Me Me Me

One of the happiest decisions I ever made was to have a second child. This was an enormous leap of faith, given that I am an only child and knew absolutely nothing about children until my adorable newborn daughter was placed in my arms. And when I say “nothing,” I mean that I had never changed a diaper, never baby-sat, never even cooed at an oncoming stroller. When, after 10 years of marriage, I took my first leap of faith into motherhood, I spent the entire pregnancy in a low-level state of dread punctuated by occasional crying jags. Luckily, the result was a curly-haired angel with big, beautiful eyes.

This little love bundle unleashed in me a feeling of family that I had never experienced growing up in the middle of an extended clan with multiple dysfunctions. I soon realized that I didn’t want her to grow up alone in the big city. So, little brother followed. Best decision ever. A nice, neat nuclear family in which the parents are never outnumbered on an airplane. 

And yet…I often wish my nuclear family was bigger. Because, in many ways, these three people are, as the amazing Mary used to say to me, “all I’ve got.” Practically speaking, I would never have had the patience (oy, I have no patience on my best day!) and flexibility (HA!) to juggle the needs of another kid when they were young, in spite of having the best babysitter on earth. (SHE always wanted me to have a third one!) But the two I’ve got have flown the coop now, with no interest in coming home between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, even for a weekend. It’s not that I want another little one — if I had to live through seventh grade again, I would need a vial of cyanide on the nightstand — but it would be so nice to see one more person of “my very own” at the dining room table.

My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about my mother, who died nine years ago. Our relationship would fuel about a dozen years of weekly visits with a shrink, but I’ve never had the time to get shrunk. (Or, as I prefer to think of it: Just put all the craziness in a trunk, close the lid, and sit on it for the rest of your life.) I was born in the 1950s when she was 42, at a time when women that age did not routinely turn out their first and only child. There are many upshots from that, most notably that I cannot ride a bicycle (”It’s fine! You might get hurt!”), which is a drag since my darling husband is an avid bicyclist. Another big upshot: She was my fifth grade teacher. Hello, shrink!

Anyway, tales of the amazing Mary could fill an entire blog, but I do wish Mama was around to be the only old lady in my ultra-conservative Alabama hometown to vote for Obama — and to revel in the success of her beloved grandchildren, both of whom ended up going to college in the south. I often think that if I had my mother’s chutzpah (to use a decidedly non-Baptist word), I would now be in command of a magazine with a million readers, twirling the Tony Award medallion on my desk for the play I’d managed to produce in my spare time. Oooh, she was a powerhouse! I can only hope I set the same example of hard work and can-do spirit for my adorable children that the amazing Mary did for me.