Is one goal of parenting to raise your children to become better parents than you are?
My brothers and I sometimes talk about what it was like coming up in our family. Among ourselves, we say it was like being raised by wolves. We learned to say our prayers, marinate a steak, and tell a good story. But there were gaps. Our family didn’t eat together, really. Most evenings, my father would sit in the front room in a coat and sip on a martini watching Marlin Perkins’ Wild Kingdom while the rest of us, captive at the dinner table, waited for him to come and sit down at his place until a certain length of time had passed, my mother sighed and we all said grace.
That’s for starters.
I watched a lot of TV. I feigned sickness to stay home and watch TV families interact on the screen, like a young anthropologist doing fieldwork. I studied The Brady Bunch: the scenes when Carol, Mike, or both of them would show up in one of their children’s bedrooms, sit at the end of a twin bed and prod their children with warm concern. “What’s going on, Bobby? Worried about the science fair?” “Why so down, Marcia? Is it about the dance?” We kids knew. Neither of our parents had ever shown up in our bedrooms or anywhere else in the house or yard to ask us what was going on with anything, except—as I remember—when I collided with a pair of pruning shears while running through the yard and had to be taken to the hospital for stitches, or when I broke my arm, or when my brother’s friend snuck into our house and stole our silver. They talked to us (or rather yelled at us) when things were bad. But I knew they were trying. And I knew it was not easy.
My father never talked about it, but now that I’m a parent, I see what he was up against. A houseful of customers: a wife who was bored, a pack of children, a business to run, and a house that was falling apart faster than he cared to fix it. And I see what my mother was up against: a child who doesn’t walk, one who is angry, another who cries too much, a baby who came early, and a husband who’d rather watch wild tigers on television than fix a broken basement light.
When she realized she was pregnant with me, my mother started to cry. She was ironing, and started to cry. She told me this many times. I wanted to travel, she said. I think she just wanted to get away from my father. My father promised her he would take her on a trip, and bought tickets for a sea voyage three weeks after I was born. Away on the ship, she missed me. With me, she wished I were elsewhere; or maybe that we both were in Paris.
I do not hold against her the wish to escape, or the experience of motherhood as tedium. She tells us that for 10 years she did not see color. In about the same years that TV was in black and white, so her life appeared to her. She found consolation in the public assessment that her children were beautiful, and punishment in the fact that one was plump and one disabled, and that they were obliged to be Catholic. Rather than drink, she channeled her misery into chiding, and learning French.
Somewhere between the dinner table, the TV screen and a few years on the couch, we children turned out fine.
And then—not sure if we’d ever be ready—we had our own.
The day I first laid eyes on my daughter, when she was one month early, the size of a small loaf of bread, and her blue eyes like two violets wooing me, I found her easy to love. Give her the breast, said my doctor. No matter what seems to be the matter—if she’s crying and it’s not about the diapers but something more mysterious—give her the breast. If it’s an earache, give her the breast. I think he liked saying the words. Kiss her on the head, too. Kiss her on the head a lot. So I did. I told her I loved her. I sang to her. I cradled her. I loved the fierce grip of her tiny hands.
But sometimes I felt oppressed. Sometimes I did not want to be with my baby. I could not get her to take a nap, for example. I am pretty sure it was because I was waiting on customers, had her with me, and neither cared what the other one needed.
I did not always like how she thought of me as hers.
In the summer months I drove her to her father’s restaurant a few miles down the road at naptime: He would lay her down on a soft cushion under an oak tree where she would sleep, often for three hours; he would sense her waking and come outside as she was opening her eyes to look around.
I liked knowing he had that talent. I liked knowing he could sit her on a shelf in front of him while he was cooking, and talk to her. I liked knowing he was teaching her to plant seeds and snip herbs from the garden, and call them by name. I liked being free for a couple of hours.
And then I discovered other mothers. I hired a friend and her daughters to help me, and they are still in our lives. I traded babysitting days with another friend who worked, and she became another mother to my daughter. Each new presence in her life taught my daughter that love was plentiful, and like Piaget’s ball rolling out of sight, I would come back.
I saw that while my daughter—or any child—deserves to be loved all the time, that love might not always be flowing from me. Partly out of sheer exhaustion, I shared the stage. I let others love her, and she loved them.
This became our style.
Recently I was in a café and noticed a darling baby, seated in the corner with its parents and a crowd of adoring relatives. My eyes kept settling on the child, a curly-haired beauty with enormous eyes and deer eyelashes, taking in the scenery and daintily accepting little gifts of food from her parents. My daughter, now 15 and looking up from the book she was reading, noticed my eyes were listing toward the baby, and whispered “Stop staring at the baby.” The baby was a magnet, but not to her.
And then I knew that this was what babies could do, and had to do: to work magic on us so we would succumb to their powerful charm, flirt back with them, love them with a passion others might see as crazy, and raise them to be better parents than we ever were.
Michele Gazzolo is a mother and writer living in southwest Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times Parent-lode blog, the Yale Journal of Medicine and the Humanities, and most often on her own blog, girlwalksin: http://girlwalksin.wordpress.com/
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