Epicurus
01-29-2004, 10:25 AM
Not so much a debate. I got this in my e-mail this morning and thought it was nice. You can subsitute dad for mom and it works just as well :)
Collette
>On Being Mom by Anna Quindlen
>If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever
existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the blackbutton eyes
of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high
piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an
apostrophe above her chin.
>
>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 pored 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 a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is
toilet trained at 3, his brother 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 for 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
Collette
>On Being Mom by Anna Quindlen
>If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever
existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the blackbutton eyes
of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high
piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an
apostrophe above her chin.
>
>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 pored 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 a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is
toilet trained at 3, his brother 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 for 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