This is wonderful, and so true.
For All My Favorite Moms by 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 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.
