Maternally Challenged

We Are All So Very, Very Special

When somebody hit the "play" button and the sound of the Olympics theme song filled the elementary school auditorium, I turned to my husband and said, "I take it back. You're right."

We were at our oldest daughter's Fifth Grade Awards Ceremony, and my husband had been fuming about the need for attending this particular function; he had a deadline at work and didn't see what the big deal was. I'd been telling him that this was a major event for Rebecca and that it wouldn't kill him to sit through it, so chill out already. But I'd already witnessed a loooong conversation among my fellow fifth grade moms about exactly what type of lanyard to give the kids (an eagle? a sunrise? a star?--and what color should the ribbon be, anyway?), so I had an inkling that maybe things would turn out to be over the top. And Jeesus H. Keyrist, were they ever.

They gave out awards for attendance, of course, and they gave out awards for making the honor roll (of which there were I think about four or five different varieties--the all A's and B's, the all A's, the all A's since third grade, yada yada yada) AND they gave out awards for good citizenship (which was never defined) and for being a safety patrol, and for being in chorus, and for being in band, and for helping move the physical education equipment, and...frankly, I lost track. My kid got a couple of awards, including an award for being in chorus even though she dropped out of chorus in the middle of the year when she discovered that she was not going to get all the solo parts. Still, there it was, a certificate recognizing her "contribution" (which was what? Demonstrating how to act like a diva?) And then the principal got up and told the kids how great they were, just on the remote chance that anybody had missed out on that message, and reminded them of the two Most Important Qualities that a person could cultivate that would predict success in life. These were, in case you were wondering, 1. Charm and 2. Perseverence--which, when you think about it, are exactly the qualities which would make a first-rate con artist, too. And then the kids were awarded their certificates of having made it through fifth grade, while a pantheon of parents hoisted their digital/video cameras to record the moment (including me, yes, I brought a camera too), and despite the request that we all delay our applause until all the names had been read, some families were so charged up by the whole thing that when their child's name was called they carried on as if their kid were Eugene McCarthy and this was the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Finally, when it was all over, the parents were told that if we wanted to (and it seemed to be a strong suggestion that we would want to, being responsible and supportive parents), we could sign out our children for the rest of the day and take them to lunch or something--you know, to reinforce the idea that they were so very, very special. My daughter came up expecting this and was gravely disappointed when I told her no, I had things to do and so did her dad. But that meant she spent part of her afternoon helping put back all the folding chairs, which was actually something useful (and which, maybe, she will someday get an award for).

Don't get me wrong: I think my child is very special. I think she's bright and has enormous potential to be any number of things--a lawyer (she could argue with a fencepost), a singer (nice voice), a veterinarian (she loves animals and has a gift for dealing with them), a writer, an actress (anybody who visits for more than two hours will appreciate her flair for melodrama)....all kinds of things. But at this point in her life, they are mostly potential. Seeds which are still germinating. Flowers which have not yet bloomed.

And this awards crap has me totally flummoxed. I just don't get it. What are these kids going to do when they hit the real world and discover that just Showing Up isn't necessarily cause for a celebratory dinner? (Actually, Forbes recently carried a story on this phenomenon, focusing on how employers were learning to deal with the Millenials, i.e. the college graduates now entering the job market, who have been suckled on the Self Esteem Movement since they were babes; it seems kid gloves are required, and lots of reassuring the new employees that they are Valued Members of a Team.)

To me, self-esteem is like beauty: you can fake it for awhile, but eventually the make-up comes off and the truth emerges. Like real beauty, self-esteem comes largely from within--and yet sometimes the people who have the most reason to feel self-esteem do not, just as some people who are obviously  beautiful truly do not believe that they are. The analogy between these two qualities is really pretty good--until you get to this point, which is that, unlike beauty, self-esteem is earned. It is not bestowed; not all the feel-good awards ceremonies in the world can generate it. Self-esteem is not even a God-given right, and if you take issue with this statement I ask you to consider: did Adolf Hitler have great self-esteem? You bet he did.

When I want words of sanity on this topic, I turn to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, who I have interviewed and whose books I have read (well, two or three of them, anyway) and who makes a whole lotta sense on this topic. Real self-esteem, in Seligman's view, does not come from giving kids awards every time they turn around, or from constantly telling them how beautiful, unique and wonderful they are. Self-esteem comes from dealing with challenges, from mastering difficult tasks and from hard work.

This is a totally common-sense view. Yet it's also an unfashionable one, especially in education circles, where a generation or two of teachers have been taught that "self-esteem" is essential to learning and that "self-esteem" can be applied like Band-Aids over every little personality quirk and flaw (despite lots of recent research which shows no connection between how great a kid feels about himself and how much he actually learns, and if you want a leaping-off point to start looking at this, try this 2003 study by Brown University researchers). This makes me worry about kids today; it makes me worry about my daughter. Lake Wobegon is a fictional place, and in the real world children are not all above average. And even those who are above average in some things are not above average in everything. Moreover, if kids are praised incessantly for simply doing what they should be doing, what are parents supposed to do when they actually do something amazing? What words in our vocabulary are left?

Years ago (I cackle in my dotage), I worked on a newspaper story which concerned the killing of a prisoner inside the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. It was a hard story to do, involving lots of furtive meetings with anonymous sources in parking lots and dealing with authority figures who did not want the story to be told, but I finally got the facts in printable form and wrote it. And then my editor, Wendell "Sonny" Rawls, came over to my desk to read it over, line by line. He asked me lots of questions and when he was done he got up, rolled up the printout and tapped me on the shoulder with it, said, "Good work," and walked off. 

Someday, I hope my daughters will have an experience like that. But I fear that after the Fifth Grade Awards Ceremony, the real thing will be such a letdown.

I Take It Back. This Job Does Come With Benefits.

It's summer. The 10-year-old is in Georgia with her Aunt Nonny and my six-year-old and I are having a week at home, just us. Today she had a friend over to play, and in the middle of the afternoon she runs into the kitchen: "Gimme an I!"

"Eye!" I say.

"NO." She draws a big breath. (Those blue eyes, those adorable freckles, the curly pigtails--oh God, I want to eat her up.) "Just listen. Gimme an I! Gimme an L! Gimme an O! Gimme a V! Gimme a E! Gimme a Y! Gimme a O! Gimme a--" She pauses, thinking. Then: "Gimme a U! Gimme a M! Gimme an O! Gimme a M! Gimme a M! Gimme a Y!" She runs away, then skitters back. "Gimme a exclamation mark!"

I'll Take a Heapin' Helpin' of Boredom, with a Topping of Ennui

I had a very interesting day yesterday. In fact, it's been an interesting week.

Let's see, I think my husband got the ball rolling on Sunday night, when he almost set the house on fire. He was making popcorn the old-fashioned way--in a big pot, heating the oil first--and he turned the heat up too high. We have a gas cooktop, so when he took the lid off the pot, a bit of grease popped out, hit the flame and--WHOOSH! There is a good side, though: when we remodeled the family room six years ago, I chose a shade for the walls which I thought was going to be bluish gray, but which turned out to be more powder-room blue. I've never liked it and now, in one corner at least, the walls are the kind of smoky blue I originally envisioned. I do not recommend this decorating method, however. It makes the children scream.

Okay, then, yesterday: It's about 9:30 a.m., and I'm sitting in my doctor's office, waiting to talk to someone about my neck (which has sprouted not one, not two, but THREE discs which are in the process of herniating, and let me be the poster child for all you people who think that proper desk ergonomics is a silly waste of time). I'm flipping through a magazine when I become aware of the fact that a man immediately to my right is talking to the receptionist, and that he and she are not communicating well. It seems he had a balance on his bill, the insurance company is giving him a hassle, he's between jobs....it's a mess. I thought, Poor guy--I mean, this is a doctor people don't go to see unless they are in pain, and medical insurance companies, in my opinion, are Satan's representatives on this earth--but I kept my eyes glued to the page because that's what one does when one is shamelessly eavesdropping. Suddenly: WHAM!--a computer screen goes flying past my head. A phone goes flying past my head. I turn--all this happened in a split-second--and see the man with his feet off the floor, lunging across the desk trying to get at the receptionist. It wasn't the violence per se--the doctor came out instantly, the cops were called, the man immediately backed off--but the speed with which a quiet conversation became an assault. I never saw it coming, and I'd been listening. An hour later, long after I'd left the doctor's office and life there had gotten more or less back to normal, I was still shaking and felt myself near tears. That seemed like an exaggerated reaction, even to me. But then I figured out that the sudden flip from conversational to violent reminded me of certain events of a bad, a really really bad, relationship I'd been in quite a few years ago. Funny:  it took my mind a good hour and a half to figure out the connection, but my body had remembered instantly.

Okaaaaaay, then. Back home, take a few deep breaths, talk to a friend, get calm again. The day passes. I work, I clean the house, I do the usual stuff, and at about 6:30 or so I am sitting in a chair right beside the family room window with my six-year-old daughter in my lap. A thunderstorm had been through a few moments earlier, but it had passed, and it looked as if the sun was going to come out again any minute. We are watching a DVD (and tickling each other) when suddenly--CRACK!--and I see a bolt of fire out of the corner of my eye. Suzanne screams in terror and flees to the other side of the room. I scream, too, and realize almost instantly that a bolt of lightning has just struck something outside the house. At first I thought, The transformer box--but no: the lights are still on, the TV is still working. (It turned out the lightning totally fried our fiber optic connection). I had to spend quite a few minutes calming Suzanne down, and calming myself down, and assuring myself that nothing was on fire. But finally both of us get calm again (Suzanne still whimpering), and we go back to our DVD. I am sitting there thinking, wow, that lightning bolt couldn't have been more than five feet away from us; thank God we hadn't gone outside...and then I start to wonder: where is David? He and Rebecca had gone out a couple of hours earlier. I had my usual thought--They've been in a car accident--and immediately chastised myself for catastrophizing again (it's a habit you get into when you get depressed, and it's hard as hell to break even after you've stopped feeling depressed)...but time passes, and no David.

Finally, finally, the door opens, and it's David and Rebecca. And David says, "I've been in the worst accident I've ever been in, and I think the car is totaled. We walked home."

He'd taken a corner a little too fast, and the streets were still wet from the rain, and he hit a fire hydrant. (We're not sure, but we think the hydrant may have been drunk--it just came out of nowhere.) No damage to hydrant, no damage to either David or Rebecca, but one whole side of the car is pretty wiped out.

All this in one day, not counting the Popcorn Incident. I am really ready for some boredom now.

Okay, Leslie, Let's Call It a Draw

A while back, I posted something about Leslie Bennett's book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? , in which Bennetts argues that women who drop out of the salaried workforce (note the adjective) to raise kids are making a dumb decision because they will be forever economically penalized. I was pretty hard on ol' Leslie because I thought she was placing the blame on moms and not the culture in which we live; Bennetts responded to that criticism (which was made by many others besides me) by saying basically she wasn't taking sides, she was just a reporter reporting the facts. I think it boiled down to a question of tone, and the fact that maybe Bennetts underestimates the difficulties some mothers face in combining career with child-rearing--a feat she was able to pull off herself rather successfully.

Anyway, all this made me rather interested in today's Kojo Nnambdi Show, on WAMU (88.5 FM) in which the panelists were discussing the benefits of marriage. The panelists included Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and who wrote, among other things, the book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992). Here's my question:

"I just heard somebody refer to marriage as a 'wealth-generating enterprise'. I'm curious as to how this squares with the fact that educated married women who drop out of the salaried work force to spend time with their kids suffer a long-term blow to their earning potential, if in fact they ever make it back into the salaried workforce at all. Are women like me just exceptions to the "wealth generating' rule?"

Here's Stephanie's answer, which I took off the air just now:

"That's a problem we don't have an answer for, frankly, and I don't think we ever will....There IS a penalty for women dropping out of the labor force."

 

So, okay, Leslie, you got your facts straight (though the existence of this phenomenon was never anything I took issue with). This is a reality I'm living with right now--though I have to say that my life has resembled Leslie Bennetts' life in many ways, the chief one being that I have never entirely dropped out of the labor force. I quit my job at the Washington Post when my oldest daughter was born 10 years ago, true, and I did not go back to the job that was waiting for me there after my year of maternity leave. My reason was really simple: I did not want to work at a job that would require me to devote roughly 12 hours out of my 24-hour day, with commuting and everything else, when I had a baby at home--and there were no flextime, telecommuting or job sharing options available to me (note to Leslie: please re-read this sentence). I took on contract work with my former employer. I freelanced extensively. I wrote a book. I did the math just the other day and, on average, I have contributed roughly $23,000 a year to the household income for each of the 10 years that I have been "not working" and home with my daughters. But still, in dollar terms, there's no doubt I have paid a price.   

In human terms, the jury is still out. When my oldest daughter was three--about the time I was thinking hard about returning to the full-time work force--it began to become apparent that there were Issues looming. She had tantrums--all kids have tantrums--but these were mind-boggling tantrums the likes of which nobody had ever seen. She'd been a high-strung kid from day one, and with that gut feeling that moms develop, I was getting the vibe that rough times were ahead. And they were. Over the next four or five years, she was a part-time job all by herself. Either I was dealing with a meltdown, or recovering from the effects of one, or looking up stuff on the web to explain them, or talking to school officials, or finding the right testing and psychologist, or going to therapy sessions, or....Trust me. It's a long list. Anybody who has a kid with ADD or Sensory Integration Disorder or autism or any other neurological issue is going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Her exact diagnosis doesn't matter here; suffice it to say that today she has a therapist, a psychiatrist, an occupational therapist, a pediatrician and several highly involved educators--all first-rate, all actively involved in helping her find her way through the mine fields she's been given to negotiate, and they have all made a huge difference. Yesterday, her therapist said to me, "Who could have done more for her? Look at what you've hooked her up with." My husband has told me much the same. The fact is that being a person with way too much experience with mood disorders and psychiatry provided me with tools to a) detect a problem at the very beginning and b) figure out, eventually, ways of dealing with it. Had it been up to my husband alone, it wouldn't have happened--not because he loves her less, but because his life has not included anything like the experiences I've had. Could I have done all that and held down a full-time job? Hell, no. That combination would have taxed a person of robust health who could get by on six hours of sleep every night, and believe me, I do not fit that description. It was either me, or nobody; it was a career or her.

So here we come to the big question, the one Leslie Bennetts asks: did I give up too much?

I don't know. All I do know is that today she graduated from fifth grade, and she was beaming. She made the honor roll; she has friends; she is (mostly) a happy kid. Next fall we start middle school, so stay tuned, but today the sky is blue and things look okay--not perfect by any means, but definitely okay. And, yes, there are days when I miss my old life; there are days when I yearn for the independence and sense of mastery I got from bringing in big bucks. During the dry spells that every writer goes through (this one has lasted about a year--so, note to the Cosmos: enough already!) I sometimes think, Boy, what an idiot I was. What a dumbass. If my kid turns into a heroin addict someday, I guess I'll know I made a bad bargain; if she wins the Nobel Prize, I'll know I did the right thing. And who knows what lies in between? Not me, not Leslie Bennetts, not anybody.

Anatomy of a Marital Dispute

Forget the details. The details are not important.

He's been working extraordinarily long hours and I've been covering the homefront, which can be tough, because at the moment we have two very high-maintenance kids. Our 10-year-old will soon be making the transition to middle school and has major angst; our six-year-old happens to be in a major whiny phase. There there's my ongoing health issues, and the fact that I am facing a big fork in the road in terms of my career, and don't know what to do. His career, meanwhile, is going great guns; he is in high demand. I confess I sometimes find the stark disparity painful. He needs a break. I need direction. The kids need attention. We all have needs that are not getting met, because there is this thing called Life, which feels like a marathon, and which we must all get up every morning and run all over again or risk....what? I don't know. I just know that we have to run.

And then this morning he makes a comment that a bystander might classify as passive-aggressive, and I rip into him about it. So then the kids are out the door, and he and I are having one of those conversations all married couples have at times--one of these "It's always--" or "You never--" And I'm saying to him, you have a pattern of doing this, and he's saying to me, You always notice every tiny little mistake I make, and I say heatedly, That's not true, there's plenty of things I don't comment on--oh crap, where did that comes from?--and he says, Then I guess I am just a lousy person, and I say with exasperation, Come on, that's not true, it's just that sometimes little things bug me. I'm sure you could come up with a list of things I do that bug you, too. But the fact is, I realize even as I say this, I don't know what those things are. He's never mentioned them.

There is a pause. And he looks at me and says, I just feel like you hold me to these high standards, and I never measure up--and suddenly we are on the same page, I know exactly how he feels. There is not a day that goes by that I don't feel that way, I say, with deep conviction--like I'm falling short.

You should give yourself more credit, then, he says, because you work really hard. And I say, Maybe you should give yourself more credit, too.

And then there is this long silence while we look at each other, having reached a point of impasse or understanding, it's not clear which, and then he sighs and reaches for his car keys and goes out the door, and I retire to my study to cry for a while. And gradually it dawns on me that really, he is not the person I need to forgive; there's nothing he's done that's so awful. The person I hold the most grudges against is myself; the person I most need to forgive is me. Because maybe if I were better at admitting that I am only human, it would be easier to let other people be only human, too.

And with this realization comes an unexpected sense of peace. And I know that somehow--I have no idea how--things will be okay.

Consciousness Raising Begins at Home, And We Plan to Start Tuesday

Saturday the mail came. I look through it and say to my husband, "Oh, terrific. I just got a summons for jury duty." My 10-year-old wants to know what jury duty is. I tell her it's a civic obligation and very important, but that sometimes it can be inconvenient.

"Well, Mom, look at it this way," she says, attempting to see the bright side. "At least you got a job."