"All My Babies Are Gone Now”
By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist
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 me, 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 a stern 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.
As 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.
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 here.) 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.
the experts pictured below...
No comments:
Post a Comment