shadeofgray
I know the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully
I wish I had read this 35 years ago
My 1973
My daughter emailed me this. It's worth reading
Wisdom
by Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author
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, a 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.
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