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By Liz Alterman

One spring evening as my family and I rushed out the door, already late for a concert, my youngest son stepped in a fresh pile of dog poop on our front lawn.

This wasn’t a one-off. For weeks we’d been coming and going and falling prey to these little “surprises” lurking in the grass. Catching the canine culprit and its inconsiderate owner had begun to consume me.

I saw myself morphing into the grown-up version of that paperboy in the movie “Better Off Dead.” Instead of barking a menacing, “I want my two dollars!” I roamed my neighborhood giving the side-eye to every dog and the human holding its leash, muttering, “I want you to pick up after your pet!” 

I said some things I won’t repeat here. I also thought, This is going in a book one day!

Even in the worst of times (like when you’re hosing excrement off a child’s sneaker) there’s no denying motherhood offers a wealth of material. I began to see how this — and so many other scenarios that drive a suburban parent to the edge — could be included in a novel.

Another example: When my oldest son was in third grade, class moms sent an email regarding an end-of-the-year pasta party that had long been a tradition for students. These began as friendly messages asking volunteers to donate trays of various types of pasta. When few stepped up, these emails escalated, arriving every few hours. Their tone ventured into something I now refer to as “Baby Reindeer” territory as they threatened, “This will be the first third grade class in school history to not have a pasta party!”

Personally, I was okay with that. At the time, I had three children under nine. Our family was already consuming more pasta than most of Sicily.

And yet, I succumbed to the pressure and dragged my brood to the store to purchase the requested gluten-free pasta and dairy-free vodka sauce. I delivered my offering the following morning and wavered between feeling like I was a team player committed to keeping this ritual alive and like I’d been bullied into doing something I didn’t have the time or energy to undertake.

Later that day I received another message from the class moms, which I opened while wincing. “Good news, parents!” it read. “We ended up with nine extra trays of pasta and delivered them to a soup kitchen!”

Now, I love donating to a soup kitchen, but how were the numbers of trays needed so far off? Maybe I’d spent too long working in finance or journalism but I had some questions: Where was the data that suggested we needed a veritable Ronzoni factory to feed approximately 120 children? Who’d done this shoddy math? Even if these kids were carb loading for a mini-marathon, they couldn’t eat that much surplus pasta.

So much of motherhood at midlife (or at least the way it’s been unfolding for me) has felt a bit like being nibbled to death by ducks. Thankfully, no one large, terrible incident has occurred. Instead, I’ve encountered a thousand small (often repeat) annoyances. They leave me wondering if there’s something similar to a federal witness protection program for moms who are solely responsible for locating the ketchup in the fridge though it is always in the exact same spot. (On the door with the rest of the condiments!)

When I sat down to write a momcom, I decided I wanted to include all the minor grievances that cause the Talking Heads lyric, "Well, how did I get here?” to loop through my mind daily.

I wanted to explore how:

You can love your family and still resent the fact that you are the only one who seems to know how to feed the cat.

You can put your partner as the emergency contact and still the school nurse will call you.

You can adore your mother and still not want to hear from her 40 times a day or play her special brand of MadLibs that goes a little something like: “Your former classmate’s daughter was just accepted to ______ (a college in the south with a bulldog mascot)." 

You can laugh and/or cry at the unfairness of having both teen acne and wispy grandpa-like chin hair.

And you can write about it all!

For the past few years, I’ve been working on suspense novels. Every once in a while people ask if a character is based on someone I know or something that happened in my real life. I’m grateful that answer is no.

I’m sure I’ll face similar questions when my momcom Claire Casey’s Had Enough comes out in June. While the main premise — a newly separated mom reconnects with an old boyfriend at a college reunion and must decide if she should blow up her life or try to rebuild it flaws and all — is not based on my life, most of the things that get in the main character’s way have been adapted from my day-to-day.

I have motherhood to thank for that!

While I still haven’t apprehended the pooch who leaves those awful brown landmines on our lawn, this maddening situation appears within my novel. And I’m not above having the dog’s thoughtless owner meet a gruesome fate in an upcoming thriller!

— Liz Alterman

Liz Alterman is the author of the award-winning memoir, Sad Sacked, the young adult thriller, He’ll Be Waiting, the suspense novels The Perfect Neighborhood, The House on Cold Creek Lane, and You Shouldn't Have Done That, as well as the forthcoming romcom Claire Casey's Had Enough. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other outlets. Subscribe to her Substack where she shares the ups and downs of the writing life (and cat photos).