This morning I took the baby for a walk in her stroller, and we headed over to Carpenter Woods, a glorious patch of wooded paths near our home. These woods keep us happy, and often I drop Samira at the bus, and head into the woods with the baby, for the best way to start the day that I know. My neighborhood is often pulled into the dogs-versus-everyone else debate over these woods, with dog owners claiming that they just must walk their dogs off leash, and others saying, well, it's against the law, please don't.

I've never paid too much attention. Dogs never bothered me; my best friend is a dog owner. I figured there was room for all.

Until this morning, when at 50 yards inside the woods, I heard a man screaming at me to guard my baby as his huge monster of a dog rushed our way and before I could get in front of the stroller and block the dog's path he had already reached the baby's stroller, and she was screaming.

Amelia likes dogs. She loves Max, who hangs out in front of the High Point. She likes all the really well trained dogs she meets. Too bad she had to meet this one.

His owner, too. In our neighborhood there's a Town Watch, and we're taught to be mindful of descriptive details of people who break the law, so we can report them to the police. That's the Town Watch strategy for trying to cut down on the break-ins and muggings that happen with more and more frequency here. We're told to call 911 immediately when we see anything happening; even if the police can't get here, it's part of the electronic records they keep. As the attacking-dog event unfolded, all I could think was: middle-aged white male, tall, brownish hair, wearing dull green polo shirt.

The baby is okay. I calmed her down and we returned to the sidewalk to continue our walk, not wanting to deal with a huge array of off-leash dogs, including two others who rushed toward us a few minutes later, only to turn away at the last minute (in the ownership of two men; I told them it was the law to keep their dogs leashed, and they snarled at me too: was this off leash dog protest day? I swear I've never seen this much dog action here before).

The worst part of it: the man yelled at me. Yes, he really did. I couldn't believe it. I told him, as he struggled, to get his dog back onto the leash, as I stood between the dog and the baby, that it was illegal to walk dogs off leash in Carpenter Woods. Maybe he always speaks in a raised, mean voice. He did actually snarl to me that " everyone does it."

And you know what, in a neighborhood that tries to be civil, where people really do try to live together well, to cooperate, and to build community spirit, this man with he off leash dog that attacked my baby's stroller never apologized. Not once.

That's when you have four different types of baby gates, and you can't get any of them to fit the crazy mismatched stairwells of your 150-year-old house.

Which is where I am right now. And I'm the mechanical one in my family.

I need the baby gate fairy godmother, the one who swoops down on your home, measuring tape and drill in hand, get those gates to behave, yes, the ones that come in the box with 5000 screws, and yes, the ones that come in hard plastic that doesn't bend to the whims of this aged house, to the walls that don't quite line up, and makes it all go away.

That's one. We're back to lists.

Two: today, my dear friend, whom I won't name in case her boss reads my blog, which is very unlikely, came over at 9.30, with a coffee and two pastries in hand, and didn't leave till 2.30.

Exactly: we played hooky, did no work, and more amazingly, spent five hours talking. Can I tell you how revived I feel? Can I tell you I haven't spent this long catching up with a friend, enough hours to really get into stuff, to circle back, to cry, to laugh, in I-can't-remember-how-long?

Can I tell you I feel like the luckiest woman in the world?

Three: people I know are chatting about Katie Allison Granju's Babble.com article, The Overparenting Crisis, in which in her trademark voice of Tennessee bombast, Katie reminds us of what many of us know: not to get sucked in to the culture of competition. Not to worry too much. Not to keep comparing our kids to others.

Resisting competition isn't just a politically progressive stance. That would make it out to be too external, although it's a worthy cause to critique the crazy levels of competition out there, and the article has its share of moms who admit they went into debt to buy a high-end stroller (although I often wonder where these moms are, because I've never met one, but perhaps I travel in very different circles, where the competition is not about material objects but about other forms of cultural status).

Resisting the competition is important because it's the only way to stay sane. If you're sucked in to social competition, you can't win, you're always unsteadily in the game, you're always waiting to be upended since of course, there's always someone with more. Always.

I've always believed this, but with a delayed child, I'm learning all the more to keep my eyes on my own mat, as they say in yoga. I'm learning not to look at other children and compare, because it only makes me sad. It takes my focus off the amazing micro-strides that the baby is making. She can bend her knees. She made a "mmm" sound today. She's a tad closer to pulling herself up to sitting. Perhaps having a child who lives at one far end of the spectrum makes it easier to opt out of the craziness. Maybe that's a really good thing.

Four. My resolution, after rereading: call in some reinforcements on the baby gate situation. Now. Will report back.

Cross-posted at MomsRising. So glad I squeezed in a moment to scan the NY Times Op-Ed page this morning, in between puring cereal, warming up soup for Samira's lunchbox and handing the baby a sippy-cup of milk (and let me tell you, if the NYT were based on mothers' reading it over busy morning routines, they would not publish on those hug oversized pages).

Lucky me, because I got to start my day by reading Gwen Ifill's response to Don Imus's racist and sexist remark about the Rutgers women's basketball team (which for anyone who doesn't follow the NCAA, rose from near obscurity and a roster of younger players to play the championship game and claim the #2 spot).

Here's the link, for as long it holds.

I'm posting it here because I believe in the need for vision, big vision, humane vision. We're doing political work as mothers. We're seeking policy change to help those who care for women, men, families, workplaces, and children, and from that, we end up reaching though the breadth of social and human issues. Part of what happens when you take parenting, caretaking, and mothering seriously is that literally, you start to care. The 'care' in caretaking jumps out at you, whether you are male or female. You start to care about how you fit into our society, how society fits together, how society cares (or doesn't care) for all it's members.

And that's where Ifill's article comes in. She's offered up the most breathtakingly, humanely sublime example of caring I've read in a quite a while.

After discussing just what's wrong with Don Imus' shock radio pronouncement (and I will not repeat it here), she talks about the way he referred to her as "the cleaning lady." Yes, as in "the cleaning lady who gets to tell the news." It's beyond horrid. By mid-article, though, she tells us this is not just about her. She beautifully and poignantly mentions the shell, the carapace, that women develop so that all the barbs don't get under our skin, don't debilitate us, and notes that black women in particular develop this shell.

The Rutgers women though: they are kids. They deserve better. Ifill writes about all the young girls she meets, the ones who look up to her, the ones without a voice.

Then she calls bullying for what it is, and perhaps this, too, is what I'm responding to, having been following all the bullying of women that is the new normal, whether they are politicians like Pelosi and Clinton, normal everyday mothers, or young women playing their hearts out on the basketball court. She calls it bullying. She names it, and then replaces it with vision, love, critique of injustice, and yes, care:

"So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots."

Gwen Ifill: Thank you.

This morning I've been emailing with Rae Pica, author of the book A Running Start: How Play, Physical Activity and Free Time Create a Successful Child, whom I've never met, of course, but whose book I adore.

I struggle with the rigor vs play conundrum. I do. If there were a 12-step program for parents whose instincts to hyper-train and hyper-educate their parents constantly conflict with their purer values of letting kids grow up without anxiety and stress, I'd be there. Hell, I'd be leading the damn thing.

I constantly keep at bay that voice that says, "If you don't do all the right things now, your child will not be successful, ever, at anything, and it will all be your fault" and then lists all the classes and resources I am ignoring. I admit it, it's a constant battle. Some people battle drugs, alcohol, or eating disorders, and I, a Juilliard trained classical musician and holder of a PhD, battle the anxiety of rigor.

And I resist, with the help of book's like this A Running Start, that helps my value voice. I'm sure that if Rae came down to Philadelphia and saw all the kids running through our linked and open backyards, screaming about going to China, or yelling directions about how to accomplish the latest spy mission, or (my recent favorite), figuring out how to set up a home-made zipline from the tree house, she would pat me on the back and say, Miriam, it's really okay that your daughter isn't a violin prodigy. And I would laugh, because all of this sounds so petty and ridiculous when put to words.

So many stresses about competition and achievement haunt our generation, especially those of us who have made alternate choices about what success means (by the way, I just saw an add for this book, The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, which I look forward to reading (the Amazon blurb does say it's good for men, too).  I'm trying hard, as others are, to really show other values to our kids. I grew to adulthood thinking that school and success always had to come with a very traditional form of rigor and attention, and that they must of necessity be accompanied by stress, that's just the  way things are. If there's something good I can give my daughter, it's that work can be about love, that abstract fears of judgment can be ignored, and that stress doesn't have to be a normal part of life.

ps. I just realized that Rae has a website, chock full of info: Moving and Learning.  I think that this is the parenting companion and corollary to my other recent fave site, Equally Shared Parenting.