amomynity

Stepping into your daughter’s room to find her huddled on her bed, un-dressed, brushed, or washed, and weeping bitterly, is, I think we can agree, a fantastic start to a school day.

Me (looks at clock): “Is… Something wrong?”
Her: “I FORGOT TO DO MY READING HOMEWORK!” (Sobs.)
Me (looks at clock, does quick calculation, looks at daughter, amends calculation): “Oh. Darn.”

My daughter and I are similar in many ways, too similar in some key ways, but one thing we differ on, (for now, at least), is our philosophy about homework. I am lazy. I am lazy on, like, a cellular level. In my school years I expended much more effort trying to get maximum gain out of minimum work than I expended on the actual WORK. Much of my adult “work” life boils down to a half-assed battle against the forces of sloth. I have largely avoided traditional workplaces because of those slave-driver bosses breathing down your neck and expecting “deliverables” and “results.” When I’m my own boss I take a lot of, uh, mental health days. I count getting my eyebrows waxed as a work appointment. I don’t always wait until the stroke of 5 to have a post-work cocktail.

My daughter, however, clearly operating under the auspices of a filtered genetic inheritance, comes home from school, gets herself a snack, and sits right down to do her homework. Never, ever, not once in my life, did I ever do this. She follows instructions to the letter and takes pride in ticking off each item on her homework to do list. If there is confusion about an assignment, she chooses to do extra work, just to be safe. Her frustration and fury when she doesn’t understand directions or runs out of time to work are formidable.

So, because she’s a kid, and because one of our similarities is falling helpless victim to sweeping emotional shitstorms, there’s a lot of drama around homework, and I am finding it hard to manage. On the one hand, I want to encourage and support her good work ethic. On the other, my default solution is SKIP THE CRYING AND JUST DON’T DO IT.

So back to this morning and the 20 minutes of required reading she didn’t do last night. The kid reads all the time! She normally reads for more than 20 minutes a day! It all averages out! So my first suggestion is that we just kind of fudge–have her read for 12-ish minutes and round up.

Her (shocked, SHOCKED): “That’s lying! I can’t do that!!!”

Ugh, right. Don’t coerce your kid into lying about homework, Stupid McBadparent. So then I offer to write a note to her teacher explaining that she worked on her math homework for an hour instead of the 15 required minutes, and just ran out of time to read. (All true! SHE WORKED ON MATH FOR 45 EXTRA MINUTES VOLUNTARILY IT’S LIKE MOTHERING AN ALIEN.)

Her (crying again): “But I was only supposed to work on math for 15 minutes! That was my fault! I’m going to get in trouble!”

And no matter how I gently tried to explain that she would never get in trouble for doing extra work she full-on panicked about not being able to finish everything before school and meanwhile had not eaten breakfast and bus arrival time was getting nigher and nigher and LORD we needed to just GET THE SHOW on the ROAD so I started hurrying her and barking at her to JUST GET DRESSED WE WILL WORK IT OUT which only made her cry harder which was so simultaneously pitiful and annoying I hardly knew what to do with myself.

All this before 8 am. I would be so much better at parenting if the crises did not so often happen at bedtime, in the middle of the night, or first thing in the motherscratching morning.

Yeah. See, so, my problems are mostly just issues of TIMING. No need to read parenting books for advice, lord no, that sounds like homework, and what kind of grind does THAT?!

The other day my eight year old shared a school anecdote I can’t stop thinking about. We were talking about art class, specifically a project they’re working on called “Sandwiches” where they were given a long, skinny blank sheet of paper with a piece of bread inked in at the top and bottom, and instructed to fill the sheet with drawings of wild and crazy sandwich fixings. All very Dagwood.

She giggled as she told me that one of the things she put on her sandwich was a picture of “Johnny,” one of her classmates. “He sits on one side of me, and I thought he would think that was funny,” she said.

Then she said, “And on the other side of me sits “Billy” and guess what HE did all during art class, Mom? He would lean over really close to me and get right in my face and say, ‘Hey beautiful.’ He did it over and over! Then he said, ‘I’m gonna MARRY you!’ And Johnny was laughing, so he said that again, too.”

The look that passed over her face as she told me this was one I recognized, and it tied my stomach in a knot. It was 50% flattered, 50% uncomfortable. It was a look that matured her sweet face in an instant.

I remember how it felt when people started to respond to me as something other than a little kid. It’s not that little kids are genderless, not at all, but they’re KIDS, immune to overtly sexual overtures (at least ideally, ugh.) I don’t remember this transition happening to me in the third grade, though.

And look, this boy is a third grader, too, I get that, so I’m trying not to blow the incident out of proportion. My daughter didn’t seem so much upset as confused. She laughed about it, but with a twist to her mouth. I didn’t want to freight her response with the power of what I was feeling, so I tried to stay calm and neutral in probing a little.

My internal response is not calm or neutral, though. I went through my teenage years feeling like prey, for lack of a better word, and at the same time desperately wanting attention from boys I felt like were forever withholding it from me. That dance, between courting attention and rejecting it, is one I still hadn’t perfected in my twenties, when I was living in a big city and trying to navigate dating. I’m more protected from it now as a married lady in middle-age, but seeing my child’s face contort like that brought it all back.

Growing up is hard whoever you are, but growing up a girl has some unique challenges. I guess I’d better strap in–seems like this ride has already gotten started.

My grandparents raised 8 boys. EIGHT. BOYS. Not only did they see these boys safely to adulthood, they raised eight outstanding, successful men. It was an incredible parenting feat, one I puzzle over regularly when mired in the many confusions of caring for TWO children.

It certainly helped that they had a farm with plenty of acreage for the boys to get their ya-yas out–my impression is that there were times of the year when my grandmother would open the back door and shoo everyone out with instructions to stay gone until lunch. But actually, in that anecdote is the kernel of another quality I believe made their parenting successful–a laissez-faire attitude.

My grandfather is on his own now after my grandmother’s death in May of this year, and I’ve gotten in the rhythm of a weekly lunch with him. I bring a sandwich or a couple of salads, and we perch at his kitchen counter and eat and talk for an hour. My grandmother was their front-woman, so I’d never really talked to him before her death–not REALLY. His lips are also loosened by his creeping dementia; his confusion has increased in the wake of her passing as if she was his tether to reality. While this makes me sad, it also makes him a fascinating lunch companion because he has almost no filter anymore, and a willingness to roam his memories aloud at length.

This past week I was asking him about what it was like to raise all those boys. I said whatever they did clearly worked pretty well and I could use some tips. He thought about it for a minute with a half smile, and then offered, “I think what I’d say we mostly did is take a hands-off approach.”

He continued, warming to his subject, “I remember when my mother died she left each boy a small bequest, about a thousand dollars for each boy. Your grandmother wanted to put the money right in the bank, but I resisted. ‘Give each boy his money and let’s see what they do,’ I told her, so we did. It was hard to give them that much freedom, especially financial freedom, but I was really curious. And they did a wonderful job, just wonderful. Some of them did put the money right in the bank. Others spent it on needed items, or things they only thought they needed but were happy to have. None of them wasted it. I was proud.”

Kind of wishing I could prove to him how responsible his grandchild would be with that kind of money, but I digress. My kids are only elementary-school aged, and I struggle with what things to help with and what to let them hack through themselves. Also I’m a stay at home parent; it’s hard for me to act like I have a whole lot of better things to do than be up in their business. But this conversation with my grandfather gave me new resolve; when in doubt, I could do worse than to step back and let them flail a little. I love them, and I should trust them, too.

Oh, hey, Internet. So I’ve tried and tried to make a blog, and I just can’t figure out why I’ve never been successful. It can’t be lack of work ethic. It can’t be unfocused thinking. It can’t be a hyper-critical authorial eye and ruthless editing style that torches whole posts in a single keystroke. No. It’s just that I never had the right background picture before. But now I have a very soothing, nautical-type background picture, so I’m convinced that Blog 14.0 is going to be the one that sticks. The Sticker! Welcome, welcome.