High Tide in Tucson (9 page)

I have a child who was born with the gift of focus, inclined to excel at whatever she earnestly pursues. Soon after her second birthday she turned to the earnest pursuit of languor, and shot straight through the ranks to world-class dawdler. I thought it might be my death.

Like any working stiff of a mother keeping the family presentable and solvent, I lived in a flat-out rush. My daughter lived on Zen time. These doctrines cannot find peace under one roof. I tried everything I could think of to bring her onto my schedule: five-minute countdowns, patient explanations of our itinerary, frantic appeals, authoritarianism, the threat of taking her to preschool
exactly
however she was dressed when the clock hit seven. (She went in PJs, oh delight! Smug as Brer Rabbit in the
briars.) The more I tried to hurry us along, the more meticulously unhurried her movements became.

My brother pointed out that this is how members of the Japanese Parliament carry out a filibuster—by shuffling up to the voting box so extremely slowly it can take one person an hour to get across the room, and a month or two to get the whole vote in. It's called “cow walking,” he reported. Perfect, I said. At my house we are having a Cow Life.

And that's how it was, as I sat at breakfast one morning watching my darling idle dangerously with her breakfast. I took a spectacularly deep breath and said, in a voice I imagined was calm, “We need to be going very soon. Please be careful not to spill your orange juice.”

She looked me in the eye and coolly knocked over her glass.

Bang, my command was dead. Socks, shirt, and overalls would have to be changed, setting back the start of my workday another thirty minutes. Thirty-five, if I wanted to show her who was boss by enforcing a five-minute time-out. She knew exactly what she was doing. A filibuster.

I'd been warned the day would dawn when my sweet, tractable daughter would become a Terrible Two. And still this entirely predictable thing broadsided me, because in the beginning she was
mine
—as much a part of my body, literally, as my own arms and legs. The milk I drank knit her bones in place, and her hiccups jarred me awake at night. Children come to us as a dramatic coup of the body's fine inner will, and the process of sorting out “self” from “other” is so gradual as to be invisible to a mother's naked soul. In our hearts, we can't expect one of our own limbs to stand up one day and announce its own agenda. It's too much like a Stephen King novel.

Later in the day I called a friend to tell my breakfast war
story. She had a six-year-old, so I expected commiseration. The point of my call, really, was to hear that one could live through this and that it ended. Instead, my friend was quiet. “You know,” she said finally, “Amanda never went through that. I worry about her. She works so hard to please everybody. I'm afraid she'll never know how to please herself.”

A land mine exploded in the back of my conscience. My child was becoming all I'd ever wanted.

 

The way of a parent's love is a fool's progress, for sure. We lean and we lean on the cherished occupation of making ourselves obsolete. I applauded my child's first smile, and decoded her doubtful early noises to declare them “language.” I touched the ground in awe of her first solo steps, as if she alone among primates had devised bipedal locomotion. Each of these events in its turn—more than triumph and less than miracle—was a lightening, feather by feather, of the cargo of anxious hope that was delivered to me with my baby at the slip of our beginning.

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up,” claims Annie Dillard. That's just about the whole truth, a parent's incantation. Wake up, keep breathing, look alive. It's only by forming separateness and volition that our children relieve us of the deepest parental dread: that they might somehow
not
wake up, after all, but fail to thrive and grow, remaining like Sleeping Beauty in the locked glass case of a wordless infancy. More times than I could count, in those early days, I was stopped in the grocery by some kindly matron who exclaimed over my burbling pastel lump of baby: “Don't you wish you could keep them like that forever?” Exactly that many times, I bit the urge to shout back, “Are you out of your mind?”

From the day she emerged open-mouthed in the world, I've answered my child's cries with my own gaping wonder, scrambling to part the curtains and show the way to wakefulness. I can think or feel no more irresistible impulse. In magnificent pantomime, I demonstrate to my small shadow the thousand and one ways to be a person, endowed with opinions. How could it be a surprise that after two years the lessons started to take? The shadow began to move of its own accord, exhibiting the skill of opinion by any means necessary. Barreling pell-mell through life was not my daughter's style; a mother ought to arrange mornings to allow time for communing with the oatmeal—that was her first opinion. How could I fail to celebrate this new red-letter day? There had been a time when I'd reduced my own personal code to a button on my blue-jeans jacket that advised:
QUESTION AUTHORITY
. A few decades later, the motto of my youth blazed resplendent on my breakfast table, the color of Florida sunshine. I could mop up, now, with maternal pride, or eat crow.

Oh, how slight the difference between “independent” and “ornery.” A man who creates spectacular sculptures out of old car bodies might be a wonderful character, until he moves in next door. Children who lip off to their parents are cute in movies because they're in movies, and not in our life. Another of my brother's wise nuggets, offered over the phone one Saturday while I tried to manage family chaos and pour a cement porch foundation, was: “Remember, kids are better in the abstract than in the concrete.” Of all kid abstractions, independence may be the hardest one to accept in the concrete, because we're told how we'll feel about it long before it arrives. It's the mother of all childhood stereotypes, the Terrible Twos.

Now there are stereotypes that encircle a problem like a darn good corral, and there are stereotypes that deliver a prob
lem roaring to our doorstep, and I'm suspicious of this one, the Terrible Twos. If we'd all heard half so much about, say, the “Fat Fours,” I'd bet dollars to donuts most four-year-olds would gain lots of weight, and those who didn't would be watched for the first sign of puffiness. Children are adept at becoming what we expect them to be. “Terrible” does not seem, by any stretch, to be a wise expectation. My Spanish-speaking friends—who, incidentally, have the most reliably child-friendly households in my acquaintance—tell me there's no translation for “Terrible Twos” in their language.

The global truth, I think, is that the twos are time-consuming and tidiness-impaired, but not, intrinsically, terrible. A cow in parliament is not a terrible cow. It's just a question of how it fits in with the plan.

The plan in our culture, born under the sign of freedom with mixed-message ascendant, is anyone's guess. The two developmental stages we parents are most instructed to dread—the twos and teens—both involve a child's formation of a sovereign identity. This, a plumb horror of assertive children, in the land of assertiveness training and weekend seminars on getting what you want through creative visualization. Expert advice on the subject of children's freedom is a pawnshop of clashing platitudes: We are to cultivate carefully the fragile stem of self-esteem. We are to consider a thing called “tough love,” which combines militarist affection with house arrest, as remedy for adolescent misbehavior. We are to remember our children are only passing through us like precious arrows launched from heaven, but in most states we're criminally liable for whatever target they whack. The only subject more loaded with contradictions is the related matter of sex, which—in the world we've packaged for adolescents—is everywhere, visibly, the goal, and nowhere allowed. Let them eat
it, drink it, wear it on their jeans, but don't for heaven's sakes pass out condoms, they might be inspired to
do
it. This is our inheritance, the mixed pedigree of the Puritans and Free Enterprise. We're to dream of our children growing up to be decision makers and trend setters, and we're to dream it through our teeth, muttering that a trend-setting toddler is a pain, and a teenager's decisions are a tour down the River Styx. How, then, to see it through?

The traditional camp says to hold the reins hard until the day we finally drop them, wish our big babies Godspeed, and send them out to run the world. I say, Good luck, it sounds like we'll have men and women with the mental experience of toddlers running domestic and foreign policy. (And, in fact, it sometimes appears that we do.) This is the parenting faction that also favors spanking. Studies of corporal punishment show, reliably, that kids who are spanked are more likely to be aggressive with their peers. For all the world, you'd think they were just little people, learning what they were taught.

I hold with those who favor allowing kids some freedom to work out problems their own way, and even make some messes, before we set them on Capitol Hill. I do not hold that this is easy. The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. In every case, bondage is quicker. Boundaries, however carefully explained, can be reinterpreted creatively time and again. Yes, it's okay to pet the dog, and yes again on taking a bath, but
not
the dog
in
the tub. No to painting on the wall, no again to painting on the dog. I spent many years sounding to myself like Dr. Seuss: Not in a box! Not with a fox! Not on a train! Not in the rain!

The hardest boundaries to uphold are those that I know, in my heart, I have drawn for no higher purpose than my own con
venience. I swore when I was pregnant I would never say to my child those stupid words “Because I said so!” Lord, have mercy. No contract I've ever signed has cost me so much. “Because I said so!” is not a real reason. But how about “Because if you do that again Mommy will scream, run into the bushes, pluck out the ovaries that made you, and cast them at the wild dogs.” What price mental health? When your kid knocks over the orange juice, or ditches school, do you really have to listen to her inner wishes or can you just read the riot act?

Maybe both. Maybe there's not time for both right this minute—there never is, because life with children always bursts to fullness in the narrowest passages, like a life raft inflating in the emergency exit. If that's the case, then maybe the riot act now, and the other, listening to inner wishes, as soon as possible after you've worked free of the burning wreck.

 

During my short tenure as a parent I've relived my own childhood in a thousand ways while trying to find my path. Many of the things my parents did for me—most, I would say—are the things I want to do for my own child. Praise incessantly. Hold high expectations. Laugh, sing out loud, celebrate without cease the good luck of getting set down here on a lively earth.

But the world has changed since
Howdy Doody Time
, and some things nearly all parents did back then have been reconsidered. Spanking is one. Another, a little harder to define, has to do with structuring the family's time. My mother's job was me. But now I'm a mother with other work too, and fewer hours each day to devote to my main preoccupation of motherhood. I represent the norm for my generation, the throng of maternal employed, going about the honest work of the planet with gusto
and generally no real alternative. The popular wisdom is that families used to be more kid-centered than they are now. I'm not so sure that's true. It's just different. My mother had kids to contend with from dawn till doom. She was (is) educated, creative, and much of the time the only people around for her to talk with had snakes in their pockets. My father worked very hard, as good fathers verily did. I had the guarantee of three squares daily, the run of several hundred acres of farms and wild Kentucky hills, the right to make a pet of anything nonvenomous, and a captive audience for theatrical projects. When my mother is canonized, I will testify that she really did sit through a hundred virtually identical productions, staged by my siblings and me, of the play titled approximately “The Dutch Boy Who Saved His Town by Putting His Finger in the Hole in the Dike.” I have no idea why we did this. It seems truly obsessive. I can only offer as defense that we had a soft gray blanket with a hole in it, an irresistible prop. We took rave reviews for granted.

We also understood clearly that, during major family outings and vacations, our parents needed desperately to enjoy themselves. They bundled us into the back of the station wagon and begged us to go into hibernation for two thousand miles, so they could finish a conversation they'd started the previous autumn. I'm sure there were still plenty of times they sacrificed their vacation goals on the altar of my selfishness; I have forgotten these entirely. What I particularly remember instead is one nonstop auto trip to Key West, during which my sibs and I became bored beyond human limits. “Try counting to a million,” my father suggested. And this is the point I am getting to: we actually did.

This seems amazing to me now. I could claim to be a victim, but that would be fatuous; my childhood was blessed. In the spectrum of the completely normal fifties family, nuclear units
kept pretty much to themselves, and in the interest of everyone's survival, kids had to learn a decent show of obedience.

I'm amazed by the memory of counting to one million in a station wagon, not because I resent having done it myself, but because I can't imagine asking my daughter to do that, or, more to the point,
needing
for her to do it. When she and I head out on a car trip, we fall right into a fierce contest of White Horse Zit or license-plate alphabet. Childish enterprises, since they aren't my job, are in a sense my time off, my vacation. In spite of the well-publicized difficulties of balancing career and family, when I compare my life to my mother's I sometimes feel like Princess Grace. Each day I spend hours in luxurious silence, doing the work I most love; I have friends and colleagues who talk to me about interesting things, and never carry concealed reptiles. At the end of the day, when Camille and I are reunited after our daily cares, I'm ready for joyful mayhem.