The Misery Business

In pursuit of a better mom blog.

I said I would get the first issue of this out by Good Friday and by God I did it. And I literally mean “by God.” I had a whole week to sit around and write something and I waited until Thursday but, sometimes, it’s worth not pressuring yourself to meet a standard.

Mark that down, it’s important.

Because, as far as this newsletter is concerned, I’m all about standards and not meeting them. I frequently don’t meet them, sometimes I don’t even try. At some point, I bought a rug that was the same shade as the clot that’s formed when you smash all of the Play-Doh colors together into a ball and whip it at a toddler sibling. Next time around, I’m getting something with and additional texture of dried fettucini noodles so it looks less like those grow out of my carpet, unaided.

I’m putting the subscribe button here, now, so that you will. I need that rug.

Anyway, this newsletter formed in response to the endemic question, “what in the dang heck am I doing with my life?” that surfaced somewhere around the turn into my fifth decade, as I embraced motherhood and all of its fruitless efforts at removing stains from expensive items I bought when I stupidly thought I might be infertile. There’s a message about motherhood — several messages, really — and they’re all just uniformly terrible, because they all say the same.

“This is just a miserable thing.”

Truthfully, that’s the kind of insight someone gives you when your oven catches on fire or your dog runs off to find a better family, or your computer crashes before you’ve saved your file, even though you’ve been using computers since the dawn of the information era and you should know better by now. But its also the message we give women about motherhood.

The messsage we all give women about motherhood.

Occasionally, it’s a message followed by “it’s worth it,” or sometimes it’s a message followed by, “I should have never had kids.” It can be printed across the glossy pages of high-level e-magazines, in text that makes it sound like someone’s telling you of a heretofore secret stage-4 motherhood diagnosis in hushed tones in a television hospital supply closet. Or it can be plastered across an idyllic scene of the countryside, with two people in anachronistic period dress, hugging for the camera, trying to hide the little remote that sets off the iPhone, in order to suggest Instagram trad-husbands randomly request slow dances on historically significant riverbanks on weekday mornings.

One end of the spectrum suggests that motherhood is so secretly unfulfilling that people deliberately hide the depths of their despair in order to con unsuspecting females into producing offspring with preloaded generational trauma, and then spring the misery on them later. The other, that motherhood is not simply the only worthy sacrifice, but no one save mothers have sacrificed so much since Christ took His last breath atop Calvary.

Am I being facetious? Possibly. There are surprisingly a lot of historically significant riverbanks on tradwife Instagram. But the end result is the same: mothers in the trenches of life feel either not good enough — or not good enough. “What in the dang heck am I doing with my life?”

Neither motherhood messenger is offering any real advice on navigating womanhood with any real ease or grace, just new ways to feel like you’re missing out and not measuring up. According to popular belief, stories of motherhood have to be terrible to be believed. The aesthetic may change, but there’s little improvement. Unless, of course, you do entirely what the advice-givers are suggesting, namely, remodel your life to look like theirs — you know, the life sustained by high incomes and invisible domestic help.

It’s no wonder, then that the number of women choosing motherhood is declining rapidly, and those who do choose motherhood have fewer children. If the public relations that surrounds toddlers is to be believed, the fewer the better. After all, if every mother is telling you that motherhood is nothing but misery business, why choose it at all?

Hence, me.

Hopefully, I can alleviate some of those feelings of inadequacy by sharing my own: the trials of toddler life, the recipes that can’t be easily messed up, the effort at growing food that will likely turn into a charity for wayward and unproductive barn animals. I have a reasonably high income and extremely visible domestic help. I’m also a very strong advocate for the substandard, happy mess of kids.

I’m not a strong advocate for telling women what to do. Work, don’t work. Have the kids, don’t have the kids. Clothe them in Wal-Mart or Worth. Whatever. I’m just hear to tell you it doesn’t have to be bad, you don’t have to feel inadequte. You can choose joy.

And I’m not miserable — at least not because of motherhood.

It might be the fettucini.

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And now, the recipe.

Oh, you thought it would be for fettucini. It is, if you buy the fettucini.

Someday, you’ll have to pay for these, but as I understand you don’t really know me as much more than a Twitter raconteur with cute kids, I’m giving you a taste for free. Like a drug dealer or a Costco employee.

The secret to good Bolognese is time, nothing else. You can look up a good meat sauce on Google, but the truth is, no one 100 years ago, herding goats and growing help on the side of a miserably cold hillside in northern Italy was accessing the variety of ingredients available at Publix. But they had time.

1 large onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, chopped (small)

2.5 lbs of ground beef, fancier the better

1 24 oz. can of tomatoes, stewed preferred because my children don’t like to see tomatoes in their food, but you’re not cooking for my children

1/4 cup sugar

12 oz. can tomato paste

Water

Salt and pepper to taste

Carlo Rossi wine in a jug

Saute the onion and garlic in just a little olive oil over medium-high heat until translucent. Add ground beef, break up and saute until brown. Add the stewed tomatoes, the sugar, and a little salt and pepper, more than you think you need. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer (like, a 1 on the dial), and leave uncovered for an hour.

Come back, add the tomato paste and as much of the wine and you’d like — a half cup is traditional, the rest of the cup goes in you — along with a few cups of water. You want to be able to see the meat peeking out of the water like tiny islands rich people take vacations on. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer, simmer uncovered for four hours.

Yes, four. Ideally. No fewer than two.

Sometimes my husband will sop off the grease with a paper towel before testing for flavor, but after four hours, its ready.

Boil fettucini according to package directions, take some sauce, heat in a shallow pan, add cooked fettucini, pour into plate, cover with cheese, add to toddler. Success.