I blog, therefore I am...

A couple of posts ago I mentioned an article that influenced my blogs greatly. I have so many thing that I would write about...if I had the time I would have 4 or 5 different blogs that all served a different purpose. But for now, this is what I have time for and its what is most important for me to write about. I've come to the somewhat obvious realization that the fact that they occupy 99.9% of my life from day to day means that they must be pretty important...and I am grateful. My husband and my children are my life and there is precious little in this world that should compete with that. It doesn't mean that there aren't other things that I love or other things that could make me happy...but things that require the greatest sacrifice bless us with the greatest rewards. And I can honestly say, even on the toughest of days where selfishness seems to be the answer and only respite, there is no place I would rather be than here with them.

On Being a 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 included 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 included 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.