I THINK IT’S PART OF the pain of parenthood that however hard it is being in possession of so much responsibility, relinquishing it is even harder. Being nine months pregnant isn’t nearly so difficult as going through postpartum depression. Holding a baby all day is easier than putting her in somebody else’s arms and walking out the door. Though that was hard, with all three of my children, I never felt the separation so acutely as I have, at every new stage, with my eldest. Maybe because she’s the girl, because she’s the one who looks the most like me, the one with whom I identify. Mostly, I think, because she came first. Now I’m accustomed to the familiar, stabbing sensation (part regret, part pride) of seeing a child of mine head off without me. But I remember when it was all new. Lines from my journal, 1979:
Audrey will be one year old next week, and I am trying to decide if it seems as if she’s been with us forever, or if it seems like the day before yesterday when she was born. Both are true. This year has been the longest and the shortest of my life. It’s hard to remember that there ever was a time when we didn’t have pretzel crumbs and ancient carrot sticks under our sofa cushions, a time when I couldn’t recite the words to Goodnight Moon, didn’t know every curve of her body and her face better even than I know my own. I have wondered often how I ever lived my life without her. But I also wonder, on occasion, where my life has gone now that she’s here. It has sometimes seemed to me, over these last twelve months, as if I’ve gained a daughter and lost a self.
Audrey is likely to get a new stuffed animal next week, and a dress whose ruffled skirt will annoy her as she resolutely (and for the fifteenth time that day) mounts the stairs to our sleeping loft. (Where she will then stand, looking down, unsupported, causing my heart to stop, and applaud her victory over the stairs, over me.) She isn’t interested in birthdays yet, of course. As for me, I feel the need for a present, a cake, a firecracker, to mark the anniversary of our parenthood. Someday I hope we’ll have another baby, who will be just as dear to us as Audrey. But no one, ever again, will turn our lives upside down this way. It is easier for three people to become four than it is for two to become three.
The odd thing is: The moment when suddenly you want a baby is likely to come precisely when your life seems so good the way it is. And having a baby is the one thing that’s guaranteed to change it. I was always crying, in the early days of my pregnancy. I would spend all afternoon cooking dinner, cutting radishes into roses, carrots into trees, decorating pie crusts with mermaids and swans, setting the table on our porch with candles and wine, and placing tiger lilies in the soup. And then I would sit across from Steve, watching the sun set behind his back, thinking about how it would never be this way again, and lose all appetite.
Not that I didn’t long for our baby, didn’t know I’d love her. It was because I knew I would that I was in mourning, I think, for my heart. When I was three months pregnant, Steve was still my one true love. When I was four months pregnant, though, and I’d heard her heart beat, felt her swimming, the baby had already begun to steal me. At six months I almost never cried anymore, and my dreams were filled not with images of Steve and me, but with visions of a washing machine and a dryer. I was on an express train to motherhood, and even though I didn’t want to get off, the knowledge that I couldn’t terrified me.
A few months before Audrey’s birth a woman I knew came to visit with her year-old son. Her little boy was still breastfeeding—constantly, it seemed, to the point where she sometimes just kept her shirt open, for convenience. Her little boy slept in a double bed with her; her husband had a pallet on the floor nearby. She had never lost the weight she’d gained when she was pregnant, she told me, and neither would I. She was tired all the time. She complimented me on a loaf of bread that I’d just baked. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. “You won’t have time for baking bread once the baby’s born.”
After she’d gone home I lay down on our bed and wept over the occupied territory that used to be my body, and the imminent invasion of our marriage. I was nothing but a mother. All I could think of was the baby. Now she was filling me up. Soon she would drain me dry.
Then Audrey was born. The morning after her birth it took me a few seconds to remember about her, and once or twice, for the first few days, I’d forget her name. But then my arms got so used to holding her and knowing exactly what weight to expect that when I’d pick up somebody else’s baby who was lighter, my arms, expecting those other ounces, would lift him too high. I did bake bread, but with Audrey in my arms. Audrey always in my arms.
And Steve, during those first months, seemed somewhat peripheral to our tight circle. The thought came to me one morning that she was my blood relative and he wasn’t, and that while there were things that he could do to make me stop loving him and stop being his wife, there was no way Audrey would ever not be my daughter.
My worst fears—that she would be too much with me— seemed to have come true. Steve was devoted to her, and she loved it when he played with her. But when she was tired or hungry, it was her mother she wanted. She didn’t know, I read, that she and I were two separate people. Not for her, yet, adolescent rebellion or the devastating announcement a five-year-old I know delivered to his mother once, “I hate you, but you still love me.” To Audrey, I was perfect.
At Thanksgiving we went to Steve’s parents’ house in Ohio and spent an evening viewing family slides. My father-in-law looking like Steve, in a T-shirt, standing outside a tiny rented house with a very pretty young woman who is now my mother-in-law and the three-week-old baby who is now their thirty-two-year-old son. More babies: getting teeth, losing them, getting them again, standing in front of a succession of larger and grander Christmas trees. Charley, Steve’s father, still handsome, but losing some of his hair; Anne, Steve’s mother, still pretty, but more lined. Then one by one, the children going off to college, until the slides show just the parents again, except at moments like Thanksgiving, when the children come to visit.
Now Audrey—I am both saddened and relieved to say—has already begun preparing for her departure. At the age of one, her declarations of independence are, like her, small. But when, on a day that registers five below zero, she pulls off the mittens I’ve put on her (three times in a row) and in spite of the cold, smiles defiantly at me, when she wriggles from my lap and heads for her own room and her xylophone, I am reminded that she is no longer what I used to call her, jokingly: my protégé. And that, though Steve may never give me the looks of total adoration Audrey sometimes gives, neither is he likely ever to throw a piece of scrambled egg in my face. He was here first and will, I hope, stay longest.
Already there are parts of my daughter’s life I don’t know about. On weekdays, from nine to five, she goes to her babysitter Irma’s house, where she plays with other children, hears Spanish spoken, listens to Irma’s husband, José, play songs on the guitar that I have never heard. The top of her head, that used to smell like me, smells like Irma’s kitchen now. Audrey knows some secrets. We no longer own her, if we ever did.
We go back and forth like dancers, my children and I. Two steps apart, one step back together. They need me utterly, they need me not at all. They want me to help, they want to do it all themselves. And luckily, they do still want me, need me, and I hope (for moments, anyway) they always will.
We were in our car, driving to the movies—my friend Ellen with her three children and me and my two older children. Steve had been away on a trip for two nights and I was finding every opportunity to be somewhere besides home. (So much so, that I was taking my seven-year-old and three-year-old to see Fred Astaire in Top Hat, at a theater some thirty miles away from our home.) Ellen is divorced, so for her, single parenthood is familiar and holds no new terrors. But I had been feeling lonely. Nights, especially, seemed long.
It was dark. Our older children were giggling and whispering in the back seat, recounting adventures and making future plans. Charlie (who was permitted to come along, instead of staying with Willy and the babysitter, only after taking a solemn vow that he would not cry or whine or spill his refreshments during the movie), sat very quiet and bolt upright in his car seat, sucking his thumb, listening to the others, looking out at the night. Suddenly his voice piped up from the back seat, “I want you, Mom. I want you.”
I was at the wheel. The movie was due to start in fifteen minutes, and we still had a good thirteen minutes of driving to get there. “Remember your promise,” I told Charlie. “You said if I let you come to the movies with us, you’d be a big boy.”
“I want you,” he said again. Not crying, not whining. Just a statement of fact, but delivered with some urgency, the way a child might say he needed to go to the bathroom or that he just remembered he left his science project on the kitchen counter.
“When we get to the movie you can sit on my lap,” I said. “You’ll get popcorn. Maybe a drink.”
Audrey joined in, “You’re lucky to be here, Charlie. Think of Willy. He didn’t get to come at all.”
“There’s going to be dancing in the movie,” said one of the other children helpfully. “Do you like to dance, Charlie?”
Charlie loves to dance. When I put on our Michael Jackson album for him and he starts moving to the beat, I think he forgets where he is entirely. He jumps off furniture, he twirls, he poses, he gets down on the floor and spins. When the song ends, he freezes in position, with one hand raised, and one finger pointed. His face registers something that sure looks like passion to me. And then he wants to hear the song all over again.
But right now all he wanted was me. “I want you,” he said again.
“Shall I sing you a song, Charlie?” I said soothingly. “Would you like ‘Hush, Little Baby’ or ‘Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night’?”
You. I want you.
Ellen laughed softly in the seat next to me. She’s been on her own for a couple of years now. A young, attractive woman, living in a small New Hampshire town with not a whole lot of single men over age nineteen around. “I’d love to hear those words,” she said. And the truth is, you don’t even have to be divorced for those words to have a strong effect. Husbands and wives, married a few years, paying bills, raising children, putting up and taking down storm windows, don’t always get around to saying those words to each other.
My son was saying them again. Over and over, like a chant. Like the little engine that could, going over the mountain. Like a mother comforting a child who’s just fallen down the stairs (“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay”). Like a medicine man, dancing around the bonfire, pounding a drum.
“Tell me what you want, Charlie,” I said.
“I want you to hold me.” That simple.
Now, there are lots of ways I try to be a good mother. I tell my children every day how wonderful they are, and how much I love them. I read them lots of books, I play games, I seek out interesting, stimulating “quality time” experiences at museums and concerts. I take them to old Fred Astaire movies, at which, if the truth be told, they will be politely attentive, but a little less than enthralled. I read about child development, and I debate, with my friends, ways to approach discipline, the importance of bedtimes, whether it’s a good idea to perpetuate the notion of Santa Claus.
But the truth is, there is not much that’s more important, I sometimes think, than just putting your arms around your child, tight. They want me. I want them. With all of our new, heightened consciousness about child sexual abuse—all those sensible and necessary reminders for children, in between the Saturday morning cartoons, to the effect that their bodies are their own, and private, and not to be violated—I have to insert the assurance, here, that what I’m talking about here isn’t incest or sex abuse. But sometimes I like my children to be in bed with me. Sometimes I can’t keep my hands off them. I want to nuzzle my face in their bellies, take a bite out of their ears, kiss every one of their toes.
So on the way to the movie, with three minutes left, and the older children groaning faintly, “Come on, we’ll miss the beginning.” I pulled over alongside the highway, put on my parking brake and my warning lights. Got out, came around to Charlie’s side of the car, opened the door and unbuckled his seat belt, picked him up and gave him the number of kisses he asked for, which was ten. Buckled him back in again. Got back in the driver’s seat. Headed off to see the show. Fred Astaire got Ginger Rogers too.
Steve and I had been away on a trip for three days, leaving our children home with Vicky, and amazingly, everything had gone well. Then the plane touched down and the flight attendant made her announcement about checking under the seat for carry-on bags. And when I did I realized my purse was missing.
I could have left it in North Carolina, when we changed planes there. I could have left it in Savannah, at the airport waiting room where we sat for a half hour before boarding the plane. I could even have left it in the ladies’ room, or in the cab we took to the airport. All I knew was, the purse was gone.
When we got off the plane I rushed, first thing, to the baggage office and had a man there call those other airports. All lines were busy, so he told me he’d take my name and let me know if anything turned up. I could tell from his expression (hearing the long list of places where the purse might be) that he didn’t hold out much hope of reuniting me with my bag. I could feel an awful headache coming on as I began tallying my losses.
Naturally, my wallet and credit cards were in my purse, but that wasn’t the half of it. There were my glasses. My driver’s license. My checkbook. It had taken me weeks to get my account in order, and now I wouldn’t have a clue where I stood.
Standing at the baggage carousel waiting for our suitcases to emerge, images of other items in that purse kept coming to mind: a pair of screw-on earrings in the shape of fruit baskets, that I’d bought at a flea market. (They always hurt, so I’d often end up taking them off and sticking them in my purse. But I loved those earrings.) A favorite toy of Charlie’s. A long letter I hadn’t got around to mailing.
Well, we found our suitcases, and Steve went to bring the car over to the door just outside the baggage claim. We buckled ourselves into our seats, shivering in the winter weather, still dressed for Georgia. Here in Boston it had begun to snow, and we had a hundred-mile drive ahead of us. I could tell from the way Steve held the wheel and the look on his face that the roads were very slick.
It usually takes us an hour and a half to make that drive from the airport, but that night we took twice as long. Three times we started to go into a skid, and we passed half a dozen cars that had turned around completely, or spun off the highway and landed in a ditch. I gripped the seat covers and pictured Steve and me killed in a crash, our children orphaned.
I also thought about my purse. I’m not sure whether it was the loss of the purse that made me feel more vulnerable in the storm or the storm that made me feel more vulnerable without my purse, but whatever it was I know I felt as if the ground had slipped out from under my feet. I was without my children. Our car was skidding. And my purse was in some strange southern city, where I wasn’t.
About twenty miles from home I remembered my address book was in my purse, and in it were the names and addresses of everyone I knew and care about on the face of the earth, including at least thirty people I hadn’t seen in years—old acquaintances I’d never be able to find without that address book. Never mind that I hadn’t written or called them in years. As long as I had my address book I knew I could. And now they had all disappeared forever.
Well, we made it home safely, got the report from Vicky on how things had gone, tiptoed upstairs to take a look at the children, asleep in their beds. No disasters had taken place in our absence: the house was immaculate. There was no bad news in our four days’ accumulation of mail. Still I felt unsettled, and lay awake a couple of hours, running over and over in my head the places where I might have left my purse. I pictured it hanging from the hook against a ladies’ room door in Savannah. Propped on the floor next to a water fountain in North Carolina where I’d stopped to take a drink. I drifted into an uneasy sleep (dreams full of car wrecks) and woke with a gasp. I had just remembered one more thing that was in my purse.
A set of photographs (and negatives) taken one weekend in early fall. There were half a dozen shots taken on top of a mountain we’d climbed with the children: Audrey had just lost a tooth; Willy was bundled up in three layers of sweaters—the only time in his life, Audrey pointed out, when he actually looked chubby. There were pictures of a play the children had put on: Willy in a rhinestone-trimmed hat and an orange silk gown that trailed along the floor; Charlie as a cowboy; Audrey, as always, the queen. There was a really goofy bunch of pictures—my favorites—taken at a place we’d stopped at, on a Sunday drive, where they sold garden sculptures. The children loved that place, would’ve happily stayed there all day. We took Charlie’s picture on the back of a nearly life-size ceramic deer, and Audrey’s embracing a statue of a Greek goddess she’d begged to buy.
The day after we got home, when the man from the airline called back to say my purse hadn’t been found, I began sorting my losses. There hadn’t been much money in my wallet. Canceling those credit cards was a nuisance, but I could bear that too. Glasses were replaceable. About the names in the address book, I told myself that at least those old acquaintances could always find me.
Losing the pictures was the worst. I understood, for the first time, what it must be like for people who get wiped out in a fire and end up (the lucky ones, who survive) with no record of their children’s babyhood. Family history wiped out. All I’d lost was the record of one good weekend, and still I felt devastated.
I spent most of the next day and a half on the phone to airports—New York, Charlotte, Atlanta—trying to trace the route that plane had taken after we got off. I thought, crazily, of taking a drive up to that mountaintop again, to retake those pictures, of stopping again at the place with the garden sculptures and repositioning our children on the backs of those elves and deer. Of course I was glad to be home with my real, flesh and blood children. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about that roll of film. I imagined the stranger in whose hands my purse must have ended up—pictured him flipping through the pictures of our family, thinking about us briefly (filling in the pieces of our life), and then tossing the envelope in some trash can. I wept.
Three days after I lost my purse, I got a call from the airline, telling me the purse had turned up in Miami. When the woman who called with the news began running down the list of credit cards she’d found in my wallet I interrupted her. What about those pictures, I asked.
“They’re here,” she said. “I figured you’d only want to hear about the valuables. We’ll send everything up to you this afternoon.”
So now I have my pictures back, and today I’m sticking them in our album and thinking about what it is that makes me so compulsive about my children’s photographs. (Also an envelope full of hair from Willy’s first barbershop haircut. A pair of binoculars Charlie made out of two taped-together toilet-paper rolls. A pebble Audrey once gave me, with the instruction that I hold onto it forever—which I’m attempting to do.)
And here’s what I think: So much of raising children is about letting go. No wonder I’m always trying to hold on to whatever I can.
I can still remember the struggles I went through over my hair and clothes when I was growing up. I remember what it felt like, being made to wear an outfit I hated. I remember the naked feeling of too-short bangs. Practical brown shoes, when what I wanted were red ones. Undershirts, cardigan sweaters, snowpants. I vowed I’d never make a child of mine endure those indignities.
And later, when the choice of what to wear was finally up to me, I remember the daily indecision. Changing three times, four times, five … laying pools of clothes on the floor of my room as I tried on one outfit after another, searching for the one that looked and felt right on that particular day. The practice of those endless changes carried on into my twenties. The tears at the mirror. The impulsive visits to beauty parlors. (Let me be a redhead. Give me curls. Take them away.)
Then I was married, and, right away, pregnant. There’s the ultimate humbling experience, for someone who’s spent twenty years examining her reflection from all angles for the least indication that she might look fat. Suddenly—no doubt about it—I was, and not just in the belly either, but round-faced and thick-ankled too. I gained fifty pounds with that first pregnancy (thinking, innocently, that I was simply eating for two). The day after giving birth to my seven-and-a-half-pound baby girl, I stepped on the scale and found I still weighed forty-two pounds more than I used to. I cried and cried and cried.
Well, I lost the weight eventually. The time came when I once again fit my jeans. But though I still get dressed up now and then, and still put on my eyeliner every morning, without fail, motherhood signaled the end, for me, of a particular sort of vanity. These days I have no time to spend agonizing over which blouse, which stockings, which pair of earrings. I step into the same pair of jeans every morning, and one of the same three tops. I, who used to spend sixty dollars on a city haircut and perm, now cut my own hair, and I don’t even check a mirror when I do the back.
But the end of one kind of vanity brought with it the beginning of another sort. It began the day Audrey was born, the first time I put her in a dress. Of course I would’ve loved her if she’d looked like a monkey, but from the first she was beautiful, with dark skin and black eyes, lots of dark-brown hair, and eyelashes so long a woman once bent over her stroller and pulled at them to see if they were real. A friend of mine says that in the early days after the birth of her first child, she once spent twenty minutes dressing her son, then walked out of the house with him in his new outfit and herself stark naked. Heading out the door to a party, a few weeks after Audrey’s birth, I once found myself saying to Steve, “I’ll be right with you as soon as I put her eyeliner on.” For a moment there, I had forgotten who was who.
Having a child is part birth, part death. It means stepping back, leaving the younger generation to join the older, being no longer the newest, most precious. You look in the mirror, and it tells you someone else is fairest in the land.
I never minded that. I have always reveled in my daughter’s strange, exotic beauty. But it’s dangerous too. I am not her. She isn’t me. Brushing her hair won’t make mine shiny.
In my mind I know that. But mornings, lately, getting her ready for school, I have had to keep reminding myself of our separateness, and how dangerous it is to invest one’s self too deeply in one’s child. In her looks, especially.
With our sons, the problem seldom arises. Very often my boys’ faces are dirty or their hair’s a mess, or Charlie wants to wear his red Superman cape with his maroon Oshkosh overalls, or Willy’s hand-me-down socks have ruffles on them or his pant cuffs go just below his knees. None of which causes me a moment of pain.
But Audrey’s another story. For years I could dress her like a doll, exactly as I pleased: in smocked dresses and A-line jumpers, overalls with turtlenecks, 1950s-style thrift-shop treasures. I styled her hair in pigtails and French braids. She owned tights in every color of the rainbow.
Then she started school, and what she wanted were shirts with pictures of Strawberry Shortcake and Cabbage Patch Kids on the front; jeans, tailored shirts, her hair held behind her ears with a plastic headband. She wanted what the other girls were wearing: conservative knee-length corduroy skirts and matching blouses. Or, the other extreme, crazy, ill-matched combinations, or some beloved but too small dress.
Some mothers with whom I conferred on this told me they simply set out their child’s clothes every night; but with memories of my frustration at being told what to wear as a child, I’ve resisted that. As a result, the kilts and smocked dresses I’ve bought for Audrey—and even a lot of outfits she chose herself—hang at the back of the closet. On good mornings, when she comes down in one of the same three outfits (none of them, in my opinion, the most flattering of her clothes), I bite my tongue. But there are bad mornings, too (often the ones when I have just studied my own reflection in the mirror and been unhappy with it), when I snap at Audrey, “Can’t you ever wear something different?” or simply send her upstairs to change. At my worst, I have pointed out to her how much money I spent on those unworn clothes hanging in her closet, while I say (indicating my sweat pants and T-shirt), “Look at me. I dress in rags!”
Our arguments make her so late that I have to drive her to the school bus—both of us close to tears. I watch her trudge across the street and mount the steps of the bus, the pompom on her hat bobbing, and I want to call out, “Come back.” This morning, after the worst showdown yet, I ended up driving the five miles into town to meet her getting off the bus and to tell her I was sorry. Next time, I vow throughout the whole drive home, next time she comes down the stairs (as she did this morning) wearing crew socks and black patent-leather shoes, a too big skirt and a too small sweater, I will say to her only that I love her smiling face.
If I were talking to a therapist about my daughter’s dollhouse (and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea) the first thing I’d say is that I never had a dollhouse of my own. Variation on a theme of parents everywhere—who move through their children’s youth attempting an odd mix of re-creating their own, compensating for everything their own failed to provide, and attempting to construct, for their beloved offspring, that most elusive of experiences known as a happy childhood.
In fact, it’s not entirely accurate to say I never had a dollhouse: The year I turned six, my parents gave me a split-level ranch house with fireplace, doors, windows and paintings printed directly on the walls, and a set of furniture meant to symbolize beds, chairs, bureaus. But none of the drawers opened. There was no way to tuck a doll into beds whose spreads and pillows were molded in plastic, with not a wrinkle present. The view out the windows was always the same: sun shining, red geraniums in bloom.
What I actually played with—nearly every day of my life, from age five to nearly thirteen (when self-consciousness, not lack of interest, finally led me to pack it all away)—was actually a set of bookshelves: wallpapered, carpeted, and filled with mostly homemade cardboard and balsa-wood furniture, with matchbox drawers that always had something hidden inside. I was the only one who knew that if you cut open the Play-Doh food in the dollhouse refrigerator, inside the eggs you’d find a yolk, and in the watermelon, seeds. In 1967, when I finally packed it all away, I set the contents of those shelves in boxes according to rooms, with written instructions describing how things should be arranged, for the daughter I always knew I’d have. I’ve gone through the years, since, still saving the paper parasols from tropical drinks at restaurants, the miniature pencils that sometimes come inside magazine subscription offers. Because as surely as I knew I’d have a daughter, I knew the two of us would someday have, not wallpapered bookshelves, but a real dollhouse.
There are children who don’t make possible their parents’ fantasy-childhood reenactments: daughters who want haircuts when the mother’s idea is French braids, sons who greet their father’s presentation of Celtics tickets with the news that they have other plans for the evening. But I have a daughter whose natural leanings, combined with a heavy dose of indoctrination, have usually tended to follow the lines of my passions. Even before she was tall enough to see into display cases without being lifted up, Audrey—breathing heavily—was fogging up the glass separating her from the museum dollhouses I took her to see, crying out in a way some might mistake for distress when she’d spot a chandelier or a mouse hole or some other particularly heartbreaking detail. And she has always set up little houses of her own— outdoors with sticks and leaves, and in her room out of cigar and shoe boxes. To Audrey every commonplace object suggests a miniature variation. Thimbles are flower pots, a burnt-out flashcube is an aquarium.
I was on the lookout for a real dollhouse for a very long time, and I considered numerous contenders. There was an exquisite, copper-roofed Victorian reproduction at a museum gift shop that was not only too expensive but too grand all around. You couldn’t put a toothpaste-cap lampshade in that mansion. There was a house in a secondhand store I frequent around here, made by a middle-aged man whose dream it was to recreate his childhood home, exactly as it was in 1930, complete with Caruso recordings playing all the time, a Mary Pickford calendar on the wall, and in the basement, a furnace that really worked. No mistaking that dollhouse as anything but the product of a full-fledged obsession—but somebody else’s, not mine. Though I could have bought it for $350, the house would never have belonged to anyone but him.
I saw the house I wanted to buy four years ago at a local craft show. Roy, the man who made it, used to build real houses until a bad heart forced him to retire. So now he builds little houses, but with real shingles and three coats of paint on the clapboards, polished hardwood floors and hand-turned banisters and nine-over-six paned windows that actually open. Not fancy in their designs, but solid, homey, lived-in—the kind of house you wished your grandparents lived in, with swings on their front porches and sleds leaning against the door.
For the next few Octobers after that, Steve and I had our annual dollhouse discussion: I wanting to put in an order with Roy; Steve arguing that Audrey was too young by about twenty-five years, the house was too extravagant, and that the person who really wanted a dollhouse wasn’t Audrey anyway, it was her mother. Sometimes during these sessions I would cry (my girlhood and my parents came up with surprising frequency) and Steve would make the comment that it’s not until a person loses her childhood home that she seeks out a dollhouse with the kind of compulsion I displayed. Usually he’d end up saying “Go ahead, buy it,” but of course I knew the objections he raised were real and accurate. I did want a dollhouse for the child I used to be. And in a way that’s good for neither Audrey nor me, Audrey sometimes represents, for me, that childhood self.
So I held out against temptation the Christmas she was almost four, and again (more reluctantly) when she was almost five. But this fall—one of our most broke ever, at a time in our lives when I was putting off dental appointments and all but the most essential car repairs—I gave Roy my order for a $475 Christmas dollhouse, to be paid for (significantly enough) with a portion of the inheritance I had just received following the death of my father.
It’s more than mildly embarrassing to admit how large the dollhouse loomed in my imagination, all this past December, as we awaited delivery: the hours I spent stitching a patchwork quilt for the brass bed, constructing a miniature Christmas tree for the living room, sewing stockings for the real stone fireplace and making doll-sized presents to stack inside it. For Charlie I ordered a yellow Tonka bulldozer from the Sears catalogue. For Audrey (not better loved, just differently so) I made a heart-shaped, doily-covered, doll-sized chocolate box filled with individually formed chocolates, the size of seed pearls. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, setting up the dollhouse in a corner of our living room, arranging the furnishings I’d been accumulating for years, plugging in the chandelier, putting the note from Santa into the mailbox beside the front door, I felt as excited as I had, twenty-five years earlier, when I lay in my bed, listening for reindeer.
When Audrey came into the living room next morning she didn’t let out any screams, didn’t even seem to register the dollhouse for several minutes as she painstakingly unwrapped the colored pencils and stickers and barrettes inside her stocking. Then, very slowly, she approached the house, ran her fingers over the smooth floors, opened the drawers in the bureau, picked up the baby in the cradle, looked inside the mailbox. She didn’t make a sound for a long time. Finally she said, “I can’t believe it’s really mine.”
What I felt, watching her, was not only simple parental pleasure at having found a really nice present for my child, but also relief: The whole dollhouse question had been resolved, the only way it could’ve been—by getting one. I also knew that, much as Audrey liked the dollhouse, she would have liked a plastic Barbie Townhouse just as much and maybe (for the moment) more. Now sometimes I walk through her room and see dollhouse furniture and the patchwork quilt strewn on the floor. Days go by that the house stands idle. Now and then I’ll suggest it might be fun to sew curtains for the nine-over-six windows, and Audrey, kindly but firmly, will explain she’s busy. (She’s making a doll out of a sprouted onion, with a toilet-paper dress. She’s set up a Barbie tanning salon, using our broken toaster oven.) I think back to my six-year-old self (who would have run upstairs first thing after school every day to play with a house like Audrey’s), and realize (with interest, not pain) that my child and I are not as totally alike as I have sometimes thought.
Time was, I told my children about the world. I held their hands when I took them places, and told them the names of butterflies or rocks. Sometimes I’d go away—for an afternoon, or longer—and come home with stories for them about my adventures. It didn’t have to be much to thrill them: Maybe I saw a porcupine cross the road, or a fireman bringing a cat down off a roof. I’d bring home a bagel from the city, or a helium balloon from my dentist, or a bar of soap from an airplane ladies’ room, and they were happy. What they learned about life beyond the edges of our driveway they mostly got from Steve and me.
But I’ve begun to see the tables turn. I can still make the room come alive for Willy just by walking into it. But more and more, lately, I am the one who stays home (sitting at this desk of mine, looking out the window a lot, and eyeing the clock, waiting for them to come home, waiting for the stories they’ll have for me). I see how it is for my friend Jessica, with her children grown and gone now, free to do the work she had to put off nearly twenty years, while she raised them. How she looks forward to the occasional weekend when her children are all, once again, briefly sleeping under her roof. I begin to see, though my children are much younger, how she must feel. Now they walk in, and I light up.
I felt it pretty keenly on Audrey’s first day of school—the way the mothers (and I was one) lingered on the playground after their children filed into the school building. Scuffing our feet in the dirt, studying the class lists for any clue they might yield about what our child’s year would be like. Huddling together, surrounded by empty swings and teeter-totters, comparing notes on teachers—who looked nice, who looked tough. I’m not proud of the fact that one or two of us (and again, I was one) could not resist walking past our child’s classroom just to catch a glimpse inside before finally taking off.
It’s not that we’re idle, that our lives are empty. Most of these mothers (and the few fathers who were there in the schoolyard that first day) have jobs, and a life separate from their children. We design buildings, draw up legal documents, build houses, counsel patients, write books. Our lives are full. But an hour after school starts, my phone rings, and it’s my friend Erica (who also has a job she likes, a husband she loves, interests and concerns beyond motherhood), and she’s saying “Well, what do you think?” And I know she’s not talking about economic sanctions in South Africa or trade talks with Japan. She’s talking about our daughters’ new second-grade class.
Charlie is just four, and already it’s happening with him too. I drop him off at his nursery school and kneel for a kiss, and he gives me one. But it’s fleeting, and a little distracted, and I can tell, as I hug him afterward, that he’s looking over my shoulder and eyeing the boys in the block area. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours,” I tell him (not that he’s asking). “Yup,” he says gruffly, over his shoulder. “Bye.”
Of course there were children, that first day, who wept and clung to their mothers’ legs. Even Charlie has his moments, still, when he climbs into my lap, afraid of a daddy longlegs in his room, or needing to hear, one more time, that dinosaurs are extinct. He still needs me to drive him places, to pour his milk, to do up the fasteners on his overalls. And he still depends on me to walk him across the street.
But there are also some things my children know that I don’t. It starts with silly, odd bits of information: the various types of Care Bears available, which He-Man figures are good and which are evil. Then, gradually, it gets a little closer to home, and before a person knows it, her children are explaining photosynthesis and teaching her how to make an origami box. Which is just what we all want to happen, of course. Still, when it does, it’s a shock.
One morning I notice Charlie putting on his socks and fastening the Velcro on his sneakers unassisted (and I wonder whether, in part, he has been humoring me, every morning, when—without thinking about it—I’ve dressed him). I speak, in some story I’m making up, about “a deadly tarantula,” and both Audrey and Charlie correct me: A tarantula bite, to a human, it turns out, is hardly worse than a bee sting.
Charlie can transform a GoBot; I can’t. At our local ski slope Audrey rides the chair lift to the top of the mountain while I stand at the bottom watching, amazed, with Willy in my arms or toddling close beside me. But even with him, I know, the days are numbered before he moves on and I’m left standing in his dust.
These are the very early stages, still, of a process all our parents and grandparents have witnessed clear through its completion: from the point at which the child is entirely dependent on the parent, to the place where it’s the parent who looks to and counts on the child. We are, most of us, overtaken by our children in our lifetimes. (If we’re lucky.) They will be not only taller, and longer-lived, but smarter, stronger, more handsome and more beautiful, happier (that’s the hope) and wiser, their lives even more full than our own.
So already I see it beginning. Today, with Audrey at school and Charlie off playing at a friend’s house, and only Willy left with me, I stand in my doorway, at one minute after three, waiting for the first glimpse of Audrey as she trudges around the last bend in our driveway and up the last little hill to our house. Swinging her Snorks lunchbox and her backpack, singing a song I didn’t teach her. She breezes in the door as I turn to fix her a cup of hot chocolate. “Tell me about your day,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Later, Mom,” she says, blowing me a kiss. “I’ve got a really great game of Barbies going upstairs. I’ll tell you about things later, I promise.”
“Well,” I say, turning to Willy. “Shall we put on Cyndi Lauper and dance?” I am still, briefly, his favorite partner.
A half mile down the road from our house there’s a wide, rushing brook. In summer we swim there, in a place where the brook widens, and in the fall we sometimes have picnics along the banks. In winter the brook mostly freezes over, but because of the rocks and the speed of the water as it crashes over them, the ice forms thick blocks that fracture into jagged chunks and pile up, one against the other. Every winter—standing on the stone bridge over our frozen swimming hole and staring down at the way even the trees on either side have frosted over with the moisture from the brook—I think: “This has to be the most beautiful time of all.” Then comes spring: The snow melts, the ice blocks break apart and dissolve, the fiddlehead ferns stick up through the ground, watercress begins to grow in the icy water, and the brook runs so fast I can hear its roar from my back porch. And I remember that there is nothing I like better than this brook, just as it is right now.
Always, though, my love of this spot is mixed with something else, and that’s fear: Fear that when my son tosses his pebbles in to make a wish, he will lean too far over the railing and fall into those swirling waters. Fear that someday, like their father, they’ll want to jump off the high boulder at one side of the swimming hole (where, if you don’t position yourself just right, you could land on stone and break your back). On a walk one day with Audrey, when she was very small, we saw a gust of wind swoop down and lift her red cowboy hat right off her head and carry it down into the water, never to be seen again. And last fall, when a neighbor’s puppy disappeared, we all eventually concluded that the dog had probably gone for a dip in the brook and that he’d been pulled under by the swift current.
Every spring, I try to make boats with my children and sail them in this brook, the same as I used to with my father, in a different brook, when I was young. With three children now, it’s not always easy to hit just the right combination of good weather, good moods, good sailing conditions, and free time. Last Saturday everything fell into place.
It was, for starters, a beautiful day. We had a couple of friends’ children over—Ben and Aaron, around the ages of Audrey and Charlie. Everyone was getting along. Nobody was wearing the kind of shoes that couldn’t get wet. I brought out my giant box of boat-building supplies (Popsicle sticks, fabric scraps, Styrofoam blocks saved from various small-appliance purchases, odd bottle caps and old curlers) and let everyone loose with the glue. Forty-five minutes later, we had five small craft—each design as distinct as its creator—and we headed for the brook.
We found a good spot for launching: a place where the water was choppy enough to make for an exciting course, but not so rough as to capsize our craft altogether. There were enough broad flat rocks that we could step across to dislodge a vessel if one got stuck on a twig or hung up on some leaves. And because the brook flowed reasonably straight there, we could follow our boats downstream a little way, instead of losing track of them in a moment when they rounded the first bend.
I want to describe these boats because each one told something about the child who made it. Charlie’s, unnamed, had a single mast, a red and black flag, the silver cap from an old shampoo bottle stuck on right in the middle. He worked very hard making this boat, and put a lot of thought into the placement of each feature. When he was all done, he announced he didn’t want to sail it. He’d rather just hold on to his boat and keep it in his room.
Aaron had chosen a more elaborate boat design, with cardboard tubes from used-up toilet-paper rolls and bits of foil and a balloon and bottle caps all over the place, attached with liberal amounts of glue. Ben, his big brother, had actually gone so far as to consider flotation factors in his design. Willy cared only that he have some Styrofoam object, with a balloon attached, to fling into the water (and I was concerned chiefly with insuring that only the boat, and not Willy, got dunked). Audrey had made a kind of yacht, named Amelia, with a lifeboat, a captain and crew member made out of clothespins with glued-on yarn hair, a cabin, a couple of sails, silver streamers, a purple feather sticking up from the mast, and a few forsythia blossoms at the prow. She was willing to launch her masterpiece, but attached a long string so she’d be able to retrieve it.
I’m not sure I myself understand the source of the excitement produced by seeing a boat you’ve constructed actually making it from one point on a stream to another point a little farther down that stream. We all know water flows. We all know Styrofoam floats. But launching a boat, seeing it bob along, racing along the banks to meet it, and reeling it in again farther down—well, all that is not a whole lot less thrilling to me now, at age thirty-two, than it was at age eight.
For over an hour we launched these boats and watched them go, and dislodged them from the rocks, ran ahead, met them as they came by, reeled them in, then launched them all over again. And of course Willy did get soaked. And of course the toilet-paper rolls on Aaron’s boat did get waterlogged. And the sails fell off, and the balloons came undone. None of the boats looked much like boats after a while (and in truth, we didn’t look much like sailors, either).
It was getting late. Willy’s pants were so wet that I was wringing them out like a dishtowel. I told Audrey we’d take one more run, and then we’d better head for home.
But the Amelia hit a trouble spot: a little eddy of swirling water that sucked her pink balloon ballast over a rocky dropoff, causing her to capsize. Audrey managed to rescue the boat, but when she did, I heard her let out a wail. The captain and crewperson were missing, lost in the muddy depths of Beard Brook, along with the purple feather. Losing the feather Audrey could bear. It was losing those two little wooden people that made her weep.
So I put my arms around her and we talked about bodies of water and boats. How our small brook flows into a river, and how that river flows into an even larger river, and that large river flows into the sea, which stretches all the way to England. I suppose some people might think those two clothespin people will simply end up buried in the muddy brook bed or snagged on a stick a little way downstream. As for me, I picture them washing ashore on some African beach or bobbing across the English Channel some day, round about next August, where surely there will be someone waiting to receive them, with joy and wonder.
And that, it occurs to me, is pretty much how I feel about launching children into the turbulent waters it will be up to them to navigate. Their father and I will put our mark on them, for sure: we’ll lower them gently, run along the banks a ways, step out on the rocks to get them unstuck when necessary, reel them in, even, a time or two. And then they’ll be off, toward some distant and unknown destination, while we stand on the shore, waving and cheering, watching them go.