im1096

My daughter is helping her boyfriend raise his three year old daughter.  Sometimes she calls me stressed out because they can't get Chloe to behave the way they think she should - or she gives me a stern look when I laugh at Chloe's antics and says my laughter only encourages Chloe to misbehave.

Recently, my oldest son and his wife announced that they are expecting my first "official" grandchild in September.  Josh said that they had already read all of the baby books so that they can be as prepared as possible when the baby arrives - and I laughed and told him that NOTHING he ever reads can prepare him for fatherhood.

Today, I read the following, and emailed a copy to each of them, along with one caution and that is to ENJOY every moment and treasure them all.  In the overall scheme of life, parenthood is too fleeting.  I regret not living more in the moment when my children were small, and I vow to treasure each second with the grandchildren - however many shall come.

Anna Quindlen, Newsweek Columnist and Author:

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I
take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two
taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books
I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their
opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once poured over is finished for me now.
Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling
rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education,
have all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild
Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if
you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those
books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me,
and the well-meaning relations -- what they taught me, was that they
couldn't really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes
multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an
endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to
positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and
a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his
belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last
arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of
research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this
ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you
must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.
I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books
on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of
infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a
sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something
wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny
little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically
challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China . Next year he goes to
college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were
made. They have all been enshrined in the, "Remember-When- Mom -Did Hall of
Fame." The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not
theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for
preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The
day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, "What did you get wrong?". (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing
this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now
that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture
of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the
swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember
what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they
looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner,
bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the
getting it done a little less.

Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me and what
was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday
they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect
they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand
ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I
was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.