The school secretary looked at me over the top of her glasses. The look clearly said, "Oh. It's you again. The mom who can't be bothered to get her child to school on time." She knows my daughter and me, which is not a good thing in a large school like my daughter's where I am definitely not on the PTA. She knows me because, I'm the Chevy Chase of moms. Seriously, if I were a mom in a movie, Chevy Chase would play the role of me.

I used to have a different relationship with school secretaries, and a part of me wishes I were wearing a big flashing shirt with a picture of my college diploma on it. It would be my way of saying, "I know! I'm disorganized! But I graduated at the top of my class and went to a really fancy college. I'm super good at all school stuff, except the getting here on time part. Seriously, give me an essay to write on the use of theatrical metaphors in Shakespeare and I am so on it. I can even get an A+ in gym and wood shop, as long as a significant portion of the grade is based on written tests about theory. You would like me if I were a student here. You'd never have a single disciplinary problem with me, and I'd skew the standardized test scores up to make the school look fancy. It's just as a parent that I seem kind of sucky."

School secretaries used to like me, even though they had to write late slips. And I'm an obsessive record keeper, so I know the had to write lots of them. Over the years, my diary entries read something like this:

"Missed the bus. Late for school."
"Missed the bus again."
"Late for school again."
"Walked to school because I missed the bus."
"Got to school on time! But forgot to brush my hair and put on makeup. "

Still the school secretaries would smile and ask if I wanted to pick up my trophy/certificate/medal/savings bond/scholarship check while I was there. It was like being a student athlete, only without the being-good-at-sports part.

And today, I had really genuinely meant to be on time. It was school picture day, so I knew I was going to have to be on my game. My daughter wanted to wear her fanciest dress and have me do her hair in its fanciest style: pigtails. So, she was up on time, eating breakfast and I was focused. No TV this morning. No playing Beatles Rock Band. I combed her hair into two neat pigtails and we put on her favorite dress. Then she grabbed her baseball cap.

"I think that's going to mess up your hair for the picture," I said.

"No it's not," she said, and placed it lightly on top of her head, so that if she leaned forward, it would fall off. She removed it and said, "See?"

"Oh no!" I cried in mock horror. "The hair! It's crazy!" And I laughed, but Janie covered her face with her hat and started to cry, "No, it's not!"

"No, it's not. I was teasing."

"That's not nice."

"I'm sorry. I love you. And it doesn't matter how your hair looks anyway. You're awesome. Let's go."

So Janie mashed the hat down on her head for real, smooshing down the carefully placed pigtails and walked out the door, head down, still mad at me. As we approached the school, I checked her backpack and... Oh crap. There was the picture order form (not filled out) and the envelope for the money (with no money).

"Uh oh. I didn't fill this out or pay the money," I said.

"Oh no!" said Janie, "But Mama, I got dressed in my fancy dress and everything, and now I won't get my school picture taken!" Her lip started to do that quivery thing. Crap. The form says right there on it "No late payments will be accepted."

"It's ok. I can do it right now." So I find a bench outside the school and start pulling out the entire contents of my purse. I definitely have some kind of writing implement in here somewhere. Mini-golf pencil! Score! I fill out the form. Now for the payment. I'll just whip out my checkbook and... Out of checks. Damn. Ok, I'll dig around in my purse for money. Is there a voice coming out of my cell phone? Crap. I accidentally called someone. Ok. Deal with that later. I definitely don't have enough bills, but I do have a lot of change. In fact, five dollars of it: nickels and dimes and quarters, which I stuff into the envelope, which now weighs twenty pounds. This is when my disorganization pays. Literally.

Janie is wide-eyed with delight at watching me count so much change, and clearly relieved that I have saved the day by having barely enough money in my purse for the minimum picture package. "We're going to be late," I said, "I'm really sorry."

"It's ok, Mama," said Janie, and together we walked into the office.

"Reason for lateness?" the school secretary said.

"It's totally my fault," I said. Janie looked up at me and smiled.

"Mom late," she wrote on the late slip, frowning. She handed the slip to Janie, and I watched her bounce off to her classroom, her hat still smashed down over her pigtails, thinking it's not bad to be the Chevy Chase of moms, but I still do want that flashing shirt, just a little.

This, by the way, is the point at which blogging experts say you shouldn't blog. You should always put your best stuff out there and dazzle the Internet multitudes. But I say... Um... Ah, whatever. I don't have it in me to come up with a dazzling response to that either. So, here, my friends, are your bullet points:

• I was working on a guest post for a blog on disability and spirituality that I think many of you will love: Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places. The post won't be up for a week or two. I'll post a link when it is, but do feel free to poke around and get to know Amy Julia in the meantime.
• I've been working on my 1st Step, in depth this time, which has consisted of writing up a history of my life and relationships. I've used a lot of blog material, and it's about (gulp) 50 pages long, which is awful and fabulous. Awful, because I need to edit it down to about 8 in order to present it to my 12 Step group and fabulous because I started this blog with the idea of writing a memoir about my marriage and I've found I have a really solid foundation for that. When I read it to my cosponsor, she and I both cried.
• I have been celebrating! My husband and I have 7 years in recovery, and since many of you know that discovery and recovery happened when I was very pregnant with my daughter, you can probably guess that we've been preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Janie's birth. We've also been celebrating a sobriety anniversary for my husband, who has 4 years since his last major slip. Yay!

My son wanted to go to bed early the other night. Now you wouldn't think that this would be cause for alarm. There are lots of good reasons for him to be tired. Summer break is over. Fourth grade has started. The kids are no longer on a lazy summer schedule. Add the fact that cold germs are flying around, and maybe you have a kid whose immune system is fighting off some annoying but relatively harmless virus. So he's tired. And he asks to go to bed early. Think nothing of it.

Unless you're me, that is. This is An Event Out Of The Ordinary! And whether the Event Out Of The Ordinary is Mark coming home late or Austen going to bed early, these things are Bad (yes, with a capital B). In this case, my money was on leukemia. Either that or some horrible irreversible disease caused by the fact that Austen's diet is so limited.

Ordinarily, I don't share these things with anyone outside of my husband, because the inevitable response (even, to a more limited extent, from Mark, who at least keeps loving me anyway) is: you're crazy, you're so overreacting, he's just tired, and I'm somewhat disturbed by your craziness, so I'll just go stand over here now. Or... If you're so worried about it, you should work harder and do better. Clearly his diet is limited because of your awful laziness and lack of discipline and willpower. People like you are ruining America and are personally responsible for my unhappiness. I demand that you fix this, and if you just [insert long list of advice that hasn't worked yet and/or recommendation to focus solely on this goal to the exclusion of the needs of all other family members], all the world's problems would be solved.

So, it's tiresome, this admitting of strange, secret, niggling fears. It feels like walking a mile carrying a hundred pound weight (which, by the way, wouldn't be so hard if you stayed in better shape, MPJ, so stop complaining). In fact, it's so very tiresome, that I've spent my entire life not telling people (aside from a trusted few) that if my son asks to go to bed early, I secretly think he might have leukemia. And that I might even go so far as to stand next to his bed, biting my bottom lip, my hand hovering over his sleeping head to see if I feel a fever.

Austen is fine, of course. After a few nights of early bedtime, he has been his usual cheerful, energetic self. And I'm fairly certain (well, ok, maybe I will be in a few days) that he doesn't have any life threatening disease at the moment. But I'm also fairly certain that the next time he says his stomach is upset, I'll be biting my lip and furrowing my brows, thinking I may have been wrong last time, but this time...

The one thing I feel I can never be certain of, until the very moment I hit publish, is whether or not sending my whispers of imperfection out along distant electronic tendrils of this universe -- and the relief and recognition and connection and not-aloneness it might bring somewhere -- is worth walking a mile with that damn weight. This summer, it wasn't. But, today, it's back to school time, and unlike my kids, I feel like I have all the energy in the world.

A Facebook friend challenged me to go vegan for Earth Day, and I decided that, since I'm already vegetarian (I eat eggs and dairy but no meat or fish), it wouldn't be much of a stretch for me to stay away from all animal products for the day.  It will be good for the Earth, and besides my doctor told me just yesterday that a lower fat, lower cholesterol diet couldn't hurt.

So I got up on this fine Earth Day, threw some clothes on and got my kids off to school.  As I was walking back inside, thinking with satisfaction about the nice vegan breakfast I had planned for myself, I looked down and realized that I had been thinking of going vegan strictly as making a dietary change and had forgotten that veganism encompasses all use of animal products, including those in clothing.  Here I was going vegan wearing very non-vegan leather shoes.  Hm.  And my other pair of shoes?  Also leather.  That's the entirety of my shoe collection: all leather.  I'm just not a big shoe person.  But that's ok, because my jacket, purse and clothes are all still plant based, right?  Oh.  Turns out I'm wearing wool.  Which is also not vegan.  On the other hand, the polyester I'm wearing is vegan, but still not a sustainable, Earth friendly fabric.

Ok, this is going to be harder than I thought.  So, forget the clothes.  I will not go vegan on the clothes.  I'll just stick to eating vegan.

So, I pop my wheat bread in the toaster and prepare to top it with my usual Nutella, only...  Noooo!  Nutella is not vegan.  It contains milk.  I have to go all day without Nutella?!  Seriously?  Fine, fine.  Peanut butter is vegan and so is jelly.  And while that begs for a cool glass of milk, I can go with a very vegan glass of ice water for today.  Whew!  So, I had a nice vegan breakfast of PB&J on wheat toast.  Only as I rethought things on the energy of a full stomach, I realized the bread has yeast and honey, which if you are going to be hardcore about it, are also not vegan.  Damn.  I have now failed breakfast and getting dressed.

Ok, fine.  Progress, not perfection.  I will not go hardcore vegan.  I will just do food, but I will only cut out eggs and dairy, not yeast and honey.  Ha!  By those standards, I am now passing with flying colors and the rest of today should be no problem.  As long as I can stay out of the Nutella.

Thank goodness Coke is vegan or I'd never make it through the rest of the day!  Oh, and if it's not, please, don't tell me.  I don't love the Earth that much.

Last week, I was sitting cross-legged on my plump little black cushion on the floor of the Zendo I visit regularly and listening to a talk about cleaning incense burners.  And as I listened, the very deep and profound thought that came to me was, "I seriously am never going to volunteer to clean incense burners at this place."  It wasn't that the task sounded unpleasant — it didn't — but the volunteers who hadn't done it right, who hadn't been sufficiently thorough in their cleaning, were the subject of the dharma talk.  Yikes!  Wouldn't want to be those guys!

Now the leader of the Zendo... (Or is it master or priest or teacher? I never know, because everyone refers to him as Bob, which sounds odd when trying to put him in context.)  In any case, Bob had built his talk around these slacker volunteers — who remained nameless (but they knew who they were...) — who were occasionally leaving little butt-ends of incense in the burners.

Bob wanted to make the point that we need to put our whole hearts and our full effort into everything we do.  But instead of being inspired, I was thinking, "Damn, that job cleaning the incense burners sounds like way too much pressure.  Not only that, everything sounds like way too much pressure.  I've already tried to put my 'full effort' into everything.  It's what led me to crawl, broken and bleeding, into both the rooms of 12 Step and this damn Zendo.  This is so not a good talk for a recovering perfectionist to hear..."

At the end of the talk, there were questions, and as I struggled to formulate mine, someone else asked it for me.  "I don't understand," one woman said, "This week you tell us to put our full effort into perfectly cleaning the incense burners, but last week you told us this story about a student who thoroughly raked all the leaves in a courtyard, only to have the Zen master throw the leaves back on the ground and make him do it again.  The student raked the leaves perfectly, but was told that was too much effort.  How do we know when we're giving our full effort and when we're doing too much?"

I have a habit, born of years of training as a straight A student, of always trying to answer another student's question before the teacher does.  I give myself extra points if my answer (as scored by an independent panel of judges in my head) is better than the instructor's.  But in this case, all I could think was, "Good question!  Let's see you get out of that one, Bob!"

Bob paused and said, "You stop when it is no longer a gift.  In the story, when the master threw the leaves on the ground, it was because the student asked for the master's approval.  He wanted to be praised for what a good job he did.  So he did the work, not as a gift, but to gain something: to gain the master's approval.  When you seek to gain something, it is not a gift.  And when your work is not a gift, it's time to stop.  That is your full effort, even if the job is not done."

Oh.

Good answer.  Wish someone had told me that about 40 years ago.  Maybe I can learn to clean those incense burners better than I thought I could.

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity.  I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice.  That's a nice goal.  I like that image.  Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday's episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail.  And it turns out, that led me, well, maybe to the same place anyway.

A few months ago, Colbert's guest was AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.  The premise of the book sounded like a take on the humorous e-mail that circulates periodically mocking Biblical literalists for calling homosexuality an abomination while ignoring passages that condone things like slavery and animal sacrifice.  It sounded interesting, but because my hands were wet and covered with dish soap, I didn't jump right over to Amazon to buy it.  And then, I'll admit, I forgot about it.  Until a few weeks later, when my husband and I were out on a date night and decided to use our last few minutes of babysitter coverage to browse in a bookstore, where I noticed the book and decided to buy it after page one made me laugh out loud.

I loved it. It was much more than a take on a joke e-mail. It was spiritual and funny, reverent and irreverent.  It reminded me in many ways of my own spiritual journey.  (And what's not to love there?)  It even (unknowingly) contained some commentary on what recovering sex addicts face in our culture (but more on that tomorrow).  The bit that inspired me was the author's relationship to the Sabbath.  At first, leaving work aside for a day and resting is an anxiety producing chore for Jacobs, who can't make it through the first evening without checking his e-mail.  But it gradually becomes his favorite day, the one around which the rest of the week revolves.

I thought about my own tendency toward constant work: how hard I push myself, how difficult it is for me to make time for rest and how overwhelmed with guilt and fear I become whenever I am not being "productive."  I thought about how freeing it had been when my computer was in for repairs recently, and I couldn't do some of my work.  And I thought the idea of a Sabbath, a day of rest devoted to spirituality, might be good for me.

I don't formally belong to any organized religion, so I can choose any day for my Sabbath and honor it in any way that works for me.  So I've been thinking about what it would look like to spend one day a week dedicated to my spiritual life and wondering how I can make it happen.  I don't have it all figured out yet, and I don't need to, but what I do know is that I've decided I'd like to make it part of my spiritual journey to find out.  And I suspect that will mean that, at least one day a week, I will turn off the Colbert Report and light some incense when I do the dishes.

I'm a party pooper.  I'm a downer.  I'm no fun.  I ruin other people's good times.  (Because I totally have control over other people's good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch.  We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze.  But I woke up a few hours into my night's sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of a cold woke up early and was ready to start the day.  And, as people who don't get enough sleep will be, I was cranky.  Bite your head off cranky.  Stab you in the eyeballs with a fork cranky.  Blast your eardrums straight out the top of your skull with my screams cranky.  That is, if I could open my bleary eyes long enough to find you.

I decided that I needed to go back to bed.  And that was a good decision.  But there was that whole pumpkin patch thing.  Now, the kids didn't know we were planning it, because I'm no fool or at least not so much of one as I used to be.  I know that my kids get so hyped up about exciting events that they can't sleep.  (Not that they slept anyway on this occasion.)  And then they become sorely disappointed (read: wail all day as if the world has ended) if someone gets sick or it rains or the car blows a tire and we can't go.  So I rarely tell them what we're up to until we're up to it.

I knew that they were none the wiser, but it still triggered that whole party pooper speech in my head.  That whole "I should work harder and do better" speech.  That whole "Why is it that everyone else in the world seems to be able to juggle jobs and sleep and housecleaning and taking their kids out to one freaking pumpkin patch once a year and I can't?!" speech.

I knew those speeches were coming from a place of exhaustion, but they were still pretty persuasive.  (You do have a point there, crazy voice in my head, I can be pretty sucky.)  But I went off to bed anyway.  And hours later, when I woke up, all the crazy talk was gone.  I took my son out to a park while my daughter went to a friend's house to play and Mark took a nap of his own, and suddenly I felt like the most together Mama ever.  Amazing what a little sleep will do to turn the party pooper into the life of of her own party.

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He'd actually been better than usual in this morning's version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I'd found him in the end.

I've had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I'd happily, if absent-mindedly, voiced my assent to my 6-year-old daughter's trip to the mall with a friend of hers on Christmas day. Dream-hours later, when she wasn't home yet, I realized I didn't know the friend's name, address or phone number and there were no stores open on Christmas. She was gone, taken, and it was my fault.

Last night, my husband was the bad guy for a change instead of the usual villain: me. In my dream, he'd planned to go out to run some errands alone, but Austen begged to come, so the two of them went off together, but only Mark returned home, having forgotten he'd brought Austen with him. We rushed back to find him, with my dream mind running through the very real-life possibilities that Austen would not be able to communicate his needs and get help. We found Austen and he burst into tears mingled with a steady stream of anxious, repetitive shouts and questions with no answers, very much like what I'd expect of the real Austen under stress. Then the chime of my alarm woke me, still tight and panicky, and truly wanting to punch my husband, who was sleeping innocently beside me, totally unaware of what he'd been doing in my dream.

I realized, as time passed and I calmed down, that on top of the fear that I will lose my children, the sheer panic that they could be hurt or lost or worse — a fear any parent understands — there extends through all of these nightmares a different kind of fear. In each dream, at some point, I always think, "Oh, no. I'm not going to be able to find this child by myself. I have to ask someone — the store clerk, a police officer, a neighbor — for help. But if I tell them I lost my child, they are not going to want to help me. They are going to blame and judge me. They are going to tell me I didn't work hard enough and do well enough. They are going to tell me that it's my fault. And even if we find my child, they are going to think that my husband and I are such bad parents that they take our children away forever anyway." It's not just the realization that my child is missing that causes the nightmares to be so traumatic, it's the realization that my child is missing, that I might be blamed and that the problem is so big, I can't fix it by myself.

And I recognize that isolation and loneliness, that self—blame and guilt. I recognize those fears: The fear of asking for help. The fear that mistakes or weaknesses or imperfections will cause me to lose everything I love. The fear that I'm not working hard enough. The fear of judgment and of blame, and not just in and of themselves, but as agents of loss. I recognize in all of these the deep roots of addiction and codependency still present in my mind, gripping me when I sleep.

Image credit: Photo by DaveAustria.com on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

So, you know, I'm not really codependent.  (I hate that word anyway.  Sincerely I do.)  I just like to do nice things for people.  Really nice things.  Like that time in college when my boyfriend's parents were going to come for a visit and I helped out by vacuuming his carpet.  Only he wasn't actually my boyfriend, but I wanted him to be, and I didn't, technically, vacuum the carpet, I went a little overboard, which really was not my fault because I couldn't find a vacuum.

Ok, let me explain.  I was enamored of this guy I met my freshman year, and I was pretty sure that, if I just worked hard enough and did well enough, I could eventually get him to ride off into the sunset with me after which we'd live happily ever after, enjoying the ripeness of our golden years in our house with a dog and a white picket fence and grandchildren bouncing on our knees.  And one day just before his parents were due to arrive for a visit, I saw the perfect opportunity to prove my everlasting devotion and put him so deeply in my debt that he would have to consent to, if not ride off into the sunset, then at least go buy the horse.

He had tidied up his little ten foot by twelve foot room and was frowning down at the carpet remnant that covered the floor.  "Too bad I couldn't vacuum it," he said, "Oh well.  I have to leave for class.  What about you?"

"I don't have anything right now.  Is it ok if I hang out here for a little while?  I'll lock up when I leave," I said, slyly.

"Sure," he said and left for class.

After he left, I set off in search of a vacuum, thinking I'd quickly run it over his carpet as a surprise.  When I couldn't find any available (at least none that were working at the time; although I did hear tell of fabled vacuum cleaners that had been working just days before), I refused to give up.  I went back to his room, and as I surveyed it, I had a brilliant idea.  I might not be able to get up all the dirt, but I could at least make the carpet look better; I could clean the floor the way I sometimes took lint off a sweater: with tape.  So I wrapped tape, sticky side out, all around my hand, and on my hands and knees I got to work painstakingly clearing all visible debris from the carpet that no one asked me to clean.

When my soon-to-be boyfriend returned from class, I showed him the room with a flourish.  At first, he didn't notice anything, but given time (and sufficient prodding from me), he said, "Oh!  The carpet!  Great.  Thanks.  I guess you found a vacuum cleaner."  Suddenly ashamed to admit that I'd just spent the last hour all but licking his floor clean with my tongue as an act of devotion, I said, "Yes, I did.  Took like 10 seconds."

"Well, that was nice of you.  Thanks.  See you later."

Not the ticker tape parade in my honor it should have been, but I was laying that groundwork in my niceness.  (That wasn't codependent, right?  I'm pretty sure codependent would have been doing that on a much larger room he never asked me to clean.)  But folks, here's the important part: it sort of worked.  We dated for years.  And it's not my fault that we broke up because I couldn't sustain that level of working hard enough and doing well enough at things I was never asked to do or that he didn't work that hard or do that well in return.  Still, that's the kind of healthy, successful dating relationship that's totally going to get me published in Sexual Codependents Magazine Cosmo someday.

Last Monday I walked through the grocery store feeling like a weight was crushing my chest, a tight lump in my throat the only thing between me and tears. And part of me wanted to self-indulgently sit there on the linoleum floor under the flicker fluorescent lights and cry, much the same way that I'll both fear and crave the relief of vomiting during a wave of nausea. For the second time this year, a babysitter had dumped us because she found my son Austen's autistic behavior too difficult to handle.

The grocery store I was in wasn't the one closest to my home. It was an additional twenty minutes further away, because the one closest to my house was all out of strawberry Yoplait, one of the three foods Austen will eat (and not just eat reliably, but eat at all). I'd had a clerk check the stockroom and then check with the store in the next town before making the drive to the store in which I now clutched my cart wanting to cry.

It had been the sitter's first attempt at watching the kids, and I'd been satisfied that everything went just fine.  She had experience working with autistic children in the past, and both children seemed to take to her from the start.  There seemed to have been a few rough patches, but it didn't strike me that the kids or the sitter had a particularly difficult night and the sitter, even at the end of the evening, seemed interested in learning more about how to work with Austen.  But this morning I'd been informed that she did not want to come back because the job was too difficult.

Too difficult?  Is that what my life is?  Here I was having driven an extra twenty minutes each way to the grocery store because my son's eating issues are so severe, and I have a babysitter who has worked with autistic children before seeming to say to me (through her actions) that my son is worse than any of them.  Am I in another one of those situations, like living with an addict, where we start to think that everyone secretly drives raging drunk or tries to pick up prostitutes or does drugs with their kids because that's all we see, where the bizarre and unacceptable become normal?

I remembered the babysitter asking about whether Austen's behavior was better at school than at home and wondering, "Was she saying it was my fault?  Did she think if I'd worked harder, if I were smarter, if I were more skilled, if I set up a different structure, if I were stricter, if I trained him better, everything would be different?  (I'll work harder, I'll do better, please love me!)  Does she think I'm a bad mom?  But the beloved sitter she was replacing used to tell me what great work I was doing and how blessed our family was..."

And I actually started to tally the sitters up: "Two quit this year, but three started and love us.  One stayed on from last year (the one who had just moved, whose eyes would glow with enthusiasm when she talked about our family) and in past years no one had ever quit; they got pregnant or moved or started school... But maybe things are getting worse?  Oh, this isn't helping!  Am I in denial?  Is my life crazy or just life?  Am I bad or am I good or am I... (damn!) looking to other people to tell me what is real and whether I'm doing the right thing for my son."

It didn't help that tightness in my chest or that longing for tears to dissipate to know that I was looking to other people (rather than myself and my God) for definition and approval.  I still desperately wanted to know what I couldn't know: that I was doing the "right" things, that my son would be ok in the way I (not God) wanted him to be ok, that he'd be able to get along in the world on his own someday.  But it did help me to see that, wherever I am on my journey as a parent, the answer is not going to come from taking a tally of what babysitters think of my family, but in feeling confident in myself and my higher power.