How to Change a Diaper Like a Porn Star

Because I like to keep in tune with popular culture and embrace my inner stereo-type, on the one afternoon a week that I spend completely unencumbered by work or anything else, blissfully at home with my daughter, I like to watch Oprah while my daughter takes her afternoon nap.

Like her or not, Oprah is still among the most popular household names, among the highest paid female professionals, and (for a more current reference of popularity) has the most people following her tweets (along with God and Lance Armstrong).

You can imagine my surprise last week to tune in and find Jenna Jameson, the “number one porn star in America,” as Oprah's invited guest. I don't know exactly what it takes to become a “number one porn star,” whether it means your name or other choice body parts are most commonly recognized by the masses. Oprah kept sighting that Jenna's films and popular spin off web site grossed billions and Jenna's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, had spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list at number 8.

I was amazed by many things during the interview, but what surprised me the most was the fact that in addition to her erotic notoriety, the focus of the interview was not Jenna's professional expertise, but rather the fact that Jenna was now a “retired stay-at-home mom.” Considerable time was spent with a video tour of Jenna's home that featured the kitchen (which revealed a star with more money than taste), the nursery, and shots of Jenna cuddling her two infant twin boys.

Let's pause a brief moment to appreciate the irony: me, an aspiring stay-at-home mom (that I would be if I had any guts and a bigger savings account, more on this later), watching the show of a woman who will never be a stay-at-home mom herself and yet has been made famous by them, interviewing a stay-at-home mom who has taken early retirement from a career that has no room in it for mothers.

Sure, we've come a long way from having to de-sexualize motherhood to the point where we are making up stories about virgins and miracles, yet this whole scene makes me wonder if there was a feminist revolution at all. Is there any question, after forty years of trying, as to why we still can't successfully combine work and family life?

Jenna's is the classic perception problem. She can't be both a porn star and a mother. Of course not, the thought offends our sensibilities. We all wish we could erase the unfortunate moment when our parents should have installed better locks on their bedroom doors; it makes me squirm to think her sons will one day find the DVD. So, on the surface, this statement makes perfect sense.

In the tearier parts of the interview, Jenna worries about what her now eight-month-old sons will think when they grow up. (She can't hide the internet from them forever.) I, too, wonder if Jenna will indeed be accepted into the PTA at her son's middle school, and I would love it if ten years from now Oprah was still around to have her on again and find out.

Yet, if we scratch the surface of what Jenna is going through, is it really all that different from the rest of us, trying to force together the disparate pieces of our lives that refuse to fit? The forever private, intimate, protected, and innocent moments between mother and child spent in the nursery or running around the house without clothes on because that's what you do when you are first in the world and trying to air a bottom out from diaper rash or feel the niceness of breeze on places that don't get enough air normally (Christ, the unabashed nudity required of the birthing suite) versus the former, more public, hardly recognizable, pre-mom, independent selves? (I fully recognize the ironic mixe of images here, too.) So it begs the question: Is the difference only in the details?

I need only to rewind the interview to find out:
Oprah: Now that you are a stay-at-home mom, do you miss it (your career)?
Jenna: No (uttered emphatically).
My answer would be the same of my career if I could give it up, as that would mean that I could spend the next few fleeting years helping my daughter explore the world without being so tired and frazzled and pulled in so many other directions (at least until she is old enough to require less time-intensive assistance from me); and if I could do so without the fear that my resume gap will render me completely un-hireable, save by Wal-mart.
Oprah: Do you have any regrets?
Jenna: No.
Me: Only that I didn't know enough before I became a mother to know that I'd want to spend every waking moment with my daughter and wish I could have chosen a career that would have more space in it for being both a mom and professional.
Oprah: Was it really something you wanted to be when you grew up?
Jenna: No, Oprah, I wanted to be you. (Uttered with such honesty and sadness that it makes me catch my breath at how there is still such little room in the world for women that make a living with their minds, instead of with their bodies.)
Me: No, Oprah, I had no idea that it would be this beautiful, this hard, this singularly important.

Three Neighborhood Vignettes

1. It's a Sunday like any other in mid-spring. The afternoon has just begun to stretch and linger, and the heat of the day feels refreshing in the way it suddenly gathers on your skin. I'm in our front driveway playing a game of horse with two neighborhood kids. This is before we have a child of our own, and it will be a few months more until we know that life in my belly has taken root.

I've got letters “h” through “s” and I'm on my way to an “e”. I've not really been trying all that hard, caught up in watching the two kids instead. The boy, Justin, I know. Ever since we moved to the block, when my husband and I are out on our evening walk, he makes us stop so he can pat our dog. He's told us more than once that he'll even walk him for us, but that it will cost us a dollar. Since we have a fenced in yard and our evening walk is the few moments in the day that my husband and I get to enjoy each other's company, we've told him that for now we'll pass, but you never know. We've left the door open on account of the fact that no one can really say no to an eleven-year-old kid without looking like a jerk (except maybe if your their parents and even that's debatable).

The other is a girl I haven't seen before. She's about a year younger than Justin. In watching them, I am fascinated by two things. One, that Justin seems to like this girl despite the fact that she's a whole year younger and their at the age where kids are prone to telling each other to get lost if there is just one hair askew. He genuinely cheers when she makes a shot, even if its something silly like standing directly under the hoop and throwing the ball straight up through the basket, which is much harder than it looks ( that was my "r" thank you very much). Two, she's about as good at basketball as I am, but that doesn't seem to stop her from trying like hell.

So I've fallen way behind the count to the delight of both the kids. It's my turn again, an easy lay-up from the right side of our driveway. I am dribbling and taking my sweet time, palming the ball and pumping toward the basket to line up my shot. I'm the kind of player who still shoots like a second grader, hands on either side of the ball instead of the dominant hand underneath and one to the side to guide it in. A basket for me has more to do with a general understanding of high school physics and mostly pure luck.

“So,” I ask, pausing to look down at the girl for just a second. “I haven't seen you around before. Did you and your family just move here?”

“No,” she says. “My house got closed. So we're living at Justin's.” Just then, the ball rolls off the tip of my fingers and heads off into the other side of our yard without even hitting the rim. Lucky for me, my shooting has been pretty bad, so I don't have to admit that my heart is in my throat.

“You've got an E,” Justin says, laughing and chasing after the ball. “You lose.”

“It's a hard shot,” the girl defends.

“Yeah, that's hard.” Only I'm not talking about basketball and I think she might know it, so we both look at Justin who is now lining up for his shot to start the next game.

Because there is nothing else I can do for this kid but offer up my driveway and a basketball hoop, I let them keep playing until they are both sweaty and panting. The girl's hair is naturally curly like mine and it's winging like crazy out of her ponytail, even in the low humidity.

I lose every game, five straight. Eventually, both kids collapse onto the warm concrete, their hands swung lazy over their eyes to block out the sun.

Somehow, I want the simplicity of afternoon to last forever or at least give her and Justin's parents time to sort out the accommodations of two families living in one house.

“Do you want some Popsicles?” I blurt, standing over them and looking down.

They both nod, so we sit on my driveway and suck the last bit of sweetness that we can out of the afternoon until it is too dark to see the hoop and our Popsicle sticks have gone dry.

“Let's go home,” Justin finally says. He pulls her up off the concrete and they wheel their bikes off to Justin's house, which is only six doors down.

I find myself letting go of my breath. I am so very thankful that she doesn't tell him that she can't.

2: It's just shy of two years to the day and despite the promises that everyone keeps making, the slim evidence that this whole mess is turning around, suddenly Justin is missing from the end of his driveway. He's grown out of advertising his dog walking services, but up until a week or so ago, he still waved while attempting a kick flip on his skateboard and he still asked me to stop so that he could pat our dog. Since the birth of our daughter, a little less than a year ago, our walks have gotten more frequent, motion a trick for conjuring sleep us parents learn early if we hope to survive that precarious first year. I walk by and try not to look up at the yellow notice posted to his front door.

Soon after, a dumpster pulls up. It takes two days for the contents of the house to be piled in. The guys on the crew lift their hands to me. It probably has to do with the baby peeking out from my chest like I've got two heads and both of us are wearing sunglasses. I see the legs of a kitchen table, the upholstered foot of a living room chair. No one asks me to stop so that they can pat my dog.

3. This afternoon, from my bedroom window, I watch two budget rental trucks barrel down the street. I wonder if they will have children, a baby my daughter's age. Someone we can wander over to with a plate of cookies on a lazy Sunday afternoon, practice holding hands, looking both ways to cross the street. Like two conspirator's, my daughter and I press our noses to the glass. The back gate rattles up. The truck is empty. Even I am not naive enough to ask why no one seems to be moving in, but only moving out.

Object Permanence

Yesterday, in yet another incident that marks the oddity of our virtual ways of being, I visited my father's new home from the comfort of my own. He offered up the grand tour via Skype, moving from room to room with his laptop out in front like a sort of ill balanced waiter. Peekaboo being one of my daughter's favorite games of late, she giggled every time his face would bounce back onto the computer screen as he repeatedly leaned in to make sure the camera was angled correctly and asked over and over, “Are you seeing this?” in a kind of prediction of what will undoubtedly be Verizon's next advertising campaign.

He has moved a total of five times since I have been on the planet, for all the usual reasons both personal and financial -- career, divorce, remarriage, the dream of having property in the country with horses, a romance with the coast. Perhaps because my husband's parents still live in the same house and once a year, at least, we return to the scene of his childhood in our adult skin, or more pressingly now because we have our own child; each time my father moves, I have come to wonder what happens to the evidence of the life we lived together, and what proof of it will be left for me to show my daughter.

There is nothing like having a child of your own that makes you long for the bedroom you grew up in, if only to sit in it for just a moment and remember what the world smelled like when you were their age. (Of course, it should be said that all this nostalgia is hitting me at a time when it seems as though more American's are loosing their homes than will remain in them, so I should be thankful that there is even a tour for me to take.)

During each return visit to the house my husband grew up in, a story from his childhood inevitably slips out, a window of memory opens, and we leave feeling that much closer to each other, as if the story shared lessens the time we've spent on this earth without each other.

My father's new home is as nice as it is foreign. He catalogs the contents of each room with a kind of obsessive fervor -- the elegance of a hutch, a gold-plated tea set sitting artfully on a low table in the front entrance. He keeps asking me if I recognize this furniture, but they are pieces from his most recent house that I only ever visited twice. Yet, I nod and smile, even though the camera is facing the other way and he can't see me. Is parental acquiescence ever something we out grow?

When nearly seven minutes have passed, which on a virtual tour is like an eternity, and I'm struggling to keep my daughter from pressing buttons on the keyboard and likely disconnect our call, I want to ask him if he's showing off because he's been taking some interior design course I don't know about or if like an Egyptian prince, these objects have taken on such a supreme level of importance that he wishes to be mummified with them.

Then, he rounds a corner, and there it is, the painting of President Kennedy that used to hang on the wall in his study of the farm house in Maine, the most recent of the houses we shared as a family. My father is probably standing there smelling the brackish water moving off the bay he lives next to now in Panama City, Florida, but suddenly the sharp, dry smell of pine logs burning in a wood stove is just beyond the reach of my senses. My brother and I are sitting on the floor, listening to Eddie Vedder sing about seeing a woman he recognizes from his childhood behind the counter at a country store, only he can't remember her name and is too shy to ask her and thus share the memory. It is the last winter that we will live in the same house, before my brother is old enough to move out, and he is asking me if, at the ripe old age of thirteen, I know what this song means. Life times are catching up with me.

My father's tour has suddenly become more interesting and I lean forward on the edge of my seat, watching for familiar objects as they bob in and out from view -- the dining room table where my grandmother officiated my at-home bat mitzvah sits on a porch now overlooking the ocean, a prisma drawing by my stepmother winks from a wall in a bedroom when I remember it guiding a path up the stairs. There are even artifacts from my parent's original marriage, although they've been divorced now longer than they were ever married in the first place.

In another three years, I, too, will have lived on my own longer than I lived with my parents. And yet, there is relief in this unexpected brush with these relics. I know now, with a kind of certainty, that objects, even out of place, can afford a means to visit this history, even after its been long outgrown.

This is, after all, the reason for my daughter's delight when her grandfather finally reappears at the tour's inevitable conclusion. Peak-a-boo, a kind of proof that we seek objects-- for good reason -- long after they've disappeared from view.

Writing on the Wall

A few days ago, Joe –my husband of nearly six years -- and I were once again officially married. Rest assured family and friends, this was no elaborate black tie affair complete with five courses, a tiered cake, and a hundred or so people trying to manage the chicken dance on a ten by ten foot dance floor. This was not even a minor affair on a beach with sandals, sun dresses, and a mariachi band. In fact, our marriage happened in a series of seconds while Joe and I weren't even in the same room.

It all started when a curious message popped into my in box. It stated “Joe Wingate has updated his profile to indicate that you are married. Please click here to confirm or deny this status.”

First, I have to admit, I am somewhat of a Facebook neophyte. Gregarious and outgoing in person, I am rather socially awkward on the internet. My profile picture is still that generic shadow figure that is probably more fitting for a person in protective custody, and since setting up my Facebook account nearly eight months ago, I've not really been back. I have received the occasional email notice, mostly from people I'm in regular contact with anyhow, requesting friendship, but since I don't actively Facebook, I've felt that accepting these “friendships” would be doing so under false pretenses, setting up the kind of relationships I hate, where one party doesn't really participate.

My husband, in sharp contrast, while a self-proclaimed introvert, is an internet social butterfly. On more occasions than I can count, I've witnessed him running to his chirping cell phone to accept a new friend to his account. He's also been the first in our physical social group to figure out how to set up familial relationships and propose marriage to me, his wife. He has friended many more people than we are in regular contact with, including people who live halfway around the world and share his passion for snowboarding. To the surprise of those who know us, it can be said he has cast his social net far wider than I will ever cast mine. (What more did any of us expect from a world where the twitter account of God is owned by Richard Dawkins, the raving atheist?)

On the morning of my husband's proposal, (although this email paled in comparison to the first, which happened on the top of a mountain in the warmth of a late August afternoon) a small part of me worried that I'd hurt my husband's feelings if I didn't immediately accept.

So I clicked the link, and after nearly ten years in a committed relationship, during which have we proclaimed our undying love to one another in a very public ceremony (one that did not include the chicken dance but did feature me wearing a dress that could stand on its own reconnaissance), commingled our bank accounts, purchased a home and created a child, I “confirmed” our status as married.

This prompted the second curious email of the morning which read, “You are now in a relationship with Joe Wingate.” Immediately, I forwarded the message and asked him if we should change the date of our anniversary and if I should be packing for a second honeymoon.

To which he replied with a picture of Hawaii and asked if clothes were really required for this kind of trip. (Okay, he didn't really do this, but wouldn't it have been funny if he had?)

While lacking in romance, our marriage on Facebook is more public than the one six years ago. We are officially linked in a world far more accessible and far more connected than by the brief announcement in the Portsmouth Harold, which has yellowed in our wedding scrapbook, or that small square of paper that is gathering dust in a file drawer in the town of Greenland, NH, where the official record of our wedding is kept.

I find pleasure in the fact that people I don't even know now know that Joe and I are on this great adventure of building a life.

In addition to confirming my marriage, I found myself confronted by an entire page of people whom I could barely remember the sound of their voice. Proposed friendships, waiting for me to ignore or accept. It was both funny and sad to see their faces smiling out at me, the way they'd changed their hair or featured themselves with a spouse I hadn't met. However, instead of feeling like we are suddenly connected, as pictures of a child I didn't know they'd had flashed across my screen, it made me realize instead all the chapters of their lives I have missed.

Suddenly, there were so many questions I had to ask. Like, when did you marry that guy? And what was your pregnancy like? And, if they, like me, felt they'd seen the face of God when they first held their child or threw up during transition in the birthing suite.

Is it ironic that this “catching up” after all this time was happening while I sat alone in the pre-dawn dark, surrounded only by the eerie glow of a computer screen?

And what of all the social customs I've spent years trying to master that I will now have to learn in this new space? For instance, how much time is too much time after the birth of a child for you to send an e-card with an online gift card to Babies r us? Or, heaven forbid, what happens when someone dies? Does your family member log on to update your status? Do we need to leave passwords in our wills? Does it hurt more or less to sign a set of legal documents weighing roughly the same as a human heart than it does to click “confirmed” on the status of divorced?

Yet, these are things we do not post on each other's walls. These are intimacies forbidden to this medium, so they will remain untyped and caught up in my throat.

“I love you,” I write on my husband's wall when what I really mean to say is I want the heat of your touch, the stiff, tickling scrape of your stubble against my chin that I will find when I crawl back into bed, waiting for our alarm to go off.

Oh, Pioneers!

Growing up, my mother worked. In fact, from the very start, her full-time career as a psychologist framed my childhood.

Her water broke eight weeks early, and she spent the subsequent two weeks lying in a hospital bed, risking an infection that could kill us both and waiting for my lungs to develop. Yet, she returned to work six weeks after my birth, right on schedule. (Ironically, this was also right around the time I was just supposed to be making my way out of the safe cocoon of her belly.) To her employer and colleagues alike, it was as if she’d experienced nothing more than having her tonsils out or the inconvenience of an appendectomy.

For most of my life, even into adulthood, I believed that such feats were the mere realities of her time, her generation – the one history has described as the first cadre of women to aim to “have it all” and through sheer force of will have achieved it.

You can imagine my surprise to learn recently that of all the women to graduate college between 1966 and 1976, only 17% have actually made it to midlife with both children and a career in tact.

During the past year, my first as a mother, I have discovered two important truths: 1) My birthday should have been a celebration of my mother and the magic wonder of her ability to give me life. (This year, I did manage to call her and say “thanks” and apologize that it had taken me twenty-eight years to come to this realization.) 2) That I have never really given her enough credit for what she has achieved, as a feminist pioneer, sewing together the all too disparate pieces of work and family life with what I have only ever perceived as grace and acumen.

This is not to deny her the myriad of challenges. Yet, I’ve never thought of myself as a child who was parked in daycare, forty-plus hours a week. (An image that is strange in and of itself as it relies on the faulty notion that a toddler will stay put.) Interestingly, this is also the fate that mothers of my generation seem to fear the most for our children whenever we talk about what it means for mothers to work.

As a kid, having a mother who worked full-time meant:

• Extra opportunities to make friends: I attended full day kindergarten – public in the morning with every other kid on my block and private in the afternoon with a set of kids from the other side of town.
• Developing culinary prowess: I took over cooking dinner for us both in the forth grade so that my mother could work a few extra hours in the home office, while Total Eclipse of the Heart blared out from the living room stereo, the spatula in my hand a makeshift microphone.
• Privacy: Hopping off the bus with a key around my neck on a neon shoelace meant that I had a whole two hours every afternoon with which to curl up on a sun-soaked spot of carpet with a book.

Only in becoming a mother myself have I come to realize that her choices were so ringed by sacrifice – the moments of miraculous, unscheduled afternoons when I discovered for the first time that my body casts a shadow were the moments she was forced to miss.

At my core, I live in awe of what she has achieved through stubbornness and tenacity. Despite the odds, as one of the first women to graduate from her PhD program she has made good on both the promise she made on graduation day to the dean from whom she collected her diploma, walking across a stage amidst a sea of male faces, and the promises she made to me on the day of my birth.

As a mother, striving to follow in her footsteps, I have many advantages that my own mother did not – twelve weeks of federally mandated maternity leave, a 60% schedule with flex-time hours I get to work from home, a wonderfully supportive boss, colleagues who will bear a presentation with my daughter dangling from her front pack, an electronic breast pump.

Yet, I find each day a tremendous struggle that begins and ends with consoling myself with the fantasy that someday I will quit.

I cannot tell you what the future holds for me or for my generation of mothers. I can only hope that my daughter feels as happy and proud of the choices, the promises I have yet to make or break.

Catch and Release

Almost immediately after we bought our house in the spring of 2006, my husband instituted a catch and release program. While he was in the basement cleaning the cat box for the first time, he heard a rustling over in the corner. He discovered a frog there, trapped in the slim dirt of the window well, its translucent belly pressed firmly into the glass, its legs kicking wildly as it tried to scramble up to freedom. As he came to discover, the grates over the window wells of our new home were small enough to keep people and full-grown pets from falling through, but too large for frogs and the occasional rodent.

Slowly, my husband cracked the window and scooped the frog into his hand. (It immediately peed as frogs do, their only defense from children of a certain age that are always picking them up and placing them in makeshift terrariums.) Trudging up the steps, he walked over to me where I sat on the couch watching the evening news to show me the brown/green, panting body clamped between his hands. I was in the midst of watching yet another depressing story flash across the TV screen-- fallen soldiers in Iraq, civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another attempted airplane sabotage, a senseless school shooting. Thankfully, he pulled me away and we knelt down on the step outside our slider and let the frog hop into the twilight damp grass of our new backyard, the hum of its brethren just beginning in the distance. This began my husband's nightly routine of checking the window wells for the twelve or so weeks of summer and every so often releasing a panicked and grateful animal back into our backyard.

As we watched the world plunge further into what often feels like an unprecedented time of violence, I was always impressed by this small act of kindness, this nightly ritual of putting a life all but lost back into the world.

Shortly before our daughter was born last April, an acquaintance asked me how I felt about bringing a child into a world filled with such violence. (Not exactly an appropriate question for someone eight and a half months pregnant.) Yet, this person had no children and the question gave me pause. Perhaps because it was the eve of spring, my answer was this story of my husband and the frogs in our basement.

Where there is hate and violence in the world, there is also peace and love. There is also generosity.

This spring, we will celebrate our daughter's first year of life. It has been a year filled with wonder and joy, peace and love, unprecedented generosity. Yet, it is still a world that holds inexplicable violence. This week's headlines riddled with its evidence-- Man Shoots Officers Outside Pentagon, Death Toll Rising Again in Iraq, and the worst (at least for parents) just down the street from our home-- 2 Students Injured in Deer Creek Middle School Shooting.

It is not yet spring and so my husband has yet to wander down into the basement to rescue one of his frogs, but the season will be here soon. The first breaths of it already felt in the widening of the afternoon. When it comes, the three of us will kneel down by the back slider to watch as the frog slides out from his open hands into a dark night, together in our gratitude