Earlier today I read Lily the first four chapters of Stuart Little, and I was going to write about that--and about how she keeps asking me questions like, "But is Madeline real?" as she tries to figure out the line between truth and fiction (like the rest of us, I suppose), but then as I was sort of absent-mindedly sketching it all out in my head, I had another thought.

A close friend who lives very far away and has been reading this blog sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago that said, among many other things, "But I suppose it's not really much of a reflection of your life at all," about the blog, and she is right. If something I write here is about my life, it is one scene from a day of thousands, one eye cast upon one incident or thought or conversation, in a day that contained multitudes. In that way, it sometimes feels disingenuous to write about my life here, although of course it is often my chosen subject matter. But what occurred to me today is that it is an especially inaccurate, lopsided way to write about parenting.

So much of what I read about parenting annoys me in some way, and the way it most frequently annoys me is that it feels dishonest, even phony or stagy. And when I was plotting out my little sketch about me and Lily sitting in the reclining chair, each having our own experience with Stuart, I realized I was doing it too. Not that the experience of reading Stuart Little with Lily was not special or memorable, for it was. But it is also true that as I was reading, I was thinking about the New Yorker article I just read about the writing of Stuart Little, and trying to remember something funny Katharine White said about one of the book's critics, and that I was using this ability I have developed thanks to much less enjoyable books that I am sometimes forced to read to keep reading out loud while maintaining a totally separate train of thought of my own.

This, of course, flies in the face of "being in the moment" with your child, the holy grail of modern parenting, and a state which, in theory, I totally espouse. However, I also think that caring for an infant is often stultifyingly boring, and spending hours on end with a four-year-old sometimes can be viewed as a form of torture. While it did not surprise me to learn that the sound of a newborn wailing is sometimes piped into cells as an effective means of torture in prison camps, if I believed in torture I'd suggest instead an overtired preschooler whining on a loop while being, say, treated to a special lunch in a nice restaurant or being bought new shoes.

I could go on, elaborating on my theory that playing Go Fish or Chutes and Ladders as an adult qualifies as an actual glimpse into hell, or how much I loathe the fact that I have to change my clothes pretty much every time I pick up Annika, which quadruples the laundry and forces me to break out certain items of clothing that predate the Clinton administration, but that is as boring and stagy, in its own way, as the "precious moments" that I so want to avoid.

I guess my point is that I am setting myself a kind of a challenge in writing about parenting this week, and in general. Is there a way to encapsulate both the fact that Lily said, as we closed the Stuart Little book, "I really love that his family acts like he's just like the rest of them even though he's actually a mouse. Which is really weird," as well as the fact that her companionship can stimulate the intense, desperate need for an alcoholic beverage? The fact that Annika can throw her arms around me and plan an open kiss on my cheek that brings tears to my eyes and makes me feel that I need never do another thing in my life and that carrying her around the apartment when she wimpers at being put down makes me feel like brain cells are actually dying as the life I want to be living sails by like a boat on the Hudson?

I guess we shall see. But I do think it's important to paint as complete a picture as possible, for my own sake as well as for the sake of anyone reading.