The End of Motherhood?

Yipee...

The invitation arrived today!

And because I always do what you tell me, we never peeked.

Moi?

The other day we came home and, unexpectedly, found a package left halfway up the driveway. It had this notice stuck to it:

"Who, me?" 

maternal double fault...

Last week, I watched Youngest compete in a tennis match.  As I sat among the parents from the other team, I heard a mother call out the following to her son on the court:  "Michael, no double faults!"

Seriously, short of shouting out "You suck!", could she possibly have found anything less helpful to say to her son as he stepped up to the service line? 

I remembered the little distinction I made the other day.  I mean, if she had to say something, couldn't she have settled for "watch the ball" or "keep your tossing arm straight" or, heaven forfend, "have fun."

When I am at my most compassionate, I would say that her admonition, "No double faults!" was really just maternal anxiety articulated.  But since I don't spend much time at that end of the compassion scale, I will try to simply be grateful to her for reminding me that I want my presence at my kids' activities to speak only of my support for them.

I think that's all the talking I need to do.

In that situation...

one of those moments when you know everything is going to be just fine...

I went in to wake Middle this morning for the dreaded SATs.  Only his hand was visible.  It peeked out from the mount of his duvet and rested on his computer.

"Middle," I whispered, "You are asleep with your hand on your computer."

From beneath the covers, he mumbled, "I woke up this morning and checked my email but there was no good news so I went back to sleep."

Just then, the song he had picked to wake him up for the SATs began to play.  As the volume rose, I recognized some very familiar bars.  And a moment of worry and sadness and fear became one of those most cherished of all mothering moments - the ones when you know everything is going to be just fine.

Because how many of the seventeen-year-old boys who received that longed-for invitation this weekend chose this to wake themselves up for the SATs?

It's all good.

want to play couple's therapist?

Middle is waiting for an invitation that is supposed to come today.  He desperately wants this invitation and has worked incredibly hard to get it.  He is hopeful, nervous, and excited - all very appropriate feelings.

Mate and I, however, are total wrecks.

I know there are many things more difficult than fearing your child will be rejected, but right now I can't think of any. 

The invitation, if it comes (please make it come!) will arrive in Middle's email. Since I am the resident IT maven around here and set up everyone's email accounts, I happen to be in possession of Middle's username/password combo.

Mate, whose normally unflappable self has been replaced, in this situation, with something akin to a Victorian lady who spends a lot of time on her fainting couch, wants us to check Middle's email on a regular basis today. 

I am resisting the idea.

I have tried to talk my way into agreeing with my Mate.  I mean, if I know in advance what the outcome is, won't I be better able to help him with his feelings?  If it's bad news, I can work through my own disappointment on his behalf, right?  And then be there for him when he hears the bad news?

I'd like to say my resistance comes from my commitment to mother less.  I mean, I can't really hold my head up with all of you if I'm going around checking my kid's email on a regular basis because I can't stand the thought of him being rejected.   

I'd like to say the resistance comes from my awareness that the true job of mothering in these situations is being a home for the feelings my child will have at the end of the day - whatever they are.  But (can you see me hanging my head in shame, here?) it's not that either.

The bald truth is that I don't want to check his email for fear of jinxing him.

OK, This is where you get to play couple's therapist:

bonding moment

After our typically silent car ride home from practice, Youngest usually grabs a snack and heads to his room.  The door closes and chances are good I will not see him again until dinner.

Yesterday, I had had enough. I knocked on his door and went in.

"Come on, Youngest, we need to have a bonding moment."

He looked up from his computer and lifted an eyebrow (hey, when did he learn to lift an eyebrow?  And why wasn't I informed?).

"Must we?" he inquired.

"Yes.  We must."

I lay down on top of his duvet and patted the spot next to me.

"Oh, all right."

He lay down next to me and put his head on my chest.

"For how long?"

"One minute."

For the first thirty seconds, I was lost in memory. How many times did his tiny self fall asleep on me, his head getting heavier the deeper he fell?

And then I heard something. Something whispered. Something rhythmic.

"Youngest, are you?... Could you be?... Don't tell me you are....counting the seconds?!?"

I felt his body shake with silent laughter.

That devil.

My angel.

masquerades...

Magda Gerber was the first person to tell me to stay the hell out of my children’s way.  I thought I took her words deeply to heart. Thanks to her, I never lifted my boys up to play on something they couldn’t climb on their own.  This simple rule had multiple benefits.  First, the distance they could fall was in direct and safe proportion to their climbing skills. And second, I got to be the mom sitting calmly on the bench at the playground and not the one standing next to the play structure, arms painfully outstretched, waiting to catch my falling child while endlessly repeating some version of, “Be careful!”

Simply because I have never done it before, I will now, for the purposes of this here blog, define over-mothering as inserting oneself unnecessarily into one’s child’s developmental process.  The only thing a child who is put somewhere he cannot safely get to on his own learns is that he needs his mother in order to climb.

I know this.  I believe this.  Even so, when I look back, I see that I still spent too much of the last nineteen years doing a lot of meddling and calling it mothering.  Lately, I have been trying to change that pattern. Hence my New Year’s Resolution to “mother less, but no less than necessary.”

The other day, I may have skated into “less than necessary” territory.

It was no big thing.  Really. But in the end, the work of mothering is really nothing more than a long, linked series of no big things.

Oldest called.  Of late, he as been in mild, but unpleasantly consistent contact with the law.  Thus, I assumed he was calling to complain yet again about the high cost of parking tickets and fake ID violations and the negative impact said infractions have been having on his bottom line. I will admit to being a tad bored with his whining about money and stifled the urge to yell through the phone STOP DOING ILLEGAL THINGS THAT COST YOU MONEY!

Also, I was busy.

Those are my excuses.

Oh, wait, there’s one more.  His cell phone makes him incredibly and annoyingly hard to hear. He always sounds as if he's slurring his words.  At least I hope it’s his cell phone. I'd much rather it be that than the other obvious choices - a significant pot or alcohol habit.

Anyway, he called and I can’t remember what he asked exactly.   Maybe it was, “what’s the deal with dry cleaning?”.  Something like that.  He had three shirts he needed cleaned. I was busy. He might have been slurring. I didn't want to talk about money any more.

I thought that he was asking about how to get his shirts professionally cleaned when he was short on cash.  Thinking I was being - well, if you must know - brilliant, I informed him that it was customary at the cleaners to drop your clothes off for free and pay to get them back. Thus, he could take the shirts in immediately, and pick them up and pay for them after the first of the month from his replenished coffers. That seemed to work.  He said OK, thanks and we hung up.  The conversation was brief, bordering on curt.

I turned my attention back to my work, but for some reason the conversation kept nagging at me.  And whatever that thing was, the particular agent of buoyancy that made the conversation keep popping into my mind, I wish I had more of it because it is exactly the quality a mother like me should cultivate.  In fact, it is the probably the only quality I should be cultivating.

I had missed something.  But what?

Finally, it came to me.  He hadn’t been asking about the money.  Or maybe a little bit of it was about the money, but there was more to the question he had called to ask.   And because I had been busy, and figured I knew what he was calling about, I had missed it. 

When your child is small, he asks a thousand questions a day.  The questions break over you like long, curling waves you think will never end.

And then they end.  Your child grows up. He enters a phase where he either knows all or would rather die than admit he does not know all. After that, he successfully cuts the apron strings.  But here is a little secret.  If you wait him out, he will come back to you.  And when he does, it will be with questions.  The questions are lines he throws back to you.  They are his way of reconnecting.  He doesn’t need you to answer them anymore.  He just wants you to.

These questions he asks, they are gifts masquerading as questions.  And to me, they are a big deal.  Why? Because when he was little, he had no choice but to ask you those long, curling waves of questions. Now that he is grown up, he doesn't have to call you.  He could look it up.

I called him back and said that perhaps I had misunderstood his question. I may have hurried off the phone, I said.  Was there more he wanted to know?  Was he really asking about the differences between dry cleaning and laundry - and when you use one and not the other?

Yes.

OK.  I can help you with that.  What were the shirts made of?  Cotton?  You’d best launder them.  It’s cheaper and better for the clothes and the environment.  How about starch?  You’ll need to tell them how much starch you like.  How much starch do you like?

Is starch bad for them?

Once I assured him of the fundamentally innocuous nature of starch (it is innocuous, right?), we seemed to have covered all the bases. We hung up again, and I was more content.  If belatedly, I had been able to give him what he was looking for. 

I had caught the line he had thrown to me from 3000 miles away.

I feel vindicated...

Perhaps because I spend a lot of time barefoot, I always let the boys run around barefoot.

Yes, in the city.  Yes, on the sidewalks. Yes, in the rain.  Yes, in winter.

I did draw the line at walking barefoot in the snow. 

Happy now?

I never understood why anyone would buy shoes with hard soles for infants, much less someone spending a significant amount of time trying to learn how to walk.  It is so much easier to toddle barefoot.

I had mothers look askance, fathers lift their eyebrows, teachers harrumph.  But did I care?  No I did not.

I told the mother's that being dirty can boost your immune system.

I told the fathers that being dirty can make you happier.

I told the teachers the boys would wear shoes by the time they started kindergarten.

Now that everyone is all grown up and shoe-wearing, I finally found the best reason to walk barefoot.

It's good for your feet.

So, now that you have the perfect rejoinder for those nosy adults with nothing better to do than get on your case for the choices you make with your children, please, for me, go forth, and go forth barefoot.

a possibly useful distinction I wish I had thought of sooner...

I'm not quite sure where it came from, but it occurred to me the other day that, when talking to my children, it might be a good idea to replace the admonition "Don't forget" with "Remember." 

Why not replace the negative with the positive whenever possible?

Or maybe I should practice what I preach and never say either.

Robin, Youngest wonders if you, perhaps, would be his mother from now on...

After reading about Youngest's thoughts on the necessary co-existence of evolution and Christian belief, Robin wondered in the comments:

Perhaps some of those 2,109 text messages were philosophic discussions?

After laughing heartily to myself, I thought I better check in with Youngest on the off, off, off chance that it could actually be true.   So, on the way from school to tennis, during the only interval available for conversation - the commercial breaks between songs - I mentioned her suggestion.  He responded without missing a beat:

Two-thousand-one-hundred-and-eight were philosophical discussions and one was to you to pick me up.