PLAN LIKE A PRO
Nobody knows your family like you do. You know the baby will blow her diaper, so “pack blowout bags,” says Jason Kotecki: individual gallon-sized bags with paper towels, a diaper, wipes, a towel saturated with stain remover, and a fresh set of clothes. I know one of my children will wander off no matter what I do, so when she was younger, I wrote our contact information on her arm or clothing, and even now, I give her very specific instructions for what I want her to do when she finds herself unable to spot us. Pack snacks for the blood sugar crash, headphones for the child who needs some space away from the crowd, Band-Aids for the kid who will run ahead and then skin her knee. Make a list of three possible emergency mid-excursion ice cream/coffee shops or find a park that’s close enough to the museum for one parent to duck out with a child who can’t take the hushed crowds. There’s a difference between allowing for spontaneous fun and wishful thinking. Being prepared in the same way you would at home can allow you to weather a minor catastrophe and keep going.
Holiday Travels and Travails
You may want to host the perfect get-together or manage to bring well-mannered, clean, and appropriately clad children to the festivities. But there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to holidays with extended family, and many of them are outside of your control—starting with the members of your extended family themselves.
Much of the narrative-changing advice for vacations applies here. Holidays do pile up. You get enough of them to make up for the seeming disasters (which, again, often make great memories). But to your attempts to expect less and enjoy more you can add another mantra when it comes to the family holiday: you are not in this alone.
That applies in both a practical way and a more emotional one. You can and should ask for help if you’re having trouble with the more material aspects of a family holiday, like cooking for a crowd, decorating like your grandmother did, or just managing three children under five at a large outdoor gathering. That may mean more hands; it might mean someone else picks up the bill for the groceries or the wine.
But if the story you’re telling yourself about a family holiday is that things are going all wrong, and it’s all your fault, then that is where “you are not in this alone” really applies. When what’s happening is that you’re not living up to someone else’s expectations (or your children aren’t), then that other person—your parent, your in-law, or even your child—might not be meeting you halfway.
My husband was raised Jewish, and his aunt and uncle keep kosher, which means (among other things) that they don’t eat meat and dairy at the same meal. When I host Thanksgiving, I used to feel a lot of pressure to get that exactly right. I worried mightily about serving nothing that they wouldn’t eat and keeping dishes separate. I researched whether every ingredient needed to meet some additional standard that I wasn’t familiar with.
Before many years passed, I realized that I was trying too hard. Our aunt and uncle wanted to enjoy the annual family get-together, and they wanted everyone else to enjoy it, too, which meant they didn’t care if the kids buttered their rolls, and they didn’t want me to lose sleep over the gravy. It’s not that I don’t still want to give them a wonderful kosher meal. I do. But I also know, now, that they would never want to make me feel terrible if I made a mistake. They’re the perfect guests in that they want things to be a success as much as I do.
It may be that not everyone at your family gatherings is working toward that goal, and if that’s the case, the only way to learn to enjoy yourself anyway is to find a way to build that into your own expectations. I know plenty of people who work at that for a lifetime, but knowing that the entire burden of a happy holiday doesn’t rest with you should contribute to your ability to keep yourself in balance over the trouble spots and not beat yourself up afterward.
Do Birthdays Better
It’s hard for your children to be happy when you’re not happy.
This is true when it comes to vacations and travel, yes, but it came up in particular while I was getting things ready for my younger daughter’s birthday. As we made cupcakes to take into her classroom, I asked my then-ten-year-old what’s important about the treats you take in.
“It should just be something you like, but that other people like, too,” she said. “And you don’t want it to be too hard, because it’s like, your birthday, and if it’s too complicated it might taste too interesting, or just take too long and then in the morning you’re all stressed, and your mom is yelling, and you just want it to be your special day. It should just be something you can share with your friends on your special day. Plus, I like things out of a box because it’s easy.”
Making birthdays and holidays fun and joyful for you—even if it means you “do less” for your children—makes those special occasions happier for your entire family. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect for things to be wonderful, and sharing the work that goes into creating a great day makes it more fun for everyone, especially kids, who are very, very tolerant of imperfectly frosted cupcakes and haphazardly displayed decorations, especially if they created them themselves.
It can be hard for parents to feel that same joy in an imperfect celebration. Birthdays invite both you and your children to draw comparisons, and we tend to build a mental story around what we think those we love expect from us (like homemade cakes) that may or may not be true. Add on the weight of the memories and nostalgia that surround those red-letter days and you can easily find yourself dreading birthdays instead of looking forward to them.
Birthdays are a very social thing. The fact that every other child in the class has produced cupcakes for a birthday means that if you fail to provide cupcakes, your child isn’t just disappointed, but singled out. If every other child in the same class has had a birthday party that included every classmate, you may feel obligated to do the same. We get caught up in the cycle of striving for perfection, as painstakingly described in the very scholarly Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life, edited by Emma Casey and Lydia Martens:
Birthday parties are rarely organised as singular expressions of parental/child relations but rather as part of a broader gendered sociality in which networks of gifts and children are circulated in rounds of reciprocity. The increasingly aestheticised and elaborated nature of children’s parties and their intertwining of material culture, social relations and commerce is a form of consumption that is not merely an extension of women’s domestic work, but is rather a testament to the ways in which mothering and consumption have become a mutually constitutive phenomenon.
If “rounds of reciprocity” doesn’t make you want to make a cake out of a box mix and throw the kids on the lawn to play in the snow or the sprinkler, I don’t know what will. You will be happier about celebrating your child’s birthday if, instead of looking to the “network of gifts and children circulating” in your community, you consider, first, your own limits and values, and second, what your child wants—and know, too, that this is not necessarily easy. For many families, birthdays aren’t just a single day but multiple celebrations for schoolmates, family, and friends. That’s not new, and it’s also not just in the realm of the privileged. One mother of a third grader living in a homeless shelter in New York City told me that they’d had three parties—one with family, one with friends, and one with the shelter community. Parents want to make our children feel special on what’s seen as a big day, and if parties or gifts are the norm where you are, it will be hard to buck that trend (but it won’t necessarily impact your child in the ways that worry you).
Ask your child what’s important to her. A two-year-old might tell you that all she wants is to have the big kids next door over, and even if that’s a slick thirteen-year-old girl and a hulking sixteen-year-old boy, you might be surprised how happily they’ll come over and play hide-and-seek for an hour. Keep your own strengths, values, and budget in mind. If you’re lucky, your
child’s dream birthday party will be something simple, but if she asks for something that doesn’t work for you—for a petting zoo you can’t afford, or a trip to the trampoline park that’s two hours away that you can’t imagine making—it’s okay to say no. Your child will remember the party you have, not the party you don’t have.
You also don’t have to adhere to the “every child in the class” custom—even if your school recommends it. If big, homegrown parties are your thing, indulge your urge to barbecue (unless your child wants nothing to do with crowds). If, on the other hand, the idea of hosting twenty three-year-olds (and, presumably, one parent or caregiver each) fills you with dread, do not do that thing, even if your child has been to multiple parties along those lines already. Do you know who will pause, come the end of the school year, and say to herself, “Hmmm . . . we hosted little Fenella for Arethusa’s birthday, but Fenella’s mother did not do the same” and strike you off some master social list somewhere?
Exactly no one whose opinion you value and, almost certainly, actually no one at all. Instead, consider that maybe the big party hosts just like throwing big parties, while many of your fellow preschool parents will thank you for setting a simpler standard, like three friends for a build-your-own ice cream sundae party. Make it a surprise or host it over a break from school if you’re concerned that the kids will bring it up, but know, too, that at some point, children do discover that not every child is invited to every party.
That will also work out just fine—although I have absolutely worried over the child who has come home to report birthday after birthday without an invitation. Try not to encourage your child in a belief in this reciprocity system, and when it’s his turn, invite the friends he wants without much consideration of who else invited who when. (I say “much” because few of us, and few kids, would want to leave out the friend whose small party you went to last week.) If you’re worried that children won’t attend because your child is struggling socially or has special needs, talk to the parents of the invitees in advance of the party and decide what works best instead of leaving it to chance.
Savor the Calm and the Crazy
All of these moments, from vacations to holidays to birthdays, offer opportunities to soak up the good. There will be moments of chaos. There will be times when you’re caught between two generations, when your mother just doesn’t understand your daughter and your father thinks your son is an irresponsible goon, but that’s what you’ve got. There will luau parties held inside during a flash thunderstorm and Thanksgivings when your vegan uncle is trying to convert your meat-loving brother-in-law while your teenager texts from inside a locked bathroom. There is nothing wrong in those moments, even as everything seems to go wrong around you. And there will be, if you’re lucky, moments of peace while stirring the gravy, moments of exhausted bliss in the wreckage of the piñata, and moments of just settling in on some random park bench somewhere along your journey and watching all the members of your family do what they do. Those are your memories, and you get to have that cake, and eat it, too.
THE END OF THE BOOK, NOT THE JOURNEY
A not-so-surprising thing happened while I wrote this book: I got happier. Not just a little happier, either. I’ve just been reading The Year of Living Danishly, in which the writer asks all kinds of Danish people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten and is repeatedly surprised by the consistency (nines and tens, every one). With my feet still firmly on American soil, I’d say I went from a six or seven to a nine, or maybe even a ten, even without Denmark’s characteristic elevation of cozy happiness to a national art form. I can imagine a few things that could happen that would make me feel happier, but I can’t think of anything more I could do. There are still things I could do better, more consistently, so maybe a nine. But a nine is good. A nine is great. At nine, I spend far less time feeling grumpy, frustrated, and annoyed, and far more at sort of a pleasant equilibrium. I notice when things are going well. I let a lot of small things go.
Of course, that was the goal, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little surprised. I thought I was pretty happy to begin with. I knew we had some problem spots, but I didn’t expect the changes I was making to have such power.
There were other things happening that probably helped push my happiness along. My children got older, and while bigger kids do have bigger problems, they also generate far fewer sippy cups and are more pleasant on long car rides. I took a leave from my day job to work on the book, and while my schedule has always been flexible, that space made it easier to accept the natural spikes in a family schedule, like the periods when everyone needs a checkup and a dentist visit and a trip to the eye doctor, the viruses that keep kids home from school one at a time for days and then weeks on end, and the increased demand for parent participation in school and activities that always appears around the holidays or when school draws to a close.
I don’t discount those things, but the changes I made to my own life, and to the stories I told myself about what was happening and the ways I approached it, really made a difference. A few stand out as downright life changing.
What do I do differently? For starters, I let the good times be the good times. I revel in the ordinary. I remember that this is the life and the family we chose and that here we are, having what we wanted. In the introduction, I quoted Michel de Montaigne: “My life has been full of misfortunes, most of which never happened.” I don’t dwell on those imaginary catastrophes anymore, or project my worries out into a distant future where my children, aged forty and beyond, are still fighting over who gets the seat next to the door on the passenger side of the car. (Ask me why that’s more desirable. Go ahead, ask me. I have no idea.) I keep things in perspective when it comes to worries about the larger world. Just a few generations ago, my life would have been so much more difficult on a daily level. Consider all we’ve gained—combustion engines, antibiotics, electricity, doctors who wash their hands before childbirth. We are still a society and a world with challenges and inequalities, but we can appreciate all we have without disregarding what we can still achieve. I want to be happy, and the wanting turns out to go a long way.
Alongside those big thoughts are small daily actions. The phrase If you see something, don’t always say something has been a magic bullet for me when it comes to both daily discipline and the mundane brotherly and sisterly bickering that forms the soundtrack to so much of our family life. Like the young teacher I described in the homework chapter, who thought she was expected to assign something every night, some part of me still felt that my role in successfully raising these children to adulthood was to correct them every time they did wrong. In a completely positive and constructive way, of course. If they screwed up, in ways big or small, I needed to immediately teach them what was right.
This was exhausting, ineffective, and largely impossible. Even assuming I saw every transgression, attempting to respond to them all left me certain that any quality my words held was getting buried in the sheer quantity. It is sometimes useful to stop your children and say, “Wait a minute, how do you think that makes your brother feel?” Do it every time they squabble, though, and you become a nattering cliché, perkily oozing the same pleas to “use your words” and “talk about what you’re really feeling” while your children carry on exactly as before.
Faced with a choice between letting them become background noise or becoming background noise myself, I realized that I had to let more things go. Their bickering often signified nothing beyond a generalized disgruntlement that they were taking out on one another, or a route to a decision among competing interests regarding things like what to watch on television or who sat in which seat in the car. Theirs was a loud, acrimonious road, to be sure, but they could take it, or, if their battle was bringing me down, I could tell them to stop it. All of them, that is. I did not need to single out the one who was being unreasonable or the one who was being bossy. I did not need to care. For me, with th
ese kids, at these ages, the right thing to do 90 percent of the time was just tune it out.
My daughters came home from school recently squabbling, as they often do. One called the other a “wimp,” the other retaliated with a barrage of intentional annoying behavior that culminated in her walking around her sister in circles, singing a tuneless song while her sister tried to read. Once, I would have interfered, stopped first the name-calling, then the intentional annoyance (which was annoying me, too). I didn’t. I picked up my laptop and walked away without comment, without even much of a second thought. There were no real explosions—there wasn’t much arguing, even. Both name-caller and singer got bored, and less than half an hour later they were baking a cake. The transition from school back to family provokes something like this almost every day. It’s a pattern, not a problem. If I don’t get involved, it ebbs away naturally. If I do, the drama can stretch well into the evening.
I tried to stop seeing every disciplinary infraction, too. This is trickier. It takes vast quantities of repetition to persuade children to hang up coats, to go to bed on time, or to consider the feelings of others when entering elevators or holding a conversation in a public place. Certain things recur nearly constantly. Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run. If I don’t say anything, they often don’t see anything.
Still, sometimes I just let them run. I don’t scold the kid who ran into the person exiting the elevator. I let them have the crazy loud argument in the grocery store. Not everything is worth calling out.
I’ve found that each one of my kids goes through periods of being more difficult, which means it’s often just one of the four constantly getting the admonitions while the others are standing around looking innocent and polishing their halos. That mantle passes from kid to kid, but while it might all even out, I don’t like the feeling of picking on this one or that one all day long. The constant corrections can really take a toll on our relationship at what is often a challenging time already. That’s when I want to choose my battles, and if that means I don’t look like the greatest parent of all time as my child hangs off the front of the grocery cart, that’s okay. I’m a happier one.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 27
