Parenting: A MOTHER'S DAYS
by Joyce Maynard
Originally published in Parenting Magazine, May 1997

I started writing about the experience of being a parent nineteen years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child. She graduated from high school last June. The older of her two brothers recently entered high school. His younger brother will join him there next year.

None of this means my days of parenting are over. In fact, one of the surprises for me in watching my children grow up has been the discovery that these older years I'm now concerned with require just as much of a parent (often more, in fact) than the stages that found me diapering and getting up in the night, hosting birthday parties and mixing batches of homemade play doh. I remember when my kids were six, two and two weeks old, how I'd sometimes look enviously at parents whose children were the ages mine are now -- ages allowing them to go out for dinner without arranging for sitters, ages no longer requiring shoe-tying and negotiation over whose cookie was bigger.

I wasn't wrong of course, that life with older kids requires infinitely less in the way of physical demands, and a lot more freedom and separateness for parent and child alike. What I didn't understand then, that I do now, was how emotionally and intellectually demanding it would be still to have these three people in my life, whose world has now expanded so much, become so interesting and complex, so full of passions and curiousities. I didn't anticipate what it would feel like to have these three beloved children reach the age where their heartbreaks could no longer be solved with a hug and five minutes on my lap, a stage where their desires that would no longer be met, for $2.99, at Toys R Us. I didn't know that it would be just as hard, sometimes, to let them go, as it used to be to hold onto them.

For most of you who read these pages, the stage of parenthood I've reached still lies a ways ahead. But be warned: you'll get there sooner than you think. As endless as the days seem now, when you're doing battle with your toddler or winding the Fisher Price ferris wheel for the fiftieth time today, or re-reading the page in Curious George where George gets the new bicycle, the moment will come when you wish you could be there again, for an hour anyway.

So this will be my last set of monthly reflections on A Mother's Days. But I couldn't move on from what has been an extraordinarily rich and fortunate assignment, these last seven years, without a last word or two on the subject. And specifically because my children Audrey, Charlie and Willy have now either left, or are leaving, childhood, it seems like a good time to offer a few thoughts from the vantage point of a parent who has been doing this long enough to see the broad arc of years, and to observe the long-term implications of all the little short-term choices we all make daily -- hourly -- as parents.

One thing about raising young children is how little opportunity you have to step back and take in the long view. (Sometimes, I know, ten minutes can seem endless. It's worth buying that candy bar for your crying child now and then, just to get out the door of the supermarket and home again.) It's often only later -- at the point where I find myself, in fact -- that a parent can enjoy the luxury of looking over what she's been doing all this time and considering what it all means. What worked. What didn't. What mattered most over the years, and what, that once seemed so incredibly important, now seems meaningless or insubstantial.

At a 20th college reunion I attended recently, I was startled by how many of my classmates -- people in their early forties, like me -- were just now beginning to raise their families. The whole thing made me partly relieved to be done with all that, and partly nostalgic. But I felt something else, too: I didn't want to do it all over again, precisely. But I did wish that I knew, back when I was raising small children, what I know now that they're grown. I was so unformed as a person, in my own right, when I had my first child at twenty three, that I was a lot less able to be a wise parent in some of the ways I could be if I were embarking on the task now.

Don't get me wrong. I consider my children to be three of the most lovable, funny, good, lively, interesting, intelligent, talented and healthy people I know. As one of the two people on earth who remembers each one of them on the day of their birth, I know how much of a child's makeup is a with him from the beginning. (Plenty.) But I also know how much it's shaped by everything that happens on all the days that follow. My predominating view of those days is that, flawed as my children's father and I have been (our greatest flaw as parents being, no doubt, our inability to live peacefully and lovingly together), the values we brought to raising our children were mostly solid ones. Observing the young adults our children are becoming, I even allow myself to say, we did a good job. But of course, it's always easiest to see what you did wrong, or what, at least, you might have done better. So for what it's worth, I thought I'd offer up a few last observations about how I'd do things differently, if I were starting out raising my first child now, instead of seeing her off to college.

It's funny: I was never so broke in my life as my husband and I were the year Audrey was born. And maybe it was specifically because we had so little then, I cared desperately about the stuff attached to having a baby. I remember how, when I was pregnant, I would walk through those fancy stores of baby layettes and tiny smocked dresses, wishing I could buy them, and how, when my mother sent me a birthday check, I raced right out to buy an expensive mobile to hang over the crib of our not-yet-born infant.

Partly, I think, that syndrome of accumulating things for the nursery, before the baby's born (followed by that next syndrome, accumulating more things for the baby, afterwards, has to do with the intense eagerness a young parent feels to start being a parent. Arranging stacks of sleeper suits and undershirts along the shelves feels like one way of doing that. There's something so wonderfully concrete about shopping.

These days I'd have less difficulty coming up with the money for baby clothes and toys. Oddly enough, though, I'd have a lot less interest in buying them. And I'm not just talking about the baby stuff either, but about stuff for one's children, in general. Most of us buy way more of it than we need. More importantly, we buy way more than our children need. More, even, than is good for them. I know I did anyway. My newborn daughter could have been just as delighted if I'd hung a bunch of measuring spoons and interesting jewelry and scarves over her crib. I could have played her records of Irish folk music I loved, instead of buying half a dozen different lullabye tapes.

Not that any of my purchases caused my daughter problems. But in a subtle way, I was establishing, early on, a pattern that stayed with us throughout my children's growing up. If our children learn most powerfully from the model of our own example (as I absolutely believe they do), then I have to say, what I modelled -- especially at birthdays and Christmases, but also plenty of other times, throughout the years -- was a pattern of more acquisition and consumption than was best for them. Even when we didn't really have the wherewithal to acquire.

Naturally I loved my children. Toys made them happy, and I loved their happiness. And, I have to add, I loved toys. I liked to study dolls and dollhouse stuff almost as much as my daughter did. I pored over catalogues at Christmas, marking pages, making lists, endlessly weighing the merits of a toy castle against a cowboy fort. So no question, Christmas mornings at our house were magical. We had wonderful toys, chosen for their capacity to engage our children's imagination and encourage the most interesting kinds of play. But often, as I think back, I realize that the very best times we had came when we made our own toys, built forts, sewed doll clothes, constructed dollhouse furniture from plastic spools and balsa wood. At age eighteen, my daughter still remembers a day we spent once in the woods, building a fairy castle in an old rotten tree stump, making moss beds for acorn-head dolls, and bridges out of bark, and bowls from acorn caps. Probably a crucial part of the memory, too, was that at the end of the afternoon, we left that fairy castle in the woods. At the time, Audrey felt terribly sad that we couldn't take it home. But that was part of the magic of the experience, too.

There's another problem connected to giving children too much stuff (and I'm talking not just about toys, but clothes, and games, and souvenirs from museum gift shops, fun little barrettes, and all the other interesting products people think up to entice parents to part with their money). The more a child has, the more she gets used to having. The more she expects. The harder her parents may have to work, providing it. The more we may shift the form of our gifts from time, to things. Carried to an extreme (and I like to think we never did go this far) a parent's buying habit can actually inhibit a child's ability to entertain herself, without things, or leave her supposing that without that Gap sweatshirt, or that special lunchbox, she can't be happy.

As I watched the incredible turnover of stuff in our lives, I shifted my own buying patterns more and more to thrift shops and second hand stores. We went treasure-hunting at yard sales (our town dump, even). Although there is a danger even with accumulating too many great cheap things, or even too many great free ones. Because they still convey the message to a child that things are important and necessary. Where what I'd want to focus on more, if I were doing this again, would be a different lesson: You can get by with very little. What matters is what you have inside yourself.

I'd always equip a child with good sporting equipment -- not as a status symbol, but for safety, and fun, and to encourage in every way I could the kinds of activities that get a child outdoors, with other kids, doing healthy activities. When your skates are too tight, or your bike gears won't shift properly,participating in a sport can get frustrating fast. But I'd probably take more care, now, to see that my child had demonstrated real desire to play a sport, and follow through with it, before I invested a lot of money in roller blades or a tennis racquet that might gather dust, or dance classes.

A corollary to my late-come-by views about too much stuff -- and simply, too much, period -- has to do with the inclination to spend too much time picking up stuff. And feeling frazzled, burnt out and grumpy as a result. If I had it to do over again I'd spend less time with my vacuum cleaner and more time with my children.

I remember one time when my son Charlie was in the second grade, his teacher had the class write a little book for Mother's Day titled "My Mom," in which each child was asked to write a description of his mother. When I opened up mine, I read this: "My mom cleans our house a lot."

This was not, in fact, the whole story of Charlie's life with me, not by a long shot. But I couldn't avoid the conclusion that something was off with my priorities here, for my son to perceive me this way. And it was true, actually, I did spend a lot of time in those days, sorting matchbook cars and Ninja Turtles into bins and searching for missing Playmobil pieces. (I had to. I'd spent so much money buying them. Imagine if we'd lost some crucial item.)

"Do you realize," my daughter asked me a while back," that the majority of the bad fights we've had have been about housework?"

She was right, to a surprising degree. And actually, some of those fights were important, because they had to do with respecting a parent's time and energies, taking personal responsibility (for things like dirty dishes, laundry, school books, socks left on the couch, paper bags fillled with half-eaten sandwiches.) I will never change my view that children need to pick up after themselves, or that not enough parents, these days, ask enough of their children when it comes to taking care of the house, the meals, the yard, the pets. It's not good for us to do our children's work for them. But even more so, it's not good for our children. (One more thing that's a mistake is when a babysitter or nanny does all the picking up. It continues to amaze me, how many women who would never think of teaching their sons and daughters to view women with a double standard, are willing to let their children witness, daily, the sight of a child care provider -- nearly always female -- cleaning up after them.)

Some of the things I feel best about, as a parent: Time my children have spent, with me, and with their father, exploring the natural world. Camping, hiking, bike-riding. Sometimes, initially at least, with some reluctance. But in the end, those were times that have stayed with them, and taught them valuable lessons about finding joy in simple ways, protecting our world, taking time to notice birds and plants and stars. Sitting around a campfire at night. If I had the last eighteen years to do over, I'd do even more of those things.

And I might go so far as to keep television out of the house altogether. Or keep a television only for the watching of movies on video. Not as a babysitter, but as an occasional family event. To me, the politicians who cite violent or explicit television programming as the main corrupter of our young are off course. The fundamental problem to me about children and television isn't about what they're watching, but the simple fact of how much they watch. Your four year old could be limited to Mr. Rogers, Barney and a bunch of Disney videos, and I'd still say there's a real problem going on. She's watching, not doing. She's disengaging from the world, instead of entering into real-life activity. She's also learning, young, the habit of watching television.

These are challenging times to be raising children. Ask a fourteen year old today what she believes in, and she may have a hard time coming up with an answer.If she believes in nothing, holds nothing dear, and recognizes no promise in the future, what's to keep her on a clear path in life?

I didn't raise my children within a particular religion, and truthfully -- raised, myself, by a non-practicing Jewish mother and a non-practicing Protestant father, and not having grown up with a clear set of religious convictions of my own -- I don't know how it could have been otherwise. What I did try to do, and wish only that I'd done more of, was to make room in our lives for spiritual exploration and discussion. In recent years, we started observing the Jewish holidays whenever we could. Just the small act of pausing before beginning to eat our dinner every night, and saying grace, was important to my kids. I think going further, and establishing a pattern of prayer (whatever form it might take, however you might choose to define what or whom it is you pray to ) would only be a good and comforting thing for a child, these days in particular. And if I had it to do over again, I'd also establish the pattern early on of regular and consistent contribution to our community and the world beyond, and not just at holiday times, when everybody's suddenly seized with the Christmas spirit.

I'm grateful for the times my children and I managed to travel together -- sometimes to distant and exotic places, often just a road trip, a few hours or a few miles from home. Partly what was important about our travels had to do with the places we visited, of course. But at least as much as the museums and natural wonders we took in, what we got out of our trips together were lessons about each other. Leaving home, getting away from the familiar territory, the distractions of work, friends, television, the ringing phone, places your lives in a kind of close focus. I always felt I saw my children grow more, in two weeks on the road, than I might, in two months at home. And because of that, as hard as it seemed at the time to arrange a trip, now that my kids are older, and their lives going off in so many directions, I wish we'd taken even more time, earlier, to go places together -- whether it was Costa Rica, or a hike in the mountains an hour north of our house. I wish in particular that we'd driven across country at least once. Maybe we still will, but the logistics of coordinating everybody's schedule would be infinitely more difficult at the ages they've reached now than they would have been when the kids were small.

I was pretty good, as a parent, in meeting my children's needs. Most of us are, actually. What I had a much harder time accomplishing (and once again, I think this is a problem shared by many) was recognizing the need to balance my needs with those of my kids. For years I was so occupied taking care of my children that I neglected myself. From the age of twenty three to nearly thirty five, I drove my children to their sporting events and then sat on a hard bench waiting for them, without ever picking up a tennis racquet, or taking a dance lesson, or going to a gym. I loved to skate, but spent my whole time at the pond or the rink lacing and unlacing my children's skates, and never getting out on the ice except to hold the hand of my four year old, while we moved slowly, slowly, around the ice. And because of experiences like that -- small deficits, accumulated over long periods of time -- I carried around a sense of martyrdom and frustration I have to fight to avoid, even now, as I make time for my tennis games and cross country skiing and my salsa dancing lessons.

Time was that I dealt with my my regret over never learning to play the guitar by getting one for my daughter. Now I know to buy one for myself. And while I do those things for me, I also know that like everything else I do in my life, my actions convey to my children a lesson about how they should live themselves. With balance.

If I were to name my single greatest regret about my approach to parenthood, it would be this: I tried to be perfect. I don't need to tell you I didn't succeed. But the sheer effort of trying was enough to take away a lot of the fun. And fun is something it's easy for parents to lose sight of. (Which is a shame, because among other things, raising young children should be tons of fun. It's easy to see that now. Hard, sometimes, when you're in the thick of it.)

Having grown up, myself, in a family where there was too much anxiety and pain, for sure, I brought to my own mothering the desire to spare my children those things. I had a hard time watching my kids experience even the small pain of lost Playmobil swords, birthday party invitations that didn't come, not winning the baseball game, not getting the prettiest dress.

Often I managed to protect my children from those kinds of pain, too, but never from the real sorrows life delivers, of course. And just recently, I ‘ve realized that much as I love my children and want good for them, I wouldn't even want them to experience life without disappointment or hardship or grief. Now I see so clearly that it's often the adversity from which I tried (but never succeeded ) to protect my kids that make a person compassionate and strong. I know now, as I didn't ten years ago, that there's no avoiding disappointment, and no way to control your child's universe. And that it's just as well you can't.

These days, when I take my son to a tennis tournament, or tell my daughter that we can't afford a college that doesn't provide scholarships, what seems most important for me to accomplish as a parent is not to make my children's lives perfect, or spare them pain, but to raise them to be strong when the inevitable disappointments occur.

I remember a time I burst into tears when I discovered that my six year old daughter had scratched a chicken pox scab, and caused a bald spot on her head, about an eighth of an inch in diameter. A dozen years later -- with far more substantial kinds of loss and pain behind her -- I can only smile that I thought that bald spot mattered.

It's a scary thing for a child, if she supposes that a tiny bald spot or a lost toy spells disaster, just as it's scary supposing that happiness depends on getting this or that toy or outfit, or winning a game. Or having parents who live happily ever after together, for that matter. Or having every dream come true. I think my own three children are strong and happy people today not because any of those situations has occurred in their lives, but because they carry an internal sense of well-being dependent on no person or thing, but only on their own strong selves. My plan is to be around to mother my kids in all kinds of ways, for many years to come. But it's reassuring to know, too, that the day has come when they could get along without me. It's what we're all trying to do here, of course. We're working ourselves out of a job.

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