11:04 p.m. Writing. Writing online. Writing true stuff. Writing often. Trying to entertain, rather than to purge.

I think I could go mad wondering why I'm doing this. Writing here. Writing simply, rather than twisting tumbling modern interpretive and i pound! out! my! rage.

There are so many things to write about. There are so many, many ways to say it. Is this art?

I've been reading a certain kind of journal entry lately that is just plain heartbreaking. Over and over again, I've been reading the journals of young women who are in passionate love relationships with younger men (or women). They have a difficult time coping, and I really feel sorry and worried about them.

I mean, these women are really in love. And the love objects are really young -- and these women (let's call them mommies) try every trick in the book to try to amuse or satisfy their beloveds (let's call them kids), and they just about always fail.

Really intelligent, competent women are reduced to tears every day in homes across America. The little love of their lives is sleeping peacefully, finally, but the frazzled mom is too wound up to rest. Each day she fails a little bit more. She looks in the beautiful eyes of her child and she believes she sees disappointment.

Nobody tells you, before you take on the toughest job in the world, that you can not possibly succeed. There is no perfect way to feed a child, keep a house nice with a child in it, amuse a child, do right by a child. Each day you will fail, and fail mightily, and tomorrow you will fail again.

We are not raised in this country to feel comfortable with the loosey-goosey, old-bedroom slipper concept of amiable failure. Of a series of days in which progress is made by going forward one step, backwards (while spilling juice) three steps, and then repeating until college.

Between the one- and two-minute commercials and the half-hour sitcoms, you have perhaps two hundred examples in any given day of people who are performing "better" than you when it comes to child rearing. Patient, clean, happy. You look away from the TV and you see squirmy, wormy, ornery. And smeared.

I would love to visit and help. I would tell you that it goes by quickly if you stop measuring. I might suggest that you could look at your life right now as if it is a party -- which it is -- and realize that there is no peace, no calm, no rules except: Keep the food coming and the trash emptied. Try to enjoy your guests while you have them.

You may sense that your own self is getting lost in the struggle, but I can assure you that it's not lost -- it's hiding. It's a statistical fact that women who have children are younger-looking than women who don't -- so you may think you look haggard and wan, but if you could get just one good night's sleep, you'd bloom again.

And you will. The conveyer belt rolls forward. Take a moment and look back at your own mother and make a wish.

And hold on.