family

Two islands

Picture from France, my guess is that Hilary is 4 or 5 and I am 6 or 7.

One of my very favorite stories about Mum is from my grade school years at BB&N. It so perfectly sums up the creative, loving, generous, no-nonsense mother she was – and absolutely encapsulates the kind of parent I aspire to be.

One day right after spring break I came home from school dismayed. Mum asked me what was wrong.

“I feel sad. Lots of the other kids went to the islands for vacation. Why didn’t I get to go to the islands?”

“Lindsey, aren’t you the luckiest girl – you got to go to two islands for vacation!”

“I did?” my surprise was evident.

“Yes, you did. Rhode Island and Long Island.” I had gone to visit my maternal grandparents in Rhode Island and my paternal grandparents on Long Island. And I was absolutely chuffed at her answer, I remember feeling proud and satisfied.

What is luckier than a girl who gets to spend her vacation with her four living, loving grandparents?

And Grace’s vacation looms. She is going to Delaware with Nana to visit Hilary, Hannah, Terence, and Margaret, and then she is going to Florida with Grandma and Grandpa. Pretty lucky girl, I think!

An ancient grief

Read a marvelous editorial in, of all places, Parenting magazine. The quote that has me nodding:

Instead, she reminded me of what I’d never recover, opening an ancient grief. In the intervening years, I’d tried to spin that trauma into a necessary trial, one that made me more compassionate. But the unadorned truth, freshly confronted in Gillian’s house, is that motherhood’s first months gouged a terrible pit in my heart.

So Much Advice

What a huge industry parenting books are. I confess I’ve been largely disenchanted with the genre. I totally rejected all the how-to-make-your-baby sleep books: my God! 7:10, open curtains in baby’s room, 7:15, nurse, 7:30, sterilize pumping equipment, 7:35 diaper change, 7:40 pump, 7:50 put child on floor for tummy time, 8:15 start naptime music, close curtains, 8:25 time for nap … jesus. Non merci. I preferred something along the lines of: wake when the baby wakes up, nurse, hang out for a while, maybe walk to Starbucks for venti latte, do email while nursing, make grilled cheese for older child while nursing, insert wine IV at 5pm and keep right on nursing, etc. And for the nighttime sleep? I confess the Ferber in-and-out every 20 minutes method just seemed to make things worse for everyone. I preferred my pediatrician’s advice: at 7pm, bedtime. Tuck in. Close door. Open door at 7am. Good morning! Easier for my pea brain to understand, and apparently also for those of my children.

And now I find myself trying to read the next iteration of parenting books. The ones that want to coach you into a better parent. Playful Parenting was a recent gift, and yes, I think I could use a lot more playful in my parenting … but, disappointingly, the playfulness ends with the title. The book is dull and boring and … well, after 20 pages, I think I kind of get it! Am I being stupid? Does there really exist 200 pages of insight on playful parenting? Perhaps it is over my head. Raising Cain has been in my stack forever. That one I swear I’ll get to. And maybe for Title IX reasons I ought to also read Reviving Ophelia (though I have a few years until I need that one, I think). And I have heard great things about The Price of Privilege and So Sexy So Soon, both of whose central topics (the potentially corrosive impact of wealth and the terrifyingly early encroach of sexuality onto my six year old) I care about a lot. So maybe I’ll give those a whirl. But somehow all of the instructional parenting books I’ve read so far seem redundant, repetitive, and not a little holier-than-thou. Maybe I’m defensive about my own subpar parenting and not open to input, who knows.

Which brings me to the three books about parenting that I absolutely, passionately adore. They are The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich, Operating Instructions by Annie Lamott, and Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman. What these books have in common, in my opinion, is that they are not out to offer advice. They are really not about parenting, actually, but about life broadly defined. Each woman describes her experience in exquisite detail, telling stories both hilarious and tear-jerking. None of the three writers subscribe to the Deification of Motherhood school, which I deeply dislike, so that’s a plus. They are by turns dispassionate and deeply committed, funny and wise, unsentimental and tender. These are motherhood books I can embrace, and I think that’s because they are really about personhood, about the experience of living as an adult in this world.

Waiting for Birdy’s subtitle captures it best of all: “…frantic tedium, neurotic angst, and [the] wild magic.” Doesn’t motherhood – and, really, life itself – contain each of those three in every hour? If you haven’t read all three, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

A deep desire to raise hopeful children

I really enjoyed this article/book review from the New Yorker (thank you Kara!). The discussion of the perils of overparenting resonates with me. I am so opposed to doing this that sometimes I think I overcorrect, to Grace and Whit’s detriment. I especially like the reality check at the end of the article, where the author’s call to arms is calibrated against the much more real urgency (in my view) of one in six children in America growing up below the poverty line.

I love this line: “It may be that robbing children of a positive sense of the future is the worst form of violence that parents can do to them.” Many of my instincts about parenting strive from the deep desire to raise children who are hopeful and not afraid of the world (to me these two things are inextricably linked). This is precisely why the allergy diagnosis in Whit bothered me so much (well this and my tremendous guilt that my lackluster nursing performance visited this onerous responsibility on him): to carry an epipen, to read labels, to know you are one bite away from a 911 call and the ER is to live in a world that seems scary. Anybody who knows my aversion to vacuuming (I do not own a vacuum cleaner and never have) will know that the hygiene hypothesis is not at work in my son’s case. My Lord that child ate more dirt and boogers (he often, to this day, tells me how yummy his boogers are) than most – and somehow he’s still allergic.

Feeling safe is something I crave profoundly, so I am not surprised that this desire to help my children feel at ease and not at risk is a priority for me. It is the reason I put Grace on that airplane by herself (the parenting decision that has caused me the most insecurity, bar none). Of course if she had not wanted to go I would never have done that. I think one can only support and promote qualities and inclinations that are already there; I think pushing a child to do something that he or she is uncomfortable with is by far the wost offense.

As I drove this morning I thought more granularly about my parenting, about where I am strict and where I am lax. I believe in the notion of a few, firm rules. This is my current thinking:

Things I am strict (rigid, inflexible, Nazi-like … pick your adjective) about:

– sleep
– manners (please, thank you, look adults in the eye)
– treating all other people with respect
– not behaving in a spoiled or entitled way
– safety (hold hands crossing the street, in parking lots, etc)

Things I am loosey-goosey (cavalier?) about:

– food (you want string cheese for dinner? breakfast as bag of Kix in the car? fine)
– baths (routinely skipped bc I am lazy)
– cold (you want to take your gloves off? fine by me)
– television
– being away from G&W for work travel (more than fine, awesome by me)
– germs (share toothbrushes? cool. bring 4 week old into the MGH ICU? sure.)