I’m sure I mentioned this opening sequence when “Handmade Nation” came to town last year, but now that I’m a video-embedding fool, I’ll share it again.

At 11 this morning, I threw myself down on the couch with a magazine, completely exhausted.

Sophie had been up at 6, shoving her face into mine and then, instead of climbing in for a cuddle, disappearing — which meant I had to roll out of bed and search for her. She gave me a hard time as I tried to alternate unpacking from a week’s vacation with entertaining her, and soon after that, Annabelle showed up, demanding breakfast and an agenda for the day.

Ray took off, returning mid-morning from the hardware store with a rented jackhammer and the goal of digging out the rusted stump of the basketball hoop that fell over in our driveway during a monsoon storm a summer or two ago. He’d never used a jackhammer, so not long after he’d begun, he was back at the hardware store, investing in a sledgehammer to dislodge the now-stuck jackhammer.

Meanwhile, inside the house, I was sorting piles and putting away toys — but not as quickly as the girls took them apart and got them out. Sophie emerged from the playroom in a Cookie Monster costume from a couple Halloweens back, and she and Annabelle raced across the (filthy) wood floors on a scooter intended for outdoor use only, narrowly avoiding hitting me several times. I managed to shower then announced it was time to go to the fabric-by-the-pound store, only to have Sophie announce there was no way that could happen til “Olivia” was over on TV.

At this point, I was feeling a little envious of Ray, slaving in the 110 degree heat — but alone.

I crashed on the couch with a copy of New York magazine. I’m not sure how I got the subscription — I suspect I wrote the wrong number on someone’s Girl Scout order form a while back — but I’ve been enjoying it, on the rare opportunities I’ve had to actually read it. It’s pathetic. I’m a newspaper editor with no time to read the daily paper. My New Yorker subscription is long gone. Even People‘s lapsed and I don’t see the point in renewing it. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a chance this weekend to check out the craft in the back of Parents, a magazine my mom signed me up for before Annabelle was born and which, for nine  years, has continued to show up every month.

You can barely see the unread piles of books and magazines in my house; they are obscured by laundry baskets filled with clothes, craft supplies and Important Papers I can’t find. Somewhere, there’s a Crock Pot I swear I’ll start using.

In short, I’m a disaster. Harried at work, even worse at home. Not sure what day of the week it is or what that noise is coming out of the air conditioner. Do I get enough quality time with my kids and husband? Of course not. And please, try not to notice that it’s been way too long since I had my eyebrows waxed. Whatever you do, don’t tell Ray I was up at midnight blogging, wasting precious moments that I could have used for sleeping to have the energy to chase the kids tomorrow.

Yes, I’m a mess, but never once in the nine years and one week I’ve been a parent has it occurred to me to to ask whether or not I’m  happy. Until this morning at 11, when I opened a magazine while the girls watched Olivia try to open a lemonade stand.

The cover of New York magazine had a pronouncement: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.”

My first reaction: jealousy. Great headline, good concept. Very counter-intuitive. Kinda ballsy. All the things I look for as an alt weekly editor, and all the button-pushing I try for in memoir writing, whether I’m doing it or teaching it. Honesty tends to be the best policy when you’re writing about yourself, and with the mom-oir genre, you really want to let it all hang out. Go ahead. Say that you resented little Sophie when she deprived you of sleep; tell the world you let Annabelle stay up til 11:30 on a week night.

But admit that parenting makes you unhappy? That one really caught me off guard.

Slumped on the couch, anticipating a trip to the hot, smelly remnant store with two whiny kids in suburban Phoenix when I once spent my Saturdays deciding which block of Manhattan or L.A. or D.C. to explore with my girlfriends, I read the story and asked myself the question.

The answer: No. I am not unhappy. I am exhausted, frustrated, sometimes disappointed (mostly in my own failures) and often surly, but I am one happy camper, damnit.

And this, I must tell you, surprises no one as much as it surprises me.

I think I was born depressed. I don’t remember a time I wasn’t anxious as a child, and it’s painful to watch Annabelle approach fourth grade with a touch of the trepidation I had at that age. No one was medicating kids in the 7os, so I suffered in silence and did just about nothing about it til I was 30 — engaged, employed and bone-shaking miserable.

The psychiatrist suggested Prozac. Would I have to take it forever? I asked. She was honest. We don’t know how it works, she said. For some people, it flips a switch. You stop taking it, you still feel better.

I took it for a while. I felt better. I would have continued, but I wanted to get pregnant. So I stopped. And I braced myself, waiting for the dark clouds to return. Oddly, they never did — even when I couldn’t get pregnant, even when I had a miscarriage, even when I did get pregnant, even when I was a new mom, even when work got really hard, even when I bickered with my husband.

Even when I had a second child, and this one had Down syndrome and needed open heart surgery.

I’m not saying that I was dancing a jig every day, but I was always able to get out of bed. I didn’t spontaneously weep at the dinner table. I could breath. I was okay.

I’d even say I was happy. I am happy.

I do know that I’m one of those sick-o people who can’t function unless I’m really busy. So the working mom thing — though infuriating, and I’ll admit that last month I warned several colleagues at a staff meeting that anyone who says the working mom thing works is a liar — is a god-send for me. The only times I feel the depression peeking in is when I’m on vacation, but vacations with kids don’t count. Too hectic.

So maybe I’m too busy to be unhappy? Maybe. But I prefer to twist it around, to think that the writer of the New York mag piece, along with all the people in the studies she dutifully researched, are confusing being busy with being unhappy.

Really, folks, buck up. Whoever said that parenthood — specifically in touch economic times, particularly in single family households or double-income ones — was going to be easy? No one told me it would be. Raising little people is an honor and a privilege and it’s also by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m quite sure I’m not even doing it right.

Maybe it’s the Prozac (still, after a dozen years without it) talking. Maybe I’m just jealous of someone else’s good story. Or perhaps it’s that snotty voice in the back of my head that says from time to time, “You think you have it rough? Try raising a kid who’s got more therapists than friends, a low IQ, and a patch on her heart that could give way.”

It could also be the thought of a dear friend with daughters almost the same age as my own. This friend battled cancer several years ago, and one night not long ago, tipsy at a backyard BBQ, she told me through tears how much she treasures each day, explaining why she gets up at 5:30 in the morning to brush her sweet girls’ hair into perfect braids and dress them in matching outfits, then be at every Brownie meeting, every birthday party, every school event, and teach them to cook and sew and be good people even when she’s been at work all day herself. When I get frustrated, I think of her.

Most likely, it’s the sight of Sophie, asleep on the couch tonight, snoring like a linebacker, holdng tight to her Piglet as I carried her to bed. Or the feeling of Annabelle’s hair as I rubbed her head, singing both of us to sleep.

Tomorrow, those girls will wake up too early and drive me nuts. I can’t wait.

New goal for this year: make a stop-gap video. I’ve become a total slut for it. And now that I have figured out how to embed video (not to mention use a glue gun and an embroidery hoop, though not at the same time), I’m getting cocky. So watch out.

Meantime, enjoy this, which I first watched courtesy of Frances & Smeeks (for some real eye candy, check out Georganne’s blog archives) and can’t stop playing.

Grieves & Budo “Cloud Man” Music Video from Jesse Brown on Vimeo.

I had fun leading a memoir writing workshop at Changing Hands in Tempe earlier this month, and the store was gracious enough to ask me to do another.

Sign ups are underway for a workshop the evening of August 26. Details here.

Several months ago, Ray had an apple tree planted in the front yard, in honor of his mom. The name is “Anna Apple,” which seemed appropriate since Annabelle was the apple of her grandmother’s eye.

But it wasn’t until I was chopping the apples up for pie that I suddenly realized that Annabelle’s inadvertantly named for Ray’s mom, Patricia Ann. I stopped at the kitchen sink and stared down at the apples, wondering if it ever occurred to my MIL. I bet it did.

How could this have escaped me for all these years?

The pie could have been better — the birds ate a lot of the apples off the trees (who knew you need to harvest apples in July in Phoenix? I was waiting for fall) and even with store bought crust things weren’t perfect.

But (knock wood) I can try again next year.

(The title of this post should not be confused with my recent realization that I really need to buy Annabelle a copy of the book, “Where Did I Come From?”)

Until last week, I’d never seen Sophie burst into tears and run from the room sobbing. Now I’ve seen it. Over a whoopee cushion.

To be fair, the whoopee cushion was brand-new. Sophie asked Annabelle to sit on it at the dinner table. Her sister obliged, but didn’t sit hard enough, apparently. Then she sat too hard.

Pop.

I had no idea a whoopee cushion could literally explode. It looked like a cartoon bullet had ripped through it. Sophie was devastated. I was speechless. But Annabelle was resourceful. She reached into the bag holding the duct tape she’d just received as a birthday gift, requested scissors and — ta da! Better than new.

Remember that great irrigation picture from a week or so ago? Look what landed in my in box yesterday — titled “Supergirl.”

This photo was taken three-quarters of the way up “A” Mountain in Tempe. Maybe Ray should quit his day job…. Oh wait, now that reporters are required to take their own photos and video, this is his day job. In any case, this makes me want to invest in a good camera, but of course this photo is about more than that.

You can’t take a photo like this one without a connection to your subject.

The other day, Ray was jousting with the girls in the pool as I watched from the steps, wincing not only because I don’t like getting splashed in the face but because, of course, every small action — in my paranoid, terrified mind — leads to injury and tragedy.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that in 20 minutes that afternoon, Ray had played longer and harder with the girls than my father ever played with my sister and me, over the course of our entire childhoods. My dad doesn’t read this blog, so I’m comfortable saying that here, although I will still add that he’s a great dad in many ways I didn’t realize when I was almost 9, or even when I was almost 39.

I’m not a big jouster, either, I get that from my dad, although I wouldn’t say our parenting styles bear any sort of resemblance beyond a tendency to fall asleep on the couch too early in the evening.

I’ve also never known my father to take a photograph.

(With thanks to Bridget for the suggestion.)