) at the BlogHer 2012 Voices of the Year Community Keynote. The buzz surrounding this conference is, frankly a bit overwhelming: 4500 attendees! Private parties! Swag! Katie Couric and Martha Stewart! Rehearsals and green rooms and voice coaches and panels!

At both events, I’ll reading about strong, beautiful women who left me and this world much too soon. For those of you who know me well (or for those of you who know me even somewhat well), this probably isn’t surprising. I need to practice a bit more, to make sure that I don’t tear up too much, but just enough — whatever that is.

(I’m also on a panel at BlogHer: on Friday, August 4, at 10:30 AM, Rita Arens, Jennifer Armstrong, and I will be discussing   “Turning Your Blog Posts into Publishable Essays.” Come. Ask questions.)

I may feel somewhat less overwhelmed once I figure out what I’m going to wear, once I cross a few more items off my to-do list (just give you a sense of where things are at, I am writing this in the car while someone else is at soccer practice), once the plane takes off and I am finally, irrevocably, on my way. I may feel somewhat less overwhelmed once I’m finally there, when they call my name and I get to stand up and take out my notes and inhale and exhale and inhale again and smile and begin. Begin.

So, apparently, I get another night at Bluestockings. I get another couple of nights of readings in Manhattan. In fact, at this very moment, the universe feels as though it may just hold no shortage of readings in places that only once seemed unattainable.

All the more reason to finish up that second draft, already.

And, if you happen to be in the Big Apple in the next week or so, swing by and say hi.

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You may recall that Rob, our donor-dad extraordinaire, took care of the kids for us for a week in May while we lived it up in Denmark. Here, in what I think is my first guest post ever, are his reflections on that time. (Note: I was not the mother with the Word document.)

(Oh, also: today is your last day to enter to win a copy of Jenny Lawson’s — a.k.a. The Bloggess’s — memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Brought to you by my ineptitude and Amazon’s sneakiness. Also also: the deal has become even sweeter: Mary, Jenny’s assistant (who signs off her e-mails with “Hugs!” and how sweet is that?) has very kindly offered to send along a signed (by Jenny, just in case that wasn’t clear) bookplate for the winning book. For a chance to win, leave a comment here and/or become a Facebook friend/liker of this blog. Good luck!) (Done with parenthetical comments, for now.)

* * *

I read somewhere that we are more likely to agree to a thing if it’s far in the future, when the details have not yet been sketched in, when the thing in question is at its most abstract. So, when the mothers asked me eight months ago if I could take care of the boys while they went to Denmark to celebrate Susan’s 40^th birthday, I agreed. It made me feel warm inside, like a good guy, when I said yes, absolutely. Besides, who even goes to Denmark? They’re probably joking, I thought to myself.

But then eight months passed. And here I am, sitting at their kitchen counter as one mother explains lunches and idiosyncratic eating habits with the same gravity she might use in a training video to explain how to defuse a bomb. I learned from the last time they went away that it’s important that I should nod, mirror her grave expression with my own. I also learned last time not to repeat back the instructions the way a logical training session might demand, because the slightest error or discrepancy in repeating the instructions will make her shoulders and face drop with a “you just blew up the children” admonishment.

The good feeling inside me is not there now. In its place is a growing Word document with detailed instructions for each day and a thin (but growing thicker) feeling of foreboding.

Day 1

The sun’s not yet up. The children are sleeping. The mothers scuttle around the house preparing for their departure. I’m about to be a single parent for a week. Praying for that village they’re always talking about. Or mastery of the Vulcan nerve pinch. And thinking with gratitude of my mom who was solo for five years. So glad she’s not on Facebook to revel in this.

The moms had suggested that small child might need a night light so as to more easily adjust to sleeping in his own bed, in his own room, while they are gone. Last week, in a fit of optimism, I agreed to help sleep train him.

What hangs as prophecy over tonight is the wailing I heard from upstairs last night; the thin, drawn faces of the mothers’ fatigue this morning as they shuffle luggage to the cab. If it was that bad for them, these first steps of sleep training, how awful will it be for me?

Nightlight becomes another word for hope. Tonight the child is getting a Led Zeppelin–style light show. Shock and awe, child. Shock and awe.

Day 2

Discover mothers have been raising sons wrong. Someone taught the small one that 5:30 am is morning.

There was something resembling sleep. The way butchered lamb chops resemble fluffy sheep.

At a low moment tried to convince the four-year-old to count the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. Few things less depressing at 1:00 am than a four-year-old glowering at you like you’re a dumbass. Think I even said “That’s all I got,” before backing out of the room apologetically.

Feel I have it marginally more together than the dad in sad pajama bottoms and leather coat at the school drop off. But did find myself yelling “Don’t put your toothbrush in the bird poo!” this morning as we played soccer and brushed our teeth in the backyard (I forgot about teeth brushing until we were already out the door).

After they are at school, I go to the gym. I discover that being the small one’s dad means showering and discovering a mysterious bump on your lat muscle, only to find a purple gem sequin stuck there. I am a little fancier for being his father. And this is how the week seems to be going: sleeplessness punctuated by panic and small shiny moments.

Day 3

Small one is collecting bugs in the backyard, big one is reading by himself upstairs, and I am making roast chicken with Greek salad and corn on the cob. All seems calm and normal. This is how horror films begin.

Day 4

Saturday morning. Vaguely recollecting my mother sticking us in front of cartoons for three hours with sugary cereal. Tempted. But take the boys to the playground to play instead. Also, they don’t have cable.

Afternoon. I yell at the big one for first time ever. I want to defend this, explain that he had been tantrum crying for 45 minutes, demanding I submit to his will in a loop that logic could not undo, both Dr. Spocks failing me at once. Every meditation class I ever took failed me. And I yelled. And I hate to admit it, but for a moment, the smallest moment it felt good, like rubbing sore eyes or scratching at poison ivy: a small relief already tinged with the regret to come.

At bedtime the small one presents me with the two books he wants to read before bed and one of them happens to be titled Sometimes I Get Angry. I apologize to him, both amused and irritated with his superior parenting ability.

I then apologize to the big one as I wash his hair in the tub, explaining how I didn’t know what to do with my frustration, but that yelling was not the answer.

When I am done my apology, big child looks up at me with his big eyes from where he is half submerged in the water: “What?” His ears have been under water the whole time. And he hasn’t heard a word. For a brief moment I wonder if I should repeat the apology. My Irish Italian upbringing tells me if you can apologize without being caught in an apology you have had a glorious win. But I inhale and repeat the apology. Because I want to be a good father. Whatever that means.

Day 5

Sunday. Small one wakes me at 5:30 a.m. again. I sort of lie and tell him it’s not morning yet and tell him to go back to bed. He does. I do not revel in this as I know this won’t last.

Am going to dry hump Monday’s leg.

In other news, it turns out it’s way more fun to make them pee their pants laughing when you don’t actually have to do the rank, sodden laundry.

And as for laundry, I know I should look in the pockets of this moist, miserable pile of clothes, but I can’t bring myself to. I wash the pile, secret contents and all. I feel both relief and foreboding. See a pattern?

Day 6

Monday. Both dropped at school. Relief. Followed by, you guessed it, foreboding. Slow dawning realization that the mothers might never return. Remember thinking that they took an awful lot of luggage. Imagine they will travel the world now like that gnome in the film Amelie, sending postcards:

“Wish you were here?”

“How about here?”

In the news, Maurice Sendak died. Even he has abandoned me.

Day 7

Beware the cuddles. This is how they will get you. Tantrums about tortellini, who said what to whom, the unfairness of the world that, it turns out, is not all about them … all falls away in a headlock of love at bedtime, a snuggle squirm. Drats, foiled again.

Day 8

Overwhelmed with the urge to say, “Every time you pee on the toilet seat, god kills a Pokemon.” I don’t believe in god but feel like I need to resort to the wrath of someone more convincing than me. “Just you wait until your mothers get home” also has a ring to it, but keeping that one in my back pocket for a real emergency. Consider this an advance apology. But not for the random deaths of Pokemon because they are so asking for it.

Day 8.5

A mother comes home tomorrow. Plan to pick her up and carry her out of airport a la Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. Strangers might think it’s romantic. It’s just my way of making sure she gets to the house and takes over parenting a.s.a.p.

Day 9

Not sure but think the mothers in the schoolyard have been watching me in a Gorillas in the Mist kind of way. With amused scrutiny. Not sure if they have been rooting for my success or failure. Or what this means for the future of menchildren everywhere.

Day 9.5

No more solo. Oh thank gods for moms.

On the plane to fly east and then west to see my own mother, I find myself looking back over the lost boy time we had. Somewhere in there I had the insane idea I could be at least pretend to be as good at it as the moms are. Somewhere in there I thought I could avoid making mistakes like my father(s) made. I couldn’t. I didn’t. But I did learn that I could keep the children alive. And when I stumbled I learned that I could apologize and explain what I did wrong.

And, yes, I will admit that the encyclopedia the one mother prepared saved my life. But the boys, when I would stop worrying and pay attention to the giggling joy of the monsters before me, ensured it wasn’t just an apocalyptic survival exercise.

Inevitably, I think this brought me and the boys closer. But I can’t honestly say it evolved me in the parenting department. Except that maybe next time I might panic less. Maybe next time I’ll trade it in for a glazed sort of nonchalance, a little like leather-coat-pajama dad.

Next time. I can say that because it’s probably a year away. And saying it gives me a warm feeling inside.

Big one sobbing at the airport pre Rob’s departure.

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