oh this is hard

Pushing forward and holding back

Lisa Belkin’s blog today is thought-provoking and articulately states something I’ve been inarticulately thinking about. She writes about the tension between pushing forward and holding back that seems to define so much of current parenting.

Today’s parents, critics tell us, are managing to mess up our kids in two contradictory yet somehow simultaneous ways. On one hand, we push them to grow up too fast, proud that they are reading before they are walking, pleased that they are taking college-level math in middle school. On the other hand, we keep them from really growing up at all, helicoptering in to solve all their problems well into young adulthood.

Is it possible that the answer lies, as most answers do, somewhere in the middle? Maybe if childhood was time to be, well, a child, the rest might sort itself into place?

On the pushing forward, I am not sure how I am doing. In terms of media and entertainment I am definitely holding my children back, probably to their detriment: witness Grace still watching Berenstain Bears while her classmates enjoy Hannah Montana. This is probably some deep commentary on my own inability to grow up, I’m not sure – I do know that as she gets older and more exposed to media and stimuli, the questions grow more complicated. I also know that I’ve probably overreacted to this stuff; more than one friend has pointed out that by making Hannah Montana and High School Musical and their ilk off-limits I’ve only made them that much more appealing and seductive to Grace. I’m actually cautiously optimistic that I may have dodged the bullet here, as the American Girl Doll Obsession has taken over. Ridiculous pricing aside, I am enthusiastic about AGD.

On other kinds pushing, it’s too early to tell. I’m excited about Grace’s early reading, admittedly, but that’s for two reasons that have nothing to do with her emergency as a prodigy:

(1) I have such vivid, happy memories of early reading and can’t wait to relive those books with her – Terabithia, Trumpet of the Swan, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Tuck Everlasting, Phantom Tollbooth … oh I could go on!

(2) I have fantasies of Grace spending all afternoon in her bedroom reading, alleviating me of the actual parenting that currently eats up so much fo my weekends. Oh I kid … but only sort of. I was that kid, reading alone at every chance. Actually, I still am: at the littlest opportunity I am in bed reading. I dream that Grace and Whit will do this too. Sounds like a recipe for a relaxing, quiet afternoon and maybe a nap.

I don’t think I’m otherwise pushing her (or him) in terms of skill development, but clearly the private school community is rife with this and I need to be vigilant.

On the holding back, I have a clearer picture. I strive so hard to avoid the helicoptering, the leaping in to solve Grace or Whit’s problems, as anyone who knows me knows. But perhaps I overcorrect here as well. While I don’t ever want to be one of those parents who hears about a child being disciplined at school and assumes the teacher was incorrect, I also don’t want to be disloyal to Grace and Whit by always thinking they are in the wrong. I want to love them and support them while giving them enough room to fall and learn to pick themselves up. Resilient I am not (more on that in a later blog post after long, interesting conversation with Hilary), and I am desperate that my children learn to be.

Regardless, interesting to think about for all parents. Have just ordered Lenore Skenazy’s book, Free Range Parenting, and am eager to read it (on the topic of not helicoptering).

Trust life

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know. – James Baldwin

I will try my best to give thanks for gifts strangely, painfully, beautifully wrapped. – Rebecca Wells

Heavy-hearted today.

A million ways to be a good mother

“The most important thing she’d learned over the years was that there was no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.” – Jill Churchill

I also like this comment by Carl Honore, author of Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting:

“To me, Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. They keep the family schedule under control so that everyone has enough downtime to rest, reflect and just hang out together. They accept that bending over backwards to give children the best of everything may not always be the best policy. Slow parenting means allowing our children to work out who they are rather than what we want them to be.”

I’d never refer to myself as balanced or slow-moving (more like wildly unbalanced and frenetically moving – including an injury this week from walking down the hall at the office. yes, I am that coordinated) but this description of parenting philosophy really feels right to me. Perhaps I try so hard at this with my children in an attempt to make up for what I know is a keen personal void. Who knows. I liked the quote.

Trying my best here, in the still-freezing-cold early spring.

Deep joy and unsettling ambivalence

I adore this post about the experience of motherhood. It evokes the twin emotions I feel on a daily basis: deep joy and unsettling ambivalence.

So, to write my own list of five things I love about being a mother:

1. The absolute hilarity of the things that come out of their mouths. Whit and his majesty pants, Grace and her mouth-of-marbles attempts at using really big words (today was “inevitable”).

2. The rediscovery of string cheese, chicken nuggets, ritz crackers, macaroni and cheese, and those divine fruit gummy things that are pretending they aren’t candy. Also, that every restaurant meal comes with french fries.

3. The occasional demonstration of genuine affection between them. When I bust them playing nicely together or holding hands crossing the street.

4. The way sleeping children are just so sound asleep. And the delicious, Johnsons-baby-shampoo smell of their heads in sleep. And the pajamas. I love pajamas, especially from The Gap.

5. Children’s music. I unabashedly listen to Raffi, Steve Songs, and other children’s CDs even when driving alone.

The passage

Many of you know that birth is an important topic to me personally. Let me say that again: to me personally. I do not consider myself an evangelist and hope to never come across as one. It has struck me more than once that it’s interesting that the universe made the process of becoming a mother (conception, pregnancy, birth) so easy for someone who struggles so mightily with being a mother.

Anyway, I read this passage today on babble.com and it captures a lot of what I feel about birth – an open mind rather than a closed one, in fact, and a powerful awareness of my own luck in having it go the way it did for me. It is an important passage, certainly, but in the grand scheme of identity and motherhood, a very small one. And, arguably, you make the passage one way or another. It is the arrival on the other side that is the key, no?

The lesson, ultimately, is that we are not in control; this is a conversation I’ve had many times over with friends waiting at 41 weeks for their first child to commence his or her arrival. We are simply not in charge of these little people: not then, and not ever. I may have handled relatively easily the intense hours of becoming a mother that the writer describes, but I grapple on a regular basis with the months, years, and decades of mothering. There is no ambiguity in my mind about which struggle is more important, more meaningful, and more difficult.

Was it the birth of my dreams? Hardly. Do I wish it could have been different? Sure. But compared with the result — my daughter, Liana, little sister to my sons Eitan and Daniel — I really don’t care. If I’ve learned anything in ten years of motherhood, it’s that the way our children are brought into the world means very little for how they live in the world. Nor do the intense hours in which we become mothers shape the months, years and decades of our actually being mothers. And if the experience of childbirth is in fact a crucial process, then let it be the process of teaching us that our children will emerge in ways varied and complicated, not necessarily in times or manners of our choosing, neither made in our image nor as proof of our prowess. Let birth remind us that, with children, so little goes according to even the most well-drawn plan.
– Tova Mirvis