In many ways it is a great relief that I am no longer a parent to very young children. At times, being a mother during the early childhood stage was difficult and stress-inducing. It wasn’t always the children themselves that caused this tension but, surprisingly, other parents.
Every generation of young parents believe they have found the “magic key” to raising children. They stand in righteous judgement of the generation of parents before them (as well as to their contemporaries who don’t follow the same parenting prescription as them) convinced that only they themselves know how to do things right.
It will never cease to amaze me that people actually believe the very complicated procedure of raising human beings can be reduced to a step-by-step, one-size-fits-all approach. How can anyone have a monopoly on parenting?
Whenever I run into new parents, and sense their joyous hearts but see their weary eyes, I tell them to do whatever they think is best. I advise them to throw away the books and to shield themselves from the harsh judgement of others.
You want to breastfeed? Go ahead. You want to bottle feed? Go ahead. Your baby will only sleep in the bed beside you? Go ahead. Want to put your toddler on a leash at the mall? Go ahead. You have to do what you have to do to love your child while simultaneously loving and taking care of yourselves.
It is with just a touch of a heavy heart that I share the following with you. Speaking as someone who knows that sometimes our worst worries do come true regarding our children (come to think of it, maybe because of that) I truly believe that the following is, bar none, the best piece I have ever read on parenting young children. So with great admiration and respect I share with you Anna Quindlen’s poignant advice on parenting.
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 in the 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 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 choices, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows everything. 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 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 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 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.
