You may remember we were burglarized last September, twice. In one week. They stole my laptop and essentially every piece of jewelry Mac had ever given me during our 13 years together. They stole my grandmother’s ring, the single item I inherited from her.

It took months to “get over it,” but recently, the wound was reopened. Basically, through a rather coincidental chain of events I’d rather not elaborate on, we found out for sure who burglarized our home, and it was the person I suspected: Our former nanny’s son, a young man addicted to methamphetamines.

I knew it was him the moment I saw my jewelry box laid open, empty. I drove immediately to his home. He was in the street. I walked right up to him looked him dead in the eyes and said “Hey. I get it. I was a drug addict once too. Just give me back my things. Have them show up on my doorstep and I’ll give you $1000. No questions asked.”

Looking back, I realize he had probably already traded everything for a 20 sack, maybe two.

He went around and around about how it wasn’t him. But I knew it was. The sight of his face in my mind’s eye makes me feel sick. Lying motherfucker. I had no proof, but I knew. 100%.

And the worst part is I knew it was going to happen before it happened. I saw it in my mind. I literally saw in my mind that this person was going to burglarize our home.

I knew it the day my nanny sat in our living room and told me her son (who lived with her) was addicted to meth. A thought crossed my mind: One of these days, he’s going to find out through his mom that you’re gone for the weekend and he’s going to burglarize your home.

Three months later, that is precisely, EXACTLY what happened.

After my nanny left that day, I called my mom. I told her “I need to find a new nanny. I need to disconnect. Something bad is going to happen.”

But I did nothing.

I talked to Mac about it, told him my concerns. I am no stranger to drug addiction and what it causes. I am no stranger to the monsters people become.

But still I did nothing.

I did nothing against my better judgment.

I did nothing against every cell of my being screaming at me “Stop this. Get out. Bad things are going to happen.”

I did nothing because I ignored my intuition.

I did nothing until it was too late.

And that is the part I can’t get over.

That is the part that haunts me, late at night when I think about the family photos and videos that were lost in the stolen laptop and the pearl necklace gone, the one Mac gave me a couple months into our relationship, and the diamond ring I remember so clearly on my beloved grandmother’s thin, wrinkled gorgeous finger.

I did nothing because I was stuck. I was stuck in a motherfucking rut and I could not see out. I refused to see out. I would not see out.

Life gave me the signs. It gave me the chance to redirect, to move along, to do something new. The universe hinted, nudged, and at times downright pushed and shoved, but still, I did nothing.

Why? Because it was too hard. Because I preferred the comfort of my rut to the difficulty of a new course.

Our home was dark. The neighborhood was terrible. I hated it. We all hated it.  It was a dead, depressing place. We lived two houses down from a known drug house. They’d do deals in the street. They’d park in front of our house waiting for the delivery. Sometimes I’d walk up to them and knock on the car window, ask if I could help. Probably not the safest move, but it gets to the point when you don’t fucking care anymore. The neighbor on our left occasionally got drunk and poisoned animals in the neighborhood. We lived in near-constant fear of our animals getting out. One day our cat did. We found her on our driveway, poisoned the same way our two kitties died when we first moved in, two years prior, before we knew. Our street was a thoroughfare to the worst street in town, so a constant stream of addicts and drunks poured down our road like a sad parade. They left their trash on our lawn and their baggies on the sidewalk.

We needed to move a long time before, but we didn’t. We didn’t because we were stuck.  We didn’t because sometimes the misery you know is easier than the unknown, because it’s safer, or you think it is, simply because it is known.

It all starts to feel so heavy: The change. The fear surrounding it all: What will happen? What if it doesn’t work? Where will we go and do and how will it all work?

One day turns into the next and the next and the next and it’s just you and the aching intuition, the burning feeling that something needs to change. But nothing changes, because nothing changes. And fear.

The burglary ended it.

Shaken to our core, we were faced with the reality of what our life had become and how distant we had grown from that reality. Within 45 days our house was on the market and we had moved into my mom’s house. Within 90 days our house was sold and we were in escrow on another. Around 4 months from that burglary we moved into the house we live in now, a place I love so much I never want to leave (which is its own problem but one I love to have!). I had forgotten how much a miserable house can bring you down. I had forgotten what it feels like to love where you’re living, to feel “home” each day, in your home.

Action. Finally. Happened.

In a way, that burglary was the best thing to ever happen to us, but still I’m full of hatred sometimes, toward him, but mostly toward myself. Why didn’t I act? Why didn’t I do something? Why didn’t I trust my gut and heart?

I know. I already know: I was doing the best I could at the time. And really, it was just stuff gone. It’s just stuff. Means nothing.

But shit. It’s hard. You know?

Hard to face the elements of responsibility in our own lives, hard to square off with the truth about ourselves. It is not my fault that he burglarized our home. It is, however, my fault that I denied my intuition and chose comfort over change, even though that comfort was making me fucking miserable and I KNEW IT.

It is my fault that I didn’t leave a house and town and situation that was sucking the life out of me.

It is my fault I DID NOT ACT.

Life is strange, isn’t it? The way we stay in things that are killing us because at least we feel safe – hang out in the muck and dirt and mire because at least it’s the muck and dirt and mire we’re accustomed to. The way we justify the shit in our lives as if it’s other people’s faults when really it’s us – we’re the ones too chicken shit to move, paralyzed by our own indecision, cut off at the knees with terror. Of what, who knows. How could it be worse than this?

Until life slaughters us one day, to be reborn.

I’m beginning to think life is just a series of little deaths, of becoming unstuck, of seeing how fear pulses through my mind and spine and legs, moving my body for me, on nothing more than a glorified rat wheel. Around and around we call it “living.” I know the truth but I’m too scared to face it. That bullshit job, relationship, habit, whatever. The truth rests deep inside of me. I work every day to ignore it, until I cannot any longer.

I was stuck. I’m not stuck now.

I want to forgive myself, but some mental construction won’t work. “I forgive you Janelle.”

Ah, fuck off.

That shit never works. I need action. I will forgive myself by staying unstuck, by laughing at the voice that says “You can’t. It’s too hard. Stay here.”

I tried that, asshole. I went down that road and it didn’t work. I couldn’t get off  the track on my own so life did it for me, and it hurt. I was shattered into a new direction.

I’m responsible for that, too, I guess. New digs and freedom. My own failure to move – literally and figuratively – killed me. But to begin again. Unstuck, one more time.

Maybe I’ll trust better, sooner.

Myself, and life.

The real kind.

sometimes I feel like this.

I’m feeling ill-equipped for motherhood lately. I can’t stop being an asshole to my kids.

I’m yelling too much. My patience is almost always already gone.

I lose it over nothing. Them. Being kids. Doing annoying kid things. Leaving their shoes on the couch one more time. The 5^th time I have to ask him to get dressed. The bickering again about the dishes. The flailing in the back seat.

I know it’s me, you know. I know it’s my exhaustion and profound discomfort and the weight of this baby on my back and bladder and heart.

I realized the other day I haven’t had time to love this baby. Does that make me a monster? That probably makes me a monster. I feel distant, disconnected. Though I feel her (him?) against the deepest swells of my body, and the little pushes and jabs comfort me, I only barrel forward through the days. I only wonder how it’s possible to pee so many fucking times a night. I wonder how many thoughts can awaken me at 4am. I wonder why I screw around on my phone until 10:30pm when my whole self needs only sleep. Maybe it’s the privacy, the silence. Maybe I’m just not equipped for adult life. Maybe the responsible decision will always elude me. Or it will sometimes, at night, when I should be asleep.

I want to settle down and wonder at my baby.

I feel the weight when I rise, go down, roll over in bed. Every time I get up I wonder how so simple a task could be so hard. The pressure shifts. My joints barely cooperate.

My kids drain me. That’s pretty much all.

I do it one more time. I do it a hundred more times.

I should be in better shape. I should have taken better care of myself. I should eat better.

You think I’m feeling sorry for myself.

I am, though it doesn’t manifest in inactivity. I wake up in the morning and think “I can’t.”

But I do.

Not because I’m some fucking martyr, but because there’s no other choice. It’s a job. You get up and fucking do it.

I look at the calendar and wonder how much longer. How much longer will I be teaching these classes? Standing for hours at a time. Standing until my hip and thigh go numb. I took on too much, I guess. I took on too much but we need the money. A woman in Austria told me pregnant women get 8 weeks standard time off before the baby comes. I went to Austria. Austria is nice. Do they take Americans?

They say “You should feel blessed and lucky to be 30 weeks pregnant with a healthy baby.”

What a lovely family you have.

What a sacred thing.

Well, it doesn’t feel sacred now, motherfucker.

It feels like work. Grueling, brutal work. It feels like relentless work, like the kind that robs you of your air and laughter and body. It feels like taunting teasing heavy heavy labor.

I wish they’d stop calling it sacred.

I wish they’d stop talking about motherhood like it’s some sort of gentle rainbow across a bucolic meadow. I wish they’d stop telling women like me who are barely doing it that “motherhood is the most important job in the world.”

Is that true? Is that really true? Then what does it mean that I suck right now? What does it mean that I just cannot pull it together and I probably won’t for at least 2 more months?

I am failing my kids. Myself. My husband.

Right?

The weight of the souls of 3 kids. Their futures. Their whole beings: It rests on me, right now, ME this broken human who hurts and took on too much and can’t or won’t do much of anything beyond getting through, barely, trying not to get mad today, to keep it under control when all I want is for it to end – RIGHT NOW – this pregnancy – this job – the finances and futures and laundry – I’m crushed under it all (And what were we thinking anyway? And will it be worth it and how will we handle it all?)

Are these lives really on my shoulders, right now? Am I all there is?

No. I don’t think I am, and I wish you’d stop making that shit up.

The fact is that motherhood is important, and my role in the lives of my kids cannot be diminished or overlooked or ignored, but it’s also a fact that sometimes humans suck and my kids will be just fine.

Sometimes this shit is sacred.

SOMETIMES THIS SHIT IS NOT SACRED AT ALL.

Sometimes it’s day after day of just pulling through and wondering when things will chill the fuck out again. Sometimes it’s wondering what exactly you were thinking. Sometimes it’s searching for the meaning in all this work, just like any other job.

Only with this job, you’re raising America. With this job, you break souls. With this job, the world looks at you and yells “YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF. Figure it out.”

Do you realize how insane that is? We tell women “motherhood is the most important job in the world” but then bash them for struggling with it.

Incidentally, it’s not the most important job in the world.

Let it go, people.

I am a mother, but I am a whole lot of other things, and right now, I am a woman who is totally and completely NOT FEELING IT.

Will that ruin my kids? Probably not.

Will that crush their little hearts? Doubt it.

Rather, they’ll probably learn that people struggle sometimes and battle personal demons and sometimes you don’t get the “best” version of a person. You get a piece of them. You get glimpses. You feel their love in splintered fragments, as it’s always been, because this is humanity. These are humans. This is as good as it gets for us.

Right now, I am the mother who doesn’t read stories.

I am the mother who can’t cuddle for more than a minute or two.

I’m the mother not tucking you in…getting you late to school, letting you watch too much TV, feeding you questionable dinners.

I’m the mother who doesn’t want to hear stories or endless toddler questioning and “what happened at school today?”

I’m the mother who doesn’t care.

I’m the mother not RSVP-ing to parties, forgetting commitments, not helping with projects.

I am the one irritated with the way the kids eat, the one telling them to brush their teeth because damn! That breath. Foul little creatures, really.

I am the mother finished, demolished, pulling herself up with nothing.

I go to bed.

I’m the mother in bed, who lies down at night and feels the weight of all these things, hears her own yells rattling in her gray brain, wishes she could be a woman who holds her fucking tongue and lets it go.

To preserve the sacred family. To stop messing with goddamn rainbow meadow and shit.

In 5 years she’ll be 16 years old. My first, nearly grown.

I turn my giant body and flinch at the pain of my back, and that thought.

In 10 weeks my toddler will gaze into the face of a new baby. She stomps in each morning “Can I cuggle (cuddle) with you?” I hold her though my bladder protests violently. In 10 weeks a baby will be in this bed too. Where will she fit? There will be times I cannot hold her. There will be times she is not the center anymore.

I close my eyes and hold those mornings.

I listen to my son breathe as he sleeps on my husband’s chest. I wonder how his first 2 weeks of homeschool went.

I realize it’s 5:30am.

I’m so tired.

I wish my love were enough, enough to make me the kind of mom who doesn’t cave sometimes, into some place only time can dissolve. I wish my love were enough to make me “strong enough” or good enough or pure enough or whatever the fuck it is that makes women capable of doing all this and feeling all this and finding themselves pinned to the ground by life and still, not yell at their kids. Turn off. Shut down. Crawl away.

Yesterday I read them The Tale of Tom Kitten.

Today maybe I will make some stir-fried chicken.

In 10 weeks I’ll birth a baby and find myself reborn too, with a gush of waters I’ll enter this family carrying a new extension of my heart, my blood, my life.

I’ll watch my family enfold him as they’ve done me, and I’ll kiss their heads with a whisper of thank you, for holding me as I trudge humanity. Motherhood. The shattered sacredness of today.

because they look like little rocker warriors.

I wrote a post about the struggles of motherhood, those moments when the work becomes too much and we’ve got nothing left and we just want to quit the whole damn gig. Those moments when we’re really, really not “grateful.”

And in response, a woman wrote this (more or less): “A year ago around this time my 2-year-old died unexpectedly in her sleep. I’d give anything to experience the things you complain about, to get irritated at the noises and antics of my child. Why don’t you think about what it would feel like to lose those children you’re ranting about.”

Just for fun, click over and read the other comments left on that post.

You back? Cool.

39 mothers (and a stay-at-home-dad) commiserating about the harshness of this job of parenthood. 40 people who found a place to say the shit everybody’s thinking (well, lots of us at least) but nobody will admit because, well, I don’t know. We’re not supposed to, I guess.

I read her comment in the car and wanted to vomit. I was simultaneously filled with rage and sadness and piercing guilt. Even shame.

I didn’t publish the comment. I’m not exactly sure why. I thought she might be a troll (I mean what the hell was she doing on a parenting website while mourning the death of her child?), but I don’t think that was really it. It’s unlike me to censor somebody. In fact, that’s the only comment (besides troll name-calling (e.g. “You’re a slobbering vagina.”)) that I’ve deleted.

I really didn’t want to subject the 40 other commenters to her guilt-inducing wrath. It was like she had this flaming sword and could SLAUGHTER any parent in the world for the slightest hint of ungratefulness, in a few words. And holy shit, did it work.

I think that was a wrong choice. Nobody needs me to protect them. I should have published it. I won’t make that mistake again.

In hindsight, I imagine I deleted it because it struck some chord with me that I couldn’t handle.

I’ve thought about it a lot since then and I’ve realized I really, really hate that shit: You can’t complain about your job because people are unemployed.

You can’t bitch about pregnancy symptoms because some women can’t have children.

You can’t loathe motherhood occasionally because parents have lost children.

And come on, friend, stop talking about your pneumonia. People are dying of cancer.

You lost your dad? I lost BOTH parents (I didn’t actually, thank god). You’re 20 pounds overweight? I’m 40. You’re poor. I’m more poor. Unemployed for 3 months? It’s been 6 for me. And on and on.

Somebody can always, always one-up your problems. And you know what? They’re fucking right. It’s true. It’s 100% true that I should be grateful for the fact that I can conceive children. I should be grateful for the fact that none of them have been ripped from my yearning hands. And I should be grateful I’m alive, and my parents and family are alive (mostly), and nobody is facing a terminal illness (that we know of).

And guess what. I AM GRATEFUL. But I’m not grateful all the time. I’m not some freaking guru.

I am also beat sometimes, by them and me and my life, just as it stands, as glorious and beautiful as it is. Sometimes I fall into a depression. Sometimes I’m full of self-pity and agony and pain and I’m not even sure why it’s there. It’s real. It’s life.

And THAT is why the problem one-upping thing is so fucking irritating and a complete waste of time: Because it doesn’t WORK.

It is 100% ineffective in actually reducing pain.

When I am depressed, or terrified, or tired of being broke, no amount of mental chanting “But some people have it worse” reduces my pain for more than a minute or two. Ultimately, no mental construct – no new idea – will pull me through my darkness.

If you think about it, the pain one-upping could just go on forever. There is always somebody “worse off” than you…what about those women locked in the Castro house? What about people who lose their whole families in car accidents? What about people trapped in abusive marriages living in countries that don’t give a shit? Should we talk about Ethiopia? Starvation? Sex slavery? Come on. We could do this all day. There is always, always a “worse” situation.

So ultimately, where do we land? If we take this one-upping as far as I goes, we end up at “No pain means anything. No pain deserves treatment. No pain matters.” And that, my friends, is completely ridiculous.

Why? Because this pain is real. It does matter. It’s happening, isn’t it?

THIS is where I am in my journey. What good is pretending I’m not in pain just because I should be more enlightened or insightful or deep or appreciative? I should be a better person, capable of focusing on my blessings. I should be blah blah freaking blah.

I should, BUT I’M NOT.

Maybe my pain is ridiculous. Maybe you’ve been down to levels of agony that make my problems seem utterly ridiculous.

And yep, when I hear people bitching about which tile to pick out in their Newport Beach mansion as if that’s the biggest, hardest decision they’ve ever made, I judge the shit out of them. I wonder what the hell is wrong with them. Privileged assholes. Never suffered a day in their lives.

And I imagine that is precisely what that woman saw when she read my blog: Privileged asshole. Look at her, bitching about those gorgeous children. She thinks she’s suffering. She’s never suffered a day in her life.

And compared to her, she’s right.

I have not known that pain. I cannot even comprehend an ounce of the pain that is her pain.

But my pain is still real, and unfortunately, imagining greater pain does not alter the course of my own. The only thing that alters the course of my own is life. Experience. I must live through my pain as you live through yours, wherever we are on the spectrum of depth and insight and development.

I must move through the course of my life, learning as I go what matters, what doesn’t, and each person’s journey is their own, to be endured, enjoyed, lived and learned from.

There’s a line in this song by Langhorne Slim, one of my favorite singers in the world, and it goes like this: “I’ve had it better than some and I know that I shouldn’t complain/though my grandfather told me once that all pain hurts the same.”

I have a hard time believing the pain I feel from my nondescript depression that’s come and gone my whole life, my vague dissatisfaction with life, is the same as the pain of losing a child. In fact, I know it cannot be. And frankly I find it self-righteous and ridiculous to claim it’s the same.

But he’s right: Pain is relative. And it all hurts. And the pain you feel from your suffering can be as profound as my own, even though your life might not cause ME pain. We cannot one-up each other’s suffering. There’s no healing in that.

And yet, there’s a strange thing that happens when you put yourself in the presence of somebody in greater pain than you. Theirs becomes yours, and yours seems small.

Sometimes I speak in rehab centers for drunks and addicts who were found homeless on the streets. When I spend an hour with those women, I get in my car and I have no fucking problems.

And when I spend time with friends who are really, really struggling, like fighting cancer or losing a baby or missing a husband who just died, and I try to be of service to them somehow, I get out of myself, and my pain is diminished, forgotten for a while. I let go of myself and find peace in the disassociation. I would say those moments keep me alive, bump me back on track.

It’s a fucking gorgeous thing. But it isn’t an IDEA. It’s an experience. I am experiencing a shift in my perspective arising from a moment with somebody else – a collision with reality that knocks me  out of my delusion.

But day in and day out, as the daily annoyances and difficulties of my life arise, as I find myself impatient and yelling at the small human specimens who irritate the living shit out of me but would take my life if I lost them, when I lay my head down at night broken and done and without resources, the vague idea that some people have it worse does precisely jack shit to alleviate my pain or make me more patient and loving and kind.

Does that make me an asshole? Probably. But I’d rather be an asshole facing my asshole nature than an asshole pretending to be enlightened.

Part of my journey is facing exactly how self-centered I am, how self-absorbed and shallow I can be – how unreliable my perceptions often are. And, perhaps most importantly, how 99% of the time, my problems lie IN MY HEAD rather than in reality. Reality is that I have a damn good fucking life. My head says “Let’s be sad. Let’s be depressed. All things suck.”

But I can’t change a broken mind with a broken mind. I can’t fix a problem WITH the problem. (That’s not mine. I learned that from sober alcoholics.) I’ve got to move my feet in a different direction. I’ve got to continue living my life, trusting that teachers will always come, teachers who won’t TELL me how I SHOULD be feeling, shame me into something I’m clearly not capable of doing, but SHOW ME through their actions, through the very essence of their selves, through their motherfucking LIVES – who they are what they see  and how they’ve suffered, and overcome. Until I remember, see the truth of my own life, and maybe realize that through my own suffering and what I’ve overcome, I can help others do the same.

Until my problems become nothing, and my pain diminishes, and I’m grateful again.

Hey son.

What I want for you is to stay soft.

It’s really un-American of me. It’s really against what “men” stand for, you know. All that machismo badass shit.

The world will eat a soft man alive. For breakfast. Fucking pathetic weakling.

That’s what they’ll say, but I don’t care. I will not harden you. I will not break you. I hold between my mama hands your giant gaping sensitive heart. I refuse to abuse it.

The softness in you. It will remain, intact. As much as it can, anyway.

Not because I made you that way, or even envisioned you that way, but because you came that way. Really it’s none of my fucking business.

My job is to not destroy what you are.

You arrived in a birth that felt like the sunrise, and stayed with a light in your gut or behind your eyes, of pain and love and humanity and some weird empathy or clarity that manifests when I want to beat the shit out of people and you say something loving, pierce to the heart of compassion so fast and sure I see my own hardness like a flash across a shocked brain: He is soft. You aren’t. Don’t fuck this up.

You barely spoke until you were 3.

You almost never cried.

You played and watched and loved and watched more and curled in close, to me, daddy, your grandma and grandfather.

You were always soft. When I say it, it sounds like an insult, in a culture like ours. “The boy is soft.”

But they don’t see you.  

They don’t see you in your scarf, the one you picked out in the women’s section of Old Navy, the one you didn’t wear to school yesterday because you know the kids will make fun of you. They don’t see your locks of curls hanging across eyes that hold mine in another time and space. They don’t see the boy sleeping on our floor and curled against his dad, still, always, forever until you don’t need it anymore, because your dad is soft like you, but was maybe almost hardened somehow, by life, and knows it, and wants differently for you. 

We will not break you.

We will not make you leave.

At the playground, you said, there was a boy with a “really weird face” and he was alone, so you sat by him. I asked if you talked or played with him. You said no, I just sat there by him, because he was alone.

And when I asked you what the hell was wrong with that one kid who was so obnoxious in your class, and I thought the little bastard was exactly that, a little bastard, without blinking you said “His parents divorced and he doesn’t get to see his dad anymore. I think he wants people to think he’s tough.”

You’re soft, kid, and I’m hard.

Sometimes I want you to be hard, because I worry for you, or you bring pain in me, when you fold into yourself almost paralyzed when I raise my voice, or you come home telling me about the girl at P.E. who said “Don’t sit by me” and I get mad, really mad but then you say “She always misses play time on Friday because her little brother needs her to go to his classroom. I think that must be hard for her.”

You feel empathy. I feel rage. I feel a bit of rage at your empathy. I’m silenced and I learn from your heart.

Sometimes I wonder where you come from. Sometimes you really piss me off, the way you match your sister’s fiery screaming temper with a gentle voice, or a quick tear. Sometimes you yell back, but not without trying a lot and a lot of gentle, first.

Gentle. You. Rocket.

And when you cry because daddy’s been working too much and I’ve been fighting all day with kids and mess and work and my brain and stress and then your tears, your tears falling on freckled cheeks, for a moment I want to yell Damnit kid just toughen up! THIS IS LIFE! I don’t have time for this shit.

You are the kid who was made fun of by their dad and maybe mom. Don’t be a wimp. Don’t be a crybaby.TOUGHEN UP.Don’t be a sissy.BE A MAN.Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.

And one day, you were the boy who stopped crying.

I will not be the force slapping the last tear from your eye.

But I will never baby you. I will never cater to you or stroke your ego or let you whine and snivel to get your way. I will make you work. I will make you face your fears and suffer and keep on going. The sensitive ones have to fight too, kid.

But I will never crush or fault or smash you for the gentleness that takes my breath away, that feels pretty foreign sometimes, the way you’re all heart pretty much all the time. The way you walk up to me with those dimples and say “Mama, can we cuddle” and you bury your face in my chest. Still. In the morning when you wake up you roll onto my side of the bed, without a word, and I roll onto my back and you put your head on my shoulder. I kiss your curls. Just as I’ve always done. 

You’re 8 years old now.

I won’t turn you away. I won’t toughen you up. Ever.

You are the kid who takes a stuffed white seal to class and gets teased.

You are the kid who doesn’t fit.

You are the dyslexic kid, the only one who can’t read yet. But when a girl asks you about it, “Why don’t you read?” You snap “None of your business.”

You know who you are. You are not weak. You are so strong you sword fight and wrestle and wear embroidered flower purses and beg for ballet lessons, maybe simultaneously.

You are so strong YOU WORE YOUR SCARF TO SCHOOL TODAY, told me “I don’t care what they say.”

I watched you walk away and wished for a second you would fight. At 2:30 I’ll pick you up and ask “How did it go, son?” and I already feel fear.

They’ll tell you it’s weak, to love and feel and cry. To live open and exposed. To see more than the rest and act on it, feel it.

They’ll tell you you aren’t a real man. That you’re something else. They won’t say it directly. They’ll say it in advertisements and characters in movies and “the American way” and the hot men that always get the hot women.

But the bravest thing you can do, kid, is to keep that softness intact, to let that heart stay open for all the pain it will entail. The love, the desperation, the agony. That’s some crazy badass shit right there. To fight and work and serve with a sensitivity that could leave you wrecked at any moment, real and in love and raw.

Most of us are too afraid to do anything of the sort. One day we look around at the pain of this world and the black inside and we snap shut, Boom. Done. You’re out. I’m in. Nothing’s getting through. I did it. I was 8 or 9 and standing in my unicorn bedroom looking into my white mirror over my dresser and I said out loud, quietly, but aloud: “This will not break you, Janelle. Nothing will EVER break you.”

I made a decision that day, in response to a pain I won’t explain now. That moment. That day. I would never need another soul. I was in control. Nothing would ever hurt me again. I was wrong, of course, but I was hard. I would die hard, like the movie. Ha. See what I mean?

My wish for you, son, is that you stay soft.

I pick up your face and see the face of a boy who knows something, beyond hard and soft or good or bad and it’s not my job to shove you into the mold of the world.

My job is to loosen my grip on myself, my hard edges and old ideas, to fit beside you, and hold the softness I almost can’t find in me.

So yeah, America, I’m raising a soft one. I’ll leave it up to you to raise the tough guys.

And when you meet my boy, I hope you love his scarf.

I recently encountered a mother who won’t let her teenager read mythology because it violates “God’s word.” A friend of mine, a preschool teacher, told me about a family that forbade their child from participating in yoga, because it wasn’t Christian. We all know families that allow only the music, books, media, etc. that reinforce their religion, creating a little silo of existence, separate from the evil outside world threatening to contaminate their child.

This is a bad plan. This is a very bad plan. You know why? Because it’s illogical.

Why does God hate logic? Does God hate logic? I don’t see why he or she should hate logic. Logic is some totally solid stuff. Logic is da bomb.

I can’t believe I just said that. I really am a nerd.

Anyway, let’s get one thing clear: I am not a God-hater. I am not a religion hater. I am not even an atheist. I used to be an atheist. I used to be one of those people waltzing around announcing with an almost palpable arrogance: “I am an atheist. I am a ‘free-thinker.’” But then I heard a loud “pop” as my head was removed from my ass and I realized I had simply chosen a new God. Namely, Science and Humanity. I had determined that the only valid “way of knowing” is found in that which we can “see” or “prove.” And I thought this made me a “free-thinker.”

Bullshit.

A real free-thinker recognizes that “seeing” and “proving” are slippery at best, and there are many, many forms of ontological knowledge (ways of knowing). A real free-thinker recognizes that the human brain is finite and conditioned and rather pathetic when held against the mystery of our existence. The vastness of eternity, the cosmos, the universe – whether we like to admit it or not- is impossible to grasp by our feeble brains, so the brain-created assertion that “THERE IS NO GOD” is as “simple-minded” and “small” as the assertion that there’s a white dude up in the sky running this show. It is merely a NEW form of comforting oneself. Some are comforted by “There is a God.” Others are comforted by “There is no God. Science is God.” What’s the freaking difference?

Why can’t we just keep our minds open and accepting to god and no-god and creator and non-creator, based on the truth or our existences, as they evolve and unfold in whatever messy directions they may take?

Clearly I have some strong opinions on this topic, but it’s another piece of writing. Let’s stick with the whole sheltering-your-kids discussion.

This plan, though it sounds sort of good in theory (kids won’t be exposed to “impure” things that will lead them to trouble), fails in execution. It may not fail with every kid, but I promise you it will fail with many, if not most.

First of all, it isn’t sustainable. Haven’t you ever thought about that? Unless you plan on homeschooling your kid for the rest of her life, or locking her in a basement, which I think is like totally illegal, your child will at some point, LEAVE YOUR FOLD. She will walk off, into the world, where sex and drugs and liberals live (sorry, I couldn’t resist.).

Also gay people.

Your child will live in the world. Period.

So how is it logical to prepare your child for a life IN THE WORLD by sheltering her FROM THE WORLD? See? Illogical.

Further, do you really have so little faith in your kid’s judgment? Think about what you’re saying: “Hey kid, since you’re clearly incapable of choosing for yourself that which is moral/immoral, good/bad, spiritually uplifting or draining, I have decided to POLICE EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE on your behalf even though some day you will have to make these decisions on your own.”

To prepare you for those decisions, I’m going to never let you make those decisions.

No really dude I don’t get this. This makes no sense.

And check this out: Do you or do you not want to empower your child to carry with him the connection with God you’ve fostered? Do you or do you not want your child to develop a real, sustaining belief?

If you want that, why would you take it upon yourself to create, nurture and sustain that relationship? Are you God? Because it sounds to me like you’re trying to be God.

And if you are policing every area of your kids’ lives, making sure it all complements your religion, then you are effectively erasing any REAL experience your child may have that would in fact foster a faith in whatever it is you’re trying to instill.

In other words, God either is or isn’t. Your God is small or your God is big. PICK ONE.

If your God cannot sustain the evil of the world, if your God cannot stand face to face with the crap of humanity, well what’s the point of having a God in the first place?

If the only way you can have a relationship with your God is to never encounter that which goes against him, well then, wow. Creator of the universe? Huh. No. Sounds pretty weak sauce to me.

Plus, if your child chooses another path, if your child is exposed to yoga and Greek mythology and suddenly “goes astray,” isn’t that better than a FAKE EXISTENCE BASED ON YOUR TEMPORARY POLICING?

How little interest do you have, really, in the individuality of your child? I don’t let my kids do and watch whatever they feel like. In fact, we don’t even have a television. I won’t let my daughter read the Hunger Games, but not because it’s “immoral,” but rather because I don’t think she’s mature enough to handle the immorality. Murder. Too much for this kid at 11-years-old. My kids also don’t watch horror movies. I’m not talking about making reasonable decisions based on a child’s maturity. I’m talking about BLOCKING age-appropriate material because it doesn’t align with your religious beliefs. I’m talking about forbidding certain things because it doesn’t reinforce your own religious stance, even if the child has an interest in such things.

Isn’t it better to just tell kids the truth?

Hey kid, yeah, watch this TV show, but notice the way the women are objectified, acting like fools to gain the attention of men.

Hey kids, go ahead and drink, but know your mama’s an alcoholic and you’re playing with fire.

Hey daughter, yep. Fine. Have sex before marriage, but let’s talk about unwanted pregnancies and all that entails.

Sure, get hooked up with kids who are stealing and doing drugs, but know that the depth of pain in your heart as you try to look at yourself in the mirror each morning will be immeasurable. Also you might go to prison.

Wow, listen to that song, kids, the way it makes life seem like nothing more than the endless pursuit of material goods.

Hold what gives you peace. Hold what gives you meaning.

But by God let your kids find the same.

Let them find the power they need.

Let them find the faith that withstands all attempts to shake it. Whatever that looks like. Truth becomes truth when it is LIVED, not when it is TOLD.

This is where the freedom lies. And really, in the end, isn’t that all we want for our kids?

Joy, and the freedom to live it.

Or at least the chance to find it.