On Being Mom
by Anna Quindlen
If not for the
photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever
existed. The
pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black
button eyes of a
Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow
ringlets and the
high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an
apostrophe above her chin. 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 pored 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 boy is toilet trained
at 3, his brother
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 sleep over. 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 I'm
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....
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the moments that take our breath away." George Carlin
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