jodi714
Love my little girl!
Member since 2/06 3621 total posts
Name:
Jodi
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Anna Quindlen Article
A mommy friend of mine just sent this. I enjoyed so I thought I would share...
Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist & Author:
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow
but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what
I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I
am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the
same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of
disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who
sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I
choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel
and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more
than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom,
zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth
all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for
the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the
baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible
except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once poured over
is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry
Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and
sleeping through the night and early-childhood
education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight
Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered,
spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped
the pages dust would rise like memories. What those
books taught me, finally, and what the women on the
playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations
--what they taught me, was that they couldn't really
teach me very much at all. Raising children is
presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes
multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize
that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything.
One child responds well to positive reinforcement,
another can be managed only with astern voice and a
timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his
sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents
were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he
would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my
last arrived, babies were put down on their backs
because of research on sudden infant death syndrome.
To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is
terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must
learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will
follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr.
Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in
which he describes three different sorts of infants:
average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a
sub-quiet codicil or an 18-month old who did not walk.
Was there something wrong with his fat little legs?
Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind?
Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged?
Was I insane? Last year he went to China Next year he
goes to college.He can talk just fine. He can walk,
too. Every part of raising children is humbling, too.
Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been
enshrined in the 'Remember-When-Mom-Did ' Hall of
Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad
language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell
off the bed. The times
I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare
sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the
youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98
on her geography test, and I responded, 'What did you
get wrong?'. (She insisted I include that.) The time I
ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker
and then drove away without picking it up from the
window.(They all insisted I include that.) I did not
allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two
seasons. What was I thinking? But the biggest mistake
I made is the one that most of us make while doing
this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is
particularly clear now that the moment is gone,
captured only in photographs. There is one picture of
the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in
the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6,
4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and
what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how
they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had
not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing:
dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the
doing a little more and the getting it done a little
less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what
didn't, what was me and what was simply life. When
they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they
would become who they were because of what I'd done.
Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves
because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back
off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and
I
was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes
over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound
up with the three people I like best in the world who
have done more than anyone to excavate my essential
humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was
bound and determined to learn from the experts. It
just took me a while to figure out who the experts
were.
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