One of the most treasured times of day for me, is the 1+ hour schlep I take from my home office to pick up my daughter at her school. We live in Manhattan and don’t use our car except to get out of the city, so the vicissitudes of NYC public transportation generally make for a long five mile round-trip.
I’ve gotten the trip to the school down to a science: it’s just 30 minutes if I leave the apartment at or before 29 minutes after the hour. It’s 10-15 minutes longer if I’m late. The trip back is much more erratic and unpredictable but it’s always longer. Even so, it is the trip to the school that is the more irritating and stressful. I could do without it.
But it is the unpredictable trip back home with my 9-year-old daughter that is the delight of my day. It wasn’t always this way. But I’m about to lose these precious moments that I have only within the past two years begun to treasure.
This is the 1st of 2 diaries that grew out of 3 synchronistic events:
- A funny incident that happened this week on one such trip,
- An upcoming event that will end this irrevocably,
- And, of course, this week’s “pie wars”.
Part 1 is a set of musings on parenting, my husband, gender, acceptance, and the bitter-sweetness of “letting go”.
Part 2 will be about parenting, sexuality, sexual imagery, freedom, power, and “chivalry”.
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Let me confess that, as far as being a mother is concerned, I make an excellent “dad”.
Her father is the more traditionally “nurturing” one. He’s an Italian who loves to cook and prepare meals. So every morning as I’m pouring out the cereal or making toast for her, he is preparing her a daily lunch that is always sumptuous (as a kid defines it at least) and healthy. Her lunch is the envy of her friends. On weekends he does all the cooking and I do all the dishes in our “dishwasherless” weekend home.
He also is a big “kid”: his favorite toys from the 60s are on a special display shelf I had made for him as an anniversary present. He’s a serious vintage toy collector: GI Joe, Fischer-Price movie cameras, Planet of the Apes figures, a Mattel Thingmaker with accessories (sort of an Easy Bake Oven for boys), a Pee-Wee Herman doll with Chairy, and a whole bunch of really scary monster figures that only he knows the names of, and that used to scare the pants off our daughter. Very few are the ones he had from his childhood — his mother threw those away, much to his consternation. But he’s replaced them over the years with finds from toy shows, antique stores and collectible outlets on the web. My only contributions to the shelf are my pristine mid-sixties Barbie and Midge dolls with their original boxes and even the brochures that came with them … I was such an anal-retentive child!
So he has been the more playful one: he actually enjoys playing Barbies or with her dollhouse or with her medieval knights and ladies for hours and hours when I can only stand it for 15 minutes. Being an artist himself, he has helped foster her amazing artistic talents since she could first hold a crayon: they have an art project every weekend together. He has taught her various techniques in cooking and she regularly helps him prepare meals on the weekends. I’m relegated to shucking peas, fava beans, and all the boring tasks.
You must understand … my husband is a bit unusual: he has very few gender issues. He’s even played “dress up” with her and her friends. He actually likes clothes and jewelry shopping with her. I am the one who loves to play with her for hours at a time when it’s Legos, puzzles, and blocks.
On the other hand, I am the fairer and, therefore, more effective disciplinarian. I don’t do the Italian “scream fests” that my husband and daughter do with each other. I’m Irish, after all, and I prefer to use my high school principal father’s method: quiet, firm, fair and “disciplinary” (as in “disciple” not “punishment”). I’m not always good at it: it can take me sometimes over a month of them going back and forth at each other about an issue to figure out what the problem really is and to come up with an effective discipline. But my method seems to have worked out well so far.
I am also the one who has fought with the Department of Education to get her the appropriate instruction to deal with her dyslexia and have become an activist against high-stakes tests in elementary schools. I was the PTA president for a year. (Never again! It’s like herding cats!) I am also the parent who best helps with the homework, especially math. And I’m happy to say I have a daughter who loves math and is comfortable with mathematical thinking: take that Lawrence Summers! … But that is a whole other diary for some other time.
My husband always loved the trips to and from school, and before that, to and from the nursery school. The chance to be with his daughter, to be the “kid” he loves to be, and foster his daughter’s imagination were some of the happiest moments of his whole day. When she was a tiny baby the inevitable early inter-parental jealousies manifested themselves in him fighting with me for the more “motherly” role. At first, I resisted this like a cat with a full set of claws. But once I realized that he wanted to parent her in ways that, although I thought it was the “mother’s” role, I frankly wasn’t that excited about doing, I relaxed, “let go” and the roles settled out the way that was most effective for us all. Don’t get me wrong … I changed more diapers than he did … he’s not a saint! But it ended up that the parent who was better at doing a particular parental task performed that parental task.
It was a little unsettling or off-putting for our most conservative friends — and by “conservative” here, I mean conservative around gender issues. Some of our most liberal friends were very uptight around the issue — especially the couples. And one or two of my women friends who call themselves “feminists” told me they didn’t approve and that I should not let my husband usurp my authority and interfere with the mother-daughter bond. I found this amusing in the extreme!
But for other friends who are more “evolved” in a gender sense, my husband and I became poster parents for their conception of the “modern family”. This is certainly the case for our gay friends who have chosen to form families with or without children. But it is also true for the “evolved” couples who haven’t yet or have just begun to have children. The “admiring” group that I’m fondest of, are the young straight men who work for my husband and are just casually dating at this point. They’ve seen my husband take our daughter to work and have heard the stories about what his relationship with her is like and have expressed the desire for that same kind of relationship with their daughters and sons when they have them in the future. It’s a surprisingly large number of men: the majority! It shows how things have changed for the better in the past 30 years and that there is hope for single women, especially for our daughter when she comes of age.
I can say for myself that this attention is both flattering and unsettling. We’re far from perfect. No … let me be honest here … something that is much easier in an anonymous forum: I’m far from the parent I want to be. But I am really trying to work on it. I fail a lot, but I haven’t given up.
One of the things I’d been most ashamed about was my negative feelings about dropping her off and picking her up from school. It was usually a stressful, time-consuming, and, for this workaholic personality-type, unproductive time of day. Ugh … There, I said it! It’s hard to put into words since it still causes some guilty feelings to arise.
Mornings weren’t so bad since neither she nor I are morning people. Once we got on the bus and got our seats, it was a full 20 minutes of pure relaxation before the coffee kicked in for me and her breakfast kicked in for her. The only bad part of the morning was getting caught at school by another parent on the PTA who wanted me to volunteer to do some “mom-like” job for a fundraiser … like baking. They just don’t get it even after five years in the school! Ask me to put up tables or check coats, or do the accounting and I’m there. You want some baking or decorating? Ask my husband. Sewing and knitting … you’re SOL with anyone but our daughter.
It was the afternoons I found most irritating. I was always stressed, pumped up and talkative from work, and with an eye to the ultimate goal: arriving home, relaxing for a few minutes, starting dinner, and helping out with homework when necessary. I liked the homework part: that was my “bonding with my daughter” time. My husband hates the homework part.
My daughter on the other hand, was always in decompression-mode from school, although this realization of her need for decompression has only come lately. In response to my “what was the coolest thing you learned in school today” questions, I got very little to nothing out of her. It was frustrating, especially in the early grades. I’d ask questions and get little or no response. She just didn’t want to talk much. When she did it was of the “Johnny or Suzie hit me today” variety, which inevitably produced the following exchange:
Me: “Why did he/she hit you?”
My daughter: “I don’t know.”
Me: “What did you say or do just before he/she hit you.”
My daughter: “Nothing, he/she just hit me for no reason”.
When I questioned her further she closed up like a clam. So I felt like a failure: I couldn’t even help her sort out her emotional traumas on the bus.
It took a long while for me, and some maturing on her part, to figure out that she needed her time on the afternoon bus the same as she needed the morning time — as a sort of “transitional space” between dual, and competing, parts of her life. She’s always needed a “transitional object” of some form. These days it’s a purse or backpack with at least one item in it that can serve as a talking point for a current topic of interest. It’s the way she integrates her life at home with her school life. The “transitional space” mostly provides quiet time and a chance to reflect.
I was butting in on her quiet time! But it took me a long time to get to that realization. I began to notice that after homework time I’d get more of the story about what happened with “Johnny” or “Suzie”. At that point, with a little prodding, the whole story would come tumbling out and I could finally be an emotional help to her. From that realization, it took a while to get to the “eureka!” that whatever she said on the bus was something that she wanted to process: first by herself and then later with me.
It was only after that breakthrough to my “inner parent” that the time we share on that afternoon bus became most precious. When I began letting her decompress in her own space and in her own due time, we not only started having fun on the bus — quietly laughing at people’s cell phone conversations, making up our own language to carry on bus conversions in, etc. — but also, I started hearing about what she thought was some cool fact she learned in school, how well she did on a presentation, a joke her teacher told, without even asking her about school. But it was always on her time and in her space and not mine: after homework or over dinner or before bed.
She’s done a tremendous job teaching me how to be a parent.
But alas my “eureka!” only occurred sometime in the late third grade and, now that she’s finishing up fourth grade, I see that the end is near … Too near!
Early this spring (March-ish), the mother of one of the other fourth grade girls in the school who lives in our neighborhood suggested to me that her daughter and mine should take the morning bus together. She had been taking her daughter by bicycle to school on her way to work but work is close to home and school is way on the other side of town. And she knew that I work out of my home and might like the idea. Besides, even though they aren’t close friends — the two girls are in different classrooms — they get along well. And my daughter, upon hearing this plan, begged me to let her do it.
My husband, overprotective “mom” that he is, at first objected strenuously. But he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on: before this school year, we had always cut the “ferrying her back and forth to school” chore in half using an ingenious method so as to allow both of us to have both late nights and early morning at work But this year his work has been a hellhole and he’s been able to drop her off or pick her up only sporadically. He realizes I have done that chore almost solely this year and, although jealous of that, he realized that the morning time really cut into my day. Besides I was getting stuck at school about school matters or activist-related tasks for one or two parents or the teachers. And I need to make a living. So he relented about the mornings.
So every morning I walk her to the city bus stop for the cross-town bus and we meet her friend and her mother there. There is always at least one “regular” rider also waiting but usually several: a business man or woman, an elderly person, one or two kids from another school on the route who we’re friendly with. The bus comes, they board we wave goodbye. At the other end, they get off the bus without us but with at least a dozen other parents and children who are going to the same school or the school across the street. And they have only one street to cross and it has a crossing guard, since the school is only a half block away from the bus stop.
This makes my daughter and her friend the envy of all the girls in her grade. This may not be such a big deal in other parts of the country, but in Manhattan, the first day of their journey alone on the bus was the closest thing to a “bat mitzvah” or “confirmation” that I could imagine for my daughter … and for me and her father. He’s come around and agreed that my instincts were right in this and he’s so proud of her. And the effect it’s had on her general maturity is really noticeable.
But another “bat mitzvah” is around the corner. And it may be coming too soon even for me.
This week, her friend’s mom broached the subject of their riding the bus alone together on the way home as well. We’d talked about it before, but at that point we were thinking of starting this new phase in September. But her work schedule and the frequent PM thunder showers in NYC at this time of year make picking her daughter up on the bike a major hassle. She’s even offered to purchase a pre-paid cell phone so that they can call us once they’re on the bus so we can meet them at the bus stop.
As you can imagine, both girls are game for this and would start it tomorrow. I have not even broached the subject with my husband, not because of the reaction it will provoke and not just because of the anxiety I feel about this new phase.
Frankly, I haven’t broached the subject since I’m not sure I’m ready to give up some of the sweetest moments of the day.
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In Part 2 of this diary, I want to tell the story of an incident that happened on my way home this week with my daughter. It was a poignant moment that exemplifies why I love these trips. It also happens to tie in nicely with other aspects of her development and my concerns about her immediate future. And finally it will explain how these musings came out of the “pie wars” of the week.