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Hope this doesn't show up a million times, though.

Goodbye, Dr. Spock, by Anna Quindlen

If not for the photographs, I might
have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the
swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The
placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy
toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin.
ALL MY BABIES are gone now.

I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what
I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in
fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be
afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell
vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades
and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I
like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move
food from plate to mouth all by themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber duckie at its
center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except
through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry
and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown
obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are
battered, spotted, well used.

But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.

What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground
taught me, and the well-meaning relations -- what they taught me was that
they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is
presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until
finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows
anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be
managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at
3, his brother at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put
baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By
the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of
research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting
certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to
trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.

First science said environment was the great shaper of human nature. But it
certainly seemed as though those babies had distinct personalities, some
contemplative, some gregarious, some crabby. And eventually science said
that was right, and that they were hard-wired exactly as we had suspected.

Still, the temptation to defer to the experts was huge. The literate parent,
who approaches everything; cooking, decorating, life as though there were a
paper due or an exam scheduled, is in particular peril when the kids arrive.

How silly it all seems now, the obsessing about language acquisition and
physical milestones, the riding the waves of normal, gifted, hyperactive,
all those labels that reduced individuality to a series of cubbyholes. But I
could not help myself. I had watched my mother casually raise five children
born over 10 years, but by watching her I intuitively knew that I was
engaged in the greatest and potentially most catastrophic task of my life. I
knew that there were mothers who had worried with good reason, that there
were children who would have great challenges to meet. We were lucky; ours
were not among them.

Nothing horrible or astonishing happened: there was hernia surgery, some
stitches, a broken arm and a fuchsia cast to go with it. Mostly ours were
the ordinary everyday terrors and miracles of raising a child, and our
children's challenges the old familiar ones of learning to live as
themselves in the world. The trick was to get past my fears, my ego and my
inadequacies to help them do that.

I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books
on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of
infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub- quiet codicil
for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat
little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he
developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he
went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can
walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were
made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of
Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not
theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for
preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day
when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her
geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I
include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through
speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all
insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the
first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing
this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now
that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture
of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the
swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what
we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked
when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on
to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing
a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what
was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they
would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they
simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways
that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was
often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how
it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the
world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.

That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn
from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts
were.

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In a message dated 10/18/02 10:08:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time, sjogy@...
writes:

<< Goodbye, Dr. Spock, by Anna Quindlen >>

Your timing couldn't be more perfect . . . this is exactly where I am in my
life! Thanks so much for sharing!!!

Leonore