parenting

A Mother's Day Message

Motherhood, even the most well-intentioned versions, is messy, filled with mistakes, and infused with worry. We are told from our earliest days that it’s not supposed to be those things. Television and popular culture tell us – have always told us – that successful parenting is simply a blend of a strict-but-loving mother who can handle any crisis with a wry comment and a dose of practicality, and a loving father who backs up mother and throws in a pinch of discipline as needed.

But June Cleaver’s children didn’t show up with a tattoo at the age of 13, and no matter how bad an influence Eddie Haskell was, he wasn’t carrying a little bag of pot in his pocket.

Parents feel immense pressure to turn out perfect children who will go to the perfect schools and move on to perfectly planned lives. And many of these children fit right along with that program, happy to fit in, to excel at school and sports, and comforted by the fact that there is a path for them to embrace and follow. These are fun children to be around, socially mature and interesting. They rightfully do their parents proud.

But what percentage of all children are these children? I ask this, because they become the models – not just for the other children, but for the parents of those other children. They set the parameters of envy, judgment, and self-loathing. Don’t get me wrong –to find purpose and achievement in childhood is an exciting thing and I would wish it for every child. I’m not saying these children have done anything wrong.

Rather, this Mother’s Day message is for the mothers of the rest of the children. The ones who are the distribution on the Bell Curve. The pre-teens shutting parents out completely, experimenting with screamer rock and metal bands, checking out marijuana at an overnighter or behind the bleachers, and unable to focus on schoolwork. This is for the mothers of the unconventional children, the ones who just don’t fit in with their classmates, who did really well in kindergarten and first grade, but by third grade were increasingly shut out and shut down. This is for the mothers of the capable children who simply can’t thrive and won’t stay in traditional school. This message is for all the mothers who worry that they are insufficient, who can’t understand how those other mothers have it so much easier, who wish they could demonstrate their awesome mothering skills with children who had awesome social skills. In other words, this message is for most of us.

Here it is: Be fierce. Be unconditional, uncompromising, and unapologetic in your love for your children. If you have absolute confidence that they are perfect the way they are, then they will absorb that confidence into their insecure little souls and hold onto it like a life-jacket in stormy seas.

If your child steals a golf cart, bashes it into a tree, then taunts the security guards and runs . . . after the police show up at your house and scare the sense out of all of you; be confident. Remember that all the character you have taught and demonstrated and discussed is in there, somewhere, and it will make a stronger appearance in the years to come. Your child can handle the consequences and punishment that you (must) dole out. He can handle the fact that you are disappointed in him. What he can’t handle is the feeling that you have lost confidence in his essential goodness.

If your daughter tells you, at age 15, that she’s pregnant, be there, completely, for her. Let your worry be about her, and not about what other people may think of you. Take a moment to think about what crazy mistakes you made – or almost made – and how hard it is to be a teenager. Help her make her difficult decisions with absolute clarity that you love her, love her no matter what, and that you’ll get through it together. She can handle the natural consequences of the decisions she must make. What she can’t handle is feeling that she is already a has-been, a lost cause, without worth or potential.

I suspect that society’s fixation on the average child is actually a fixation on the easy child, the conforming and compliant child. And like good company men and women, we have accepted – at some place in our own little souls – that our parenting skills are judged by the conforming, performing children we churn out.

But there is no such thing as an average child, nor should we will that on our children. Each one thinks differently, expresses himself differently, behaves differently, and makes different choices than the other children. If they get the message that their essential selves are unacceptable, inadequate, or disappointing, they start losing pieces of their identify before they have even formed it.

How do I know this? Because I did not have the easy children (to be fair, I wasn't one myself). Every example I have given you so far is from our lives. Luckily for my children, I received an essential piece of advice from my own mother when my oldest child, at the tender age of 11, showed her first signs of teenage rebellion. My mom said, “Honey, what you must remember, every day and with anything that should happen, is that your children are not actually a reflection of you. They are a reflection of themselves, and where they are at the time. If you can remember that, you can be there for them and give them what they need. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking it’s about you.” So with each nauseating drop of the roller-coaster I remembered that advice and did my best to make it about them.

Today my children are lovely, accomplished, interesting, and still-evolving adults. I prefer their company to almost any other. They did things the unconventional way, and often the hard way, but I accept that the routes they took to adulthood were the routes they needed to take. I see that what I was supposed to do, as their mother, was be there, available, often on the sidelines, assuring them of my unfaltering belief in them and giving the insight and advice they wanted from me, even if they hated me for it at the time. I learned that motherhood was only about me and my children and our family, and that my job was to help them to become themselves despite peer, social, and school pressure.

Be fierce. Be unconditional, uncompromising, and unapologetic in your love for your children. Have unwavering confidence that they are absolutely perfect just the way they are. It’s the work of a lifetime, and we mothers were made for it. Happy Mother’s Day.

We're home-schooling our kindergartner. No, we're not fundamentalists (of any sort), separatists, public school antagonists, or shiftless. We just don't know where we'll be living in the next few weeks.

No, we're not homeless.

We put our house on the market in July. July, 2007, the month the housing market imploded, sending would-be homebuyers everywhere running for the exits, or at least running for their latest FICO score. Suddenly the world of easy credit disappeared, and with it went the era of thinking one could sell their house in something less than five months. But that's a topic for another day, because right now, we're talking about home-schooling a kindergartner. In July, our five-year-old was on track for entering kindergarten in less than five weeks. Kindergarten would not have been the significant milestone it was for our older children, who are 22 and 16.

What to do about kindergarten? We didn't know if we should start her, then yank her out five weeks later (we were highly optimistic despite the daily gloom in the Wall Street Journal), or if we should hold off and start kindergarten in our new home. We opted for the latter. We bought books with titles like "What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know" and "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons," and we began a daily playtime that included reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. From our little one's perspective, it has been a blast. Every morning she dances around impatiently until it's time to start school. She has now had nearly seven months of staying at home every day, hanging out with her family, and attending school in my home office. We're worried that she will not be enthusiastic about attending real school when the time comes. From my perspective, it has been a challenge.

Apparently my skills as a businesswoman are not the same ones required to provide a kindergarten education. I am exhausted at the end of each 2-hour lesson. Did I push too hard? Not push enough? Is she making the appropriate progress? You know – the usual parental questions that always come back to the core issue -- how badly am I ruining my child? I was always relieved to be able to send my older children off to school each day. It was a comfort to know they were someone else's responsibility for the next six hours, and that that somebody else was far more capable than I of preparing my child's mind for the rigors of the future. Once we moved to the southern state in which we currently live (and are moving away from), that relief turned to constant anxiety. The schools are a huge disappointment. The community is small enough that you have to know someone to get into the very limited number of non-parochial private schools (we didn't), and I really don't think most parents – no matter how educated we are – are the best option for educating their own children. So the only option was to turn my children over to someone else's responsibility each day, but no longer with the comfort of believing they were in better hands than my own.

My older children have done fine, due to their strong personalities and undauntable natures. But both of them chose to test out of high school early and proceed with college, rather than remain in the quasi-violent holding tanks that our community calls school. And no doubt that played a strong role in our decision that our youngest would have nothing to do with the schools in this community. When she enters school, it will be in truly top-notch public schools (far from being a public-school antagonist, I am an incredibly strong believer in the system, though it has been damaged so greatly by no-child-gets-ahead and prior administration neglect and abuses that one wonders what we can do to salvage it). But in the meantime, I am gaining tremendous appreciation for those dedicated souls who throw themselves to the kindergarten gods each autumn, to embark on yet another season of teaching them social skills, reading, writing, and creativity. Without ruining them.  

Our children - and now our grandchild - have paid a certain price for having gay (grand)parents. Back in the '90s, my daughter was directly confronted, taunted, and ostracized about it. Today, our granddaughter hears gay-bashing on the bus, on the playground, in the lunchroom.

So why, our friends sometimes ask, do we choose to live in rural Wisconsin - a blue state with a lot of red rural areas, a place known for having large pockets of extremely conservative folks? We choose to live in Wisconsin because this is where my partner is from, her family is our family, and we didn't want to miss out any longer on being part of that.

Now, here's why we didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin. We didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin because of Harvey Milk. We didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin, because people fear what they don't know, and the only way to dispel that fear is to make the unfamiliar familiar. We didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin, and now we're just known as "the girls who live on the hill." We know people in the small towns around us, and they are always warm to us. Their children come over and play with our granddaughter. They come into our house for a cup of coffee and to share the local news.

We didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin, and we didn't change the world. But we became familiar to a few dozen people who may not have known any gay people before. We didn't choose not to live in Wisconsin. And we're very glad.

I hadn't been a parent for long at all before I realized that it's impossible to do the parenting thing perfectly. No matter how hard we try, we screw up often enough to have a few regrets. So I started telling my children that I would be happy to pay for half their therapy, figuring that I was at least covering my own damage.

Yet somehow, my children have turned into strong, interesting, ethical, grateful, accountable people with big hearts. And as I reflect on all these years of parenting - and now grandparenting - I can take a few lessons from where I did do a good job of trimming the sail. So here are a few questions I will continue to ask myself in the grandparenting years of my life - questions that I believe help me be more conscious of the parenting choices I make and the likely results of those choices.

"Will this choice, behavior, comment, etc."

1. Teach my child about the importance of gratitude?
2. Help my child develop confidence in his decision-making skills?
3. Teach my child to be accountable?
4. Model for my child that the feelings, needs, and concerns of others are equal to her own?
5. Demonstrate for my child the joy of working hard to achieve something?
6. Show my child how to handle failure and loss with grace and optimism?
7. Affirm for my child that she is perfect the way she is, completely accepted now and forever?
8. Allow my child to take risks and remain fearless?

Of course, at all times we should be asking, "does this action demonstrate to my child that he is loved?" But many times, the things we do to demonstrate our love to our children don't feel like love to them at the time. Our acts of love will often feel more like parenting to them, and children often do not feel like being parented. This leads us to two more questions we must regularly ask of ourselves, which are:

1. Am I more concerned with being loved by my children or loving my children? The former will get in the way of living up to our responsibilities. The latter will sometimes earn us the silent treatment, a roll of the eyes, or a slammed door, but produces more mature adults.
2. Am I more concerned with controlling the situation, or with teaching my child about choices, consequences and sound decision-making? The former will lead to unnecessary conflict and lack of skills development. The latter is harder for us as parents in so many ways, but produces better-prepared adults.

Children don't come with an instruction manual because they are the instruction manual. I would never have dreamt of offering this advice 30 years ago. Back then I was just starting to flail around and figure things out for myself, and it's hard enough to be fully conscious about our own lives, let alone fully conscious about the effects we are having on the lives of others. So now I keep these ten questions handy, and when I am unsure of how to respond to any parenting situation, I refer to these first. Who knows, maybe I will have added three or four more questions to the list in the next 30 years. One thing is for sure though - I wish I'd had the list when I started out!

Be careful out there! Parenting is definitely a contact sport.

The Wisconsin Family Action Council won't even tolerate gays 'imitating marriage'. I had no idea that what we were doing for the past almost 20 years - raising children, taking care of each other, caring for in-laws, being active members of our extended families, and investing in our schools and communities, was an imitation. I always thought it was real!!