I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(57)

So I play a shell game of approval. Today my writing group won’t be proud of me, but my healthy-living group will. Tomorrow I will admit to eating a bowl of my kids’ cereal for breakfast but I will also gloat over having pushed the bowl aside when I finished and stayed in that seat, building and demolishing and rebuilding paragraphs for three hours.

You can’t have everything.

Speaking of my kids, I am not in any accountability groups for parenting. Children hold you accountable on their own. They keep a tally, and they remind you. Hey Mom, this is the third day we’ve had sandwiches for dinner. Hey Mom, we were late for carpool yesterday and the day before. And this one, always leveled half accusingly, half compassionately: Hey Mom, your eyes are red. Did you cry? There’s no dodging these little accountability officers. They report for duty—and report on my duties—every day.

As if kids and accountability groups weren’t oversight enough, there’s always Facebook and Instagram to help you feel the pressure to measure up. People say social media is making us miserable, and I don’t always agree—I think there’s a lot of joy and connection to be had online—but there is a downside, too. Everything online is quantified, tallied up in hearts and upturned thumbs. If a woman posts a picture of the sparkling sunrise over her morning yoga session, she’s publicly delivering on her commitment to meditative stretching. When a pair of doting dads post a photo of their twins on their shoulders at the farmers’ market, they’re proving they’ve achieved optimum levels of family fun. Meanwhile, over at my house, the kids sat on the sofa with headphones on for over an hour this afternoon, because I was on the phone trying to finish an interview and I needed quiet. I will not post that. I don’t want it to count.

Sometimes I feel ill-equipped to do all this accounting. (I did not take any accounting in college. Of course, in college I didn’t need any help staying accountable. I had so few things to be accountable for. Show up to class, do your work, that’s it.) There are days, even weeks, that I don’t check in with my groups. I pull back when I feel the tail is wagging the dog, that I’m putting more energy into my anxiety over reporting what I’ve done than I would have put into simply doing it.

Ultimately, accountability is optional. I could leave my groups and cut myself loose from the commitment to show proof of how I use my time, but I’m self-aware enough to realize I need that sense of obligation. Knowing someone’s going to ask whether I met my goals has often made me get up and do what I might otherwise have blown off, and I have better health, more pages written, and—yes—greater happiness to show for it. The encouragement helps, too. When I lost my writing time that morning in the park and started freaking out that I’d have to waste additional hours at the DMV replacing my license, my friends commiserated. They, too, have more to do than time to do it all. They urged me not to worry, it would turn up. (It did. A park ranger found my license and called the next day. I didn’t lose that much time after all.)

But that’s the main reason I’ll always have some sort of accountability mechanism: time. I feel too keenly the need to use my minutes wisely. They will turn to seconds soon enough, and those go by too fast to count.





Blind-Spot Detection


The boy who was three when we left for Ireland is now approaching sixteen.

A dozen years ago, I feared what I thought parents of three-year-olds should fear: Should he be learning another language? Am I feeding him enough protein? Is it the right protein? What if he falls in the driveway and cracks his head? What if I forget to teach him something important about how to make friends?

As fear so often does, it refused to look itself in the eyes, instead drawing my attention to problems I could solve with things I could buy—namely, the perfect double-stroller. In Dublin, we’d have no car, and our ability to go anywhere would depend on taking both children on lengthy walks to the train station. My baby daughter would need a stroller, and, though he was really too big for one, my son might sometimes need a break from walking, too. I scrolled through page after page of online reviews before settling on an ideal model. Its extra big-kid seat affixed with a secure click to its metal arms. It offered ample foot room for both passengers, a smooth ride thanks to bicycle-style wheels, and a narrow body, perfect for maneuvering down crowded city streets and onto trains. Press a lever with your foot, and the whole thing collapsed into a neatly folded rectangle. It was sturdy, efficient, sleek—and safe.

Safe is everything. I bought it.



* * *



Now my son is taller than me, and I fear different things. Is he happy and does he know what to do when he’s not? Will he suffer or cause some terrible pain because he thoughtlessly takes one of the many stupid risks teenagers take? Or what if he takes the risk all Americans take—simply going to school or the movies, walking around in public—and he gets shot? I can’t mitigate all those risks. So I obsess over cars instead.

Before my son even had his learner’s permit, I was comparing the safety features of our two decade-old family automobiles, imagining which set of airbags and antilock brake system could best get him from home to school and wherever else he needs to go. Which one would handle wet roads better? Which provided optimal visibility at night?

Sometimes I think it would be ridiculous to buy a new car for a teenager. Then again, I’ve seen the ads: “I’m sorry. I’m okay. I’m fine,” the tearful boy in the commercial says, his bumper crumpled but his body not even bruised, the impact of the crash absorbed completely by steel. New cars these days are made with features like “blind-spot detection sensors.” Blind-spot detection? If only we all had it.