I was really hoping to write a nice long, thoughtful post today, but real work (you know, the kind I get paid for) got in the way. So I just want to give you this:

When you’re first learning to jump a horse–or, more accurately, ride a horse that jumps over fences–you’re taught to always look beyond the jump. The old horseman’s adage is that you go where your eyes go. Look on the ground, and more than likely that’s where you’ll end up. I’ve been riding and jumping for more than ten years now, yet I’m always amazed how often I still find myself riding to a fence with my eyes trained directly on it.

This morning I was cross-country schooling my horse, which means we went to a field with a lot of logs and ditches and banks and water and practiced jumping them all. Rebecca, my trainer extraordinaire, was there, and noted after Chama and I cleared a few fences that he and I were getting stuck right before them. He would jump the fences (except for one small log that he could literally step over…I think he deemed it beneath him) but not after first slowing down on his approach and peering at it, as if to say, “Really? We’re going to jump THAT?” As a result, he wasn’t so much jumping the fences as crawling over them.

“You need to really ride him to the fence,” Rebecca said. “Get aggressive. Don’t let him slow down to look at it.”

And I realized that one of the reasons he was slowing down to look at the fences was because I was looking at them. There’s always part of me when I’m jumping cross-country that’s hesitant. It’s a blast, but it’s also a little scary, and part of my brain likes to remind the other part that the ground is hard and unforgiving, so I better be careful. But the counter-intuitive truth of riding is that as soon as you’re “careful”–as soon as you back off and don’t completely commit to riding your horse–is when bad things happen. I can remember every time I’ve fallen when jumping, and every single time it’s because I got scared and didn’t ride as aggressively as I should have. The horse relies on his rider for confidence. If I ride Chama to a fence with any doubt, he can feel it–and reacts accordingly. You can almost hear him saying, “Well, if you’re not sure we should jump it, then there’s no way in hell I’m doing it.”

So on my approach to my next fence, I did what I learned over a decade ago: I kept my eyes up. I rode beyond the fence. I didn’t even look at the fence I was jumping, but to the hillside in front of us. I kept my legs tight around his barrel and squeezed with as much certainty as I could muster. And Chama responded in kind: flying over the fences without so much as glancing down. He landed on the other side, stretched out his stride and galloped on to the next one.

I think of how often I get stuck in life. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t feel stuck in my abilities as a writer, as a mom, as a wife.  The challenge of making each of those things work, and work well, can feel utterly impossible sometimes. So I find myself staring down at the obstacle in front of me wondering how the hell I’m going to get over it–and do I really want to? It’s so hard. Wouldn’t it be easier to just pull the shades and call it a day?

Someone recently told me that to get from a bad place to a good one, you need the creativity to imagine beyond what’s in front of you. You need to be able to envision a new reality. I thought of this on the drive home from the barn today. Of how, in the end, life really comes down to being able to look beyond the jump and ride to it–confidently, even if you’re scared shitless the whole time. Because it’s only then that you get the sheer joy of feeling a stride stretched out in a full gallop beneath you, carrying you along with the wind to the next discovery.

My heart stopped beating for six-and-a-half minutes yesterday.

Well, okay, it probably didn’t. Because I’m alive today and I didn’t see any bright light or my grandmother waiting for me. Although I’m not sure she would be waiting for me. She probably has better things to do—like find a radio in heaven that picks up Rush Limbaugh. And, really, when people like me die, do we see the bright light? Or do we just see the flames of hell licking at our feet?

But I digress. So, yesterday morning around 11 o’clock, after my kids had been in school for a good two hours, I got a phone call. I answered and heard an automated message telling me to call the school to discuss an unexcused absence. The thing was: Dave had dropped the kids off at school that morning. Both of them should have been sitting bright- and shiny-faced in their desks anxiously awaiting the next lesson in organic chemistry. Given that they’re only five and six, I had a hard time imagining they were cutting class and smoking cigarettes behind the trailers. I don’t expect that kind of behavior until they’re nine or ten. So it was 11 o’clock, and, no, Mr. Child-Abduction-Voice-Over, I apparently did not know where my children were.

Let me say right here: I’m not a worrier. When I get a call from the school that basically tells me one of my kids isn’t there, I don’t immediately jump to the worst-case scenario. I figure it’s some sort of glitch that will be easily remedied.

I didn’t always used to be this way. For the first half of my life, I assumed the worst. I think it came from being raised Catholic—the religion whose motto should be, “Someday…somehow….you’ll get yours!” If I had a fight with my mom and told her I hated her, I was sure God would kill her in a horrible car accident later in the day just to get back at me. If I envied the girl in school in the wheelchair because she got to skip P.E., God would cripple me. (Yet for some reason, envying the girl in my math class with big boobs never got me big boobs.) If I fantasized about dying of cancer so I could hear all the nice things people would say about me at the funeral, I would get cancer and die.

But then in my late teens, I realized something: my thoughts didn’t have power. I would think all sorts of things—happy things, vindictive things, depressing things—and nothing would ever happen as a result. If there was a God, He could seemingly give a shit about what was on my mind.

And what’s more, worrying that bad stuff would happen didn’t make it any less painful when it did. When Craig Welch dumped me in 8^th grade for one of my best friends, the fact that I suspected it all along (I mean, how could I not…the way he spent those six weeks we were together leering at Susan Pierce in her mini-skirts and legwarmers) didn’t allow me to say, “Oh, boy, I sure saw that one coming!” and shrug it off. Instead, my pain was compounded: six weeks of waiting for the axe to fall, and then the following two months looking at my bloodied head in the basket. (By this age I was already writing poetry regularly and let me tell you, the oeuvre that came out of that breakup was epic.)

So I stopped worrying. This was helped by adopting two important rules: I don’t watch TV news of any kind; and I don’t watch (or rarely watch) crime dramas.

But I’m human. And every now and then, the worst-case scenario creeps into the corner of my brain—especially when it comes to my kids. So when I called the school back and told them in my most casual, non-helicopter-parent voice that there must be a mistake, my kids were at school, my heart had already climbed up into my throat.

“Huh?” the woman on the other end of the line said. “It probably was a mistake. Let me put you on hold and find out. What are your kids’ names again?”

Then she went away for more than two minutes, which was entirely too long. I started going over the morning in my head. Dave had dropped them off. He probably did what I always do, which is drop them at the corner, and then they walk past the buses and into school by themselves. They’re on school property the second we leave their sides. They’re safe there, right?

When the woman came back she told me that Noah was marked present but Gwyneth was marked absent. “I’m going to transfer you to the person who handles attendance and she’ll help you out.”

This worried me. Being transferred always makes things sound worse than they are. What’s more, now I knew which kid was “missing.” For some reason, before I had a name, my anxiety could be less specific. Now, I imagined Wyn in her pigtails and her mismatched clothes and her little pink backpack walking by herself past the buses. It’s always a mob scene there. Couldn’t someone posing as a bus driver be lurking about? Couldn’t he tell her she had to come with him for a minute and then pull her into a car without anyone noticing? Christ, that was two hours ago. She could be in Pennsylvania by now.

Stop, I told myself. Stop. She’s fine. She’s in class.

But I couldn’t stop. My mind kept going to this horrible place. We shouldn’t let them walk so far by themselves, I thought. We should walk them all the way to the door. I knew this was ridiculous even as I was thinking it. I am a firm believer in statistics. I know that child abductions are exceedingly rare—and even rarer now than when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s (no one believes me when I tell them this, but it’s true—Google it)—and the vast majority of abductions are committed by parents embroiled in custody battles. I also know the majority of sexual abuse is committed by family members or people known to the family. Sadly, I have a number of friends who were sexually abused as children, and every single one of their abusers was someone they and their families knew: a neighbor or an uncle or a brother or a babysitter. (Also, interestingly, not a single one reported the abuse. Makes you think twice about the usefulness of sexual predator registries, doesn’t it? Further, only a few told their parents that it happened—and even then, not until many, many years later.) So the odds of my kids getting snatched away in the three minutes they’re out of my sight and walking across school property are probably one in several million. I’d be better off putting my salary on red 32 on a roulette table.

“But you would never forgive yourself if something happened!” is the battle cry of worriers. And, of course, they’re right. I wouldn’t.

I remember right after Gwyneth was born, I had to go pick up some drycleaning. Noah was only sixteen months old and had just barely started walking. Getting him and a newborn out the car and crossing the parking lot was enough to make even an Army Ranger doubt his abilities. I sat in the car and looked at the drycleaners’ storefront, a mere ten steps away. I looked in the rearview mirror at my kids, both of whom were sleeping. I could leave them in the car with the windows cracked, run into the store and get the drycleaning, I thought. They would never be out of my sight. I would be back in half the time it would take me to get them out of the car and into the store.

But I couldn’t do it. “You would never forgive yourself if something happened!” echoed through my head. So I woke up my son, who started crying, and then unstrapped the car seat with my daughter in it, which woke her up and she started crying. They cried the entire way into the store, the entire time in the store, and the entire drive home. They didn’t nap the rest of the day and I seriously considered, for probably the billionth time, of committing myself to the friendly neighborhood loony bin.

Later I told my dad this story and how much I regretted not just leaving them in the car. He said (you guessed it), “Yeah, but you’d never forgive yourself. What if someone had stolen your car? Or it had caught on fire? Or someone had slammed into it?”

I didn’t fault him for saying this. It was exactly the line of thinking that had led me to take them with me in the first place. But now that I’d had an afternoon to ponder it with two cranky kids on my hands, I knew that reasoning didn’t hold water. “But, Dad, the same could be said for bringing them into the store. What if the store had caught on fire? What if Noah had fallen in the parking lot and cracked his head open? What if Gwyneth had a severe allergic reaction to the fumes in the drycleaners and died?”

“You’re right,” he said.

The fact is, I wouldn’t forgive myself if my children were seriously hurt or killed no matter the circumstances. There would always be some way I could blame myself. My son could die in his bed with me upstairs fast asleep in my bedroom, and I would never forgive myself for not being at his side, listening to his every breath. My daughter could contract a rare and debilitating illness and I would be convinced it was because I smoked pot in college or drank wine when I breastfed or used insect repellant with Deet.

The fact is, I’m a mother. As such, I feel the burden of my kids’ safety and security with a weight greater than Atlas.

But I need to recognize that for what it is: an instinct. And like other instincts, it needs to be modulated. It needs to be managed. It needs to be soothed. Because otherwise, my children would live the life of prisoners. And so would I.

I thought of all this as I waited what seemed an eternity for the person at the elementary school in charge of attendance to come back on the line. Finally, I heard the click signaling I was being taken off hold. “Yes, Ms. Mullane, Gwyneth is in class. I just talked to her teacher and she meant to mark the name below hers. Sorry about that.”

“No problem,” I lied. “I figured it was just a mistake. Thanks for checking.” I could feel my heart begin beating again.

I was told by some friends who actually read blogs regularly (unlike me, who never read a blog before I started writing one—and now still only read my own) that if I want to be taken seriously as a blogger, I should post something every weekday. When they saw my jaw drop to the floor and I began sputtering, “But…but…but…that will take TIME and lots and lots of CREATIVITY and I don’t think I can do that…” they adopted that voice people get when they talk to children and crazy people and said, “You don’t have to write a lot. Just a little something. You’re writing columns. Just try writing something short about your day or something you saw. Or even a link to something else.”

I took deep breaths, downed another glass of wine, and spent the rest of the night wondering what in the hell I could possibly write each day that would be worth reading.

This post here tells you the answer: nothing. Absolutely nothing.

So I’m posting a picture of my dog Barrabas on our walk today:

And here’s a picture of the trees:

And here’s a picture of poison ivy on my neck:

And here’s a picture of my other dog, Clara:

And I’m tempted to post pictures of my kids, but that seems weird for some reason. Sure, I’ll tell you the intimate most details of their lives—their hopes, their fears, their joys, their disappointments—but putting a picture up would seem like I was exploiting them.

So, that’s it. That’s my post.

I would like to share with you something I overheard at my kids’ elementary school’s Halloween party Friday night.

Gwyneth and I were in the craft room stringing beads. Ok, in truth, Gwyneth was stringing beads while I checked email on my iPhone. And sitting next to Gwyneth was a three-year-old boy doing the same thing. His parents were watching, and as the boy’s cute pudgy fingers managed to successfully push the string through the center of a bright-blue bead, his mother exclaimed, “Excellent fine-motor skills, Joshua!”

I searched the mother’s face for any trace of irony…like maybe this was an ongoing joke between her and her husband (who was hovering behind her holding a backpack and hand sanitizer) and she said it for his benefit. But there wasn’t. Not that I could see. No raised eyebrows, no wry smile. She was dead serious.

Is this what we’ve come to? Congratulating our children’s fine-motor skills? Has her son had anxiety about this that required affirmation? Does he toss and turn at night, unable to fall asleep, saying to himself, “Gosh, I’ve really got my gross-motor skills down pat—but my fine-motor skills just aren’t where they should be at this stage in my development.” No doubt he heard about the bead-stringing workshop at the Halloween party and thought, finally, here was his chance!

I’m sorry if I sound unduly harsh. I don’t mean to. I’ve certainly said things during my tenure as a parent that have sounded equally ridiculous. “Great job expressing your feelings using ‘I’ statements, Noah!” and “You should be proud of yourself for remembering to use toilet paper, Gwyneth!” (Because I read once saying, “I’m proud of you,” is damaging because it makes the child think they should do things to please you instead of doing things to please themselves.)

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with congratulating our children on their achievements, no matter how small. But every now and then I just get so fatigued by it all. I get tired of sitting on the park bench and listening to the other parents tell their kids, “Great job!” for everything from building a sand castle to wiping their snotty nose on a tissue instead of on their playmate.

Actually, maybe that’s not what fatigues me so much as the unspoken expectation that if you don’t do those things, you’re a Bad Parent. If you use the wrong words (“I’m so proud of you!”), you get those sideways glances that lead you to imagine the other mothers sitting around at their mommy-and-me playdates later saying, “It’s so sad, really. I guess she didn’t read the parenting books.”

And God forbid you raise your voice in public when addressing your kids. I’m always amazed in what soft, sing-songy voices parents mete out discipline in public: “Now, Alex, you’re not supposed to bite your sister. How do you think that makes her feel?” or “Caitlin, we don’t knock down other children when we want a turn.” I’m guessing most parents don’t feel quite so soft and sing-songy. I’m guessing if they had their way, they would unleash fury and hellfire on their children along the lines of: “If you bite your sister one more time, I swear to God you won’t have any teeth left because I will knock out every single one!”

I hope it goes without saying that I don’t advocate screaming at and threatening children. Whenever I’ve lost my temper, I’ve regretted it. Horribly. I do a lot of apologizing to my kids. “Remember when Mommy screamed at you so loudly you actually jumped? I’m really, really sorry.” But I hate that we’ve become this culture where every word that comes out of our mouths is supposed to be scripted and approved by the American Psychological Association. I mean, is it so terrible for our kids to see that we’re human and sometimes lose control, too?

I remember when I was potty-training Noah. I was a bundle of anxiety and insecurities—certain that I was going to fuck up my kid for life if I did it wrong. And I told my therapist (yes, I have a therapist—not that that will surprise any of you) that I had read five books and they all told me something different, and what was I supposed to do? And he gave me this look that I’m pretty sure meant after I left his office he was going to take a shot of whiskey from the flask in his drawer, and said, “First of all, I can’t believe more than one book has been written about potty-training. Second, why are you reading books about this?”

“Because I don’t know what I’m doing,” I replied. (I’m pretty sure I was literally wringing my hands by this point.)

And he said, “Yes, you do know what you’re doing.”

“No, I don’t. I have no experience with this.”

“But you have good instincts,” he said. “Trust them.”

I try to remind myself of this when I feel at a complete loss as a mom. When I feel like I am messing up on pretty much an hourly basis. When I feel like I should just save us all a lot of trouble and call Angelina Jolie and ask her if she wants to adopt my kids, because I suck as a mom. I take a deep breath and tell myself, “You have good instincts. Trust them.”

So I do. Or I try to. I don’t censor myself as much. I don’t second-guess every word that comes out of my mouth when I talk to my kids. If I’m pissed, I let them know that. If I’m happy, I let them know that, too. I think of how rich and deep the whole spectrum of human emotion is—from face-cracking joy to inconsolable grief, from beaming pride to seething rage—and how I don’t want to become a pod who only shows my children the quiet, sanitized range of that spectrum.

So when Gwyneth finished stringing her pretty little necklace on Friday night all by herself, I exclaimed loudly, “I’m so proud of you, sweetie!” And she looked at me and said, “Thanks. I’m proud of myself.”

I think even the APA would approve.

This afternoon I was driving back from a farm in Maryland where I went to interview a racehorse trainer for an article I’m writing for the Washington Post Magazine. (All of that is irrelevant…I just wanted to find a way to work “horse” and “Washington Post” into this post. The former because I like to annoy my non-horsey friends by talking about them incessantly. The latter because it makes me sound legit…you know, like I actually work for a living instead of just writing a self-absorbed blog.)

I was starving so I got some McDonald’s, which I really don’t like—believe it or not—but I was really, really hungry. And then I turned on NPR because I have this thing when I’m driving: if I’m just driving, I exclusively listen to my iPod. But if I’m driving and eating, I listen to NPR. This is a hard-and-fast rule. There are no exceptions. Unless “Car Talk” is on. But luckily, being in the DC area, there are about 50 public radio stations, so I can always find one that’s broadcasting something of interest.

So I turned on NPR and it was a local show and the guest was comedian—or, I should say comedienne—Tig Notaro. I’ve seen her on cable a couple times and she’s very funny. If you don’t believe me, watch this.

And it turns out there’s a comedy festival in DC this weekend and she and Sarah Silverman and a bunch of other comics are going to be doing stand up. As she was rattling off the names of the other performers, I noticed that there were a disproportionate number of women comics, which made me happy because I think too often stand-up is dominated by men. But simultaneous with that happiness came jealousy because, you see, I’ve always secretly wanted to be a stand-up comedian.

I actually tried stand-up. Twice. And that’s the story I’d like to share with you today…

In the fall of my freshman year at DePaul University in Chicago, where I was an acting student—nay, a theatre (with an “re”) student—my dorm, Corcoran Hall, had an open mic night. Corcoran was populated with mostly performing art students, so it was actually a pretty talented bunch. As I watched someone do their best to emulate Bruce Springsteen and someone else do their best to emulate Indigo Girls and someone else play the cello, I thought, “I should do a stand-up routine.” Brilliant. I’d never done it before, but who cared? I usually made my friends laugh, why couldn’t I make these 60 or so people laugh—most of whom were already high? The odds were totally in my favor.

So I put my name on the list, ran into the bathroom, and prepped for 20 minutes. My name was called and I took the stage—which wasn’t really a stage, just the front of the lounge where the TV usually sat.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been as nervous as I was at that moment. What if I bombed? What if I made jokes and heard nothing in return except the mouth-breathing of that dude in the front row with the Bears cap on backwards?

But I was already on stage and there was nothing to do but go, so I plunged in and did five minutes of material. And to my delight, people actually laughed. Some quite hard. Afterwards total strangers came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed it. Others who knew me told me they thought I had found my calling.

It was a high unlike any other. Holy crap, I thought. This is it! This is what I’m going to do with my life! I couldn’t wait to do it again.

The next open mic night was scheduled for February. That gave me plenty of time to amass a veritable treasure trove of comic genius. And I did. From that point forward, everything in my life—every interaction, every relationship, every event—was potential material. Nothing was too insignificant. I became what I liked to believe was an astute observer of human behavior. And, boy, what I collected was funny. I knew funny and this.was.funny. Like the entire routine I created based on the train ride I took from Chicago to Albuquerque that Christmas? Think that doesn’t sound like good material for stand-up? Boy, are you mistaken!

The day of the show dawned cold, gray, and miserable, but nothing could dampen my spirits. I was, as Katrina and the Waves so aptly described it, walking on sunshine. I had my material. I was prepared. I was ready.

My name was called. I walked on stage and started belting them out—one joke after the next. And I think you know what happened…

I bombed.

Big time.

Hearing the mouth-breathing Bears fan would have been a relief. Instead, there was nothing. Just silence—or, worse than silence, the occasional pity laugh. But dammit, I wasn’t going to give up. I kept going. So what if no one was laughing? I had a good 20 minutes of material that I had put together. If they didn’t laugh at the first part of the set, maybe they’d laugh at the second? I had saved my best material for last anyway. So I kept plugging away.

Until I heard, “Laura!” and looked to the corner of the room from whence the voice came, and saw the organizer of the show with his oh-so-superior clipboard, giving me the little whirly sign with his finger that, I believe, is show-biz-speak for, “Wrap it up,” or, more bluntly, “You suck; get the hell off the stage.”

So I did. I wrapped it up and got the hell off. I wanted to cry. No, more accurately, I wanted to go into the corner, ball up into the fetal position, and bawl like a baby. After I did that, I wanted to change dorms. Better yet, I wanted to drop out of college and move to a town where no one knew me and I could live out my days manning a hot-dog vending cart by day and, by night, writing letters to the newspaper editor complaining about the sewage treatment plant that was just up the street from my basement apartment that I shared with six cats named after the Brady Bunch children.

But I couldn’t, of course. I had done enough acting to know that, no matter how badly something goes, you hold your head up high and walk off the stage with dignity.

I took my place in the audience and watched the other acts, but I didn’t really pay attention. I just kept going over my sucky routine in my head, convinced that everyone was staring at me wondering what in the hell made me think I could do stand up.

That night, my friends and I gathered in my dorm room. They bucked me up. “It was good, Laura! You just went over the time limit, that’s all,” they lied…and I was eternally grateful to them for it.

But no matter what their placating words said, the shame I felt was deep and actually physically painful. So I did what I always did to deal with situations like these: I got drunk and streaked the dorm in my underwear. Now, that’s walking off the stage with dignity.

To show you the depth of my vanity, after posting the article below and all the humiliating photos, I turned to Dave with a gasp and said, “What if people who don’t know me really think I’m that unattractive?” So here I am today, with long-ish hair…

So I’ve got this idea that I should cut my hair short. I go through this about once a year—this sudden urge to remake myself…you know, like I’m Madonna. The only problem is: I’ve had short hair before. In fact, I’ve had short hair most of my life. The only times in my life that my hair hasn’t been short are: 1980, 1988, 1991 through 1993, 2000 through 2003, 2005 to present.

You’ll notice the last stretch has been the longest—because I finally figured something out: I don’t look good in short hair. I’m kind of amazed it took me so long to realize this. I mean, wouldn’t you get a clue after the first or second or, I don’t know, FIFTH haircut that short really isn’t your look?

I blame my ignorance on my mother (sorry, Mom). She’s had short hair practically her entire life and it looks really good on her. But she made a fatal error in thinking it also looked good on her daughters. So, as soon as my sister’s and my hair was cuttable, it was cut. Short. Actually, my sister could pull it off. Her face was feminine enough that she still looked like a girl without the flowing locks. I, on the other hand, have always had more masculine features. Imagine Don Johnson without the stubble. Thus from the time I was a very young girl, I grew up hearing, “Well, hello, young man,” and “What a handsome boy!” more often than is healthy. Whenever I would play house with my friends, I was forced to play the husband. When we’d play Charlie’s Angels, I was always relegated to the dreaded role of Sabrina.

I’m probably walking proof that sexual orientation isn’t a choice because if it were, I would have been a shoe-in for being a lesbian.

Yet still, even when I was older and had a choice in what my hair would look like, more often than not, I would go for the sheared look. Here’s a pictorial tour of my bad short haircuts through the years:

I’m the young man in front, on the pony:

Third grade. No one had the heart to tell me that the feathers weren’t helping:

Seventh grade. It might be hard to look past my smokin’ hot bod to see that that’s a permed mullet under my painter’s cap:

Eighth grade. Hot rollers helped achieve this look:

Ninth grade. The precursor to Kate Gosselin’s do. By the way, the one-strap overalls? That was my idea. Edgy:

Tenth grade. It seems by this point I’ve just given up. Oh, and the Von Trapps called, they want their curtain clothes back:

1996. Please note the high-waisted jeans that make me look heavier than I am now, when in fact I was probably 10 pounds lighter. And that “come hither” look? Really?:

1997. I was 26 years old here, but the haircut easily puts me at an even 40:

And the sad thing is, I found these pictures when I was looking through my photo albums for proof that short hair looked good on me. You’d think I would have learned by now.

I remind myself of my dogs. When we lived in New Mexico, our property was adjacent to public land—miles and miles of open desert. Every day we would walk the coyote trails and every day—every single day—my dogs would chase the Harvey-sized jackrabbits that made their homes under the juniper bushes. And each time, they would fail. In the five years we lived there, they never once caught a rabbit. And yet that history was lost on them. Every day they would try as if they had never failed. Every day held the promise that maybe, just maybe, this time would different.

I know exactly how they feel. I think this time will be different, too. I really do.

This morning, my friend forwarded me a news clip about how women are less happy than men. This according to several new reports (here’s one) analyzing data that tracked happiness trends among women over the last 35 years. It seems all the choices feminism has given us since the early 1970s have resulted in us feeling not a greater sense of freedom, but more burdened.

But the real kicker is the consistent finding that motherhood makes women less happy. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how much money you make, or your race: having children is a major downer.

Awesome.

Actually, this doesn’t surprise me. And I doubt it surprises most mothers. While I feel like my life is richer and more interesting because of my kids, I don’t necessarily feel that it’s happier. The fact is, parenting is exhausting, guilt-ridden, often unrewarding work—particularly in a perfectionist culture that reminds us hourly of how important it is that our children be the centers of our universe, and how we’re failing them if they’re not.

A scan of the magazine covers in the grocery store checkout line is proof enough: For every headline telling mothers “Give YOURSELF a Time Out” or “10 Ways to Take Care of YOU,” another dozen warn us of the dangers of not living a child-centered life. “Put yourself first and watch what happens,” is the not-so-subtle message we’re bombarded with daily.  The “what happens” ranges from ruining any chance your child has of getting into an Ivy League school to raising a serial killer.

No wonder we’re depressed. I know women who, with the birth of their children, gave up nearly everything that used to give them pleasure: fulfilling careers, yoga, soccer on weekends, lunch with friends, sex.  We’re told that by putting our children first we’re better mothers who are bound to have happier, more successful children—shouldn’t that be reward enough? I don’t buy it.

Before I got pregnant, my life was about as near-perfect as I could have hoped. I had a career that I loved; a great marriage; and my horse hobby (I promise I’ll try to keep the horse talk to a minimum–but it’s relevant, I swear). I was ambivalent about having children, but Dave’s certainty tipped the scales and at age 31, I was pregnant. The second people found out I was expecting, I was told how drastically my life would change: I wouldn’t have time to ride anymore. I probably wouldn’t have the money. And even if I had both, fear of getting injured or, God forbid, killed would overshadow my love of riding. (I compete in the same sport that critically injured Christopher Reeve.)  I met these warnings with scoffs and shrugged shoulders. As a die-hard equestrian, telling me I would no longer ride was akin to telling Amy Winehouse she would give up pills.

But much to my surprise, they were right.  For the three years during my pregnancies and after my children were born I hardly rode and didn’t compete at all. Part of it was due to lack of time. Part of it was lack of money (I had to jettison my more time-consuming—and lucrative—freelance writing projects right at the time I acquired bank-account draining childcare expenses). And part was concern for safety. But mostly it was because this voice echoed through my head telling me that I was a mother now; things changed; horses would have to wait.

Through it all, I was miserable.  I was angry. I was resentful. I resented my husband for wanting children in the first place. I resented society for putting such a huge burden on mothers. And I resented myself for having a hobby that seemed antithetical to being a mom (why couldn’t I have a passion for knitting?).  But when I began to resent my kids, I knew something had to change.

I sat down with Dave and told him that I had to ride again—really, seriously ride. I knew we had a lot of demands on our time and finances, but whatever it cost to get me in the saddle regularly again would be nothing compared to the amount of money we were going to spend on Xanax if we didn’t. Perhaps it was the desperation in my eyes, or the fact that I, who cry a maximum of once a year, was sobbing pitifully, but for whatever reason, he agreed.

And I’m happy to say that, for the last four years, a week hasn’t gone by that I haven’t ridden at least once.

When I tell other women about my horse habit, I sometimes get a heart-felt “Good for you!”—usually from older women who lament not doing more for themselves when their children were young.  But just as often I get a backhanded “I wish I had time to do that” or “Aren’t you lucky?” Yes, I am lucky. I’m lucky to have a husband who’s supportive enough, a job that’s flexible enough, and money enough to pursue my passion.  But the implication that comes with these comments is that I’m spoiled, selfish and, ultimately, a bad mother. I would be lying if I said sometimes I didn’t wonder if they were right.

But then I remember what life was like when I wasn’t riding, and ask myself how that mother—bitter, resentful, angry—could be better for my children than the mother I am now? Are we really better parents if we abandon our pleasures for the sake of our children? Instead, shouldn’t we show our children, through example, that a full, meaningful life is about pursuing and nurturing what you love, including—but not limited to—our kids?

Whatever the answer, I know that joy should not be a casualty of motherhood. And I’m betting that if more women were willing to ask themselves, “What do I want?” and then give it to themselves—guilt free—being a mom wouldn’t result in so much unhappiness.

The other day I was walking out the barn to ride and Gwyneth asked me why I always rode horses.

“Because I like it,” I said.

She thought for a moment. “Oh,” she said, and then called after me with a smile, “Have fun, Mommy!”

I smiled back.  “I will,” I told her. You bet I will.

Usually I try not to talk too much about horses because when I do, people’s eyes tend to glaze over or they change the subject really quickly or they say things like, “Oh, gosh, I’d love to hear more but I’m late for my weekly toothpick-injury support group. We’ll catch up later, okay?”

This is the same reason I try not to write too much about horses. I can already see the small readership I’ve amassed over the last few weeks reading the word “horses” and immediately clicking the “back” button to YouTube to watch Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance again, or that nine-year-old kid scoring the hockey goal, or the cat playing the piano.

But what’s the point of having a blog if I can’t write about the things I want to write about? So bear with me.

For those who don’t know, I have a thoroughbred named Chama who used to be a racehorse until he had an injury that ended his racing career. So I got him for free from a woman who rescues horses like this and retrained him (under the tutelage of my trainer and all-around expert horsewoman Rebecca) to compete in the sport of eventing. Let me start by giving you a brief history of the sport…

Kidding.

But briefly, eventing involves three phases: dressage (riding precise patterns), stadium jumping (jumping fences in an arena), and cross-country jumping (galloping over natural terrain and jumping logs and ditches and into water and so on). Throughout my childhood, I dreamed of competing in this sport. I was a horse-crazy kid without regular access to a horse or lessons. Instead I would spend hours pouring over picture books of riders doing these exact things and dream of one day being in the saddle. Now, I am. And I absolutely love it, probably more than anything else in the world. If I could have one wish (after world peace and a cure for cancer—ok, no, not really), it would be to compete in the Olympics. I spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about this. I’ve even scripted the entire NBC Sports montage:

[Background music: “Wow” by Snow Patrol]

Bob Costas: “A racehorse [cut to image of Chama galloping through a field] with a career-ending injury. A Nobel-prize winning writer [cut to image of me, except I look less like me and more like Megan Fox] with a dream. And now, that dream has come true…”

And so on and so forth. Sadly, the chances of this happening are highly unlikely. I compete at the lowest levels of the sport—which is difficult enough. Here’s me and Chama:

Now here’s an Olympian:

I can’t imagine any circumstances that would propel me to the upper echelons and the Olympic team. Ok, no, I can imagine it. It involves befriending the British royal family who see in me two things: potential and lots of spunk, so they offer to bankroll my equestrian aspirations—buying me a full stable of talented horses. Meanwhile, some sort of bizarre nuclear mishap results in giving me heretofore undiscovered talents as a rider.

Yeah, I think that’s my best shot at making the Olympic team.

But no matter. Even if I don’t make the team, I still love toiling away at the lower levels…the discipline it requires, the sense of accomplishment I get in helping bring along a horse that, when I got him, didn’t even know how to steer and now leaps over fences.

So yesterday I competed Chama in our first show of the year. For those of you not on the east coast, let me take a moment to describe the weather. Better yet, here’s a little something you can do to actually experience yesterday’s weather (and, in fact, the weather every day last week beginning Tuesday): 1) Get into the shower. 2) Turn the water on full cold (you want it about 40 degrees). 3) Stand under it. To add to the effect, turn off the lights in the bathroom, except for maybe a nightlight, so it’s really depressingly dim. Add to it two dogs looking at you plaintively wondering when you’re going to take them for a walk and two kids with cabin fever saying, “I’m bored,” over and over again.

Good. So, this was the weather I woke up to at 5:45 a.m. Saturday morning. I peeled myself out of bed, pulled on my riding pants and turtleneck, and then put jeans over my riding pants and two sweaters and a jacket over my turtleneck, and stumbled out into the dark (dark dark) to make the 45-minute drive to the farm where my horse is boarded. There I walked into a saturated field to get my saturated horse and led him into the barn to feed him his grain and try to brush off at least one layer of the mud that caked his legs.

Chama looked none too happy about all this. Not that I was surprised; Chama had looked none too happy about most things recently. Simply put, Chama had been a consistent pain in the ass for the last two weeks or more. Just two days before, it took me an hour-and-a-half to get him to walk past a ladder (yes, ladder) without him spinning and rearing and trying to dump me on the ground because, you know, ladders are soooooo scary.

While I was in the tack room collecting the hundreds of pieces of gear I would need to take with me (to give you an idea of the overhead required in getting ready for a horse show: imagine going skiing, sailing, and mountain climbing all in one day and all the equipment you’d need to make that happen…then add a 1,000-pound animal to it), Chama slipped out of the halter that tethered him to the stall and went trotting down the barn aisle. Not a good way to start the day.

I collected him and tied him again and went back into the tack room, at which time another boarder walked in. She was not competing in the show, but was coming along with her young horse just to expose him to the sights and sounds of a horse show. She looked at me and said, “We’re fucking insane.”

“No,” I told her. “I paid an entry fee [which would not be refunded if I didn’t go to the show]. You are fucking insane.”

I mean, she was going just because. And, to top it off, she got back the day before from a two-weeklong business trip to Russia. If I were her, I would have woken up, taken one look out the window and immediately gone back to bed. But horse people are a hardy lot, and she’s a good sport who didn’t want to bail at the last minute, so there she was, at the barn ridiculously early, looking way more chipper than she should for being in a time zone on the other side of the world.

She and I led our respective horses to the trailer to load. Her young horse walked right on. Chama balked and tried to run away. This is going to be a stellar day, I thought.

The collective efforts of four able-bodied adults were finally able to get him on the trailer and we drove to the show grounds about 30 minutes away. We pulled up to the parking attendant, an older man in a raincoat who looked cold and mad. He leaned into the window of the truck, regarded us all suspiciously, and said, “You’re crazy.” Just then Chama kicked from inside the trailer so hard the truck shook. Oh yeah, a stellar day.

I’m sure the suspense is killing you, so I’ll cut to the chase: It turned out that is was a stellar day. I mean, don’t get me wrong…it was miserable. I have never been so wet in my life (and I’ll say it so you don’t have to: “That’s what she said.”). Everything I was wearing—everything I owned—was soaked through to the core. During the two jumping phases, when the rain was heaviest, I couldn’t feel my hands holding the reins. Then there was the whole fear factor: Huge pools of water had collected in front of the jumps. The grass on the cross-country course was slick. Galloping a horse to fences on footing like this—when the risk of the horse slipping and falling is high—is a bit scary, bringing to mind phrases like “spinal cord injury” and “colostomy bag” and “funeral planning.”

But the amazing thing was, through it all, Chama was perfect. The rebel-without-a-cause I’d been riding for the last two weeks went on holiday and was replaced with a quiet, compliant horse that was more than happy to do his job. He didn’t look twice at the huge puddles of water. The sloppy footing didn’t faze him. To my delight, we placed second in the show—a personal best.

But the best part of the day was when we were running our cross-country course. We were at the back end of the course, far away from the other competitors, and galloping over a hillside. For a moment I looked around me and noticed the red and gold leaves of the trees against the gray sky and how beautiful they were—and I couldn’t believe I’d gone all day without noticing that. And then I noticed that the slanting rain looked like falling stars. And then I heard Chama’s rhythmic snorting as he ran, and watched the steam billow from his nostrils. And for a moment, I felt like the world was empty except for the two of us. And I thought of how I had dreamed of this as a little girl—of doing this exact thing—and here I was, doing it. And I thought of the man tending the parking lot telling me I was crazy, and I thought how wrong he was. I was the sanest person on the planet. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to spend the day.

My daughter, Gwyneth, likes to wear short skirts, high heels, and midriff-baring shirts. I know, I know…mothers of teens all across the country feel my pain. The only thing is: my daughter is five.

Needless to say, we don’t let her go out of the house dressed like this. She’s only allowed to wear these clothes when she’s playing dress up. It’s just that, instead of dressing like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Snow White, my daughter dresses like your friendly neighborhood streetwalker. What’s the harm in that?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s any harm. Not at this age. It’s not sexualized for her. She doesn’t consider what she’s wearing revealing or provocative. She just thinks it’s fun. But what worries me is what will happen the day clothes and appearances do become sexualized for her? Is this how she will want to dress? How will I handle it if it is? Where will I draw the line?

This is a constant worry for parents of girls. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with another mother that lasted longer than ten minutes when this issue didn’t come to the surface.

It’s no wonder. Girls are inundated with sexual messages in every facet of their lives. They’re told time and again in a hundred different ways that—while brains and talent and kindness are nice to have—your beauty and sex appeal are what really make you a worthwhile human being. And the sad fact is, those messages are reaching girls at younger and younger ages. They sell thongs to tweens, for god’s sake. And I’m sorry, I can’t imagine any circumstance when an 11-year-old girl would need to worry about visible panty lines—which is the second reason anyone wears a thong…and the first reason is too troubling to imagine an 11-year-old even considering.

So we mothers rage against this with all of our fury and try our hardest to instill in our daughters the belief that who they are is what matters, not how you look; that there’s nothing wrong with modesty; that they should hold onto their childhood as long as possible. Given what we’re up against, sometimes it feels like we’re trying to stop a freight train with nothing more than our pinkies and a stern glare.

But there’s a flip side to all this that I always get stuck on: What message are we sending our daughters by sending them this message? If we’re always telling our daughters that being modest and chaste is good, and that exhibiting their sexuality is bad, are we really helping them? Or are we just perpetuating the Madonna-Whore divide that has plagued women for centuries—implying at every turn that you’re either a Good Girl or a Bad Girl…and you better be the former.

I often think of this when my daughter watches her favorite movie of all time: High School Musical (which, no doubt, inspires some of her fashion choices). I’ve managed to avoid watching any of the three (yes, three) movies in their entirety, but I’ve watched enough to know this: Gabriella is the heroine. She’s smart (she got accepted to Stanford!), beautiful, kind, modest, and the devoted girlfriend of Troy, the basketball-star hero of the movie. Gabriella and Troy are always trying to avoid falling into the self-serving traps of Sharpay: their glory-seeking, flamboyant (and provocative), narcissistic classmate. In creating Gabriella and Sharpay, Disney has brilliantly given the world a heroine that all moms will love and an antagonist all moms will love to hate. But what’s interesting is that, although Gwyneth recognizes that Gabriella is the “good” one, it’s Sharpay that she tries to emulate. (For good reason: Sharpay is sooooo much more interesting than Gabriella.)

Truth be told, I’m okay with this. I actually think it’s more dangerous for Gwyneth to look to a character like Gabriella as a role model. The reason being: Gabriella always makes the right choices. She might struggle with those choices occasionally, but in the end, she always does the right thing. In a word, Gabriella is perfect. And I would argue that the pursuit of perfection is a greater enemy of girls (and women) than probably anything else. Because when they fall short of perfection (and they will—because we all do), they will feel what I believe to be the worst of all the self-flagellating emotions: shame. Because we’ve inadvertently told them that they have two choices: to be a Good Girl or a Bad Girl. And in failing to be perfect, they’re clearly on the Bad Girl end of the spectrum—especially if it involves sex.

Full disclosure: I say this as someone who spent most of her mid-teens to early-twenties in the bad girl camp. I wasn’t capital “B” bad, but I don’t think anyone has ever described me as a good girl, either. I did a lot of things I won’t write about here because my mom reads my blog—but suffice it to say, chastity and modesty were not part of my vocabulary.

Unlike some people, whose lives seem to quietly follow a map from points A to B and so on, mine never did. I meandered. I got lost—a lot. I got stuck at dead ends and found myself in swamps covered with pond scum and in deserts without landmarks or even a hint of an oasis. I had to circle back to find my way many, many times. And even then, I would get lost again.

And you know what? All of that was manageable. It was hard, but I could handle it—and I think I became a stronger and more interesting person because of it. But what I couldn’t handle was the great sense of shame that overwhelmed me during those times. The shame that made me wonder what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I get it right? Why was my compass so fucking messed up? Why wasn’t I a Good Girl who made the right choices?

What I didn’t know then was that the Good Girl is a myth. So is the Bad Girl. They don’t exist. The only thing that exists is the human struggle to find our way to some sort of happiness, some sort of deeper understanding for who we are and how we relate to the world. To find that place where we’ll look back on our death beds and say, “I’m so glad I got there.” For some people, the path to that place is easy to find; for others, not so much.

I still get lost from time to time, sometimes quite badly. And every time I do, I have to remind myself that I’m not there because I failed; I’m there because I was searching for something. I just need to backtrack to where I started and look at the roads a little more closely.

This is what I hope Gwyneth will learn as she grows up, leaving behind her world of dress up and pretend for a real world that can be so difficult to navigate. I hope that she sees her choices are not Gabriella or Sharpay, or Miley Cyrus or Lindsay Lohan, or Anne Hathaway or Britney Spears. They are not Madonna (the Virgin Mary, not the singer) or the Whore. Her choices are infinitely more vast, and the paths to those choices are infinitely more interesting. And even if she has trouble reading the map, she’ll find her way eventually. And through it all, she will be neither good nor bad. She will just be herself—which, in my opinion, is pretty amazing.

I just hope she wears practical shoes, because I know from experience that trudging through the mud in high heels is a bitch.