The Girls from Ames (31 page)

above: The girls’ hands on a pregnant Kelly left: Karla and Diana, both pregnant

A recollection comes into Karen’s head, and she turns to Jenny. “Remember in junior high? What was the coolest magazine?”

“
Teen Beat,
” says Jenny. “I had a subscription.”

“Yes, and I’d always go to your house to read it. Every issue. I never asked my parents for my own subscription. I knew it wasn’t necessary. Because, hey, I could just go to your house and read it there.”

The girls talk about the definition of “spoiled.”

“When I think of spoiled, I think of obnoxious and unappreciative,” says Karen. “I wouldn’t describe my kids like that. But they’re spoiled in the sense that they have no trouble just asking for whatever they want. My son wanted a Razr phone. It’s three hundred dollars. He just asked.”

Karla says that in the wake of Christie’s death, she has a heightened sense of the needs, moods and desires of her two surviving kids, Ben and Jackie. She knows how they feel inside—like a part of them is missing without Christie—and she knows it’s naïve to think she could fill that emptiness by buying them material things. Still, she admits that she has relented at times when they wanted her to buy them something. She knows life is fleeting and she wants them to be happy and feel whole.

All the girls want their children to be happy, of course. But when they think back to their own childhoods, they realize that their parents weren’t especially focused on keeping them happy and satiated. Their parents didn’t just give them things. Their parents were more apt to say: “You want something? Find a way to get it and leave me out of it.” As Karen sees it, there’s less of that philosophy in the culture of parenting today.

She reminds the girls of the time she and Karla were in a department store fashion show. As a reward, they got a discount on clothing. “I was so excited,” she says. “I had saved up my babysitting money, and I used it to buy a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, which was a real extravagance.”

The girls lament that the idea of wanting, saving, buying, savoring is foreign to a lot of kids today, even kids in Ames. These days, the students at Ames High and elsewhere in Iowa might not be as hip as kids in, say, Beverly Hills, but they’re still full-fledged consumers, like their peers all over America. At least that’s what the girls are hearing from loved ones back home. “My niece in Iowa went to get a bra and underwear for the prom and spent seventy dollars,” says Karen.

Jane circles back to her original point. The fact that kids have more today isn’t necessarily terrible, she says. But she urges the other girls, in their roles as mothers, to adopt her mantra.

She tells them a story: “A couple of summers ago, my family was out all day doing fun stuff. We went to the water park. We went out to eat. It was almost the whole day. And we got home at four o’clock and the girls were asking Justin and me, ‘What do we do now?’ Like they were already bored. And I’m thinking, ‘Jeez! We’ve been having a good time all day long! What am I, a camp director?’ And that’s when I started saying, ‘Things won’t be going well in this house, and fun times won’t be happening, unless we have cooperation and appreciation.’ I think everything can be distilled down to those two words.”

The girls stop walking to stand under a tree and take a drink from their water bottles. That’s when Kelly says that maybe they should cut back on their pining for the good old days and their complaining about young whippersnappers. They’re starting to sound like grouchy old ladies.

“Anyway, on some level, I think our kids do understand the issues,” Jane says, and then offers up another story. At Hebrew school, her daughter Hanna was recently given an assignment. The kids were studying the Ten Commandments, and each was asked to create an appropriate eleventh commandment. Hanna came up with “Thou shalt be appreciative.”

“She explained to me that people don’t appreciate all the things they have, and they should,” says Jane. “And I was so thrilled. I said to Justin, ‘Wow, the kids heard us! We’re getting through!’

“You know, it’s funny, because half the time, as your kids get older, you feel like you’re talking to a wall. You feel like an inanimate object that they’re ignoring. But sometimes, when you’re just living your life, they surprise you, and when they do, wow, it’s so great.”

 

 

F
rom the moment Karla delivered Christie in 1990, and through all the children who’ve followed, the girls have been trading an unending procession of motherhood tales.

Often, their reports from the home front are meant merely to entertain.

In a 1999 letter to all the girls, Marilyn described her daughter, Emily, as a three-year-old optimist with “a zest for skipping” rather than walking. “On warm summer days, she likes to exclaim with delight, ‘It’s our lucky day!’ ”

That same year, Jane’s younger daughter was two years old. “Sara shows a strong independent streak,” Jane wrote. “She seems to have no fear except for clowns and ice-cream trucks. Our only fear is the day Sara sees a clown driving an ice-cream truck!” Meanwhile, Hanna was four years old that year, and when she got her tonsils out, she took a liking to the Vicodin she was taking for her pain. “We then had another problem,” Jane wrote, “a kid who kept pleading with us, in shorter and shorter intervals, for more Vicodin—even after the doctor said she was completely healed and in no need of pain medication. Fortunately, we were able to stop just short of a twelve-step program.”

Sally’s daughter Lindsay won her school’s spelling bee at age ten in 2001, “so now we are spelling more than we talk in our house, in preparation for the next level of competition,” Sally wrote.

The girls identified their kids to each other in part by their quirks. At age three, Karla’s son Ben was a loud talker. At age six, Kelly’s daughter Liesl wanted hair like Jan Brady of
The Brady Bunch
. At age eight, Marilyn’s son David decided to wash his Game Boy in the sink, and Marilyn had to use a hair dryer to dry it out and get it working again. Those were among the million anecdotes the girls shared with each other.

On some fronts, the girls first got involved with each other’s kids prenatally. In 1998, for instance, Kelly, Karla and Diana visited Cathy’s house in California. On the plane ride west, Kelly watched Diana devour a McDonald’s Big Mac. “I’ve never seen you eat like that before!” Kelly said. “Maybe you’re pregnant.” Diana and her husband had two daughters at the time, and hadn’t yet settled on the idea of having another child. But in L.A., the other girls convinced Diana to go to a drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. Sure enough, and to her surprise, she tested positive. So the Ames girls knew the good news—she was pregnant with her third child—before her husband did.

From the time they each got email accounts, the Ames girls have been asking each other for instant advice regarding their kids. One of them recently had questions about attention deficit disorder and teens—what are the signs?—and threw it out to the other girls. Sally and Kelly weighed in as teachers. Cathy offered nutritional advice. Everyone had thoughts.

A few days later, Jenny wrote an email to everyone about her three-year-old son, Jack, having trouble sleeping through the night. Marilyn wrote back about her own son’s sleep issues, but no one else responded to Jenny’s email. Finally, Jenny wrote again, “Hey, did you guys forget about me and my question?”

Jenny didn’t have Jack until she was forty-one, so he is by far the youngest of the twenty-one children. Because the other Ames girls are now focused on their own preteens and teens, they’ve moved on from toddler issues. Jenny’s follow-up email, written with mock indignation, left the girls slightly guilt-ridden, and most felt obliged to recollect how they’d dealt with nap time and sleepless nights. “You know what? I don’t really remember how we got through it,” Karla said.

The girls enjoy observing the ways, big and small, in which each of them chooses to make her commitment to motherhood. Karla makes sure she provides nutritious after-school snacks and meals. Marilyn keeps in mind her dad’s final wishes to remember the things he did for her that made her happy, and to do those things for her own kids. Karen, who rarely misses her sons’ hockey games, realizes that she is very comfortable with her decision to be a stay-at-home mother. “I know there are lots of wonderful working mothers,” she says, “but for me personally, I love being at home to get my kids to school in the morning, and to be there when they get home. When we are in the car together going to hockey practice, that’s a great time to talk and hear what’s going on in their lives.”

In Jenny’s case, when Jack was an infant, she felt strongly about the benefits of nursing him. And so, at an Ames girls gathering at Diana’s house in Arizona, with Jack back home in Maryland, she brought along a breast pump. The need to pump didn’t stop her from joining any activities. She sat with everyone, talking and pumping away. Jane came up with her own pet name for the machine, Big Betty, which the other girls quickly adopted. They had some good laughs impersonating what they called “the milking machine,” which sounded like a piece of heavy machinery.

No one told Jenny they had dubbed her device “Big Betty,” and then Jane casually mentioned it in an email after the reunion. Jenny asked for an explanation.

“I kept talking about Big Betty because I think it’s so cool that you are nursing, and so dedicated to pumping, which I never got the hang of,” Jane replied to Jenny, cc-ing everyone else. “I also think it’s cool that you were so freely pumping in the mix of things. That’s just as it should be. No need for a nursing mother to miss out on the conversation.”

Jenny responded: “Well, I’ll be packing up Big Betty to take down to Mexico with me on vacation this Friday. I’ll be pumping and dumping, as FedEx will not allow me to ship my milk from country to country. It’ll break my heart pouring that liquid gold down the drain. But I’m leaving my parents with about thirty-five bags of frozen breast milk, so that ought to be a good start. The things we do for our kids!

“When Jack is older and he is screaming that I don’t love him—or is that something that only girls do to their mothers???—I’ll be sure to remind him of my time spent pumping every day, three times a day, at the office, on vacation, in the middle of the night, in the wee hours. . . .”

 

 

A
s a girl, Jane had always assumed she’d be a working mother, and figured she’d end up as a professor. Given that she was the daughter of an anthropology professor and a social worker, it’s not surprising that she got to college and narrowed her interests down to anthropology, sociology and psychology. After taking some sociology courses, however, she decided that the topics of sociology, such as solving the problems of poverty, were just too broad and unmanageable. “I was drawn to psychology, where I perceived the issues to be more specified and empirically testable,” she says, sounding very much like the academic she has become. She spent several summers at Grinnell College working with live pigeons doing operant conditioning research; that’s the use of consequences to modify behavior. She considered pursuing graduate work in animal learning, but instead got her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology.

When her students post comments on “Rate Your Professor” Web sites, almost all of them give Jane high marks: “Professor Nash is a very clear teacher. She uses lots of everyday examples. Very specific grader, though, so study specifics.” “Best professor ever! She’s super-motherly. She expects a lot from you and sets the bar high. If you like to learn, to be treated like an adult, and don’t mind high expectations—take Nash!”

Jane is proud of her career, but like all of the other working mothers among the Ames girls, she calls her children her greatest accomplishment. “Time will tell, however, if we’ve really done our work well,” she says.

Her wishes for her two daughters are specific. “I want them to become happy, fulfilled women who feel a sense of pride in themselves,” she says, “and most importantly, I want them to really love each other. I always say to them, ‘Friends come and go, but you always have your sister.’” Of course, that’s not true for her, since she has all the other Ames girls. But she thinks her experience is something of an exception to the rule. “Friends often fade into the background,” she says, “and your siblings are always in the foreground—at least in a semi-functional family.”

Jane says finding a work/life balance is the greatest challenge in her life. Her job is somewhat flexible. She can take some of her work home, such as grading papers or assessing labs. Then again, when she’s in the house, her girls always need her to drive or talk or whatever. “When I’m at home,” Jane says, “I often feel conflicted about which hat I’m wearing, my professor hat or my mom hat.”

Her husband, Justin, is very involved with the girls, and that helps. “He’s patient,” she says, “when I’m at the end of my rope and want to renegotiate our roles or responsibilities. But the fact remains that I’m home earlier from work than he is, so there are many tasks that fall on my shoulders in the afternoon and early evening.”

The one area in Jane’s life where she feels most compromised—and she has discussed this with the other Ames girls—is the time she gets to spend on herself. “I’m talking about the things that aren’t about work and aren’t about family.”

Looking at her life, she realizes she’s pretty much down to two “me time” things—running and her book group. “Both come with plenty of guilt associated with them,” she says.

Jane started running in 1997, after her second daughter, Sara, was born. “I was on maternity leave, and home with a baby and a three-year-old,” she says. “Before I became a runner, the day would start with a baby crying or my older daughter wanting breakfast. This seemed like a tough beginning to what was going to be a long day. So one day I decided that I would get up before everyone else and go for a walk. Then at least I would have some fresh air and would have accomplished one thing before the day began in full.