Motherhood, The Second OldestProfession (7 page)

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When my son entered the first grade, his teacher asked to see me. She began our meeting by telling me, “He verbalizes during class, periodically engages in excursions up and down the aisle, has no viable goals and seemingly no definitive conception of his role expectations. Peer pressure seems advised at this time.”

“Are you trying to tell me my son is goofing off?"

“I would not have expressed it in the vernacular, but you are correct.”

When he was in the third grade, a teacher at open house opened his folder and announced, “To categorize the problem as simply as I know how, your son has challenged group management techniques, our academic expectations, and our sense of efficacy with his declining attention span, which at this time does not occupy a position of priority.”

I took a shot and figured he was goofing off.

In the fourth grade he was still goofing off, but he was described as “lacking the basic skills of competency and languishing in his academic environment, even though he has not attained his cognitive limits.”

In the sixth grade, I had a long talk with his teacher, who said, “Your son has potential, but is incapable of any viable feedback. You tell me—what are we to do with a child who does not engage in social interaction, does not respond positively to established concepts, and persists in interruptive behavior? I'm sorry to come down so hard, but certainly you can understand the ills and lacunae of contemporary education.”

I didn't even understand good-bye.

In the eighth grade, my husband answered the phone one night and did a lot of nodding. When he hung up, he turned to me and said, “Guess what? Our son is not motivated by curriculum innovation. They're apprehensive about his stagnating in a lock-step system, and they're trying to stimulate his awareness. What do you think it means?”

“I think it means he's goofing off.”

He was in his sophomore year when he was diagnosed as “having problems that indicate behavior modification, perhaps in a modular-flexible schedule on which an aggressive monopolizer would diminish his role and force him' to accept a lesser role in a nonpunitive, restraining, yet pleasant way.”

At the beginning of his senior year, my son's adviser summoned me to her office and said, “Well, it's that time when we have to consider the conundrum, isn't it?” She laughed so I laughed too.

"It's hard to say where the burden for the lack of motivation and apathy lies, but before your son's achievement levels polarize, I thought we should have a little talk.

“Hopefully we can open options so he can realize his potential and aim for some tangible goals. Although accreditation is near at hand, I wanted to emphasize his need for upward mobility if he is to succeed on a postgraduate level.”

On the way out, I leaned over to the secretary and

said, “English! Do you speak English?” She nodded.

“What was she talking about?” “Your son is goofing off,” she said flatly. I don't know if education has helped my son or not,

but it has certainly improved my vocabulary.

What kind of a mother would…

hang up on E.T.?

Dottie

Dottie Fedstrom was a no-nonsense mother who raised her children by the rules.

Dottie Fedstrom made the Marine Corps look like an exercise in Show and Tell.

She was born to mother. She had hands like thermometers, two sets of eyes that could look through doors and tell at a glance when a child was constipated or lying. She had a nose that could smell chocolate on the breath of a child in another state with his head buried in a pillow.

Dottie had six daughters. She called them The Gang. She bought them white socks (one size fits all) and brown oxfords which were passed down from one sister to the next. Once she bought two bolts of navy corduroy and made each of them a jumper and had enough left over to make drapes and spreads for their bedrooms. (As one of her daughters observed, if you didn't smile, she wouldn't know if you were in your room or not.)

If one daughter wanted oatmeal for breakfast, they all got oatmeal. If one got the measles, Dottie made sure they all got them. If the first to get a watch lost hers, then none of the others would be trusted with one.

Whether they were twenty or two, they all had the same curfew and the same allowance, and got the same doll, the same sweater, album, and hair dryer for Christmas. Dottie didn't play favorites.

It surprised no one when the girls married young. They were as predictable as their mother. Eventually, Dot-tie was down to one daughter, Nicky.

For three years Nicky heard:

“I don't know why you don't let your hair grow like your sister Leslie's. You'd look good in that style instead of looking like a twelve-year-old boy.”

“When Pammie had your room, she had that real pretty pink spread. I think it's still around here somewhere. I'm going to dig it out for you.”

“Does your teacher know you're Wendy's sister? She should have recognized the dress. It was Wendy's favorite.”

“You're exactly like your sister Leah. She never could manage her money either. Every week she wanted an advance on her allowance.”

“You and Alice were never good judges of character.”

“You'd better snap it up. All five of your sisters were married before their twenty-first birthday.”

Nicky was destined never to do anything original in her entire life. She had been sired by a Xerox machine set for six copies.

Her wedding was predictable—a carbon copy of her sisters'. The dress was the same design; the flowers came from the same florist, the food was from the same caterers, the cake from the same bakery. She received from her parents the same gift her sisters had received: a toaster oven and two goose-down pillows.

As she waited in the small room at the back of the church before going down the aisle, her mother appeared with the same tearful face she had displayed at the weddings of her sisters. She cupped Nicky's face in her hands and whispered her last piece of advice (which had also been given to Nicky's predecessors): “Be yourself or you'll never find happiness.”

Two Be or Not Two Be

grand rapids, mich.—Robin Hawkins could be the little girl they had in mind when they named it the “terrible twos”: the toddler has, by actual count, racked up nearly $3,000 in damages in two months.

First, it was the plumbing, then the dishwasher, the refrigerator, and the family car. None has escaped the $2,862 rampage of Rowlf and Bernie Hawkins' two-year-old daughter.

Robin's trail of terror began at the toilet, a familiar trouble spot for toddlers. A stuffed animal, named Alice the cat, got dunked, drowned, and flushed.

Hawkins, who dutifully has kept track of Robin's exploits, neatly tallied the expenses in a yellow tablet: $62.75 for the plumber, $2.50 for Alice.

That was only the beginning.

Robin's decision to give Teddy Bear a bath—atop the heating element in the dishwasher—cost her father $375 for repairs, $25 for smoke damage and, of course, $8 for the teddy bear.

Then there was the refrigerator. It seems Robin stuck some magnetic letters in the vents just before the family left home for the weekend, burning out the motor. The cost: $310 for the refrigerator, $120 in spoiled food and $3.75 for the magnetic letters.

“That evening, we sat down to watch TV,” said Hawkins, an East Grand Rapids police officer. “Robin had twisted the fine tune so far that it broke inside.”

The repair bill: $115.

The next day, Mrs. Hawkins went to pick up her husband from his second job as a part-time officer in Sparta. She left Robin sleeping in her safety seat, with the keys in her purse inside the car.

“We heard the car start up, and we ran outside just in time to watch the car start down the street,” Hawkins said.

The car ran into a tree. Cost: $1,029.52 in repairs.

A few days later, Robin tried to play some tapes in the family stereo. Cost: $36 for tapes and $35 for tape-deck repairs.

Shortly after that, the Hawkins (sic) parked their car halfway in the garage after a shopping trip and, because they were planning to unload groceries, decided to leave Robin strapped in her safety seat.

“My wife had the keys, so figured everything was OK,” Hawkins said.

Everything was OK, until they heard a loud noise and went outside to find the automatic garage door bouncing off the hood of the car with—guess who?—locked inside the car, pushing the remote control. The bill: $120.

Robin also lifted $620 out of the cash register at a supermarket, drilled fifty holes in the walls of a rental property owned by her parents, painted walls with nail polish and slipped the garden tractor out of gear so it rolled down the driveway narrowly missing a neighbor out on a walk. “Some day, when she comes and asks me why she isn't getting any allowance, I'll show her this,” Hawkins said, waving the yellow pad containing an itemized list of his daughter's damages.

What kind of a mother would...

buy vanilla a fifth at a time?

Brooke

Every time Brooke visited her sister, she never sat down without first running her hand over the chair.

The whole house was like a giant playpen inhabited by five active children with sticky hands, pacifier lips, and something running from every opening in their faces.

The house was a dump! A lone goldfish swam around in an Old Fashioned glass, the three silver iced tea spoons she'd gotten her in her pattern for her anniversary were stuck in the flower bed, and she could have sworn she saw a rainbow over the baby's diaper.

Both of them had been raised in an atmosphere of fine china, good books, oriental carpets, and cloth napkins. Somewhere, her sister had lost her way.

In six years of marriage, Brooke and her husband Clay had done a lot of thinking about how their child would be raised. Like every stick of furniture in their white and chrome townhouse, their two-seater sportscar, their his-and-her careers, and their club membership, their baby was planned.

Brooke would conceive in February, after the holiday parties were over, still be slim enough in May to work on her tan, and deliver in time to have the family portrait taken for the Christmas card.

Brooke and Clay made only one mistake.

They made promises to each other that new parents should never make:

Their baby would not dominate their lives.

They would never stoop to plastic.

They would never put their coffee-table books or art glass out of the reach of their child.

They would be able to take their child anywhere and not be embarrassed.

They said all of this in public where people could hear them.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

Other self-righteous people who have defied this law have included: Mia Farrow, who was delivered of “Rosemary's Baby,” Lee Remick, who birthed Damien in “The Omen,” and the parents of Lizzie Borden.

It came as no surprise to anyone except Brooke when she went into labor a month early at the Halloween party at the club and was rushed to the hospital where she gave birth to Wesley.

Her timing was lousy. She had gone to the party dressed as a nun.

Brooke stubbornly insisted Wesley wasn't a bad little boy, he was just “accident prone.” He started each day like one of those battery-driven cars that you put on a track and it doesn't stop until it hits something and self-destructs. Brooke was fond of capping each trauma with, “Wesley is just 'all boy.' ”'

By the time Wesley was six, his medical charts read like the first eighteen chapters of a first-aid manual. He drank paint tint and urinated Melody Blue for a week. He pulled a bubble gum dispenser on himself, fell out of his crib, swallowed a penny, cut his lip on a waste can, got his foot caught in a shopping cart and had to be torched out of it, ate a plastic banana, and bit a rectal thermometer in half.

He gouged himself in the eye with his own finger, broke his arm while watching TV, was bitten by a hostile turtle, fell on the ice and caused a boil on his tailbone, forced a golf tee in his ear, and made a bet he could swan-dive into two and a half feet of water, and lost.

Brooke made so many trips to her local emergency ward, they sent her cards when Wesley was well.

Through it all, never once did Brooke publicly admit defeat. Other children could watch TV and “waste time.” Wesley could do it and be “curious and searching.” Other kids could shove people out of the way and be “aggressive.” Wesley could do it and be “ambitious.” When other children took money from their mother's purse without her permission it could be construed as “stealing,” but when Wesley did it, it was “reinforcement of the mutual trust between them.”

Early in June, Brooke smiled stoically when her obstetrician told her the scanner revealed she was carrying twins.

Normally, that kind of news would have given a mother pause for reflection, but not Brooke.

She stopped on her way home to buy fresh flowers for the table.

She called her husband to tell him the news and thanked goodness the silver pattern of the baby spoon was open stock.

She called her sister to tell her their season opera tickets were still intact, even if the babies came early.

She told Wesley the news and sent him to the neighbors to play.

She retired to her room with a bottle of vodka and was not seen until 4 pm the next day.

Born to Crisis

Some mothers are born to crisis.

They're ready for it. They sit around in color-coordinated outfits, with their car keys in one hand and a first-aid manual with illustrations of pressure points and CPR in the other.

When a child comes screaming in the back door, “Mommy! Mommy! Mikey has a bloody boo boo,” this mother calmly instructs her oven to cook the dinner by six, backs the car (filled with gas) out of the garage, and off they go to the hospital.

She's always at the reception desk when I arrive with my child, who is wrapped in a dirty dish towel and wearing a pair of pajamas that I was going to use for a dust rag as soon as I ripped the snaps out.

She rattles off her insurance number by memory as I wrestle with my child's name and age, finally pinning his birth down to the year we paid off the freezer.

As she quietly goes to the waiting room holding the Saturday Review of Literature under her arm, I am checking every phone return for a dime to call my husband, Whats-hisname.

One of the most difficult jobs of child-raising is knowing when your child needs medical attention and when he doesn't. Or as we say at the wine-tasting parties, “Be not the first on your block to race a case of constipation to the hospital, nor the last to call the pharmacist for a compound fracture.”

There is possibly no guilt in this world to compare with leaving a sick child with a babysitter. The sitter could be Mother Teresa and you would still feel rotten. There is something about having your child throw up without you that is difficult to live with.

I once spent more time writing a note of instructions to a babysitter than I did on my first book.

Dear Miss Tibbies:

The suppositories are in the refrigerator next to the meal worms. The meal worms are for the lizard, who eats breakfast when everyone else eats breakfast. The suppositories are for Brace's nausea. He will work against you, but persevere. Please return them to the fridge as they are better chilled. The antibiotic is to be given every 12 hours. Bruce is crabby at the 3 am medication and he will spit it in your face, but remind him it is for his own good. Be firm! The baby aspirin are in the medicine chest on the top shelf. Start early, as the cap is childproof and difficult to remove. Simply depress the cap and twist at the same time in a counterclockwise movement until the arrow reaches the indentation and then, using your thumbnail, flip up. If you cannot get it off, give it to Bruce. He can whip that sucker off In two seconds flat.

He has not been able to tolerate solids yet, but try him on some gelatin and crackers. If he throws up, stop feeding him solids.

Mrs. Bombeck

Pediatricians are no help. Year after year, they dole out instructions that are some of the best comedy material being written today.

“Make sure he keeps it down” is a classic. And how about “Don't let him scratch.” (That's like telling the Pope to buy a leisure suit.)

“Keep him quiet and in bed” is another goodie, but my all-time favorite is “Watch his stool.”

Do you know of any mothers personally who have ever followed that advice? My son swallowed a nickel once. I was ready to declare it a tax write-off and forget it. My mother was outraged. “You have to take that child to a doctor and see where it is lodged. It could be serious.”

The doctor examined him and through X-rays discovered the nickel had “traveled.” He then turned to me and with a serious face said, “Watch his stool.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked.

“For the nickel.”

“Money is no object to us. We own our own home and have a microwave oven.”

“It's not the money,” he said. “Don't you want to know what happens to it?”

“Not that badly,” I said.

There are some things you just don't ask a high school graduate to do.