We have a trope in our family, about flowers and gardeners, those who expect to be cared for and those who do the caring. My second son is what you might call a master gardener, and I never doubted that he would find a way to become a father. (Although it turns out he can be surprisingly hardcore when the occasion demands; one evening he was minding Arthur in the midst of one of those toddler crying jags that is second cousin to demonic possession. “Arthur, breathe,” his uncle commanded sternly, and Arthur did.) Our daughter started babysitting almost as soon as she was no longer the babysittee; several times she looked after infant twins, which is a temporarily effective form of contraception. Definitely future mom material.
But for the longest time our elder son said that he had no intention of filling the parental position, and for what was, as is his wont, a logical reason. He is a person who likes to do things that he knows he can do well—which may explain why he didn’t walk until he was almost two—and he said it was too hard to do the job of fathering correctly and catastrophic to do it wrong. Who was I to argue? I, too, had intended in my twenties to go through life childless. I’d had to take some responsibility for my siblings after the death of our mother, and I’d not only found the task onerous and tedious, I’d become far too aware of the centrality of a mother to a family’s existence and terrified of playing such a pivotal role in the lives of others. I was also the leading edge of those character traits that are in opposition to motherhood. I wasn’t a fan of deferred gratification, and I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. As the eldest of five, I grew up craving my own things: not shared, not divided up. The first time I went to a Chinese restaurant and realized that everyone else expected to dig in to the food I’d ordered was traumatic. Once I got my own place there were two things I couldn’t wait to have: as much bacon as I wanted, and a batter bowl I could lick by myself. Do you know how little there is to lick off the wooden spoon when five children each get a lick?
When I was a teenager I read a book called The Baby Trap, by Ellen Peck. It seems unremarkable today, when people feel so much freer to choose whether to have children or not, but at the time it was revolutionary to me, to read these words: “Take your pick. One or the other. Housework and children—or the glamour, involvement and excitement of a full life.”
That’s your pick? Come on, I was nineteen. That’s an easy choice when you’re nineteen and your other guidepost is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which suggests that altruism is a trap and self-interest should be your ruling principle. I was totally Team Anna, and remained so for some time. And then one day something shifted. I cannot say why, and I do not pretend to think that people who remain childless are selfish or wrong and that at some point they will rue their decision, which they must get so very tired of hearing. Quite the contrary: the fact is I’ve known some people who had children over the years who should have thought better of that decision, and when I meet a couple who are childless by choice (as opposed to the many who are childless because sometimes nature is cruel), I don’t think they are shortsighted, stupid, or selfish. Being a parent is an awesome responsibility, and I believe it should be freely chosen and that it is not for everyone. But after years of saying I would never do it, eventually I chose it and managed to embrace what swiftly became the most transformative experience of my life.
But sometimes now I remember what I once felt like, what once led me to The Baby Trap and Ayn Rand, whose novels my father recommended because he thought they would show me the error of my egocentric ways. (My father was a very smart man, but to say he didn’t understand the mind of a teenage girl is an understatement.) At a threshold level, one of the challenges in becoming a grandparent is that, over time, as our children grow into lives of their own, we revert to that Me Me place.
You get used to having an orderly house, and then suddenly you don’t, at least not if your grandchildren are going to feel welcome. They have to be able to scatter the Legos, leave a rubber T. rex on the kitchen counter or a bathing suit on the bathroom floor. You get used to wearing white pants without fear, and then there are those grass stains from sitting on the lawn or the drool blot left over from a teething baby. You get used to being able to do what you want, and then you’re back on the clock, your schedule synchronized with naps or school pickups or camp visiting days.
You have finally gotten to the point where you no longer have to share: time, space, ice cream, clothes. Place the pillows carefully on the couch, and a week later the pillows are where you left them. Unless you have grandchildren. There are some people who want untrammeled pillows, who decide that their sharing days are done. They don’t want cocoa or crayons in their living rooms. Although what is the point of maturity if you haven’t learned that a pristine living room is not the secret of life?
I remember why I didn’t want to have children. It’s just that the woman who felt that, who was intent on leading that life, is no longer me. I see my own experience so clearly mirrored in Quin’s. He, too, came around for mysterious reasons after years of saying the job of father was not for him. He was wise enough to know that those men who accede to fatherhood because their wives want children, with the proviso that it’s her job, have just made a fool’s bargain, not for themselves but for their kids. He wholeheartedly embraced the challenge and the role; in the way he has done other things, his no no no became a yes, and a yes it has remained, in the best possible way. It is not simply that he took out a life-insurance policy and opened a college savings account; he opened his heart, as well, in ways he says he could not have imagined. The rigors of parenthood sometimes excavate the sentimental in the rationalist as well as the disciplinarian in the laissez-faire. We become an unexpected expanded version of ourselves.
Becoming a parent changed and enlarged my son; it’s no stretch at all to say that parenthood made us both better people. I’ve watched him be a father to my grandson, and I’ve been thrilled by his ability to put his own concerns and needs aside to minister to those of this little boy, to put himself in the place time after time where he is attuned to who his son is and what he needs, whether indulgence or discipline. The same deep curiosity he brought to the work of Joseph Conrad or the Beijing Olympics he has brought to understanding Arthur down to the ground. He has plumbed stores of patience he never knew he had: I can’t count how many times he has drawn Ferdinand the bull in chalk on the patio. But I know he will keep doing it until Arthur stops asking. He even created infant doggerel:
Arthur is the best,
Forget about the rest,
We put them to the test,
And Arthur is the best.
He loves his mother’s breast
And impresses every guest.
Our family is blessed
Because Arthur is the best.
Being an oldest child often means you always feel like the adult in the room. Having Arthur has helped excavate Quin’s inner kid. A person who does not suffer fools gladly, he has become uncommonly understanding. A person whose imagination can sometimes be leavened with skepticism, he is most often now joyful. A demanding person, he has become something of a softy. When the decision was made that Arthur was miserable from lack of sleep and that sleep training was in order, his parents repaired to their own quarters at our house, there to let their son cry it out. I texted to ask how things were going. Ten minutes in Quin started to cry, Lynn replied. We have to wait until he’s away for work. When he was, Mama and Nana sat in the kitchen, the monitor turned to mute. “It’s so good he’s not here,” Lynn said of her husband.
I was in an interview some time ago when an applicant said, “How would success be measured in this job? What would it look like five years in?” Being a parent is complicated; we fail every day in small ways and wait for the big reveal of adulthood to tell us whether we have ultimately succeeded.
Along the way there are various measurements, but they tend to be logistical, not
spiritual. He wears underpants instead of diapers. She can write her name with a pencil. The grades are good. The diploma is in hand. They don’t really tell the story, of course; they are guideposts, no more. Some people measure their success by the profession their children have chosen, by the purchase of a house, by how often they visit or call. But the only measurement, truly, is something that’s quite subjective: have you raised good people?
I haven’t decided yet if there are ways to measure being a successful grandparent. After all, the grades and the diploma are not precisely your purview. Some people try to salve their uncertainty by placing themselves in competition with the other grandparents. Some make the mistake of trying to subvert the ambiguity by doling stuff out, ever-larger and more-expensive toys and consumer electronics, ever-more-elaborate vacations. These grandparents wind up being the next-generation version of a divorced dad who only gets weekends, and so constructs some Potemkin village of late-night pizza and trips to all-inclusive resorts to make up for missing the boring, essential everyday. Believe me when I say, this is not a good look.
Because success is never measured by the satisfaction on an adolescent’s face when he opens a new tech gadget. The greatest measures are more amorphous. There are small moments as a parent when you suddenly have reason to say to yourself, my God, it was all worth it, the sleepless nights because of stomach flu or broken curfews, the craziness around toilet training and SAT tests, the exhaustion and the worries and the second-guessing.
And then there are the moments that are like lightning striking, like sunrise and sunset and New Year’s Eve all at once. I had one of those moments when I asked Quin what surprised him most about being a father. And he said, “I guess it’s how much I love him in a way I’ve never loved anyone before.”
And, ladies and gentlemen, my work here is done.
SMALL MOMENTS
The evening routine is almost done. Arthur has had dinner, sweet potato and chicken sausage. He stayed in the bath for a long time, blinked and gasped dramatically as his hair was washed, ran naked down the hall once he was dried. Getting him into his pajamas should be an Olympic sport. He thinks the struggle is hilarious.
Finally we have settled into the rocker in his room to read, and I realize that I have forgotten my reading glasses. They were once a convenience and are now a necessity. But luckily there is a book by the chair that I do not need to be able to see, because I can recite it from memory, so I pick it up and put my arm around my grandson and begin:
“In the great green room…”
“Mouse,” Arthur says.
“There is a mouse,” I say.
Is there anything better than sitting in a rocking chair with a little boy next to you while you read him Goodnight Moon? Is there anything more magical than the connection between reader and book, Nana reading and grandson listening? Arthur discovered the book The Story of Ferdinand, and because of the gentle bull, he is interested in both flowers and bumblebees. I assume he is learning lessons about the possibility of being both strong and gentle, but who knows? All I know is that books are magic. The Story of Ferdinand was published when my father was seven years old, and yet here is his great-grandson attending as Ferdinand is taken to the bullring and refuses to fight.
Some of the books Arthur reads have moved from shelves in our home to the ones in his. A shared language, a shared past. The copy of Quack! Quack! is a bit furred at the edges. His Ferdinand is new, and his Goodnight Moon and his Shrek, but he has our old copy of An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs and Hey, Al. He got a lot of books before he was born, at the baby shower, and then more for each successive birthday. He has a Nana book, and a Llama Llama book about spending the night at your grandparents’. I didn’t know those books before, but I’m glad they, and others like them, exist.
“Goodnight light and the red balloon,” I read, or, more accurately, recite.
Arthur leans in. “The bears,” he says.
Through my own reading I learned, when my boys were small, that psychological theory had it that to become adult men they would have to separate convincingly from me, break the bonds that attached them to the person from whence they came, the person whom many of us consider the center of our psyche. But because they were boys, that bond could not stand if they were to reach maturity.
I don’t want to get into a tussle with Sigmund Freud here, who is a much bigger name than I am, but I considered this a blunt object of personal development, cruel and unnecessary, perhaps the root of the problem so many men have with emotional intimacy. My boys loved me so, and yet at a certain point the prevailing culture insisted that they should reject me? Ridiculous, and completely unacceptable, for their sakes as much as mine.
So I turned where I had so many times over the course of my life, to books. I transmuted our connection into that of readers and writers. We talked about so many things, connected over and over again, over characterization, description, theme. But most of the time we were talking about ourselves. Because that’s one of the really important things about books, that they enable you to talk to your children about all sorts of things, sometimes without speaking at all.
“And goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush,’ ” I say to Arthur, pretending to read although I am really remembering, falling down the well of memory as I speak, other children, other chairs.
Arthur will begin to forget his nana as a pillow for his head, an encircling arm, a low voice intoning, “In the great green room.” He will begin to see her as an old woman with her life behind her who he might conclude has nothing in common with a young man just figuring it all out. And to combat that I will try to read the books he’s reading, and I will talk to him about them, which will really be talking to him about himself.
“Goodnight noises everywhere,” I say finally.
“Another book,” Arthur says, and how can I say no?
Lessons learned:
Have a pair of glasses handy.
If not, there’s Green Eggs and Ham. Or In the Night Kitchen.
Reading connects us. Always and forever.
THE VILLAGE
Parenting has changed a great deal over the last century. For one thing, it wasn’t even called parenting until recently; people of my parents’ generation had babies and then got on with it. Stimulation consisted largely of saying, “Go outside and play,” and an educational toy was your younger sibling. Shoes were often hand-me-downs, and parochial school uniforms certainly were. The teacher was always right, especially if she happened to be a nun; the idea that our mothers would check our homework, much less march into the school building and confront Sister Mary Luke over a math test, was unthinkable.
Some years ago my friend Donna and I were reminiscing about pushing our baby sisters, who were born within weeks of one another, in their strollers at the request of our mothers. We basically parked the girls and went about our business. “Did we even put the brake on the stroller?” Donna asked. “There was a brake?” I said.
It was like that then.
The dads were available to turn down requests for money and to tell what I now suspect were apocryphal stories about the hardships of their own early lives. So-called homemaking was the territory of women alone. My father could cook two things when I was a kid: grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. (Campbell’s, from a can, so not exactly culinary legerdemain. Although the man made a mean grilled cheese sandwich, largely because he put so much butter in the pan that it essentially constituted deep-fat frying.) This was the meal he made whenever my mother was in the hospital having another baby, the only time when he was home during a weekday.
On the other hand, my mother’s life went like this: pregnant, baby; pregnant, toddler/baby; pregnant, child/toddler/baby; pregnant, child/child/toddler/baby; pregnant, child/child/child/toddler/baby. Totally unfair that by the time she’d reached teen/teen/teen/child/c
hild, she died. If I ever get a chance to talk to her again, I would say so many things, but one of them would be, jeez Louise, how the hell did you do it?
But parenting was different then, less crazy and manic, and of necessity five children meant a different kind of attention and concentration. This meant grandparenting was different, as well. To repeat, because it deserves repetition: my paternal grandparents had thirty-two grandchildren. (I double-checked. When you have that many cousins, sometimes you lose track, but thirty-two is accurate.) In the year my sister was born, four other cousins arrived as well. This wasn’t as aberrational as current standards make it sound. Most families in my grandparents’ orbit and in our neighborhood had something similar going on: in really large families, with one priest and one nun and one daughter who was the sacrificial lamb fated never to marry so she could care for her aged parents, you were still bound to have a sizable next generation. I took all this for granted until the time, some years ago, when I was discussing it with an old friend whose family was twice as large as my own. “There was just never enough,” she said, which I found puzzling since her family had been prosperous, but she shook her head. “Enough time, enough attention. You just can’t pay enough attention to that many kids.” Which makes perfect sense under the new rules, in which I was always trying to individuate, doing things alone with each of my three in turn. To her credit, our mother tried to do the same, to break each of us out from the crowd of “the kids.” But it was hard and often didn’t happen.
Not only was that true, no one felt badly about it. The motto “It takes a village” means, among other things, that your own mother and father simply won’t have the time to do all the raising, and conventional wisdom has it that the slack was taken up by aunts, uncles, neighbors, and, of course, grandparents. But that last didn’t seem accurate when I was a child. My grandparents were not particularly engaged or attentive, although we were taken to see them ritualistically, more for obeisance than face time, always on Sundays, as though it were an extension of the morning’s religious rites. Their grandparenting matched the style of their parenting, so different from today’s, replete with advice books, mommy blogs, online forums for everything from breastfeeding to sex roles. My grandparents seem to have believed that their role was to house, clothe, and feed children who would then do the same for their own. The current assumption of unconditional love would have been ridiculous to them. Love was purely conditional, on what you accomplished, on who you became, on how you behaved. Love needed to be earned. Otherwise, of what value was it?
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