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4AM email
dave sent me a great article this morning (accompanied with a very loving note) that made me chuckle in some parts and get all misty-eyed in others. along with confirming all the reasons why i love my husband and justify why i can sit, stare and try to memorize my children for hours, i found a new writer to obsess over: anna quindlen.
the part that made me laugh the most:
outbursts, tantrums, bad language - check.
baby falling off the bed - check.
late for preschool pick-up - check.
and i couldn't agree more heartily on the rest.
parenting anna quindlen
all my babies are gone now. i say
this not in sorrow but in disbelief.
i take great satisfaction in what i have today: three almost-adults, two taller than i am, one closing in fast. three people who read the same books i do and have learned not to
be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them,
who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until i choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and
privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than i like. who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets
and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. like the
trick soap i bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at
its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely
discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.
everything in all the books i once
poured over is finished for me now. penelope leach., t. berry brazelton., dr. spock. the ones on sibling rivalry and
sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all
grown obsolete. along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild
Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. but i suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. what those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what
they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very
much at all.
raising children is presented
at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice,
until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless
essay. no one knows anything.
one child
responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout.
one child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.
when my first child was born, parents were told to put
baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own
spit-up. by the time my last arrived, babies were put down on
their backs because of research on sudden infant death
syndrome.
to a new parent this ever-shifting
certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. eventually you
must learn to trust yourself. eventually the research will
follow. i remember 15 years ago poring over one of dr. brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. i was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. was there something wrong with his fat
little legs? was there something wrong with his tiny little
mind? was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? was i insane? last year he went to china . next year he goes
to college. he can talk just fine. he can walk, too.
every part of raising children is humbling,
too. believe me, mistakes were made. they have all been
enshrined in the 'remember-when-mom-did ' hall of fame. the
outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not
theirs. the times the baby fell off the bed. the times i
arrived late for preschool pickup. the nightmare sleepover. the horrible summer camp. the day when the youngest came
barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography
test, and i responded, 'what did you get wrong?'. (she insisted i include that.) the time i ordered food at the mcdonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up
from the window. (they all insisted i
include that.) i did not allow them to watch the simpsons for
the first two seasons. what was i thinking?
but the biggest mistake i made is the one that most of us make while doing this. i did not live in the moment enough. this is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. there is one picture of the three of
them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the
swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. and i wish i could
remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they
sounded, and how they looked when they slept that
night.
i wish i had not been in such a hurry
to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. i wish i
had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
even today Iim not sure what
worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life. when they were very small, i suppose i thought someday they
would become who they were because of what i'd done. now i
suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that i back off and let them be. the books said to be relaxed and i was often tense, matter-of-fact and i was sometimes over the top.
and look how it all turned out. i wound up with the three people i like best in the world who have done more than anyone to excavate
my essential humanity.
that's what the books
never told me. i was bound and determined to learn from the
experts. it just took me a while to figure out who the experts
were.
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| | Posted 9/10/2008 11:03 AM - 56 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
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