If decades from now my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Taylor, questions me the way Hannah questioned Eva, will I tell her about the times I played Candyland through gritted teeth? Will I ‘fess up to how often I said "no" to her endless requests for time and attention beyond what I could give? Will she even have to ask or are my frequent refusals (including some not-so-proud moments) etched on her psyche, rich fodder for future psychotherapy?

I’ve spent the last two years trying to nail down exactly what I owe my child in terms of play and my undivided attention, hoping, at best, to ease my troubled conscience about what makes a good mother, worrying, at worst, about how much I’ve missed the mark.

It all started with our decision to home-school. My brain, easily given to self-flagellation and perfectionism, misconstrued much of what I read and respected about home-schooling and parenting, reducing it to this impossible little nugget: Constantly being with your young child is easy and natural, a dynamic borne out in the historical record even. Until the advent of compulsory education in the U.S., a process that began in the 1850s, children typically remained by their parents’ side. This fact always conjured cozy sepia images in my mind of small children and their parents working the land for sustenance or in the case of my ancestors in the antebellum South, working someone else’s land for free, children at their parents’ side only if they hadn’t been sold away. In either case, I wondered with all sincerity: Did these mothers of antiquity play with their children when the work day was through? If so, how often and for how long?

After a long day in the fields, did bone-weary mothers feel guilty saying ‘no’ to their children’s repeated requests to play the nineteenth century equivalent of Candyland? Or is this guilt the price I pay for the privilege of not worrying about where my next meal is going to come from (and if I have to be the one to kill it)? Am I entitled to a guilt-free ‘no’, even though caring for an energetic, fearless child while doing two-months worth of laundry in a single day is the closest I get to hard labor?

I chided myself for dwelling on such ridiculous questions until two years ago when someone on a black home-schoolers? (mostly moms) email list asked the reticent question: Do you play with your kids, and did your mother play with you?Responses ranged from "My mother didn’t have time to play and neither do I" to "My mother didn’t have time to play, so now I play as much as I can with my children" to "My mother played with us all the time, and I play the same way with my kids". One last such response included a veritable catalog of imaginative activities. Show off, I muttered to the lengthy list on the computer screen.

My answer to the question (which I did not post) was: I try to play with my daughter. It was easier when she was a wide-eyed, easy-to-please infant. Now, I can feel my brain atrophy with each block I stack. I just want to jump out of my skin, it’s so tedious. My daughter’s insatiable need for my undivided attention makes it all the harder. And I feel really, really crappy about that.

What if you and your child are a lot alike, but your empathy only goes so far? I remember what it was like being an only child, craving an ever-present playmate -- better yet, lots of them. Intense and sensitive, both Taylor and I have a tendency to be very dramatic about exactly what we want and when we want it. What I want is to curl up quietly with my laptop or a good book. What she wants is to use my body as a jungle gym. Sometimes this town ain’t big enough for the both of us divas.

What if the opposite is true, and sometimes you feel as if you have nothing in common with your child, like who you are fundamentally isn’t who your child needs you to be? I love hugs and cuddles and kisses, but not nearly as much as Taylor. Once I asked her to describe her perfect day. It consisted of the two of us sitting on the couch cuddling all day and "nothing, nothing else". I know I’ll be pining away for these tough times when she’s a teenager banishing me from her personal universe. But right now it’s hard not to feel frustrated and guilty when she tries to make every day that perfect day, and expresses her disappointment (loudly and frequently) when inevitably it fails to be.

Taylor’s pleas for verbal interaction and affirmation (of her very existence, it seems) are non-stop. That’s a nice way of saying she talks a lot. I assumed her definition of enough conversation was "every waking hour" until she started having conversations with us in her sleep. That she manages to use the word "Mommy" at least five times -- sometimes in a row -- in a single sentence amazes me. The frequency of her chatter is rivaled only by its volume, which gets increasingly higher as bedtime approaches. Exasperated, I said to her one night at dinner, "Taylor, honey, your dad and I, we’re a quiet people."

I’ll admit to personal baggage having to do with my energy level, low noise and touch tolerance, personal space, and the challenge of parenting differently than how I was parented. In English: I’m sedentary and bookish with linguine-like nerves and spanking’s not an option. Based on who I am, I’ve established healthy but also child-sensitive limits. Still even those limits are routinely pushed, stretched to the breaking point because of who Taylor is as a typical four-year-old, as well as who she is as her unique and wonderful self.

I realize parenting isn’t like dating and that a "love connection" with one’s child isn’t optional. But I have to quote Tina and ask, "What’s love got to do with it?" I practically wept over the title of Nancy Samalin’s classic, Loving Your Child is Not Enough, until I realized it was about positive discipline and not further proof of my failure as a mother. I love, absolutely adore, Taylor, but that doesn’t change the fact that spending an entire day alone at home with her without somebody ending up in tears, while not impossible, is a tall order.

Guilt (there’s that word again) compels me to interject here a partial list of things I do enjoy doing with Taylor: cooking (she makes mean scrambled eggs), drawing, reading, going to parks and museums (anything outside of the house), taking dictation while she composes poems and letters.

Of course in Taylor’s calculus, this one doesn’t count: sometimes I watch her sleep, and I pray that her strong desire to be with others comes from a healthy place. I rub her back and think, "I hope your solitude blues ain’t like mine, sweetie."

It’s not that I don’t ever give Taylor my undivided attention. It’s that what I give is never enough, and I’ve struggled to make a lasting peace with that fact. The time between ages two and three-and-a-half were particularly exhausting. On those doomed days when the homebody in me begged to stay home for a change, nothing in Taylor’s world was more interesting than me. We could spend the morning playing, or not. I could give Taylor all, some, or none of my undivided attention -- turns out, it didn’t matter. When I finally decided I had to take a break, her resistance occurred in stages.

First, I’d sit down at the computer to write (cheap therapy). She’d step over her toys and books to climb all over me until I reminded her that she needed to play nearby or somewhere else. If she managed to detach herself from me, she’d play for a minute or so and then the flurry of conversation would begin until I reminded her that this was quiet time and that she could be quiet with me or as chatty as she liked somewhere else. And on we went until she ended up in the hallway with me on the other side of the door to the study, one or both of us crying (and sometimes screaming). She pounded and kicked on the door, screeching, "Mommy! It’s me, Taylor! I love you!" Of course by this time she was sleepy and cranky but was no longer interested in naps. Yes, we tried a pallet at my feet. Yes, I tried lying with her until she fell asleep. Her eyes flew open the instant I even thought about getting up.

When I finally opened the door after I calmed down or finished writing or simply couldn’t stand it anymore, I would find her standing there, sometimes near a puddle of vomit, and, inexplicably, nude. Her rage somehow expressed itself in the act of disrobing. Looking at her standing there like that, I’d dissolve into tears and laughter, and she’d laugh too.

But laughter fades, and guilt moved into my insecure self like a squatter, lots of wide-open space after my confidence, such as it was, took a hike. Guilt told me I owed it to my mother (and to the legion of other single, working moms) to quit my bitching and just deal. The way guilt saw it, it was all about of gratitude and I didn’t have enough.

One sympathetic friend, a full-time working mother of two sons, shared the inverse experience: because she chose to work for non-financial reasons, she imagined stay-at-home types like me dismissing her mama fears and complaints with a "you made your bed?" eye-roll. Reassuring each other and validating the other’s right to whine helped. It helped the way a fireman’s ladder helps the suicidal climb down off the ledge--the problem’s still there when you reach the ground.

With guilt came worry. Worry put its two cents in declaring that the more I pulled away, the needier and more damaged Taylor would become until she got the message loud and clear: she was unloved and unlovable. From there, unhealthy relationships awaited her in adulthood, a pathetic searching for the love and attention she never got at home.

Bound up with so much fear and melodrama, my interactions with Taylor grew increasingly strained. I was trying and failing to be super-mom, rescuing her from a future straight out of a Lifetime Original Movie. Secretly and ashamedly, I also resented her for demanding too much, for making me feel like such a failure.

Days when we invited friends over or got out of the house were a welcomed respite from our drama. Music and gymnastics classes also gave Taylor so much that I couldn’t. When Taylor was three, I inaugurated a mom’s night out for myself once a week. But nothing made the bad times -- almost anytime we were at home alone -- any better. What I really wanted but could barely bring myself to even whisper aloud, was to just be by myself, in my own house (or even just in one room of it), before midnight, having a complete thought, or finishing something, anything, that I started. What I really wanted was to not be reminded daily (if not hourly) how badly I sucked at giving Taylor everything she wanted and needed (which were one and the same in her mind, and mine too at my most despondent). I wanted to forget how short I fell compared to sane, well-adjusted, motherly mothers.

The idea of preschool entered my head and then was gone in a guilt-drenched flash. I was committed to home-schooling, after all. In the end, however, my greater commitment was to Taylor’s well-being and my own sanity. I found out about a Spanish immersion preschool with a small class size and loving teachers, and after almost four years with me as her near-constant companion, Taylor started there three days a week last fall and loves it.

On preschool days, I write, reveling in the clarity that comes at ten a.m. instead of one a.m. I’m happy to be over the martyr complex, channeling my intensity instead into something fulfilling and stimulating. No longer motivated by fear, my interactions with Taylor, while not always drama-free, are far more relaxed. The resentment has faded.

Guilt, however, still loiters. When it starts to wear out its welcome, I remember the words of a dear friend, a very wise mother, whose youngest of three children is twenty-years-old. When I told her my concerns about a Lifetime movie fate for Taylor, she expressed more concern that my playing through gritted my teeth and doing things I didn’t want to be doing was modeling for Taylor that women have to just grin and bear it, that pursuit of one’s own needs and interests must be completely subjugated to the wants of others. Instead, she encouraged me to lovingly model limits along with giving and sacrifice, in short, to model balance.

Sometimes during the non-preschool days of the week and in the time after preschool, bad moods and impatience can still do us in, but we haven’t had any nude vomiting episodes since preschool started, and I call that progress.

In the interest of full-disclosure, lest I give the impression that preschool alone preserved my sanity, let me give props to the periodic phone therapy sessions I’ve had with a sympathetic therapist with whom I first connected two years ago.

Is this just a long-winded attempt to justify my decision not to home-school, to make lofty excuses for the fact that my child is now in preschool whenever the doors are open? There is that urge, yes, because old habits are hard to break. If I had to sum up my affliction over the past few years it would be that dogmatism was doing me in. More and more frequently, however, I’m having "duh" moments when I realize that certain choices, like home-schooling, can be wonderful and rational and simply not for us, not at this moment in time. I reserve the right to change my mind, overnight if need be.

Another duh moment: At the same time that I applaud and remain in awe of moms who can spend whole days with multiple children, maybe getting a break every now and then, and still be quite sane and satisfied, I can also accept that I am not them but am still a good mother in my own right.

Taylor still prefers playing with me or with a friend, but she’s beginning to notice that wonderful things happen even when she plays alone. She invents games and songs, and regales us with unusual stories. In Taylor’s hands, a chip clip, a strawberry, and a Kleenex become characters in something akin to a Greek tragedy.

One thing she still won’t do without complaint is play alone with traditional toys. She’s had "fun" toys recommended to her, and been asked to "Please go play" so much, I think she objects to doing so now on principle.

As for me, I give Taylor credit for getting me out and about much more than I would if left to my own hermit-like devices. And there are those precious moments when I lose myself with her in a good book or in a game of Trouble (Candyland continues to be especially torturous). I am especially grateful, though, for times when we can just sit on the couch, cuddling and nothing, nothing else.

Deesha Philyaw Thomas is originally from Jacksonville, FL, but currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She writes short fiction and personal essays, but is also at work on a novel.