Better late than never.

My friend Melissa sent me this in a forward today and about a third of the way in tears were rolling down my cheeks. It very well could be the pregnancy hormones in full effect but it also has a great message that I'm going to try to desperately remember in these crazy chaotic years as a Mom.

Mothers
by Anna Quindlan, 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 razor blades 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 rubber ducky at
its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible
except through 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, 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 timeout. 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.