really tired and this is what came out

I was checking my email the other day with the baby on my lap when I noticed he was chewing something. My Page Up key.

It is difficult to capture the extreme chaos that is the first year. It is nearly impossible to explain to those with "good little sleepers" the overriding and absolute collapse that threatens hour by hour your life when you have a child that doesn't sleep well - day or night.

It is Mother's Day weekend and I arrive here broken, convinced that raising the next generation means nothing less than imminent self destruction. It should have been plain all along: They will take our place. I just had no idea it would be quite so soon.

Sometimes when I should be getting my full two hours of contingent shut eye, I instead read profiles in Poets & Writers magazine where the writer is described sitting in some beautiful room of her beautiful house with its beautiful art on the walls sipping what can only be assumed to be beautiful tea. They live in some town or city or village somewhere and no matter what you know of that place or have previously concluded about it, it now sounds beautiful. Beautiful and exotic and exactly the type of place a successful writer should live and I wonder why I don't live there and where on earth they got the money for that space they own.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with children? Just everything. Everything.

I offer up Billy Collins' "Lanyard" (and here is the poet reading it on video) in honor of mothers this weekend and in acknowledgment of the lag time it takes children to appreciate theirs - hell, society in general still hasn't figured out what we're worth.

I swear, seven years ago, I never even gave a single thought to what might be in those strollers.