mother – Page 3 – Don't Gel Too Soon

YOU ASKED FOR IT

That’s me with my older son, Josh, in Muir Woods outside San Francisco — pretty many years ago. I don’t know if you can tell but I’m pregnant with his brother. Happy to join the virtual shower although despite my adoration of and respect for both Liz and Catherine, I’m from the generation that put their babies to sleep on their stomachs and so may sound a little old-fashioned.

1. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right no matter whose advice it is. 2. Trust yourself. 3. Remember that everybody makes mistakes and anyway a child is not a product, she is a person. You’ve heard that kids are resilient. They are. Do your best with love and if you don’t dwell on your mistakes neither will they. 4. You can’t turn a child into someone. You can only help them become the best somebody they already are. 5. Don’t be afraid to say no. Parents who don’t set limits and help their kids learn self-discipline are selfish. It’s easier but it’s not right. 6. No experience is wasted on a child. Maybe they’re too young to remember, but if it happened, it had an impact. So share as much of what you love as you can – music, museums, trips to Timbuktu or Target — poetry, cooking, washing the car. 7. No child ever went to college in diapers. 8. Listen to experienced people you respect, preschool teachers, friends, even, God forbid, your mother. Experience really is a great teacher. Then, though, think it through and then do what you think is right. 9. Everything is not equally important. Pick your fights and win them. 10. Leave time to just be. Lessons are great but quiet time is where imagination and a sense of self emerges. 10. LISTEN to your kids. They are smart and interesting and wise and if you respect them you have a far better chance of having them respect you. 11. Did I say trust yourself?

With love, admiration and the joy that comes from knowing all you wonderful, poetic and caring, committed and in one case, very new mothers on the occasion of this lovely virtual baby shower.

Home and Heartache

Yeah, we’re home – and as usual it’s like walking into an electric fan. We landed, unpacked, did laundry, slept (until 3AM) then Rick went back to the airport for a fund-raising trip to California. I’m working on several major projects and wanting to organize for when the boys come home for the holidays. Grocery lists and activity planning in addition to many hours of business obligations.

Lots on my mind. Today a friend told me about the last conversation she had with her father and I was ambushed by a deluge of memories. It’s tough to come to terms with the loss of a parent. Both of mine have been gone for years and there isn’t a day I don’t think of them — and, often, wish I could ask them something – or tell them something — or just feel their love again. I haven’t felt this way in a long time and it surprised me. I just wasn’t expecting the intensity.

I once sent my dad the lyrics to a Judy Collins song about her father. It’s a wonderful evocation of the love between fathers and daughters and the bitter-sweet realization that one’s life will exceed that of a beloved parent. It’s what they’d wish for us but it’s complicated. Anyway there wasn’t a moment of my life when I doubted the love for and faith in me felt by both my parents.

There were also circumstances in my life that led me, in my memory at least, to be less attentive than I wanted to be. I think it will haunt me forever- times when finances or my own parental responsibilities kept me from visits; times when I let my dad tell me not to come because he didn’t want us to "see him like this." — all those things we all wish we’d done differently. I am beginning to think that this is a real issue for me and one I’ve got to get some clarity about.

This is the second time in the space of the 90 days or so I’ve had this blog that my dad has come up and he’s been gone since 1991. Somehow though I’m more at peace with the loss of him. I can summon memories that make me smile and I know that he had a profound and lovely effect on my sons, which adds to my own fond remembrances of him.

My mother, who died in 1998, haunts me though. I know things in her life frustrated her – and that she would have liked to do more in the world outside the house. My husband told both her and me that I was guilty that my arrival had pulled her out of a promising career but she insisted that that was HER choice and I should get over it. That she loved raising the three of us. I don’t doubt that she loved raising her daughters but I also think she needed more than she was able to get in life as a suburban mom. I don’t know – all I know is that I feel a need to be particularly helpful to elderly women on the street, or the bus, or the synagogue steps. As if I can do for her by doing for them. Agh. I don’t know. I’m going to bed to see if I can beat the last of the jet lag. This is too sad.

NO BREASTFEEDING BUT HELP YOURSELF TO THE BLOODY MARY MIX!

OK. So it’s really true. Delta Airlines actually removed a nursing mother from a flight for breast feeding her child. The mother, Emily Gillette, noted that she was in the second-to-last row, next to the window, and “her breast was not showing.” A flight attendant apparently offered her a blanket to cover what she believed was already covered enough and she declined. At that point the attendant asked that the family be removed from this three-house-late flight. If you’ve ever traveled with a toddler late at night on a delayed flight you know how hard it is to settle them down. Besides, from the reports I read, the decision to nurse was made partly because kids often cry on takeoff and landing because of the pressure changes. One of my kids used to get ear infections when we flew because the pressure pushed mucus around in his eustation tubes – until our pediatrician suggested we give him Benadryl before flights to dry him out. So I know it’s an issue.

More importantly though – what could possible have “offended” the flight attendant who asked for the removal? We know that gate agents comply with these requests as a matter of policy and we know this is one of those puddle jumper subcontractor airlines and maybe they aren’t as worldly as larger ones but everyone has been a baby and she was in the back of the plane in a CORNER for heaven’s sake. Lots of you have been very funny on your blogs about this but I’m just not in a funny mood . It is a reflection of our larger policy toward children and it ain’t good. Somehow everything comes before the kids. Even the sensibilities of the only person likely to even notice this going on – that flight attendant.

While everyone is so censorious about nursing – I happened in the same weekend that I read this to fly from DC to Orlando and spend an hour and a half in the United Red Carpet Room – a very pleasant and useful luxury if one travels frequently. Here’s the thing. There are apples and bananas and oranges and 3-4 kinds of juice and pretzels and TWIX bars and sometimes even cheese and crackers sitting around in there. So when grownups are hungry – or even when they’re not – it’s all available and it’s all free (unless you count the annual feel for the Red Carpet Card.) I was going to write about how hard it is for me NOT to take a whole bunch of stuff in my tote bag – if only because it’s free. This time I failed – partly because the stuff was kosher and I thought we might need it. Three tomato juices, 4 tiny pretzel bags, five mini-Twix bars and two granola bars. And over the weekend we used them all. But isn’t it funny that I can get free food and carry it on in quantity while a 22 month old child three hours late for dinner can’t even get what’s naturally, organically, God-givenly hers? Somehow there’s nothing funny about that.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?

At BlogHer there was a great debate among the “mommy bloggers” about how much to reveal about one’s children. Much of what was best in my career (as well as, of course, my private life) came from my kids – literally. They’re why I finally wrote a book [for kids.] They’re why I got interested in kids’ books and began writing book reviews for the New York Times and Washington Post and eventually served as early children’s book editor at Amazon. They’re the reason I did some of my best TV pieces – about kids learning to ski, learning disabilities, etc. You get the idea. BUT

Once they were over 7 or so I always asked before I mentioned them in anything I wrote. I kind of felt that it was my gig and they had their own lives. Now this is a problem. Michael Chabon says:

“Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

He’s right I think – I can feel myself hanging back when those “other people’s secrets” begin to emerge — and if affects my writing. It’s true even of the most innocent things: something really lovely was said to me this week by one of my kids but it would expose HIM and I can’t do it.
Granted, most moms who blog have far younger kids than my adult sons but it’s an interesting question. Any thoughts?

Whatever we think about this though it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite Michael Chabon quotes. (of very very many…)