K.C. Willivee's Blog

Once upon a time, K.C. Willivee thought she could be the perfect mom. But when reality intruded, she ended up with a better story....

The piece was originally published on http://redtri.com. You can read it in its entirety here:
http://redtri.com/how-i-learned-to-le...

I hope you enjoy it and I welcome your comments!



I wanted to be a perfect mom.

And what perfect meant to me might be different than what it means to others. I wasn’t looking for an immaculate home and gourmet dinners on the table, but for shared adventures and infinite patience and somehow always the time to read just one more story. Perfection meant following every rule, every single time, to optimize my daughter M’s physical, intellectual, emotional, moral, artistic and athletic development.

So when I had a chance to quit work and move to Puerto Rico for my partner’s job transfer, I was thrilled. All the competing demands and complications of my career eliminated in one fell swoop, leaving me with my family as my primary focus. M was 30 months old and I had been back at work since she was 12 weeks. But no more. Bliss!


Spoiler alert: I didn’t turn out to be very perfect.

But I really did try.

Everything seemed so romantic when we first moved to Puerto Rico as a family. But then my daughter and I came back, and her father had to stay. Not so romantic anymore...

The piece was originally published on http://www.parent.co. You can read it in its entirety here:
https://www.parent.com/keeping-her-fa...
I hope you enjoy it!


“As I get bigger and bigger, I get sadder.” The words rocked me, and I turned to give my full attention to my toddler daughter, M.

“Why are you so sad, honey?” I asked, enfolding her in my arms.

She told me that she misses her father, V, who is overseas fulfilling a job contract. We were able to maintain frequent visitation at first, but couldn’t keep that pace up, the realities of both time and money intruding. Her comment came at the end of our first visit in three months, the day after he left.

For me, this was a consign-the-clothes, pass-up-the-pedicures, walk-to-work kind of moment. Our toddler had just matter-of-factly shared her suffering, adding her assumption that it would simply continue as she continues to grow.

Of course we could do all those things and tighten our belts in a myriad of other ways, and none of that would make the loss of his salary viable.

We miss him terribly. But when we finally had him here for a visit, he was a stranger to our routines in a way that made his presence feel almost like an intrusion. He didn’t know that we read two bedtime stories before brushing teeth and the rest after, that we use a hooded towel whether or not we’ve shampooed her hair, that she is only allowed one flavored milk per day.........

This essay is about one of the most poignant experiences I have had with my daughter. It was originally published on http://www.parent.co. You can read it in its entirety here:
https://www.parent.co/mom-mermaids-ca...
I hope you enjoy it!



I was burying my daughter’s legs on the beach when inspiration struck. “Look, you’re a mermaid!” I exclaimed, fashioning a crude tail out of the sand. And that’s when M broke my heart.

“But, Mom, mermaids can’t be brown.” She wasn’t even angry, my little half “pink” (as she calls me), half Puerto Rican child. She was simply telling me the way of the world as her toddler eyes saw it.

I have seen her scream for an hour in response to the perceived injustice of being denied a third popsicle. But third popsicles exist in the world of possibilities after all. Brown mermaids evidently do not. Hence this tired resignation, this easy acceptance of something unacceptable.

I was stunned. Certainly nobody in her personal life has ever said anything to her that would convey this kind of attitude. We lived in a diverse and warmly affirming community in Decatur, Georgia, where she went to a diverse and warmly affirming school surrounded by diverse and warmly affirming teachers at all levels of experience.

When we moved from Decatur, it was to the site of the mermaid debacle – the island of Puerto Rico. Here, surrounded by a loving extended family, where she and her father were the ethnic majority, she still somehow voiced this opinion of otherness. More than otherness, of being less than.

In my hiatus from writing romantic suspense and my focus instead on publishing parenting essays, I've found that my creativity feels enhanced in all areas. Far from losing focus as I feared, I have ideas on different topics flowing naturally as I work. And speaking of ideas, I recently published a post on http://redtri.com about some of the worst ideas I had for trying to entertain my toddler. You can read the rest of the piece here:
http://redtri.com/5-epic-disasters-tr...
I hope you enjoy it.

Last January my partner and I excitedly packed up our toddler daughter M for a job transfer. We were moving to Puerto Rico! We were sure that the future held exciting tropical adventures, sunset walks on the beach, and Facebook photos that would be the envy of everyone we knew. Fast forward a mere nine weeks and reality is sinking in. My partner works crazy hours. Bus service is unreliable and we only have the one car that he takes to work. There are no playgrounds within walking distance. Here's what 14 hours a day in an unairconditioned apartment with a 3-year-old who no longer took naps could look like.........

This essay really isn't about lack of cooperation from my daughter; it's about the lack of cooperation from my own body in shedding that baby weight! It was originally published on http://www.parent.co. You can read it in its entirety here:
https://www.parent.co/3-ways-i-promot....
I hope you enjoy it!

When the sonographer told me I was having a girl, I was stunned. How could I, and the dozens of strangers who had stopped to comment, been so wrong about the size and shape of my baby bump? But a girl it was, an incomparable gift, now three years old and whose feminine identity I am tasked with molding.

To me, one of the most important aspects of this molding is promoting a healthy body image. Through thinking and muddling and talking with friends, I’ve settled on three main ways I’m going to do that. I’m sure when she’s 16, M will let me know where I got it wrong.

1 | Ditching the “us versus them” rhetoric

I wanted to like Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass.” I did like it at first, in fact. I would play it and dance with M in our underfurnished entryway. The local Y played it at their family festival. It became an anthem of body positivity that I was happy to enjoy. Over and over and over again.

All that came to a crashing halt one day when I selected the wrong version on YouTube and heard Megan cheerfully belt out a line about “skinny b****hes.”

Huh?

I looked it up after I heard that and learned that critics had raised this same point. Is it really positivity if it’s based on attacking other women for their shape? In my house, the answer to that question is no. People, regardless of gender, should not be shamed for their weight.

I’m not saying this because I’m skinny. I need to lose about 25 pounds. I feel a little bit of dread every time swimsuit season rolls around. I don’t try on clothes in stores, preferring just to buy them so that a glass of wine can ease the process.

If a magic spell turned us all into horses, I wouldn’t be prancing along daintily with ribbons streaming from my mane. I’d be pulling the Budweiser truck. When I ran two marathons in six weeks while taking a weight-training class and watching my calories, I wasn’t skinny. Back then, I was a big-legged runner. Now I’m a big-legged ex-runner with a knee injury.

I've been taking a small break from writing romantic suspense as my characters aren't cooperating with me. In the interim, I've turned to another subject in which I sometimes get poor cooperation: parenting a toddler!

This essay was originally published at https://motherwellmag.com. You can read the rest of the piece here:
https://motherwellmag.com/2017/02/28/...
I hope you enjoy it.

My three-year-old daughter M had been playing with her dolls for over an hour, giving them bottles, changing their clothes, gently patting them as she laid them down for afternoon naps. She asked if I could help pack their diaper bag. “Maybe you’ll be a mom when you grow up,” I said, tucking a plastic bottle into the side pocket.

Disappointment immediately flashed across her face. “No,” she said. “I want to be a surgeon.” And there was a bite to the way she said it.

“Well, actually, I’m a psychologist and a mom,” I shot back, unreasonably stung by her response. I admired her ambition, but at the same time I was saddened by her belief that motherhood and a career could not co-exist.

Because I was a psychologist, in practice for ten years before my partner’s job moved him to Puerto Rico and we embarked on a family adventure that had no place for both careers. For the first few months, it was a giddy ride of mother-daughter finger-painting projects, art creations with box tops and seashells, and ridiculously one-sided competitions with veteran mom bloggers (“I’ll see you your fake snow project and raise you an ice castle nestled in it”).

But within three months we became hampered by the practical realities of our living situation, in which our one car went off to work in the morning and my daughter and I did our daily errands on foot. My partner’s hours were a lot longer than either of us had expected, and so we wound up with a gender-stereotypical division of labor. And, as it turned out, there were just so many times I could walk down to the cleaners carrying a pile of men’s dress shirts in the rain before I started to feel diminished......

Spent much of the time curled up reading with the little one, adding the books to her 1000 Books Before Kindergarten log. We're at 834! She's so proud...and I am, too. And now back to the routine of more adult reading and writing for me, ha!

In a guest post on Urban Book Reviews, I talked a little more about the creation of The Wrong Man and I invite you to read those additional details here:

https://urbanbookreviewsrus.wordpress...

I'm pleased to be joining the Goodreads community as both a reader and a writer, and am looking forward to engaging discussions of my work and the work of others. I'd like to start by talking a little about my writing life. I started writing at a fairly young age and I think one of the best things I've learned is how to let go. Let go of characters who are unrealistic, of scenes that don't work, maybe even of whole books if need be (I have an unpublished novel that has a character with a Batman insignia gold tooth if you're curious about what I'm sparing you!). It's hard to look at your own writing and acknowledge that it's not something worth reading. But we owe it to ourselves, to readers, and to the craft of writing itself to be judicious about what we put out there. The Wrong Man isn't for everyone, and I don't flatter myself that everyone will like it. But for people for whom it's an enjoyable read, I'm pleased to be able to share it with you.