How lazy is this? I'm just posting an essay that someone else wrote. It's definitely cheesy...
On Being Mom by Anna QuindlenIf 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 duckie 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.
First science said environment was the great shaper of human nature.
But it certainly seemed as though those babies had distinct
personalities, some contemplative, some gregarious, some crabby. And
eventually science said that was right, and that they were hard-wired
exactly as we had
suspected.
Still, the temptation to defer to the experts was huge. The literate
parent, who approaches everything; cooking, decorating, life as though
there were a paper due or an exam scheduled, is in particular peril
when the kids arrive.
How silly it all seems now. The obsessing about language acquisition
and physical milestones, the riding the waves of normal, gifted,
hyperactive, all those labels that reduced individuality to a series
of cubbyholes. But I could not help myself. I had watched my mother
casually raise five children born over 10 years, but by watching her I
intuitively
knew that I was engaged in the greatest and potentially most
catastrophic task of my life. I knew that there were mothers who had
worried with good reason, that there were children who would have
great challenges to meet.
We were lucky; ours were not among them. Nothing horrible or
astonishing happened: there was hernia surgery, some stitches, a
broken arm and a fuchsia cast to go with it. Mostly ours were the
ordinary everyday errors and miracles of raising a child, and our
children's challenges the old familiar ones of learning to live as
themselves in the world. The trick
was to get past my fears, my ego and my inadequacies to help them do that.
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.
