Motherhood Check-In

So this morning started out well - and by well I mean poorly. I rearranged the carpool schedule to make it to a physical therapy appointment at 8 am, at a place twenty minutes away, because everything is twenty minutes away from me, except the coffee shop and the library, the reasons I liked this town; anyway, I arrived, parked askew because I was a minute late, and discovered that my appointment was for a different day. Yup. 

Then I had to decide whether to drive all the way home and then back out again for my next appointment (dermatologist for annual skin check), also twenty minutes away, or whether to go somewhere for coffee. Naturlich, I had no book with me, because I’d been running late. So I had to buy a magazine. So I went to the coffee shop near my next appointment and read Psychology Today. 

Well, so here’s a thing. Never one to miss an opportunity for reassurance, I finally did ask the dermatologist about my itchy feet. Remember those? The dermatologist said I had itchy feet because of dry skin - and offered a solution. The solution involves a solution, a solution of baking powder and water. I’m to soak my feet in this solution, then dry them, then apply a heavy moisturizing cream. I’m to do so for several days in a row, and then, voilà. This will make me feel better than getting a cheap pedicure at the local nail salon where the workers might be abused and poisoned, according to my favorite paper. 

In other news, in case you haven't noticed, both my children are teens now. This means that when I make myself available to them after school by lingering around the kitchen and doing dishes, there is no converstaion. Both are bowed over their electronic devices and simultaneously inhaling snacks. Silence is broken only by requests for money or signatures on school forms. 

At this point, I’m the chauffeur. They’ve figured out my old scam that allowed me to eavesdrop on their conversations. All I had to do back then, once upon a time, when they shushed one another in front of me, was say, “Oh, don’t worry. I can hear you, but I don’t know what you’re saying. I don’t speak kid.” Then they’d resume talking in front of me. "Don't worry, she doesn't speak kid," I heard one of them say to another friend once and I did a (internal) victory dance.

Those days are gone. Now I’m password-excluded from their Instagram and Tumblr accounts and text messages. Never mind that the experts insist parents should have those passwords and be checking those accounts regularly. Not happening in my house. I can’t remember my own passwords. What am I going to do about theirs? And they keep changing them anyway. And making other accounts that I don’t know about. Except that I know about their existence. 

At this point, as Madeleine Levine unreassuringly pointed out in her book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, my influence is basically nil. It’s all peers all the time now. So if I haven’t imprinted upon my offspring to this point, tough luck. "Tough titties" as we used to say with a giggle back in fourth grade. Childhood is really not a time of innocence, Readers.

On top of that, I read in the Sunday NYTimes that daughters of working mothers earn 23% more than daughters of stay-at-home-mothers (SAHM’s). This led to a (totally not at ALL defensive) conversation last night after our family meeting about how I am not “just” a SAHM. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Ahem, ahem. But that I do work professionally - I’m a writer. I just don’t earn any money to speak of. But I work. Do they think of me as working, I inquired? They, being somewhat clever children, quickly responded that of course they think of me as working. 

Then I said, "Well, my feeling is this. If it turns out that it is better for you that I am a working mother, then I am a working mother. If it is better for you that I am a SAHM, then that is what I am. Because that is what I’m about. What is best for you."

And I have to say, that gave at least one of them pause. I saw it. The pause it gave her. So there was a moment when one of them was listening. I’ll take it. 

10 Tips for Creating a Can-Do Child

In response to my previous post about the best advice Martha Stewart ever received, a friend emailed me, "So how do we teach our children what Martha Stewart's dad taught her?" 

Now, Readers, I have absorbed a lot of material about success over the last year – year or two (can you believe) – and it’s changed me in ways I can no longer parse into categories. Things have blended together in my head into a big smoothie of success. This analogy is my acknowledgment that I may repeat something someone else, someone much Bigger, someone much more Expert, someone much more Famous (which is not at all hard) than myself may have said, and if so, I apologize. In advance. In advance of any advance I may eventually receive for work not yet published, in fact.

Now that’s out of the way. 

My amalgamated advice is as follows:

• Believe your children are capable of great things – however they may grow up to define them.
• Tell your children you believe this of them.
• Praise and encourage all effort, persistence, and progress your children make.
• Encourage them to make and meet goals.
• Allow them time to be autonomous when possible and to find the creativity in all disciplines.
• Model, model, model for them your own effort, persistence, and progress toward goals you set yourself.
• Model your creative engagement. As one reader commented, show them that it’s worthwhile to devote full attention to whatever you do, and not to hold back in hope of something better coming along.
• Celebrate achievement – but focus on achievement being the result of effort. And persistence and progress.
• Model resilience after setbacks.
• Hope for the best!

Now, this list may skew a little vague and touchy-feely, and it is. Oh, it is. But I think and hope it works. I guess we’ll find out eventually. 

All of this advice begs a deeper question that came up from several emails and comments from my treasured readers: How much control do we actually have over our children's development? You see, Readers, I've noticed a tendency, a propensity, shall we say, among people to change their views on how much influence parents actually have over their children, depending on how old their children are, and how much of a mess their grown up childrens' lives appear to be. In short, Readers, I’ve noticed that the older children get, the less their parents say they have any effect on or control over their choices and personalities. 

Buddhists, Kahlil Gibran (“your children are not your children, they are blah, blah, blah"), and anyone who’s a grandparent will tell you: NONE.

And Madeleine Levine, my current book mama, says that once your kid gets to 11, 12, 13 and so on, it’s pretty much up to their friends to shape them. Krikey. This is somewhat distressing to the parent who spends a good part of the night obsessing over what courses her child should take in high school. 

So what good is my list?

One way of looking at this problem is that our parental understanding develops as our children develop from infancy to adulthood. We move from the SENSATION of having no control, except (and this is big) over their physical selves, due to our relative gigantism compared to them, to FEAR that we have no control over them, to HOPE that we aren’t responsible for them. That is, unless they turned out fabululious, and then we take CREDIT.

Another way of looking at this trajectory of responsibility divestment is that by the time our kids are adults, possibly with children of their own, they’ve defined themselves by making many mistakes and having many triumphs, and we are developing dementia. Because we humans tend to forget things were ever different from how they seem in the present, we feel we have no influence on them anymore and that, therefore, we never did. Neither of which is true, as anyone who has spent any time in psychotherapy will know. We did influence them, and we still do. Their eyes are always on us. But the enormity of responsibility for how a person grows up to interact in the world is much easier, perhaps, to disavow than to accept. Which is fine, Grandparents, if you must. You may wash your hands of our stupid choices. But then you aren’t allowed to take credit for our successes, either. And that extends to the offspring of those children you feel you had no ability to influence. And our eyes are on you.

For some reason, I am recalling that when the 9^th grader was two, she became obsessed with dressing herself. And undressing herself. And re-dressing herself. Her room was a shambles, with everything always spilling out of the dresser and onto the floor. Needless to say, her outfits were not exactly matchy-matchy Garanimals. That didn’t bother me, actually. I’m not into matchy-matchy. But I didn’t want her wearing bathing suits or party dresses to school. Her very wise Toddler Time teacher suggested I designate one or two drawers of her dresser into which I was to place several outfits appropriate to the season, which she was allowed to wear in any combination she chose. I could rotate these outfits as needed. So, freedom to choose, but limited freedom. Parameters. It worked like a charm. Stripes and florals, skirts over pants, whatever. I didn’t care. In fact, I liked it. Eliminated some of the mess and all of the power struggle.

What does this have to do with the reader who responded that he felt it would have been useless to tell his daughter she could do anything she wanted to, because he knew it was untrue, and she would have known he knew it, too? He went on to explain that there were too many random factors at work in determining what a person could be; ultimately, he said, citing Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, success depends about 30 percent on ability and 70 percent on chance. This is a pretty bleak outlook, in some ways. It’s tempting to say, why bother trying, then? And yet, because I am not yet old, I persist.

I guess the connection is this: that we all operate within constraints, and yet those constraints can be the mold for our creativity and for our sense of autonomy. None of us can control the external world, but we can still learn agency from within that constraint. The point is not to say that the world is going to throw you curveballs, so you’d better spend your life ducking. The point is not to say that you must wear a red shirt with your blue pants, or else. The point is to say that given the need to wear clothes and your parent’s need for some kind of order, your choice is limited by circumstances, but within those limitations you can create your own outfit. Similarly, teaching your child that she can do whatever she wants allows her to stretch. The world may – will – prevent or hinder or complicate circumstances, but the child who believes she can do, will do what she can with what life hands her. Goals may need altering, but the can-do child will accommodate that. That’s better than not trying stuff in anticipation of chance working against her. Besides, hard work and creativity may alter goals and circumstances in positive ways.

Sonnets. Villanelles. Sestinas. Sometimes restrictions are liberating. Look at it this way. By frustrating your young child’s desire to do whatever he wants (wear a bathing suit to school in winter in Albany, NY, say) yet giving him some choices, you teach many lessons. One is that the world will not always bend to his wishes. Would you not say that is a useful lesson? Another is that he still has some control over himself and his person. Is that not also useful? And a final one is that there is satisfaction from working within constraints. Again, useful. It teaches him he can do anything he wants to do. In this case, he wants to pick his own outfit. It also teaches him to modify his goal to accommodate his limits - to revise what he wants to do, if necessity forces him to. And that, I think, is the way of the world. Success is determined by how fully you express yourself within your limits. 

Selected Bibliography

Dweck, Mindset

Faber and Mazlich, How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen & Listen So They Will Talk

Ginott, Between Parent and Child

Halvorsen, Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals

Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success

Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

Pink, Drive

Whose Screw is Loose?

Is it mine?

Last week I had this piece in the New York Times Motherlode blog. It ran in tandem with KJ Dell’Antonia’s response to it. In case you missed them, they are about how my daughter's course selections for next year triggered my anxiety about how much to push for prestigious colleges and KJ's lack of anxiety about it and her heartwarming belief in passion and hard work. Together, they are still generating comments, which is good, since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I am told. If only I could publish my blog in the NYTimes everyday, I’d get a lot more comments on it. Of course, I would have to grow a thicker skin. Maybe just let my tendency to eczema fulfill itself…

Because some of those comments – hoo boy. Let me tell you. I’ve tried not to read too many of them, because I can only stand so much. Plus, I am suggestible, so it’s best not to pay too close attention or I might start (really) believing them.

Interestingly, every comment I saw suggested or downright declared that I had better seek help for my mental illness. Which, you know, rankles, since I’ve been doing that for years. And none of those professionals has ever told me I’m crazy. Except one, but she was joking. I am pretty sure.

Meanwhile, every comment the husband read was about how the commenter hadn't been a bit concerned one way or another about college, yet his/her child had grown up to be an exemplary human with absolutely no stress or intervention of a parental nature.

Yet my friends told me they thought the comments were overall kind of in agreement with me.

Go figure. We find what we are looking for, I guess.

*

I thought, Readers, you might be interested in a few background details about the posts.

First of all, Gym Mom immediately identified herself. Not to worry. We are still on excellent terms. In fact, she emailed that she was “excited and proud" to make her debut in the Times. So all is well there. And you can see she has an excellent sense of humor.

I, too, have retained mine, despite glancing at one too many exhortations to let my kid eat lunch already. Far too many commenters use as evidence of my mental illness and my terrible mothering the “fact” that I am “making” the 9th grader skip lunch. Hello? She took lunch this year, her first year in high school, because I/we insisted. She has put her foot down about next year. None of her friends take lunch, so why should I force her to if she doesn’t want to? Eventually, one HT from Ohio wrote in explaining why she avoided lunch all through high school: "my high school cafeteria was like something out of The Lord of The Flies, and anyone who could avoid it, did." Of her cafeteria experience, the 9^th grader says, simply, that it's full of “drama.” 

Furthermore, since we live in a town that has its school schedule organized for the benefit of the all-important athletic teams that “need” to practice in the afternoons, high school starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 2:07 p.m., and not at the time that would most fit with adolescent development and support academic achievement. (Do NOT get me started on that.) The point is, the 9^th grader can have lunch slash snack when she gets home.

By the way, many of these kids take that extra period and use it for art or music, because they’re only allotted time in a regular schedule for one or the other, and this way they can take both. So it’s not as if it’s only the Type A tiger cubs who drop lunch.

Second of all, almost better than having something published was emailing with KJ Dell’Antonia about publishing it. After she accepted my initial essay, I decided I wanted to rewrite it, making it less flippant and self-deprecating, which doesn’t play well when Motherlode readers are ready with their comment-trigger-fingers. Subtlety doesn’t really work, as I’ve found on both occasions I’ve published in Motherlode. In fact, half the readers don’t even finish the piece, which I could tell this time, because they criticize me for being too invested, when I concluded by letting the 9^th grader make her own decision about her extra class. Yes, that little factoid eluded most readers. KJ told me she hashed out her response with her husband, who comes down a little closer to my side than she, and then it was a go. Still, she worried that she was “letting me out to hang,” because my piece was going to offend people who didn’t have ways or means of getting their children into top colleges. I could see that my piece hinged on my emotional conflict, while hers was a reasoned, logical argument, and therefore I would be blasted by people who didn't read the subtext, but I told her it was fine. I am all about conflict. So I put my head on the block and wham!

I am still here.