The dog sniffs at a puddle, then pulls ahead towards the shadows and the safety of those big overgrown branches and bushes. He’s a little dog, and peeing out in the open is scary for little dogs. We hurry away from the sidewalk, under thin clouds hanging around the courtyard like some ghost’s laundry which I hate to tell them is never going to dry out here. Even the air feels wet.

There are shredded woodchips all over the ground in the spot where dogs are supposed to go poop. This morning there’s also mud, and I do my best to step delicately in my flipflops. The puppy doesn’t step delicately. They don’t even make flipflops for dogs and even if they did — shhh. Stop. This is stupid. He clomps through the mud as though nothing strange has happened, no one vandalized our courtyard with water.

He sniffs the ground, looking for his instructions from Zebulon which will tell him exactly where he is supposed to go. But everything is wet now, the map, the spot, all of the horrible poops he has made before. He can’t find it. Maybe it’s over – no. Oh! Right – no. He turns in a circle, squats, and changes his mind.

A fat drop of cold water plops into my hair. I look up, and the raw branches overhead shed more water onto my face. Awesome.

The puppy has given up. This is all wrong, he can’t find anything that’s supposed to be here so now he’s standing there shaking in the warm wet morning light, looking at me and begging to go inside where he can pee on the floor like a civilized person.

I tug the leash back towards the wood chips. Seriously, man. You haven’t gone all night. If you don’t pee, you’ll die. It’s happened before. This guy was at a party and it was a long time ago when people would rather die thn be rude and say excuse me, I have to pee. So he did. He died. His bladder broke and flooded everything and he died.

The dog doesn’t care. He wants to go in.

A long time ago I would have lost my mind. I would have said something mean like, “I hate you. You SUCK.” and I would have dragged him inside all frustrated and then I would have been in a bad mood for the morning over it.

Now I take Zoloft. It evens out my brain so I can just laugh and say, “You suck, dude.” and then we stand there a few more minutes.

I look up at the branches scrawled across the grey sky and think about how many people I know who take a drug to fix their brain. Why is that? Do we have a pharma rep hidden somewhere in the family? Do crazy people attract each other?

But everyone I know says that everyone they know takes stuff to. Why?

I look down at the dog. He’s chewing on a leaf. His brain is calm. I know why we all take medication. We take it because it is available.

We’re using our brains to do things they weren’t designed to do. We take the pattern recognition — which lets us tell apart animals and people who look very similar — and use it to learn how to read. We live in villages and tribes that are several thousand times the size of what our brains can count. We compete with magazine covers. We don’t exercise, or if we do, it’s contrived and our brains must know the difference. Food is readily available all the time, leaving huge areas of the system that are supposed to be devoted to food finding with nothing better to do than to worry about shit that’s actually fine.

There’s more things like that, and all of it is bound to stress the system and make us feel upset or angry or worried or nervous or socially anxious. Right?

I tug the dog over to another area. He runs across a puddle and sniffs everything because oh my god! This all smells a little bit different over here! We stand there for a long time before he starts playing with leaves and I know that he’s never going to pee out here and if we stay out here we’re going to die from being hungry and waiting and OMG.

I turn and walk towards the door. Yay the puppy is excited! We are going inside now! To pee on the floor! He’s happy. That’s happy.

“Dude,” I tell him cheerfully, “You suck. I hate you.”

In the olden days I worked at a software company where we spent all day in frustrating meetings with people who wanted the result without having to do or understand or even hear about all the stuff in between. I’d stay there 10 hours and then come home with my head buzzing. Mouse would greet me at the door and Kevin would chat with me about his day and about funny stupid people and – it was all interesting, but I barely responded. Not that I didn’t want to be with him, but conversation felt like too much. Saying words back was too hard with all the talking noise from the day.

It wasn’t a creative time. My drawing table sat in a cluttered corner while I spent long night hours thinking about nothing, watching sitcoms I’d already seen.

I’m very, very lucky that Kevin was nice enough to stick around because I was barely a wife those days. It makes me sad to think about it now… what wasted time, what energy I spent on people and things that did not matter. It was the dot-com days I guess; we had stock options and there were free sodas in the break room. Everyone was a little nutty.

So that’s sort of the same kind of way that I wasn’t a good mother today.

I did do some of the things that good mothers do. I put pants on the one that was half-naked. provided four (4) complete, balanced meals plus snacks in between. Gave one child a bath. Put shirt and pants on him afterwards. Encouraged both to draw with chalk all over a chalkboard wall. Scrubbed the bird’s cage, dishes, toys, and perches because holy Christ birds are nasty. Helped children with various potty-related activities. Played a computer game with one. Did two hours of school work with the other. Put pants on — oh my God, Graham where are your pants? Took them outside to play. Watched a library video about rocks and minerals PLUS the single greatest movie ever made. Managed orderly and thorough hand-washing before dinner. Served dinner. Refused to give in to 3-year-old’s unreasonable cup-related demands. Politely overlooked his partial nudity at the dinner table. Helped them brush their teeth. Read stories. Hugged them goodnight.

But I was also irritable and disengaged. Distracted. I caught myself in a stupid power struggle to make Nicolaus read a page because I knew he could read it and he was being all silly and acting like a five year old. I barked at him: “Pay ATTENTION. You need to focus here.” Hi, Kettle? It’s me, your ADD mother.

This went on for awhile before he gave it to me straight, “Mama, why are you acting like this is the most important thing in the world and if I don’t read it we will all DIE?”

Well, you never know when knowing how to read the words little, friend, animal, please, doctor, bigger, and better might save your life. According to some of the spam I get anyway.

But he was rightly picking up on the fact that I was being a freak for no reason. We finished the page, then I let him go run around and be grumpy for awhile. The next time we sat down I gave him a handful of pretzels to munch on while he read. No games, no if you read a sentence I give you a pretzel. Just hey, wanna snack? And hey, wanna read? He did, and it was better.

After that I fell asleep, using the pile of clean laundry for a pillow. I woke up 30 minutes later to the sound of my own voice saying, “NICOLAUS! Didn’t I just tell you to STOP YELLING??”

I vaguely remembered telling him to stop stuff many times during my nap.

The table was covered in cut paper and pear juice because hey, mom’s asleep and our insurance deductible started over this month! Let’s get out sharp things and open metal pop-top cans by ourselves.

That was the sort of day it was. I’d hug them, then I’d yell at them, then I’d take care of something they needed, then I’d ask them why they were being so dang rude today. Then I’d hug one, put pants on the other, and keep going.

Side effects so far: dreams are not as detailed and interesting as usual. Though I think I did dream something very funny about an old man who came to the present from 1,000 years in the past via time travel, but it was confusing see because he looked so old. People thought he meant that he was a thousand years old and it was very funny in a Three’s Company way to watch him try to explain that he’s only 90-something, even though – sigh, yes, well he was born some thousand years ago but that’s not how it works and – oh nevermind.

But the texture of my dreams is normally a lot more interesting and fun. These are sort of like watching a movie while half asleep.

Other side effect: Is there a word that means “full of words”? I don’t know what’s going on, but I feel very… wordy. If I actually posted everything here that I want to post right now, you’d all run away for good. And how!

So I won’t.

So. How’s it going? Anything… good on the internet?

Graham was in a horrible mood today which – please forgive me – is almost entertaining. He wants so bad to be awful, to tell us all to fuck off, to throw the tantrums his brain is demanding. But part of him likes us, and is embarrassed, and wants a hug, and wants to tell us a joke. He was howling and furious because he couldn’t cut. It is his right to cut, and he is very good at cutting, and he wanted to cut and I – an unreasonable whore of a mother – was saying no. So we faced off.

“Graham. Put the scissors down and stop throwing a fit. If you don’t stop it, you will go to your room.”

He stood, old-western style and stared at me, deciding what to do. His face quickly morphed from one expression to the next. He scowled… then melted into sad. Then shifted to an angry pout. Then – a tiny twitch of a smile? Back to scowl. Then a flash smile. Then hurt. Outrage! Half a smile followed by a look of total confusion.

He needed help. I scooped him up and gently took the scissors, swirled him around and changed the subject. We moved on, until the next human rights violation occurred four minutes later. Dinner was announced, and he wanted to eat but also wanted to bring his paper boat to the table but we didn’t hear him so we said just come and eat, and he thought that meant no you can’t bring your lousy boat to the fucking table, so he howled and we told him to quit it and

I’m doing it, aren’t I? I told you. It’s a problem. Maybe there’s a wordpress plugin that will auto-cut a third of what I write.

When he messes up, he hides his eyes. It’s should be infuriating that this otherwise capable person pees everywhere but my god, he looks like a little rabbit with his paws over his little face and it just makes me want to hug him until I gobble him up, but not in a violent child-eating way. In a oooooh I just can’t squish him hard enough way.

Nicolaus meanwhile was more bouyant than usual, and he chatted with us and instructed us on the ways of many things. The kid is writing a book of funny history… he dictates while I type, then he draws pictures and he wants me to print the whole thing out and make him famous somehow. Here are the entries he has come up with so far:

Nicolaus Copickleus
Discovered that the Sun goes around the Earth and THAT all goes around ANOTHER SUN.

Julius Meaner
Julius Meaner was an emperor in Rome. He was called Meaner because he was really mean and one time he killed Jesus. His reward from God was to get stabbed.

I have got to find the picture for that one because it is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Julius Caesar is standing there with blood gushing out everwhere and there are knives that his friends threw down and he’s saying something like “Oh I’m dying” – and there’s a beautiful angel up at the top saying “HER IS YUR REWRD.”

When Nicolaus tells this story he almost can’t talk he’s laughing so hard. “You know, your reward for killing Jesus?” Hahaha. Ha. Alright so technically Caesar predated Christ but the premise is still pretty funny. He cracks up telling it because haha! REWARD? Being killed? Get it? That’s not a very nice reward!

I love this kid. He is so damned weird.

Today was Kevin’s ten year anniversary of being married to me on purpose. When we explained this to Nicolaus and told him we were all going out to lunch to celebrate he asked why we were celebrating now, ten years later, instead of you know – like, at the time we actually got married. Because. We had our wedding that day and it was so stressful and exhausting that we weren’t up for going out to eat afterwards.

Oooh and! We have declared Saturdays our family art day. Tomorrow is the first one – we’re all going to work on projects and make a giant mess in my studio. Then we’ll clean it all up and go to the grocery store. I’m trying this new thing with cooking at home, and it’s almost becoming fun in a sick, satisfying way because hey look at me I’m acting like a regular person.

Okay shhhhh. I’m going to stop now.

It’s creepy to realize how much of reality is just the exact mix of chemicals that happen to be squishing together in your brain that day. Because a week ago my female hormones would have rammed into my whatever else is in there and it all would have been powerful enough to light up an actual light on my car’s dashboard which would have flashed: CHECK TIME – YOU SUCK.

And I would’ve driven the same speed but the drive would have felt faster, more hurried, and more awful. Sometimes it feels like I live in one of those frenzied traffic reports they yell over the sound of a news radio chopper. OVER ON THE NORTH SIDE WE HAVE AN EAST BOUND PARENT WHO IS STILL CLEANING UP AFTER IN AN EARLIER INCIDENT INVOLVING AN OVERTURNED CUP OF MILK IN THE BACKSEAT OF HER VEHICLE. CONGESTION IN BOTH CHILDREN, EXPECT DELAYS AS THEY DECIDE WHETHER TO WEAR FALL SHOES OR SANDALS OR MAYBE BALLET SLIPPERS THAT DON’T EVEN FIT.

Those weeks are long. But not this week. This week I’m having an easier time zooming out, backing up from the intense focus on all of my stupid minute-by-minute tragedies. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t suck – I do. But this week, even as I run late and mess things up and end up at Arby’s, I’m noticing the fiery trees that line the suburban streets. Their leaves look like paper. And even through my filthy windshield, the sky is a chalky blue, and in the backseat my boys are warning me about activating the warp engines.

I’m not proud of how much I enjoy their Star Trek chatter. It truly warms my heart. “There,” Kevin says, “Are you happy? You finally have friends.”
He’s right! Man. It makes me wish I’d had kids sooner. Like – if I’d gotten pregnant at 14, then Nicolaus could have watched Star Trek with me every day during my freshman year of college. It would’ve been SO FUN.

Anyway, it’s a decent week so far. I’m making an effort not to slip into a funk, and to remember the many ways that I do not suck. I need a motivational poster to constantly remind myself: You might be a lame mom, but you’re the best mom they have. Besides, it’s not like they know any better.

Right this second I’m sitting at a neighborhood coffee shop which offers free babysitting in their fancy enclosed play area while you sit and work. It’s a really neat place – for $7 you can use their wireless internet and legally ignore your children for two hours. The boys like it, but I know it’s lame. We should have gone to the park today, or to a museum, or to the library even though the library has no more books on account of my children checked them all out last week.

So I’m sitting and instead of working on fixing my web site or catching up on etsy feedback, I’m blogging and sort of spying on my children. I’m also apparently using the word blog as a verb with a straight face. Disturbing.

There are times when I’m tempted to compare them. Like when I have to drag Nicolaus into the hair cut place, where he watches darkly and scrutinizes every teeny snip because he already told the girl that he is growing his hair out, so this had better not be a serious cut. And then it’s done! So we start to leave, and then I have to physically drag a screaming Graham out while he begs for a haircut.

Or when I order pizza.
Graham: White sauce, every topping except olives.
Nicolaus: Red sauce, extra olives only

Or when the day begins. Every day since he was born Nicolaus has run into our room and begged us to get up! Start the day! Let’s go! Let’s eat! OMG! GET UP GET UP GET UP. I wonder what that does to a kid, to have to work so hard to get his basic needs met like that. You know, like psychologically.

Graham comes to our bed at sunrise too. He shuffles in quietly, climbs up next to me and whispers, “I needa blankit.”

“Do you want to get up and have breakfast?”

“No.” He says, and he yawns and falls back asleep.

Their fundamental vibes are so different. Nicolaus is a PC, he makes things needlessly difficult and crashes a lot. He wears muted colors. He has a great work ethic, and only cost us $47 if you count the $20 I paid to get a private room at the hospital when he was born. Graham is a Mac: he is silly and makes everything simple and cute, but he cost like $8000.

So I’m spying on them. Graham is playing by himself, running with their little shopping cart and goofing around with all of the pretend food. From what I can tell Nicolaus has befriended another boy about his age and is pressuring that kid into joining him on a serious mission. They’re both having $3.50 worth of fun I think. I know I am.

Life here is also packed full of entertainment, and it’s extraordinarily safe. Our food and water supply, the homes we live in, the things our kids play with are all things we can trust on some level to not kill us or give us serious lead poisoning or tetanus or salmonella unless we really work at it.

Yeah, there are trade offs to living in modern America. We feel stressed out a lot, there’s all these hassles and obligations and schedules and little pressures eating at us. We drive in traffic and our kids worry us, and other moms judge us for making slightly different parenting choices. We worry that we aren’t adequate, we worry that we’re gaining weight. But really? Big damned deal. Chances are our kids will grow up fine, and it’s not like gaining weight and going up a size means having to grow the cotton and weave a new pair of pants. We just stop at Old Navy on the way home.

We take these things all so for granted that even the phrase “take it for granted” doesn’t say enough. We take it for permanent. We take it for fundamental right. When we talk about our way of life being threatened by terrorist attacks or gas shortages or economy crashes, what are we talking about if not our ability to drive to Target and buy a new garlic press whenever we want?

Tiffany goes to Libertarianism
It was this kind of easy lifestyle that first led me to learn more about libertarianism. I still had a full-time job, but was moonlighting and daydreaming about a time when I’d be running my own business. It was the exciting dot-com days and things seemed pretty great for myself and everyone I knew — even my poorest friends had cable TV and cell phones — and it seemed like the good things were all thanks to capitalism. Capitalism gave me a good car to drive at an affordable $200 per month. It gave me ten different restaurants to choose from at lunch time, some chains, some quaint local places. I also worked in marketing which is all about compelling people to consume, giving them choices.

With this perspective, it’s easy to see why I’d start to think that the government should leave companies alone. It looked pretty straightforward: The government sucks butt at things. Private companies are good at things. The government is cumbersome and bureaucratic and corrupt. It’s slow to react, and inefficient and expensive. The problem, I argued, with centralized legislation is that some dude in Washington or NYC or Chicago might make a law that is impossible for a Georgia farmer to follow if he wants to stay in business. The free market, I said, can work things out. Ooooh trust the free market. Ooooh it’s such a beautiful idea.

I wasn’t a Republican, because on social issues I’ve always been a liberal-butted hippie. People everywhere just wanna be free. They want to do drugs and make mistakes with their money and have the anal sex. GO FOR IT, I say. Just don’t hurt anyone else who isn’t, you know, into that. But in terms of government regulation of businesses, taxes, income, property, etc – I found myself on the far conservative side of things. The Libertarian philosophy worked well for me: laws should be pared down to almost nothing. You shouldn’t need lawyers to interpret them, anyone should be able to understand what’s expected of them in this society.

In my mind this was a perfect, simple, beautiful thesis to test every political issue against. For six years my liberal friends would beat their heads against their computer screen and try to understand how I could agree with them on 16 out of 20 issues but still be so infuriatingly determined to see the Democratic party fall on its ass. The question I kept coming back to was this:

As a group, people who are on the left tend to be very (rightfully) suspicious of the man, of large organizations, of institutions, and of the government. So why would it make sense to give more power to the US government, arguably the biggest lamest corporation in the world?>

This contradiction bugged the shit out of me. And I couldn’t ever get an answer that made sense.

So now, here we are several years later and I have an answer:
I had it backwards. The basic tenet that we should entrust our government with great power requires that we remain vigilant. We must never trust our government completely, not despite the contradictory fact that we ask them to take over areas of our lives such as health insurance or education but BECAUSE of that fact. The suspicion is built in, the same way that red tape is built in to prevent anything from happening too quickly.

And for added points you could have turned the question back around on me:
If the federal government is just like a giant corporation, and is so terribly suspect, why do you trust the free market to do the right thing?

In fact, now that I think about it, someone did ask me that. “Oh!” I think I said, “Easy! Because the free market is better incented to respond to what people want. It may not happen instantly, but it does happen.” Here is the problem with that. And yes I do know that I’m now arguing with myself from four years ago, and it’s really fucking boring, but there are really three reasons that logic no longer works for me.

1. The government is designed to encourage suspicion and vigilance – the market isn’t.
   Politicians try to calm the population, and it works some of the time, sort of. But there’s always a good percentage of people going WAIT. WTF? Because that is part of the system. The market on the other hand is designed to assuage fears… shhh… there, there, don’t worry… don’t think too hard about what you’re buying. JUST DO IT, in all caps if necessary.

2. A truly pure free market is not possible unless consumers can make informed decisions.
   The idea that consumers will push companies to build safer cars and put less poison into baby formula assumes that consumers know what’s going into those products. The idea that we don’t need environmental regulations because the free market will encourage educated consumers to only buy from companies that use ecologically practices assumes that consumers know how products are built and what that means for the environment.

   With all of the inner workings hidden behind a big curtain, a lot of industries are impervious to market pressure. Others are dangerously slow to react even when the market is all Seriously. Stop putting poison into baby formula. We think it’s just that wacky China and their morally inferior business practices, but all they have is the kind of unregulated market that we had just a few decades ago. It’s totally what we would have now if consumers hadn’t gone to the federal government and demanded oversight and creation of The National Department of Not Putting Poison Into Stuff For Babies. Now we’re so used to our safe life with no poison in stuff that we find the news that companies would DO such a thing totally shocking. But they would totally do such a thing here, if they could get away with it.

   So the truth is that for all their talk, companies do not want a free market. A true free market would not mean that companies are free to do whatever they want without the pesky burden of stupid government intervention. The free in free market means — or at least is SHOULD mean — that people are free to spend their money where they choose. Under this definition, a free market would mean that companies would have to give consumers 100% of the information they need to make a decision, right down to the name and email addresses of the individuals who assembled this infant car seat or box of cereal. I want to know exactly what ingredients went into this thing I’m buying, and how exactly you made it, and what impact that has on the area’s water and air quality. I want to know exactly how you tested it for safety and what you’ll do if it proves unsafe. I want to be able to email the assembly worker and make sure that she’s working in decent, humane conditions for a living wage.

   Different consumers will have different priorities when making a purchase. Some people won’t buy from you if you make cuts in order to compete on price. Some people will. Hey, that’s the free market. In exchange for this kind of total transparency, companies would pay no taxes and be subjected to zero government regulations. Deal?

   But then my brain goes: But wait. What about intellectual property, patent rights, trade secrets? How would companies stop competitors from stealing their great ideas if they have to be totally transparent about how they do things? You’d want to put something in place to help protect and — shit. If you put federal laws protecting trade secrets, that’s not a pure free market anymore.

   Then I loop back around a few more times and come to the conclusion that the libertarian ideal of a pure free market is perfect except for being impossible.

3. There are certain things that aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure to be handled privately, but are critical to maintaining our way of life.
   Things like national security and healthcare and oh, I don’t know, saving people who are trapped in a major city that is under water.

   As a libertarian I didn’t understand what all the healthcare fuss was about. I became a full-time freelancer and still could not believe people wanted health insurance in the hands of the federal government. Then 18 months later, COBRA ran out. We bought our own and learned exactly how impossible it is to buy insurance as an individual. Insurance companies aren’t sensitive enough to market pressure because consumers aren’t the real customer. But also, because if they truly gave the consumer what they want – affordable, excellent healthcare coverage even for people who are very expensive to cover – insurance companies wouldn’t make a whole lot of money. And if they operated under total transparency, pretty soon healthy people would notice that they were paying for sick people and would cancel their insurance and the whole system would go under and we’d all be fucked.

   A year after Kevin had to shut down his business to go work in a dangerous and shitty chemical plant so our family could have health insurance, there was a pretty big hurricane down in New Orleans. Right after that another big hurricane hit Texas. Lots of people died while the world watched.

   Watching these events on CNN, where news anchors cried openly as they tried to convey the situation, I felt a new kind of outrage. This – THIS – is what we have a government for. Oh I know, it was actually not Bush’s job; it was the mayor’s fault, the state’s fault, but whatever. We have a federal government to goddamned keep people from dying if something goes terribly wrong in that chain. And if that’s not the way it works because that’s not how our federal government is set up to work, then I want that changed. I WANT the federal government to work that goddamned way. We’re a civilized, first world country. This is the very best place to live, we like to think. That’s not the way the world leader in human rights ought to treat its own citizens.

So where does that leave me, politically? Well, take a libertarian. Once you subtract a total stubborn hatred of all things legislative, and you add in a strong feeling that the government should play a role in protecting its citizens, you’re left with a social liberal who is skeptical of government but wants key areas of involvement and SHIT. That’s a Democrat.

I tried to fit all of that onto an Obama bumper sticker, but it didn’t work.