notes to self
Mama Lovin
I know it’s astonishing to get another blog entry in Notes to Self so rapidly, but this is largely written by my sister Dwyer. And it’s Annie’s twentieth birthday today, so I wanted to send her some mama lovin.
We had a family reunion in Maine last weekend and Dwyer read me something she’d recently written. Every summer for the past fifteen years, her family has visited mine at the beach. Her girls are younger than mine; only our two youngest daughters are the same age. So she had a bird’s eye view of Lily and Annie’s teenage years and as you will see, she was watching closely.
Why do I always think of separation from my children at the lake? Each year when we come here my children are taller, stronger, more independent, more knowing. Today Hayden will swim across the lake with Chris as she has for the last few years. Last night, Brynn and I had our “camp talk” – as we have most every summer. This time it’s about going into High School as a freshman. How did we get here? I know it was only yesterday that I held her little body safe in a yellow lifejacket as Daddy sped across the lake. Brynn is worried about not knowing what to do her first day – how to “be”. Another day I will worry about how she’ll “do” – today I’ll just enjoy the time we spent together on my bed.
My sister Donna taught me this. We visit her family every summer. Her house was always a hive of activitiy – two teenage girls with a “posse” of friends draped over the oversized couches in the great room. Tennis, art classes, and working at local shops kept her oldest girls busy – leaving Tally, the youngest, to join Brynn at the hip and play pranks on Hayden.
Donna, clearly queen of the hive, would be on the phone, scheduling more activities, talking with her friends, rearranging items on the coffee table, and telling her girls to pickup their wet bathing suits again with a mix of exasperation and humor.
And then there would be a lull in the hive. Friends running home to get bathing suits, money, books for the beach, would leave an empty space on the white couches that would draw Donna in to flop down “simply exhausted”. Even in her “exhaustion” Donna is still blonde, elegant, and articulate.
The lull would bring out one of her girls. I would watch the same young woman who had just snapped at her mother with that odd blend of adult annoyance and teenage tone drift by Donna and collapse on the same couch. My sister would open her arms without awareness, change her body angle just enough for her daughter to know that it was okay to come home – and this beautiful teenage girl, all legs and tan, would flow into her mother’s arms and rest.
My sister would pet and smooth her daughter with her hands and her attention. Donna, the ultimate multi-tasker, would drop everything to pay complete and utter attention to her daughter. It was as if everyone else had become invisible and it was just the two of them, alone and together. She even has a name for this time – Donna calls it “mama love.”
I remember watching the two of them wrapped up in each other. My girls were younger and had different demands – so that all I wanted was a moment of peace, a minute to myself without kids pulling on me.
Last night when I was trying to carve out a moment of stillness in the chaotic camp by reading alone in my room – my daughter Brynn crept in – and I gave her “Mama love.”
I love this story, and not just because it’s beautifully written and it makes me look good. Dwyer brings back those summers so vividly I can almost touch them, and believe me, I wish I could. I would grab them so tightly they would never get away from me again.
Those beautiful teenagers are mostly gone now. They come back for an occasional weekend, the house fills up with their friends, and I am once again in my element, happy in the hive. But more often, the house is quiet and (how I longed for this for so many years), neat. So neat. I used to say that I’d spent the entire summer washing wet towels retrieved from the floor, or better yet, the bed. Now they sit in orderly rows in the closet, arranged by size and color, undisturbed by impatient hands.
So my opportunities for mama lovin aren’t what they used to be. Our youngest daughter is still at home, but I suspect she suffers from too much mama lovin. I’m always focused on her. Her older sisters don’t need or want much of my undivided attention anymore. My husband occasionally needs to remind me that this means we did a good job, but on the whole, I recognize it’s as it should be.
Sometimes, like little homing pigeons, they return home for refueling. Last week Annie called every day. Each call was brief, nothing deeply troubling, just a series of small problems at school. Finally on Friday, she let out a deep sigh and said, “ I think I just need some mama lovin.”
Mama lovin. Grab it while you can.
Fantasy Parenting
I had a fantasy parenting moment recently. Destined to disappoint, fantasy parenting is the New Year’s Eve of parenting. We are all vulnerable it, though I hear about fantasy parenting more from women then men. That may just reflect the fact I have more women in my practice. Or it may be because (generally speaking) most mothers are still more likely to have exacting “good” parent fantasies than most fathers. Lucky men. For whatever the gender breakdown, fantasy parenting develops from the same source; those.. well.. fantasies that we all have about what ideal parenting looks like.
In it’s most benign form, fantasy parenting is a like a lovely daydream you hope happens. More commonly, and considerably less benignly, you decide to make your fantasy come true. (Note to self: Google definition of “fantasy”. Pay attention).The intrinsic inequality of the parent-child relationship actually gives you a shot at this, or at least the initial stages. But as in any instance where a vision is unilaterally imposed, fantasy parenting almost always produces disastrous results. As illustration, I offer the following cautionary tale.
A late August evening at the beach, beautiful sunset and sky. It was our last family dinner together before my older two daughters returned to college. We had a scattered summer; my older two daughters had internships and jobs in New York, and planned their vacation time in August independently. No one realized that we wouldn’t all overlap until the end of the summer, when we hadn’t. (Note to Self: probably okay to exert a little more control over the schedule next summer). So on the last weekend we were all together, I was decided it was imperative that we all ”reconnect”. I envisioned a long, lazy candlelit family dinner, filled with laughter and catching up under the stars. Inspired by my vision, I set the stage, dragging a table into the garden, pulling out pillows, tablecloth, and candles, and scattering lanterns in the trees.
Unfortunately, I neglected to share my vision with my family. I doubt it would have changed anything if I had, but advance notice generally prompts more cooperation, at least from my husband. As it was, he was unpleasantly surprised to discovery that we were eating in the garden when it was 94 degrees outside. Annie hates to eat outside under any circumstances. She likes to see her food. She objected immediately, muttering darkly about my “mania for candles”. Lily had slept for a total of four hours the previous the three days. She wanted to order in and have a Law and Order marathon in front of the TV. I can’t even remember what our youngest daughter Tally wanted to do, but I airily dismissed all objections, promising, “It will be fun” (Note to Self: You know so much better than this).
Ensconced in the garden, Lily enthusiastically filled us in on her last week of work. Perched in her favorite dining position, one leg up on her chair, arms on her knees, she leaned forward repeatedly to make her point. I decided to let it go for the evening, in the interest of family harmony. Unfortunately, this repeatedly brought her elbows into contact with Annie, who has never understood why Lily has to sit like a cat. After the fourth jab, she elbowed Lily back, and asked her if she was ever going to stop talking.
Lily looked hurt, momentarily silenced. Annie charged into the breach, describing her favorite course at college, gender and sexuality. This involved a spectacularly inappropriate level of detail, even by our standards. I interrupted Annie with a loud ” Annabel!!”, surprising her, and no doubt disappointing Tally, who had been listening attentively. Lily seized this opportunity to reclaim the floor.
One of our few strict family rules is “no interrupting.” Otherwise no one would ever finish a sentence. But Lily and Annie have become used to life at college, which evidently involves interrupting. And I’ve become accustomed to hearing Tally’s voice at dinner. These days, it’s usually just the three of us. With her conversational alpha dog sisters around, Tally slipped back into her previous family role of intent observation. I think she was probably quite happy there, or in any event, happier than she was after I leapt into action. As Lily embarked upon another tale, I interrupted her, determined to give Tally a chance to speak. ”Tally, what do you think about that?,” I asked.
My first attempt was unremarkable, but by the third or fourth, Lily turned to me in exasperation and asked, “Why do you keep interrupting me?” Tally shot me a beseeching ” Why are you doing this to me?” look across the table, and Annie gave me her special “You are such a shrink” scowl, while stealing her sister’s tomatoes with her fingers, a habit of her that drives me INSANE. My husband raised his eyebrows, code for; “I like to save you from yourself but you may be too far out on that limb already.”
At least Sophie didn’t bite anyone.
Ahhh..fantasy parenting moments. When in the grip of one, it’s almost impossible to imagine 1) that everyone doesn’t your vision, and 2) that you aren’t “right”. Possibly I should put those two points in reverse order, because as I look back on this story with the benefit of hindsight, what I remember most clearly was my utter conviction that “reconnection” was important for not just me, but everyone. This imperative offered no room for what I now suspect was Lily and Annie’s need to reclaim their place in the family, not to mention sleep. And it completely subsumed Tally’s right to a little…umm.. privacy.
In other words, it’s pretty much the opposite of reflective parenting. And it is the enemy of real parenting; the dinner we might have had, the moments we missed while I tried to force everyone to behave as they should, according to my vision of “reconnection.” As my friend Inge would say, when it comes to parenting, “Le mieux est l’enhemie du BIEN.”
The best is the enemy of the good.
Letting dogs be dogs
Sometimes you have to love the male mind.
“I need to treat my children more like my dogs.”
This was the subject line of an email I got last week from Nick, a father in a group for parents of young children. I confess to some anxiety before I read further.
On the other hand, Nick has two impeccably behaved Wheaten terriers, Luigi and Vlad. We have Sophie, our impossible bulldog (Note to Self: next time, if there ever is one, consider all the implications of the word BULLdog), an unrepentant criminal. If I treated my children more like I treat my dogs, there’d be a whole lotta shouting going on. But maybe Nick is on to something. It is worth listening further, if only for some advice about dogs.
“Today after group I had a realization. I am able to understand the feelings of my dogs. Without judging their feelings. Without trying to replace their feelings with my own. I don’t counsel the dogs with how I feel or how I think they might more profitably approach a situation. Admittedly, they may be simpler creatures than my kids, but it does seem like a fair lesson to remind myself: I should actually start treating my kids slightly more like I treat my dogs.”
Ahhh.. Nick, how I underestimated you! This is so brilliant I wish I’d said it myself. If we could think of our children more like we think of our dogs, we could stop expecting so much of them. We would still have some expectations, to be sure. We’d like them to develop a deep and loving relationship with us. We would expect that they play well with other dogs. We would hope that they grow out of puppy behavior like.. err.. biting, and learn more mature and appropriate ways of expressing their feelings (maybe Nick can offer some pointers here?).
But we wouldn’t expect that they feel differently than they do. We wouldn’t expect that they could change their feelings to feel more like a cat. We wouldn’t expect them to change their feelings to feel more like us. And as Nick says, we certainly wouldn’t expect them to change their thinking to accommodate our beliefs about the best way to approach a situation.
We could let dogs be dogs.
Of course to do this, we would not only have to give up our expectations of what our children should think and feel, but also our expectations of what we should think and feel. This may actually be the tougher task. We all have fantasies about what it means to be a parent. These are usually formed, at least in part, by our experience of being parented. Often we haven’t thought much about them- they are more likely to be half conscious beliefs developed from childhood experience, and as a result, not entirely reliable. Yet they form our default response to parenting situations, especially the highly charged ones.
They are worth thinking about, these “shoulds” that fuel our parenting. You may discover that some of your expectations of yourself as a parent have little to do with your relationship with your child, and a lot more to do with your relationship with your parents. I am thinking of a story that Nick told in group a few weeks ago. He brought his six-year old son, Oliver, out to dinner with this parents, sisters, nephews and nieces for a big family dinner. Oliver is the youngest grandchild, he was tired, and was the fourth such dinner in a row. In fact, unbeknownst to Nick, he begged not to go.
Nick believes that parenting is a teaching opportunity. This view was formed by his experience as the youngest in an intellectual family of three highly intelligent and articulate children. Nick spent a lot of time sitting quietly at family dinners and listening to conversation that was never adjusted to allow for his participation. As a result, he invites, encourages, and on some level, expects his own children to participate in conversation, which he consciously tries to direct to areas they are interested in.
You can imagine what happened at the family dinner. Oliver was furious that for the fourth night in a row, conversation was not adjusted to allow for his participation. Nick was furious that Oliver couldn’t at least sit quietly, even if he couldn’t speak, as Nick had done for all those years growing up in own family.
However, that’s not what Oliver had been “trained” to do (forgive me for this word Oliver, but I am sticking to the dog metaphor). He expected to participate, not behave. And as Nick reflected on the differences between his son’s experience and his own, he now wonders if his own expectations about parenting, however well intentioned, have put a lot of pressure on Oliver, even at home. After all, as the youngest at the table, there is a big difference between listening to a conversation and being expected to be fully engaged in one.
Believe me, I am still guilty of excessive expectation. From my children, myself, and the limits of job description as a parent. Other than on the athletic field, my husband is far more likely than I to let dogs be dogs; that is, be open to what everybody will be happy actually doing, as opposed to what I imagine we should be doing. And as far as Nick goes, as you can tell, he’s evolving into a highly reflective parent. In fact, I am thinking that next fall, Nick and I could work out an arrangement. He could come to the next group for free, and in return he could take.. oops.. I mean train, Sophie.
Raising a powerful girl means living with one: Lily in New Orleans
Raising a powerful girl means living with one. So says Meg White in Understanding and Raising Girls, a line that made me laugh out loud. LOL, as my daughters would say. My three powerful girls.
This is a story about my oldest daughter Lily in New Orleans. She went there for the Super Bowl (Note to self: Next time check location of Superbowl. Also remember that Super Bowl tickets are hundreds of dollars, so she is unlikely to really go, even if in the same city as Super Bowl). I wasn’t crazy about this idea even when I thought she was actually attending the game. You can imagine how I felt when I (belatedly) discovered that the real purpose of the weekend was one long party in New Orleans. But she is 21, her boyfriend was playing in an exhibition baseball game, and the sponsors paid for their tickets and hotel rooms. There wasn’t much I could do to stop her. Sigh.
This story requires a bit of background, so bear with me. When I entered my doctoral program, I had two young daughters 4 and 6. I was fortunte enough to be at Harvard at the same time that Carol Gilligan, Lyn Brown and Annie Rogers were directing the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. It grew out of Carol’s work on moral development, In a Different Voice, which has been described as “the little book that started a revolution.” (Note to Self: Would a 216 page book have been described as “little” if written by a man?)
I digress. In this book, Carol argued that girls develop differently than boys psychologically. I know. As my daughters would say, duh. This is perfectly obvious to anyone who has ever been or had a girl. But Carol proved it, and at the time (1982), it was truly revolutionary in the field of psychology. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1990’s, the “psychology of women and girls” was an emerging and (for me anyway), inspiring field of study at the Graduate School of Education.
It’s hard to describe how much impact this research had on me. I was transfixed by the developmental trajectory that girl after girl described in Carol’s interviews. Were my daughters also destined to lose their “voice” and self confidence and take their true feelings “underground” during early adolescence? Unfortunately I could recall this experience only too well in my own life. One day in seventh grade (if anyone can hear the words “seventh grade” without shivering, please write in), certain things and people were cool, and other things and people were not cool. I was most definitely in the latter group. The judgement of my peers was swift, powerful and devastatingly effective. I shut up, kept my head down, and tried to fit in. It took me years to unlearn those lessons.
I imagine that boys undergo a similar transition. As the mother of three girls and the sibling of three sisters, I’ve never experienced it first hand. But there is a critical difference between girls and boys during this period in their social and emotional development. When the defining line between acceptable and unacceptable begins to emerge in early adolescence, girls, unlike most boys, can become mean to their friends. The myriad of reasons why this occurs is a subject worthy of another blog (or two), but it produces “relational aggression,” a phenomenon described by both Catherine Steiner-Adair and Rachel Simmons. And anyone in the process of raising a girl recognizes it instantly, whether your girl is a victim or an aggressor. “Frenemies” anyone? ”Mean girls”? “Queen bees”?
One of the effects of relational aggression is to make girls afraid to speak their minds. Who wants to risk telling your true feelings when it could result in being ostracized by your friends? Who wants to risk anything?
I was determined that my daughters avoid both the practice and the experience of relational aggression. The good news is that there are ways to do this. Our daughters have been fortunate enough to attend schools that are equally committed to raising strong, confident, assertive girls, and have designed curriculum to do so. A major goal for educational interventions designed for girls is to teach them how to challenge their friends directly, rather than indirectly. Many girls are afraid that disagreements and disputes mean the end of a relationship. And most girls will go to almost any length to preserve their relationships. Girls can learn that disagreements and disputes strengthen relationships, if done constructively and directly; ” Sarah I don’t like it when you do that?” rather than ” Amy, did you hear what Sarah said to Charlotte about you.” They certainly need to learn how to do this to assume leadership roles in their communities, jobs and relationships.
The bad news is that raising a powerful girl means living with one. There is nothing my daughters will not discuss, debate, challenge and dissect with us. We talk about everything, all (and I do mean ALL) the time. This is frequently exhausting. My husband and I now recognize that we employ a team of world -class litigators, who are kept busy full-time, negotiating with us. Our oldest daughter Lily treats every request from us as an opening offer. Middle daughter Annie would (as I recently exclaimed during an exasperated phone call) argue with Satan if given the chance. Our youngest daughter, trained by masters, shows early promise.
This is the reality of raising powerful girls. As my brilliant friend Catherine says, girls need to identify themselves as leaders in the context of their relationships. Our daughters need to feel effective in their relationships, especially when they become adolescents. Including their relationships with us.
So if you want your daughter to be able to challenge the boy who wants to drive her home drunk, she needs to be able to challenge you. If you want your daughter to be able to assume personal authority in her workplace, she has to be able to do so with you. She needs to practice the skills of challenging, confronting, discussing and disagreeing with you. And sometimes, increasingly as she matures, she has to “win.”
This is incredibly hard to do. But the bottom line is that your daughter needs to become the boss of herself, even in her relationship with you.
So to Lily in New Orleans… While out on Bourbon St., Lily noticed that a table of of men behind her where taking picture of her butt with their iphones. She was wearing “jeggings,” jeans that fit and feel like leggings. There were about five men at the table, aged 45 to 55. (I asked if they had been drinking which shows the level of my ignorance about Superbowl Weekend in New Orleans. Lily said, “What a mother question!”). Lily walked up to them and said, ” Excuse me, I saw you talking pictures of my butt. If you are going to do that, at least you should give me your Mardi Gras beads.” Needless to say, they were stunned.
And embarrassed. Immediately handing over their beads, they began explaining. They were a group of old friends from Texas, having a reunion weekend in New Orleans. One of them, Eric, a lawyer, apologized profusely, saying, ” I promise that I am not a sketchy guy. I don’t normally do this. I have a family and two kids. We are just on a boys weekend, having fun.” I am not exactly sure how everything followed, but Lily joined them, saw pictures of Eric’s children, they bought her a drink and she explained her boyfriend was in a tournament. As she got up to leave, Eric wrote the number of his law firm on a beer coaster, in case “she ever got into trouble and needed a lawyer.”
Lily ran into “the guys” several times over the weekend. They greeted her enthusiastically, asked if Brad had won his game, and chatted some more about New Orleans. Needless to say, they never attempted to take another picture of her butt. Lily said they parted as friends, and weren’t “bad guys.”Nonetheless, she couldn’t wait to tell me the story. I think she was proud of herself, and happy that she had confronted them.
Me too. You go girl.
Bode Miller’s daughter and neuropsychology
My daughter and Annie and several friends from college came to visit last weekend, to “eat good food, sleep and watch the Olympics”. We were all sprawled around the television, full, when Bode Miller won his silver medal for the downhill. He was surrounded by reporters immediately after this victory, one of whom noted that it was his daughter Dacey’s birthday. She asked Bode if he had been inspired by Dacey during his race. I didn’t pay attention to Bode’s response, because I was busy staring speechlessly at Annie, who turned from Bode to ask me, ” Are parents really affected by their children’s moods?”
I can hear you laughing out there in cyberland.
I assured Annie, as well as her friends (who had all tuned in, possibly drawn by the fervor in my voice), that parents were indeed affected by their children’s moods. “Haven’t you ever heard the expression, “You are only as happy as your most miserable child?” I asked. Needless to say, no one was familiar with it. Including my husband. ( He says he is far too preoccupied by my moods. “When Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”) Interesting.
I know, I know, I know.. Annie is a teenager. She is not supposed to wonder how her moods and actions might affect me. She is completely absorbed by the day to day excitement of her first year in college. There’s not a lot of room in her imagination to focus on what I might be thinking. And that’s how it should be. Honestly.
In fact, as Annie herself recently mentioned (Note to self: intro psychology class worth every penny), adolescents brains’ go through extraordinary changes during this time. I just received an email on this subject from Wil Blechman, a rheumatologist who became so fascinated by the human brain that he retired early to study brain development in the first five years of life. I asked him for information about adolescent brain development for Annie, because he has a wonderfully clear and concise way of translating the findings from neuropsychology, which generally speaking, are neither. He sent me an article by Jay Giedd, as well as an Allstate ad, asking; “Why do most 16-year-olds drive like they’re missing a part of their brain?’ The answer, of course? Because they are.
In adolescence, the balance between the limbic system, which is the seat of emotion, and the frontal lobe networks, which regulate emotion and higher level brain integration, shifts. The frontal lobe areas mature later than the limbic system; indeed, MRI’s show that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex area, which regulates “executive function”, (all the decision making, problem solving and “understanding the consequences of one’s actions area”), doesn’t mature until the mid-twenties. As Giedd points out, this harried and late chief executive must struggle to manage both a highly activated emotional system and a body at it’s physical peak. He calls it the “healthy-body, risk-taking brain paradox”. I imagine that scene in every action movie when the terrified-but- heroic passenger is suddenly called upon to fly the plummeting 747.
Now imagine that you are the air traffic controller. This is parenting during adolescence. You are responsible for a giant jet that is just barely aloft, powered by an inexperienced and immature pilot. And he periodically screams at you because he’s frightened. You aren’t in the plane, you can’t see him, you don’t know what he’s doing, and neither does he.
Trying times for reflective parenting! But these are the moments when you really need the skill to see into your child’s mind. Even if only to discern not to take it personally. Most of the time, adolescent behavior is neither directed at, nor the result, of you. Most of the time, your teenager is just as mystified by her behavior as you are. And most of the time, it’s not her fault. In the immortal world of Allstate, she’s missing part of her brain.
Allstate prempted my conclusion. I was planning to end this entry with; “If you think your teenager has suddenly become a completely different person, she has”. So as usual, Annie has the last word. After Bode won his medal and the uproar over her comment died down, we discussed how differently teenagers think in, well, adolescence. Annie said, ” You know, I realize now that a lot of things I thought were real when I was a teenager were just because I was a teenager.” So I forgive her for not being able to read my mind. For now, it’s enough that she can read her own.
Happy birthday Dacey!