Lake of Fire, Anyone?

Last Friday, our third consecutive day of chilly rain (in late June, mind you) and, coincidentally, also the third consecutive day of school-free, all-three-girls-home summer vacation, I received the following missive slipped onto my porch with the mail (and I beg of you, if you are farsighted PLEASE click on the pic to enlarge):

You don’t say? But wait: never one to skip the fine print, I couldn’t help but notice the polite directive calling my attention to the other side:

Well, aside from the unnoted fact that “Hell” also contains more than a little bit of redundancy (see “fire” et al.); what a COINCIDENCE, this sounds a lot like my summer “vacation!” (jesus notwithstanding). But lo and behold, in the midst of my Jehovah’s Witness-sponsored pity party this little pamphlet actually made me think, which is most certainly the opposite of what its circulators intended.

In one of my favorite plays of all time, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, the big thematic plot-reveal is: “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is other people). And on a superficial level this is true! Try to deny it when you miss every single red light in town (while late to pick up your kids) because you’re stuck behind Grandma Moses With No Particular Place to Go, or are doomed to present a crucial pitch in partnership with a turnip-brained colleague who is in love with the sound of her own voice.

On the other hand, the more perspective and experience I accumulate, the more I realize that Hell is actually the sum of the consequences of the decisions we make. That’s right: my summer wasn’t off to a crappy start because of the weather or the kids being home or not being able to get work done because of the aforementioned. It was because of my own inability to manage these challenges, which in itself was a consequence of my lack of material resources with which to do so, which ultimately was the consequence of my inability to adequately assess and plan for the future (I believe the Latin term for this is Head-up-the-Ass-itis).

You see, when I had my second baby in 2 years and decided to drop out of the mummer-esque, cutthroat farce that is the tenure-track [humanities] academic job market, I thought I knew what I was doing, even though older and wiser members of my inner circle tried to persuade me otherwise. Just like co-sleeping! Yes, the reason why I have a Ph.D. but am struggling to cover the cost of my childcare every month is the same reason why my husband and I were bed-hostages of our children for a rough total of 7 years. Hardcore breastfeeding advocates, we discovered that the easiest way to make night-nursing work was to have the kids sleep in bed with us. Dr. Sears confirmed it: we were naturopathic parenting geniuses and we defied both my mother and erstwhile mother-in-law (a pediatrician) to tell us otherwise! Mother-in-law actually seemed surprised that we were so adamant about it, her opinion on the subject being, “Sleeping with the baby in the bed is fine. The only problem is going to be getting the baby out of the bed.” Sure enough, these words returned to haunt me like a Shakespearean curse when each baby was about a year-and-a-half old, big and strong enough to kick all three bed occupants into the dreaded Letter-H formation AND to make our lives miserable when we tried to lovingly initiate a transition into the “big-girl bed.”

Similarly, dropping out of the competitive work force that I had spent the previous 10 years preparing for was a move I thought wholly my own, completely separate from the life-experiences of my mother and mother-in-law–both of them feminist trailblazers who insisted on maintaining their own careers (teacher and doctor) in the seventies when all my other friends’ mothers were home baking cookies–and something I ALONE was in the best position to judge. Comments such as, “Won’t it be so much harder to enter the workforce when the kids are older and you’ve been out of the loop for ten years”? fell on righteous, über-mother deaf ears. I breastfed while pregnant! I baked all my kids’ birthday cakes by hand! There were storybooks in foreign languages, Mommy-and-Me gymnastics/music/library classes, playgroups and playdates at the zoo and cupcakes-in-class-for your birthday…and, at the end of the road, a Doctor of Philosophy mother with smart, wonderful children who is nevertheless grinding her teeth in her own personal Lake of Fire as she tries to reconstitute a career from the ashes of the funeral pyre she lit approximately ten years ago.

L’enfer, c’est moi-même.