So, have your read the recent New York Times article on toddlers and iPhones? It's shocking and alarming! More and more parents (oh, ok, moms -- only one nameless man is mentioned in the entire article and we are not told how he handles his toddler's request) are giving their badly behaved children iPhones in order to shut them up! It's the 21st century version of plopping them in front of a TV! Only worse! Because it's interactive and kids like it better! It's damaging their developing brains! And deluded parents moms (colluding with evil marketers) pacify themselves by imagining some of this is educational for their children!

So, having kept on top of articles criticizing mothers for not being perfect and blaming them for everything that's wrong in the world the latest in parenting news, let me parse this for you:

• Letting your child ever, for one second of her life, touch an iPhone = bad parenting. You let your child touch an iPhone? Congratulations! You just caused brain damage. Your child will grow up to be a friendless alcoholic who is a drain on society. The collapse of Western civilization is entirely your fault, Mom.
• Having a child who is unable to remain motionless and quiet at all times in public without an iPhone = bad parenting. See above re: friendless alcoholic and it all being your fault.
• Wanting 10 minutes of quiet time, free from your child's demands = bad parenting. You must not really love your child if you are not constantly enraptured by them. Plus you clearly don't know how to set limits. Oh, and you're taking the easy way out. There's so much wrong with you, I don't even know what to say, other than: friendless alcoholic!
• Focusing your constant, developmentally enriching attention on your child for every single waking instant of your damn life, so that your child behaves to everyone's satisfaction without a minute of boredom and without ever touching an iPhone = bad parenting. Actually, the worst parenting. Helicopter parenting! (I wish I had a really spooky font for "helicopter," but that's okay, you can just read it in a spooky voice to yourself.) Your child will not only end up a friendless alcoholic, but he will have been so coddled he will be unable to dress himself, leading to an arrest for indecent exposure. Just you wait!
• "Free-ranging" your child so that they learn to entertain themselves without an iPhone = bad parenting. They will just steal someone else's iPhone while you are irresponsibly shirking your duty to watch them every moment (but the right way, you know, not by being a "helicopter parent"). Still, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that your child will not become a friendless alcoholic. But that's only because she won't live long enough. She will be abducted and murdered by a stranger or will drown in a puddle or will fall and break her neck. And you will deserve it. Don't expect any sympathy. You got what was coming to you, bad Mom. And we are all better off without the worthless criminal your child was sure to become.
• Using your own best judgment about the use of various tools and techniques in moderation = bad parenting. Stop being lazy and making excuses for giving your child brain damage by handing him that iPhone for a 15 minute car ride! There is a right and a wrong way to do things. And anything less than 100% perfectly right all the time will lead to friendless alcoholic, drain on society, end of Western civilization, etc.

So, how can you be a good parent? It seems hopeless. Fortunately, there are two options:

1. Provide your child with wooden toys. (And make sure there's no lead paint on those! Oh, and don't be too uptight about it, because nobody likes a killjoy). Also, provide developmentally appropriate books. (And do start with picture books. After all, you did read that article about how bad parents moms are pushing their kids into chapter books too fast, right?) Nothing with batteries, nothing with screens, no BPA plastic, no potentially toxic anything, no choking or strangulation hazards. But do that all effortlessly, because if you suck all the fun out of childhood, you are also a bad mom.
   
   Next, focus your complete, perfect, developmentally enriching attention on your children for some unknown ideal number of hours each day. Too much or too little and we are right back to friendless alcoholic. If you don't already know that perfect number, I'm not going to tell you; all good parents already know it. If you don't, you were clearly raised by wolves yourself, so there's no point. You're beyond hope, and so is your child. You'll have to skip to Option 2.
   
   Now (and this is the most important part) have a child who behaves perfectly at all times and entertains herself on cue in quiet and educationally appropriate ways whenever your perfect, developmentally enriching attention is not on her, and who voluntarily (but politely and without seeming uptight or brainwashed) refuses offers of other kids' inappropriate toys and effortlessly redirects them into fun, educational, developmentally appropriate play. If that sounds tough, it is. Fortunately, there's an easier way. Which brings me to...
2. Be a man. When fathers hand their kids iPhones, it's cute, because those silly men don't know any better. And besides, he's trying to train Junior to be an engineer! When fathers refuse iPhones and the kids throw a tantrum in public, Dad is being a tough disciplinarian who is raising an upstanding citizen.
   
   Be a man and no one will mention you by name in a New York Times article full of dataless speculation about things that might, maybe, in some unknown quantities be harmful to children (or not, but of course they are, we all know that). No one will criticize your sad inability to breastfeed. No one will picture your fatherly face when they read about a 12-year-old who can't operate an ice tray because his "helicopter parents" (read: mom) spent too much time with him, gave him too much attention or was too helpful. No one will imply that you are heartlessly shirking your duties or that you don't love your child adequately if you drop him off at daycare.
   
   Now, I know what those of you born with vaginas are thinking, "But I can't just become a man!" To which I say, sure you can. Halloween is just around the corner and I bet all those fake beards will be on sale soon. And let's face it, even sex reassignment surgery and a lifetime of testosterone supplements would be a hell of a lot easier than Option 1. Or you could, oh I don't know, use your own best judgment and trust other people to do the same. Oh, right! That would be bad parenting.

A recent NY Times opinion piece on toxins and autism has been making the rounds lately, and well, frankly, the piece bugs the crap out of me, and I can't quite figure out why. After all, it seems like, not just an excellent idea, but a complete no-brainer to want to ensure that that the products we use -- that go into our air and water and foods and bodies -- are safe and non-toxic. And it seems reasonable to be concerned, given the thousands of untested chemicals in use every day, about possible links to our health: from the way they affect our organs and tissues to the way they affect our neurological processes. And it seems reasonable to me to want to investigate what autism is and what causes it. And yet...

Maybe it's the fact that the first few paragraphs contain the words "frighteningly common" and "financial and human cost" and "burden." Words matter. And those words, rather than including my son Austen and others like him in the human family, set him apart, as a burden and a cost that the rest of us have to shoulder.

Maybe it's the focus on autism in particular. If the concern is truly about the effect of toxins on our health, why call out autism rather than talking about either cancers or neurological issues generally (both of which were mentioned almost in passing)? Instead, autism is set apart.  Autism is chosen to be the poster child for neurological issues; autism is the frightening specter from which we all must run; autism is the enemy; autism is the pawn in this political game.

Maybe it's that several paragraphs are spent on what pregnant women ought to be doing and only one sentence is spent on the mention that often, at least in the one quarter of autism cases that are genetic, there is nothing a pregnant woman could be doing differently at all. Maybe it's because I can already hear the same voices -- the ones who told me that the "costs" and "burden" of Austen being autistic were my own doing, because I vaccinated him, because I let him watch TV, because I had him when I was over the age of 30 -- now telling moms this is their fault for using the wrong shampoo or for painting their nails, when that may not be the case at all.  The factors are so complex and difficult to tease out that we simply do not know right now, and may never know.

Maybe it's that all of those things leave me feeling that autism is set apart, that my son and my family are set apart, that we are (and have brought on others) a burden and a problem to be eliminated, rather than being an integral part of a situation we all need to work through together.

I rashly went out Halloween costume shopping a few days ago. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Well, I know I needed to pick up a costume for my daughter — Yes, a few days shy of Halloween. I'm totally on top of it as a mom. — but for some reason I thought maybe I could find something cute for myself. You know, something suitable for a 40-year-old mother of two married to a recovering sex addict. There must be tons of costumes to fit the bill, right? At the very least there had to be a nice Hillary Clinton, complete with businesslike pants suit.

Instead, I prowled through the store grimacing, rolling my eyes and blowing exasperated puffs of breath like some kind of crazy person. I wasn't fussing, like most of the other customers, at the cost of the costumes (although, yeah, ouch! Shouldn't those things be marked down with just moments left to go?) but at the sexuality of nearly all the costumes for women and girls, with the exception of those for infants and toddlers. (Boys and men, I noticed, had a variety of different costumes available. Most of these were neutral in terms of sexual content, while even those with a sexual element (I'm thinking the orange "Department of Erections" jumpsuit with penis prosthetic) comfortably covered their bodies.)

The womens' and girls' costumes were a veritable Fredrick's of Halloween catalog.  There were tens of different variations on the same micro-mini barely covering the buttocks matched with the same plunging, cleavage baring neckline; I could choose to be any number of porn star characters: the cop porn star, the nurse porn star, the super-heroine porn star, this hippie porn star, the movie star porn star... It was like looking at Carvel ice cream cakes back in the day; Fudgie the Whale would look like a whale, while Santa would come out sporting a red cap topped by a suspiciously untraditional two tassels. (Apparently, Tom Carvel didn't get to the top of the ice cream game through extravagant purchases like molds that would be used only once a year.)

Needless to say, all those droopy eyes, pouting lips, fishnet clad legs and ample bosoms can be triggering for sex addicts and their partners alike. I can't dress up like that: not after the way it's been mixed up with feelings of trauma and degradation.  My husband can't look at anything like that: not after the way he's used it as a drug, an escape into fantasy.  I found myself wondering if there was a special Halloween store for Mormons and if they'd let me shop there. (You make the costumes yourselves, don't you? Sigh!)

Hanging out with my kids all day, going to their Halloween parties at school, watching them dress up with their friends, I sometimes forget (even having had experience with it in recovery) what a sexual (sexually objectifying?) holiday Halloween can be for adults. I think that I, married to a sex addict, with all of my complicated issues around sexuality, can just pop into a store and pick up a fun little costume for myself, not have it trigger the shit out of me. And I'd be wrong. Halloween is just too scary. Next year, I'll stick to eating cupcakes and shopping for modest pantsuits on the Internet.

"Worry Brain, your mama's so ugly, she makes onions cry!" I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband.  I had to hang up the phone because I'd burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me.  I'd read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts.  As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn't use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that's probably just my Worry Brain trying to get out of having its mama called ugly.

The company Mark works for is on shaky ground.  There have been layoffs and the people he knows that have been let go have had a hard time finding new jobs.  But I wasn't worried about that.  I was worried because he had a job interview.  For a really good job.  That pays a lot more than what he makes currently.  Working in an industry he's really interested in.  And the interview went well.  Crazy to be worried about that?  The job is (gasp!) in another state.  We'd have to move.  And the thought of that level of change grips me with anxiety.

I started whirring right into a panicked overdrive, "Fine.  I'll just tell him he can go, but I'm staying here with the kids.  I can't believe he'd pick a job over us!  And if we're not there, he'll probably just go on an incredible acting out spree.  He'll pretend he's not married and have sex all over some new town.  But I can't move, can I?  It took a year for Austen to be able to sleep through the night the last time we moved, and we stayed in the same area.  We'd have to find new 12 Step meetings and new doctors and new friends and a whole new set of resources for Austen.  And for crying out loud, we are a mixed race family and I look like a crazy bohemian.  We can't just move anywhere.  People will burn crosses on our lawn and the neighbors will tear the Darwin fish off my car and kill us.  We're safe here.  Everything is familiar here.  Everything is under control here."

That's when I brought out the big guns and called my Worry Brain's mama ugly.  (I mean she had to be ugly.  She was a big slimy brain, right?)  Mark still has a job.  He hasn't lost his job.  He hasn't been offered a new job.  Even if he were offered the job, we'd have time to discuss it and decide what's right for our family.  No need to try to soothe my anxiety by jumping on the computer and spend the next two hours doing Internet research on school districts a thousand miles away (although I was sorely tempted to), not when I can use my prodigious recovery skills to stay in the moment and tell myself ugly mama jokes instead.

Image credit: Photo by kchbrown on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a woman named Paula Saardchit. She told me she'd found my blog while doing research for an article she was writing on sex addiction for her website, and she wanted to write and tell me how moved she was by my story. Of course, I was curious to know more about her site, so I googled her. And I found out that she helps women plan lingerie and sex toy parties. (And I know what kind of party some of you have in mind. No, not that kind! You know, this is like a Tupperware party, only with vibrators.)

When I found out about my husband's sex addiction, one of the first things I did was get out my big, black garbage bags and start dumping in porn, lingerie and sex toys. The sight of them, of anything that made me think of sex or by extension of my husband's sexual acting out, made me want to vomit. So off in a landfill somewhere are all the artifacts of my subconscious attempts to control my husband and keep his sexual attention firmly fixed on constantly exciting, porn star me: the dildos and the vibrators, the bustiers and fishnet stockings and the crotchless panties and the wigs and the costumes, the X-rated board games and the porn DVDs. Yeah, I tried it all. Well, except a stripper pole. That hadn't occurred to me yet. And thank goodness because how would I have carted that out to the trash?

I had been as conventionally sexy and exciting and adventurous and engaged as can be, and my husband loved it. But it wasn't enough. That endless, aching need of his wanted more than I could give. More than all the women in all the lingerie with all the sex toys in the world could give. And still I wanted to give it. Which is how I ended up there, with the black Hefty bag in my hand, sick to my stomach with shame and disgust and rage.

And now, six years later, I was on a lingerie party website, full of pictures of that conventional sexy I dumped in the trash, wondering what kind of sex addiction article Paula intended to write. As I glanced at the site, I saw that there was plenty of the usual "hot" and "titillating" sex selling, but Paula also genuinely seemed to see these parties as a way of empowering women to learn about and appreciate their own bodies. Black and white thinking is common in the lives of addicts and those who live with them, and I've been slowly working toward a place where, after fully indulging in our culture's idea of "sexy" and then fully rejecting it (from lingerie to makeup to shaving my legs), I am exploring more shades of grey. So, just because I can't incorporate lingerie and sex toys into my relationship in a healthy way right now, doesn't mean they are evil in themselves. There are definitely aspects of lingerie and sex toys that I'm deeply uncomfortable with, and even perceive as dangerous to women, but there was enough that was positive about Paula's site that when she asked if she could interview me, I said, "Well, send me your questions and I'll see."

When I saw the questions, I found that not only was I comfortable with answering them all, this would be a good opportunity to reach out to women who may not realize (yet) that their partners are sex addicts. (I mean, what better place to find a sex addict's partner in denial than out buying lingerie?) So, while many women may be using Paula's parties as a healthy expression of their sexuality, I (taking to heart that 12 Step message of reaching out to those still suffering) couldn't pass up the opportunity to plant some seeds among those who might be indulging in sexy, not as an act of empowerment, but as one of desperation and degradation.

Then had to take that last leap of faith that Paula would put it up as I expressed it before I clicked send. (Not that I have trust issues or anything!) And she did. The interview is up, and after having thought long and hard about linking out to such a potentially triggering site, I thought I would share it with you all, especially since many of you don't have sex addiction as part of your lives at all and may find it interesting. There is nothing in the content of my interview that I wouldn't post here, but images and links in the header and sidebar are related to lingerie and sex toys. So, one last time before the link...

Warning: Sex addicts and their partners may find images and language in the linked site triggering!

(If the thought of clicking through raises any concerns about your sobriety or serenity, please feel free to e-mail me for a copy of the information contained in the interview instead.)

And here's the link (isn't it cute that I'm an expert?): Interview with Mary P Jones at Lingerie Party and Adult Toys.

Sarah Palin and I have very different moral, political and spiritual beliefs. We have had very different experiences as women and mothers. I'm sure there are folks who would say that all we have in common is our gender and the fact we each have a special needs child.

After all, before Palin had her son Trig, she was aware that he would be born with Down Syndrome. She kept up a demanding job as governor of the state of Alaska throughout her entire pregnancy and was back to work within days of her son's birth. Now he's four months old and she's running for the second highest office in the nation.

When my son Austen was born, I didn't yet know he was autistic. I didn't even know that he was different; I hadn't spent much time around infants, so I assumed that his high pitched wailing, inability to sleep and need to have his environment just so were typical of all babies and that I had simply been woefully unprepared for parenting. His crying induced a kind of wild panic in me, and the mere thought of leaving him to go back to my job reduced me to tears of sheer terror. I quit my job at the end of my maternity leave, and my husband Mark and I agreed that we'd just have to do whatever it took (which included rapidly decimating our finances and credit rating) to make it happen.

Forget about working, let alone running a vice presidential campaign, between Austen's needs and my undiagnosed post-partum depression, I didn't even leave the house for three months. (Yes, literally, three months.) I had a friend who was out hiking and camping with her one-week-old around this time, and I was completely baffled. I remember hating women like her who were able to get back up and running so fast. What were they doing right that I was doing wrong?

Still, while I secretly envied them their seeming strength, I was the one being applauded by a society that recognized my post-partum depression as brave decision making. People praised me for doing the right thing in forgoing money and career interests in order to say home with my son. And as they did it, they'd quietly tsk-tsk the moms who made the opposite choice, just as I've heard Sarah Palin tsk-tsked. As a friend said to me, "Palin went back to work when her son was just a few days old! If she makes those kinds of bad and irresponsible decisions about her son's wellbeing, what kinds of decisions would she make for the country?"

The problem was, that while I was lauded for my admirable decision to quit my paying job, now that it was my job to care for my son and home, and it rapidly became clear that I wasn't doing it right. All that babies are supposed to do in the beginning is sleep, eat and eliminate the digested remains of their meals, yet my son had a terrible time with two of the three of those. (Yes, he can pee and poop with the best of them, but eating and sleeping? Sigh!) And as time went on he wasn't doing some of the other things he was supposed to on time: things like waving and talking. I was told that I wasn't sleep training him properly, wasn't feeding him properly, wasn't talking to him enough and correctly. And a part of me believed it. It was my fault. I wasn't working hard enough.

I was criticized by many of the people who tore through our lives in those early years: doctors, therapists, teachers, other parents. They told me that -- while I'd certainly made the right choice to stay home -- I needed to work harder and sacrifice still more. I needed to learn educational law, occupational therapy, organizational skills, nutrition, speech therapy, and if I wasn't good at it or didn't enjoy it, I'd better try harder.

An advocate I tried to hire to help me navigate complex educational law and negotiations with the school district lambasted me for not being able to do (or even being interested in) the job I was going to hire her to do. "You have to learn to do this yourself! If you're not good at it, you'd better work to get good at it! Your son needs you to do this!" Then, when my son was having trouble in school last year, the school's solution wasn't to train the teachers properly or hire an aide; it was to have me come in and act as free support.

After all, if I really loved my son, wouldn't I do anything for him? Wouldn't I go to any lengths to give him what he needed? Shouldn't I? Moms are supposed to do anything for their children, and special needs moms? Why, we're supposed to be superstars. We're not supposed to have jobs or other priorities or needs of our own to balance. We're not supposed to admit that there's anything we can't or won't or don't want to do. We are supposed to live, eat and breathe our single minded dedication to our children.

And when I say moms, I do mean moms, not parents. Because you see, Sarah Palin is supposed to do all that too. Yet, other than gender (and that's a big other!), she has more in common with my husband than she does with me; she makes a good salary working long hours in a high demands career, and she has a spouse who, while not a stay-at-home parent, has taken several months off of work and cut back on his own career as the demands of hers have increased. Her son Trig (like my son) has parental care equal to other working families and his family (even more than ours) has financial resources that allow access to quality medical care and therapy.

In his seven years of parenting, Mark has gotten a series of cheerful "good jobs" for doing his satisfactory and expected job as Daddy. No one said Mark should quit his job or even cut back on his hours at work to help at care for Austen. No one criticized him for going back to work exhausted and sleep deprived days after our son's birth. No one said Austen was suffering because Daddy was working long hours and traveling frequently. No one said Daddy should have done a better job with the sleep training or feeding. No one suggested Daddy learn educational law or teach himself to be an occupational therapist when he made a good enough living to pay an expert to help. No one expected Daddy to leave his other responsibilities to come act as a free aide at school. And no one suggested he didn't really care about his son if he didn't do all this.

I love my son. I'd give my life for him. But he is not -- and I think shouldn't be -- my entire life. And I always feel a pang of guilt for that. I feel guilty for having no interest or aptitude at educational law. I feel guilty for not having any interest in or energy for spending each waking minute of my day on his development and improvement. I feel guilty for wanting to (and enjoying doing) work on things that have nothing to do with him.

So now when I hear these whispers around Sarah Palin about what she "should" be doing for her children, especially her special needs child, I get angry. I get throw-a-flaming-dagger-into-the-heart-of-the-next-person-who-brings-it-up angry. Sarah Palin and I share more than "just" our gender and a special needs child. We share the ways in which we are perceived by society. We share the burden of that special needs supermom myth. We share the weight of society's expectation that we should express our love for, and dedication to, our children in a particular way and that it's our job to do it all, not Daddy's.

Whatever you think of her politics or her qualifications, Sarah Palin has become a mirror for ourselves. She's a Rorschach test for the American psyche. And when I tease apart the personal from the political, what I see in that ink blot is another special needs mom who, however different from me, still can't manage to do anything right enough for anyone.

Image credit: Photo by Bethany L. King on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

The day I had my abortion, or maybe the day after, I was lying in bed, resting. I'm an obsessive record keeper, and I know that I could go back and look up what day it actually was, but I'm finding that I don't want to revisit that time so closely just yet. (And I'm smiling to think that I'm not ready "just yet," when just yet has been four years already.)

As I lay in bed, I decided to distract myself by cleaning out my e-mail inbox and catching up on correspondence with friends. I opened my mail to find a message from my friend Jeremiah, an evangelical Christian who was looking to dissect the results of the previous day's 2004 presidential election. Jeremiah forwarded, for discussion, a piece on abortion written by a conservative Christian who believed that so called "values voters" had swung the election in Bush's favor.

Jeremiah knew nothing of what was going on in my personal life, but reached out to me because he liked and respected me and knew I was a committed feminist and progressive who was passionate about the election. Still, coming within hours of both the termination of my pregnancy and the end of a bitterly contested and emotional election, this seemed seemed cruelly ill-timed. My political pain was being laid at the feet of my personal pain and my personal pain was being politicized.

Also on the list of recipients were two other friends: a liberal academic and a libertarian businessman. I felt privileged to be part of this diverse little discussion group of highly intelligent and well-informed people, so in another spectacular example of my inability to take care of myself, I dove right in. I was consumed (as always) by a need to understand why and unable to acknowledge that engaging in an intellectual debate on this topic was not the most brilliant idea for me at that moment.

I felt... It's hard for me to say how I felt even now. I've struggled with writing this post and the tone is always more detached than what I want, because trying to capture that particular mix of thoughts and emotions feels like trying to grab mist with my hands only to watch it slip through my fingers...

What I felt most of all was Other. Separate. Alienated. Alone on one side of the world's balance.

I read the piece Jeremiah had sent me, which posited that the morally questionable nature of the war in Iraq, in fact all questions of morality, paled in comparison with the world's greatest wrong: the taking of an innocent life in abortion. I looked at myself -- one woman, making one decision about one family -- balanced against an entire war and somehow coming out (in one man's view of God's eyes) more weighted down with the chains of evil than any who led us down the road to Abu Ghraib. I saw George W. Bush standing with me before the Catholic God of my youth, on clouds in the cold white sky, waiting to be judged for our crimes. And in the balance against me was one small soul. And in the balance against George W. Bush were the thousands and thousands of souls sent to their death in Iraq. Yet those souls were lighter.

I discussed abortion in the abstract with three (wonderful) men. I was the only woman. The only one who could bear children. The only one who had borne children. The only one who had had an abortion. The only one who could. I watched these intelligent men assume (as is so common, I've noticed) that abortion is something that happens to young, poor, unmarried women who either lack access to birth control or choose not to use it. Married, middle class, well educated, white mothers in their late 30's with good health care and reliable birth control aren't the demographic people are talking about when they talk about abortion. And maybe, I thought, I'm worse: worse than those other women who had better reasons than I did because they have less than I do.

I know I flew off the handle and ranted and cursed at my friends and cried as I typed, but I never told them why. That's me. Passionate on the issues.

And when the discussion died down, I found I still wanted to know why: why my experiences as a woman made me so separate from these three wonderful male friends of mine and why the God of my youth and the people who followed Him thought my sins alone were greater than an entire war.

Image credit: Photo by jamesjordan on Flickr

When my son was born, the decision to quit my job was an easy one. I imagine I would still have left a job I loved very much in order to be there for that vulnerable little baby, who seemed to be telling me so desperately that he needed me, but the fact that I wasn't passionate about my career made things all the easier. In fact, I've never held a job that I wouldn't quit the instant my winning lottery number flashed on screen. I've had jobs I liked: jobs where I worked with interesting people, completed projects I was proud of, used some of my creativity and helped others a bit. But in the end, I've done them all for money, and when they stopped being worth the money, I left.

The thing was, I did have something I was passionate about: the kind of writing I do here. But the chances that I could make a living at it were so slim, that I didn't even bother. My husband and I, my brother and his wife, we all grew up in families with parents who dreamed big of being artists, musicians, TV stars. And we all saw that led to a life of run-ins with the IRS, no electricity, no health insurance and a feast-or-famine life of odd jobs. Be a writer? Write the kinds of things I wanted? Nuh uh. No way. I was taking the safe path: the one with benefits and a regular salary and a cubicle with a picture of my well fed, well insured, well cared for family on the desk.

It's closing in on eight years now since I left my last full time job. And in taking up blogging I've finally gotten a taste of my dream job: the one where I get to write what I want to write, where I can connect with and help other people, where I can think and inspire others to think, where I learn and grow as a person, where I spend plenty of time with my family, where I'm my boss so I only have to do what pleases me, where my office isn't a cubicle but my laptop and the world. This is the job I'd keep doing even if that winning lottery number did flash on the screen.

And my AdSense ads -- those ads that paid me pennies an hour for my writing -- they showed me that I could actually get paid to do what I love. They gave me hope. But when Google pulled my ads a few weeks ago, I found that those ads gave me more than a dollar here and there, more even than hope I could do more one day: they gave me a justification for pouring my time into this room of mine.

You see, we stay-at-home mamas, and especially we mamas of special needs kids, often feel guilty for taking time for ourselves. It feels selfish. In spite of the fact that I'm on call 24/7 and working nearly all the time, I feel guilty doing this for fun, doing it for me. When the kids are at school or asleep shouldn't I still be working? When the kids are (as they are now) playing sweetly together, shouldn't I still be working? Shouldn't I spend every last waking moment, every ounce of available energy, scrubbing the bathtub or planning fun educational events for them or badgering the school district for services or making tonight's nutritious dinner? Am I really allowed to do this? Write, just write, just because I enjoy it? And do that at the expense of that time I should be spending somewhere else? (The laundry is not folding itself as I type right now, people.)

That was the beauty of the ad revenue. It didn't matter that the ad money I made in a month of daily posts wouldn't pay for a tank of gas (especially not at these prices), forget making a dent in paying for the mortgage or groceries. What mattered was that I was bringing in something. That money said "I'm not 'just' a stay-at-home mama. I'm not Mr. Manager's wife. I'm a writer. And my writing makes a contribution to this world. My writing has value to people." I could grab my laptop and instead of saying "I'm going to go goof off now," I could say, "I'm going to go get some work done."

This blog, my friends (and you all know it) is a labor of love. (After all, the ads are gone, people, and I'm still cranking out the good stuff for the denizens of the Internet free of charge.) But somewhere along the line, I learned that labors of love aren't "real" work. They're hobbies. They're fun. They're frivolous. They're selfish. And as a good, responsible mama, I'm not allowed to do that. Or (with a mischievous smile) am I?

The movie was carried by Heath Ledger, whose performance as the Joker was terrifying. On the car ride home (where my husband and I deconstruct the movie) we talked about how comforting we both found routine, predictability and sameness in our lives and how terrifying unpredictability like the Joker's was. While we didn't encounter anyone in our own lives as dangerous and maniacal as the Joker, watching Heath Ledger somehow brought us both back to the powerlessness we felt in our lives as children: how we would try to find structure and rules for the craziness or rage we encountered, so that we could predict and avoid it. We cling to the structures we create to give us the illusion of control and avoid the terror of chaos, the terror of knowing that some people (people -- not machines or monsters or animals -- people) can and will hurt you and you may never understand why.

I also found a parallel in the movie between the pains of early recovery and the battles waged by District Attorney Harvey Dent and Police Commissioner Gordon resembled the pains of early recovery. Things, the movie kept telling you, get worse before they get better. Try to take down the mob bosses (or fight your personal demons or beat back the compulsions that have ruled your life) and those mob bosses (or demons) will fight back. They will not go quietly into that dark night. When you let them rule, there is a kind of peace. When you've found the tools to fight them and made some headway in restoring the rule of law, there is some peace. But in transition, in change, there is fear, violence and desperate struggle.

The thing that annoyed me most (that always annoys me) was the weak female protagonist. The character of Rachel Dawes was (presumably) the Assistant District Attorney of Gotham, but was defined throughout the movie by her relationship to Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne, and was referred to (even on the job, in court and by reporters) as "Harvey Dent's girlfriend." When Mark mused after the movie that he didn't understand her and that her role seemed dull and simplistic, I speculated that (like most female characters, in action movies or otherwise) she wasn't there to be an actual person, but was an object to move the plot forward: something for the men to fight over. Of course, the fact that she wasn't a fully fleshed out or real person made the actions she was supposed to forward nonsensical. (Note to writers: write your female characters as real, multi-faceted people, just like the men, and your work will benefit for it.)

And now I'll leave you with this: Dark Knight may have been a great adrenaline ride and given me lots (from childhood demons to portrayals of women) to think about, but Holy Recovery Nerddom, the Batman I love most will always be Adam West.

I'd feel a wave of aggressive sexuality coming from these women that would make my chest tight with rage. Everything about them screamed sex and seemed to say, "I want every man to desire me, and when a man desires me, nothing will prevent me from trying to get him to act on that, if he is what I want."

In the days immediately following my husband's revelation that he was a sex addict, I pressed him for details with sleepless fury. I wanted to know everything: to break the bond of secrecy he had with these other women, to reclaim my reality, and to try to make sense of what had happened and what was happening. I would make lists of tens questions as they popped into my mind during the day, so that I wouldn't forget a thing, and I would keep him up far into the night answering them, not letting either of us rest until I knew every word, every thought, every name, every touch.

I know this wasn't a unique desire; the first impulse of many wounded and betrayed partners is to want to know everything. And I know that many of them regret it; that knowledge stays with them and the images haunt them. But while it's true that those details did (and sometimes still do) bring a deep, piercing pain, they also did bring me some of that insight I craved and some of my first real moments of empathy: for my husband and the women he was with.

In one of those very early days, my husband was telling me about a sexual encounter. The woman he described was very sexual, very eager and willing to become intimate quickly. And yet, although they had sex, she refused to touch him. As she took shape through his words, I saw her arranging a casual sexual encounter with a married man whose body she wanted and shuddered at, to whom she revealed herself and from whom she wanted to hide. And the realization of her pain went through me like an electric shock. I shook with rage, locked for that one moment in a furious solidarity with the woman whose actions tortured me, as I hissed at my husband, "My God! That woman was sexually abused! How could you not see that? How could you use her like that?"

I started to see, slowly, that she wasn't the only one. The women my husband acted out with were, each in their own way, deeply hurt and damaged. In trying to understand the other side of my husband's story, I read books (because I'm a nerd like that) on female sex addiction. I read the personal stories of women like former porn star Shelley Luben. I got to know courageous, inspiring women bloggers who struggle with their own compulsive sexual behavior.

I learned how abuse, particularly sexual abuse, can lead women to seek out love in the only way it has ever been shown to them, through sex. I saw how sex could be used to medicate feelings created by the abuse: that they were unworthy, undesirable and unlovable. I saw how that aggressive sexuality that threatened me was a woman's way of seeking power over her abuser. And I started to recognize that when a woman made me feel uncomfortable and threatened with her sexuality, it was a sign, not of her desirability or confidence, but of some deep, past hurt to her body, mind and spirit.

A few days ago, I was chatting with some friends in recovery about celebrities when the topic of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie came up. And I said, "Oh, I hate Angelina Jolie!" It wasn't one of those dramatic uses of the word hate either. I thought about her and felt a sickness like a punch in the stomach. I've never met the woman, I know nothing about her other than her on-screen persona and the headlines I've seen on tabloids in line for the supermarket checkout. But I have truly always felt a tight, burning rage and disgust at the sight of her.

"Ugh! So do I," said one of my friends, who is also the partner of a sex addict.

"That's because you're both with sex addicts," said another. "She's sexy and you're threatened by her."

Duh. I hadn't thought about it lately, my hatred for Angelina Jolie was so long standing and unspoken that I'd virtually forgotten about it. But why had I always had such passionate negative feelings about her? What had she ever done to inspire irrational loathing in me? She was sexy. Sexy in the same distinctive, fierce way that always made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

And the proverbial light bulb clicked on, right over my head, and flooded every cobwebby room in my mind with light. Maybe Angelina Jolie was sexually abused. I could feel something like that in the aggressive sexual energy that was beating against me. And I experienced one of those moments where faces and images and sound fired at me in a rapid barrage, like a movie time traveler. The women my husband was with were abused. Prostitutes and porn stars overwhelmingly come from abusive backgrounds. Marilyn Monroe, the queen of sexy herself, the woman on whom so many women from whom that same threatening sexuality radiates have modeled their own image: Marilyn Monroe, was sexually abused as a child.*

And I sat there like some slapstick cartoon character, with stars dancing around my head, knocked to the ground by that falling anvil. What we call sexy, what we hold up as the standard of female sexuality as a culture, the sexiness we aspire to and celebrate, is the sexuality of abuse. In looking for feminine power in movie stars and models, in porn stars and pole dancers, we're aspiring to be victimized girls grown up, fiercely pretending to revel in our shame. We are modeling our behavior on a sexuality born of violence against women, of abuse, of molestation, of rape.

And I thought, my God. My God. What are we doing?