Jen Wing’s column in the Parent magazine a week or so ago sang to me, a song that I already knew, one that lives in my heart. I remember that melody, those words, its measures marking time that passes too quickly, embellished with notations both soft and strong – adagios, largos and very few rests. Mostly “presto.”
My song book, as I entered into the journey known as parenthood, was written by Dr. Spock. My copy was ragged by the time my first born was a year old. I had no clue. None.
Everyone thought that it would be so easy for me. After all I was the eldest of four. And, yes, I did remember my mother washing diapers and making formula, but not much else. After all, I didn’t wash the diapers or make the formula. I never knew the woman behind the mother. At least not until now.
All of the books that we consult about motherhood or fatherhood are about the growing child. They pay short shrift to the overwhelming parallel journey of becoming that parent. Sure, we can watch and measure and consult about the growth and health of our offspring, but there is that meta thing, that oxytocin-driven thing that binds us to those children with such a power that there are few, if any, words to describe it. We are born the day our child is born.
“Oh, my gosh. Look! He’s smiling!” Then…
“Look! He’s crawling!”
The world becomes a different place full of dangers and joy … and you are the mediator, the protector, the teacher, coach, nurse and confidant. Sometimes you rock it. Sometimes you don’t. It’s a learn-on-the-job thing.
“Look! He’s walking!”
Dr. Spock could tell me about how to teach my son to tie his shoes, but there was nothing on those pages to tell me how that moment would be so poignant. My little boy, my four-year-old little boy whose weedy hands and loving words, was learning, along with tying those laces, how to leave me.
There were no instructions for the mother who first notices that her 12-year-old boy has shoulders. Where did my little one go so fast?
“Look! He has his driver’s license.”
How to handle the newly-adult voice, the man-child who navigates the vagaries of high school society?
Or my sweet, determined young daughter who wrote in her journal about wanting to talk to her mother, but couldn’t. What should I have done? Did I interfere too much? I ache for her and for my inability to make her secure in my confidences.
Where do you learn these things?
How do I hold these things in my heart, these parameters of a mother’s life. Dr. Spock was no help at all.
How many hours, how many sleepless nights of worry? The on-so-many doctor visits for childhood ailments, each a breach of my faith that I could protect them.
The part of the song when warm little kisses were transformed into antiseptic, cursory hugs …?
And I sang the songs of soccer games and school plays and concerts and prom nights and parent teacher conferences and the agony of college applications … and their leaving.
The power of that ever-forward rush to emancipation is daunting. It’s a wave of change that you hope to ride, to help your child reach that shore where the adults are supposed to live while you long for the left-behind shores.
“Look, how quiet the house is!”
What do you do with the empty rooms? The surplus hours, formerly filled with their lives entwined with yours.
You waited to hear that first “mommy,” relished in the closeness of their little hands in yours. And now? The silence is too loud.
Turn around and they’re two,
Turn around and they’re four
Turn around and they are young ones
Going out of the door.
I still hear that song. All these years past and it is still the same. The song is always bittersweet.
