Celebrating Mother's Day at Chicago Botanical Gardens

385 Acres of Beauty

J spent the day taking pictures, L trying to catch butterflies

I'm Going To Be Okay

For the majority of the new year I have been fretting over one thing: Summer. And how to make it go by without permanently damaging the children or sending myself straight to the loony bin. Instead of three months of the possibility of endless fun, I saw 90 days of potential hell, eight long, very long hours each day and the inability to find enough things to do for all of us. Add on a new unexpected pregnancy and a whole lot of nausea and my terror level was nearing red alert.

I began to look at organized activities, summer camp sessions, potential mom friends and kids who were available and anything else that might make the summer speed by. It all came to a head on Mother's Day Eve when I finally realized that I was more worried about getting through the summer than just enjoying being in it. After all, it will be the only summer that my five year old son and two year old daughter and I will ever be together again. They will continue to grow and change and I'm sure it won't be on top of their priority list to hang with mommy during the day. Friends will replace me, as it should, and times will change.

I started of thinking about my mom and what she experienced when I was growing up. We've talked many times about how life was different. Playgroups didn't really exist and there wasn't a barrage of activities to entertain kids in any direction you looked. We didn't get together with other moms and kids in organized ways and most summers were spent befriending whatever kid happened to be at the pool that day or playing in the woods by yourself. Sure there was a feeling of isolation she felt as a mom, but it wasn't abnormal, and the pressure for mommy cliques wasn't there to fuel the fire. Maybe that was my problem - I was a bit scared to do this alone.

Don't get me wrong - with Keith traveling, I'm no idiot. I still am signing up for some day camp activities, vacation bible school and some other fun projects to give us all a break. And we'll have plenty of friends to get together with for group fun when a change of pace is needed. But my focus is going to be on me and them. Period.

A friend that just moved to California sent this to me last week but I never got around to reading it...until last night when I needed the affirmation the most. It was the whisper of encouragement that I needed to know my change of thought was a good one.

Just me and them. Like it should be. And just like that my fears are gone - replaced with almost a sense of anticipation for it to begin.

Happy Mother's Day!

You may have already read this but it's a good read if not:

Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author
All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razorblades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock.The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations --what they taught me, was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a time out. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there
something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded,"What did you get wrong?" . (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less. Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what was simply life.

When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.