Maternal Dementia

I’m still getting used to the new fry pans. Since we swore off Teflon, I’ve yet to get the right balance of butter and heat and pancake batter to avoid filling the kitchen with smoke. Yesterday’s breakfast preparation elicited the high-pitched scream of our smoke detector. All heads bolted up, eyes rounded. De-facto knew it was the smoke from the stove but surveyed the apartment anyway and then reached up with his long arms to reset the alarm.

As the girls turned back to their syrupy plates, he said, “What if it had been a real fire? What would you have done?”

“Get low and go!” Short-pants and Buddy-roo shouted in unison. This from a Sesame Street book featuring Elmo and several fire-fighters which was conveniently in favor a few years ago, helping us to teach the girls about fire safety.

“Right. You get low,” De-facto said, “and where do you go?”

The girls repeated the instructions that we’ve pounded into them. How they need to call out loud for mama and papa and bang on the bedroom door (if it’s at night) to wake us up. How on the way out the door, they should bang on our neighbors’ doors and shout out to them on their way down the stairs and out to the meeting place down the street.

“Good,” De-facto said, “but don’t spend too much time banging on doors for mama or the neighbors, just enough to alert them. You want to get out of the building as fast as you can.”

He’s right, I know, though it feels a bit heartless, the way he says it, that they would leave me to burn in my sleep.

“Yes, but if the fire is in the hall and we can’t get out the door, we should climb out on the roof!” Buddy-roo says this every time we run through this drill, and every time I’m sure my head jerks toward her with big wide eyes.

I shudder to think of her and Short-pants pushing themselves out on to our roof, which is sloped at a serious diagonal angle. It’s nearly impossible to traverse it. I know, having done so when I was without keys and crawled out of our neighbor’s window and, in my bare feet to keep a grip, inched along the roof to the open window of our locked apartment. I’d give them two steps on that roof before they’d slide down and over the gutter, falling four stories to the cobblestone street.

Short-pants recognized my alarm.

“But that’s a last resort!” she said, to assure me.

“And only if the fireman are there with a ladder, and with a trampoline,” added Buddy-roo.

To say that I’m terrified is too strong, but I’m seriously concerned that in the event of a fire, the two of them would panic and climb out on the roof right away, or that when they’re a wee bit older and lot more daring they’ll try it just for kicks. I always make the big pronouncement about how it really is a last, last, last resort, and only if there’s no other way out, and ideally with the fire department there to help them. I picture one of those blue-uniformed French Pompier – and they are uniformly buff – carrying the girls down the extended ladder. I’d absolutely crawl out on the roof in my nightgown if one of them were waiting to rescue me. If there was time, I’d even change into that sexy little silk number first.

“You only go out on the roof is if there’s really no other choice,” I said.

The girls returned to their breakfast, the kitchen silent except for the sound of their cutlery on the plates and the thought-absorbed chewing of pancakes.

Until Buddy-roo burst into tears: “I don’t want to be without any parents.”

I moved to where she was seated, already big fat teardrops were sliding down her reddened cheeks. I told her I don’t want her to be without parents either, and that the chance of a fire in our apartment is very slim and it would be very unlikely that her Papa and I woudn’t smell the smoke and we’d all go out the door and down to the street together. She slid off her chair and threw her arms around my neck in a fierce hug. I could feel her wet tears on my shoulder.

What I wanted to say to her was, “Don’t worry you’re not going to be left without any parents.” But I can’t really promise that. We all know someone who’s fighting a disease they didn’t expect to get in the middle of their life. The busses in Paris run fast down their designated lanes, I could be hit by one at any time. A tragic or poignant disappearance is, in fact, always at hand. I don’t need to dwell on it, but I can’t hide it from her, either.

So I didn’t say anything. I just rocked her back and forth without words, feeling her against me, her little heart beating, alive, just like mine. Then she loosened her embrace and let go and turned back to her empty plate, and asked for another pancake.

Try as I may to let our upstairs be the wild and creative universe of my children, eventually I reach a point when I can no longer endure the disorder. This is usually prompted by a predictable chain of events: Buddy-roo dilly-dallies through breakfast, and the absolute last time of departure (ALTD) to get to school on time is fast approaching so I volunteer to go up to her room and select an outfit. “Pants or a dress?” I pretend this is a fun errand. Upstairs I’m appalled at the clutter that collects in just a few days since it was last in a reasonably tidy state. “It’s okay, they’re being creative,” I say to myself, closing the drawers left wide open and snatching Short-pants’ eyeglasses up off the floor, barely managing not to flatten them, instead stepping on some tiny piece of plastic, an umbrella shaped thing that came home in the favor-bag from a birthday party. It smarts, a lot. I lose it. Get up here now and pick up your rooms! All the reasoning and thoughtful discussions go out the window. So much for being the ideal parent. But sometimes it just feels good to holler.

The results of the first trimester bilans come home. Buddy-roo’s scores are all over the board. Even Short-pants, who actually enjoys doing her homework, has inconsistent grades. I smile at anything equal to or above a score of 8/10. I try not to overreact to that glaring 5/10. I ask her how she feels about it. “I’m not that strong at geography,” she says.

I’m torn. I want to inspire her to try harder, do better. Another part of me remembers a consultant I worked with in my earliest career, Don Clifton was his name, talking about how good leaders were rarely straight-A students; they only excelled in the subjects in which they had strengths or that they felt were important. In other words, they prioritized.

We talk about how to do better in geography and I try not to harp on it. A final summary sentence about how hard she’s worked and how that really paid off with her grades. “Except that one,” I say. (But not out loud.)

I don’t want to pressure my kids to get everything right all the time. But is this a question of individual strengths and preferences or is it just plain lack of trying? It might be that she just got lazy – sometimes that’s all it is – and being reminded might help her do better the next time.

On the other hand, maybe she’s just not that strong at geography.

Buddy-roo can recite by heart entire passages from the movie Hello Dolly, or sing the most obscure song from On the Town without any practice. But ask her to conjugate the verb être, even though we’ve been over it a million times, she still can’t remember the six forms of the present tense without making a mistake. I don’t want to beat her up. But I know she can do it.

What’s the right balance of supporting and challenging your children? How do I inspire them to try to perform well – and take pride in their work – without thrusting upon them the stress of being a perfectionist?

I’m sure I make things more complicated than they need to be. My parents had no apparent angst about how to respond to my report card. Good grades were expected. If you got a B, it was met with a raised eyebrow. Getting a C was grounds for a discussion; you were called in to the living room and seated at the square card table. My parents were never cruel or harsh, and yet we lived in mild fear of disappointing them, and this was what you realized you’d done if you were called in to sit at that table. Would a psychologist today find fault in the way they held us to their standards? Maybe. But they weren’t trying to be perfect parents. They were trying to be good parents.

I sit in judgment of messy bedrooms or inconsistent grades, but what about me? Do I get it all right, all the time? Consider the piles of files and papers stashed in shelves in our office, I mean to sort through them but somehow never get to it. My taxes are never turned in without at least filing for one extension. I ran a workshop yesterday and it went well, but it was far from flawless. I’ve been writing a post about procrastination – for another blog I write with my colleagues – for three months now. (This is not even ironic anymore, it’s pathetic.)

I signed up for the NaNoWriMo challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November – ambitious if you’re composing a novel from scratch, but the last unfinished chapters of my novel are already outlined, which ought to make the job easier. I started with great fervor, overshooting the suggested daily goal by a few hundred words each day in anticipation of the mid-month business travel that would interrupt the daily exercise. That trip set me back several thousand words, and when I returned home I was bombarded with things not attended to in my absence. I knew I shouldn’t let it stop me, but once I was 10,000 words behind it was too overwhelming. So that novel I’ve been writing for seven years, it’s still not done.

Oh, guess what? I’m human.

As a mother, I’m compelled to fend off the idealized image of motherhood (this is the point of my unfinished book by the way), which has made us a generation of parents that over-protects and over-provides. Our children, in turn, are under pressure to be the perfect children, to have dabbled in all the right extracurricular activities, to get the best scores, to be popular and social and yet independent and self-possessed. To go to the right school, the one most likely to help you get into the next right school. This all horrifies me, having grown up in a generation that did not study for SATs – they were aptitude tests, after all – and I’m fatigued just thinking about what’s ahead for the girls as they grow into young women hoping to find their place in the world.

(And yet I hope is that they will do well – in school and in life – so that they’ll have more choices when it comes to finding their place in this world.)

There is the adage, one I’ve subscribed to in theory but perhaps not in practice, that if you’re going to do something, do it well or not at all. The inclination to cross every t and dot every i and put your best work forward isn’t necessarily a bad thing – until it becomes compulsive and restrictive. Sometimes it’s just fine to be good enough, to let them be the messy, dreamy kids that they are, and to be the mother who does her best while juggling a lot, which sometimes means raising my voice or losing my temper. Besides, sometimes it just feels good to holler.

De-facto was bringing home the bacon this week. He got an assignment in London, which means I’ve been flying solo with the girls for a few days. In the old days, I’d have hired the babysitter for a few extra hours, just to cushion the full-on press. But these are the new days. Work isn’t exactly streaming in, and like everyone else, we’re feeling the weight of this bleak economic climate. So I was on my own.

This is not a severe hardship. But as any parent will attest – and let me express the extreme awe I have for single parents for whom this is business as usual – being the lone adult with little kids can wear you down. When there’s nobody to whom you can hand off the baton, even for just ten minutes here and there, nerves get frayed.

This morning, the three-ring circus that is our breakfast routine was running a bit behind schedule. I knew I needed to pick up the pace or we’d get derailed and never get to school on time. But children are wired with an innate contrary metronome. When they sense that you want to speed up, they slow down. Buddy-roo chewed her pancakes in slow motion. I rushed Short-pants upstairs to get dressed.

The first mistake I made was asking her what she wanted to wear. I’m of two mindsets on this. De-facto thinks they don’t have enough choices in their little lives, so he’s always creating some: “Do you want apple juice or milk?” or “You can go to bed now and I’ll read you a story, or you can stay up for 10 more minutes but then there’s no story.” I understand his reasoning, but I don’t always follow it. I think limits are a good thing and this is sometimes best expressed in the form of one firm option. And yet despite the rush of the morning, I offered her the choice.

“Do you want to wear a dress or pants?”
“A dress,” she answered, pointing to her pink striped one, “this one.”
It was draped over the wicker toy chest, where she’d left it last night when she took it off to put on her pajamas.
“You could wear that one,” I answered, my voice conveying disapproval, “but you wore it yesterday.”
“I can wear it again,” she said, “please?”
“It’s dirty,” I said.
“No it’s not,” she said.
“I’d really rather you wear a different dress,” I said, “how about the red one?”
“No,” she said, “this one.”

We went back and forth like this a few times. The more I cajoled, the more she insisted. We were at an impasse. I was getting angry and she was nearly crying. And then I said it: “If you wear the same dress two days in a row, everybody might make fun of you.” She burst into tears.

Why on earth did I say that? If she wants to wear the damn dress two days in row, if that makes her happy, who cares? And so what if the kids at school make fun of her? And who says they will? And why am I planting this fear in her little 7-year old head? Like, who’s issue is that?

Parenting is the most transparent form of therapy.

Later, Short-pants sat at the table, wearing the pink striped dress, finishing her pancakes. I’d sent Buddy-roo upstairs to get dressed. “Wear whatever the hell you want,” I said. (Not out loud, though.)

Short-pants was bravely trying to pull herself together, but having a hard time swallowing because she kept re-erupting in to tears.

“Usually people don’t make fun of me,” she said between sniffles.
“I know,” I said.

I wrapped my arms around her narrow frame and pulled her close. We held this embrace, longer than the usual hug.

Our responses to life’s little events can be so automatic. This comment about kids making fun of her, perhaps it’s a reflection from my childhood, or maybe it’s my worst fear for hers. It was a reflex; I blurted it out. But what she heard must get filed away somewhere in her consciousness. Is it ever forgotten? Maybe if I’m vigilant not to reinforce it, this little seed of self-doubt will slip away, a one-off remark lost in a sea of a thousand other more positive, esteem-building sentences I’ll repeat over the course of her emotional development. Twenty years from now, sorting through my blog archives, she’ll read this post with no recollection of our exchange this morning. But will the residue remain?

Whether we mean to or not, we hand our fears and prejudices to the next generation. The reinforcement of a belief from parent to child is tangible; it is the source of cultural pride and heritage, but also the reason for hate crimes and religious wars. It has funded the psychiatric industry for decades.

But I guess we’re only human, bouncing and bounding off the things that happen to us in our lives, doing the best we can, and (hopefully) wearing whatever we feel like wearing.

It’s not my style to go overboard on parenting websites and mom blogs, but one of the handful I read is called Mommy Confessions. What I love most about this blog is its tag line: Preparing children for therapy since 2001.

You can say that again.