Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

A SECRET LIFE

  My elder boy admits to having a girlfriend. I am sure it is Rebecca. No? What about Alexia? No again. Sonia? Jo-Ann? Sarah? No. No. No.

  “Miss King,” he says impatiently, amazed that I could be so dim.

  Miss King is his preschool teacher this year. She overcame unbelievable odds to win his heart. The unbelievable odds were the much beloved Mrs. Frank. She was last year’s passion. Now she has faded into the glow of fond remembrance.

  “What do you like best about Miss King?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  And so his secret life begins.

  I remember the first stirrings of my own, when I squirreled away contraband in my desk at school, safe from my mother’s eyes (except for the sanitized view offered on parents’ night). The power of that secret life, contained as it was in a cheap powder-blue Leatherette diary with a tin key, and the exhilaration: the feeling of being on my own, of hating my bag lunches because they represented a connection, however tenuous, to adults back home. I lobbed the hard-boiled egg on which my mother had painted a picture of a princess into the trash, and bought packaged cupcakes instead.

  All over America we children sauntered home at 3:00 P.M. with the same answer to the same question: What did you do in school today? Nothing. The houses that were havens slowly turned into massive invasions of privacy except for the room at the end of the hall with the single bed, the yellow flowered curtains, the bulletin board and the books. My bedroom door had a sign: Keep Out. This Means You! The “i” was dotted with a daisy.

  Times have not changed. For weeks, my son and I walked home from school and discussed the new song about the five little snowmen, the alphabet puzzle, the balance bar in the gym. Then, all at once, feeling his strength, knowing that he was beginning to achieve separation, he shut down on me.

  “What did you do in school today?” “I can’t tell you.” At least that is an improvement over “nothing” and its undertones of teachers whiling away the day drinking coffee and reading magazines. “It is my privacy,” Quin finally said, hoisting me on my own petard. Privacy is a big word in our house now that I have taught it to my children. The little one has just learned to say it. When you are in the bathroom, he enters and loudly intones “privacy.” Then he hangs around, showing that he has gained mimickry but not comprehension.

  The older one has not yet invoked the privacy privilege about his room, just the bottom bunk. This is what he has in it: three triangular wooden blocks, an Etch-A-Sketch, a copy of Babar and His Children and one of Mother Goose, two empty coffee cans, the raggedy red-and-white clown that is his comfort object, a stuffed version of Max in his wolf suit from Where the Wild Things Are, three small pillows, a down comforter, and a wire whisk that is well on its way to replacing the clown for reasons I cannot divine. (In the middle of all this, there is usually a little oval empty spot reserved for sleeping.) The last time I changed the sheets he went berserk. “You touched my stuff,” he keened, and while my mouth said, “Don’t be silly,” my brain traveled back to the time my mother cleaned my closet. “You invaded my privacy,” I said, eleven years old and disdainful, which is probably redundant.

  This is the point, isn’t it? I learned at least one thing from the New Testament—that mothers have children to sacrifice them for the greater good. It turns out that this is true, and that the greater good is their independence. But between A and Z lies a minefield of MMMM’s. First there is the shock of distance, of realizing that life continues, even when there is no mother to observe it. Later comes the contempt. I remember it well, thinking that needing my parents was a pathetic emotional rag left over from my baby clothes.

  When does understanding emerge? I suppose it’s different for each of us. The cord lay slack when I was a child; it twisted and pulled and occasionally broke later, when I was running in another direction. Now it is a nice straight line. It would be too much to say that my father and I are living parallel lives, but we are both going the same way. I have my secret life and he has his. Both of us know they are not so wonderful that we have to surround them with so much psychic barbed wire. And now we each know how to back off.

  I must nonetheless learn this all over again, now that I must back off in a different direction. My children and I are not going the same way. I know that is necessary, and good. It is sad, though. Quin has a secret life, the first thing he has ever had constructed by and belonging only to him, and each year it will grow. One day he was singing a song I had never heard before. “What is that song?” I asked. “I can’t teach it to you,” he said. Today, it is can’t. Tomorrow, won’t. Someday he may teach it to me, but by that time I will already know it. That is the point, isn’t it?

  I remember lying on the bed when my second child was handed to me, all mottled pink and blue like the wrapping paper at a baby shower; I looked down at the umbilical cord still attached to both our bodies. Then, snip—it begins. Separation. Distance. Perhaps, someday, estrangement. Privacy. Intimacy. Miss King makes better snacks than I do. Ah me.

  BABY GEAR

  Well, another year has gone by and still the Nobel Prize has not been awarded to the inventors of the Snugli baby carrier. I can’t figure it. Here you have someone (I prefer to think that it’s a woman) who has come up with an invention that takes literally hundreds of thousands of people who have lost the use of their hands and gives them a new lease on life. They can pick up oranges in the supermarket, they can flip through magazines, they can smear lipstick on the backs of their hands in a test try, and all this despite the fact that they have babies.

  That this kind of achievement could go unrecognized is beyond me. The only people who have come close in the circles of civilization in which I currently mingle are the folks who developed the baby backpack and who took young impressionable people who heretofore thought the world consisted of knees, cuffs, and running shoes and enabled them to see at adult eye level. I say bravo.

  These are exciting times in which I live. My mother-in-law gasped at her first sight of a collapsible stroller. It was not the miracle of engineering, the sleek design; it was the bittersweet (in that order) memory of pushing perambulators the size of sanitation trucks up steps. My father, who had five children and yet whose experience at holding babies was basically confined to the baptismal font, was mesmerized by the sight of an infant confined to its mother’s chest in a blue corduroy Snugli. “They didn’t have anything like that when you were kids,” he said. Actually they did, but my mother owned the contraption; it was called arms, and it had no warranty and a limited life span.

  Consider the snap-crotch T-shirt. It has changed life as I know it. Grown grandmothers, people who will commit physical violence at a good department-store sale, became emotional when they first saw it—in plain white, never mind the little pastel prints. Even the utilitarian Oshkosh overall is a phenomenon, sharing with the snap-crotch T-shirt the ability to cover a baby’s great protruding pot in a way hitherto unknown. Finally, babies are losing that sideshow look they had when they wore clothes like ours.

  It is my theory that those clothes—the little pants that slipped below the belly, the little shirts that rose above it—were a visible manifestation of the contempt big business secretly had for babies. Babies drool, eat disgusting food, have rarely read anything interesting in the last week, and never buy low and sell high. Today, clothes for babies look different from clothes for adults, which is all to the good. This does not reflect any heightened respect for babies, only an appreciation of our need to pretend we have such heightened respect.

  Nevertheless official recognition has lagged. Cynics would suggest that this is because babies have never been a compelling special-interest group, but this belies the fact that most of the baby inventions of the last two decades were developed not for babies but for the convenience of adults. (The exception is the baby backpack, which is convenient only for those adults who incorporate into their regular weekly workout the lifting and carrying of twenty pounds of dead weight b
etween their shoulder blades.) There is the Swyngomatic, which enables parents to consume enough calories to maintain body weight and energy. Most babies can tolerate the Swyngomatic for at least fifteen minutes, which has been shown to be sufficient time to throw the baby in the swing, wind it up, sit down, shovel your food in and have that all-important glass of wine before the baby starts to cry. Some babies are even said to be entertained by swinging in the Swyngomatic for a full hour at a time, although no one I know has ever actually met such a baby.

  There is also the Sassy Seat, a freestanding baby seat that attaches to the end of a table and is held on by the weight of the child’s body within it. Many new parents think the wonderful thing about the Sassy Seat is that it eliminates the need for a high chair and can be taken anywhere. True, but not most important. The best thing about Sassy Seats is that grandmothers cannot figure out how they work and are in constant fear of the child’s falling. This often makes them forget to comment on other aspects of the child’s development, like why he is not yet talking or is still wearing diapers. Some grandmothers will spend an entire meal peering beneath the table and saying, “Is that thing steady?” rather than, “Have you had a doctor look at that left hand?” This is clearly more important than being able to take the seat to a restaurant.

  One can only assume that the big boys in Stockholm have never seen a Sassy Seat or have never had children. How else to explain their stubborn refusal to honor these phenomena and their inventors, and their willingness to concentrate instead on biomolecular theory and the cultivation of strange little things in pond scum?

  Next year I will lobby again for the Snugli and, failing that, the snap-crotch T-shirt. (I’m sure I am not the only one who has hypothesized that both are a product of the same fertile mind.) In the meantime, I feel a groundswell of support building for those little refastenable tapes on disposable diapers. A mother of four grown children said just the other day that if she had had them, it would have changed her life; it would have erased forever the myriad tiny holes made by diaper pins that she still carries, even today, in the tip of her index finger.

  HURT FEELINGS

  The most hateful words I’ve heard in the last three years were “He’ll need surgery.” It was not major surgery, thank God; we brought him in early in the morning and carried him out at sunset. But giving anyone permission to open up the blue-white body of your two-year-old is dreadful. I even held him while they administered the anesthesia, a bright idea I pursued with great parental indignation for the sake (allegedly) of the child’s psychological well-being, so that he would not be surrounded by strangers.

  By the time I had on my white paper moon suit, my surgical mask and my cap, I could have been Lon Chaney for all he knew; that I was helping to hold him down as he struggled didn’t seem to diminish the terror in his eyes. The only effect of the exercise was that I had to leave the operating theater, fall against my husband, and burst into tears on his shirt front, my nose running into my disposable mask.

  Other parents gasp when they hear this story, and on paper it is probably the worst thing that has happened to my child since he was born, although the three stitches in the palm of his hand last month run a close second. In reality, things like this do not bother me as much as I thought they would. I am pretty good at emergencies, amazingly calm and well-organized considering that I am the sort who never seems able to find two matching shoes in my closet.

  So it is only in theory that those things sound like the torments of the damned. It is something else that haunts me about being a mother.

  One day I was at the playground with my son, and everywhere there were children just a little older than he, skinny four- and five-year-olds, infinitely inventive giants hanging from the monkey bars and swinging so high the chains strained against their moorings. Time after time he approached them, his hands linked behind his back, and tried—not well—to talk to them, to make friends. Time after time he was ignored, too young to be worthy of notice. Finally, his shoulders slumped and he came back to me, his thumb in his mouth, rebuffed one time too many. I took him home.

  Such a small thing, but I can’t even think of it without wanting to cry—for the worst things I remember about childhood aren’t the physical injuries, the broken nose on the gravel driveway or the bad belly flop off the high board at the local pool. The worst was hurt feelings. When I think of them dispassionately now, they seem so silly, but even as the adult in me is chuckling, from somewhere in the distant past a feeling rises in the gorge, that hot, awful flush and surge in the stomach that comes when you feel ashamed to be yourself.

  I don’t think it would surprise many women to hear that one of the most vivid memories I have of growing up is intercepting and reading the note that the two cutest boys in my eighth-grade class exchanged, describing me as a carpenter’s dream—flat as a board. Funny, huh? And meaningless now, when I am no longer constructed that way and might not care if I were. So why is it more vivid to me than the day my long longed-for sister was born? And why, of all my relations, can I best evoke a great-uncle who never missed one opportunity, always in company, to make a cutting little comment about my sucking my thumb?

  I don’t mean to suggest that such things are only done by and to children, but we adults, having successfully flattened out the sharp edges and idiosyncratic little corners of our characters to more generally acceptable configurations, usually are adept at keeping them sub rosa. I still get hurt feelings, sometimes seriously hurt feelings, but I meet them with complicated rationalizations. With children it is more difficult, because it is simpler. “They don’t like me,” my little boy said, when we got home from the playground.

  So while I have learned to live with the two small pink scars left over from his hernia surgery, I cannot bear the thought of the hurt feelings that my son will have to endure before he is old enough to will them away. When someone teases him about sucking his thumb, I turn on them, a virago in running shorts and a T-shirt, defending not only the little boy now but the little girl then. The children who will not want to play with him, the teams he will not make, the girls who will laugh at him at dances—sometimes the stitches don’t look so bad.

  Occasionally, my husband and I try to torture ourselves, prepare ourselves for the worst by reading each other news stories about terrible things happening to children. But when we’re talking about real life, our lives, we come again and again to hurt feelings, to the comments about the braces, the best friend who suddenly wasn’t, the droop of the shoulders. Then we turn to our sons and sigh. I occasionally wish them to be the kind of people who don’t get hurt feelings; they’re not, and I would not truly want them to be. Hurt feelings come because they will walk out to the world, their arms open, their chins up. And somebody will boink them one on the head. It is a wonderful thing, and a terrible one, like seeing your mother standing there while a black rubber mask comes down on your face, knowing she will not leave you, but knowing too that she is helping strangers give you pain.

  SIBLING RIVALRY

  The boys are playing in the back room, a study in brotherly love. The younger one has the fire engine and the older one has the tow truck and although entire minutes have passed, neither has made a grab for the other’s toy. The younger one is babbling to himself in pidgin English and the older is singing ceaselessly, tonelessly, as though chanting a mantra. It is not until I move closer to the two of them, toe to toe on the tile floor, that I catch the lyrics to the melody: “Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here.”

  Later the older one will explain that he picked up this particular turn of phrase from me, when I was yelling at one of the dogs. (In a similar phenomenon, he always says “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” when I apply the brakes of the car hard in traffic.) When I said it to the dogs, I meant it figuratively; how Quin means it is less easily classified. I know, because I know where he is coming from. I have vivid memories of being a small girl reading in a club chair, and of having my brother, a year younger tha
n I, enter the room and interrupt me. An emotion as big and as bang-bang-banging as a second heart would fill my ribs. It was, trust me, pure hatred.

  This house is full of sibling rivalry right now, as colorful and ever-present as my children’s Lego blocks. The preschool class is full of it, too, filled with three-year-olds in various stages of shell shock because their moms and dads came home in the car one day with a receiving blanket full of turf battles, emotional conflicts, and divided love.

  Realization has come slowly for some of them; I think it began one day when the younger one needed me more and I turned to him and said, “You know, Quin, I’m Christopher’s mommy, too.” The look that passed over his face was the one I imagine usually accompanies the discovery of a dead body in the den. shock, denial, horror. “And Daddy is Christopher’s daddy?” he gasped. When I confirmed this he began to cry—wet, sad sobbing.

  I cannot remember which of my books described sibling rivalry thus: Imagine that one night your husband comes home and tells you that he has decided to have a second wife. She will be younger than you, cuter than you, and will demand much more of his time and attention. That doesn’t mean, however, that he will love you any the less. Covers the down side pretty well, doesn’t it?

  And yet the down side is not the only one; if it were, “Get out of here” would not have such a sweet little melody. My son loves his brother, who is immensely lovable; at the same time, he dislikes his brother intensely. He wants him to be around, but only sometimes, and only on his terms. He is no different from a lot of us, who have fantasies about the things we want and who are surprised by the realities when we get them. He likes the idea of a brother, but not always the brother himself. When his brother is hurt and helpless, he calls him “my baby.” “I don’t want my baby to cry, Mommy,” he says, which is the kind of line you get into this business to hear.