Sunday, February 12, 2012

International Parenting

Much has been made of parenting books Confessions of a Tiger Mother and most recently Bringing Up Bebe, which extols the virtues of French parenting. Apparently, not only do French women NOT get fat but also they are good mothers. Perhaps it’s the jealousy talking but I hate them all.

No doubt parenting is hard. At least GOOD parenting is hard. It requires sacrifice. Just this morning I ate the remains of chocolate cake for breakfast so that my sons wouldn’t get to it first and start the day with a non-nutritious meal. It was tough. The icing got stuck to the roof of my mouth and it took three cups of strong coffee to wash it down. But I pushed through because of my great love for my sons. This is what good mothers do.

Honestly, I often swing between the Tiger Mother and the French Mother with a little bit of Redneck Texas Mother and Pacifist Canadian Mother thrown in.  I would like to say that I have a tried and true philosophy for parenting. I don’t. I observe what seems to be working for other mothers and copy it. I read books and magazine articles about authoritative parenting and permissive parenting and depending on the day, fall somewhere in between. Often, I collapse into bed just praying for the wisdom to do it better.

Was it always this hard? I know our mothers and grandmothers had their share of parenting gurus from whom they sought advice but did they obsess over their mothering as much as this generation?

And whatever happened to just following one’s instincts? Usually, if I just slow it down a bit, set aside whatever parenting book I’m reading at the time and just pay attention to what’s going on, the answers will come to me. They might not be the perfect answers for whatever challenge I’m facing at the time but they almost always point me in the right direction.

I’ve got about four years left with my oldest son before he goes off to college and about six with my youngest. While it is definitely important to me that I do a good job mothering them and that my husband and I send them off into the world prepared to be good men, I don’t want to waste these precious years worrying about the method and forgetting to enjoy them for the interesting, frustrating, enjoyable and unique people they already are.

So I’m taking an international approach to parenting these days—picking and choosing among the various approaches and finding the ones that work best for us. That and always eating the leftover chocolate cake before the kids get to it.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Aging Gracefully


A woman once told me, “You are the old woman you are becoming.” In other words, you can’t be a shrew up to age 60 and then expect to become a gracious, kind and gentle senior citizen.

My mother-in-law, Irene, has proved this out. She has always believed that people are more important than things and that the comfort and wellbeing of others is superior to her own.  Having lived this way all her life, it’s simply part of her nature now that she is pushing 80.

Other than our mutual love for my husband and my sons, my mother-in-law and I don’t have much in common. She is from Canada, and I am from Texas. Need I say more? But the greatest difference between us is her tendency to save everything and my tendency to save nothing. The joke around our house is, “Keep moving or Mom will take you to the Goodwill.”  Irene, on the other hand, once handed me a large ball of used hockey skate laces that her sons had worn 30 years earlier. Just in case.

Just how much of a packrat she is became clear to me this summer when my sister-in-law coerced me into cleaning her mother’s closet. As I was discarding scarves from 1970-something and old programs from long-forgotten nights out, I groused, “Why on earth would someone save all this junk?” I confess I was feeling rather superior thinking of my own streamlined, tidy closet. Then I happened to glance over at her chest of drawers and there next to the baby photos of her three children was a photo of me. From kindergarten. It has been there since I joined the family 26 years ago.

And in one of her drawers is a pile of folders labeled with the names of her children. Each folder contains immunization records and other important documents. And there is a folder with my name on it. I’m not sure what’s in it. But she considers me one of her children and therefore, I get a folder.

Now that I’m older and perhaps wiser, I realize how hard it must have been to watch her youngest son get married to an unknown girl from thousands of miles away. She never let on that she may have preferred a daughter-in-law who shared her culture and her country.  I hope I am as gracious if my sons make a similar choice.

This Christmas my in-laws made the long trek to Cincinnati from Vancouver, B.C. Sadly, my mother-in-law is losing her memory and with it, the ability to do tasks that she did for years.  

But true to form, she continues to demonstrate that paying attention to what’s going on around you is more important than just getting things done. She doesn’t remember how to make some of the more complicated dishes but she noticed the little house the squirrels are building in the large tree outside the window. She no longer makes the pies. But she notices the lint in the corner of my kitchen and painfully stoops to pick it up because she wants to make sure she’s doing her part.

This year, instead of resolving to lose 10 pounds and get to the gym more often, I will start practicing now to be the old woman I want to be in the future. I might even save some hockey skate laces.