Motherhood
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 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 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.
–Anna Quindlen is a Pulizer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling
author.
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