All My Babies Are Gone Now

I share this with you here, though I know you can read it elsewhere, simply because when I read it today it really moved me.

By Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and 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 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. 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. 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.

classrooms like slums

CSUS, the state college where I work, has been afire with acrimony this semester. Faculty accuse the President (Alexander Gonzalez) of mismanaging the budget and overwhelmingly voted "no confidence" in his direction. The President and many alumni accuse the faculty of being short-sighted and interested only in their own salaries.

As an English lecturer at CSUS, I don't have time to investigate the ins and outs of those claims. But I can illustrate a little of the reason for such low morale and cynicism on campus.

I share one office with four other instructors, all conferencing students simultaneously. We five share one computer, one broken printer and one phone. When we arrive for 7:00 a.m. office hours, our building’s door is often locked. When we bring in a space heater to ease the winter chill, we are chided for unnecessary energy use. When we arrive at our classrooms, we find wires dangling where clocks should be. When there is a clock, it reports its own, unique time of day. When we write on chalkboards, we do so with tiny chalk-stubs and no replacement boxes. When the classrooms have whiteboards, there are no dry-erase pens. When we bring transparencies to class, we find no overhead projector. When students file in for the first day of class, they find broken desks and chairs stacked precariously, artistically, in the front corner of the room, and must lean against the wall or squat on the floor.

I ask my students to judge their education by the quality of our academic dialogue, but they are not fooled. Our classrooms and offices are slums and the landlord isn’t proud enough of what happens here to fix it.

Reading Lolita in Sacramento

Two summers ago, my 15-year-old son sat at the kitchen table reading Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita. About 14 pages into the thing, he put it down in disgust. “Jeez, what kind of parent are you? I can’t believe you’re making me read this!”

I was not “making” him read it. My son and his friends had started a book club as eighth-graders. They planned to read three books every summer, with me as facilitator. Coincidentally, all their choices that first summer were banned or challenged books: Catcher in the Rye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Of Mice and Men. So they remade themselves into the Banned Books Club, the bad boys and girls of the library.

In their second summer, when the local children’s librarian got squeamish about their club name, we moved our meetings from the library to Giovanni’s Pizza and became the Banned (from the library) Banned Books Club. This was better yet. They were real readers, making their own choices, holding lively and funny talks and eating a lot of pizza. Getting kicked out of the library was an added benefit. I approved.

In their third summer, wanting to up the ante, they decided to read Lolita. Now, I see myself as a mom who supports her sons in reading against the grain. I think books are dangerous, in a good way. But when the group announced its plan to read that book, I felt a great big balk coming on. Was I really going to read Lolita with a bunch of 15-year-olds? Was I going to discuss a grown man’s rape of a 12-year-old with teenagers at a pizza parlor? I e-mailed the parents, and they all gave their OK. (Thanks a lot.) I told my son I was uncomfortable with Lolita, since it was, well, you know, about pedophilia. His response: “Wait, you encourage us to have a Banned Books Club and then you tell us what we can and can’t read? Really, Mom?”

He had me there. The kids read the book. Over pizza, they shared their disgust for Humbert. They thought that the topic was creepy, that the book was often difficult to understand and that they had never experienced such dark material written in such a humorous voice. Absolutely nobody in the group concluded that pedophilia was a good or strangely funny thing, though they did conclude that Lolita was a good and strangely funny book. They were smart readers. They saw the difference between art and life.

I believe that reading is an earned pleasure. If my sons will do the very hard work of reading a good, challenging, complicated book, then they certainly have earned the right to discuss the content of that book with someone who will respect their ideas. I think that we can help intelligent, responsible adolescents to grow into intelligent, responsible adults when they are allowed to safely confront disconcerting ideas in books they are ready to read and then discuss them with adults they trust. I believe in teenagers who read banned books, and I believe in the adults who read with them.

Moroccan supper for boys and moms

Every year my sons' high school has a mother-son dance. To attempt to take at least some of the dorkiness out of it, we always do a mother-son dinner on folding tables in our front yard beforehand, at which 40 dads plate the food and serve and clean up for their partners and kids. This year was great, partly because my family prepped so much of the food in advance.

We served Lemon Honey Wine Punch (for the moms), Pistachio Couscous and Moroccan Chicken Arugula Salad with Pita.

Here's how it went.

For the Lemon Honey Wine Punch, I combined 2 bottles of an inexpensive Spanish white wine with half a bottle of vodka, a can of Trader Joe's honey, four ziploc bags of frozen Meyer lemon juice, a whole lot of halved kumquats, and sliced blood oranges in a Sangria jar a day in advance. Right before the party, I added a liter of club soda and another of seven up. We served the punch over ice and it was very good on a hot Sacramento evening.

For the Pistachio Couscous, I cooked whole wheat couscous in chicken broth with added tabasco, rather than water. I chopped and blanched asparagus and carrots for color, adding them to the cooked couscous. For each large casserole pan, I ground up and added a bag of pistachio meat. I seasoned it with ground cardamom, garlic, salt and pepper. At the last minute I added chopped scallions and parsley.

For the Moroccan Chicken Arugula Salad, I boiled bagged, frozen chicken breasts (dirty little secret) and then shredded them and refrigerated them overnight in a dressing of meyer lemon juice (frozen from last season), garlic, salt, pepper, honey, white wine vinegar, orange juice, chicken broth, currants and raisons. I tossed the chicken and dressing the next day with arugula, mandarin orange sections, mint leaves and chives. I THINK that's it! It got a little crazy with additions to the chicken so I am not promising that is it exactly.

But the dishes went over well, even the boys cleaning their plates.

procrastination

This is the really great thing about beginning this blog -- I have discovered a new (for me) procrastination device.

In the past, when I had essays to grade, as I have now, I could turn to deadheading, then fertilizing, then snailbating, before grading. By the time I had responded to every garden need, it would likely be time to pick up the kids from school. Procrastination mission accomplished.

But now that my kids can drive their own selves home from school, it turns out I need a new device. I can only garden so long without looking like a fool.

Ergo, I am here, typing this, rather than grading.

Why put off the reading and responding to 45 essays? Because I cannot just grade them, or even correct them, both of which are easy enough. I have to RESPOND to them. Some days I feel about this the same way a shy person feels at a party. I just don't want to try to interact in that way.

I know it is important to hear and to respond to what my students have to say, before I can respond to how they say it. But it is just so much harder to deal with their content. Sometimes, they have precious little to say and it is hard to be positive about their thinking.

And that is why I drag my feet. That is why I've typed these words. (After having handwatered the beds rather than turning on the soaker hose.)

Enough of that. Back to the essays.

I hate sports

As a chubby reader growing up, I never took part in sports, mainly because they did not come naturally to me. Some kids are designed by nature to fidget and wiggle and wail unless they can be climbing or running or hitting. It seems to me those kids are far more likely to grow into athletes than kids like I was.

I had a long attention span. I could sit and daydream and read and listen to music or imagine things quietly for hours alone. I was not unhappy. And I had no trouble relating to other kids when they happened by. But I certainly was not driven to play. It seemed odd to me that others were. It also seemed odd to me how “into” sports other people, especially adults, could be.

Then I grew up and became a mother of boys. Now of course I know that girls play sports at the highest levels and with the greatest intensity. But I don’t think they HAVE to play sports. They can focus on being artistic, or social, or intellectual or business-like or pretty instead if they like, and find friends and be happy in those ways.

But I am pretty close to thinking that boys HAVE to play sports. Not only that. They also have to be notably good in at least one of those sports in order to possess the invisible union card that will allow them into boy friendship circles.

Any good parent wants her children to have friends, so in spite of my own lack of sports-savvy, I made sure my sons were registered in all the relevant seasonal leagues. There was soccer and swimming and football and basketball and water polo and track and cross country. By watching carefully through these seasons, I figured out (slow learner) that they would have more fun and more friends if they got good at these sports, especially in middle school, when boys are prone to running into trouble.

So my husband (who knew all this without studying it) and I made sure our sons made all the practices and talked about the games before and after and attended additional private training sessions and went off to summer sports camps. We wanted our sons to be good at sports so that they could have friends so that they would be happy and so would we.

In fact, this thinking paid off. Each of our sons did develop a notable level of expertise in at least one sport by middle school – our eldest in swimming and our youngest in basketball. The interesting thing was, that as our sons began to perform well in these areas, we noticed that other adults were paying more respect to us, too. Imagine. My husband and I gained status as our sons moved faster and scored more. And I don’t just mean that the Neanderthal types thought we were cool. I mean that some of the most intelligent, successful adults we knew thought more highly of our family when our sons swam fast and made baskets. I felt this was pathetic, but I certainly did enjoy it.

I became a rabid fan of my children’s sports. Of course I pulled coolers of gatorade and typed rosters and threw potluck awards banquets and waved pom poms. But beyond that, I cared. I mean I really cared how well my sons performed at these STUPID events.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that exercising is stupid, or that teamwork or effort or passion or strategizing or celebrating victory are stupid. I am just admitting that if my sons were doing all these things, caring for their team and trying hard and thinking intelligently and rejoicing at good moments, why did it matter whether they were a hero or not, or even whether their team won or not? But it did matter to me. I definitely preferred the role of sports when my sons won a medal or made the clutch shot.

Now my sons are in high school. I hate sports.

My older son, the swimmer, decided to shift his attention to water polo in high school. Since there are many excellent and talented players at his school, early on he suffered through some painful moments of being edged out of the playing rotation. In his sophomore year his coach seemed to decide our son would not be in his senior year rotation so stopped investing time or interest in him. This made my husband and me sick to our stomachs. How should we advise our son to handle this situation? It seemed to us that he should speak to his coach. Clearly we should not speak to the coach on his behalf. So I did. I was the mom who emailed the coach. That did not work out well. I do not recommend it.

Fortunately, our son found a very satisfactory (for him) way to deal with sports disappointment. He decided he hoped he’d never get in a game. That way he could stay dry on the pine, cracking jokes with the other bench warmers. He really was happy in this new role. In fact, he was relatively famous for wearing his team bathrobe over no swim suit at all. He just wouldn’t put it on. In the rare event the coach called his name, he’d ask him to wait a minute while he deck-changed. My son dealt with his disappointment by deciding not to care, with flair. My husband and I had to shift around and try to not-care too, which was harder than you’d think. This was the boy who’d won every single swim event in the Meet of Champions as an 8^th grader, the boy who’d set five club records. This was the boy who’d made us look very, very good, without our swimming a lap.

We adjusted. Within about a month of his senior season, we were the witty, relaxed parents in the stands, joking, cheering and having fun while the parents of real players worried. It worked.

But our second boy did care about basketball. So when he worked and ran and yes-coached the best he could and made his freshman team, we were so happy for him (and for us – we love to watch him play), until such time as the coach decided he would not grow into the tall kind of kid who might play in his senior year and benched him and four other boys for nine games straight.

When we called the coach (yup, we did it again) to ask if our son had a bad attitude or failed to work hard enough, he answered “Oh no. He is the hardest worker on the team. He has a great attitude. It’s just that I want him to learn that sometimes hard work and a positive attitude aren’t enough.”

This wasn’t the lesson we wanted to teach our 15 year old son. So we told him to quit.

Yes, we encouraged our son to quit. And as a result we endured many hard looks from sports people who disapproved of the lesson we were teaching our son. As you may guess, we typically seek to avoid disapproving hard looks. But we decided to suck it up and tell everybody: sports are not important enough to make a kid and his parents sick. And if hard work and a great attitude aren’t predictors of fulfillment in anything he is doing, then we think he really ought to quit that thing and go where effort and attitude do make a difference.

Of course the real reason I hate sports is because it puts my kids in a position to be hurt, and a part of me wishes they could avoid that (and that I could too). But in a way I am happy that they continue to put themselves out there, trying new things – the swimmer became an actor this year, the basketball player a runner. And though these risks make me nervous on their behalf, I continue to cheer the highs right along with them.