All About Eve

Not that I'm really the mother of all living. Just feels like it when Sam, both girls, and the cat all need to be fed different things. :)

Yesterday, JS observed that I've been rather anxious lately, and a few hours later, I happened to read a scholarly article a friend had copied for me about the pressures borne by contemporary mothers (three of us had been chatting about parenting--one woman with two kids ages 4 and 6, me with my toddler and newborn, and another woman expecting her first child). The article described the competing ideals that pull at us, tracing the history of these ideals through representations in the media. It was a fantastic article, and one of the things that stood out to me was the idea that we are supposed to be "relaxed, spontaneous, and prepared every second for the possibility that our kids could suddenly be killed." How true . . . from laying them on their backs to sleep, to cutting the cords on our blinds lest they strangle, to placing our purses in the backseats with them so we don't forget them in cars, to banning toys with lead, to eschewing foods with high fructose corn syrup (which I don't even do, being an avid consumer of such foods for myself), there's quite a lot to learn about and remember.

And I'm a student at heart, straight As in subjects I didn't even care about, much less in the responsibility for caring for the two most dependent and vulnerable people I love. But another thing the article described is how mothers today seem to be expected to have professional-level expertise in first-aid, medical diagnosis, consumer products, nutrition, psychology, early-childhood development, and more. The Internet makes it possible to gather information on these things, and as a result, I can tell you the brand of slings recently recalled and how many babies died in how long in what positions while using them. I can also tell you the rates of SIDS deaths by month in the first year of life, the most common reasons for recalls of juvenile products, the most choke-able household objects/foods, and how many children have died by either being driven over in their families' cars or drowning in household buckets. Part of this is my fascination with all information, and part of it is my memory for weird patterns and facts. But parenting has accelerated my information-gathering habits into overdrive, which while interesting and even occasionally useful, has not been good for the restfulness of my mind and spirit.

Coupled with all of this, I hear the voices of the people whose parenting I respect in my mind when I'm faced, so frequently, with the challenges of my very strong-willed toddler. I wonder what would work best with her, how to help her learn to master her will so that it does not master her, and so on. She's a moving target for all of this attention, however, as her needs change so quickly, and that means that the parenting calculus is ever more complicated.

And as these insights came together in my mind, JS's observation and the article I'd read, I realized that I had given some thought to what I needed to jettison in order to become a better mother (e.g., outsourcing house cleaning and eating meals that are more quickly prepared), but I hadn't thought much about what parts of mothering itself I was willing to discard. I'd never felt pressure to be the perfect mother, but I realized that of all the voices that I hearken to in my head, the ones that are most important are God's, of course, and Sam's, since he is my partner in all of this.

And I suspect God is actually pretty uninterested in a lot of the ambitions that contemporary parents have for their kids. It might be a commonplace to observe that lots of kids today are overprogrammed, but it's less common to say that maybe God doesn't care care exactly about how intentionally intellectually stimulated my children are--he wants them to be curious, I think, and interested in the world and critical enough not to be foolish, but not necessarily to have their brains exercised with educational goals in mind. And that's probably because he cares a lot less than just about anybody I know in the world about where they go to college, or whether they go at all, or whether they even finish high school. I say this as someone who obviously highly values education as a good . . . but there might be lots of "goods" that my children are uninterested in, or that they don't really need any propulsion toward. I personally learned to read by reading over and over the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden mysteries, and watched as much TV as I wanted as a child. My parents didn't do anything to try to encourage me to read (though they were totally supportive, driving me to the library to get my haul every week), and as a result, I read whatever I wanted and loved it. Perhaps I might have made a better academic with a more formative reading plan, or maybe I'd read more classics and criticism in my spare time. But I don't think I would love reading any more--most likely, less.

And that's what it seems to me that God would want Sam and me to cultivate in our children--the passion for the things that he's created their hearts to love and seek. For Allison Clare right now, she's pretty passionate about Elmo, Blue's Clues, shapes, hamburgers, and letters. When we were at the mall the other day, she spied a sign and ran over to it to read the letters out loud to me. Then as we walked away, she called back affectionately, "Bye, letter B! See you tomorrow!" Who knows what to make of that? I couldn't teach that kind of love.