Maybe this year, I'll make the Parent Honor Roll

I’ve decided this is my favorite time of year.

And the reason is simple, though perhaps somewhat pathetic:  we’re three weeks into school and I haven’t messed anything up yet.

Sometimes by the time school gets out in June, I feel like I’m looking back on a ladder of errors and missteps. Arriving late to a parent-teacher conference. Making mistakes on the library volunteer schedule that I’m responsible for organizing every week. Neglecting to refill the kids’ lunch accounts. Overlooking my room-parent duty to supply popsicles for Field Day.

The kids seem to make far fewer mistakes than I do in the course of a school year. But their responsibilities also fall into a narrower scope: get to the bus on time and get homework done. There isn’t a lot of room for error.

I take solace in reminding myself that school isn’t my job, and I make far fewer mistakes at the work for which I’m paid than the unpaid work of overseeing the kids’ schedules and events and my own school-related volunteer commitments. And it also helps to know I’m not the only adult making mistakes. Last year it was the day before Field Day when I suddenly remembered that supplying popsicles was my responsibility. “I would have been the first room parent in the history of the Carlisle Public Schools to forget popsicles on Field Day,” I said to Holly’s homeroom teacher. “Actually, the entire sixth grade teaching team forgot about Popsicles this year. We were relieved that you thought of it at all,” she confessed, making me feel a little better.

But it’s only the third full week of school. We’ve only just begun. No one yet has missed the bus on my watch or left for school without the proper early-dismissal note. So far we have a perfect batting average.

It won’t last, but it’s a good feeling while it does. The kids are always diligent about homework and routines; I’m the one who gets frazzled as the year goes on and makes out the check for intermural sports incorrectly or gets lost on Parents’ Night. So far so good. In another month, I’ll have mistakes to report, but at the moment, I’m passing both seventh grade and tenth grade as a parent.

Maybe this year I’ll even make the Parental Honor Roll, which I’m convinced exists in some secret place and lists all the parents who do everything right.

Or if not this year, maybe next.

Letters from camp (that are brief and inscrutable)

Months ago, when I signed up both kids for camp programs during this last week of July, I started thinking of it as "the West family All-Star break," because it reminded me of that brief interlude halfway through the Major League Baseball season when all the players get a break.

From that early vantage point, this particular week seemed to hold the potential to be a unique midsummer interlude for me. With Tim away at baseball camp in the Berkshires, it would mean significantly less cooking, less cleaning, less grocery shopping, less laundry -- and no evening baseball games to attend. And even though Holly’s program is at a local day camp, it still means no Disney TV shows yammering away in the background when I'm drafting articles, and no responsibility for me to plan her day's activities. I envisioned a stretch of five consecutive days when I had nothing to think about except my own tasks, errands, and work assignments.

But I didn't count on the fact that with it being Tim's first time at overnight camp, I'd be too anxious about his well-being to enjoy my All-Star Break Week Off at all.

Now that the week is under way, I'm trying hard to appreciate it for what it is: a week that provides a break from the busy jobs I juggle all summer long, typically an amalgam of meeting deadlines, keeping the house clean, and keeping the kids busy enough to be happy and social but unscheduled enough that they can relax and be resourceful about how to enjoy themselves.

But instead, I'm mostly just spending the time fretting about whether Tim is okay.

It's not that we have no way to be in touch with him. Though cell phone use isn’t allowed during the day, the camp allows the kids to text-message their parents for a few minutes before bed every night. But the texts we've received from Tim are not exactly what I would consider updates on his well-being; in fact, they require translation from Rick.

"What did he say?" I asked Rick excitedly when I heard Rick's text-message notification buzz at 9:03 last night.

Rick handed over his phone so that I could read their five-minute text-dialogue myself. "At SS, started off a 6-4-3," Tim wrote. "1st at-bat grounded to second off 80+ mph pitch; 2nd time walked."

"Why is he writing in code?" I asked Rick. "More importantly, how is he? Has he made friends? How's the food? Has he been sleeping well? Does he miss us very much?"

"He initiated a double-play from shortstop," Rick replied. "And he hit a grounder to second."

"But how is he?" I demanded again.

"He broke out of a season-long hitting slump and led a double-play!" Rick answered. "So he's doing great!"

I'm not sure I believe him. "Doing great," to my mind, would include phrases like "Camp has been fantastic!" and "I'm having a wonderful time!" and "The counselors are fun and the other kids are nice to me!" That's what a mother yearns to hear the first time her son goes to overnight camp. After all, he waited almost 15 years to ascend this milestone; now that we're here, I'd like a little information.

But very little more is forthcoming. The campers are allotted five minutes per evening for texting, and Tim apparently wishes to use those five minutes for telling his father his fielding and hitting stats rather than for allaying his mother's primal anxieties about his well-being.

Going to camp for the first time is a milestone for him, but I have to concede that it's one for me as well. As a kid, and well into my teen years -- okay, pretty much until my second attempt at college -- I had a terrible time leaving home. And my separation anxiety was, hands-down, the flaw I least wanted to see my children inherit.

Tim may not have much to say when it comes to communicating with me this week, but this much I can deduce: he's at camp and he's doing okay. And I'm doing okay too. He's learning to get by while away from home; I'm learning that he is his own person and may not choose to communicate his thoughts, feelings and experiences exactly as I might wish. I'm learning that this rite of passage for me as a mother means accepting that I simply won't know what he's doing and how he's feeling every moment of the day.

So I'll have to be content with the news that he executed a 6-4-3 from SS. It's not exactly the information I would wish to have, given that it tells me nothing about whether he's eating or sleeping well or even remembering to take regular showers, but for now, for this first week away, that's what he’s chosen to impart. I'll have to trust him to eat, sleep, wash, and be reasonably happy. And I'll have to trust Rick that a 6-4-3, whatever that might mean, is evidence enough of his well-being.

The wisdom of peer parents

It was just a passing comment, somewhat transparently intended to remind the assembled journalists and the listening public of the president's humanity, but I loved him for it. Though ostensibly in the Rose Garden during yesterday's press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to talk about Syria and other international issues, the comment that stayed with me was when President Obama said to the Turkish Prime Minister, “As always, among the topics where I appreciate your advice is close to our hearts, and that’s how to raise our daughters well. You're a little ahead of me in terms of their ages.”

I already have great admiration for President Obama, but this made me like him even more: a parent who recognizes that your best resource as a parent is other parents.

I've been looking to other parents for guidance and mentorship ever since Tim was two weeks old and I joined a new baby group. The oldest babies in that group were about four months old, and yet I still looked to their mothers as founts of wisdom and experience. They lay their babies on quilts on the floor during our group gatherings. They knew how to breastfeed without removing any clothing. They could change a diaper without looking. They could even leave the room for a moment to use the bathroom themselves without taking their babies along, entrusting them instead to the other mothers in the group. Just two weeks in, I thought these skills were magical, and over the course of the next three months, I practiced everything I saw them doing.

And that was only the beginning. Shortly after Tim turned two, we joined a playgroup in which a lot of the mothers had older kids. Already thinking about what lay ahead, I pumped them for information: What kindergarten teachers? What afterschool activities? Soccer or t-ball? Walk to school or take the bus?

When Tim started kindergarten, I met even more parents with older kids. Now that my two children are 10 and 14, it amuses me to think that a mother with a third grader once seemed to me like the height of experience, but clearly these women knew something I didn't: they had their children in organized school routines, packing lunches, doing homework. And I wanted to know everything they knew.

I still do it even now. Tim will go off to high school next year; I've spent the past several months asking questions of parents with kids in high school. For almost every phase my children approach, I draw on the wisdom of more experienced parents. What's the right length of time for Tim's first trip to sleepaway camp? Should I urge him to go to school dances? Should I let Holly drop out of the school band? Is the cross-country team good exercise, or too competitive?

One year when Holly was still in preschool, I held the volunteer position of town playgroup coordinator. I was surprised when a mother called and said she wanted to start a playgroup but only include kids with no older siblings. I suppose she sought the support and empathy of other first-time parents, but I wanted to tell her she was depriving herself of vital learning opportunities.  I wanted to tell her that practically everything worthwhile that I know about parenting, I learned from more experienced parents.

So I appreciate the fact that the president gets this too. I realize his comment was meant to win over his audience; I don't suppose he and the Turkish prime minister really had time to discuss whether 13-year-olds should be allowed Facebook accounts or what was the right age to stop imposing bedtimes on weekends. But it's the thought that counts, and I only hope the mother who once said she wanted only first-borns in her playgroup learned at some point along the way how much she would miss out on by not exposing herself to other parents who were a few steps ahead.

Back-to-school, 2012

As I keep reminding myself, I’m not going back to school. They are.

And if they don’t seem concerned about it, I needn’t be either.

If they’re not lying awake at night thinking about it, there’s no reason for me to be.

My kids have never yet had a bad year of school, so on the face of it, there’s no reason for me to worry. But instead of thinking “Will this or that unpleasant thing happen to them again?”, it’s the opposite: I worry “Will this be the year? Other parents tell me of teachers their children didn’t get along with, terrible homework burdens, difficult relationships with other kids, unfair run-ins with the administration. I never have similar stories with which to counter. So I can’t help wondering: is our number up? Will this be the year?

But so far, no. Minor heartaches typical of preadolescence for Tim; minor inexplicable misunderstandings with friends for Holly, last year. But nothing so challenging that it kept any of us awake at night.

So I tell myself now is not the time to start worrying. The kids feel just fine about going off to school today. Yesterday they rummaged through their newly purchased school supplies to check off each item on the prescribed list and fit it into their backpacks (an old one for Tim, which he’s had – and loved – since fifth grade; a new one for Holly, brown with bright pink polka dots), and after dinner last night, at my insistence, they even packed up their own lunches: stuffing and leftover steak for Tim, yogurt and Pirate’s Bootie and cheese slices for Holly. Seltzer bottles for each.

Neither of them gave much thought about what to wear today. I remember tremendous excitement over first-day-of-school outfits from my own childhood, and judging from the photos my friends have been posting today, the tradition still holds true among many families, but my kids can’t be bothered. Holly chose a clean and neat but unspectacular outfit that she used to wear a lot last spring. Tim appeared in a familiar Hershey’s Park t-shirt that he wore more days than not last year. Long ago, we had a rule about no t-shirts with words on them for the first day of school, but it’s one of those things that just stopped seeming so important after a while.

This is Tim’s last year of middle school, and it’s also the last year he’ll attend a school with which I’m familiar. I attended his current school from kindergarten through eighth grade myself, just as he is; but next year he’ll go off to the public high school, whereas I attended private school after eighth grade. So next year I’ll be even more anxious about the unknowns, though Tim will probably once again be the picture of complacency.

I remind myself that they are in clean clothes, they know how to find their homerooms, they’ve packed nutritious lunches, and they have a full set of school supplies; there’s not much else I could have done this morning to send them off prepared. In an essay about parental involvement at schools in Sunday’s New York Times, Bruce Feiler attributed Dan Levin, a founder of a charter school network that runs 125 schools across the country, with saying, "If [a] kid is coming well rested to school, with his homework done on time, and is behaving well, the parents are doing their job."

Well, I know my kids are well-rested; they weren’t lying awake last night while I was. And they’re usually fairly reliable on the other two points as well. And so. Good for them not to be anxious, and silly for me to be. It’s a new school year, and I’ll just trust and hope that it will be as good as all the ones that preceded it.

Amaryllis, unfolding

When it arrived, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Strangely, there were no instructions attached. Just a medium-sized square cardboard box in our mailbox a week before Christmas.

It was a bulb, I could tell that much, in a festive if frangible gold-colored gilt flowerpot. And with it in the box was a dark chocolate torte, as well as a packing slip and a computer-generated card saying the gift was from my two Colorado aunts. I wondered whether that particular combination packaged together – a bulb in a gold flowerpot and a chocolate torte – was a regular catalog item or if my aunts had chosen to combine the two. Either way, it was a generous Christmas present.

I know a lot more about chocolate tortes than bulbs. And as it happened, we were having guests midweek. So I refrigerated the tightly wrapped cake for a few days and then sliced it into thin wedges and served it on our holiday dessert plates with a spoonful of whipped cream. Our guests loved it; I admitted regretfully that I hadn’t made it.

I told myself I’d do a little bit of online searching to find out how to take care of the bulb, which the packing slip informed me was an amaryllis. I’m not very skilled with plants under the best of circumstances, and bulbs, with their onion-y appearance and tendrils barely emerging from the dirt, are even more mysterious than ordinary house plants. I put it on the windowsill and gave it a small amount of water, after asking both my mother and my aunt how to care for it and having both of them tell me, “You’re either supposed to water bulbs or not water them, but I can never remember which.”

Though it was right on the kitchen windowsill facing toward the sunny back yard, I didn’t think much about the bulb. I gave it a little water every few days, with no idea as to whether I was hurting it or helping it. I neglected my resolution to do some online research and find out how to take care of it.

And then in late January, the stem started to grow: a strong, pale green stalk extending straight up from the peculiar orb in the dirt. A bud formed on the end. And this morning, I noticed the bud was starting to open a tiny bit, revealing dark pink petals within.

The sight of this bud so very slowly flowering reminds me of when my children were born. First, the incredulity that anything was actually gestating at all, physical evidence to the contrary not withstanding. In the hospital while in labor for the first time, I saw the bassinet that the nurse had placed in the room and had a pang of surprise that she was so confident a baby was actually going to occupy that tiny crib by the time we were done. But sure enough, a baby did arrive soon enough, in both cases, and throughout the years ever since, I’ve been watching with wonder and curiosity as the bud slowly opens and the brilliantly colored petals of my children’s personalities emerge.

And of course then, as with the bulb, they arrived without printed instructions. I had to do my own research, and ask for advice, and figure it out by trial and error.

In a few days, we’ll have a fully flowering amaryllis on the windowsill, and it will remind me of mid-December and the arrival of a bulb that I really wasn’t sure how to take care of. Wondrous beings emerge from the plainest of containers. From this dull and oddly shaped brown bulb came a beautiful flower. Opening fully as it will just in time for Valentine’s Day, it will be our first hint of spring.

Super Bowl sentimentality

I don’t normally look forward to the Super Bowl. It’s not that I lack affection for the Patriots; it’s the sport of football itself that leaves me indifferent.

But this year I found myself looking forward to the Big Sunday. Sometimes it takes a few years of repetition before I begin to recognize a ritual for what it is, but for the past five years or so, we’ve watched the game at the same house, attending a party that seems to double in size every year.

And although big parties aren’t always my favorite place to be, this one is special because the guest list is loosely centered around the families of Tim’s wide circle of casual friends: the boys with whom he’s played baseball, sat in class, played at recess, and attended birthday parties for the past seven years or so.

It’s a group of people – parents and kids alike – whom I generally really like. But more than that, this year for the first time I began to sense how transient this ritual might well turn out to be. Our boys have all hung out together or at least attended school and played on teams together over the past several years, but that probably won’t last too much longer. In another two years, they’ll start high school; those who go to the public high school will attend classes with three times as many kids from the neighboring town as from their own, and some will go to private schools nearby or even off to boarding school. They’ll still be happy to see each other and maybe they’ll become part of Carlisle’s traditional day-after-Thanksgiving soccer game, an event that typically draws together old friends after they’ve gone off to college. But this particular group of fifteen or twenty boys won’t make up Tim’s daily peer set anymore, and their parents won’t be such a regular part of my life either.

I find that hard to face, but in a way this sentiment is very much in keeping with how I’ve been feeling ever since the start of the school year: Everything is perfect so please stop the clock right now. Both of the kids are happy and well-adjusted, with a healthy mix of social, recreational and academic interests. Holly is finally past the mercurial stages that can make the early years of school difficult; Tim isn’t yet thinking about SAT scores or learning to drive. This, right now, fourth and seventh grade, this is perfect. This is where I would freeze us, if I could.

And so as I began coring peppers and mixing filling for the tray of chilis rellenos I was bringing to the Super Bowl party, I thought of the other parents whose presence in my life I had taken for granted for so long: from the sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-tedious days of toddler playgroups, to the continuous birthday party circuit of their early grade school years, to the spring and summer baseball games at which we spend so much time gabbing. Even as I recognized all the specific privileges that my parenting circumstances afforded me – a friendly and safe community full of like-minded families with similar priorities – I indulged once in a while in twinges of boredom, admitting to myself if no one else that I’d rather be reading a book or working on an article than attending another library sing-along.

And yet as with so many things, the awareness that it won’t in fact last forever is finally making me appreciate it. Tim will probably always have friends, but not these friends; I’ll always have other parents to share the parenting experience with, but not these same couples I’ve known for almost a decade. The boys will grow apart and so will we. Even now, the boys hang out after school at the library or the general store or the soccer field on their own, so we parents don’t spend as much time gathered together watching them play. Soon we’ll see even less of each other, and that realization makes me sorry.

So this year I headed off to the Super Bowl party with something I didn’t usually take along: a sense of anticipation. I was looking forward to seeing all those other adults whom I see less now than I used to. Tempis fugit, in this situation as in all others. I don’t know how many more years this particular party will happen for, or who will attend in future years. This time, I’m looking forward to all those familiar faces. We grow older as the boys grow up, and it’s good to be spending time together once again.

Breakfast on the house

One of them sings loudly. One doesn’t like to talk at all. One wants only water. One deliberately initiates a scuffle even though there’s plenty for everyone.

It’s a typical winter weekday morning: one on which between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., I’ll feed four different meals to three different species in three different locations. In all, it’s 15 mouths to feed; or, put another way, 56 legs all making their way over to see what I’ve got to offer them for their morning repast.

Not all at once, of course. My 13-year-old eats first, fresh out of the shower and cheerful even though first light has yet to dawn. He takes one look at the thermometer, which hovers around the 10-degree mark, and begins to sing loudly: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a song he learned from watching the movie “Elf” twenty or thirty times last summer, when it was most definitely not cold outside. Today it is, though, and as I listen to him do his best cabaret act while buttering an English muffin, I wonder where the stereotype of sullen teenagers slow to waken on a winter morning comes from. I may be wishing he’d go back to bed, but he’s clearly ready to face the day.

As he assembles his backpack for school, I make a quick stop in the laundry room to toss a scoop of kibble into the dog’s empty dish. I notice her water bowl is empty too and would prefer not to think how long that has been the case for; it continues to be a mystery of domestic life that in four years, I have never once known anyone in my family except for me to fill the dog’s water bowl, and yet at least twice a year I go out of town for two days or more, leaving the rest of the family behind, and when I return the dog is always still alive. Somehow it gets done by someone else if I’m not around, but most definitely not when I am. Another truism of motherhood.

After feeding the dog, I head upstairs to wake my very drowsy 9-year-old, who does not like to be roused one bit. The only thing that cheers her up in the morning is a somewhat maddening game of her own invention in which she answers my question about what she’d like for breakfast by forming letters with her fingers and expecting me to guess what breakfast food the initials represent. On a good day she flashes me an easy one: “O” for oatmeal; “B” for bagel. Other days it’s not so easy, and I waste six or seven minutes trying to figure out that “L” stands for “lightly buttered toast” or “M” represents “medium-sized bowl of Special K.” She always seems disappointed when she has to provide verbal clues for me; I’m just glad to be one step closer to getting everyone fed and out the door.

A cacophony of mooing greets me an hour later as I drive down the lane to the barnyard, where 12 cows divided into three groups based on weaning, breeding, and general compatibility are waiting to be fed. The adult cows point their faces skyward and let loose with their loudest moos; the calves stand in front of the gate and then skittishly leap to the side as I reach out to pat them.

The cows eat in their usual inexplicable pattern: although I throw five hay bales down from the hay loft for one sub-herd of seven animals, all seven of them cluster around the same single bale, shouldering each other out of the way while four other bales sit nearby, unnoticed. Two more bales go over one fence to a group of three cows; and the last group of two gets just one bale to share.

And then I’m done: everyone whose breakfast I’m responsible for has eaten. I still need to go running and then write some articles, but it all seems easy and relaxed after everyone has been fed. The kids are off at school; the dog is waiting to go running with me; the cows are chewing away, as they’ll do for the next several hours before they make their way through all the bales.

I’ve often said the reason I like feeding the cows is that it’s so easy and yet so satisfying. It requires so little judgment or analysis, just strength. And yet the results are so tangible: I’m faced with a herd of content, well-fed animals whose noisy clamor has ended. I suppose that's true of the other creatures as well. The rest of my day might be more challenging: writing compelling text, offering intelligent conversation, solving various problems. True, it sometimes seems like feeding hungry beings is my primary role in life, but at the same time, feeding is easy. And for now, feeding is done.

Blanket praise

Last month, according to the Boston Globe, USA Today and numerous other news sources, the Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, inducted three new items: Hot Wheels, the dollhouse and the blanket.

According to the article I read, “Curators said the blanket was a special addition in the spirit of two earlier inductees, the cardboard box and the stick. They praised its ability to serve either as recreational raw material or an accessory transformed in myriad ways by a child’s daydreams.

‘Blankets have been keeping people warm for centuries, but they have also been heating up kids’ imaginations,’’ serving as superhero capes and tents, said Christopher Bensch, the Rochester museum’s chief curator.”

If it were up to my 9-year-old daughter, blankets wouldn’t just be in the Toy Hall of Fame; they’d be in the Hall of Fame of Life, if there is one. Yes, she uses it as recreational raw material and for the traditional purpose of staying warm. She also uses it as clothing, napkin, apron, shroud, umbrella, puppet, carpet, slide and imaginary friend. Sometimes she even spreads it over puddles before she walks across, as if she’s a gallant knight offering the height of chivalry to herself.

Each of my children has one comfort object from which they have been inseparable since toddlerhood, but the two objects are very different. Tim’s is a pale green stuffed frog named Ba; Holly’s is a faded fleece baby blanket that once had a print of light brown puppies with red bows, though the pattern is all but indistinguishable now. At the ages of 9 and 13, the kids still need their objects close at hand; when we leave on overnights of any length, the first question I ask once they’re in the car is “Do you have Ba and Blankie?”

As Tim has pointed out, though, I don’t hide my biases well. He occasionally quotes me on a regrettable outburst in which I said “Ba is a member of the family; Blankie is just a blanket.” The kids were shocked that I could compare the two and announce which I preferred, almost as if I had just baldly announced which of them I liked better. But I maintain there’s no contest. To my mind, Ba just has a lot more character. He’s a creature, not a blanket. He has a name that isn’t the same as the name given every other copy of his kind. You can love a frog, whether it is alive or inanimate. But a blanket? Ba has eyes, a mouth, an expression. (These days, he doesn’t have much else; he’s so ragged after 13 years of affection that his limbs and torso have shredded into strings. But he still has a face.) Blankie has just….a lot of square inches of dirty gray fleece.

But Holly loves Blankie, and for that reason alone, I do too. She drapes Blankie over her face while she sleeps at night; when I go to wake her in the morning, I like peeling Blankie back slowly as if I’m opening a present, with Holly’s sleepy face under the wrapping. She totes Blankie down to breakfast with her and holds onto it (“Him!”, she insists on correcting me. Him? No comment.) until it’s time to leave for the bus; then she drapes Blankie as close to the door as she can in anticipation of a reunion in the afternoon.

A few days ago, I saw Blankie lying on the staircase in the middle of the school day as I was throwing a load of laundry into the washer, so I scooped it up and tossed it in along with the other dirty items. By the time Holly got home, Blankie was already in the dryer, but she was horrified by my temerity nonetheless. “You have to ask me!” she chastised. “What if I had needed him sooner?’

It didn’t help for me to protest that she was at school. To her, there’s always that chance that some kind of emergency will necessitate immediate contact with Blankie.

So I suppose the Toy Hall of Fame designation serves as something of a gentle rebuke to me. Blankie is more than just a scrap of material. Holly has insisted that for years, and now toy curators are backing her up, calling it recreation, comfort, an accessory to imaginary play and an agent of warmth. I should really try to appreciate Blankie a little bit more. And for the moment, freshly washed, fluffy and smelling of clean laundry, Blankie has my affection. Blankie, you’re no frog. You’ll never have a stitched-on smile or shiny glass eyes. But to Holly, you’re perfect, and that’s good enough for me.

Fill in the blanks

The first few questions on the fourth grade parent questionnaire were easy enough to fill out, and those were the only ones we were required to answer. Parents’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, preferred method of contact.
The questions on the reverse side were optional, Holly’s teacher emphasized, but would help her in getting to know each child better. I studied the questions.

“My child is particularly interested in ______.”

I thought about all the ways I could answer that. The TV show “I-Carly.” Finding new and unusual ways to irritate her brother. Who wants to sit with whom on the school bus.

“Learning about other cultures,” I wrote down. Sure. Such as the culture inhabited by the teens on the show “Suite Life on Deck with Zach and Cody,” or, as I like to think of it, “The Love Boat, Junior.”

“My child is great at _________.”

That’s not the kind of statement I ever make. Holly is good at plenty of things, the kinds of things you would expect a nine-year-old to be good at: art projects, making up stories, building sand castles. But I’m just not the type of parent to refer to my child as great at something.

Even though it’s only the third day of school, I already know Holly’s teacher fairly well, because she was Holly’s second-grade teacher two years ago and we run into each other frequently on campus. I know that not only is she an excellent teacher but she’s also an unfailingly well-meaning person tremendously dedicated to her students, and therefore I know her only intention in asking these questions was to get to know her students better. But I couldn’t help feeling irrationally like the questions were a test, to see what kind of parent I was. The boastful kind? The stage-mother kind? A parent quick to promote her child’s talents, or one genuinely concerned about meeting the curricular benchmarks for the mathematics program?

But the hardest question was yet to come: “List the three words that best describe your child.”

I didn’t second-guess myself until after I’d written them down. “Creative. Cheerful. Self-absorbed.”

Wait a minute, my conscience spoke up. Self-absorbed? You’re not supposed to say that about your own kid! It’s so critical! So negative! You’re supposed to have nothing but positive comments, remember? Otherwise along with “My child is great at _________” there would be a question that said “My child is seriously deficient at ________,” and you didn’t see that one, did you?

I looked again at where I’d written “self-absorbed.” I didn’t mean it in a critical way, just an honest one. Holly spends a lot of time thinking about Holly, that’s all. But what nine-year-old doesn’t? Were there actually parents in the class filling in that line with “altruistic”? Wasn’t self-absorption in a girl Holly’s age to some extent just a manifestation of positive self-esteem? She’s a young girl. She’ll spend plenty of time in her life thinking about other people: friends, romantic partners, bosses, clients, spouses, children of her own. Is it so bad that at the age of nine, her primary focus is herself – possibly for the last time?

I believed in my own argument, but I didn’t want to start off the year on the wrong foot, with her teacher thinking I was overly critical. I deleted “self-absorbed” and changed it to “self-confident.” It’s not quite the same, and frankly it’s not quite as close to what I was trying to say.

But that’s all right. It’s the third day of school; Ms. McCabe has the next nine months to get to know the kids and evaluate the parents’ assessments of their own children. Her primary interest is in the make-up of her classroom, not the way parents fill in blanks. I’ll let it go for now. Ms. McCabe has her own challenge ahead, similar to this one but tougher: coming up with adjectives for Holly and every other kid in the class when report card time comes around.

This will be the year

Like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I’m perpetually telling myself: Maybe this will be the year.

Only for me, that sentiment reverberates through the air not on Opening Day at Fenway Park but on the eve of the first day of school.

This will be it, I tell myself. I’ve had seven years of training in How to Make the School Year Run Perfectly. This will be the year it all comes together.

This will be the year that everyone gets up on time and leaves the house punctually. In fact, so smoothly will our morning routine run that dishes will be washed and crumbs wiped up by the time the door closes behind us. No returning after my morning run to a kitchen-ful of breakfast clean-up: this year I’ll figure out how to get it all done at the same time the kids are preparing to catch the bus.

This will be the year the kids remember to sort their backpacks not just once a semester or even once a week but every day. They’ll come home and remove paperwork, lunch detritus, unwanted snacks, notes from friends, and (in Holly’s case) pet rocks, leaves, twigs and flowers accrued throughout the day.

This will be the year we all remember to get to bed on time every night.

This will be the year I make good on my resolution not to pester anyone about homework. Tim has already proved to us that he can be trusted to keep up with his work: we stopped reminding him last year, and his quarterly report cards made it clear he was holding up his end of the bargain. Now it’s time to make the same pact with Holly. She’ll do her work or she’ll learn the embarrassment of going into class empty-handed. I’ll save myself the daily lecture. We’ll all benefit.

Except that there’s always the nagging worry for me that she won’t get her homework done. After all, she hasn’t yet finished her birthday thankyou notes – four weeks after her birthday. Maybe I’ll pester just a little.

This will be the year I make the absolute most of my work time, too. As soon as I get back from my morning run, I’ll start writing, and I won’t stop until it’s time to meet the elementary bus. That’s more than six hours of focused, uninterrupted work. I should have a remarkably productive fall.

Well, uninterrupted: that’s the catch. That means no scheduling meetings or appointments or coffee dates or errands during work hours. But it’s fine. This is the year I realize that I’ll just have to find other times to get all of those peripheral responsibilities tended to: work time is for work, and I’m going to break the habit of letting it get adulterated with other duties.

But having said that, this will also be the year I find more time to walk in the woods. The trails of the state park beckon from just beyond the edge of our yard, and in the six months we’ve lived here, I have yet to learn more of the trails system than the one that leads to the ice cream stand at park headquarters. Well, that’s the only route that interests the kids; fair enough. But with them back at school, the dog and I are resolved to start exploring more of the trails. True, I just said I was going to work an uninterrupted six-hour work day Monday through Friday. But a half-hour walk in the woods now and then surely will only serve to fuel my creativity.

And in the interest of fueling that creativity, this will be the year I redouble my efforts to read more Thoreau. At the beginning of the summer, I bought a beautiful new volume called “The Quotable Thoreau,” clearly meant for people like me who need the Cliff Notes version of the great naturalist’s work. So far, I’ve dusted the book several times, but have yet to actually read it. With the kids back at school, this will be the year.

I know we’ll succeed in all of these resolutions because we’ll be so well-nourished. You see, this will also be the year I succeed in putting a three- or four-course meal on the table at the same time every evening, featuring a well-balanced menu of proteins, vegetables and starches, with just the right amount of leftovers (and continuing appeal) to pack up for the next day’s lunches.

This will be the year. Just like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I can hope, despite all evidence to the contrary. It could happen. And either way, I’ll keep trying.

Independence day

Growing up in Carlisle doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for children to practice independence. With its narrow winding roads, distantly spaced houses, and lack of sidewalks outside the town center, the fact that few kids walk to friends’ houses or school isn’t a matter of laziness: it’s logistics. The single standard rite of passage for a middle schooler here is to be allowed to go to Ferns Country Store and the library after school with friends – exactly as it was when I was a middle schooler in Carlisle 30 years ago.

So a mother like me, determined to renounce the notion of helicopter parenting, has to seek out ways to let children stretch. An afternoon meeting near Concord Center earlier this week gave me an idea. “How about if I drop you two off on Main Street?” I suggested to Tim and Holly. “You can get an ice cream cone at Helen’s and then walk to the library. I’ll find you there when my meeting is over.”

Concord Center is full of shoppers, tourists and community members who were sure to intervene should anyone try to snatch the kids off the sidewalk. Moreover, Tim and I were both carrying cell phones: it would be virtually impossible for us to fail to connect, even if the plan didn’t go exactly as anticipated.

As we drove to Concord, I reviewed the itinerary with them. “I’ll drop you off by the monument. We’ll be on the opposite side of the street from Helen’s, but just go to the crosswalk and be sure cars stop before you cross. Then to get to the library, you just walk down Main Street. When you get to the fork, the library will be on your right. You’re not supposed to answer phone calls in the library, so I’ll text-message you to find out exactly where you are. But just in case all else fails and for some reason we can’t reach each other, expect to find me at the library around three.”

I made myself stop. Part of this exercise needs to be seeing if they can figure it all out themselves, I told myself. You already know they can follow instructions. Take this opportunity to find out how capable they are when you’re not hovering.

My appointment ended at 2:50. I sent Tim a text: “On my way to the library.”

I parked outside the library at 2:55. I sent Tim another text: “Where are you?”

No response to either text. For the first time, I felt a twinge of apprehension. Suppose I couldn’t find them?

But how would I not be able to find them? From the library lawn, I could practically see the whole distance down Main Street to where I dropped them off, all two blocks of it. Where could they be other than in the library or somewhere along those two blocks?

Except that I couldn’t find them in the library. Not in the children’s room, not in the reading area, not in the reference room, not amidst the DVD stacks.
I went back outside and tried calling Tim’s number despite my instructions to him not to let his phone ring in the library. It went to voicemail.

Was it actually possible for two almost-teenage children to disappear on the streets of Concord Center? I couldn’t imagine how. With two of them together, even if something awful had happened to one – being hit by a car, a seizure, an attack of amnesia – surely the other could manage to get help.

I dialed Tim again. This time it rang. And he answered.

“Hi Mom. We’re at the bookstore,” he said nonchalantly before I could say a word.

The bookstore is halfway between Helen’s and the library. I arrived in less than a minute, and just as reported, both of my children were sitting together in the children’s section, poring over the newest picture book by Mo Willems. “Mommy, this book is so silly!” Holly exclaimed as soon as she saw me.

“Hi you guys,” I said as calmly as I could. “How’d you end up here?”

They explained: they’d bought ice cream cones, walked to the library, sat out on the library lawn for a while, then on a whim decided to double back to the bookstore. Tim wasn’t sure why he hadn’t heard the text message beeps or my earlier phone call; just too engrossed in books, he guessed.

Partly it was just the relief of finding them, but even after that passed, I realized I didn’t really mind the way it had turned out. Sure, they should have followed my instructions, but it was no big deal. After all, they were in a bookstore in Concord, the heart of literary America. They weren’t so much disobeying instructions as following a historical imperative.

My goal was to give the kids a small sense of independence. Not only had they had a taste of independence; they’d taken the ball and run with it, improvising their own plan along the way.

It’s not exactly Outward Bound. But for two kids from the suburbs who don’t get a lot of opportunities to chart their own course, it’s a start.

What I brought home from my vacation

I did not expect my vacation to be quite so…well, vacation-y.

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that once you become a parent, “vacation” has a different meaning. Pre-children, “vacation” meant “go away from home and have fun.” Once you have children, in the early years “vacation” comes to mean “go away from home and do all the same things you do at home only with the additional challenge of being in unfamiliar surroundings.” It’s this reality that inspires a friend of my sister to call a vacation with children a “fake-ation.”

And that reality lasts for a while. Traveling with babies, diapers, baby food (whether jarred or homemade), feedings (whether breast or bottle), nap schedules, exposure to all-new germs… I actually have a friend who commented when her children were still under the age of 5, “Vacation? Why would I want to do that?”

But it changes. Vacations become easy again. Kids grow old enough to adjust to new routines and different surroundings. They even appreciate the novelty of seeing and doing new things.

And even though my family reached that point a while ago – as long as Holly remembers her blankie and Tim packs his stuffed elephant and his stuffed frog, it’s all good – I still wasn’t prepared to have quite so much fun on last week’s vacation as I did.

I had sneaky hopes, of course. I hoped I’d get to do more reading than I’ve managed to fit in most of this summer. Take a break from several ongoing work projects. Avoid the three-meals-a-day menu planning that seems to be required of me this summer. Fit in some long walks or maybe even bike rides.

All of those seemed to me like factors of a good vacation. But what ended up defining my vacation surprised me. I woke each morning with a sense that I had nothing immediate to worry about. The day ahead was free.

Sure, we had tentative plans as we traveled through western New York and Pennsylvania: ideas for recreation, sightseeing, time with friends. But still, no worries and no stress. No deadlines, no meetings, no household tasks, no appointments, no errands. I woke each morning feeling as if the whole day was wide-open for pleasure and adventure, and it was the most vacation-y feeling I’ve ever known while on a vacation.

And once I put my finger on that single factor – the lack of anxiety at the beginning of each day – as the defining characteristic of my vacation mood, I started thinking about ways to bring it home.

I can’t get away from all my work or social obligations or household tasks at home, nor would I want to. I like having work assignments to complete and a household to run. I like being part of a community and having friends. I don’t want to get away from all of it.

But I want to learn to prioritize better and not fill up my schedule so cavalierly with so many items I end up regretting having agreed to do.

I don’t have an exact answer to how to sustain the vacation mood while I’m home, but I think it might have to do with being more discerning, even a little more selfish. More discretionary about how I spend my time.

It was a vacation from my blog, as well, and the relief that came from escaping from that five-days-a-week commitment made me rethink that area of my life as well.

My blog is two years old this week: I wrote the first entry on August 28, 2009, and with almost no exceptions, I’ve posted every Monday through Friday ever since, with usually two weeks off each year, one for the Christmas holidays and one for summer travel.

It’s too much. My blog has become yet another onerous commitment, and being away from it made me realize I needed to back off. I put too much pressure on myself to come up with something mildly interesting to say in a public forum every day.

Cutting back to three entries a week (and, if at all possible, shorter ones) is an easy to change to make. Ultimately, no one but me really cares how often I blog (or whether I blog at all).

The other changes the vacation inspired me to contemplate won’t be as easy to make. Less volunteer work? A more relaxed attitude toward housework? A more discriminating approach to accepting writing assignments? Those possibilities all have their downsides. But the change to my blog is a start, and maybe in using this change as a symbolic way to extend the vacation mood, I’ll learn to work some of the others in as well.

The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.

The sounds of silence

The woman behind me barely paused to take a breath. “Look down on the field! What do you think they’re doing? They’re rolling out a tarp! They’re covering the infield with that big piece of plastic. Look over there – that’s the pitcher warming up! See how he throws to the catcher? That’s so they’re both ready when it’s time to start the game. Look at the groundskeepers – they’re trying to seep up the puddles behind home plate! They need to make the field dry enough so that it will be safe for the players to run on.”

The toddler on her lap answered every third or fourth question. Other times he chattered back. And other times he didn’t respond at all.

His mother’s nonstop repartee reminded me of the phrase Judith Warner uses in “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety”: human television sets. Parents like me – and like Warner herself, and like the woman sitting behind me at the minor league baseball game on the Fourth of July – have so effectively internalized the idea that TV and videos for children are to be avoided at all costs that we sometimes instead turn ourselves into a replacement: providing the same nonstop chatter and entertainment that in our generation kids were allowed to absorb in small doses electronically. And as Warner points out, though avoiding kids’ TV is still a worthwhile plan, offering up ourselves as an entertainment alternative doesn’t necessarily provide a great service to our kids.

Just let him absorb the ambience, I wanted to tell the woman behind me, whose bubbly script continued even as the officials on the field conferred about whether to call a rain cancellation. She pointed out to her child the cloud formations, the crowds in the stands, the popcorn vendor, the umpires. She explained everything. Ceaselessly. Just let him take it in, I wished I could say. He doesn’t need this whole experience interpreted for him. Let him explore it with his eyes and ears and nose – and reconstitute it in his own words instead of yours.

When Tim was eight months old, I received a baby jogger for Mothers’ Day. From that point on, I went for a run and pushed him in the stroller almost every day. At first, he was too young to talk, but he didn’t give up the jog stroller until he was a little over three years old, and our practice didn’t change much during that time: I listened to NPR broadcasts through my radio headphones, while Tim drank in the passing scene. Once in a while, as he developed words, he would ask a question – “Who’s that? Why that pumpkin there? Those raindrops?” but usually, we both spend the 45 minutes in silence together.

And I came to believe it was a profoundly formative experience for him. This is what silence is like, I believed I was showing him. This is the silence when you are doing something outdoors and taking in the scenery. It’s different from the silence when you are supposed to be falling asleep or the silence before a concert or play begins. It’s the silence when just observing is a higher priority than discussing.It turned out that the officials at the ballpark did decide to call a rain cancellation, after we’d been sitting in our seats for nearly an hour. I never had a chance to find out whether the mom behind me really would have chattered to her child for the entire game or whether eventually a companionable silence might have settled. And of course, I don’t know that my way is the right way. Maybe my children, accustomed to occasionally just observing scenes in silence, whether on a run or at the ballfield, will in the end turn out to be less intelligent than this woman’s child, as he experiences life through a continuous narration loop.

But my children are now 8 and 12, and both are good at sitting quietly, whether they are reading or looking out the window on a car ride or taking a walk through the woods. And I value that in them. The fact that I’m able to share silence with my children is something I treasure. And maybe the woman at the ballpark will learn that she, too, can pause for air and just let the silence envelop her and her child.

Tim playing baseball

It’s what you might call an open secret that I don’t show up at too many of Tim’s baseball games. Even before Holly wrote an acrostic for Mothers’ Day and used the phrase “Not good at committing to watch Tim’s baseball games” for the very first letter in my name, I was a no-show more often than not.

It just doesn’t seem essential to me to appear at every game. Since Rick is Tim’s coach, Tim is always assured of one parent at the game. And I’ve never really bought into the cliché of “never missed a baseball game” (or soccer match or dance recital or skating competition) as the hallmark of an attentive parent. I go to some of the games, and I ask Tim to tell me about the ones I miss. He doesn’t read every article I write; I trust him to understand that I care and am interested in what he’s doing even if I don’t stand on the sidelines at every game.

But last Saturday I did get to the game, and it was the All-Star match-up, and it reminded me of what a joy it can be for a parent to watch a child do something for which the child has slowly and painstakingly acquired skills and honed talent. On the baseball diamond, Tim is strong, effective, sure-footed and confident; moreover, he’s happy and has fun. He was on the All-Star team but he’s not a star; he’s a good player among many good players, and that’s how he sees himself as well.

At the age of 12, the boys are no longer playing a kiddie version of the game. They pitch hard, run fast, swing the bat with considerable might and connect bat with ball a reasonable percentage of the time. Off the field, we parents reassure the parents of the younger kids still playing t-ball or in their first year of player-pitching rather than coach-pitching that the games really will get more bearable and move faster eventually. We try not to boast that our kids are at the point where it’s like watching, well, a real baseball game.

Seeing how graceful Tim is on the field reminds me all over again of that strange progression of parenthood, how when your child is young you have control over almost everything related to him: what he eats, what books he reads, who he meets, where he goes, even to some extent what images cross his field of vision. As a result, for a time he knows and experiences nothing beyond what you know and experience. And that gradually your scope of control lessens: he goes to school, meets people you don’t know, hears stories you’ve never read, learns about the Ice Age and the Iditarod and topics you’ve never thought about much at all.

And accordingly, he then develops abilities you didn’t instill. As an athlete, Tim surpassed me before he turned seven. Now, on the baseball field, he can execute moves I don’t even know exist. He’s in his own universe out there, one that hardly overlaps with mine at all. But getting myself to a game is one way to be part of this new universe, and although I don’t feel guilty about the games I miss, I’m full of delight when I do get there to watch him.

On Saturday, Tim’s team lost, and he didn’t have any spectacular at-bats or score any points for his team. But at one moment in the sixth inning, he was in the outfield when a member of the opposing team clouted the ball; it was the best hit of the game. Tim sprang after it and fielded the ball. The batter got to third base, which he certainly deserved after such a show-stopping hit, but Tim threw to the infield in time to prevent him from getting farther. Behind me, a parent I didn’t recognize who was rooting for the other team muttered with audible disappointment, “If anyone other than Tim West had been in the outfield on that play, it would have been a home run.”

This wasn’t a headline moment for Tim, but in a way, that underhanded and unintended praise for him gave the whole experience resonance for me. Tim’s team lost, but he played the strong solid game for which he apparently already has a reputation. And I was happy to be there for it.

Compromise

The outlook was grim for accomplishing what I needed to before the day ended. This wasn’t a hypothetical “What I really should try to do before the work day ends” kind of notion; it was a “the Registry of Motor Vehicles says it’s the law” kind of notion. Specifically, I had 84 minutes to get my car to a service station before I was officially overdue on my May inspection sticker.

And yes, perhaps it was my fault for not getting it done earlier in the day. Or even earlier in the month. (Does May really have 31 days? And only one of them a federal holiday? And yet I really couldn’t find a single one of those 31 days – minus five Sundays and Memorial Day – for getting my car inspected?) Well, for whatever reason, it was late afternoon on May 31st. And I hadn’t gone earlier in the day because I’m just too miserly about my work hours, especially with only four weeks left to go before the kids are home full-time for summer vacation. I have a manuscript to edit and another one to finish drafting. I have my two regularly weekly newspaper deadlines to file. I have….a whole bunch of other things.

So I thought I could do it after the kids got home from school. After all, why sacrifice my carefully guarded work time when I could instead sacrifice, well, the kids’ carefully guarded afterschool free time?

Because that’s ultimately what it came down to: Holly and me butting heads over whose time mattered more. She was cross when I announced that after she had a snack and washed up, she had to come to the inspection station with me. Just as cross as I might have been if someone had insisted that I go along with them on a tedious errand during my work time. She despises afterschool errands.

Over the weekend, I had an eye-opening moment when Holly insisted that despite my demurrals, she was absolutely certain she could drink a blueberry smoothie in the playroom without spilling it on the couch. You can probably guess what happened to that promise. She spilled no less than half of it, and Rick gave me the usual “What on earth were you thinking?” lecture as we both tried to scrub blueberry stains out of the beige couch.

“You’re right,” I had to admit. “What was I thinking? It’s just so hard to hold my ground sometimes. I just get so weary.” But obviously, I lost my perspective when it came to the blueberry smoothie. Of course I should have absolutely refused to let her drink it in the playroom. And I should absolutely insist that she come with me for the car inspection. But I was finding it very hard to get myself to drag her out of the house, which seemed to be the only way this was going to happen.

Standing our ground as parents can be difficult. At least it is for me. Sometimes Holly wears me down.

But as I contemplated my choices in terms of overruling her resistance to a trip to get the car inspected, I recalled something that has helped me out before: the acknowledgment that in between iron rule and caving in lies another option: letting the child save face. If I stopped fretting for a moment over the fact that we weren’t going to get there in time and let past history come to mind, I could remember something useful. I didn’t need to force her to come with me; I needed to give her enough room to change her mind without feeling like she’d been forced into anything.

So I let Holly stomp up to her room and slam the door. And I waited. I finished some deskwork and prepped a few dinner items. After ten minutes, I went up to her room. She was sitting on her bed working on a coloring project. “Mommy,” she said in a pleasant tone, “if I go with you, will you buy me some stickers?”

I smiled to myself at the reversal in her obstinate demeanor. “I’m not going to pay you for doing an errand with me, Holly, but I would say you could probably have a snack at the service station while we wait.”

“And listen to your iPod?” she asked.

That was an easy one involving neither money nor empty calories. “Absolutely.”

Out we headed. She was happy and I was happy. No one had caved in; we both felt that we’d reached an agreement. We arrived at the service station at 4:38. “It’s a little last-minute, I know…” I said apologetically as we drove into the inspection bay.

“Nah, you won’t even be our last customer today,” the technician assured me.

Holly and I headed into the waiting room. She chose a bottle of lemonade and settled peaceably into a plastic seat to listen to her favorite Taylor Swift album. And I mulled over what I’d learned, hoping to put it to better use next time. Blueberry smoothies on the couch? Absolutely not (although, amazingly enough, it looks as good as new following a lot of scrubbing and a white-vinegar treatment). A compromise when it comes to doing errands after school? It’s always possible.

The Little Engine Whose Mom Hoped It Could

Over the past week or two, Holly’s interest in biking has caught fire. Early in the season, she cast aside her beginner’s two-wheeler in favor of Tim’s larger, outgrown bike, delighted by the extra power its greater size and number of gears gave her. Since then we’ve taken about a half-dozen rides a mile or so up and down the road.

Yesterday afternoon she asked again to go for a bike ride. Holly was in the mood to try something a little more ambitious than our usual aimless jaunts, and I wanted to see what she could do, so I suggested we ride into the town center. It’s a little less than three miles, and not a difficult route, though the last mile is along a fairly busy road. But it wasn’t yet rush hour.

The ride into town went well. Holly pedaled steadily and cheerfully. At the general store in town, I bought her a cookie, and we sat out on the store’s porch while she ate it.

The ride home was more difficult for her, though. I think she just burned out. She whined and fussed and eventually cried about how hard it was. She stopped often to rest.

I knew I had myriad options for how to handle it. I could be a cheerleader, trying to boost her spirits by emphasizing how well she’d done on the ride already and how I was absolutely certain she could do the rest. (I wasn’t.) I could cajole, urging her to give it her best shot. Or I could do the opposite: point out she had agreed to the ride, she had already made it one way, and she needed to be a good sport and push herself a little to make it home.

If one of these was the right answer, I certainly didn’t know which one. So I didn’t do any of them. I just rode behind her, listened to her complaints, told her in as objective way as possible – neither cheering nor cajoling nor scolding – that I was fairly sure she could finish the ride, and waited it out.

The last third of the route is the easiest part. Once we reached that section of road, she stopped whining and wiping away tears; she coasted along and seemed to cheer up. When we arrived home, I knew once again that there were all sorts of approaches I could take – making a big fuss over the accomplishment; pointing out that she’d overcome the challenges and triumphed; trying to make an object lesson out of the fact that we’d completed the ride we set out to do.

But again, I opted for none of the above. Just as earlier in the ride I’d figured whatever strength Holly needed to finish the ride had to come from within her and not from me cheering, cajoling or scolding, once it was over I believed her sense of pride and accomplishment also needed to come from herself and not from me. So I told her I was glad we’d gone for the ride, but we didn’t discuss it much further than that. We went inside and started getting ready for dinner.

This was just one of the many times that I knew I had a lot of options but I simply had no idea which one was best. All of those approaches are tacks I’ve taken at some point in my parenting history, and I know each one sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

But it seemed to me no matter what that I couldn’t go wrong by stepping back and letting Holly’s own inner voice guide her: first in telling her she could probably complete the ride, and then in making her feel a sense of pride in having done it. The Little Engine That Could didn't have a mother engine urging her along either; the strength came from within.

Holly had cheered up to her usual self by the time we sat down to dinner. She was tired by bedtime, but not unhappy. There are so many approaches to parenting challenges. It’s hard sometimes to remember that sometimes the best approach is no approach at all. I don’t actually know where Holly found the motivation to finish the ride, or how she felt once she had. We just went along with our day and didn’t have much discussion about it. But however she did it, my guess is she’ll be able to draw on the same method again. And that surely beats any amount of praising or cajoling I could possibly muster.

Nothing wrong with a little parental diversity

An article in yesterday’s Boston Globe about differing parenting styles and the arguments that sometimes result between mothers and fathers made me smile – and made me realize how long I’ve now been a parent. In the early months and years, these issues seem so important; as kids grow older, at least in my household, I dwell so much less on the differences in parenting styles between my spouse and me.

But that realization inspired me to wonder just why this is. Is it that over the twelve and a half years since our firstborn arrived, my husband and I have become more similar in parenting techniques? Is it because I’m used to our differences now and don’t notice them as much? Or is it that a decade-plus of parenting has taught me an inevitable and also invaluable lesson that the parents interviewed in this story don’t necessarily seem to have incorporated just yet: it doesn’t really matter all that much if Dad orders takeout pizza and forgets to serve fresh vegetables with it a couple of times a month, while Mom insists on three food groups per meal?

To the contrary, I would argue that when parents differ in their approaches, kids gain their very first insights into diversity and begin to perceive that not everyone is the same and not every adult looks at things the same way.

Had anyone told me during my first pregnancy that my son as a pre-teen would follow in his father's footsteps with an abiding interest in fantasy novels about knights and dragons, playing baseball, and competing with his friends in online video games, I would have blanched. Imagining early in my daughter’s infancy that by the age of eight she would know the difference between a Quarter Pounder and a Junior Whopper, thanks to Dad’s occasional drivethrough forays, would have been equally horrifying to me. And what’s more, he introduced them to American Idol and Survivor!

On the other hand, there are some aspects of his approach to parenting that I could only dream of emulating. When Dad says “Time for bed,” they go to bed; they don’t pull out five or six books that they expect him to read aloud the way they do when I’m in charge of bedtime. And even if he neglects to serve salad when he’s in charge of dinner, when he tells them to take their vitamins, they take their vitamins; when I give the same order, they begin vocally tallying how many days in a row they’ve gone without skipping a vitamin so could this day please be the exception to the rule.

But it’s not only about who has the more authoritarian voice. They also know that if I take them to the pool, they can play and swim all they want while I sit on the deck and read, whereas if it’s my husband in charge of the expedition, he’ll be in the water throwing them around and initiating diving contests.

My kids are eight and twelve now, and they’ve had plenty of opportunities – though certainly not as many as I might ultimately wish for them – to note the ways in which people think differently, operate differently, react differently. My guess is that for plenty of children, the differences between their parents are their first inkling as to how this works. Yes, being one hundred percent unified on every aspect of parenting may be a typical goal of expectant parents. But I imagine most learn quickly, as we did, how unrealistic that is. And in time, perhaps they too come to see that their kids end up all the better for it.

All joy and no fun? Only for a little while

Jennifer Senior’s New York Magazine article has been ubiquitous this month, appearing in some form or other (link, reference, interview with the author) on talk shows, parenting blogs and news websites. Its title, “Why Parents Hate Parenting: All Joy and No Fun,” is fairly self-explanatory, as Senior explores why a wealth of data supports the idea that raising children is not generally a significant source of happiness for people, despite the biological and societal mandate that the majority of us choose to follow so that the species endures.

On the one hand, it raises points that are indisputable: child-rearing is exhausting work given today’s standards. Senior cites the term “concerted cultivation” to describe “the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children,” and includes this quote from sociologist Annette Lareau: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution.” I believe it was Judith Warner in her parenting book Perfect Madness who pointed out that many of us parents, in our ceaseless commitment to keeping our young children away from TV and other forms of canned entertainment, sometimes turn ourselves into human television sets, with our steady stream of word games, stories, Q&A, and frenetic verbal engagement.

So I definitely agree that parenting takes a lot of effort, and in general the voluntarily childless people I know appear just as happy and fulfilled, and a lot less frazzled, than the parents. However, there seems to be something insufficient about the data or at least the anecdotal evidence used in the New York Magazine piece: it all appears to refer to parents of very young children. The oldest child cited in an anecdote in the story is eight.

Well, as someone whose oldest is now almost twelve, I can say with confidence that things tend to get a lot better and a lot easier right around that time. Basing information about people’s level of happiness with parenting only on parents with children from infancy through the earliest grade school years seems to me – to choose a wildly random simile – like evaluating a vacation destination based on the van shuttle ride from the airport to the hotel. Sure, you see a little of the topography, and maybe you get that instant feeling that you’re going to love this place or not, but believe me, this van ride isn’t the whole trip; it’s the necessary passage to where the fun begins.

There are of course some parents who really love babies and toddlers. My sister and two of my cousins (one a mother and one a father, from different sides of the family) fall into this category. But I think there are a lot more parents who are like I once was, loving their young children but at the same time gazing at them with sleep-deprived fondness while thinking “Someday I can imagine you being a lot more fun.”

My kids were great babies and toddlers, but oh boy did they grow to be a lot more fun. And that’s not so much about them than it is about me. Even before they were born, I suspected I’d get more enjoyment from the grade school years than the early years, and this is not just because they’re off at school during the day. I simply find the activities and interests of school-aged children a lot more engaging than those of preschoolers. I like watching my son play baseball, helping my daughter with school research projects, going on bike rides with the kids, overseeing their baking projects, hosting their sleepover dates. We all have our individual preferences; these are just much more my kind of thing than the “Music Together” sing-alongs or playground visits of their earlier years.

Moreover, it’s not clear that any of the studies cited in the article included responses from parents of adult children or their elderly childless peers. My suspicion is that the data would have reflected a significant trend of parents being happier than non-parents among the senior set. With all modestly, I feel certain that the existence of my sisters and me, along with the existence of our own children, brings unmitigated pleasure to my 70-plus-year-old parents. I imagine it’s very challenging to grow old without offspring as part of your life. My parents have plenty of interests beyond their children and grandchildren, but I feel sure that we significantly enhance their quality of life, and on a purely subjective level, I imagine it must be lonely to grow old without children around to offer care and support.

So for new (or newish) parents who read this study and think “Yes, that’s us! Joy but no fun!”, I would urge them to hang in there. It gets way more fun. It really does. If sandboxes aren’t really your thing, Little League just might be. If you find it hard to sit through the hokey-pokey at the library music hour without wishing you had a recent copy of the New Yorker to read, you might find your satisfaction level lifting when your children start writing stories and poems of their own.

And if you’re one of those lucky parents who loves the baby and toddler years and can’t imagine what the rest of us are complaining about, consider yourself lucky. Your satisfaction level probably won’t decrease at all. You were born to be a parent, and the world needs more of you.