These writers don’t just follow anyone, you know. They must have been impressed with my wit, my pith, my haikus about Thin Mints and “Gossip Girl’s” Chuck Bass. Julie is the first blogger I read regularly, and anyone can tell you the special place one’s first blogger occupies in the heart. Finslippy is smart and funny and is on the short list of people I’d like to be when I grow up.

However,

When douche-duo Speidi takes time away from repulsing all of humankind to follow a non-Hollywood nobody, well, it’s oddly flattering. First these two and then maybe Paris Hilton’s chihuahua. (Shhhh! Don’t jinx it!) If I get all big-headed about my celebrity Twitter chums, help me to keep it real, will ya?

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There are brilliant multitaskers and fantastic time managers, and I’m neither. Therefore, the particular demands I’m under now are either conditioning for a yet more-difficult trial to come or I’m being fucked with. I think it’s the latter.

I have a job, a child and a husband who works 100 hours a week. And laundry and a body badly in need of exercise and a blog I neglect because I can’t face the emotions released by what I might write. What I’m in desperate need of – besides a script for amphetamines with unlimited refills and a personal trainer – are the clarity to see where the boundaries should be and the backbone to make everyone respect them.

Luckily, I’m enjoying the job, the job I really, really need. There are some nice perks to this job, but it’s a job nonetheless, with a company undergoing change. (Translation: You all can be replaced, especially you, recent hire.) Four days a week I’m functionally a single parent.

I think I have the weeks well-covered. It’s not pretty but it works – the kid gets off to school, the work gets done, and while I’m not happy with the real dinner vs. takeout ratio, I don’t think it’s a lost cause. It’s the weekends where I come completely undone.

By the time Saturday arrives, my daughter hasn’t seen her father for any more than 5 minutes since Wednesday, and she misses him. She’s whiny. My house, which also hasn’t received the full attention it needs, is whiny as well. We have breakfast at the restaurant, which isn’t as “yuppies go for their goat cheese and basil scrambled eggs” as it sounds because Chuck’s busy and can’t always sit down with us. We then do a day’s worth of errands. And you know how kids love their errands!

We should be spending the afternoon at the playground, or she should be riding her bike with her daddy while I go walking and for coffee with a friend, or I should do the grocery shopping by myself while he drives her to ballet. I’ve got more Saturday fantasies than is healthy. I make a big deal about our routine of listening to “Car Talk” and then the Met’s radio broadcasts. (”Noooo! We can listen to Barenaked Ladies any time! It’s time for those funny guys from Boston who talk about starters and oxygen sensors!”)

Saturdays wouldn’t be bad if I could spend Sundays cleaning, organizing and cooking a few things for the week ahead. I don’t subscribe to the full menu of wifely duties, but I do think, after the week my husband’s had, I should cook a decent dinner for my family on Sunday night.

The problem is, is what the problem always is. IT’S THE GODDAMN RESTAURANT. To be said in all caps, all the time, like SHINGLES! It’s always the problem, THE RESTAURANT. (Not the SHINGLES! Which I suppose is a problem, just not a My Problem.)

Sundays are busy. Their payroll is so tight they don’t have the help they need on a busy day. And I have, ahem, the day free.

I’ve spent almost every Sunday there since the place has been open, running food, seating tables, expediting meals, taking drink orders, processing credit cards, making coffee, pouring coffee and picking up chewed lumps of pancake from under high chairs. All while Tink sits at the food counter coloring, only interrupting me if she has to go to the bathroom. Half the time one of the Mexican bus girls takes her.

When I make change I give the waiters their tips, which they leave with. My husband and his business partner leave with nothing. I leave with a child who missed her nap.

So, what would you do? Would you have put your foot down? Would you sacrifice the smooth running of your coming week to help the cause? Remember, this is a business that doesn’t pay your husband and won’t any time soon. Would you stand firm and say, “No”? “No, I have a family to take care of and only one day a week to do it. We’ve got enough to deal with; I need this one day to impose some order and peace to my life”?

Or would you let guilt take over as you wonder what they’ll do if they get busy? Would you bow to pressure to pitch in with the attitude that maybe some day this business will be successful and these Sundays are an investment in future profits that will someday be your family’s?

Would you do it even if, before the restaurant opened, there was a nightmare of a showdown that ranks among the very worst days of your entire life when you were told that you will have no role in the business and that someone would rather pull the plug on the whole thing than let you be involved? But who now accepts your free weekly labor (and let’s not forget your 4-year-old daughter’s time, too) because he’s up a creek?

To say “I’m torn” is ludicrous. I’m torn, in every one of my obligations and in every emotion I have about them.

This past weekend was even worse than usual. (HOW COULD IT GET ANY WORSE? you ask? Oh, please. Nobody knows the fuckitude I’ve seen.) Saturday night the restaurant was giving a percentage of its sales to Haiti earthquake relief, and Sunday there was a mother-loving church service being held in a 15,000-seat arena three blocks from the restaurant. (Honestly, a church service in the same venue where the Wiggles and monster trucks have appeared, though not at the same time? Sometimes I completely get why atheists sneer.)

Tink and I got the restaurant around 6 on Saturday just as things were getting hairy. I didn’t have her Sunday bag of crayons, Hello Kitty coloring books and Spiderman dudes, and there really isn’t anywhere else to put her so I can keep an eye on her no matter where I am, so she sat at the bar with an old guy who comes in for dinner three nights a week, drinks a bottle of wine and then takes a cab to the upstate’s premier titty bar.

I worked well past Tink’s bedtime and once again, we had nothing to show for it. Actually, Tink left with $4. Mr. Phil asked her if she had a piggy bank and then gave her some money. I demurred politely but wanted to come right out and ask him, “Won’t you need those singles where you’re going tonight?”

She and Chuck ate Taco Bell after he got home. You know. Quality time.

She was a little, uh, off her game Sunday. As I was showering, crying and composing this post in my head, she came in the bathroom and told me we had to put her jammies in the wash. I asked her why. No reason. They just need to go in the wash.

Fuck.

She’s had more accidents than I’d like lately, and who’s to say why. Could be developmental, a stage, nothing to worry about or her reaction to an irregular family life. I’m frankly too tired to make more out of it than I should, which I guess is a blessing in disguise. But an accident on Sunday morning as I’m getting ready to go there when I should be here … it was more than I could take.

I yelled and then cried some more and scared her, of course. And then when I saw the two damp, wadded tissues on top of the underwear on the chair of her room, I laughed. It was her first deliberate attempt to pull one over on me. I think she did all she could and then realized she was going to have to fess up. It was a good first try.

Did that happen for a reason? Was it comic relief? A bit of much-needed perspective? Is this phase of my life two pee-soaked tissues, something sucky and inconvenient, but which, too, shall pass?

Would you be outraged that demands on your time by necessity means demands on your preschool daughter’s time? Because in a further slap in the face, I can’t ask anyone to watch Tink on Sunday – that’s the day everyone spends with their family.

Or should I see this as a cool adventure as Tink sometimes does? Should I take a special pride in the fact that she’ll have memories and experiences that make my white-bread childhood pale in comparison, even if it means those memories will involve making chit chat with elderly perverts?

Or, since my husband’s hands are tied and he can’t say it, should I be the one to say, “Enough”? Enough. My family comes first.

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When I moved to South Carolina, I had neither a job nor a child. I thought we timed the move impeccably – we expected to travel within two months of our October move. October 2005 is when the wait for families approved by China went from Tidy and Predictable to You’re Just Fucking With Us Now, Aren’t You? Since we did know we’d be on deck in the coming months, it didn’t make sense for me to look for a job.

It ended up being six months. Six very long, agonizing months. I had recently given up everything that gave me my identity – my career, a paycheck, our first house, which we loved, a city I had lived in most of my life, a very independent, carefree childless life – and I was foundering badly. Without an outside-the-house job, I had no opportunity to meet people. None. I came down here knowing three people – my mother, her boyfriend and my husband, who moved six months earlier, enabling us to “make certain” this was a good idea before we put our house on the market. I was a stay-at-home mom, but without a child.

After we brought Tink home, I was gut-punched by how much I both loved her and loved being her mother. I waited a long time to start a family, mostly on the mistaken assumption that I was too selfish of my time to enjoy parenting, so I better wring all the fun I could out of life before becoming burdened in that way. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We decided we’d do what we had to to live on one income, at least until kindergarten.

Adopting an older baby is an exercise in attachment, but unfortunately there’s no one formula that works for every child. I’ve documented some of our attachment challenges previously, but basically we learned quickly to avoid “adult confusion” by not allowing anyone else to feed, change or care for Tink for a few months. It worked beautifully – we soon had a very happy, secure child. But that’s only the first half of attaching. At some point you have to leave so that they can learn you’ll always come back. At some point, there needs to be some sort of babysitter/daycare/school/nanny situation to complete the attachment process.

A confluence of five factors led me to think about a situation for Tink. First the general manager at the restaurant where Chuck was working quit. The owner jumped at the opportunity to save the better part of $100k and decided to let Chuck handle the management of the entire place – and be the chef. That meant many seven-day weeks and 14-hour days. And my first experience as a sometimes-single mom.

I started getting e-mails about Tink’s “sisters” heading to day care, as most of the moms from our travel group worked. They by and large reported positive experiences.

I also started hearing more about what’s called Mother’s Morning Out here in the South. MMOs are almost exclusively in church settings, a fact that gave me pause. We were downright church-hostile at this point – didn’t attend, didn’t believe, didn’t have any use for it, but thanks y’all – but it seemed everywhere I turned people were giving me advice about various MMO programs. One recommendation came from a woman whom I still have not met, to this day. Someone my mom works with put my name on a waiting list for MMO at her church. She told my mom it was a fabulous program and a wonderful church and that these spots are not easy to get at all.

We had purchased a house in a neighborhood of empty-nesters and retirees. We knew this at the time but we bought it from a friend of a friend and got a deal on it. We figured we’d move as soon as we decided where exactly we wanted to be. (And then the restaurant happened and now we’re screwed and won’t be moving for a long time. Haahaaa!) As disappointing as it is for me, it’s worse for Tink. There are no children in the neighborhood; no one to play with close by. I needed to find her some friends.

Then at a party I met a social worker who does home studies for adopting families. She told me about another mom who recently came home from China. I called her to introduce myself and arrange a playdate and one of the first things she asks me is if Tink is enrolled in any sort of MMO and that I should consider the one at her church – the same program where I was already on the list.

I didn’t know anything about this church, other than the fact that it’s Episcopal, but the whole household was growing worn out and frustrated from Chuck’s schedule. I decided to go down and take a look.

I loved what I saw, from the facilities to the children playing and working. The assistant director we spoke with knew all the kids by name. But the best part was the announcement that the MMO and preschool had merged and were operating under one director, with a curriculum for each age. The united preschool was accredited, and kids as young as Tink’s age (the Young Toddler class) would be learning from carefully considered lesson plans.

This wasn’t babysitting in a church basement. I could get on board with this.

The problem was, the only slot open was for Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Two mornings a week felt like a nice break for me, a time when I could grocery shop or clean or look for freelance gigs and actually focus on the task at hand. Three mornings felt like I was outsourcing my child’s care. I dithered – guilted – over it for a few days and then took the spot.

And that is how it came to be that I sent my 14-month-old baby off to school. When I wasn’t even working. And she couldn’t even walk yet.

Tink had a rough first week. Rather, she had a rough 10 to 15 minutes each of the three mornings that week but then had a ball. There were two other children in the class who weren’t walking yet, but within weeks they were all walking. (Yay positive peer pressure! ) I packed her a lunch that she ate completely, without fail. I would bring a bottle of milk with me when I picked her up (a bottle), which she downed like a thirsty frat boy before passing out in her carseat. Her school bag had a new “art project” in it about every day.

I felt like I was back in school, too. I threw myself into every volunteer opportunity that presented itself – selling lobsters, making snacks for school parties, reading books in class, hiding Easter egg, preparing a whole Lunar New Year celebration, complete with homemade noodles.

Almost all of my friends in South Carolina are people I met through preschool. I am still close with other moms from that Young Toddler class. It’s through them that I figured out Greenville, got recommendations from everything from doctors to free kids’ activities, and basically decided that I like living here. These women were role models for me for how to be a mom, how to balance work and parenting, how to carve out the type of family life I wanted to create. If it weren’t for the constant stream of birthday parties, I’d have no social life at all. It might just be that I needed preschool more than Tink did.

I couldn’t have known how fortuitous the decision to send her to school would be.

Chuck ended his tenure of being someone else’s employee the next year. For months his “job” consisted of a few hours here and there meeting with landlords, developers, architects and contractors. I again debated preschool. How could I justify sending her when neither of us was really working? We decided that since we didn’t know when the restaurant would open exactly and when I’d come upon a good freelance opportunity and that she liked school so much anyway, that we’d send her again three mornings a week. This was her 2-year-old classroom, where she turned out to be the first to master potty-training and where she met more friends we see regularly outside school.

So now a pattern was set. Shortly after she started 3-year-old kindergarten, I got a fantastic writing assignment that lasted from September through December. (And Chuck’s schedule was back to the hellishness we first experienced in 2006.) For the fall semester, I put her in a Chinese program the other two days of the week, but this year – K4 – is the first year she’s attending her preschool five days. It was hard to adjust to her being gone all week. I missed those every-other-days with my little buddy, those days we don’t have to be up, dressed and out of the house by a certain time. I had to remind myself that it’s only four hours, and that it won’t hurt to get her ready for kindergarten.

So, yeah. My daughter’s 4, and this is her fourth year of school. And I’m not bringing in any income, and I sometimes feel like that’s what I should feel more guilty about and less so the amount of time I don’t spend with my daughter.

My daughter recognizes all the letters and digits and can write every letter. She can write her first and last names and any word I spell for her. She can sight-read a dozen or so words. She can do very basic addition and subtraction. She has learned songs I didn’t know and learned to share and get along with others. That wouldn’t have happened at home or with a sitter.

Tink has never had a regular babysitter, mostly because Chuck and I don’t have many chance to go places in the evening but also because when we do go somewhere, we take Tink with us. I have a hard time rationalizing paying for a babysitter when I feel that our child care budget is already being spent on school.

In July a friend of my mom’s asked my mom how often Tink spends the night. My mom told her that, in fact, Tink would be spending the night for the first time when I would be in Chicago for BlogHer. This woman was shocked – there had barely been a weekend she didn’t “keep” (that’s what they call it here) her granddaughter since she was born. I’m no anti-babysitting martyr. I just don’t feel comfortable being away from Tink any more than I am. My mom sees Tink plenty – it’s just not alone, at her house. I’m not working, for Pete’s sake. The least I can do is put my daughter to bed every night.

Are you still with me? Wondering what’s motivating all this? Yesterday on Twitter I read that another blogger might be sending her son to preschool. This blogger had written a “why my son has a nanny” post a year ago, and I got to thinking about how different this 2-year-old’s life is about to become, but also how different his mom’s life will be. These choices we make for our kids change our lives as well, bringing us into contact with people we might not meet ordinarily and force us to become friends with the parents of the kids our kids play well with. Preschool’s no small thing for anyone.

I would have had no way of knowing this back when I was a Greenville newbie, but Tink’s school is one of the most affluent in town. When the restaurant opened, our biggest supporters came from the school and church. They would ask us excitedly when the restaurant was opening, and now they report back to me how much they enjoyed their recent visit. I don’t think a day goes by when I’m picking up, dropping off or volunteering at school that someone doesn’t mention the restaurant. We of course see other demographics come through our doors, but the Christ Church family is our base. If it weren’t for these loyal customers and friends, the restaurant would have folded last winter during the worst of the recession.

I’m sure there are those who either envy or resent my ability to send my daughter to preschool. There have been times we didn’t know where the money would come from but it always appeared. There are probably some who think I’m living vicariously through my daughter, with all my school involvement. We’ve heard the worst things that could be said about this situation, said directly to us. Someone told my husband that I’m lazy and entitled, that I’ve become the sort of woman I used to despise. As hurtful as that was, I still stand by our choices. The choice to send a child to preschool (or to employ a nanny) is usually part of a larger, holistic plan for the entire family; it’s rarely just about the child. And I know there are women who make child-care choices based on what accommodates their pedicures, lunches and workouts.

That’s not my reality. As long as my husband works 100 hours a week, I’m not working outside the home, requiring Tink to be in day care all day. But I still need a break and she still needs friends to play with. Preschool’s about the best choice we’ve ever made.

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