Spirited Woman Blogger Team

Good Enough

This is the last story that appears in my book, Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in Our 40s. It's been six years since I first conceived of the idea for the book, and four years since we we appeared on the TODAY Show. Life is still full, though it's no longer frantic. I like it this way, though I do sometimes wake in the middle of the night wondering if I'm doing enough, accomplishing enough, learning enough or giving enough. Then I think of Jennifer Lear, our author of this week's Knowing Pains story, who understood this feeling and chose "good enough" over "never enough" in her life. When I first read this story I knew immediately it was the right note to end on. So that is what I will do here. Enjoy! - Molly Rosen

The underwater handstand contest nearly did me in. Until that moment, when I willed my lungs to push a few seconds beyond comfort, water had always soothed me by stilling my breath, my thoughts, my sense of time. Chalk it up to being born under an Aquarius astrological sign or to spending childhood summers with a chlorine-faded, Stars ‘n Stripes Speedo as my uniform, but floating has always been my preferred method of self-medicating.  In fact, if my Ob/Gyn had offered underwater births, I would have dived right in.

But while trying to outlast my daughters’ handstands in the hotel pool a few months after turning 40, I found myself in the grip of a terror I had never before experienced in the water.  Instead of floating in a soothing and meditative state of suspension, I felt seized.  Totally stopped.  My heart nearly stopped, my breathing nearly stopped, my control nearly stopped – everything stopped while I was held prisoner within the crushing walls of water closing in on me, suffocating thoughts tearing through my mind.  I tried to push those thoughts away and restore my sense of serenity, but nothing I did could calm me.

Days before, I learned that my college friend, Kate, had drowned in her home after a torrent of rainwater broke through the foundation, trapping her inside a basement recording studio.  The news unhinged me.  It was too random, too insane, too violent to be real.  I could wrap my brain around heart attacks, cancer, car accidents . . . but this, so stunning and incomprehensible; it was the stuff of nightmares, not reality.  Holding my breath as I balanced upside down in the water that had always buoyed and restored me, I found it impossible to wash away the image of Kate’s last moments.

Kate with the lithe limbs and the fly-girl dance moves.  Kate, whose uninhibited cartoon laugh rivaled Betty Rubble’s, but whose silky, sultry voice evoked Lauren Bacall.  Kate the storyteller who could have the entire room under her spell whether narrating “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” or musing about her day.  Kate, who at 20 was more settled in her unique skin than most of us are decades later.  Perhaps because she seemed to have had this head start, she crammed a lot into the decades between 20 and 40 – becoming the Meryl Streep of the audio-book world, using her distinctive voice to bring characters alive in award-winning recordings.  Kate’s stunning accomplishments and her premature death left me wondering, “Am I living big enough?”

As I reflected on how I’d spent the last 20 years, it seemed my life was an odd mix of impossible self-demands tempered with worry that each success increased the odds of a commensurate and compensating catastrophe.  Rather than contenting in my blessings or good luck (and perhaps, in part, because I felt so blessed), I kept myself up at night dreading the illnesses, deaths, or other ordeals that would inevitably strike to even the score.

Getting My Mother Sober

I used to occasionally coach my mom on negotiating with her boss. This role-reversal, with me as "parent" was somewhat disconcerting the first time or two. I think all of us have experienced parenting our parent, whether by nursing them through an illness or teaching them a skill (often involving computers, smart phones or social media).

But our Knowing Pains author this week, Erin St John Kelly, had to go beyond parenting, to actually staging an intervention with her alcoholic mother. I was struck by not only the tragedy of this story on many levels, but also by Erin's ability to be both wise and wise-cracking throughout this raw retelling of how she got her mother sober. - Molly

Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, my mother arrived at my house for dinner holding on hard to my stepfather’s arm, sporting a fresh, scabby shiner. She’d managed to fall up the stairs, slamming into the baluster of her staircase the night before. I nudged her towards a chair in my little kitchen as efficiently and as subtly as I could, hoping to minimize her mobility and the possibility of another accident.

My mother sat at the head of the table, having a slur of a rant to no one in particular. Among my assembled guests of friends and family, one of my sisters and her daughter sat quietly leaking tears at their places. My eldest daughter left the table after a short while and the rest of the children followed her. Their grandmother was scaring them during the appetizer course and they opted for crackers and cheese in the next room instead. She was impenetrable, only vaguely resembling the person they’d known as their grandmother. The adults knew the reason, but the kids didn’t.

My brother James had died earlier that year. It was sudden, out of the blue, and far, far away from my mother’s bucolic college town. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye. She hadn’t seen his body. The night he died she lamented that she never should have let him go. As if he’d asked, and as if he would have obeyed the demand she never made. She couldn’t relate to the distant place he’d died except through the story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because they too had died in Tupiza, Bolivia. James wasn’t robbing banks and he didn’t die in a shoot-out. He and his wife were backpacking around the world, doing good works, before they settled down to raise a family. He died of altitude sickness in an Andean emergency room that had no oxygen mask. He came home as a box of ashes.

My mother was raised on a farm, the middle child of seven girls. She was the first ever in her family to go to college. She survived a bout with breast cancer, a stint in women’s prison for civil disobedience, and Woodstock in the rain.  My mother was already a functional drunk, but it was her despair from James’ death that triggered her descent into raging alcoholism.

My mother was so drunk she smelled. She wore the same sweat pants and sweat shirt day in and day out. She had once loved a martini – we called them garbage-tinis because she’d pretend it was good for her by adorning it with limp, brown vegetables culled from the drawers of the fridge, creating a stinky salad in a fancy glass. Now she was pared down to gin in a coffee mug while lying in bed.

Stumbling into Cyberspace

Sometimes you get to a point in your life in which you know that it's now or never. You either need to take a deep breath and plunge into the deep end of your pool of dreams, or decide that this is one that you are willing to let pass by. Many people have a dream of writing a book. Our Knowing Pains author of the week, Amy Kossoff Smith, is one of those people.

These days getting a publisher generally requires having a "platform" or readership of at least 10,000 people, give or take. So Amy took the plunge of creating a website back when it required a lot more money and external help than it does now. Her site, MomTini Lounge is now a highly successful site where she doles out tips and tools to moms the world over. Here is her story about how she started out. Is a book in the works? Probably, but she's having a blast posting, tweeting, linking and learning in the meantime. -  Molly Rosen

My fingers raced across the keyboard, and my heart pounded as I heard the school bus wheels screech to a halt outside our house.  Only a few more precious minutes to get that last e-mail out before the kids would bound through the door, kick off their shoes, throw their backpacks in the hall and demand a snack.

It was time to shift gears from work to kids, knowing full well that while my second shift was just starting, the third one (post-bedtime work catch-up) still lay ahead.  After years of balancing three kids with my home-based PR business, I had added a scrumptious new project to my already-full plate.  I started a website and blog that combined my organizational skills, my writing and PR background, and my passion for motherhood.

This latest entrepreneurial fire was ignited when I turned 40.  For my birthday I went with some girlfriends to a spa where I paused for that rare moment of reflection in an otherwise activity-driven life.  The lycra-clad fitness instructor had us lying on mats: “Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.”  As desperate as I was for a true break, I was having trouble following her instructions to “clear my mind.”  I found my mind wandering to my lengthy to-do list and unanswered e-mails.  So much to do….No, no, no…breathe in, breathe out.  As I struggled to clear my mind, it hit me that I’d spent most of my professional and personal life focused on other people’s needs.  Helping to fulfill other peoples’ dreams.

But as I lay there on that mat trying to breathe, the writer in me decided that 40 needed to be my chapter. I realized that it was time to pursue a personal dream of my own that could bring more passion, fun, and enjoyment to my career.  As a journalist, I’d written articles for newspapers and magazines; as a publicist, I’d pitched press releases and managed countless special events.  But one journalistic feat that I had yet to accomplish, but had always yearned for, was to write a book about something I really cared about, something to showcase my own magic tricks for managing the hardest job in my life: motherhood.  Soon I began walking into bookstores, eyeing the packed shelves like valuable real estate, wondering if and when I could earn a spot.

Tangled Up with Two

As red and pink hearts, boxes of candy and Valentine's Day specials abound in stores, it is hard to ignore the incessant messages of this "Hallmark holiday." But I'm always open to a story of new love, especially when it involves a woman in mid-life who didn't see it coming. Author Ona Gritz is a smart, unassuming working mother with a disability who finds not just one man to love, but two.

Have you ever been in a serious relationship with more than two men at once? I would love to hear your story. - Molly Rosen

Sometime during the angst-ridden year I was fourteen, or maybe it was the angst-ridden year I was fifteen, my mother told me she didn't have any confidence in herself until she turned forty.

The statement was interesting enough to pull me out of my self-absorption for a moment.

"What happened when you were forty?"

But as usual, she was elusive. She shrugged, saying, "Nothing. I just saw things differently," and went off to start dinner. I sat on the sticky vinyl couch, the pages of my unfinished homework spread out on a small metal folding table in front of me, wondering.

My mother died six months before my fortieth birthday, so she didn’t get to see that it happened to me too, this unexpected late blossoming and new self-assurance. Nor would she know of the resulting craziness I found myself in during my forty-second year, caught in a tangle of lovers I only dreamt about in my twenties.

To be fair, things had begun to improve when, a few years earlier, my handsome, overbearing husband decided to leave me. For him it was a whim, a decision made during finals week in graduate school on a caffeine drenched all-nighter. He never intended to be held to it.

But within weeks of his departure, I realized I felt light, unburdened. Our son, Ethan, was three at the time, and irrationally in love with me. We became groupies on the children’s music circuit that summer, eating our dinners on our laps while Tom Chapin or Raffi serenaded us with songs the two of us had come to know by heart.

Sliding Away

The holidays are now a distant memory. The carols, the sweets, the time with family are weeks behind us. But for those of us who are dealing with a parent with Alzheimer's, the memory of the recent holiday contrasts sadly with those of previous years when we could count on our parent remembering what we like, what we do and who we are. A friend of mine yesterday spent 35 minutes on the phone with his mother, having the same conversation five times. He is trying to help her, trying to figure out how much support she needs while she vacillates among confusion, anger and moments of clarity. Our Knowing Pains author this week, Regina Sewell, shares the intimate story of her mother, with whom she had a complex relationship even before Alzheimers complicated it further.

Are you supporting a loved one with dementia? I'd love to hear your story. Molly 

Through the phone line that connects us, her voice sounds flat, dull. It’s lost the luster and vibrancy that it had only a year ago. Her words come out slurred, as if the effort of talking is exhausting.  I called her the day before yesterday to find out how her trip to Savannah, Georgia went, hoping to hear her usual excitement as she relived the trip with me over the phone.  She couldn’t remember any of the details. I’d hoped that today would be better, but she can’t even remember that we talked two days ago.  My heart feels like it’s imploding.  I want to reach back in time, back to the mother that remembered things, back to the mother who loved to travel and tell me every excruciating detail of her trip, back to the mother whose voice sounded vibrant and alive.  I don’t ask about Savannah.

Instead, I ask her about the cards she’s making. We talk about the stamps she’s using and how the new brand of pencils she bought are smoother and easier to use.  I used to drift into boredom when she talked about making her cards.  Now I’m asking questions about the stamps and pencils she’s using.  I’m grasping for connection. 

We move on to the weather.  It’s warm and sunny in San Antonio.  It’s cold and rainy in Ohio.  We both hate rain and cold weather.  She tells me that she wishes I’d move back to Texas.  Even in the flatness of her voice, I hear her longing and feel her pull.  In this moment, I want nothing more than to go home, to hold her.  I tell her that I wish I could go home too.

She starts to tell me about a teaching job she heard about, one that I have a good shot of getting because she knows the person who retired.  I try to feel her love when she says this, but I start to panic at the thought of moving back to Texas.

I can’t move back.  It would be too painful.  I cut her off.  I have chosen to live far away from her.  The naked truth of this choice hits me like a lead pipe.  My inner critic begins to sneer, "Not only are you not normal, you're not even a good enough daughter to move back home to take care of your mother."  My guilt sinks to shame.

The feeling rises up my spine and tightens around my throat.  I don’t know how to talk to her.  I am afraid that she’ll feel bad if I tell her how guilty and ashamed I feel.  This leads to even more shame because I realize that I’d rather snap at her than let her see my vulnerability, and sit with her in hers.

A Community to Call My Own

With the new year comes new resolutions for more exercise, more vegetables and perhaps even more FUN! I have decided to finally try out rowing, a sport which I have sporadically considered since college when I decided that 5 AM was just too early to work out. This women's rowing group meets at a reasonable 9 AM, so I have decided to finally try it out. I heard about this group through EBUG, the East Bay United Gals group. What is EBUG? Read this week's Knowing Pains story to learn how it originated. It was born out of one woman's desire for more friends and more FUN! She has not only succeeded wildly, she has also given hundreds of other women the gift of new activities and new community. I hope Kim Merkin's story will give you some ideas for growth in 2013. Meanwhile, if any of you have tips on rowing, I'd love to hear from you! - Molly

When I first approached 40, I paused to look around me, and realized that the one gaping hole in my life was an absence of good friends. So, I did what comes naturally to me: I devised a zany way to create a new community. It was very me.

Well… Actually there are two me’s. First, there is Me the super saleswoman. The always-on-call Me. The problem fixer. The merry patcher-up-of-things-about-to-go-wrong Me.

For the fifteen years leading up to 40, I had built a career in tradeshow exhibit sales. It’s good money. It’s exhilarating. And it’s good money, if I forgot to mention that. I know people all over the world. I serve Fortune 100 clients. Fortune 500 clients. Fortune 1000 clients. I help start-ups you’ve never heard of display products as diverse as green olives and bra cups, shoulder pads and airport security luggage scanners. My exhibits are enormous, incredibly expensive portable “events,” and I flit all over the mercantile world with them, to toy shows in Germany, machinery shows in Korea, electronics shows in Hong Kong, and a million and one times to Las Vegas, the glitzy trade show capital of the planet.

But there came this moment. It was just as I was comfortably moving through my late 30s. You may remember hearing about a little economic event called the dot.com crash. All those little Internet-based start-up companies – many of them my clients – who had been shoveling piles of cash at marketing events suddenly went Poof! And for an eerie moment or two, there was an unfamiliar silence in my busy little world. I found myself at home more. At home…there in the suburbs. Not in Las Vegas. Not in Paris. Not on an expense account. Not staying up ‘til 2 a.m. partying with clients. Just a little bit of unfamiliar silence.

In that silence, I noticed that there were not a lot of people scurrying around me. I didn’t like that. I had friends in New York. Friends in Germany. Friends in Ireland, for God’s sake. But I didn’t live in those places.  Or more to the point, they didn’t live next door to me. And I needed playmates.

Which is the other me. The fun-and-slightly-goofy-games Me. The Me who wants to plan an activity that we’ve never done before and go out and do it, no matter how people will react.

The only problem with this is… well…. It’s kind of tough finding pals who are willing to be zany with me. On a business trip with creative types to Vegas, you can phone up someone’s room and say, “Let’s go see the drag queen show,” and then hang out ‘til all hours in the lounge drinking banana daiquiris or whatever. People on expense accounts do stuff like that. People in the suburbs, not so much. I needed entertainment. I needed fun people.

Crisis Tattoo

One theme I heard repeatedly from women who submitted stores for Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in Our 40s, was the feeling that they were becoming invisible. They were losing their identity to the label of "Matthew's Mom," or "Jeff's Wife." They spent so much time focusing on everyone's else's needs that they lost sight of their own. They found themselves (surprisingly) missing the admiring looks from strange men on the bus. Colleen (a pseudonym) shares her feelings of invisibility and the awkward steps she took, into a tattoo parlor and the arms of a stranger, to try to become visible again. Have you ever been tempted to take either of these steps? I'd love to hear your story. Enjoy! Molly

When I quit, I had been at the agency for longer than I’d been married.  I had thought that I would stay forever; that I would lead the agency when the founders retired.  I had been so happy there for so long, that for months and months I denied my creeping unhappiness.  Then there was the meeting in which a new executive berated me in front of my solemn, embarrassed peers, while my cell phone rang and rang, ever more insistently.  My son had vomited at summer camp and the counselors wanted me to pick him up.  I finally extracted myself from the meeting, listened to the camp counselors’ increasingly urgent messages, and went to get him.  I swore out loud the whole way to camp that I would leave my job as soon as I could.  I was surprised by my sudden vehemence.

I started to think about getting my first tattoo.  I saw lots of dancers with beautiful tattoos in my weeknight and Saturday morning yoga classes. Years before, after a bad break-up, I had pierced my navel. Somehow, it had helped me to leave some of my sadness behind.  Maybe a tattoo would help me to physically mark the end of my first career.

My husband Jay and I decided that I could quit at the end of September, and stay home for a few months while I looked for something part-time.  I would help the kids ease into the new school year. I would exercise; I would dance; I would read at the café around the corner.  Maybe I would take singing lessons. I would all do the things around the house that had needed doing for the decade we had lived there. I would make some small repairs to the house; I would get us ready for the big Northern California earthquake that everyone said was coming soon.

But instead, I met a man at the café, and I shook the entire foundation of my life.

Jay and I had been married for 10 years.  Recently, I’d been reminding myself how we used to be one of those couples that I now hated to be around – the kind of people who held hands and touched all the time.  Where did all that go, I wondered?  We didn’t fight, but it was very quiet between us.  We talked about the kids, the house or our jobs.  Sometimes I felt alone, even in the midst of my beautiful little family.

Ford was almost 10 years younger than I; he managed the surf/skateboard shop down the street from my house.  He biked or skateboarded to work; he was always a little bit brown, even in December.  He saw me with Jay sometimes; he saw me with the children a lot.  He said “Hi” to me every day when I went by myself to get coffee before sprinting to the office to be berated by the new leadership.  When I quit, and stopped rushing to work every day, he talked to me more.  He said, “You seem happier.  Are you happier?”  One day during the rainy season I walked past the shop in the pelting rain with my hood up, peering in front of me just as he emerged from the shop.  “You look cute today,” he said.  I began to look forward to seeing him; I started noticing his work schedule.

The Weight of Words

When I was looking for writers with stories to tell about midlife for Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in Our 40s, I came across an article in MORE Magazine by Susan Reinhardt. Having nothing to lose, I contacted her about our fledgling book idea and she contributed a very personal story about her life-long struggle with weight. With some research showing that three of every four women in the U.S. struggles with her weight, I knew others would relate to her story. I sure did. Though I have just downed a half dozen Halloween Snickers bars from my kids' trick-or-treat bags, I generally have a decent relationship with food these days. But I used to be 20 pounds heavier and I know I can slide up that scale way too easily. Susan reminds us that we need to be kind to ourselves and ignore disparaging words from others, even if they are from our own father. Read Susan's story here....

It was the words.  Not the images in the magazines of the gorgeous models weighing all of 108 pounds and wobbling on legs the width of swizzle sticks.  The playground chant ends, “but words will never hurt you.”  But they did.

First from my band director.  I was 15 years old, 5’8” and couldn’t have tipped the scales at more than 110.  One day, as I placed my clarinet next to my Bonne Bell glossed lips, he approached.  “Your butt’s getting mighty wide,” he said, in his South Georgia accent. He winked.  His words shattered my fragile teenage self-confidence.

I began jogging every day and skipping lunch at school.  I was a cheerleader in a small town in Georgia, fairly popular and attractive in that Farrah-Fawcett-haired way.  While my rear-end has always packed a bit of “junk in the trunk,” my figure was considered near-perfect by many.  I kept my weight down and obsessed over every calorie.  During my freshman year of college, I came home after three months away.  Home for Thanksgiving, for that wonderful time when families gather and give each other the love and warmth they’ve saved up just for this special occasion.

The first words from my father’s mouth weren’t meant to be cruel.  But they would leave a devastating impact.  “Good Lord, what an arse!” he said. “How much do you weigh?”

He’d told my younger sister and me that men liked thin women.  That no decent man would marry a fat woman.  My own mother was beautiful and thin, and still is, but not from an eating disorder.  She inherited great genetics.  I inherited my grandmother’s thighs and fanny, as well as her appetite for fried foods and the propensity to pack on pounds.

I went back to college where the real impact of an eating disorder reared its malevolent head.  My roommate taught me how to gorge and throw up.  She was beautiful, exotic and from a rich family in Buckhead, the swanky section of Atlanta.  “You can eat all you want, and if you top it with ice cream, it’ll come up much easier.”

I began to binge and purge.  Not regularly, but occasionally.  I also ate nothing but Dexatrim and salads.  By the time I returned home at Christmas, my weight had fallen to under 107.  People complimented my figure - the destruction grew like a virus with such words of praise.

A Fresh Coat

I'm a sucker for make-overs. Of people, rooms, careers, whatever. I love the excitement of starting over, of bringing new life to something or someone that has run its course. In the case of women in mid-life, make-overs usually involve a new dye job, make-up in this season's colors and a new outfit with the appropriate draping to flatter our mature figures. What if the make-over involves losing the highlights, losing the make-up and losing the marriage that you thought was "until death do us part?" Our installment this week from Knowing Pains: Women on Love, Sex and Work in Our 40s chronicles the immediate aftermath of an unexpected break-up and one woman's attempt to make herself over from the inside out. Have you ever been through a makeover? Tell me about it! Molly

I turned 40 this year. Actually, I have always enjoyed aging. Ever since I can remember, I have wanted to be older, a “real adult.” Being a child was not very appealing to me, but adulthood always looked good. Now here I am. Much to my surprise, I still don’t mind getting one year older every year. I don’t need things to go any faster but I feel like I squeeze just as much life out of each year as I can, and thus have no regrets. My body is holding up and I’m entering an exciting new phase in my work.

So I was rolling happily along, playing with my style and appearance, delighted to be returning to full-time work now that my child is starting kindergarten, feeling somewhat accomplished and capable. Forty, great! Sexual peak and all that.

Then my husband informed me he wants to end our marriage. So much for rolling along. It was as if I was driving along fairly smoothly in my sedan of life, enjoying the ride, when BLAM, I skidded over some ice and careened into a tree, totaling my car. Like an accident victim, I’m now in need of a special mix of physical and emotional therapy, learning how to do things again, but differently (maybe even more intelligently). Wandering down the aisles in the supermarket, I catch myself reaching for items I no longer need to buy.  Instead of clashing with an unneighborly neighbor as I might have done before, now I offer a smile and a cup of tea.  Now I express gratitude to the people I love more often and more intentionally.  I seem to have lost my sense of righteousness, my sense that I know things already.  I now approach experiences open to more points of view, open to advice from those who’ve come before me, open to the quiet wisdom of aligning myself with integrity and compassion from the beginning.

Abruptly, I stopped coloring my hair, cut it short, and stopped wearing make-up. You might think I’m just sad or depressed, but I always wanted to be more natural. I think a lot about our culture’s narrow definition of beauty, the influences under which we make decisions about our appearance, and now, of course, what it means to be “an older woman.” For many, it’s less visible, less desired, less powerful.

Being rejected by my husband at this transitional age was a blow, to say the least. I was supposed to age with him, safe in the knowledge that he loved me, found me desirable, remembered me in my youthful beauty as the rest of the world takes less and less notice. Now what? I have boobs – that might help.

But really, what can I expect? I had a dream last night that I was sitting with my sister (happily married and younger than I am) and a cute, youngish guy, maybe 28. We were outside near a pool or the ocean, some body of water, and I had my bathing suit on, which translates, in my dream interpretation, into ultimate vulnerability. The guy and I are talking and I’m getting the impression that he’s, maybe, interested in me, you know, and thinks I’m pretty, sexy – you get the picture. Somehow, in the dream, I find myself asking him, in the course of our flirting, “How old do you think I am?” He says, “60.”

The Imaginary Nursery

I often boast of the freedom of having kids old enough to walk to and from school, fix their own breakfast and lunch, and stay home without a babysitter on a Saturday night. I don't miss car seats, bibs or reading the same book for the umpteenth time. And yet... I felt a physical urge to pick up and cuddle a cherubic toddler today. He was pointing at a scone in the bakery case, imploring his dad to get him a "schkone!" Most of us can admit that occasional heart tug for the all-consuming task of loving a new baby. Our Knowing Pains' author of the week, Stephanie Vanderslice, writes of her ambivalence in "The Imaginary Nursery." Read on and let me know if you recognize yourself in her story. Enjoy! Molly

I have a confession to make. I’ve been decorating the nursery again.

Some of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, but for those of you who don’t, I’ll elaborate: the nursery in my mind.

It is a phenomenon that occurs on a semi-regular basis in my life.  Something wonky happens with my monthly cycle, something that probably has a lot more to do with the fact that I’m forty-one than anything else, and my mind runs to pastel prints and crib mobiles, to thoughts of  “What if. . .”

“But I thought you were done,” my friends might say. “I thought you had all you wanted.  I thought you weren’t even trying.”

“Yes,” I would answer. “All those things are true – and then some.”  Like the fact that not only am I forty-one, but my husband is forty-seven and my youngest child is seven.  And the fact that this child, who regularly professes a deep longing for a younger brother or sister (in spite of his reputation for refusing to share even a lap) would probably be sent into a tailspin if he were granted his wish and lost his coveted status as the baby of the family.  Truth be told, the motivation behind his desire for a younger sibling is somewhat suspect: 

"Why do you want a little brother or sister so much?" I once asked innocently. 

"So I can tell him what to do," he answered, without missing a beat.

Then there’s the fact that, with two boys, we still have a girl’s name we’re dying to use.  And, just in case, a boy’s name too.

Finally, there’s also the fact, and this one looms fairly large in my nursery daydreams, that I have always harbored a secret desire to be surprised by pregnancy.

Now, if you have been surprised by pregnancy, or if you’re still trying for your first, you might want to stop reading at this point.  You’re not going to feel very sympathetic to the rest of my confession, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit.