On the second snow day within a week—the day after the three-day MLK weekend—are you expecting a reminder to register for summer camp? From here—cold, slushy then iced over with phrases like “wintry mix” and “storm next week” echoing, summer’s like the promised land and the dreaded one all at once.
No one tells you before you have kids that you have to figure out what to do with them for weeks and weeks and weeks of vacation (when you might still be working). Even if your answer is to have them do nothing, their doing nothing takes some effort on your part.
To the extent that from here, in my chaotic, messy house, with my excitable, snowbound children, I could barely feel at all connected with anything beyond my slippery street. However, I did read the blogosphere’s brouhaha about Amy Chua, aka the Tiger Mother.
One friend suggested I write about Chua and the Tiger Mother in my house and so I looked for her and found my Inner Mouse Mama.
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Before I squeal about this, I am watching the Tiger Mother controversy with bemusement (save for the death threats, which are deplorable and frightening and wrong). Here’s a memoir (when you’re with her, my friend Amy says this like you’re an idiot—MEM-OIR—as she pointed it out not very smartly online) that is being treated a manifesto. This is due to a publicist’s placement of the most attack-worthy passage under the banner of a very provocative headline. These days, as we well know, the result is a buzz that roars, blames, whines, pisses off and berates.
Of everything related to this hornet’s nest masquerading as tiger’s den I read I loved Ayelet Waldman’s In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom best. What I loved about it most—besides, well, her—was the reminder that as parents, if we were to showcase our worst qualities or worse “offenses” we could all look totally terrible, to others and to our children and to ourselves. She also reminded me that those of us who kind of let our kids be themselves—as she points out, that’s what’s gonna happen anyway—may find ourselves pleasantly surprised that love, some laissez-fairness and their inner whoever-they-are turns out pretty amazingly. Her daughter Rosie’s gritty determination to read—and her success in completing that very arduous task—is a moving case in point.
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So, I am a Mouse Mama, tucked away at the free-range end of the spectrum. I do not drill my children: barely can I muster steam to remind anyone about homework. In fact, I had one piano playing child and he had to convince me—three years of begging—to take lessons, because I did not want to have the practice-your-piano argument with anyone. Yet I do work achingly hard, pouring heart-and-soul into the good-enough-parent-most-of-the-time aspiration. I just wrote a piece (please, click, read and comment; it’s on Carrie Goldman Segall’s terrific Portrait of an Adoption blog) about how raising a pink boy—and my willingness to support my kids’ uniqueness—has turned out to be good preparation to raise an adopted daughter grappling with her own story’s “differentness.” I am Free-to-Be-You-And-Me Mama hear me sing out about William’s doll and parents being people. My greatest strength as a parent is that I like my kids. I believe in them. And, mostly, they know it.
But on a week that goes holiday followed by snow day followed by why-didn’t-you-get-me-a-burrito-even-though-I-was-at-my-friend’s-house, I do doubt my inner Mouse Mama and wish, not exactly to be a forceful Tiger Mother, but to force my kids to learn some of the hardest lessons, like, immediately. The lesson last night was it’s not always tit for tat—and really, you don’t want it to be. No one “gets” that by being told. Duh. You have to begin to see silver linings and half-full moments all by yourself. I had gotten the ‘tween complainant a couple of pieces of chocolate when in town (with two kids, who went on an unmentioned GoBerry trip, cough). Miraculously, once he ate them he shifted from cranky and homework striking to becoming cheerful and homework achieving (aided by the fact that the necessary website necessitated a delay in West Wing viewing, granting him homework time).
Now, I want this kid to go to a fantastic summer camp. I am sure, down to the tips of my frozen toes, he will blossom there. I am so sure I just might force him to go, even if I have to do it in my mousey way, which will likely entail tears and whining on both our parts. In the clear, shining bitter bright sunshine, though, I’m just holding the vision of him as the happiest I’ve ever seen him on a summer’s day in Vermont. Rather than think about how, I’m just letting myself imagine him there, in hopes I figure the rest out—or that he does. Squeak.
