Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  But it is still just a visit. My friend Gail, who has always provided dispatches from the foreseeable future because her children are just a little older than ours—and who once provided a gently used crib and changing table, too—warned me that it was really after graduation that the feeling of being downsized hit with full force. Work schedules that undermine family holiday celebrations, significant others who want to lay claim to Thanksgiving. A Venn diagram in which their circles overlap ours less and less. I built my entire existence around our children, wrote only during school hours, didn’t write at all when there was a school vacation or an ear infection. In the same way that I go dark around the anniversary of my mother’s death without really knowing at first what’s happening, so at around three some days when I’m working at home, I feel a spasm of loneliness, like a spiritual charley horse. No one is waiting for me to pick them up at school. My poor husband eats the same dish, reheated in Corning glass, for weeks, because I am incapable of making cassoulet or sauce Bolognese for two. No, actually, I’m not incapable. I’m unwilling. Someone may drop by, someone I once nursed, dressed, read to, yelled at, cooked for every day. When they were young, there was a schedule, a shape to things. How many for dinner—that is the essential question.

  Of course it’s not. The essential questions are much more cosmic, more critical, more terrifying. Who will they marry? What will they do with their professional lives? Will they have children, and will those children thrive? There were once bright lines to mothering, when they were little. You cannot cross the street without holding my hand. You cannot have a cookie until after dinner. Even later on, as they grew, there were curfews and rules. When my children came home at night during the teenage years, I would wait up, hug them close, and inhale deeply, sniffing for the smell of beer or pot. None of them missed the narc beneath the embrace. Our relationship was shaped by that constant duality, too, by love and fear. For instance: let’s say you have a teenage son who arrives home from camp and tosses his duffel to the bottom of the basement stairs so that it comes to rest, beseeching, against the maw of the washing machine. The clothes within will be divided into three groups: those that require hot water, those that require hot water and full-strength bleach, and those that need to be chucked. The duffel is upended onto the basement floor, and amid the filthy socks and mildewed shorts, bright as bits of foil-wrapped candy, lie a dozen condoms. Time stops, and the mother brain divides into two parts:

  • He got the message about safe sex.

  • He’s having sex.

  Once our children have moved into adulthood, the messages are more poignant, more complex, and, if we’re smart, more often unspoken unless solicited. Instead of crossing the street, they are navigating a work world where we cannot follow. The beer in the fist is sanctioned by law and by custom. And in our sinking hearts we begin to realize that while they know about safe sex, they are only beginning to understand that there is no such thing as safe love. It is one thing to tell a ten-year-old she cannot watch an R-rated movie; it is another to watch her, at age thirty, preparing to marry a man you are convinced will not make her happy. I remember the profound, almost physical sense of relief I felt when I understood that our sons and daughter did not have colic, were not autistic, showed no signs of adolescent mental illness. Done, I thought, licking my finger and crossing those things off the blackboard in my mind. When did I realize that there was something more terrifying, the possibility that any of them might have to struggle with a child with those problems, that heartrending moment when you face not your own difficult challenges but those that might come to the people you love most? Was it that evening, lying in bed and talking about my mother’s cancer and genetics, when out of the dark my husband’s voice asked, “So Maria’s at risk?” The fact that that question came as a complete shock to me, so well versed in medicine, so thoughtful about heredity, must be a reflection of the denial that covers us, like a hood, when bad things might happen to our kids. Little children, little problems; big children, big problems. Why do people share that dictum? It can’t be reassuring to anyone.

  Nor is it soothing to let them loose to make their own decisions and mistakes. But it is the entire point of the exercise, shifting the balance, giving them a little more rope each year. I remember when he was in fifth grade and Quin, our eldest, came to me to complain that he had had the same bedtime his entire life. I was so busy that I’d forgotten to let him stay up until 9:00 P.M., which felt like something of an epic fail. On the other hand, we knew parents who let their children dictate their own bedtimes so they could develop a sense of mastery and control. Which, by the way, is something no nine-year-old actually needs.

  It’s all in the calibrations over the long haul. When we think of longer life expectancy, we may envision ten years added to our existence later on. But it may also be that we’ve added time to adolescence, which now stretches past the teen years and into the twenties. So much has been written about how the young people of America seem to stay young longer now, well past the time when their grandparents owned houses and had families, and some of that surely has to do with a life expectancy that makes the forced march into adulthood slightly more leisurely. But it’s also true that their grandparents never had a mother calling the teacher to complain about a bad grade. And they certainly didn’t have parents who would call the college dean; my father’s sole connection with my higher education was when he dropped me off freshman year, and when he came back for commencement. I would have felt so diminished if he had ever called one of my professors, but luckily the idea would never have occurred to him.

  I liked to congratulate myself on my restraint when I would hear stories about parents who micromanaged their sons’ and daughters’ college courses or job decisions, but the truth is, part of this was garden-variety sloth. I didn’t want to work that hard. I passed on the weekend roundelay of kiddy-league sports when they were younger so our three could hang out with one another. I told people I hoped it would cement a bond among them, and it did. But I really wanted to be reading rather than standing on the sidelines pretending my kids were soccer prodigies. Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn’t ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.

  Quin wrested custody of his life away from me at a fairly early age, perhaps inspired by a bout, shame-making in memory, in which I tried to persuade him to rewrite a perfectly good fourth-grade paper to turn it into an eighth-grade paper. I’d been addled by the class art projects, some of which looked like the work of a crack graphic design team—and were. He was wiser than I was; I didn’t set eyes on his college essay until he’d mailed his applications, and I knew immediately that it was going to either instantly disqualify him or be his ticket in. It was the latter, which was a good thing for his brother and sister, since the niggling suspicion that I would have tried to persuade him to homogenize his essay, perhaps to ill effect, led me to be hands-off with them. So, once again, do the younger ones benefit from our experiments on the eldest, who got me used to myself. When Maria had her wisdom teeth removed, I doled out the heavy-duty opiates; when Quin had his done, I didn’t even fill the prescription. “I’m so sorry about the Vicodin, honey,” I said as he sat with his sister. “It’s okay, Mom,” he replied evenly. “I only had two out at a time.”

  I asked him once about his memories of my mothering, and yes, I know I was taking a big chance there, but in his dealings with me he has grown to be almost as kind and gentle as he is with his grandparents. “You sorta freaked out during the college application process,” he noted accurately. But then he wrote, “What I remember most: having a good time.”

  There’s the problem with turning motherhood into martyrdom. There’s no way to do it and have a good time. The most incandescent memories of my childhood are of making my mother laugh. My kids do the same for me. Nobody has ever managed to crack me up the way Quin, Chris, and Maria Krovatin have, except maybe their father.

  Sometimes on the way to the cir
cus, or the car, or around the pond, the three kids walk side by side, their heads bent together, their words a kind of pigeon murmur, alto and undecipherable, and Gerry and I will exchange a half smile that means, my God, how did this happen? The alchemy of parenthood is so mysterious. It can’t be true that we were somehow responsible for creating these three unique and remarkable human beings. We didn’t know enough, do enough. There were endless diaper changes, baths, books, Band-Aids, doctor visits, parent-teacher conferences, plays and athletic events and family dinners, so much scut work. It’s as though we were working long repetitive shifts on an assembly line, and in the end we had the Sistine Chapel.

  I had no clue about how they would change everything. That sounds preposterous, since both my husband and I are the eldest in largish families and both of us had childhoods punctuated by pregnancies, the weeklong disappearance of our mothers, and the arrival of yet another lozenge of a receiving blanket with a red face and a querulous cry. But being supplanted by babies was quite different from being in thrall to them. Giving birth to a baby is one thing; it’s another to realize you’ve given birth to a man. I don’t mean changing a diaper and getting sprayed in the sternum; I mean walking someone to kindergarten and helping him put on his fake beard for the Purim play, and then one day turning around to discover that he has a real beard, and an Adam’s apple, and a bass voice, and boxer shorts. I am the mother now of two grown men, who are bigger than I am and in many ways smarter, who know how to tie a tie and throw a football, neither of which I have ever mastered.

  And I am the mother of a woman, too. She started out very picky about her party dresses, and she liked to pretend she was the Little Mermaid, standing at the top of the stairs and warbling, “I’m coming, Prince Erik!” And then suddenly she was inveighing against sexism and giving her friends relationship advice. You look at her and understand how it’s not only possible but also desirable to be utterly female and terribly confident. You realize that instead of your being her role model, the tables have turned.

  It was an education, raising these children, but mainly for me, not so much for them. There was the sense of competence that motherhood conferred, that sense that if we could handle Halloween or the first day of school or a rainy week in midsummer, we would be able to handle anything. By the time I had all three I was no longer doing hiring, but had I been I suspect I would have mainly hired mothers returning to the work world because I would have known they could handle several things at once and still manage to peel out of the office at a reasonable hour.

  Having and raising my children made me better than myself, but they did something else as well: they helped me learn to grow older. Sometimes I think about how, on my birthdays, the first words out of my father’s mouth are always, “Wow, I must be getting really old!” For a long time I thought this was because my father has a way of putting himself at the center of any event—the baby at every christening, the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, as someone once said of Teddy Roosevelt—but like many things my father has told me, it resonates now as it couldn’t when I was younger. My place in the span of life is what my kids have shown me, too. Just as, when they were small and we were in charge of every aspect of their lives, we couldn’t help but feel like responsible adults (or, on occasion, faux responsible adults), so when I see my grown children, I can’t deny my own progression. I am part of an unbroken wave, but I am no longer its leading edge. Sometimes I look at photographs of all of us together and for an instant my mind registers an error, of angle, of perspective. Who is that very short woman at the center of the scrum? Everyone towers over me. “Little Mommy,” Christopher says occasionally, fondly.

  Any equanimity I bring to this process of growing older, of getting slower, of ceding the center to others, I’ve gotten from them. They forced me to relearn the catechism of self: instead of focusing all the time on how they ought to behave, who they ought to be, I tried to focus on who they really were. In the process I finally got a handle on who I really was. In coming to understand that Quin’s unwavering certainty and responsibility were a thin veneer over deep emotion and constant self-examination, I came to understand and even appreciate the same about myself. In accepting Christopher’s overweening individuality and lack of conformity, I dared to take my own steps in that direction. And Maria’s audacity and fearlessness made me push myself away from the beckoning quicksand of the compliant girl who had somehow survived within me despite my years of exorcisms. A long time ago, over the space of five years, a balding doctor with the benevolent look of a kindly goat peered up at me and said, “Push!” Little did I understand that that was what I would have to do from then on—push to do right for their sake, push to be better because of their example. The older I get, the more I want to be like them.

  Expectations

  We’ve lived through a time of incredible challenge, many of us, in which we’ve been trying to be both our mother and our father simultaneously. But I feel as though it’s been the very best time to live, that those of us of a certain age got it all, like a time-lapse photograph, branch to bud to blossom in a single generation.

  We started with a world of virtually no options, then moved on to a time in which every bit of progress seemed like a battle, in which valedictorians at good colleges who happened to be female were still assumed to be seeking work they would pursue only until they got engaged, or got pregnant. And then suddenly we could be anywhere, do anything, except for pope and president, and no woman really wants that first job anyway, and we will sooner or later get the second. It’s been like the Industrial Revolution without sweatshops, or the American Revolution without blood. Victory was ours, but not without some suffering. “Oh, you poor girls, with all your choices,” an older woman once said to me during an interview. And I knew exactly what she meant. There have been times when it required two or three people to be a reasonably competent version of me. But I’m not complaining.

  It’s hard to begin to explain to our children and their friends how radically different the expectations have become in the years between my birth and their own. That’s it, really: the expectations. The idea of who we are and what we can do. My mother knew she was never going to college; the expectation was that she would marry and have children and that therefore higher education would be wasted. My father’s attitude toward me was the polar opposite. The most shocking announcement I ever made to him was that I was pregnant. “What about your job?” he said. He believed in a world that was either-or, in which I could be a success at work or as a mother but not both, and certainly not at the same time.

  I understood his reaction. I’d been a child in an either-or world, in which the career choices I faced were to be either a mother or a nun. As a child, I saw no women in positions of real power and authority. Perhaps as important, I saw no women who worked for pay. The money women had was given to them by men. The position they held was given to them by men. And believe me, for a girl who was outspoken, intelligent, insurrectionary, and always faintly pissed off, that was a powerful goad to think the world needed changing.

  And change it did. The greatest social tsunami of my lifetime, the women’s movement, was part fearsome political force, part personal support group. It was hated and feared, and it changed the world completely, so that sometimes I want to send its leaders a note that says, “Thank you for my life.” With all the technological changes of the last half century, it’s the women’s movement that has provided the greatest change in the way we live now. My daughter once asked me if a man could be secretary of state, a job I grew up believing would only be held by men. But during Maria’s youth the position had been occupied by Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton. Colin Powell must have seemed like a fluke.

  That’s progress, but it’s also an interesting problem. The social movement that changed my life has been hugely successful, but it’s not over. It only seems that way. Obviously it’s easier to sell the necessity of the labor union movement wh
en young women caught in a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory die than when people on automobile assembly lines are making an hourly wage three or four times higher than the minimum. It’s easier to argue against racial prejudice when drinking fountains are designated black and white and a young black man who whistles at a white woman can be murdered with impunity than it is when the question is how many black kids are going to get into Harvard and whether the black son of a doctor is given a leg up over the white son of a cop.

  It’s far easier to argue for the systematic devaluing of women if women are denied the right to own property, to take the bar exam, and to say no to their husbands than it is when women are merely finding it hard to get elected president. There are so many glasses half full: female cops and firefighters, female Supreme Court justices and senators. But for every one there is a glass half empty, too: the harassment female law-enforcement officers still face, the women soldiers who fear rape from their fellows as well as the enemy, the justices who still have to calibrate their fashion choices for the confirmation hearings, the senators who find it harder to raise money than even their dopiest male colleagues. It’s not just that some jerks yelled, “Iron my shirts!” at Hillary Clinton when she was running for president, or that someone asked the Republican candidate, John McCain, “How are we going to beat the bitch?” It’s that no one acted as though either of those things was that big a deal.