Maternally Challenged

Mutual Assured Destruction

Love has something to do with the definition of "family"--but the real sticking point, the place where things get bolted together, is the knowledge that everybody else has the goods on you, and you have the goods on them. Mutual Assured Destruction, I think they call it. I've got your back and you've got mine, because otherwise I am going to let the world know about that disgusting thing you do with your toenails in bed, or about that time they had to close the baby pool after you crapped in it, or....You get the idea. These, friends, are the ties that bind. I realized this on vacation.

We were on our way back from visiting the relatives in Wisconsin, with a side trip to Ohio, and the trip odometer was inching up to 2,000 miles. We were tired, cramped from sitting in the car too long, a little punch drunk, and a little crabby. We'd stopped at a little diner to eat, and I can't remember how it started; I tuned in when I heard Rebecca saying to Suzanne, "If you ever do THAT to me, I'll tell about the Eric Incident." I saw Suzanne giving her older sister a glare that would have bored holes in granite, and in an attempt to divert Sibling Fight #47 of this trip, I said, "Yeah, Suze, but think of what you could tell on HER."

"Yeah," Suzanne said grimly. "Like you-know-who in math class that somebody has a crush on." 

"Why stick to boys?" I said. "how about that time she was three and gave the Miss America wave all the way down the plane aisle on the way to the lavatory?"

Rebecca said, "Parents don't get to play."

"I don't know why not," said her dad.

"Fine." said Rebecca. "Then how about that time you rode your bike to work and forgot your pants?"

"Don't forget," said her dad, "I have those baby pictures of you naked in the backyard pool. What will your prom date think of those?"

"'OH MOMMY,'" Suzanne mimicked, "'IT'S SOO BEEYOOOTIFULLL!''--a reference to the time Rebecca's enthusiastic admiration for the set of "The Nutcracker" caused widespread titters throughout the orchestra level and up to the loge of the Warner Theater. And the mayor's wife was in the row just in front of us. The recollection of this caused me to laugh, which was a mistake.

"Okay, Mom," Rebecca said. "Might I mention the time you tried to get into the wrong hotel room? Or--wait! How about the public toilet incident in Paris?"

"You weren't even alive then."

"So? Or how about watching you trying to get out of the inner tube at Great Wolf Lodge? Or the John Hancock Incident?"

She had me there. I was an adult, in my 30s, old enough to have been around for awhile, but I was buying my first piece of real estate for more money than I could bear to think about, and I was nervous. My kindly real estate agent was walking me through the whole thing and I was doing exactly what he told me to do, exactly, so when he put the formal offer paperwork in front of me and said, "Just put your John Hancock there on that line," that's....exactly.....what I wrote: John Hancock. Man, I thought, these real estate customs are weird. The look on my agent's face when he saw what I'd done said as clearly as words could ever say, Oh my God, I have been wasting my time with a complete Looney Tunes.

I will never live that down, because my kids will never let me. But that's okay: I have pictures stored away, and a few poopy diaper stories, and some information about the exact location of that chicken pox rash. We are a very close family that way. Very close.

Let's Give Us All A Pat On The Back

The other day my oldest, Rebecca, was talking about some kid who had been in one of her classes this past year. "He has ADHD, too," she said, "and my grades are soooooo much better than his. I think I deserve a pat on the back for that."

Which she did, and I gave her one--though with a little cautionary lecture about not defining success as "better off than X," because a) who knows what problems X has and b) next week, she could be X and c) it's just rude. But the moment ended, and I was left to think to myself: What about a pat on the back for me?

And on the heels of that thought came another thought: what about a pat on the back for ALL the parents like me--the parents of kids who have some special challenge, whether relatively manageable, like mine, or seriously daunting. All those parents out there who, like me, spend all that time in parenting classes, trying to figure out why their toddler is behaving so badly; who progress to Anger Management classes, to help them cope with the toddler who is behaving so badly; who spend all that time figuring out which expert to go to and what questions to ask, and how to get insurance to cover some part of it; all those parents who schlep back and forth to psychiatrist appointments that their kids don't want to go to, and staring up at the ceiling at night wondering if those pills the shrink just wrote a prescription for are going to permanently damage their child's brain; all those parents who schelp the kid back and forth to psychotherapy and social skills groups and occupational therapy and tutoring appointments; all those parents who go to the 504 meetings and the IEP meetings and stay up late at night e-mailing teachers about some missing assignment or the latest outburst.

Parenting kids like ours can be a lonely task. The only feedback we are likely to get is when there's a problem, and then there will be a lot of people who are eager to tell us what we are doing wrong and how they fixed that same problem at THEIR house (not understanding that maybe their problem and yours aren't the same at all). And though all parenting involves a lot of work, this kind of parenting involves vast amounts of extra work that nobody outside your immediate family is likely to hear about or see, much less give you credit for.

If this sounds self-pitying, I don't mean it to be; my kids are my greatest joy. It's just that Rebecca's words made me think that I deserve a little credit too, which I am hereby giving myself--and also to all you other guys out there, whoever you are. Because we are doing a very tough job.

They Are Who They Are

You have a baby, which emerges into the world as a curled-up ball with tiny fingers and toes and a mouth that sucks and a bottom that gets wet. About three months later it becomes a real baby, which to you is the most adorable being who ever lived. Surely, you think, this is a new kind of human. When he/she grows up, the world will know what perfection really is. And then 8 or 10 years go by, and you start to notice that this perfect creature has, sadly, developed some character flaws. She is sloppy. She doesn't flush the toilet. She gives you a lot of lip. She is a drama queen. What the hell happened? How did I fail? you think.

And then, if your timing is right, you manage to finish converting a whole lot of VHS tapes you've had lying around for a while into a DVD format, and you play snippets from the past back to yourself on the living room television, and you see these adorable creatures in the light of your present knowledge, and you say, Oh. Now I get it.

For quite a while now I've been fretting over Suzanne's problems with making friends, and her problems with decoding social cues and generally being super-sensitive to teasing. I thought of this as something that had somehow "happened" to her somewhere in her development, and which it was my duty to at least try to ameliorate. But the other night I was watching a recording of her when she was a year old, when Rebecca was five. "Say hello," Daddy says in the recording, and Rebecca says, "Hello, daddy," and then, as the camera tracks over to Suzanne, sitting in her high chair, Rebecca says, "She can't say hello yet. All she can say is 'mama' and 'no no no!'" And Suzanne then turns in her high chair and gives her big sister a hard stare, a look I now recognize as "You are SO mean. Why are you criticizing me?" I know this look well today; back then, I couldn't interpret it. But there it is: the hypersensitivity, the tendency to interpret a casual statement as a criticism or insult. It was all there, from the beginning.

I'd been thinking also that Rebecca's tantrums, and her tendency to focus her rage on Suzanne, was an adolescent phenomenon--but nope. There's a recording when Rebecca was six and Suzanne was two, and Rebecca is riding in a wheelbarrow, which she doesn't like and is screaming about, and after she gets down from the wheelbarrow she disappears around the corner of the house in a total meltdown rage. Suzanne looks after her, obviously concerned. "Becca?" she says, and toddles off around the corner of the house to see about her big sister, and on the recording you can hear a fierce scream: "LEAVE ME ALONE!" Again: there from the beginning--or at least there from a long time before I started to notice.

Insights like this make you think about genetics, and the powerful role it plays--not that it dooms us to a predetermined fate, but it certainly provides the raw materials fate has to work with. The wonderful stuff is still there, too: the kindness that shines in Rebecca's eyes, her bashful pride in her own accomplishments, Suzanne's open-hearted love and empathy and creativity. Parents these days often fall into the trap of thinking that every little thing they do with/to their kids in the first five or six years is of earthshaking importance--when in fact, the kids are creating the parents as much as the parents are influencing the kids. They come out of the womb as people, not parenting projects. If nothing else, having children teaches you humility--if, that is, you can avoid calling it "failure."