The other side of the sweet side

[image error]Checking my e-mail before bed the other night, I found a note from an online friend.  She is a reader I've never met, a fellow mom and blogger with whom I've corresponded a bit over the last year.  I read her posts, she reads mine, and in the process we've come to know one another as well as two simpatico strangers can. 

"I just had to tell you that your blog post this week was just what I needed." she wrote. "I so dread the days my kids are 'off at college' and you showed me the sweet side, the coming home and basking in them part."

I thought about the words I'd written in a rush on the morning before Thanksgiving.  Sometimes, I spend all day just getting a few paragraphs to sound right.  But that day, with both of my sons still asleep upstairs and just an hour to spend at my kitchen table before we needed to be out the door and on our way to an orthodontic appointment, I wrote quickly, a spill of words that captured all I was feeling at that very moment--acceptance of who they are and gratitude that they were home, along with a touch of surprise at how easy things can seem these days, compared to where we were two years ago, in the midst of a younger son's adolescent struggles.  

My friend went on to say that she had wept into her pillow the night before, mourning the transformation of her sweet seventeen-year-old-son, "the treasure of my heart," into "what I hope is a temporary self-absorbed ogre."  

I wrote her back to say something like, "Hang in there, it gets better."  And it does.  But her letter also made me think about the snapshot of our life that I'd offered the world a few days earlier.  Those of us who write memoir (or blogs) know that what finds its way onto the page or into the post is not ever the whole story.  It may be true, but it is also, inevitably, a curated version of the truth, a version that is edited for style and impact, narrated in order to make a point and tell a story, condensed for readability, censored, perhaps, for privacy.  I had written about a fleeting moment in time, words straight from the heart for sure, but words that evoked only the tiniest corner of a bigger picture.  

And just as tears soaking a pillow is not my friend's typical response to a hard day of motherhood, neither is rhapsodic domestic harmony an accurate picture of mine.   Things just aren't that simple around here, or anywhere, for that matter. 

Again and again and again, I'm reminded that my work as a parent -- and as a person -- is mostly about letting go of my ideas of the way I want things to be so that I work with things as they actually are.  Certainly boarding school was never part of our plan for either of our children, and yet there came a moment when my husband and I both knew that the best thing for our younger son was not another dismal year at the public school in our town -- much as he insisted he wanted to stay there with his friends, and much as I yearned for two more years of him at home.  Letting go of my idea of what it meant to be a "good" mother (a picture that included a happy, hardworking teenager living at home and participating cheerfully in family life)  was almost easy, compared to the pain of actually letting go of the boy himself.  For two months I cried every day as the school bus he used to take drove past our house in the afternoon without stopping.  I avoided downtown at 3, when all the high schoolers could be found hanging out.  I skipped over the sports pages in the newspaper, unable to read about his former team mates' exploits on field and court. I mourned the loss of the lovable little boy who had turned into a self-absorbed, angry adolescent I no longer recognized, and I mourned my failure to live up to my own high expectations of myself as a mother. 

But slowly the teenager who had claimed not to care about going go college, who had forgotten the joy of sports and the pleasure of a good book, who said he just wanted to be "another brick in the wall," began to get his mojo back.  Away from home, suddenly accountable to adults other than his parents, he ran cross-country and got excited about math; he took up squash with a passion and figured out how to take notes, turn in his homework on time, and go to his teachers for help.  He won some awards and also made some mistakes, weathered the consequences, and realized how much he'd come to love his new school.  He started investing in his future by making good decisions in the present.   

And slowly, I eased up on myself.  I began to think that being a "good" mom isn't necessarily about preserving an ideal that doesn't exist anyway, but rather about being realistic about what our children actually need from us in any given moment. Sometimes what they need most of all is for us to let go of our image of the way things ought to be, so that we can love life as it is, love our children for who they are, and love ourselves simply for doing the best we can.  

Last week was far from perfect at our house.  There wasn't enough "family" time, in my opinion (there never is!); there was way too much computer time, too many late nights and late mornings, too much junk food, a few sharp words and hurt feelings.  And yet, in our own ways, we were all doing the best we could.   We managed a few fires in the fireplace, a game of Bananagrams, a Thanksgiving feast for forty at my parents' old house in the woods, a festive family birthday dinner for Jack, and an afternoon at the new wing of the MFA in Boston. We saw friends and tended to haircuts and dental work, and we debated, among other things, curfews and sleep-overs and car keys, whether pot should be legalized, how many times I should have to walk into a dirty kitchen on a given day, the fact that someone failed to turn down the heat and turn off the lights at the end of the night. Our days were full of one another, for better and for worse. I watched Jack make pancakes and listened to Henry play the piano, and I reminded myself to focus on all that was good.  To be grateful, and to release my old grip on regret, regret for what never really was, for what isn't now, and for what never will be again. 

Family life is never just one way or another, good or bad, black or white, peaceful or tense, happy or sad.  It just is -- messy and complicated and wonderful and disappointing and exhilarating by turn.  There are no charmed lives or perfect children or flawless families, and yet there are charmed moments in every day, and all of our kids are perfect, each in their own blessedly imperfect way, and most of us wouldn't trade our own flawed family for any other family, no matter what.  Yes, my friend, it does get better.  It gets better the very moment that we allow ourselves to be ok with things just as they are.