Terrible mother.

Okay. I don't beat them, or withhold food, or affection, and I read to them daily, and take them to do fun things like ride roller coasters and hang out at the water park and hike and fish and camp and picnic at the arboretum.

BUT.

* I don't love to play cars and trucks. In fact, I hate it. I chalk it up to my aesthetic, really--not a girly aesthetic, mind you, because I have always preferred vehicles to dolls, and as a child drove my mother mad by refusing to touch the lovingly-made babydoll with its custom wardrobe and demanding a Tyco Night-Glo race set instead. No, it's a matter of my limited literary abilities. I can't come up with plots. I can play games, and love to participate in any play that has a narrative predetermined. But when those cars start talking to one another, and their small vehicular drama begins to unfold, I'm flummoxed. I have no idea why one car would behave differently than another might, and no idea how to respond when one of my cars gets attacked by aliens. I don't do fiction. Not at all. The period of my academic specialization is sparse in narrative fiction, and I don't really work in those texts anyway BECAUSE I'M A LYRIC GIRL.

* After a week of single-mothering, particularly an end-of-summer week when Thing 1 is getting bored, and Things 1 and 2 are beginning to get on each other's nerves, I'm ready for a night to myself. I feel awful about this. Shouldn't I be desolate when my children are not in my arms? But I'm not--on the contrary, I'm glad to have a few minutes to, say, go running without pushing a stroller and a reluctant kid on a bike, or poop without being barged in on three times. I'm not sorry to wake up when my body wakes me and not at the whim of a three-year-old alarm clock, even though my little ticker wakes me, when he's here, by singing "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal," or "It's the End of the World As We Know It."

* I hate to cook for them. Don't get me wrong: I love to cook. A bit of a freak about it, really. But it's no fun when your audience, aged 7 and 3, respond by saying, "This cilantro tastes terrible, like I might throw up" and "I only want cereal," respectively. I recognize that I must plug away, condition their palates for more advanced eating, but gah.

* I yell at them. I get frustrated having to give an instruction six times, over the course of which repetition it becomes more and more a command, and then a holler. I get frustrated with their lapses in, it seems to me, totally self-evident logic. My frustrations get compounded by the fact that I'm up all night trying to do the work I don't do during the day because I'm dragging them on outings that somehow fail to live up to staying home and playing cars and trucks.

Shouldn't a mother who doesn't have her kids every night devote herself in Donna Reed sweetness to them when they ARE around? Shouldn't she be playing cars and trucks and speaking in dulcet tones and sneakily healthifying mac-and-cheese? Shouldn't she be maternal perfection itself, to make up for their less-than-perfect, no-longer-Beaveresque-and-nuclear family?

For the record, I know the answer. But I reserve the right to occasional hysteria.

I'm going running.