I hold with those who favor allowing kids some freedom to work out problems their own way, and even make some messes, before we set them on Capitol Hill. I do not hold that this is easy. The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. In every case, bondage is quicker. Boundaries, however carefully explained, can be reinterpreted creatively time and again. Yes, it's okay to pet the dog, and yes again on taking a bath, but not the dog in the tub. No to painting on the wall, no again to painting on the dog. I spent many years sounding to myself like Dr. Seuss: Not in a box! Not with a fox! Not on a train! Not in the rain!
The hardest boundaries to uphold are those that I know, in my heart, I have drawn for no higher purpose than my own convenience. I swore when I was pregnant I would never say to my child those stupid words "Because I said so!" Lord, have mercy. No contract I've ever signed has cost me so much. "Because I said so!" is not a real reason. But how about "Because if you do that again Mommy will scream, run into the bushes, pluck out the ovaries that made you, and cast them at the wild dogs." What price mental health? When your kid knocks over the orange juice, or ditches school, do you really have to listen to her inner wishes or can you just read the riot act?
Maybe both. Maybe there's not time for both right this minute--there never is, because life with children always bursts to fullness in the narrowest passages, like a life raft inflating in the emergency exit. If that's the case, then maybe the riot act now, and the other, listening to inner wishes, as soon as possible after you've worked free of the burning wreck.
During my short tenure as a parent I've relived my own childhood in a thousand ways while trying to find my path. Many of the things my parents did for me--most, I would say--are the things I want to do for my own child. Praise incessantly. Hold high expectations. Laugh, sing out loud, celebrate without cease the good luck of getting set down here on a lively earth.
But the world has changed since Howdy Doody Time, and some things nearly all parents did back then have been reconsidered. Spanking is one. Another, a little harder to define, has to do with structuring the family's time. My mother's job was me. But now I'm a mother with other work too, and fewer hours each day to devote to my main preoccupation of motherhood. I represent the norm for my generation, the throng of maternal employed, going about the honest work of the planet with gusto and generally no real alternative. The popular wisdom is that families used to be more kid-centered than they are now. I'm not so sure that's true. It's just different. My mother had kids to contend with from dawn till doom. She was (is) educated, creative, and much of the time the only people around for her to talk with had snakes in their pockets. My father worked very hard, as good fathers verily did. I had the guarantee of three squares daily, the run of several hundred acres of farms and wild Kentucky hills, the right to make a pet of anything nonvenomous, and a captive audience for theatrical projects. When my mother is canonized, I will testify that she really did sit through a hundred virtually identical productions, staged by my siblings and me, of the play titled approximately "The Dutch Boy Who Saved His Town by Putting His Finger in the Hole in the Dike." I have no idea why we did this. It seems truly obsessive. I can only offer as defense that we had a soft gray blanket with a hole in it, an irresistible prop. We took rave reviews for granted.
We also understood clearly that, during major family outings and vacations, our parents needed desperately to enjoy themselves. They bundled us into the back of the station wagon and begged us to go into hibernation for two thousand miles, so they could finish a conversation they'd started the previous autumn. I'm sure there were still plenty of times they sacrificed their vacation goals on the altar of my selfishness; I have forgotten these entirely. What I particularly remember instead is one nonstop auto trip to Key West, during which my sibs and I became bored beyond human limits. "Try counting to a million," my father suggested. And this is the point I am getting to: we actually did.
This seems amazing to me now. I could claim to be a victim, but that would be fatuous; my childhood was blessed. In the spectrum of the completely normal fifties family, nuclear units kept pretty much to themselves, and in the interest of everyone's survival, kids had to learn a decent show of obedience.
I'm amazed by the memory of counting to one million in a station wagon, not because I resent having done it myself, but because I can't imagine asking my daughter to do that, or, more to the point, needing for her to do it. When she and I head out on a car trip, we fall right into a fierce contest of White Horse Zit or license-plate alphabet. Childish enterprises, since they aren't my job, are in a sense my time off, my vacation. In spite of the well-publicized difficulties of balancing career and family, when I compare my life to my mother's I sometimes feel like Princess Grace. Each day I spend hours in luxurious silence, doing the work I most love; I have friends and colleagues who talk to me about interesting things, and never carry concealed reptiles. At the end of the day, when Camille and I are reunited after our daily cares, I'm ready for joyful mayhem.
For this reason I was also prepared to search through the pockets of my own soul on the day she and I arrived at our orange-juice impasse. I kept up a good authoritarian front at the time, but understood my daughter's implicit request. What was called for here was some Cow Time, stress free, no holds barred. I decided that after work we would go somewhere, out of the house, away from the call of things that require or provoke an orderly process. Together my two-year-old and I would waste the long last hours of an afternoon.
We went to the zoo. Not very far into the zoo, actually; we made it through the front gate and about twenty steps past, to the giant anteater den. There Camille became enraptured with a sturdy metal railing that was meant, I gather, to hold the public back from intimate contact with the giant anteaters. There was no danger, so I let her play on the metal bar.
And play.
After ten minutes I longed to pull her on toward the elephants, because frankly there's only so much looking a right-minded person can do at a giant anteater. But our agenda here was to have no agenda. I did my part. Looked again at those long anteating noses and those skinky anteating tongues.
Other children materialized on the bar. They clung and they dropped, they skinned the cat and impersonated tree sloths, until their parents eventually pulled them off toward the elephants. My eyes trailed wistfully after those departing families, but I knew I was being tested, and this time I knew I could win. I could refrain from asking my toddler to hurry up even longer than she could persist in sloth. After something less than an hour, she got down from the bar and asked to go home.
Five years have passed since then. Now it sometimes happens that Camille gets up, dresses herself in entirely color-coordinated clothes, and feeds the dog, all before the first peep of the alarm clock. I never cease to be amazed at this miracle, developmental biology. For any parent who needs to hear it today, I offer this: whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.
Plenty of psychologists have studied the effects of parents' behavior on the mental health of their children, but few have done the reverse. So Laurence Steinberg's study of 204 families with adolescents broke some new ground. All the families lived in Wisconsin but were otherwise diverse: rural, urban, white, black, brown, single-parented, remarried, nuclear. Steinberg uncovered a truth that crosses all lines: teenagers can make you crazy. Forty percent of the study parents showed a decline in psychological well-being during their children's adolescence. Steinberg even suggests that the so-called "midlife crisis" may be a response to living with teenagers, rather than to the onset of wrinkles and gray hair per se. The forty-four-year-old parent with a thirteen-year-old, it turns out, is far more disposed to crisis than the forty-four-year-old parent with an eight-year-old. Marital happiness tends to decline in households with teens, and single parents are more likely to experience difficulty with remarriage. But the study produced one hopeful note for the modern parent: in all family configurations, work is a
buffer. Parents with satisfying careers had the best chance of sailing through the storms of their children's adolescence.
Here at last is a rallying cry for the throng of maternal employed. The best defense against a teenager's independence, and probably a toddler's as well, may simply be a matter of quitting before we're fired. Or not quitting, exactly, but backing off from eminent domain, happily and with dignity, by expressing ourselves in the serious pursuits and pleasures that we hold apart from parenting. Individuation goes both ways: we may feel less driven to shape a child in our own image if instead we can shape policy or sheet metal, or teach school, or boss around an employee or two. Luckiest of all is the novelist: I get to invent people who will live or die on the page, do exactly as I wish, because I said so!
I'm told it is terribly hard to balance career and family and, particularly, creativity. And it is, in fact. Good mothering can't be done by the clock. There are days I ache to throw deadlines to the wind and go hunt snipes. I wish for time to explain the sensible reason for every "no." To wallow in "yes," give over to a cow's timetable, stop the clock, stop watching the pot so it might splendidly boil.
I also long for more time of my own, and silence. My jaw drops when I hear of the rituals some authors use to put themselves in the so-called mood to write: William Gass confesses to spending a couple of hours every morning photographing dilapidated corners of his city. Diane Ackerman begins each summer day "by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so." She listens to music obsessively, then speed-walks for an hour, every single day. "I don't know whether this helps or not," she allows, in A Natural History of the Senses. "My muse is male, has the radiant, silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."
My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, "Okay, author lady, you've got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job."
As a mother and a writer, I'd be sunk if either enterprise depended on corsages or magic. I start a good day by brushing my teeth; I don't know whether it helps or not, but it does fight plaque. I can relate at least to the utilitarian ritual of Colette, who began her day's writing after methodically picking fleas from her cat. The remarkable poet Lucille Clifton was asked, at a reading I attended, "Why are your poems always short?" Ms. Clifton replied, "I have six children, and a memory that can hold about twenty lines until the end of the day."
I would probably trade in my whole Great Books set for an epic-length poem from the pen of Lucille Clifton. But I couldn't wish away those six distracting children, even as a selfish reader, because I cherish Clifton's work precisely for its maternal passions and trenchant understanding of family. This is the fence we get to walk. I might envy the horses that prance unbridled across the pastures on either side of me, but I know if I stepped away from my fence into the field of "Only Work" or "Only Family," I would sink to my neck. I can hardly remember how I wrote before my child made a grown-up of me, nor can I think what sort of mother I would be if I didn't write. I hold with Dr. Steinberg: by working at something else I cherish, I can give my child room to be a chip off any old block she wants. She knows she isn't the whole of my world, and also that when I'm with her she's the designated center of my universe. On the day she walks away from my house for good, I'll cry and wave a hanky from my lonely balcony; then I'll walk to my study, jump for joy, and maybe do the best work of my life.
It's never easy to take the long view of things, especially in a society that conveys itself to us in four-second camera shots. But in a process as slow and complex as parenting, an eye to the future is an anchor. Raising children is a patient alchemy, which can turn applesauce into an athlete, ten thousand kissed bruises into one solid confidence, and maybe orneriness to independence. It all adds up. From the get-go I've been telling my child she is not just taking up space here, but truly valuable. If she's to believe it, I have to act as if I do. That means obedience is not an absolute value. Hurting people is out of the question, but an obsession with the anteater bar can and will be accommodated. I hope to hold this course as her obsessions grow more complex. For now, whenever the older, wiser parents warn, "Just wait till she's a teenager," I smile and say, "I'm looking forward to that." They think I am insane, impudent, or incredibly naive. Probably I am. Call it creative visualization.
My time here is up today, for I'm being called to watch a theatrical production entitled approximately "The Princess Fairy Mermaids Who Save the Castle by Murderizing the Monsters and Then Making Them Come Back Alive with Fairy Dust and Be Nice." I've seen this show before. Some days I like it, especially when they tie up the monster with Day-Glo shoelaces and pantyhose. Other days my mind drifts off to that spare, uncluttered studio where I will arrange flowers, Zenlike, when I'm sixty. I'll write great things, and I'll know once and for all the difference between boundaries and bondage.
SOMEBODY'S BABY
As I walked out the street entrance to my newly rented apartment, a guy in maroon high-tops and a skateboard haircut approached, making kissing noises and saying, "Hi, gorgeous." Three weeks earlier, I would have assessed the degree of malice and made ready to run or tell him to bug off, depending. But now, instead, I smiled, and so did my four-year-old daughter, because after dozens of similar encounters I understood he didn't mean me but her.
This was not the United States.
For most of the year my daughter was four we lived in Spain, in the warm southern province of the Canary Islands. I struggled with dinner at midnight and the subjunctive tense, but my only genuine culture shock reverberated from this earthquake of a fact: people there like kids. They don't just say so, they do. Widows in black, buttoned-down CEOs, purple-sneakered teenagers, the butcher, the baker, all would stop on the street to have little chats with my daughter. Routinely, taxi drivers leaned out the window to shout "Hola, guapa!" My daughter, who must have felt my conditioned flinch, would look up at me wide-eyed and explain patiently, "I like it that people think I'm pretty." With a mother's keen myopia I would tell you, absolutely, my daughter is beautiful enough to stop traffic. But in the city of Santa Cruz, I have to confess, so was every other person under the height of one meter. Not just those who conceded to be seen and not heard. Whenever Camille grew cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?) the waiters flirted and brought her little presents, and nearby diners looked on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that I'd thought diners reserved for the dessert tray. What I discovered in Spain was a culture that held children to be its meringues and eclairs. My own culture, it seemed to me in retrospect, tended to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it's not our own we don't want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.
If you don't have children, you think I'm exaggerating. But if you've changed a diaper in the last decade you know exactly the toxic-waste glare I mean. In the U.S. I have been told in restaurants: "We come here to get away from kids." (This for no infraction on my daughter's part that I could discern, other than being visible.) On an airplane I heard a man tell a beleaguered woman whose infant was bawling (as I would, to clear my aching ears, if I couldn't manage chewing gum): "If you can't keep that thing quiet, you should keep it at home."
Air travel, like natural disasters, throws strangers together in unnaturally intimate circumstances. (Think how well you can get to know the bald spot of the guy reclining in front of you.) Consequently airplanes can be a splendid cultural magnifying glass. On my family's voyage from New York to Madrid we weren't assigned seats together. I shamelessly begged my neighbor--a forty-something New Yorker traveling alone--if she would take my husband's aisle seat in another row so our air-weary and plainly miserable daughter could stretch out across her parents' laps. My fellow traveler snapped, "No, I have to have the window seat, just like you had to have that bab
y."
As simply as that, a child with needs (and ears) became an inconvenient thing, for which I was entirely to blame. The remark left me stunned and, as always happens when someone speaks rudely to me, momentarily guilty: yes, she must be right, conceiving this child was a rash, lunatic moment of selfishness, and now I had better be prepared to pay the price.
In the U.S.A., where it's said that anyone can grow up to be President, we parents are left pretty much on our own when it comes to the Presidents-in-training. Our social programs for children are the hands-down worst in the industrialized world, but apparently that is just what we want as a nation. It took a move to another country to make me realize how thoroughly I had accepted my nation's creed of every family for itself. Whenever my daughter crash-landed in the playground, I was startled at first to see a sanguine, Spanish-speaking stranger pick her up and dust her off. And if a shrieking bundle landed at my feet, I'd furtively look around for the next of kin. But I quickly came to see this detachment as perverse when applied to children, and am wondering how it ever caught on in the first place.
My grandfathers on both sides lived in households that were called upon, after tragedy struck close to home, to take in orphaned children and raise them without a thought. In an era of shortage, this was commonplace. But one generation later that kind of semipermeable household had vanished, at least among the white middle class. It's a horrifying thought, but predictable enough, that the worth of children in America is tied to their dollar value. Children used to be field hands, household help, even miners and factory workers--extensions of a family's productive potential and so, in a sense, the property of an extended family. But precious property, valued and coveted. Since the advent of child-labor laws, children have come to hold an increasingly negative position in the economy. They're spoken of as a responsibility, a legal liability, an encumbrance--or, if their unwed mothers are on welfare, a mistake that should not be rewarded. The political shuffle seems to be about making sure they cost us as little as possible, and that their own parents foot the bill. Virtually every program that benefits children in this country, from Sesame Street to free school lunches, has been cut back in the last decade--in many cases, cut to nothing. If it takes a village to raise a child, our kids are knocking on a lot of doors where nobody seems to be home.