The Girls from Ames (32 page)

“Well, walking was taking too long, so I started running. And when I returned home, I found two kids who were dressed and fed.” Her husband had stepped into the void, so to speak. And her older daughter was able to dress and feed herself.

“Now what would you have done?” Jane says. “Well, if you were like me, you would try that again the next day and then the next and then the next. All of a sudden, I had become a runner to escape what I called ‘the morning mommy onslaught.’ ”

In her general psychology class, Jane has actually used this story as an example of “negative reinforcement.”

As her daughters got older, Jane would continue to try to sneak out of the house early. “I didn’t want the girls to see me leaving and giving myself what I perceived as this very selfish alone time,” she says. “Yes, I can’t shake the guilt. But then Justin convinced me to let Hanna and Sara actually see me going for a run, so they could witness a woman trying to stay fit—and taking time to do something for herself.”

Jane hadn’t exactly considered that she could be a role model for her daughters by taking time for herself away from them. It took her husband to give her that insight.

The Ames girls appreciate sharing these sorts of “aha” moments with each other.

Sally was sick a lot early in her pregnancies. One day when she was pregnant with her second daughter, she was kneeling on the floor of the bathroom, throwing up. Her older daughter, then two years old, was casually swinging the toilet lid up and down, banging it on Sally’s head as she was vomiting, asking, “Whatcha doing, Mommy?”

Sally told the other Ames girls: “As she was banging away on my head, I was thinking, ‘How in the world did this become my life? Throwing up while being assaulted by a toddler with a toilet lid?’ ”

Perhaps because she’s a teacher, Sally has found lessons in the stresses of motherhood, and she has shared these with the other girls.

Her younger daughter, Katie, was a very fussy baby. “She cried for about three months straight,” Sally says. One day, Sally was driving back to Ames to see her parents, her husband wasn’t with her, and she was feeling overwhelmed. Katie was a baby. Lindsay was two years old.

“Katie had been crying continuously,” Sally later wrote in an email to the other Ames girls. “Lindsay kept trying to keep a pacifier in Katie’s mouth, to give her a bottle—just something to stop the noise. I felt so exhausted and tense. Finally, Katie fell asleep and there was blissful silence for about two minutes. Then Lindsay said, ‘Mom . . . Hey, Mom . . .’ I really just wanted quiet, so I gave her an exasperated, annoyed and impatient ‘What is it?’

“I turned to look in the backseat and saw Lindsay looking at Katie. Then she said, ‘I just think Katie is so beautiful.’ I of course told her that I agreed that they were both beautiful. But honestly, I felt ashamed that my two-year-old showed so much more patience with the whole situation than I had.”

As mothers, the girls also help each other by straightforwardly sharing the ways they’ve found to cope and then thrive.

After she quit work to stay home with Alexa, her first daughter, Diana found herself emotional for long stretches. Alexa did a lot of crying. Diana seemed to cry even more. Her husband would come home at dinnertime and he’d find her sitting on the floor of the closet, crying. “Alexa just keeps crying and I don’t know how to get her to stop,” she’d say. She had more experience, of course, by the time she had her other two daughters. But she has admitted to the Ames girls that until her youngest reached kindergarten, “I felt like we were completely out of control, like we were literally drowning.” She told the Ames girls about a mother in her daughters’ elementary school who left the kids and moved to a beach in Mexico.

When she was overwrought or was struggling to discipline the kids, Diana would tell her husband, half seriously, half kidding: “That’s it! I’m moving to Mexico!” And he’d respond: “No. You can stay here. I’m moving to Mexico!” They both made it through without moving to Mexico.

The age difference between Kelly’s sons, Quin and Cooper, is just fourteen months, and when they were boys, sibling rivalry led to a lot of arguing and physical fights. “I can’t deal with it,” Kelly told Diana one day. “None of my teaching skills are working. We’ll go to McDonald’s and they’ll both demand the same Happy Meal toy. Then they’ll get in the minivan and they’ll both want the same seat.” Kelly feared her older son, Quin, might actually hurt Cooper. “Cooper lets his older brother pummel him,” Kelly said. “I’m freaking out. I have no strategies.” Diana had joined a parenting group, and she asked other parents there for input. When they suggested a certain book on sibling rivalry, Diana immediately sent it to Kelly as a present. “That book saved me,” Kelly recalls. “It helped me realize that I wasn’t a failure—that even good kids and good parents go through this.” (As a teen, Cooper is six-foot-four, and his older brother, who’s five-foot-ten, knows not to mess with him. “Both boys are in wrestling and play football, and now they’re best friends,” says Kelly.)

Marilyn felt a bit of postpartum depression after her first child was born in 1994. She was on maternity leave from her job as a career consultant. “You feel like having a baby should be great,” she said, “especially when you’re a first-time mother. And then, well, some of it is not so great.” Her son Christopher was born in the fall, and by the time she was comfortable taking him out and about, it was winter in Minnesota—cold, icy, dark. She’d find herself driving around with Christopher, feeling sleep-deprived, nervous and grouchy.

After her other two kids were born, she sometimes felt resentful, even doing things she enjoyed. She had always loved going to the family lake house, where she had so many childhood memories. But now the idea of packing up the kids and all their belongings felt like an unpleasant chore, not an adventure. Her mother noticed that she just didn’t seem like herself, and told her so.

Marilyn had worked until her third child was born, but by 2000, she had stopped working and was home caring for the kids while her husband, Chris, a business consultant, was on the road four days a week. She felt very lonely, with three kids under age six to look after, mostly by herself.

At one point, she took her kids to the pediatrician and he asked her how she was making out as a mother. She told him: “I feel like I’m raising my voice a lot more than I ever have in my life. I’m concerned about that.” The doctor’s response: “Well you have three little kids and a husband who’s out of town a lot. It’s normal to feel this way.”

Still, something didn’t feel right to Marilyn. She eventually went to her own doctor and was diagnosed with depression. Since then, she has taken mild antidepressants, which she says “take the edge off” and make her a more patient, more loving, happier mother. A large part of her feels very fulfilled, focusing her life, at least for now, on helping her three kids learn how to appreciate and embrace education, to find a path to more independence—and to be better people.

She has told the other girls that she calls one of her medications “the be-a-nice-mommy-instead-of-a-screaming-bitch pill.” “I can definitely tell when I’m not on it,” she says. “I become a ‘screaming meemie. ’ Even the dog has the sense to run for cover.”

Because Marilyn feels she has been helped, she’s very open about the medications she’s taking. She has warned the others that it’s important to find the right dosages and the right regimen of medications. One antidepressant led her to gain twenty pounds, which isn’t uncommon.

Marilyn also points out that depression can be part of the aging process, no different than high cholesterol or thyroid issues. She and her husband have jokingly changed the words to the song “The Wheels on the Bus”: “The wheels on the bus start falling off, falling off, falling off, the wheels on the bus start falling off—at the age of forty!”

Marilyn believes that speaking frankly about her medications to the other girls can be a great service to them; maybe they’ll see signs of depression in their own lives. “It’s not an embarrassment, because it’s neurological. It’s not something you can control by eating right and exercise,” she says. The girls are generally open about how they’ve helped themselves through challenging times in their lives, whether it’s Cathy talking about being in therapy or Marilyn talking about taking the antidepressant Effexor. The girls are pretty matter-of-fact when they’re together, and it’s comforting. “I’m not the only one opening a pillbox,” Marilyn says.

In recent years, women’s health proponents have singled out women like Marilyn as frontline soldiers in the battles against depression. The reason is this: Though 70 percent of women in a 2004 nationwide survey said they felt “depressed, stressed, anxious or sad” in the previous twelve months, only 27 percent of them talked to their doctors about this. So who do most of them talk to? Their girlfriends.

More than 60 percent of women who have signs of depression tell their friends how they’re feeling, according to this survey by the National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health. Given how women confide in each other, the organization created a program called “Girlfriends for Life: Helping Each Other Stay Healthy.” The program was designed to raise awareness that friends can be crucial players in recognizing the symptoms of depression and encouraging those in crisis (or just suffering the blues) to get help. As program organizers put it: “Sometimes the only thing keeping a woman from falling over is the girlfriend right beside her.”

 

 

N
ow that most of their kids are heading into their teens, the Ames girls spend some of their time at the reunion at Angela’s trading tips on how best to connect with them. “I find they’ll do a lot of good talking in the car, if you’re quiet and listen to them,” Sally says.

“I’ve read research about asking open-ended questions,” Jane says. “You don’t ask, ‘Did you have a good day at school?’ You need to say, ‘Tell me about your math class.’ And you’ve got to get them when they’re fresh, right home from school. If you wait until the end of the day, before they go to bed, they’re not going to share as much—or at all.”

Karla talks about her son, who likes to come home from school and go sit up in a tree in front of the house to think. When he climbs down from the tree, he’s often ready for conversation with Karla or Bruce.

The girls swap stories about the sorts of questions their kids ask them. Karen tells of the day her son came home from sixth grade and said the gym teacher had been enlisted to give “the sex talk” to students. “We’re at the dinner table,” Karen says, “and first he tells us that he saw a picture of a vagina. Then he has a question for us. He wanted to know: ‘So how much comes out during an ejaculation?’” Karen was impressed that her husband figured out a way to calmly answer the question. “He got the soap dispenser, squirted a little into his palm, and just said, ‘That much.’ ”

Kelly tells the girls about her daughter Liesl’s questions. Having two older brothers, and watching them get potty trained, Liesl learned early what a penis was. Then one day at the supermarket, she wanted a candy bar and Kelly told her it had peanuts in it. “Her eyes got huge,” Kelly recalls. “She said, ‘Really? That candy bar has a penis in it?’ ” More recently, as a teen, Liesl asked Kelly: “When you and dad were married, when did you have sex?” Kelly answered: “When you were asleep.” (It’s a good answer, some of the other girls say, but it might just lead a kid to stay awake all night.)

Because the girls live all over the country, they also compare geographical differences in their children. The Midwest contingent gets a kick out of the fact that Diana’s daughter heads west from Arizona in the summer and goes to “surf camp” on the beaches of California. And here at the reunion, they’re all taken with Angela’s seven-year-old daughter, Camryn, and her Southern accent. Camryn is so poised as she asks polite questions about the girls’ friendships and talks about her own friends.

Meanwhile, those with older kids talk about how their offspring now give them unsolicited advice: “You’re too old to wear a bikini.” “You’re too young to be complaining about how tired you are.” “You’re too judgmental, Mom!”

Diana tells a story about the ways in which daughters notice how their mother’s bodies are declining. “My friend Barb in Arizona was sitting with her thirteen-year-old daughter,” Diana says. “Her daughter wanted to snuggle with her, so she put her head down on my friend’s chest. She kept lifting her head, putting it down. My friend asked her, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘Mom, where’s your boob?’ So my friend told her, ‘Hold on, honey. I think it’s down here.’ Then she readjusted herself, pulled herself up, and all was well.” The girls roar at that story.

When the girls are together, questions are raised: How do they each view themselves as parents? Are they succeeding? Are their kids thriving? Are they happy being mothers?

“Parenting is rewarding but hard,” says Jane. “My heart is definitely in it, but I’d give myself a B as a parent.”

The girls talk about all the bad parents in the world. “OK,” Jane says, “compared to a lot of what’s out there, I’ll give myself an A.”

Given the often frenetic nature of their parenting lives—the struggles to stay on top of everything—the girls say they’ve found it easier over the years to forgive their own parents’ deficiencies. Karen tells a story, dating back to middle school, about the day when she needed to bring in a baby photo of herself to class. Because she was the fifth of five children in her household, there were far fewer photos of her. Her mother looked, but couldn’t even find a baby photo of Karen. So she gave her a photo of her older sister, Barb.

“Mom, that’s not me. It’s Barb,” Karen said.

“It’s OK,” her mother said. “You looked just like her when you were a baby.”

The other girls laugh over this story, and then Cathy jokingly says, “My mom probably gave me a picture of my older brother. I’ll talk about it in therapy.”