Love shall be our token
Love be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.
– Christina Rossetti
My children, who are like surly teenagers when I wake them up before school, both bounded out of bed on Wednesday morning at 6:00 without a single complaint.
“Is it today?” they both asked as I shook them awake. We were at the airport bright and early (I have a well-documented early problem, which might actually be an asset when traveling with children).
Our shoes at security. Both kids had to carry their own backpacks of books and toys. This resulted in some major complaining that they could not fit all of the assorted random stuff they wanted to bring to Florida in there. But I held firm. Sure, Grace had two doll heads sticking out of the top of her backpack. They carried their own stuff. Major victory.
It was raining on Wednesday, hard. And drizzling yesterday. But yesterday afternoon I took Grace and Whit to the pool, where the requisite shoe shot shows the change in climate. I sat and shivered, wrapped in towels, while they played for over an hour. Jumping, jumping, jumping. Splashing, splashing, splashing. Yelling, yelling, yelling. Despite being as scrawny as birds, both of them, they did not let the chilly day daunt them.
They alternated between being happy compatriots and ruthless enemies. For every hand-holding jump there was someone dunking the other for a few seconds too long. It interfered with my reading of my book, that is for sure.
After some “quiet time” that was lacking in all forms of quiet, we got dressed for dinner. Grace and Whit were totally wired by now, frantic with unexpended energy and running around shrieking as they beat each other over the head with plastic golf clubs. I dressed them in each others’ clothes which they thought was the absolute funniest thing in the entire world. What can I say? I’m hilarious.
After dinner, the children had sprinkled some heavy sugar onto their already frenetic exhaustion. It was a fabulous cocktail. They bounced out of bed, one after the other, refusing to go to sleep. But they were so tired they were whiny and tearful, each complaining that the other was keeping them up.
I felt that exasperation that may be familiar to some of you at the end of the day: Good GOD, children, why won’t you sleep? Their loud voices ricocheted off of the cavernous apartment, all wood walls, floors, and ceilings. I felt my thin-at-the-best-of-times patience fraying, my voice rising to compete with theirs, the gratitude I had managed to carry with me all day leaking away.
Finally I took Grace into my bed, where she told me she could not sleep with the light on (It was 8:02 and I was not quite ready to go to sleep). I pulled the lamp down onto the floor and she admitted that “Okay, if I shut my eyes, it gets dark.” I read and emailed on my iphone, watching her eyes flicker shut.
Within minutes she was sound asleep. Abruptly my mood turned, patience and calm flooding in to fill the hollows that had moments ago been overflowing with aggravation and frustration. I watched her sleep, thinking once again that I really do love my children most when they are asleep, wondering again if this is a bad thing. They just radiate a peace that I cannot help but absorb when they are sleeping.
And I thought about the fact that this might be the very definition of motherhood, this day: shivering in the gray drizzle while the children swim, finding the capacity for jokes and being richly rewarded by their delight, cutting chicken fingers and allowing M&Ms for dessert, chasing and shhhhh-ing overtired children and wrestling them to bed, feeling annoyed, strung tight and thin, close to snapping, and then leaning into a wave of emotion, love, and patience that floods in, like a tide, to wash away all the day’s frustrations.
My dad always said that parenting was 95% nature. I admit I didn’t fully believe him until I had my second child. And I was shocked, within days, by how very different this baby was than his sister had been. Where Grace was colicky and sleepless, Whit slept and cooed and smiled. She was dark, with thick black hair and deep brown eyes, and he was fair, a towhead with blue eyes. She ate everything, he was picky. She slept on her back (when she slept), and Whit slept on his stomach from the very first day (don’t tell the parenting police). Grace settled into an amenable toddler around age 2.5, but that was about the age Whit woke up and started making up for lost time with yelling and generally challenging authority.
In fact their differences started even earlier: with Grace I felt great for 40 straight weeks. With Whit I threw up every day for 20 weeks. So much for the morning-sickness-means-a-girl theory!
At their parent-teacher conferences yesterday I was reminded yet again of how very different my children are. It is easy to point to gender as the key distinction, but I think that is only part of the story; I can’t disaggregate gender and birth order, for example. I am struck, over and over again, by how much of gender seems truly innate. I know some of it is socially constructed, and I’m sure despite my earnest efforts not to I do perpetuate some of those norms. But some of it really seems just part of who they are, and it continues to surprise me.
Whit. As soon as Matt and I sat down in the tiny chairs in the Beginner classroom, Whit’s teachers were laughing. They said they can’t keep a straight face around him. They talked about his humor, his awareness of those around him, the way that he can be redirected with jokes. They described his strong preference for 3D activities like Lego and the “big blocks.” This doesn’t surprise me at all. Whit has engineer written all over him (possibly the only part of him that comes from my family).
Whit hates being alone. He loves friends, socializing, laughing, being a part of a group. This reminds me of his behavior at home. He has been known to cry from the top of the stairs if Grace and I are halfway down them, protesting that he ‘doesn’t like being aloooooone.’ As if being six steps away is alone. He plays mostly with boys and is comfortable with physical challenge despite being small. The teachers smiled recounting how he is a determined wrestler who simply jumps and clings onto the boys who are twice his size. He hangs on, and is hard to shake, they told us.
He is also physically affectionate: he loves to hug and cuddle. Last week one teacher was lying on the floor in front of the criss-cross-apple- sauce seated four year olds, working the vcr, and Whit jumped on top of her, lying flat along her body, settling himself in and pronouncing, “Best seat in the house!”
Whit has little to no interest in writing or drawing and prefers moving around to sitting, but can be coaxed into cooperation on a task if necessary. He is stubborn, however, and will dig in his heels if he really doesn’t want to do something. He barely eats at lunch because he is so busy chatting with his friends. The teachers told us a story about recess when Whit had stood up on a log and yelled “Quiet!” while sweeping his arms out. Apparently the playground quieted and all eyes turned to Whit. And then he smiled and said, “nothing,” – he had nothing to share, but seemed to want to test out his ability to get the attention of the group.
My stubborn, scrappy, social comedian, my boy who learns by doing, whose engineer’s brain is fascinated with building and creation. I love you, Whit.
Grace. The first thing Grace’s teacher told us was about how hard she is on herself. How she works diligently to be sure that anything she turns in is perfect. How she redoes assignments over when she makes mistakes. How she is careful and deliberate, eager to learn, but most of all eager to do well. The teachers talked about how she loves math and computers (she tells me these are her favorite subjects) and how she throws herself into all the subjects put in front of her.
My heart really swelled when I heard about how my daughter loves to read, loves to write. She talks about the books she is reading at home and curls over her journal, tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration, as she writes about her life and draws accompanying pictures. The teachers shared their concern about Grace’s perfectionism, wanting to be sure she doesn’t keep any frustration inside.
We then talked about her social anxieties, and I told them some of what Grace has talked about at home. About how she doesn’t feel that she fits in, about her insecurity about others liking her, about her deep desire for a best friend. She longs for a friendship around which she can orient herself, a wingman. She worries constantly about how others feel about her, and takes things very personally. She can read a room in a glance and is attuned to what others are thinking and feeling. I thought again about how Grace lately has seemed like such a liminal creature, both adult and child, struggling to subdue grown-up size emotions in her little-girl body.
My exquisitely sensitive pleaser, my wise, intelligent and driven little girl, over-concerned with the approval of others. I know you grapple already with powerful feelings and scary fears. Believe me, I know, and I will do my best to help you learn to manage them. I love you, Grace.
One of you is so familiar that the identification can sometimes cloud my mothering. The other of you is so foreign that occasionally I stare at you as though you are from another species. And yet I love you both with a fierceness I never anticipated, one that grows every day and continues to astonish me. I have learned more who I want to be and how I want to live from both you than I ever imagined possible. You continue to push and teach me every day.
Thank you, thank you.
I really love this piece, Parenting in the Age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto. The author says a lot of things that I agree intensely with. Many sentences left me nodding firmly to myself. Like this one:
We do our child a great disservice when we protect them from all risk and harm, as great as letting them go into the world unable to read.
Um, yes. I agree with this absolutely. I think the thing that the author said that was new for me, though, was about how the social norms of today make her self-conscious about being the kind of mother she wants to be:
Horribly, my social group is creating a construct whereby I can’t easily give my daughter her freedom without sending her the message that I don’t care about her. This is a first attempt to strike out against that. When enough parents are saying they restrict their children’s freedom out of love and responsibility, I have to defend my desire to let my kid experience new things- it’s not indifference and negligence. It’s being the kind of parent I would want to have, and putting her as a person above my own desire for comfort.
I am so familiar with this. The stinging criticism I endured when I let Grace fly alone (twice so far), for example. Or the raised eyebrows when I tell people I take her biking on busy streets, or let her walk to the general store alone in Marion. I’ve been chalking these reactions up to my own sensitivity, my own anxiety about my choices. But Quinn makes me realize that some of this is about the social environment, too.
The article renews my commitment to raise children who trust their own instincts, who feel safe and masterful in the world, who know what it is to fail without someone there to pick them up within four seconds. I believe that all of these experiences are incalculably valuable for a child. I also believe they are hard for the parent, both because it’s difficult to see our children hurt or failing and also because we endure the judgment of much of today’s parenting community.
There are, as Quinn reminds us, no guarantees. I think back often to my first pregnancy, when I just wanted to get to 12 weeks so the risk of miscarriage would go down. Then I wanted the triple screen blood work to be normal, then the 18 week ultrasound to be normal, then to have a full-term pregnancy and to deliver a healthy baby. At each milestone I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that some major risk was now over, that I was closer to the safe and secure reality of a healthy baby. And then Grace was born. And I realized, in a few days or weeks or months, that, oh my God, the risk is never gone. She could get sick. She could get hurt. All kinds of trauma could befall. And, as Quinn also says, something bad could happen to me. There are no guarantees.
This is not a reason to protect her (or him) so much that they are ill-equipped for life in the real world. My conviction that the world is a fundamentally good place is sturdy. It has been called naive. But I really believe it, in the marrow of my being. And so I don’t want to teach either of my children to fear the world. No. I want them to dance out into it, confident and brave, full of skills to cope with inevitable setbacks. I want to send them out without safety net so strong they never venture far enough to experience it onto their own. I am so proud of my children when they demonstrate independence. So very proud.
They don’t belong to me. On that I am clear, the crystalline, sharp clarity of sunshine on icicles. No way. I brought them into this world and that is all. One of my favorite bloggers, Jenn of Breed ‘Em and Weep, said this best of all:
I want you to grow up central only to yourself. I want you to find your center, to be your own pivot, your own point of balance, your own anchor. I don’t ever want you thinking you are the center of the universe, and be shocked to find that it is not at your beck and call.
I’ve long loved the story that Warren Buffet said he loves his kids too much to leave them enormous inheritances. This is a similar philosophy: I love my children too much to handicap them with overprotection. I love them so much that I continue to challenge myself to let them go a little bit, knowing that that letting go lets them build muscles, physical and emotional, that will help them stand steadily in life’s waves. To let them go I have to trust them. And myself. And I do.
It feels like a long time since I shared one of Whit’s sartorial statements.
Today: yellow and white striped long sleeved shirt, bright orange (2T) tee shirt with robot on it, green pants with blue whales embroidered on them.
He keeps it colorful, in every single way, this son of mine.