"Going To Do Something"

When my oldest graduated with her bachelor's degree, we were excited and proud. For one thing, she'd worked hard to get there. For another, my husband, myself, and all four of her grandparents do not have college degrees. All of my children have some kind of secondary diploma or certificate, which makes me happy.

Usually, when we'd tell people she was graduating, the comments were predictable - "How exciting!" "What's her degree in?" "What are her plans?" But one comment just landed a bit wrong. One friend of ours did not actually seem very excited, and said, in an almost scolding tone, "She is going to do something with that degree, isn't she?"

"Of course she is," I replied brightly, ignoring the implied criticism. "She's going to be educated."

This elicited a sigh. "You know what I'm saying, right?" they asked.

"Yes, I do. You know what I'm saying, right?" I asked with a bit more edge in my voice.

They appeared genuinely puzzled. "No."

Oh, for goodness sake.

I didn't try to explain how many things that I found wrong with their query, starting with the fact that good news should be met with congratulations (especially if you're then going to nit pick or gripe). Then there's the fact, as I previously mentioned, that her parents and grandparents do not have degrees. Also, they had chosen to direct this gripe to someone else (me) who has chosen, as their career, to be a stay at home parent.

I was totally clear that my friend was alluding to stay at home parents, despite my being one. I have heard, not just from this friend, but from many people, what a "waste" that is. I experienced frequent verbal bludgeoning, myself, most of it from people who liked or loved me. "But you could do anything!" they'd say, and they were completely unsatisfied by my response of, "I know I could. And I chose." It was annoying and exhausting to deal with people who were sure that no one would choose my life unless they were stupid or trapped.

I've endeavored to teach my children to avoid being job snobs. Sometimes it works. But just recently, I chastized my youngest for saying "Susie Homemaker" in a scathing tone that indicated that the occuption was less desirable than shoveling manure. "You know that I am a 'Susie Homemaker' by choice, right? And besides, do you want me saying (using the same scornful tone of voice) 'people who work retail'?" I asked, since she works in retail. She glared at me, but I'm right about this. Don't denigrate someone else's job. If you do, don't be surprised or angry when they denigrate yours.

Criticism of choosing to be a full time parent (or homemaker without kids) is often leveled at religious people, somehow coupled with the idea that men must have coerced or threatened women into staying home. That may happen occasionally, because humans are infinitely varied. However, most of the stay at home parents that I know are doing it because they really want to be at home. I am also a rarity among us; most stay at home parents that I know not only have degrees, I know a significant number of them with master's degrees. When my kid needed a math tutor, we hired a mom with a master's in math who homeschooled her own kids.

Here's another thing that bothers me when someone tells me what a "waste" it is for bright, educated people to spend their days with children. Do we want only stupid people to spend their time with kids? That's such a bad plan.

Anyway, I knew that was what this person was asking me - "Is she going to spend all that money and time on an education, and then waste it by having kids and staying home?"

At the time, she was headed straight into a job in her chosen field. Her degree is in education, and she wanted a job as a teacher. She worked as a teacher for 10 years, too.

Now, she is not working in her field. (She's not a stay at home parent, either.) I was tremendously proud of her then. I am tremendously proud now. (I would be tremendously proud if she was a stay at home parent.)

Two of my kids are working in their degree field. Two are not. I'm proud of all of them.

I understood why my oldest chose her first career. I also know why she left it. I'm not going to go into all the reasons here. In fact, I'm going to choose just one - money. After 10 years of teaching, she left, and took a job in insurance. Her new job requires only a high school diploma, and she walked into a starting wage that was higher than her wages after 10 years of teaching. It was also fewer hours - no at home preparation or grading time, no parent conferences, no finding and prepping a sub if you're sick. She constantly marveled, "When the work day is over, I just walk away, and I'm done until the next work day!" Her weekends were totally work free.

She's now been there for a few years, and her last bonus almost equalled her annual income for her last year in teaching.

So, even if this was the only consideration - and it's not - I think everyone is totally clear on why she'd choose this job, and not one in her degree field.

In my opinion (and I'm right about this, too), education provides you with two things - knowledge, and choices. She still has all of her knowledge, and all of the experience she gained in areas like time management, setting and achieving goals, "people skills" (how to deal with various kinds of people), and learning how to sift unreliable sources from reliable ones. She has choices, as she can now take many jobs that other people can't. There are many jobs, for instances, that would suit me, but I can't even apply, much less be hired, because of my degree status.

So, Friend, and any other critics, the fact that she is now not working in her degree field does not bother me, or her employer, or her husband or the rest of her family, in the slightest. She is still "doing something with that degree."

As she would be, in my opinion, if she did become a stay at home parent.

Security

"Children need to feel that their parents are all powerful, especially in their early years," says a child development expert whose work I admire. I agree with him, really; I agree on most things he says. I just know that we did not achieve this with our first born.

We did all of the things that are supposed to make a child feel secure. We picked her up when she cried. Frankly, we picked her up when she didn't cry, because crying was rare. She rarely even cried to be fed; I had to watch the clock and say, "Feeding time!" or she'd only eat two or three times in 24 hours, even as a brand new newborn. We talked to her, sang to her, read books to her. I was a stay at home parent, so she was never without me. She was a quiet, easy child, so we took her out on our dates - to restaurants, to the movies. We wore her in a backpack when we couldn't carry her. As soon as she could do things like dress herself and speak, we let her make decisions - what to wear, what to order off the menu at a restaurant.

Everyone assumed she was happy, because she was quiet and self contained, and she probably was. She colored, she sang, she "danced" (she considered walking in a circle while music played to be dancing). 

Even when she wasn't happy, she didn't demonstrate it by fussing. When her little sister was born, and she was 13 months old, I was in the hospital for almost a week. She didn't cry, and she loved the new baby, but she broke out in a head to toe rash.

As nearly as I can tell, she never thought that we were all powerful or all knowing, though. She didn't think that she was - that was our second born - but she didn't think that we, or any adult, was, either.

I mean, it's not as if either of us drank, or traveled for work, or that she ended up pouring herself bowls of cereal because I neglected to prepare dinner. We were there, we were attentive, our home and neighborhood were safe, we had extended family and friends and church members who were there for all of us.

And yet...

When she was 8 months old, we took a road trip to see my sister and her family. The route that is the most fun takes us down the California coast, with stops in San Francisco, Monterey, San Simeon, or other beach spots before heading to Orange County. That's the route we took for that trip. We have photos of her in the backpack on Daddy's back at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and on the beach in Ventura.

We didn't take a trip the next year, when we had a newborn and a toddler, but we did go the year after, when the kids were 2 and 3. Again, we went over the mountains from home, and took 2 or 3 days getting to Auntie's house, stopping at fun places along the way, and talking about how Ariel lived in the ocean.

We'd talked about how we'd see Auntie Lynne and her kids, and stay in their house, but knew that she'd have no memory of having visited before. Still, when we got there, both kids were having fun - who doesn't love the beach, aquariums, and cousins to play with? Plus, we went to Disneyland; it was a great trip.

The night before we left, I told the girls to start gathering their things, because we'd have to pack it all for the ride back home. I let them know that we had one more day at Auntie's, and then we'd drive home. It's about 7 hours in average traffic to get back home, so we wanted to do it in one day, which meant an early start.

"We're not going home," my three year old announced confidently.

"Not today, " I said. "But tomorrow, we are. That's why I want to start packing today."

"No! We're not going home!" she insisted. "You don't know how to find it!"

We reassurred her that, yes, we did know. "Just like we knew what roads to drive on to get to Aunt Lynne's, we know what roads to drive on to get home." We told her that we had done this many times, and that she had actually done it before, but she was a baby, so she wouldn't remember. She looked at us as if we were crazy.

The next day, she got more and more irritated every time we mentioned going home. Her attitude said that she could not believe that we were persisting with this foolishness, insisting that we could do something that was so obviously impossible.

We explained again that we had driven the roads before, and remembered. Then, we brought out our big California map book. (Remember the days of paper maps? I love paper maps.) We told her that these were drawings of where we were, and where we'd go. We showed her that the blue was the ocean, the green was land, and the lines were roads. "Even if we forget, these maps will show us which roads to drive on." 

Still, she insisted, "We can't go home! You can't find it!"

I started to wonder if she understood that we were deliberately visiting family. Did she think that we'd just gotten lost, knocked on a random door, and had strangers take us in?

Of course, we insisted that everything be packed, and we got in the car and drove away. Our second born fell asleep in the car, even on short rides, so she was fine, but our oldest made indistict elephant noises - "EEEEE-eeeee-EEEEEE-eeeeee" - for hours on end. HOURS at a time; I don't know how her throat didn't get sore.

About halfway home, I said to my husband, "The next town we go through, find a park so the kids can run and play, because we all need out of this car." We have cute photos that he took of a smiling me pushing smiling kids on the swings. It looks blissful. It was, in fact, a break necessary in order for all of us to avoid metaphorically exploding.

When we pulled up at home, she was absolutely astonished. "You FOUND it! You FOUND it! How did you find it?"

So we told her, again, about how we knew what roads to drive on because we'd done it before, just like we knew how to drive to her grandparents' houses, about 30 minutes away. We reminded her, again, that if we got confused or lost, we had the map book. She looked confused. "But, how did you find it?" It felt as if we would have had more credibility if we told her that we read it in our tea leaves.

A few days later, I was talking about her astonishment with my brother. "Aren't we supposed to have another ten years or so before she decides that we're brain dead? This just seems way too early for teenage dismissiveness."

He laughed. "Well, she knows that she can't do it, so she figures that you can't, either."

I'm certain that he was correct about this. That's exactly what she was thinking. I just could not - still cannot - figure out how she came to that conclusion after watching us, every day, do things that she could not. We could read, we could drive, we knew how to operate the TV remote and the phone (that hung on the wall, and only made phone calls) and the oven. She knew these things; she watched us, daily, do things that she could not.

So, despite my belief that the psychologist is right - children benefit from a "my dad could beat up Superman!" mentality - I am obviously unclear on how we could have instilled that kind of belief.

The Mouths of Babes

One of my dad's favorite stories from my childhood was not my favorite - not because it was embarrassing, but, well, because he got it wrong.

When I was 8, we took an epic road trip, including camping at Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. I loved pretty much everything about that trip - the places, the animals we saw, using the brand new camera that my brother gave me, the keychains that my mom let me buy in gift shops.

One day, we drove by the carcass of a roadkill coyote alongside the highway. "Oh, that's poor old Wile E." my dad said, referring to the Warner Brothers cartoon character.

"No, it's not!" I said, outraged. I was eight years old, after all, and I could not believe that my dad thought that I was too little to realize that a cartoon character was fictional. Did he really think that I couldn't tell the difference between a cartoon that walked on two legs and mail ordered ridiculous weapons and a real live, very familiar animal? Our dog was half coyote! As the youngest child, I was very sensitive to any reference to me being "too young" to understand something. I tried very hard to keep up with the big kids.

My dad misunderstood my outrage. "Oh, no, you're right. I'll bet Wile E. is too smart to get hit. He's just fine," my dad said, fairly bubbling with mirth. He went on to talk to my mom, as if I wasn't right there in the back seat, about how adorable it was that I worried about Wile E. being safe.

Even at 8 (and younger), I knew that it was useless to correct him. He wouldn't believe me, for one thing, and he'd be offended at being challenged. So I rolled my eyes and let him chuckle.

It was just my luck that he was so tickled by this story that he told it over and over. Great, I thought. Now his friends and my relatives think that I'm a baby, with no grasp on reality. Fantastic. Prepare to be patronized. (I hated being patronized.) I did mention how it annoyed me to my mother, but she confirmed, "It's best to just let him enjoy the story, accurate or not." He died when I was 22, still telling the story. He loved that story, thought it was so cute. I never did try to set the record straight.

So, as a child, I knew that misunderstanding isn't always on one side, parent or child.

As a parent, I sometimes wondered what people were thinking when my kids said something that sounded ridiculous, but I knew was true. Sometimes, people would argue, even if the kids got it right. For instance, when my kids would say, "Santa doesn't come to our house," people assumed that we didn't celebrate Christmas, or that we'd had a severe financial hardship, or that my kids didn't think they'd been "good enough" to get any presents. What they actually meant was that Santa brought their presents to the family party, usually at my aunt's house.

Another time my kid got it right, but it sounded loopy, was after a theater company picnic. To celebrate the end of the summer season, the company always had a family picnic at a nearby lake. It's about an hour's drive away, but most of that hour is straight up into the Sierras.

One year, on the way to the picnic, we came across our friend's Volkswagen stopped on the side of the highway with its engine compartment open. We stopped and talked to Kahele, the bug's owner, and she said that the car was acting like it was out of gas, but it had half a tank.

"I'll bet it's vapor locking," my husband said, describing what happens when part of the engine is so hot that the gas evaporates before it can be utilized. The car was weighted down with passengers and several large, full ice chests. The combination of the climb and the load left the car struggling. My husband took the largest chest out and put it in our van, then scooped handfuls of ice onto the engine. "Try it now," he said.

The bug roared to life, and we followed it the rest of the way to the lake. It had no more problems.

A couple of weeks later, we went to a pool party for the same theater company. My sister's kids were visiting, so they got to come along. As we pulled up and parked behind the Volkswagen, my kindergartner announced to her cousins, "That's Kahele's ladybug. It had too much weight in it, and Daddy fixed it with an ice cube."

Well, pretty close! It still sounded like gibberish, but aside from the amount of ice, it was pretty spot on.

My son got lots of extra sympathy as an injured toddler, due to his linguistics. He rolled out of his toddler bed and broke his collarbone, at an age when he described everything that happened in the past as being "yesterday." Wearing his little sling with pictures of Snoopy on it, whenever anyone asked when he hurt himself, he'd say, "Yesterday," and they'd say, "OOOOHHH!" and fuss over him.

Of course, every person remembers and processes things differently, but occasionally, the way my child(ren) remembered something rendered the event unrecognizable.

When my sister got married for the second time, my 8 and 9 year old daughters hoped that they'd get to be flower girls. They were disappointed that even the bride's own daughters weren't getting to be in the wedding party, because they weren't having any attendants.

My sister and her fiance wanted a small wedding, and decided, after months of weighing options, to do a quick ceremony with a justice of the peace, and dinner at a hotel on the coast to celebrate. No invitations, no new clothes, no fuss. We all got phone calls - "I know you won't be able to make it, but we're getting married on Wednesday." As in, the coming Wednesday; as in, less than a week.

If we were to drive straight there (as our other sister did), it would take seven and a half hours. My husband was working 12 hour shifts, 3 am to 3 pm; he couldn't take time off on short notice unless it was an emergency. If we were to drive, it would mean three days - a drive day, the wedding day, a drive day home - and we didn't want to take the girls out of school for that long. Flying on short notice was expensive, but if only I went, it was doable. My eight month old could fly for free if he sat on my lap. So, my mother and I decided to fly; she rarely took any time off from work, but a single day off to see her daughter get married was worth it.

Since I was a stay at home parent, I'd have to figure out child care for the older children. If I could have flown straight there, it would be about 90 minutes each way, but the airport near my sister is a small, rural airport, and there were no direct flights from home. We'd have to fly for an hour plus to a large airport, have a layover, then fly for another hour plus to the small airport, which was still about 30 minutes from my sister's house, where we'd meet before driving to the courthouse. The flight I found that would get me (and my mother and son) there on time left at 6 am; we'd have to be at the airport by 5. With my husband at work at 3, that left my kids alone, which was unacceptable. I couldn't imagine asking someone to get to my house by 4 so that I could leave at 4:30.

My inlaws lived nearby, so I asked my mother in law if she could take the girls overnight, then get them to school in the morning. She had a spare room with twin beds, and was about 15 minutes away from their school. She agreed to take the girls, asking us to get them to her house by dinner time, so that by bedtime they'd be ready to settle in. Since they got out of school at the same time my husband left work 15 miles away, instead of having them walk home to an empty house, she'd pick them up from school, and my husband would come and get them from her house. "It's probably be easier if they just all have dinner here again, instead of Danny having to go home and throw something together on short notice," she said. After getting home, he'd then stay up past his own bedtime in order to tuck them in at their normal bedtime. We thanked her profusely for making the trip possible, and bought tickets.

It was a long day for us - up at 4, at the airport by 5, and we didn't arrive back home until almost midnight. Still, my mother and I got to be with my sister on her wedding day, I got to take photos, and my children were safe while I was gone.

A couple of weeks later, I was saying something about how stressful it was that the photo processor temporarily lost my sister's wedding photos - this was the days of film, and if the film was lost, they were gone forever. My daughter exclaimed, "You never told us that Aunt Lynne got married!"

"Of course I did. Remember wanting to be a flower girl?"

"No, you told us she was going to get married! You never said it already happened!"

"You knew when it happened. That was why you guys spent the night at Grandma Donna's - so I could go to the wedding."

"You WENT?"

"Yes. You knew that. That's why you stayed overnight at Grandma Donna's."

"We've never stayed overnight at Grandma Donna's!"

What? It had only been two weeks - how could she have forgotten? I assumed that her sister would set her straight. But one of the things that amazes and puzzles me to this day was the ability of these girls who bickered constantly to also think in lock step. One was convinced of her own infallibility, and one was anxiety ridden, so it was a fairly common thing for the force of one personality to overwhelm the other, but I'd never seen it to this extent before. Her sister took up the complaint - "You never told us! We never stayed at Grandma Donna's!"

That's weird, I thought, but I waited it out, knowing that one of them should eventually recall the event, if only to one-up her sister. We - the baby and I - had been gone for two nights worth of dinners and bedtimes. Grandma Donna had dropped them off AND picked them up from school. It just seemed impossible that they'd forget almost two entire days, even if they'd forgotten WHY I was gone.

Instead, as time went on, they embellished their tale of woe. They started telling people that I had dropped them at school, driven to the airport, flown to the wedding, attended the wedding - and, somehow, also dinner - but flown back in time to pick them up from school as if I'd never gone anywhere. They were convinced that I'd then tried to keep this a secret, and that they'd only found out by accident. Both of them were deeply convinced of this exact scenario. "And she won't even admit that it happened!"

At first, it was merely irritating, but then I started to panic. I know that people often repress traumatic memories - had something deeply horrible occurred at their grandparents' house, so terrible that neither girl wanted to remember it? And how could I ask my inlaws without being accusatory and offending them? I freaked out a little bit.

My husband brought it up in a roundabout way with his mother. "The girls don't even remember staying overnight at your house." She laughed, assured him that children's memories are notoriously unreliable, and remembered that they'd had a great time with her.

I still worried a bit, but I had to chalk it up to my kids just preferring the more dramatic story, and feeding off of each other.

I think they were teens when I finally insisted that they stop telling their version of this story. "It looked silly when you were little, but it looks sillier now." Not only could their dad, both of their grandmothers (who didn't agree on much), their grandfather, and both of my my sisters and their families confirm my version of events, and I had ticket stubs with times on them, the mere math was impossible. The time we spent in the air was close to three hours. The layover was an hour and a half. Add that to the hour, each way, that we had to be at the airports before the flights, and we were already at 6 1/2 hours, and their school day was 6 hours long. The flights alone were impossible to do in the length of a school day, to say nothing of drive time, wedding time and dinner time.

The kids were both incredibly puzzled by this fact, when I laid out the timeline, again. (When they were younger, they were sure that I was just misrepresenting how long things took.) "I was sure that (me being gone during school hours only) was how it happened." "I don't remember it that way." And each sister's absolute certainty had been bolstered by their sibling's absolute certainty.

"I know you don't. But that's how it happened." Sometimes, I think that they never did really realize that they'd gotten it wrong; they just stopped complaining about it around their parents.

I think of moments like this sometimes when I'm online reading. I was recently reading an online discussion/argument among friends of mine and flat Earth proponents. One of the flat Earth arguments was, "Why do astronauts' accounts of what it's like to be in space differ from each other? Why do they describe the sky using different adjectives?" Are they kidding?

Think about any event - that Thanksgiving when Uncle Joe passed out in the potatoes, the birth of your children, or even last year's garden or last night's dinner. Do the people who were there describe it the same way? Do they always even remember it? How many times does the average person say, "That's not how it happened"?

In actuality, everyone having identical stories is usually a sign that they've all rehearsed what to say.

Really, considering differing opinions or accounts to be the sign of a huge conspiracy is just outrageous.

"But people who say (X) are so sincere and convinced! And they should know!" people say to me. I'm sure they are. And yet, they could be wrong.

I never confused a live coyote with a cartoon one.

Staying At Home

Maybe it's because my youngest child just graduated from high school; maybe not. I've had several conversations lately about how people view, and speak to, stay at home parents, young parents, and especially, heaven forbid, young stay at home parents. It's often not pretty.

I got married at 20, had babies at 20 and 21, and was a stay at home mom. To make matters, in many people's eyes, worse, we lived in small, rural communities for close to 10 years.

Many sincere, well intentioned people had feelings that fell on a scale from puzzled to horrified. It was - it is - a struggle for me to understand why.

I mean, they had reasons, they told me their reasons, but I couldn't quite make out what those reasons had to do with me, personally.

Sometimes, those reasons were phrased as concern for my mental and emotional state. "Wouldn't you feel better about yourself if you were bringing in money?" No. I'd still have the exact same IQ, abilities, knowledge, skills, and talents, no matter what I did with my days. I'm really unclear on why people expected the way I felt about myself to depend on factors outside of myself. I was certainly aware that some people thought that anyone who married young, had children immediately, and dropped out of college to be a stay at home parent couldn't possibly have two brain cells to rub together; I just didn't care. It's not as if that opinion actually lowered my IQ.

Sometimes, the wording was slightly different: the clumsily worded, "Wouldn't you feel better about yourself if you were contributing to the household?" Those people got a chilly, "I am contributing."

My responses usually led to an earnest attempt on their part to explain the query that just, from my perspective, dug the hole deeper. Insisting that the way others viewed me mattered more than what went on in my own household was an impossible task, because I will never believe that. Insisting that I "could be doing so much more" led me to point out, "Different does not mean better." If I'd decided to be a doctor, I wouldn't be a practicing lawyer. If I was a teacher, I wouldn't be an accountant. Choosing what you do with your time always means eliminating other possibilities. That's a good thing, not a bad one.

What really made me angry was people who kept pushing, getting into the idea that some jobs are "better" than others, and this makes the people who do them more valuable to society. That just smacks of Third Reich thinking. The Reich started out with policies against criminals, prostitutes (even though prostitution was legal), and Gypsies. Then they moved on to the mentally and physically handicapped. "These people don't contribute to society, but they use up our resources." After a significant portion of the population believed that some people were just lesser beings, the Third Reich had less trouble both expanding the groups considered undesirable and getting people to condone the killing of the country's own citizens. After all, those people weren't as valuable as other people. Any attempt to convince me that a person's worth lies in their employment skill set or employment status will fall flat.

Sometimes, those reasons were a reflection of how they felt about their own lives. "I just feel like my brain cells are atrophying." I never felt that way. I did sometimes crave adult company, but that's because children make no sense. They're irrational little beings, with little in the way of logic.

For instance, one of my daughters had a thing about wrapping up every bump or bruise in blankets and towels. She'd watched some show or movie where someone tore strips of gauze to tie around a wound, and became convinced that wrapping in fabric was the way to treat any injury. She further theorized that keeping a wound warm meant that it wouldn't hurt. I explained, over and over, that fabric strips were bandages, or held bandages in place, when you didn't have store bought, pre made bandages, but she refused to believe me. It was about wrapping to keep warm, she was sure. She'd insist on wrapping an entire blanket or bath towel around her hand, or wherever else she's been scraped or bumped. She'd often howl about how, "It hurts! It hurts!" until the wrapping was done, then tell you how, "Oh, now it doesn't hurt. I feel so much better." Then she'd walk around with a ridiculously mummified hand, until she had to unwrap it to, say, eat, then howl again about how being without the blanket "hurts!" Sometimes, she'd want 2 or 3 blankets wound around it at once, because more is apparently better. This went on for years. Irrational, and resistant to new information; that's the definition of childhood thinking. Sometimes I just needed to speak to people who made sense.

Maybe that's why it was so frustrating when other adults didn't make sense. And, why it was so frustrating when they wanted to critique my life and choices.

When my oldest children were young, I did a lot of work with a university theater company - it was my comfort zone - and that meant spending time around people who were close to my age, but thought that my life was unimaginable, and/or that I was doing things all wrong. Sometimes, they'd snark at me.

I lived 45 minutes away from the theater, (across two county lines) in a small farming community. (Yeah - you can see already that I'd be winning friends on a university campus, right?) Rehearsals or shows often ran until 11. That had me getting into bed no earlier than midnight. Even before I had kids, midnight was LATE to me. I never watched a live episode of "Saturday Night Live." I never saw "The Tonight Show" live until I had nursing babies who were hungry at that hour.

One night, some of us were talking, and somebody groused about how hard it would be to get up for work in the morning. (Her day went work, then school, then the show.) Several of us who had school or work in the morning chimed in. I said, "Tell me about it!" Most days, I dragged through the morning, anticipating nap time after lunch.

One of the young men in the group looked shocked. "What are you talking about? You don't work!" he said.

If you have a Handy Dandy List of Things Never to Say to a Parent (and if you don't, consider it!), put this comment on it.

"I have kids!" I said. Kids don't care how tired you are, how much sleep you got, how you feel, what you have going on.

"It's not like you have responsibilities!" he said. Seeing my face, he scrambled. "You don't have, like, obligations to meet or a schedule to keep." (That Handy Dandy List? Yeah - you know what to do.)

There are certain sentiments that one might find on a bumper sticker or T-shirt to which I wholeheartedly subscribe. One is, "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig." Explaining life to this guy was looking like the equivalent of trying to teach the pig to sing - an exercise in futility. But, I simply cannot let certain kinds of ignorance stand.

"What happens if you have a bad day at work?" I asked.

"What?"

"What happens if you have a bad day at work? Do you get written up, maybe get a demotion, get docked pay?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"If I have a bad day at work, people die." Most of the 20-somethings worked retail (the most talented guy in the group at the time was a grocery store bagger). To think that a retail job was more responsibility than taking care of human lives was an astonishing and inaccurate judgement.

He looked shocked. "Isn't that being a little overdramatic? I mean, it's pretty much babysitting."

(Pig! Singing! Handy Dandy List!)

"Why do parents hire babysitters?"

"Because they want to go out to dinner or whatever."

"Yes, but why do they need a sitter? Why don't they just leave the kids alone?"

He stared at me.

"Because a babysitter's entire job is to keep the children alive. If they are left alone, they may not survive it."

I did not point out (pig! singing!) that a parent's job is indeed NOT babysitting. Sitters might, occasionally, be asked to serve a meal or give baths, but their entire purpose is indeed to keep the children alive. Happy is good, fed is good, amused is good, but alive is a must. Plus, their job has a start time and an end time. Parents are constantly (even when the kids are with a sitter) responsible for the children's health, nutrition, character, cleanliness, manners, education, chores, and relationships. They are legally, financially (and occasionally, morally) responsible if the kids break any laws. It makes me just crazy to hear a man refer to staying with his own kids as "babysitting." Nope, Pop - you are a parent. You can babysit other people's kids, but not your own.

"Have you done much babysitting?" I wanted to know - because it seemed pretty obvious that he'd spent very little time around children.

"Some."

I thought, uncharitably, that he might have spent an afternoon or two plunking kids down in front of the TV, so they don't "bother" him.

"Well, you might want to do some more. Overnight, or maybe even for a whole weekend. Then tell me how easy it is. Then think about the fact that I do that every day."

It still astonishes me when people who are not parents think they know what it's like. I don't care if you've worked day care for 20 years, you have no idea what it's like to be a parent unless you are a parent. And yet, non-parents are so often just sure that they know as much, or more, about it than parents do.

A couple of years later, someone again voiced one of those opinions that was so egregious in its inaccuracy that I had to speak up. In fact, I fairly ripped the guy's head off, verbally.

Again, we were in rehearsal for a show. It was early in the process, and there was some "getting to know you" stuff going on. Someone asked, "So, what do you do?"

"I stay home with my kids."

As usual, there was some surprise, and some tepid smiles. One man, probably mid-20s, said, very jovially, "Oh, gosh, great hours on your job!" Seriously? Parenting is a lot of things, but the hours are not great.

"No, not really," I said. "I don't work 8 hour shifts, or even 12 hour shifts - I work 24 hour shifts. I don't leave my job at the end of the day, and go home to relax - my job is at home. I get no days off - no weekends, no holidays, no sick days, no vacations. If I want to take a vacation, my job goes with me. If I ever want to leave my job, for even 15 minutes, I have to find someone willing and competent to do it, and I, personally, have to pay them, even though I, myself, do not get paid."

He looked stricken. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to offend you."

"It's not about me being offended. It's about accuracy."

I don't care how people feel about my religion, my job, my family, politics, world news - I do care that their opinion is based on facts.

The poor guy, to his credit, tried, from then on, very hard to be very nice to me, so I didn't feel shunned. I tried hard not to make him feel judged; but man, I hoped he'd never make that mistake again. (Handy Dandy List!)

I hoped that my children, having been raised in my household, would not make those same mistakes in talking to others. That hope was, apparently, in vain. One of my kids in particular has informed me repeatedly that I "never worked." She also has often said, "You got to take naps!" as evidence of how "easy" my days were.

Sure, parents get naps - if their children are sleeping, or are old enough to avoid death or injury if they're left relatively unsupervised for short periods of time. Our culture considers it perfectly normal, acceptable (and even beneficial) for people to go out drinking alcohol "to unwind" after a day's work. I absolutely will not feel bad about sleeping, in my own house, with my kids at school or in the next room.

I never really expected my kids to fully understand adult concepts while they were kids, but I certainly expect other adults, including those to whom I gave birth, to have a better handle on things.

A couple of years ago, my daughter was again telling me that I had no perspective, and I'd had an easy life, because "You never worked!"

"I was a full time parent. When I was your age, the age you are right this minute, I had a first grader and a second grader. I also had two extras (my niece and nephew were living with us), and I was pregnant. Do you want that job? Do you want to wake up tomorrow morning and do that job, instead of going to work?"

"No." (This is the child who still says that parenting looks like "no fun.")

"Then don't ever tell me that I didn't work." Honestly, it's more aggravating to have my child say this than to hear a stranger say it, because I know what my kids have been told. "And if you're going to measure everything by money earned, I had a second job. When I worked it, I made $100 an hour - and that's a discount rate for the industry." For my entire adult life - actually, starting when I was a teen - I've been a self employed photographer, shooting mostly weddings. Back in the days of film, my husband and I charged by the roll of film shot. When we went digital, we took the average number of rolls we'd shoot in an hour, and used that for the hourly rate. That price has gone up since I was in my 20s, and I'm still less expensive than the industry standard. And you know what - none of that equals my worth.

You know what? The more that I think about it, everybody needs The Handy Dandy List. In fact, we need two - The Handy Dandy List of Things Never to Say to a Parent, and The Handy Dandy List of Things Never to Say to a Stay at Home Parent. I just watched somebody (who thought they were being funny, I'll bet) snark at my nephew online the other day, because he's a stay at home dad. I grew up with my dad staying home, and my mom going to work. I knew it was age related - Dad was retired, and not very Mr. Mom - but I also knew it was a perfectly reasonable way to live.

Go ahead! Get out your phone, or your notepad, or whatever you need, and make lists! If you get stumped, I'll volunteer to help.

Tired

I'm the youngest child in my family. When it came time for me to drive, my mother took me driving once, and that was it. My dad once let me sit on his lap and steer when I was too young to drive. The rest of my driving training came from a friend of my mother's, a 25 year old ex-police officer. "We've already done this three times. I'm old. I'm tired," my mother said. I laughed, and I understood.

I now understand on an entirely new level. I am old. I am tired.

When I got married young, had children immediately, and decided to be a stay at home parent, so many of the people I knew were distressed, to one degree or another. Quite a few tried to talk me out of it. One of the reasons they gave made no sense to me (OK, quite a few made no sense to me). "You'll be so miserable when your kids are grown and gone if you've spent your whole like defining yourself by being their mother!"

"What? I AM their mother. I will always BE their mother."

"Yes, but you need to have an identity outside of that."

"I do."

This is the point at which they'd usually start to sigh, and think that I was a little thick headed. "But you won't, if all you do is stay home and tend children!"

I usually cut them - and I'm using the plural noun because I had these conversations on more than one occasion, with different people - slack for being well intentioned, which I think they were. They wanted me to be happy. Many of them were also about my age, early 20s, and on fire with desire to conquer and change the world, and be recognized as important, and it made no sense to them that I stepped off of the merry-go-round. They thought I should be "making a difference," and I thought that I already was.

To my mind, the line of thought that my kids would be my "only identity" made no sense because I was already a good many things before I became a wife and mother. I was a photographer, writer, actor, theater technician, crafter, reader, traveler, member of a religion and of an extended family. I would continue to be those things while my kids were young, and after they had grown. I could not understand the worry that adding a new title would erase the old ones.

It also made no sense when someone explained this mindset by saying, "Well, most people define themselves by their employment." Why in the world would anyone do that? My dad retired when I was 6 months old. For my entire life, he was not employed, and certainly didn't define himself by employment status. My mother was brilliant, excellent at her job, and indispensable to her employer, and she didn't define herself by her employment. "I don't understand people who think that they are their jobs," she said. And besides, why in the world would I make my life choices based on how other people felt about their lives?

So, the worries of others notwithstanding, I chose to be a full time parent.

When our children were a bit older, we had children, family members, who needed a temporary place to stay without their parents, live with us on three long term occasions, and many weekends and school holidays. The social worker in charge of overseeing one of those placements said to us, when the kids moved out, "We need to get you licensed and get some other foster kids in here!" (The process was less involved for us, since the kids were relatives.) We have a 6 bedroom house; even with all of our kids in their own rooms, we had room.

We felt strongly about helping kids in need - at one time, we took classes to prepare us to adopt from foster care - but we turned her down. We just weren't sure we could handle going through the process with kids we hadn't known all their lives, and might never see again. I felt guilty about that - I know how big the need for foster families is - but I chose my own mental health. "Maybe when our youngest is grown, we'll take on some foster kids," we said. Sometimes we added, "But maybe by then we'll be old and tired."

I have now spent over 30 years, 3 decades, being primarily a stay at home mom. Sure, I still did things that mattered to me - hello, live theater - and I worked, on occasion - mostly for myself - but day in, day out, my primary job was Mom. Here's some of what I learned.

I would do it again. I do not regret it. I never felt that my effort was "wasted" or wished that I'd chosen the Impressive Career route.

I now understand, a little bit, why my friends panicked back in the day - why some panic now. I've watched parents who were full time caregivers be lost when there's no one to care for. Some jump into being caregivers for other people's children. Some founder. Some get depressed and say, "No one needs me any more."

Of course, some do what one lifelong friend does. She now spends almost as much time on vacation, usually cruise ships, as she spends at home. She points out that if I'd stopped at 2 kids, I could have been "free" years ago. She spends no time pining for the days of classroom parties and Easter egg hunts.

People are starting to ask me, "What will you do when (your youngest) is out of school?" They offer things - "Do you want to teach a couple of co-op classes?"

Um, respectfully, no - I am looking forward to not being at co-op. Mind you, I LOVE our homeschool co-op. It's been delightful for me and my kids. I've taught academics, art, speech and more, to older kids, to younger kids. My children loved it. But I want to sleep until noon on co-op day, if I feel like it, then spend the rest of the day in my silent family room with a book. I do not want to plan, explain, organize, grade, set up, clean up.

When I had children, I had a really easy time adjusting to the idea that all the time, money and attention went to my children, and not me. It did not make sense when people lamented what a HUGE shift that would be, and wondered if I was ready, or told me that they weren't ready. I think it would be much harder if I had spent years focused on myself, and then had to change gears. I became a parent so young that it's "always" been this way. For an entire year once, I owned only one dress, a $20, 100% polyester dress. I wore it to church every week, to weddings, to funerals, to a family christening, to parties. My daughters, on the other hand, had a closet full of dresses. That's the way things should be, I think.

And now, I am looking forward to keeping my own schedule, choosing my own activities, impulse buying a cute new top. I'm looking forward to having nowhere to go, and no obligations. I want to head out the door with a pb&j sandwich and my camera, and see what needs photographed. I want to sleep in, to nap, to stay up late or to rehearse for a show without worrying that I'll be miserable or neglecting somebody. I want to sit and read, undisturbed in silence. I want to look up nostalgic TV or documentaries on Netflix, without waiting until someone else's bedtime.

I not only did not lose who I was before kids, I've added some labels, like Rotarian and travel agent.

And if people define me as a waste of their conversational efforts, because I'm "just a mom" when "everybody else managed to be a good parent and have a career"? I will ignore them. I will not waste their time or mine trying to change minds.

And unfortunately, yes, I feel too old and tired to take on foster kids. Yes, I feel guilty about that. But having the exact same conversations for literally years is exhausting. I can't take it on again.

I never, ever imagined, for instance, that I would be dealing with children who got out of bed in the middle of the night or early hours of the morning to sneak downstairs and watch TV. Not forbidden shows, often Disney channel, just at 4 am. I not only never imagined that I'd have a child who expressed their displeasure at us by dropping their pants and peeing on the floor, I certainly never imagined that it would continue for years, until said child's age was measured in double digits. (I never imagined, either, spending those years explaining that urine was NOT "water," nor did it "disappear.")

I mean, I expected to have to explain things - I just did not expect to explain them every day for literally years, only to be ignored.

Sometimes, the English language itself made this difficult, like when we spent two years, years, fighting the battle of heating and cooling; trust me, it's not what you're thinking.

We didn't have air conditioning in our cars until the older kids were hitting puberty. One day, when my child was about 6, we were making a familiar 45 minute drive, and a voice from the back seat said, "Can you turn on the heater? It's hot back here."

I explained, "The heater blows hot air. It will make it hotter."

My annoyed offspring announced, "NO, the heater blows warm air, and I want to be warm, not hot!"

"The heater will make it hotter," I repeated. "To make it cooler, we'd need air conditioning, and we don't have it."

Outrage: "I don't want to be cool! I want to be warm! Can you please turn on the heater? It will make it warm."

We spent at least 30 of the 45 minute drive engaged in this discussion. I thought I had explained it to death, and that would be the end of it. No. the next day, and the next, and the next, the SAME conversation took place. "I want to be warm! The heater will make it warm!" I had the children - the other child had now picked up this line of thinking, and parrotted it - hold their hands in front of the heater vents, to feel what came out, at various settings. I explained heaters, furnaces, all manner of non-open flame heating, but to no avail.

Then, one day, a new request. "Can I at least have a blanket, to keep the heat off?"

I clarified this request - it was not a request for window covering, or otherwise building a shade. My hot child wanted to bundle up. "Wrapping up in a blanket is what you do when you're cold. Right now, it will make you hotter."

"It will not! It will keep the sun and the heat off me."

I reminded my children of all the times they'd bundled up when cold, but to no avail.

For days, this continued. Finally, I thought, I am not giving the kids the chance to learn from their choices. I'm a big believer in natural consequences and learning by doing. OK, I thought, let's give them their way, so they can see how it turns out.

I did worry, especially when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw their flushed, sweaty faces above the blankets they had pulled up to their necks and tucked in around them, that I was being an accessory to heatstroke.

After a drive that had us all miserable, I asked, "Do you see now why blankets are a bad idea when you're hot?"

The answer? "You gave us a blanket that was too thin. It lets the heat through. If you'd give us a thicker blanket, it would work."

"No! If I gave you a thicker blanket, your brain would start to cook! No more blankets! Unless it's COLD!"

We continued to have these ridiculous conversations on an almost daily basis. One day, I sat in astonishment in the front seat, and wondered what planet I was on, as my child yelled in outrage from the back of the car, "I can't believe it's this hot back here and you won't even give us a blanket!"

Then, finally, the weather cooled, and the arguing stopped. Ah, I thought, we've moved on. Nope.

We had an evaporative cooler instead of an air conditioner. It was a bit too big for our house, which made it fantastic during the summer. One day that winter, my child said, "It's cold in here. Can we turn on the cooler?" And it all started again.

"No. We run the cooler in the summer, when it's hot. Now it would make us colder."

"No. It would make us cool, and cool is better than cold."

And thus went the winter.

The next summer, when "it's hot, turn on the heater" started again, I said, "We have discussed this over and over. I never want to have this conversation again." But guess what conversation I had all summer that year, too, and what conversation I had all that winter?

I demonstrated mixing hot and cold water for their baths. I pointed out that the furnace was on all winter, and the cooler was on all summer. We discussed and discussed - and my children could not believe that I was so dim that I didn't "get it."

I am just too tired to spend two years having these kinds of conversations again. I. Am. Tired.

Of course, it's not just when the kids are small that you have conversations that you never thought you'd have. Sometimes my kids seemed incapable of simply saying, "OK;" like when I said to a teen with their driving permit, "You went through that corner pretty fast. Slow down through the corners."

The response was, "I don't think I need to."

"I think that you do. Slow down."

"I don't think so. I think I'm fine."

"I didn't ask what you thought. I asked you to slow down. Who's been driving since before you were born, and has a perfect driving record, and who's been driving for a grand total of about 5 hours?"

"I just don't think I need to slow down. I think I'm doing fine."

"Well, I am the driving instructor, the parent, and the owner of the car. You will slow down going through the corners."

"But I don't think I need to!"

I. Am. Tired.

Then there are the conversations that I knew I'd have, but I thought that there was an expiration date. Telling a teenager who's old enough to be holding a job to use toilet paper and to brush their teeth seems ridiculous, but I've spent far too much time doing so. How tough is personal hygiene, really? I mean, toilet paper? Seriously?

When I felt compelled to point out to a teen who worked in a food serving capacity, "Customers will not want you to serve them if you have body odor or bad breath. You don't want them to complain to you or your boss," I was unprepared for the response to be, "You are ruining my self esteem!" Really, Child? You know what will really do a number on your self esteem? Complaints from customers or reprimands from your boss! I sugar coated this message as much as I could - they will not.

When a high school senior repeatedly complained that they "don't have time" to hang up their wet towels instead of leaving them in a heap on the floor (directly under the towel bar!), I demonstrated, by counting "one one thousand, two one thousand," that it took literally two seconds for them to pick it up, fold it, and drop it over the towel bar. And yet, the insistence of, "I don't have time! Why can't you do it?" continued. Finally, after realizing that I'd been fighting this battle since the children were old enough to bathe alone, I said, "Fine. Next year, when you're off at college, and your roommate says, 'Didn't your mother teach you how to pick up after yourself?' you'll have to look them straight in the eye and say, 'Yes, she did, but I ignored her.'"

My child looked stunned. "Because they will say it, I guarantee it," I said. "You think your roommates are going to want to pick up after you? They'll be far less patient about it than I am!" This possibility had not occurred to my honor student.

I. Am. Tired.

Of course, it's not just the conversations with the kids; it's the conversations with the other parents. "Connect with other parents," the experts say. "You'll feel less alone." Nice try, experts. In actual fact, talking to other parents can be extremely alienating.

Take the hygiene issues: When my kids were young and I'd have these conversations, people would say, "Oh, just wait until s/he hits puberty. S/he'll become obsessed with cleanliness." HA! I mean, no offense, Advice Givers, but HA! And it's not just one child. I have a teen who spent an entire week at camp in the same swimsuit, never changing or bathing. (Child's take: "I was so clean! I went in the lake every day!") I've had to almost forcibly remove favorite but dirty clothes, not from my little kids but from adolescents who were sure that wearing dirty "cool" clothes was better than wearing clean "uncool" clothes. I had one child with, unfortunately, very naturally stinky feet who rebelled at the thought of washing their smelly sneakers. ("You want me to wash my shoes?")

And I've gotten (too much) advice on the subject, too. Some people tell me that, once they hit the teens, the child(ren) should to be left to their own devices, to be as smelly and dirty as they want, because the reaction from their peers will squash any ideas of doing it again. Some people tell me that I should do whatever it takes, including forcibly bathing and/or restraining the child, and preventing them from leaving the house unless they're sparkling clean and great smelling, because otherwise I'm an uncaring parent who will cause their child(ren) to be ostracized. Some people tell me that children would only behave this way if no one has taught them proper hygiene. And I want to scream.

You name the subject, and the advice pretty much mirrors this. I've spent too much time hearing, "All you have to do is..." when I have, and, "Have you explained...?" Until I'm blue in the face, thanks - and I'm articulate.

I. Am. Tired.

Even when discussions with other parents go well, it can be hard. I was once speaking to the mother of one of my then-17 year old's best friends. She said something about chores, and I said, "Yes, well, (my child) is convinced that all of the jobs in our house and yard belong to me, and the only reason I have anyone else do any of them is because I'm lazy and mean."

She looked shocked. "No, she doesn't."

"Yes, she really does."

"No! She's 17! She knows how a family works!"

"No. She really doesn't." Not for lack of our explaining it to her - she was just convinced that we were wrong.

The other mom was starting to give me a look that said she was wondering why I would say such outrageous things. So, I said, "Do me a favor - ask her. Ask her when I'm not around, so you know she's not directing the answer at me. And ask her when she's in a good mood, because when she's in a bad mood, she'll agree that I'm responsible for WWII."

Then we changed the subject, and I didn't think much more about it. I know that I have no control over the behaviors or opinions of others, so I don't tend to dwell on them.

A couple of weeks later, this mom pulled me aside. "Remember that conversation about chores? She actually does think that. I had no idea." Yeah - I know.

The kids are bright, capable, talented, articulate. I would give my life for any of them. And yet, all children are irrational.

I. Am. Tired.

So, here I am, not regretting having kids, or staying home with them, or taking on extras now and then. I do not feel lost or diminished or like I have "no identity" or purpose. I'm excited to be able to have "me time." And, I'm so tired that I just can't imagine taking it all on again. Not physically tired, but a deep, philosophical fatigue. I just can't handle the thought of having the same discussions again, over and over and over. Or having new, ridiculous, repetitive discussions. And this makes me, with my empty bedrooms, feel guilty.

One of my religion's books of scripture cautions that, "It is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength." I think that taking on more children might be running faster than I have strength. But I still feel guilty.

"I am old. I am tired."

In Case You Were Wondering

One of the many ways in which I wish I was like Mary Poppins is her take on explaining herself: "Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I never explain anything."

But, I frequently spend a great deal of time, energy and effort explaining myself, because it's important to me that people understand me. If they understand me, we'll live a harmonious existence, and everyone will be happier, right?

Yes, I actually do hang on to that hope. No comments about futility, please.

Anyway...

Apparently, there are people wondering if I've changed my mind about certain things, because, the theory goes, they didn't "really" affect me before.

You see, I belong - by choice, I feel impressed to add - to a religion that teaches that marriage is intended to be between a man and a woman, and my daughter married a woman.

For instance, someone recently said to me, "Have you come to terms with your daughter yet?" I have no idea what that inquiry means.

Do they mean, am I aware that my daughter does not follow the religion in which we raised her? Of course. When her age was still in single digits, she started arguing with us about church teachings because "nobody else does things that way." Once, when she insisted that "nobody else has household rules like that" (the subject was chores, something she detested) and I immediately rattled off the names of half a dozen families, she wailed, "Why are you talking about people at church?" I responded, "Why aren't you? When you use words like 'nobody' or 'everybody,' you'd better not know of any exceptions. Those words mean 'not even one person, worldwide.'" As a teen, she started saying things like, "Mormons do it all wrong." She stopped attending church at 18, and has never been quiet about her disagreements with doctrine or practices.

Do they mean, have I processed the fact that my daughter's in a relationship with a woman? Years ago. The first time I met my now daughter-in-law, she and my daughter were wearing matching rings. Even in the early years of the relationship, which dates back to when my now-28 year old was in college, my daughter's photos on my computer (her open Shutterfly account) contained an image of them kissing. Even early in the relationship, there were Internet searches of wedding venues. We didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes.

Do they mean, how do I treat my daughter's wife? The same way I always have, the same way I treat any person. From the time we met, we included her in family outings and family meals. Before we even met her, we bought travel souvenirs for her when we were on vacation. At Christmas, when we bought glasses with his favorite NFL team logo for my son-in-law, we bought her glasses with her favorite NFL team logo. We've included her name and photo in our Christmas card.

Do they mean, am I prepared for public scrutiny or questions? Always. How will people know anything if they don't ask? Plus, I'm generally a TMI person, not a privacy obsessed one. Virtually everything on my social media, for instance, is set on "public," so everyone knows what I'm saying about anyone and anything. I have never, ever asked my daughter or her wife to hide, to lie, to make themselves scarce, to not bring up their relationship around certain people. If people are obnoxious, well, that's a good sign that I need to keep those people, not my daughter, at arm's length.

Do they mean, am I aware that my daughter has unfavorable things to say about my religion? See above; yes, since her childhood.

Do they mean, am I prepared for this to be my reality? Of course. Anyone who believes that other people and their actions are, or should be, under the control of anyone but themselves is delusional or power hungry.

Do they mean, have I changed my mind and left, or doubted, my religion? That mindset - and yes, I have come across it - has always been so annoying. Do people usually change their minds, especially their deeply held beliefs, because someone else doesn't agree? Should they? I'm not easily swayed. Besides, it's outright offensive when someone says to me, "How can you belong to your religion, knowing that its beliefs cause your daughter pain?" but they are aghast and horrified if the question is reversed - "How can my daughter hold her beliefs, knowing that they cause her parents pain?" Take any answer you would give to one of us about free will and determining our own destiny, and apply it to the opposite question, as well, because the answers are the same.

Do they mean, do I agree with my religion? Yes, I do. Any official doctrine of my church is something that I embrace. Sometimes that has come quickly and easily (sometimes, before I even attended my church), and sometimes it's taken years of study and prayer. It's also offensive to me when someone sees me treat someone, anyone, outside of my religion with love and friendship, and then says, "So, you obviously don't believe (insert doctrine here) that the Mormons teach." (Yes, this has actually happened to me.) They are almost universally puzzled when I say, "Yes, I do. That's why my treatment of people doesn't depend on me agreeing with them. That's what my church teaches, that we are all children of God." I have no idea why people equate "children of God, who should be loved and cared for" with "agrees with and acts like me." I assure you, that is not what LDS members are taught.

As a subset of that, do they mean, do I think that this is the life that my daughter was destined to live? No, I do not. I do not believe in the "soul mates" concept that there is only one perfect partner for you. Anyone who's had a spouse die, or gone through a breakup thinking, "I will never love anyone that way again" knows that you will meet someone that you can love again (and that love is every bit as "real" as the love that you previously had). I think it is also possible to be deeply, truly in love, and have the relationship be one that should not be pursued. We know that, even if we don't enjoy the actions, or they don't come easily, we still need to practice good nutrition, exercise, hold a job (at home or somewhere else), be polite, be helpful, treat everyone fairly, clean our homes, do our laundry, refrain from violence, and a host of other behaviors. So, it makes no sense to me to say, "Unless you act on your sexual feelings, you're not being true to yourself, and you're doomed to failure." I don't think that "normal" necessarily equates to "desirable." I think that the fact that it biologically takes a man and a woman to perpetuate the species indicates that the ideal environment for raising them will contain a father and a mother.

A friend works for the local crisis hotline, and once went to her social media to ask, "What should I say to callers like this?" A caller said he was afraid to tell his parents that he was gay, because they thought homosexuality was wrong. My response was: I would say, "You think your parents are wrong. You think their views are hateful, divisive, inaccurate and hurtful. Yet, YOU LOVE THEM, and you WANT THEM IN YOUR LIFE, ALWAYS. That's undoubtedly EXACTLY how they feel about YOU."

So, I'm sitting there, having been asked if I've "come to terms," and having no earthly idea what that actually means. So I went with the only fact that matters, and said, "I love my daughter."

"I know that's what you say, but what about the Sharon in private?" Um - what? Did you just actually imply to my face that I do not love my daughter, AND that I'm two faced?

"She's the same person," I said. Remember the old computer term, WYSIWYG, which meant What You See Is What You Get? That's me. I do not have the energy to be different things to different people, and to try to remember how I'm "supposed" to act around them. My kids (and this daughter in particular) used to hate it when they'd tell some story that they were sure would embarrass me (on the theory that I'd bribe them to get them to shut up), only to discover that people already knew the story. Or, if they didn't, I was likely to say, "That's not the worst part!" and share more. I don't believe in tying myself in knots trying to make sure that others don't hear unflattering tales.

"I said Sharon."

"I know. And I'm telling you, the public and private Sharon look the same."

"Oh, I know you say that. But I know you."

Obviously not too well! This is someone who spent almost two decades in a relationship that they would not acknowledge in public, and they know very personal and often embarrassing things about me, and I'm the one accused of hiding? Seriously? I've told scores of people things that were none of their business, just because I overshare.

"You keep things inside." Do I make every effort to be civil, even when I'm angry, to be courteous, even when I don't like people, and make every effort to refrain from gossip? Yes; that's not being deceitful, that's being mature.

So, here I am, typing, trying to explain myself again, with no idea if that's possible, or even a good idea.

Let's try this. Here's a photo from my daughter's wedding:

That's my husband, me, our 4 kids, and my new daughter-in-law.

Here's one of all of the wedding guests:

Almost all of those people are members of my family. (The number inches closer to 100% if you count Mickey, and many of us would.) Since going on a cruise is expensive, the couple knew that the numbers would be small, but for a small ceremony, that's a lot of people. Now think about the fact that some people are there because they think my daughter is doing the right thing, and some are there just because they love my daughter.

The couple had a beautiful day that made them happy, and they shared it with loved ones.

Here's one from my oldest daughter's wedding:

That building we're in front of is the Salt Lake Temple. The woman in the wheelchair is my mom. She is not LDS, and she did not think that it was important to be married in an LDS temple. She is there, far from her home and in no small amount of physical discomfort, knowing that she cannot set foot inside the building, and that she will not see the wedding ceremony. She is there, in a borrowed wheelchair, because she loves my daughter.

The couple had a beautiful day that made them happy, and they shared it with loved ones.

This was taken at my grandniece's naming ceremony, at the synagogue my niece attends.

Only 3 people in this photo are Jewish, the parents and the new infant. The rest of them traveled a great distance, and are at the synagogue not to worship, but because they love my niece. (And, just as an aside, my niece is also in a same sex relationship.)

The couple had a beautiful day that made them happy, and they shared it with loved ones.

In sharing this I by no means am saying, "We are so amazing!" In fact, quite the contrary. My family and I are extremely ordinary. There are no rich, famous, or powerful people. We are flawed. We can be petty, bad tempered, forgetful, lazy, annoying, hurtful. We have money issue and health issues. We squabble and bicker. There are no Superhumans here.

Other people are doing the family thing better than I am. You're a good parent and your house is clean? Hats off to you. You work full time and coach your kid's team? I get exhausted just thinking about it.

We are so, so ordinary. Ordinary is good enough.

Any time someone wants to pat my daughter on the back for being willing to love such clueless parents, or to pat us on the back for loving such a difficult child, they need to stop. The idea that the main purpose of human interaction is achieving agreement is prejudicial and oppressive. I am amazed that so many people subscribe to it. It amazes and puzzles me any time someone feels that in order to truly love someone, or in order to even get along with civility, you have to agree, at least on the big stuff - religion, politics, etc.

Things that others said to my daughter undoubtedly contributed to the ridiculously long time it took for her to have The Conversation with us. Every time the subject of same sex relationships came up, we assured her that the horror stories you hear about people behaving badly in the face of such differences are a small fraction of the population. Most people handle them quite well, but those aren't the stories you hear repeated over and over again. Nobody calls up their friends and says, "Did you hear about Sally's parents? They behaved perfectly reasonably." Nobody re-shares "... and life went on as usual" stories on their social media. But many people perpetuate the idea that people will only treat you well if they agree with you. The positive stories that do get reblogged are the ones that say, "... and because we all agreed that Jimmy was right, everything was fine."

People say things like, "Religious parents are going to be the ones who behave badly," and, "Mormon parents are going to be a problem." Sometimes they say things like, "They'll come around eventually," indicating again the idea that everyone will need to agree for things to be fine, and that eventually, of course, everyone will agree. When I've asked people why this is, I get answers like, "Well, you hear all these stories..." or, "I had Mormon neighbors once, and they..." When someone says something like, "I had a Mormon uncle, and he...," I want to point out that I don't consider, for instance, my devout Catholic niece to be the final word in Catholic doctrine, or the poster child for her religion, or indicative of how all Catholics will (or should) behave. When I say things like, "I know a lot of Mormons who behave differently than that," I'm told that it's irrelevant, but those same people will insist that the people that they know or have heard about are hard evidence. Or, someone wants to get into a game of numbers - "I have more examples than you do!" (This is often despite the fact that they have never met as many LDS members as someone who regularly attends LDS meetings has.)

We never cautioned our younger children against spending time with, or listening to, their sister, either. We didn't view her as contagious in any way.

Someone once told me that the mere fact of my church membership indicated bigotry. Aside from the fact that that belief is the dictionary definition of prejudice, I was letting my children sit on the lap of my gay best friend with AIDS before my accuser was even born. I was still hugging him when the disease was advanced, and that was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when people still said things like, "We don't know if the virus can spread through casual contact." Do not try to talk to me about bigotry if you have no idea what my life looks like, or if you think that a single piece of information is all that you need to know! (I get almost as upset at people who say, "Well, you can't blame her for thinking that. Most Mormons..." Again, that's prejudice, and again, you don't know most Mormons, even in your own community, much less worldwide.)

People told my son stuff like this, too, when he decided to leave our church, and not serve a mission. "Oh, your parents are going to just freak out!" It's almost understandable coming from people who've never met us, but even then it's annoying. Plus, we aren't the freak out type. Neither my parents-in-law nor my parents freaked out when we joined the church, either; the odds that we'd lose our minds over a child leaving were very small. (Plus, we'd already had one child leave the church; surely that's a pretty good indicator of how we'd act.)

"It's different when it's your own child," people said, dismissing the way we'd treated anyone else, gay or otherwise. You know how it's different? The parent/child relationship is permanent. Marriages are dissolved, friendships fade, but children are always yours. My child could never speak to me again, and I'd still be her mother. I could die tomorrow, my husband could re-marry, and I'd still be her mother. The parent/child relationship is the only biological relationship that you choose. You can't choose any of your other biological relatives, but any woman who has given birth has chosen, daily, for months on end, to bring a child into the world. That's how it's different.

(As an aside, I can speak to the mindset of giving birth, because it's what I did, but adoptive parents spend more time preparing, and they have to go find their children. They are equally determined; perhaps more so.)

So, for better or worse, I'm putting us out there, pointing at my family and saying, "People can disagree on fundamental things, and still love and support each other." "Support" does not mean "agree with."

In case you were wondering.

Now, when people say, "Well, I know this one Mormon family..." you can say, "I do, too." Plus, if we aren't impressive enough, I can point you in the direction of some really impressive people.

"What Would You Do If...?"

One of my children has spent a lifetime in experimenting with her ideas of parental affection, and how and why it's bestowed. "Will you still love me if I do this? Will you still love me if I do that? Will you still love me if I'm different from my siblings?"

I knew from reading extensively that this was very normal, and I didn't take it - don't take it - personally. It didn't resonate with me emotionally, though, because I could never recall feeling that way myself. My parents' feelings were a constant, like the mountains. I don't think I felt particularly capable of affecting their affection, one way or another. I didn't either luxuriate in it or long for it.

One of the problems this child and I have in understanding each other is that she's a figurative speaker and thinker, who chooses her words for the effect she thinks they'll have instead of for their accuracy. I am a literal thinker, who chooses my words for accuracy, and understates when in doubt.

This means that she frequently looks for hidden meanings when there aren't any. She also tends to think that I'm being sarcastic when I'm not. When given any household chore as a child, she was likely to ask, "Why do I have to?" The answer was always, "Because you live here." She was sure that this was me being a smart mouth, even after complaining to other adults in her life and being told, "That's honestly why you have to."

(Sometimes, though, she took me at my word. In her early teens she wanted to know, "What would you do if I dyed my hair blue?" I responded, "Nothing. It's hair. It'll grow back." She never did dye it blue; it wasn't as much fun if her parents wouldn't be scandalized.)

She was also convinced, deep in her heart of hearts, that if other people disagreed with us, especially if they were people she liked, or a number of people that she considered to be significant, we were legally and morally obligated to change our minds and our rules. At 13, she was sincerely convinced that if we didn't send her to summer camp, we'd go to jail. ("Don't all kids think that?" she asked as an adult. Um - no, Child, they don't.)

"So-and-so thinks your rule is stupid!" we heard repeatedly. I'd usually reply with something like, "Well, I make the rules in my house," which she thought was both a cop out and "stupid." At 12, after I'd pulled rank and said, "I'm the parent. I get to decide," she said, "So you get to do things just because you're the mom? I thought we were all equal here!" My reply of, "Then you thought wrong" infuriated her.

If she kept at it, I'd say, "So, if they get to make the rules for my family, I get to make the rules for their family, right?"

"NO!"

"Why not? That seems fair."

"Because your rules are STUPID and theirs aren't!"

"All my friends think you're so mean!" she snapped at me, after I'd said no to something.

"Good. That means I'm doing my job right." Like most parents, I would die for my kids, but that doesn't mean I should cave to their every whim. The kids would think I was a fantastic parent if I threw out every rule and let them do whatever they wanted, but that wouldn't be good for them, or create healthy, functioning adults.

After my daughter huffed away, another mother pulled me aside to assure me that she spent time with my daughter's friends, "and none of them think you're mean. They all really like you." It was sweet of her, but she needn't have bothered. I do what I think is right; I don't try to win the approval of children. (Or adults, for that matter.)

Throughout her childhood, we heard a constant litany of, "What would you do if...?" More than once, she asked, "What would you do if I was sent to prison?" The answer was always, "Visit you on visiting day."

She must not have believed me, because she was still asking into her mid-20s - "What would you do if I was in prison?" One day, after getting the usual answer, "Visit you on visiting day," she said, "What if it was for a really terrible crime?"

"Visit you on visiting day."

"What if it was for a really awful, messy, premeditated murder?"

"Visit you on visiting day."

"Really?"

"Are you planning on murdering someone?"

"No. But would you really?"

"If you've done something stupid or violent, I expect you to face the consequences. I'm not going to lie for you. I'm not going to hide you from the police. I'm not going to whisk you away to a country with no extradition. I'm not going to bake a file into a cake and help you escape. But you're still my child, and I will always love you. I will visit you on visiting days, and I will be there on the day that you get out."

She must have finally believed me, because she hasn't asked since. (She has not planned or committed any murders, either.)

I think this is how we treat God sometimes. "Will you still love me if I do this?" "If you're really a loving parent, you'll love me even if I do that." Or, "You can't possibly love me after what I've done." "If you love me, you'll give me what I want. If I don't get it, you must not love me."

Sometimes, I think we sound like small children. Any of us who are parents have faced furious or despondent offspring, just sure that if we love them, we'll let them have candy for breakfast, buy them a pony, abolish bedtimes. They can't believe that we ignore their tears or their feelings or their protests. We're sometimes like that. We're seriously, deeply hurt when things don't go our way. Doesn't God love us? Shouldn't that mean that life is easy and we are always happy, and we get what we want? We recognize that our children don't have our perspective and experience, but we can't imagine that God knows something that we don't.

Or, we go the opposite direction. We decide that God loves other people, but not us. We screwed up. We did stupid, willful, harmful stuff. No one could ever love us after that.

The older I get, the more I see theology as a parent/child relationship. God is the parent. He loves us, more than we will ever know. He always will, no matter what we've done. That does not mean that he should always give us what we want - even if not getting it pains us and makes us sad or angry, and even if other people agree with us and think things should be done our way. He not only knows best, it's his job to do things as HE sees fit, not as we see fit.

Like every parent, he will be disappointed, exasperated, angry. Yet he will be beside us whenever he can, and he will be waiting to help us start over and get it right after we've screwed things up. He will do this even if we hate him or think that he's mean.

Because that's what good parents do.

And if we humans can figure that out, trust me, God knew it long ago, and he's better at it than we could be.

Thank You For Your Support

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya

OK, part of it is the problem of the English language itself, with its ridiculous rules and exceptions to rules. I'll grant you that.

Still. Let's talk about support. The actual word - "support."

We so often use it to mean "agree with." People will insist that "the way to support" someone is to tell them that you think that they're correct, or that they should be doing whatever they're doing. They will tell you that to "support" your family or friends, you need, in essence, to say to them, "You are right. You are absolutely right."

It makes me crazy.

Most of the times that I felt most supported by my parents were the times when we disagreed.

Look on dictionary.com. They supply 19 definitions for "support," and not one contains the words "agree" or "agreement." Number 3, though, says, "to undergo or endure, especially with patience or submission; tolerate." My parents did a lot of that.

I've shared before the fact that I started attending a church at age seven. I went with the neighbors. My parents did not belong to any religion. Both of them, especially my dad, distrusted organized religions as a whole. Plus, this was one outside the mainstream, deemed kind of loopy. Still, when I announced at age eight that I intended to attend every week, that I wanted to be baptized a member, my parents eventually gave permission.

Were they thrilled? No. Not even close. Did they try to talk me out of it? Sure. I rarely share those details, since I consider them irrelevant to the outcome, but it wasn't all sunshine and roses. My family had reservations. My mom worried that being religious would equate to being judgmental. My dad said things like, "They talk about the importance of the family, but I think that this could tear the family apart." When I wanted to attend Sunday services as well as weekday activities, they worried that two meetings a week was too much. My dad also stressed out because Sunday had traditionally been our "pack a picnic and head into the hills" days, and we'd frequently be gone all day long. He was unamused when I countered this worry by asking, "Couldn't we do that on Saturdays?" To me, his answer of, "But we've always done it on Sunday" sounded like a non sequitur. I got to hear everyone's stories about how they "knew this one Mormon man/woman" and how they did something wrong or hurtful or stupid. My dad's family had some long standing beef with the church that went back to his childhood.

How did they handle all this? They let me join, without undue complaining. I could attend meetings weekly, but I had to wait until I was 12 to be baptized; that was OK with me. By that time, they were pretty comfortable that things would go on as usual at home; nobody had grand worries any more. By the time I was a teen, and my mom had to drive me to and from meetings and activities, it was just a normal part of our lives. They attended activities with me when invited. When my teacher suggested a 40 day sugar fast so that we could better understand Jesus' 40 day fast, my mother obsessively read labels and bought special groceries. When I had early morning religion classes in high school, my mother got up with me to make sure I had breakfast. They didn't worry about sending me on youth group trips or sleepovers, even co-ed ones.

Did they still think that my church was odd, my choices were odd, and sometimes hope that I'd decide that I didn't want to attend any more? Sure. Did they say nasty, snarky, passive-aggressive things? Never. Did they gripe to everyone else, outside of my earshot? No. They told people how nice members of my congregation were.

On the other hand, did I secretly throw out their coffee and wine, sigh and look mournful when they drank those things, when they swore, when they stayed home while I went to church? Never. Did I, or anyone else, pressure them to join, remark on how sad it was that I attended alone, tell them that their salvation was at stake? Nope. Not even once. It's called "being mature."

That's certainly not the only time we seriously disagreed. My dad was deeply upset that I had no interest in being an athlete. They were both deeply disappointed when I decided not to go to college after high school. They didn't always like my friends, and were not happy when I chose one of those friends as my roommate when I moved out. (Truth be told, they weren't happy about me moving out, period, and they disliked the girl in question.) (Also, they turned out to be right that living with her was a bad idea.) When I started dating my husband, my mother told me that she never wanted to meet my new boyfriend, and my dad referred to him as "that wild. bearded thing." They were not happy when I got married at 20, when I had a baby that year and another at 21, when we moved hundreds of miles away, when we bought a home in our new town, when I chose to be a stay at home mom... I mean, there are literally dozens of instances in which they would have made very different choices for me if they could.

(Despite the fact that they thought that I was too young, and the fact that my mother hated playing hostess, we held our wedding in my parents' back yard. I felt very supported.)

It should be noted that my extended family and my friends were often equally horrified, or even more distressed than my parents, by any or all of these events. Quite often the collective opinion was that I'd lost my mind, or that I had tragically low self esteem, or that I didn't know that I had alternatives. Also, my inlaws were not fond of me in the slightest. When we were engaged, if I walked into a room, my mother in law walked out.

The fact that my family soon learned to adore my husband (and kids), and that the years bore out the fact that I had not, in fact, ruined my life, is an aside here, instead of the point. The point is that my loved ones continued to love me and continued to treat me and my family the same way they would have if I had done things differently. This does not mean that everyone lived in a state of denial or that nobody voiced concerns, complaints or (my least favorite) advice. It means that the fact that we disagreed was totally secondary to the fact that we loved each other.

That, folks, is what "support" looks like.

I cannot stand it when I read some account or other of someone doing something that could be controversial - leaving medical school to become a jazz musician, or coming out as gay - their loved ones think that they're doing the right thing, and say, "I agree with you 100%! Live your truth! Follow your path! God wants you to do this!" and other people respond, "Now that's the way to support someone!" and "Anyone who tells you that you're wrong is not supporting you!" Listen up, everybody. That's not support. It's agreement. It's expected. It is the very definition, the epitome, of expected. Can you think of any instance in which someone will agree with you, will think that you're doing the right thing, and will say something derogatory or rude? Will they question you and offer alternatives if they think that you're already taking the best course of action? Good gravy, folks, it is the closest thing to a guarantee that if someone agrees with you, they'll say something positive. I repeat, that is agreement, not support.

Displaying expected behavior is not amazing or worthy of praise. It's a given, like the sun rising.

Actual support should be expected behavior, but alas, it is not.

A friend posted a question on their Facebook page about whether or not it was possible to civil and supportive if your family members disagreed on religion. This was my response.

"When I joined my church at almost age 13, my parents and siblings were supportive (if baffled). I do not belong to the same religion as my parents, siblings, parents-in-law, siblings-in-law, or any of my 11 nieces and nephews (or my grandnieces and -nephews, either). (I also do not belong to the same political party as my husband.)

Having grown up in an environment where I was taught that all people have intrinsic value, unrelated to their beliefs or actions, and in which I was both encouraged to be respectful to everyone and to think for myself, I will never be able to understand people who think that everyone has to agree, or they can't truly be close, or love each other. I don't understand people who see differences of opinion as betrayal and rejection.

We recently returned from a naming ceremony for my grandniece, daughter of lesbian, Jewish parents. Someone actually said to my husband, "You would go when you don't agree with them?" Of course! They flew here and celebrated with us, with genuine happiness, when our daughter was married in an LDS temple. They don't agree with us or our religious practices, but it made no difference. That's just what reasonable people do for each other.

Most of my friends are pretty great about differences, too. When I invited a (very non-religious) family to my son's baptism, they didn't say, "We don't believe in that, and we think you're a little weird. It would make us too uncomfortable." They said, "What time do we need to be there, and what is the dress code?" When they invited us to their son's gay pagan handfasting (wedding) ceremony, we said about the same - "When should we get there, and what's the dress code?"

I know people who say they'd love people, regardless, but they'd be very upset if, say, their daughter announced a desire to be a nun. Unless someone is sacrificing children or planning other acts of violence, allowing them to freely practice their beliefs, or unbelief, benefits everyone."

I mean, how is this even a question? How are we not all clear on this?

When you look at my close friends, my lifelong friends, my relatives, people that I truly and sincerely adore, you'll find members of my religion. You'll also find drug addicts, drug traffickers, alcoholics, promiscuous people, transgender people, homosexual people, three pack a day smokers, cross dressers, unwed parents, people with multiple sexual partners/spouses, pagans, Jews, Evangelicals, atheists, Wiccans, people who fit more than one of those categories... all kinds of people whose lives do not mirror my standards. Why is this not a problem for me? Because they are my standards, that I have committed to live. They are not their standards.

And let it also be noted here, because this often gets overlooked, that these people love me, despite the fact that I live a vastly different life than they do.

Three of my children are adults, and the youngest is in high school, so now they sometimes hear details that I may not have shared when they were younger. They know now that one of their deeply loved bonus uncles spent years as a drug addicted, alcoholic, promiscuous manager of strippers. When they were children, I didn't let them in on those details, because they didn't need to know. They arguably don't need to know now, but we never ignored those things, or pretended that they didn't exist. We went the route of, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Sometimes, we said a lot of nothing.

We've always answered questions truthfully, though. When one of my daughters was working on a play that I was in, she asked one night, "Did (our makeup artist) used to be a woman?"

"Yes, he did. His name was (different) then. I knew him as (that person) when we did university theater together years ago."

"I though so. Don't tell him that I could tell."

"He's not touchy about it. He doesn't broadcast it, but he doesn't mind if you ask. Most of us knew him back then. It's not a secret." I don't know if she ever asked him anything - probably not - but it was just another piece of info, like what any of our actors did for a living.

I have never told my children to love someone despite our differences - I simply love that person. There's no need to qualify the feeling or the relationship.

I've never told them to choose only LDS friends, or to avoid certain people, or not to listen to a friend or relative if they have questions or want to explain their own beliefs or practices. When we've been invited to other churches, if our schedule allows we've said "yes." My kids have gone to Vacation Bible School with their friends. I have never displayed dismissive or superior attitudes because someone is different from me. I don't allow my kids to behave that way, either.

Someone once accused me of being "hateful" and "homophobic" because my religion teaches that homosexuality is aberrant behavior and because I believe that same sex unions (and perhaps even opposite gender civil unions) should be "partnerships" instead of "marriages." I felt compelled to point out that my toddlers were sitting on the lap of my gay, HIV+ best friend back in the 1980s, when people were terrified that the virus could be airborne - and, I might add, before my accuser was even born. I have little patience with anyone trying to give me a sensitivity lecture without knowing about my life. Don't assume that because you have one piece of information that you know me.

Do my kids always agree with me? No. As in so many other areas, I follow my mother's lead.

Two of my children have decided to leave my church. Keep in mind, according to my beliefs, this means that they have effectively opted out of the family unit. They may be in heaven, but they won't be my children in eternity. (This is, arguably, harder than my parents had it, since they had no beliefs about an afterlife or the state of one's eternal soul.) Is this painful? Deeply. Does it feel like rejection? Sure. Do I hope that one day, they change their minds? Absolutely. Do I love them less, criticize them more, insist that they move away, withdraw any financial help, tell their siblings to ignore them or plead with them, lie to our family and friends (or ask the children to do so), refuse to spend time with them or to take them on family trips, or engage in any other ridiculous, alienating behavior? No. Do I forbid discussion of religion? No. Do I continue to have weekly family night lessons that are religious in nature? Yes. I do things exactly the same way I always did. My choices are mine. Theirs are their own.

A friend asked not too long ago how I felt about something in my child's life. I replied with a wide smile, "I adore my child."

"Well, that's a very political answer," they said. Yes, it is. It's also the only thing that really matters. How I feel about my kids and their lives is 1. no one else's business, and 2. not going to change anything.

Thank you for your support.