I was driving by a nearby pond early this morning, when I saw two figures out on the frozen surface. Something about their movements captivated my attention and I pulled over to watch. At first I thought they were pairs figure skating, lovely enough in itself, but they weren’t on skates. They were just waltzing, in their boots, across a cleared patch of snow. 

A sob caught in my throat. There was a spontaneous romance to the scene, an intimacy that translated despite the distance between us and this huge surface of ice. Maybe they were running off to busy days to, but the fact that they began theirs dancing across the ice together made me want to open the passenger door and dump all the papers and schedules and lists lying there off into the snow. 

If this was a novel, I’d call my husband and ask him what he was doing tonight and did he want to take a walk in the snow or something, right? Instead, my phone rang, and I could hear Colin screaming and and Neve yelling, “You wrecked my headband!” and Tom was asking, “Did you call the bank like I asked?”

Sigh.

After Colin, Neve and I got in the door, and out of our coats and boots, he turned to me, clasped his hands together in anticipation and said, “I want to do homework!”

I laughed — after all, what does he see his heroes doing every evening but hitting the books? But Neve was appalled.

“Oh, no, Collie,” she groaned, “Homework’s not fun. You definitely don’t want to do homework.”

“I do, Nee-vee, I do!” he cried, and she sighed and got him a piece of paper and a pencil. They sat at the kitchen table for a long time, he scribbling on his paper and watching every move she made as she worked her way through math and language. 

She didn’t look up, but every now and then I could hear her saying little asides to him, reminding him that although she was spending a lot of time on this activity she was not enjoying it. I could see his face, his tongue off to the side, as he processed this, and he always replied, “No, Nee-vee, no. This fun.”

It reminded me of when I was a kid, and my world was totally circumscribed by my older siblings. My mom was so busy, and we were generally at someone’s game somewhere, that there was very little of playing at people’s houses. I never realized that other kids even watched TV on weekdays. We all came home, devoured all the milk and cookies, and then went to our respective spots to do homework. My mom always joked that she really only had to train my eldest brother and the rest of us just fell in line like dominoes.

I get a lot of comments from friends on my lack of interference in my kids’ homework, and so I mentioned it to my mother. “You know, dear,” she said, “I guess I was just never afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes, it seems to me that this generation doesn’t have a lot of confidence in their children.  I never had to worry about that. Maybe it was the times, but your father and I really just expected you all to do what you had to do — and you did. We were very lucky.”

“Well, some luck, maybe, but I think you’re right — a lot of expectation.”

When Dex was little, he had a toy lawnmower, which he ran all over the yard, hours every day. So many people joked that it would probably be the last time he ever willingly mowed the lawn, but Tom and I always said, “Ah, I don’t know about that.”

A decade later, Dex has a little lawnmowing business with his friend, and can’t wait to rev that engine.

So I am going to hold fast to the idea that Colin is going to love doing homework.

Colin has never been a big fan of riding in the car. He can tolerate about fifteen minutes before he starts complaining, and then we have about ten more before he starts launching stuff from the back seat at my head –and he does hit me, he’s got a heluva arm. I swear he has hidden pockets in his car seat, where he stores this stuff, because I don’t know where the hardened fruit snacks that come sailing into my line of vision are coming from. 

Unfortunately for Colin –and all of us — we spend a lot of time in the car, a lot more time lately. Who doesn’t? Between school and work and lessons and practice and errands were are all trapped in this endless driving cycle, and none of us likes it, but Tom, Dex and Neve at least deal with it.  Not Colin, though. Once he has reached his limit, he has spectacular endurance for crying, despite the other two working it, distracting him, telling him to knock it off. I actually find myself dreading the post-work shuffle, glancing at the clock, dreading the moment I need to buckle him into his seat and the torture begins.

As we flew down the highway the other afternoon with him yet again screaming his head off, my hands gripping the wheel, wishing he’d just shut up, I became aware of  the car in the next lane. I looked over and an older man was grinning as he watched the scene in my car: Dex gripping his head, Neve telling Colin to shut up and me hunched over the wheel like a maniac. He put down his window, and Dex put down his, despite the frigid air, and the man yelled, “Some day you’ll miss this!” Then he smiled and waved and sped off.

We all looked at each other. Even Colin stopped crying. 

Neve sighed and “Yeah, right. Like I’m going to miss homework.”

I was on frantic deadline for a project yesterday so I couldn’t see any of the inauguration, but Dex and Neve were glued to the TV. The baby was off at daycare, but the older two didn’t have school, so I left them to their own devices and sealed myself upstairs. 

A little after 12, I came down to grab some coffee and saw the two of them standing in front of the TV, watching the scene at the Capitol and toasting ginger ale with my champagne flutes. I started to move forward to inquire about what they were doing, but then Dex said, “To a new generation” and Neve said, “Yeah, and new ideas and stuff.”

I turned around and tiptoed back upstairs. They weren’t looking for an audience, and they weren’t looking for a reaction. I let it be a moment the two of them could share without adult interference.

Colin has taken to calling me “broken mommy” on a regular basis. Usually it is because my hair is a mess or he’s pulled my shirt off my shoulder, but sometimes he uses it when all is clearly not copascetic in mommydom. He senses my moods from across the room, and, since he is generally the reason these days for my brokenness, there’s something quite poignant about his ability to recognize that a storm is a-brewin’.

It’s not new to me, this clingy, whiny, destructive phase. But knowing all the reasons toddlers are cranky and difficult and trying to climb back in the womb doesn’t help either. If you don’t tend to it, you can get into this downward spiral of only defining toddlers by their unpleasant behavior, talking so much about it, asking for advice, reading books and articles and websites, that it turns from phase into their personality. I know, I’ve gone down that road. Neve was so brutally difficult as a toddler, I was consulting specialists and books right and left, making charts and graphs to beat the band. I was so focused on what she was doing wrong, it was very hard for me to see what was great about her. To this day, I don’t understand how I managed to salvage what little I could, but despite my intense focus, I never, ever, decided that she was just born with the desire to destroy. Even when others would give me the rope, I never wanted to summarize her personality other than to say she hadn’t found what made her happy yet. Eventually, the light dawned and it was like a racehorse busting our of the box: she found her niche and today is (most of the time )everything I admire.

I think of that now when Colin I driving me bananas, which is more than I care to admit. Colin is really smart, which may sound great, but  the smart ones live in constant frustration because so many things just do not add up for them. As he sobs at my feet, smearing the nectarine he had been eating all over my pants because he can’t handle the new color of the cat’s food, I just keep thinking, he’s sweet and healthy, he’s loving, he’s funny and joyful, this too shall pass. He will find his niche, he will find what makes him happy, and someday, sooner than I know, he will be everything I admire, too.

Maybe, by then, I won’t get broken anymore, either.

About a year ago, a truly dear, truly brilliant friend of mine gave me a book called Women and Desire by Jungian analyst, Polly Young-Eisendrath. It’s one of those books that I stopped underlining after the second chapter because I realized I was underlining basically very sentence. Rather than a pathetic attempt to summarize her layered and complex analysis, I’ll just give you a snippet and suggest you read it yourself.

What got me thinking about this was that my beloved daughter (and if you’ve got a daughter, you really should read this book) does not value my privacy. Despite being corrected many times, she has a history of bursting in on me on the phone, on the toilet, sobbing over my mortality,it doesn’t really matter, and demand to know where her brush/mouthguard/orange juice is:

“Women cannot be faulted for wanting to be perfect mothers; once again they appear to be offered power in a society that repeatedly declares a mother’s irreplaceable importance. Yet they never see this power materialize . . . Many mothers of grown-up children talk regretfully about having spent the better part of their adult years ’sacrificing’ for their children, who, fully grown, are often critical of their mother. We only give lip service to the idea that mothers are to be honored and loved; children do not feel responsible for sustaining an interest in their mothers’ lives. Mother is perceived simply as a resource for other’s needs rather than a person in her own right, and many mothers lose themselves in the role.”

I know I treated my mother as a maid/reference librarian at times. Maybe this is what kids will do no matter how you sensitize, so the point is, not to change their perception of you, but to change your perception of yourself. Neve no longer bursts in the door because I stopped having answers. It was hard on my pride to keep saying, “I don’t know,” but easier on my emotions. Even if I knew where the brush/mouthguard/oj is, I just shrug. Now she thinks I am useless, but at least she can find answers on her own.

Too often I complain about having a toddler around again–and I do, believe me, it is really inexcusable, but I was so over being sucked dry by those adorable little leeches. It is a source of constant frustration that Colin will walk all over town next to Tom, but if I am around, he has to be physically attached to me. The others did it too, as if I was a source of electricity they had to be plugged into to feel okay about life in general. I stare in wonder as moms walk around malls and playgrounds like normal people with their offspring happily walking behind them. How do they do that? I marvel as I lug Colin along. 

But for all I complain, I realized the other night as he was entertaining us with yet another one of his funny stories that no one surprises me, delights me and causes me to laugh out loud as much as Colin. He is a riot — a heavy, clinging, stroller- hating laugh riot, and as soon as I realized this, all else was forgiven. The screaming car rides, the refusal to eat, the smearing of ketchup all over the radiator.

All of that can be erased with one deep belly laugh.

This friend asked me:

“So, you do your kids homework with them, right?”

I laughed, hard. “What ever gave you that idea?

She dug into her dessert. “You’re a teacher, education is important to you, blah, blah, blah.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said to her. “Did your parents hang around while you did homework?”

Now it was her turn to laugh. “No way.”

“Neither did mine. And we turned out okay.”

“Yeah, but the world is more competitive now, there are lots of driven kids competing for the same spots.”

I stopped eating. “You’re not worried about where your kids are going to college, are you?”

“Sort of.”

“Do they have learning issues?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So, why are you worried?”

“I don’t know. It just feels like there’s more I could be doing to, you know, help them.”

“If 2/3 of the class gets the homework wrong, the teacher knows that unit has to be taught differently; if all the parents correct it at home, and the kid bombs the test during school, whose fault is it? I gotta tell you, even now and then I get a student who really shouldn’t be at my university and it is heartbreaking. You just know they were pulled and pushed out of their ability level, and now that they don’t have mom and dad to help them every day, they crash and burn.”

She wasn’t buying it. “But if you just let the kids do it their way, aren’t you limiting their opportunities?”

I looked at her. “It isn’t like we live in the Himalaya. Don’t give into the fear.  It’ll never be enough, no matter what you do –they’ll always be another class you can sign her up for, more studying, more practice sessions — and all that is saying is, you are not enough. Nothing is ever enough. And that isn’t the message I want my kids to have.”

She looked out the window, then nodded. “If I had a dime for everyone I know that says, ‘I have a great life, but something is missing.’”