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I live in the land of green applesauce and blue butter.
It is a place from which I fly nightly on a yellow-lipsticked horse named Tulip with my two trusty sidekicks through azure clouds. We travel to faraway lands like Falicornia and Oklamyhoma. Sometimes we stay home and work diligently, my pint-sized assistants and I, to perform "heart-cracked" surgeries of the most serious kind. Other times, I work to carefully cultivate our garden of one glorious tomato or a springy lettuce leaf that appears after a springtime magic-planting fairy dance.

Through it all, I am christened daily by applesauce-and-banana hand pats, blessed every waking moment with the knowledge that I am doing something important with my life. After all, this is not only my life; it is my career. And though my job lacks any conventional definition, it is a position that I hold dearer than all things holy. I am, for lack of a better title, a mom.
Try explaining this to anyone who asks, "So, what do you do?"
In between caring for my four-and-seven-year-olds, I paint, write, teach, play housewife to my husband and act as zookeeper to our odd collection of rare species, including two woe-begotten dogs, a cross-eyed oversized tabby cat, a hamster named Hercules and a fish named Fluffy.
And, like all moms, I'm called on from time-to-time to help with messy but Very Important glue-and-Popsicle stick projects, to crawl through the mud on my belly to give an expert's opinion of doodle bugs, or to play the role of Gothem City architect with an array of empty cardboard boxes. These are the good days.

There, too, are the days when I open the door to my husband at 6 p.m. still wearing my terrycloth bathrobe, my face tear-stained and my eyes startled. The kids are spinning in the background, screeching Barney lyrics, reeling from the 43 or so chocolate kisses they snuck while I was passed out in the bedroom during their naptime. It was on such a day that I received in the mail a random clipping in an unmarked envelope that I knew to be from my mother.
It was a reprint of a Good Housekeeping article from the 1950s. It read like this:

"Greet him at the door in your nicest evening attire. Be sure to wear perfume. Hand him his favorite drink and slippers and let him have a few moments peace before the children greet him."

Yes, my mother did this and more. She was the quintessential stay-at-home mom. Of course she stayed home because it was what women in the 1950s did, but she also took her parenting to be her calling.
"Why

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