Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman Read Free Book Online

me to develop professional skills that went well beyond making appointments and sorting the mail. It alleviated my fear that my next résumé would have to include a section called “The Missing Years.”
    I enrolled the children in a half-day Mother’s Day Out program, two days a week. They had hardly ever known a babysitter, so it felt like I was shipping them off to boarding school. Life was supposed to come through me before it came to them. It was my role to screen, diffuse, and manage their every experience. Nobody else, not even their father, was qualified enough, in my eyes. I planned to keep this up through the school years by educating them at home. Before any of my children could hold a crayon, I was already researching curriculums. One week I leaned toward the freestyle “un-school” approach to learning; the next I was sure that a classical education with Latin lessons was right for my future academy. Or we would mix it up, borrow from the best of both. I imagined us sitting around the dining room table, conjugating verbs and finger knitting, myself as a cross between Mary Poppins and the wizard Merlin—every lesson a magical adventure with talking animals and musical numbers.
    I loved the idea of homeschooling. Still do. But I must have been thinking of someone else’s home. My fantasy didn’t account for the fact that I’d never been interested in teaching kids, or admit the possibility that there were trained teachers who had always wanted to teach kids, and might have something of value to offer mine. How could they? In my mind, motherhood was a kind of enclosed terrarium, a bell jar that contained everything my children would ever need to grow. I didn’t realize how much bigger their lives—and mine—were going to get. Like the little boy in one of my old storybooks who buys a goldfish and has to keep finding larger containers to hold it, I’ve had to ditch one cherished idea of motherhood after the other for a more spacious one.
    I was braced for every possible repercussion of placing the boys in day care, except that we all might like it. It was a revelation to pick up my two-year-old at the end of his day, and hear the pleasure in his voice at having news to tell me. It was bliss to have five hours to myself at a stretch. None of us were going to fit back under the jar. The third baby was on the wait list for Mother’s Day Out in utero . They each graduated from a couple of days a week to half-days all week, then full days at school all week, and my work, like the contents of my purse, has tended to expand to fill all available pockets of space.
    Along the way, I morphed from part-time priest assistant to full-time writer. I have a desk, but my “office” is generally the end of the dining room table. According to the amount of e-mail spam I get, advertising work-at-home opportunities for moms, I’m living the dream. It’s not unlike the dream where you sit down for an exam and realize you have no pants on. Only the exam is a magazine deadline, and there’s a chance that I really don’t have any pants on. Every day is casual day at Work-at-Home-Mom Inc. Also, it’s always bring-your-kid-to-work day, because my office hours don’t neatly correspond with the ringing of the school bell. The kids come home around the same time of day that New York editors usually approach the bottom of their to-do lists, where my name and number sometimes happens to be.
    The first time one of my essays was picked up for publication, I had to leave a voice mail for one of those editors, a person I aspired to work with again and upon whom I wished to impress a certain air of decorum and professionalism. That whole neurotic, hapless, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, Wendy-Among-the-Lost-Boys thing? Ha-ha! Merely my literary persona, my dear. I can turn it on or off at will.
    I left my message, and closed with this: “I have to go now.