LOVE DOESN’T MEAN HAVING TO JOIN THE PTA

I don’t know of many changes as drastic as that from the kind of parent you think you will be when you are a kid to the kind of parent you choose to be once you actually become one.

Since the shadow of my mother hangs over this blog as well as me, there is no way not to bring her into discussions such as this.

Since I now travel through my adulthood trying to decode myself and my own behavior while looking at the behavior of those who raised me and connecting the dots, my mother always seems to appear.

Like many kids, I vowed I was going to do so many things differently than how my mother did them. It’s a very easy position to take; judging those who are giving while you are assuming what you may need or want.

While we don’t speak anymore, as everyone who reads this knows, she was a good mother in many ways.  She made mistakes, we all do. She was more of a friend than mother, as caretaking was not part of her make-up, but I don’t question that while she doesn’t love me now, she loved me then and I think in her way she did the best she knew how. And it wasn’t all bad by any stretch of the imagination. It was creative and it was unorthodox and it was her.

In fact there is nothing that really holds over now from then, the problems are all stuff that came later. And if damage was done to my psyche as a child it was more from my father’s neglect and my mother’s hatred of him than my mother’s personal agenda.

In fact, if I am to be honest, I went on to get divorced and while I think I have done a better job than they did, and I still try in many ways, no one is going to give me any Best Divorced Person of the Decade award. None of it is easy and while we all don’t always do the best we can, we do the best we can muster in that moment.  I don’t think most parents’ intent is to inflict harm on their children. The fact is, it happens, but that’s another blog or twelve.

But when I was a kid I remember promising myself all the things I would do once I became a mom.  One was that when I grew up I would eat candy every day. I would buy candy whenever I saw it and enjoy it and more importantly I would buy it for my kids who would be able to eat it whenever they so desired.

My mother, like many women including myself, watched her weight and did not eat candy. From the childhood perspective I could not understand going to the market where all the candy in the world was available and pushing your cart right past it. Though when one reads it now it sounds silly, like many things, from a kid’s perspective it made perfect sense then.

I was also going to breastfeed my kids, I made this claim later when I found out she hadn’t and that it somehow meant something.

Well, like the candy when the time came I followed my mother’s lead and abandoned the whole concept immediately. I pushed my empty cart past the breastfeeding section and like me, my kids survived.

I also vowed to be involved in all things that had to do with my children’s school. I was going to join the PTA, be a room mom, hang out with other moms, make cookies and Halloween costumes.

My mother did none of those things and somewhere I translated that into thinking she didn’t love me as much as the moms who were doing it. It’s not that I doubted she loved me, but she didn’t love doing those things that had to do with certain parts of my childhood life and from a kid’s POV that means you don’t love them as much. It’s not true, but it can feel that way.

In its own way it’s like the candy, but I didn’t see that then.

She did other things with me and took me everywhere with her– sometimes a good idea, sometimes not (says the women who took her kid to see Lady Gaga).

But she did not love the PTA. She did not love other moms for the most part.

She was interested in Saving Venice, not the Vieja Valley cafeteria. Looking at it today, I can’t blame her: I feel exactly the same way.

I’m more interested in helping the slum school I’m involved with in Mumbai than I am in Lucy’s private school in Manhattan, but that has nothing to do with my feelings for Lucy.

Several years ago Lucy told me in no uncertain terms that when she was a mom she was not going to work. And her children would grow up never, ever, ever being in the same room with a babysitter.  The subtext is pretty easy to read there.

“I am not going to be a working mom like you, who  leaves her adorable child, me, with babysitters so you can go out and do whatever it is you do that is more important to you than me.”

That is how she read the situation and one can understand her interpretation.

It didn’t guilt me into not working any more than my desire for my mother to go to PTA meetings over Save Venice ones changed her policy.

I understood what she was saying, but I also understood that time and age would more than likely change her feelings.

Last time I asked her where she would live when she grew up she said, “Wherever my job takes me”. Knowing Lucy I have a feeling her kids will meet a babysitter or two and I will end up with them from time to time.

Oddly, Taylor, who is needier of me than Lucy in other ways, always liked the fact I worked and felt working moms were much better than the ones who were always at home and in your face. I think she thought I was so focused on her already, god only knows what would happen if I didn’t have the diversion of a job.

But by the time Lucy came along, I had another marriage, another child and my career took me three thousand miles away at least every six weeks.

So she probably got more babysitter time than Taylor and came up with her theory of perfect parenting: it was the opposite of what she was getting.

The point of all this is twofold: we really don’t know how we are going to feel when we grow up and it’s often times very different than what we thought decades before. And there is no such thing as perfect parenting.

But unlike our parents we live in this age where people actually think there is and if you don’t fit into their mold of what a perfect parent should be than you are somehow truly falling down on the job.

I love my girls very much. Like most parents I would throw myself in front of a train to save them, but there are things I don’t like doing that fall under the good parent umbrella.

I HATE all things that have to do with school or homework or hanging out with people whom I haven’t selected.

I have never been to one annual auction meeting– well, OK when Taylor was at John Thomas Dye I made a stab at it. But after two years I quickly abandoned it, as there were so many moms so much better and more involved than I was. I realized there were better ways for me to spend my time and better ways for me to show my love to Taylor.

The reason I’m talking about this is that I’m not alone here. Just as my mom felt this way back then there are many parents who feel this way now. And I am one of them.

But the biggest difference is since we are now in the age of super parents we are supposed to be thrilled by every note on the recorder, every scribble on the page and every lap in the pool. The hand-held camcorder and video cell phone has only added to this obsessive behavior by allowing kids to feel that their every move is not only worthy but part of a Lifetime documentary.

And as we learned in Lucky Ducks this is not necessarily good for kids.  If taken to the extreme it can make them feel like the Prince or Princess Regent and only add to a type of narcissism and dependency that will not serve them well in later years. In fact, studies show it makes them anxious and unable to be independent as soon as they are left a little more to their own devices.
But we are not allowed to admit it because that would make us even worse parents, especially in the eyes of all those people working overtime on school projects and doing homework and showing up for everything no matter what it is.

During my childhood parents were not judged on the same terms they are today. If my mother preferred Save Venice nobody really cared, except me and I got over it.  She showed up at school if I did something like a play and she worked for one hour at the school fair because I think she had to.

This is pretty much the way I have taken to parenting as well. I show up when it really matters or when I think matters to her. But the other stuff?

When did homework become a parent’s job?

When I was a kid it was my homework; either I did it and it got done or I opted for Green Acres and it didn’t. But it was my problem. It was my homework. My mother stayed out of it.

Now homework seems to be a family activity.

Look, I didn’t like doing my own homework and was not particularly good at it, why on earth would I want to do Lucy’s?  That’s the truth. It may not be nice, but it’s true.

I love Lucy, but I don’t want to do her long division. I didn’t want to do my own, and at fifty-one after working all day it’s the last thing I’m going to do and if it requires me paying for a shrink in ten years (I don’t think it will) well, so be it.

I forget who said, “No matter how bad life gets as an adult at least there is no homework.”

Who changed the rules? Now we’re supposed to do it.

It’s their homework. I already did mine…sometimes.

Does this make me a terrible mother?  I don’t think so but I’m sure there are people who would pull the lever on yes.

I don’t want to go to parent meetings; not for fairs, not for auctions, not for anything. I’ll send a check but I’m really busy doing other things.  It doesn’t mean I don’t love Lucy; it just means I don’t love groups of women arguing over minutia of centerpieces and paint wheels when I can be writing.

I do go on one field trip a year, I enjoy one – but that’s my limit. Any more and I start to feel put upon and there are so many parents who can’t get enough of it I don’t want to take the pleasure away from them.

Here’s another one: I have no pictures on my fridge. None. Neither did my mom. I don’t remember being upset by that, but I’m a terrible visual artist, I wouldn’t have put my stuff up either.  I put Lucy’s drawings in a book, I save them, I don’t toss them, I just don’t want them hanging all over the house. Does it mean I don’t love her? No– it means I don’t want my kitchen looking crappy.

There is something known as the happy medium. You can do a little and you can do what fits into your lifestyle and you can be attentive to what really matters to them and show up for that. And you can be there for them and listen and make home life as pleasant and lively as possible but you don’t have to turn your entire world over to their every need.

It’s like those people who have babies and turn the living room into a Fisher Price warehouse.

Their toys were always in their rooms. That is why they have rooms, for their things.

But there are things I think are important. I think it’s very important that we sit down and eat like a family every night and I always have.

Now it’s been proven in childhood studies that the kids whose families eat together are better adjusted and have fewer problems.  No one ever said anything about how not hanging their art up makes them feel, I’m hoping fine. But I make the effort and I cook the dinner (most nights) and we sit down. And I use linen and china, and I do the dishes and I plan the meals and for me that is my way of showing I care and that our time together is important.  Better I put the time into that than decoupage a hamburger box or get her an F on her math assignment.

Why all this chatter today about how much is enough?
I think because in this new age of parenting there are so many things we are required to do by the schools and if you don’t do them you are a crummy mummy so you have to show up.

I promise you, I remember, and any of you who went to Laguna try and remember, there were not endless events our parents had to attend. There was the Fall Festival and I think that was pretty much it until senior graduation.

But Lucy’s school– and I love her school– has endless events at odd hours that one must go to: Like this morning.

This morning was not a great morning to begin with because for me the morning actually started at four fifteen when our smoke alarm, which has been misfiring, started chiming at ten-minute intervals. I don’t know how they have changed their torture techniques at Guantanamo but this is one I can highly recommend, as it causes no physical harm, but it does the torture job superbly.

My loving husband somehow slept through it all, but it didn’t matter as while he is immensely talented in many ways, technologically he is a tad retarded and he would have only done what he did when he woke up at seven: called Jim on the desk downstairs and asked for maintenance come up and fix it.

So I was sleep deprived from the start and we had to go downtown and be at Lucy’s school at eight, yes eight, even though school starts at eight-forty five, we had to be there early so we could have them read their reports on the Erie Canal to us in person.

One of the moms I really like, well, I do like most of the moms in her school but my friend Jeanne was the only one who had the balls to email and say this was a silly time to have this and some parents had other kids to get to school and jobs to go to  and couldn’t we all meet up at more civilized hour?

It didn’t work. Not only did we have the report reading there was a breakfast we had to supply.  We all signed up to bring something.  I picked donuts as I knew I could get them at the market and they require no preparation and are light in the tote bag. But then you get the competitive moms and when they see you are taking the easy way out and bringing trans-fatty, sugary killers because you are too damn lazy to put in any effort they write in “Fruit!” The exclamation mark celebrating their attentiveness to all things good like fruit and their very perfect mommyness and digging you for your apparent lack thereof.

Tough. I took my donuts, and let me tell you the table was covered with bought baked goods for the most part. We can’t admit how we feel so the store bought pastries speak for us.

But back to the Erie Canal, a subject I have spent very little of my life thinking about, In fact Glenn had to tell me where it was. I told you I opted for Green Acres.

But they are studying it in her fourth grade class. And they have written these very in-depth reports, but why we had to drag our asses to school at seven-thirty (travel time) to hear them read I will never know. And to make matters worse after we read our own child’s report we were supposed to read the other kids’ reports as well and be enthusiastic– at eight in the morning.

It’s not like they read them to the group, like two months ago when we had to show up to hear them recite the Declaration of Independence, I think it was that or how the judicial system works, one of those. It was an early morning curtain again, that I know. But at least then they performed.  This morning we just went, sat in little chairs and read their papers and their friends’.

Don’t think me mean, why on earth would I want to read six fourth graders’ ten page papers on the Erie Canal at any time much less eight am?  Forget that, why would I ever want to read anyone else’s child’s report on anything? Unless the kid is working as a staff writer for THE NEW YORKER I’m not interested in any kid’s work but my own and it’s presumptuous to think I am and why put me in the position of having to pretend like I’m actually reading it?

But now it’s not enough to be interested in every comma your own kid writes, you’ve got be fascinated by everyone else’s kid’s work too.

I do want to read her report– at home, quietly, maybe with a glass of wine, maybe out loud to Glenn, on my turf on my time. Does that make me a bad mom?

What I’m ranting about is why do they make us do these things all the time? When did this start?
Yes, the kids like you to appreciate their work and I do, I just don’t want to do it for them and I don’t want to have to get up at the crack of dawn and be crammed into a hot room and forced to read other kids’ work while the kids are all on a sugar rush cause the other parents whether they admit it or not have better things to do than cut up pineapple and ball melons so they bring donuts and coffee cake.

And my guess is seventy percent of the people in that room felt the same way but no one has the courage to admit it as they’re afraid it sounds unloving. Well, I’m here to say it doesn’t sound unloving, it sounds logical.
You could tell people weren’t thrilled as when the person who signed up for coffee arrived everyone yelled “COFFEE!” Lucy, who has a brilliant sense of humor and knows me too well, turned to me as I was trying to read the report and said, “I don’t think they have soy milk and I can promise you they don’t have a foamer.”  You gotta love her– and I do.

And then, then they ended this event by all singing a Lady Gaga song. I kid you not. I video-ed that on my Blackberry but I mostly have the back of David Rockwell’s head as he got to the front of the camcorder line and edged me out.

At the end of the day there are many ways to parent and love and let people know that they matter.

Parenting is hard and so is being a kid sometimes, no matter how old you may be. It’s very easy to judge and discredit and proclaim how you would or will do it differently. But life is really lived in the moment and if you can give your kids enough time and good moments to string together self-esteem, a connection to you and to the world; if you can teach them to be themselves and that although they may make choices that may sometimes go against the “group,”  they are loved by you as themselves and in turn will find others in the world to see that specialness too then I say screw the PTA if it’s not your thing,  and the same with homework.