Velveteen Parenting
Adventures in Becoming Real
I always wanted to be a mother.
Scratch that. Let me begin again.
I always wanted to be a very good mother—exceptional even.
I pictured myself with a happy houseful of children. We would play games together: kickball, Monopoly, charades. We’d have tea parties and sleepovers and go on epic family vacations we would remember and talk about for the rest of our lives. The Galápagos Islands. Paris. The Great Wall of China. I would appreciate the children, never sighing or moaning about how much work it was or how much it cost to raise them.
And, like you I’m sure, I was intent to bring only what was most positive about my childhood into my own parenting. When we actually become parents, however, we find that the disappointment, sleep deprivation, and the basic demands of—you know—being adults tug at the neat seams of our resolve until we find ourselves saying things to our kids that we swore we’d never say. We do the things we promised we’d never do. Caught in a moment of “Go clean your room!” or “How many times have I told you . . .” we hold our heads in our hands like that iconic Munch painting, The Scream, and shriek, “That’s it! I’ve officially turned into my mother!” (At that point, either we laugh at ourselves and realize there’s nothing wrong with that, or we pick up the phone and call a therapist. Both are perfectly reasonable responses.)
When I was growing up, I wondered whether my parents’ divorce prohibited me from eventually creating a marriage that would last. Did a person have to soak up—minute by minute and day by day—the stellar examples of parents in order to create a solid marriage and family as an adult? I would hear myself referred to as a “child of a broken home” as though a damaged building—not two human beings—had somehow brought me into the world. When I heard the phrase, shame washed over me, and I wondered whether tattered relationships were my destiny.
In the years leading up to my parents’ divorce, woundedness pulsed through my house at uneven intervals, filling the air with a kind of stale emotional odor, like when the heating system is turned on after a long summer. The vents blow dust and a musty smell through the house, affecting each room.
Everything seemed to be falling apart at home. And according to the evening news, it was no better in the world at large. President Nixon had resigned. Scientists were making babies in test tubes. The mass suicide in Jonestown. Patty Hearst. An oil crisis.
My religious faith confused me too. At church, my least favorite verses in the Bible often loomed over me like dark clouds. The sins of the fathers, the pastors said, would be visited on the children. Not might be, but would be visited on the sinner’s offspring. Every time I heard those verses, I felt jinxed. I certainly didn’t want anybody’s sins to “visit on” me. Not those of the father I barely knew or of the grandparents I’d never met. I wanted a strong marriage and a big, happy family someday.
(Curse-free, if you please.)
I used to wonder whether other people’s families knew something mine didn’t. I spied from the bushes as the magician who lived across the street worked with his mourning doves in his garage. I peered into family rooms as neighbors reclined in their La-Z-Boys in front of Love Boat and Fantasy Island. I strained to overhear adult conversations at friends’ houses while we sat cross-legged on the floor playing with stuffed animals.
When I discovered Louise Fitzhugh’s novel Harriet the Spy, I felt like I had found a soul mate. Harriet was quirky and curious, and she paid attention to the ordinary details of other people’s lives. So I began to write my observations about people in black-and-white composition notebooks the way Harriet did.
Alice’s mother keeps a drawer of candy bars in her kitchen. Alice and her brother David don’t have to ask before taking one and they never have to eat health food like wheat germ or Tiger’s Milk.
No one is allowed in Kim’s living room and the carpet is vacuumed into straight lines. Kim’s mother always dresses nicely, her hair is always done, and she always seems to be standing silently in front of a shiny kitchen sink.
Megan’s parents keep to themselves. Their bedroom is on its own side of the house down a long, shadowy hall. It doesn’t seem to bother anyone that the house is messy or that the doors stand open.
Every time I walk by, the front yard of Brandon’s house is filled with kids running around. Of the eight of them, some were adopted, some not. Some are white, some not. They like one another.
My parents divorced by the time I was in junior high school. It was around then that I heard myself referred to as a “latchkey kid.” Yes, I had a key on a string around my neck or sometimes waiting for me under the front doormat. And yes, with a mother who had returned to school for her doctorate, I let myself into a quiet house after school every day.
But did I really need another maudlin nickname?
As a “latchkey kid from a broken home,” my family fantasies continued. Sometimes when I pictured myself grown up and a mother, I could almost see the adult version of me (as played by, perhaps, Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers) pulling the door open wide for my kids and meeting them after school with a plate of just-out-of-the-oven Toll House chocolate-chip cookies and glasses of milk. Like the fictional Jennifer Hart, maybe I’d be a journalist with a secret life as a private investigator.
When my Jennifer-Hart-adult-self met the children at the door, the aforementioned cookies would be baked with real chocolate chips and accompanied by store-bought milk. This was imperative. The chocolate chips in my house at that time were generic and “chocolate-flavored” and seemed brushed with some kind of purplish wax. The grocery store had a whole aisle of generic products, bearing only the most basic descriptions of what was inside the packages. The lone design on the boxes or cans was a dreary olive green line and black stenciled letters: FLOUR. COLA. BAKING CHIPS. TUNA.
The milk we drank at home was made from a mix that was kept in a giant paper bag next to the water softener in the basement. After a trip to the grocery store with my mom, I’d lug a block of salt down into the basement and drop it into the softener, stepping back to avoid getting splashed, the muscles in my arms stretched long after walking the salt down two flights of stairs from the garage.
“Get some milk while you’re down there, okay?” my mom would call from the kitchen, and I’d dip a glass measuring cup into the bag of powder to take up for that night’s dinner.
We weren’t poor, and we weren’t rich. We had a house in a nice neighborhood in one of the most affluent counties in America. The schools were great, there was food on the table, and we had the clothes, books, and toys we needed. But things were very tight.
After my parents’ divorce, my father moved to Texas and I didn’t see him again until I was in college. “Our father, who art in Texas,” my siblings sometimes joked. Back then, Texas was a sanctuary for what some referred to as “dead-beat dads.” Texas provided men a safe haven from alimony and child support payments. Maybe these fathers had other reasons for relocating there. Perhaps they were infatuated with the Lone Star State or with cowboys and mechanical bulls. Later, though, it did seem it was likely more than a coincidence that all the men I heard of from our town who had left their families had moved to that same state so far away from our hometown in Illinois. I pictured them sitting together at a saloon, raising their glasses as the wooden doors swung open to reveal another father on the run from his family up north.
Saddled with bills (pun intended) and raising us while going to graduate school, my mother got the bags of powdered milk and other food and household items from a missionary organization in the town just north of where we lived. A child of the Depression, my mom knows how to stretch a dollar and is more interested in the life of the mind than in measuring up to the mythical Joneses. She is much more likely to notice a title on a bookshelf than someone’s new kitchen cabinets.
My brother Drew still favors the strawberry Suave, the shampoo of our youth, brought home in bulk from the warehouse along with the milk powder. Four years older than I am, and more my playmate than our older siblings, Drew valiantly drank my milk most days after first creating a diversion to distract our mother.
When I attempted to sip the milk, I would gag. “I can’t!” I would whine. “I’m going to throw up.”
But we had to drink our milk—strong bones and teeth and all that.
My heroic brother took pity on me and came to my rescue every evening by pointing animatedly out the window at the backyard and shouting, “Oh, look! A rabbit!” or “What kind of bird is that?” Our mother would turn to the window, and while her back was to us, he’d exchange our glasses—his empty, mine full of the lumpy, ivory-colored liquid.
“Oh, I must have missed it,” my mother would say, disappointed. “What color were its feathers?”
I realize that it wasn’t very nice of us to exploit her gullibility. But you know what they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. Drew could be in prison right now for committing a heinous crime and I’d still think he was a saint for drinking glass after glass of that lukewarm powdered milk when we were kids. Even with ice cubes, it was nasty. I knew one thing for sure: when I grew up, my kids would have store-bought milk.
Cold, tasty, and white.
No stirring necessary.
The vision of my eventual family life came into even clearer focus when I worked as a babysitter in high school and college. I noted, with an anthropologist’s vigilant and detached gaze, frazzled parents barking at their children before leaving me in charge and then, hours later when they were off having dinner at the country club, the children speaking in those same cutting tones with each other. I saw looks of cold hostility pass between the mothers and fathers of some of the children for whom I babysat. It strengthened my resolve. Such unpleasantness would not befall my home when I had children of my own.
There was no need for it. I would be in love with my husband, and he with me. I would model tolerance, good humor, and gentleness for my children, and they would mirror these traits.
I would be like a stone dropped into a pond, my children the ripples, spreading peace and goodwill as they echoed away from me into their own lives. Perhaps, I allowed, they might bicker on extremely rare occasions, but only when they were overtired or coming down with the flu. But at those jangly times, I would sashay into the room and know just what to say to calm them and help them reconnect, and they all would be back on track again. I wouldn’t spank them, shame them, or even raise my voice toward them. I wouldn’t need to—we would be in such sync with one another.
I also wouldn’t be imprisoned by convention. As a result, my children would always be fully, joyfully, authentically themselves. I’d let them paint murals on their bedroom walls. I’d allow them to have a dozen different kinds of pets. (You want a Saint Bernard? Of course! An iguana? Why not? A long-haired Persian cat? How exquisite!) They’d choose their clothes and how they wanted to wear their hair.
Our home would be an oasis in an uncertain world.
I would break that old “sins of the fathers” curse and would not be burdened by childhood wounds.
I’d blow my sad memories into the wind, like dandelion seeds.
In my early thirties, as the mother of three young children, my Harriet-the-Spy-self remained hyper vigilant, ever on the lookout for examples of happy homes to emulate. While stationed for several hours a day on the sofa with a nursing baby and a clear view of the street, I watched a red van pull in and out of the driveway opposite my own. Six, eight, ten, twelve times a day, I saw my neighbor maneuver her van up the hill, into the garage, and then out again. The garage door went up, the red van pulled in or out, the door went down.
Where could she be going? I’d wonder, captivated.
Its driver, my across-the-street neighbor, was efficient, cheerful, and always in motion. Her dress was casual but pulled together, sort of like an L.L. Bean catalog model. Her children were attractive, polite kids who seemed to be decades older than my own. (Hers were—gasp!—already all in school.) As my baby napped, my neighbor’s kids clambered around on their play set and threw a baseball in the yard with their father. They were in the gifted program at school and followed their mother’s lead to be environmentally conscious and helpful toward those in need in the community.
I picked at the frayed fabric of my sweatpants, and I swooned.
At the time, I was a part-time reporter for a local newspaper and, enamored with my neighbor, I asked her whether she would agree to be interviewed for a feature story on what it meant to be a mother in the year 2000. Gamely, she agreed. I’d been spying on her for months, noting whatever details of her life I could glean from a distance; but for the story, she gave me access to her house, her schedule, and even the holy of holies, you might say—her massive, wood-paneled refrigerator.
I sat on the edge of my kids’ green turtle sandbox in the backyard, writing the story as my children played nearby. My feet were buried and unburied by my toddler son Ian as I scratched away on a yellow legal pad with a marker that likely was a prize in a goody bag or a stumpy pencil taken from the pews at my church. I had long since abandoned my Harriet-the-Spy composition books as well as the pretentious fountain pens and Moleskine journals of my young adulthood.
But here I was, finally a professional journalist, writing from my suburban backyard. If Louisa May Alcott could write her novels with children running around the drawing room, certainly I could write features for the local paper with my bare feet submerged in cool sand.
I nervously awaited the publication of the profile on my neighbor, hoping she would approve of it. But I had nothing to fear—what was published in the paper was a sort of song of praise to the stay-at-home mother and to my neighbor in particular. The headline read “The Right Kind of Busy.”
The week’s groceries are unloaded into the refrigerator. Eight plastic jugs of milk form ranks. On the bottom shelf, twenty containers of yogurt stand at the ready. In the large pullout freezer drawer below, frozen meat and pizzas await. The only aberration from orderly rows and columns is a bowl of halfeaten ice cream, topped with chocolate syrup, a spoon stuck in it like an explorer’s flag.
This kitchen, like so many kitchens belonging to school-aged children and their parents, is clearly the family’s headquarters. Each person’s schedule is noted on the calendar; everyone is assigned a color. Yet, in this meticulous environment, signs—including the ice cream sculpture in the freezer—reveal that real children live a real life here. . . .
Keeping kids in clean soccer uniforms, overseeing their academic progress, volunteering at their schools, delivering them to practice fields, and feeding them in the scant moments between work and school can take a Herculean effort from parents. Knowing that it is a choice—rooted in love for the child—to invest in one’s children and their activities seems to help parents remain dedicated and armed with a sense of humor about the demands of their schedules.
And on it went, detailing my neighbor’s good sense as well as the ways she was creating a balanced, happy home for her children. In this one person, this one seemingly ordinary neighbor, I’d finally found what I’d been seeking for so many years: the perfect mother making the perfect family.
I wanted to be her.
Not surprisingly, for the few years we lived across the street from each other, she was my parenting guru. I asked her advice on everything from treating a child’s rash to whether to register my kids for an activity through the park district. I was always running across the road to chat with her as she pulled weeds or started on a walk with her dog. She was infinitely patient with me.
“Be there when they get out of school,” she advised. “Then you get the real story of what happened that day before it all goes out of their minds.”
Check.
“Pediatricians don’t always trust you. They forget that moms spend every waking moment with their kids. You have to insist that you get in for an appointment when you know something’s going on.”
Got it.
When I confessed to her that I was trying to follow very closely in her footsteps, my neighbor laughed and tried to dissuade me from doing so. She confessed her mistakes to me, told me about the appointments or celebrations she had forgotten, and detailed how she sometimes felt confounded by the needs and personalities of her four children.
I chalked up such admissions to her modesty. My neighbor’s house and children seemed perfect to me. She was involved at her church, a committed gardener, and always reaching out to the older people on our block. She was even her sons’ Boy Scout den leader. In my mind, she was an ideal mother and had family life “down pat,” whatever that expression meant. She made it all look so easy. You see, back then I was a believer in what author Carla Barnhill calls the “myth of the perfect mother.”1 Nothing she could say or do dissuaded me from seeing her in this rosy light.
One afternoon, I sat with my four children and her daughter, who was then around ten years old, in my front yard. The ice cream truck had made its way up our street, and in a fit of maternal zeal, I waved it down and bought treats for all the kids within sight. As my (perfect) neighbor’s daughter ate her ice cream, she remarked that her brother—then in high school—was in trouble. Big trouble. I don’t remember whether he had missed his curfew or had done poorly on a test, but whatever it was, she said it was a very big deal.
“Oh. Teenagers do stuff like that sometimes, don’t they?” I said sagely, as though I had any clue what teenagers did and didn’t do. At the time, I couldn’t imagine my own kids as teens, arriving home late, or being asked to study for tests more academically rigorous than that of reciting the alphabet or tying their shoelaces.
“My mom was so mad she chased him up the stairs with a wooden spoon,” the girl announced as she and the other kids jumped up from the grass to play.
A wooden spoon? I had no idea she has such a flair for the dramatic, I thought. I bet that got his attention, the rascal! I was awash in appreciation for my neighbor’s good humor.
Later my neighbor told me about the incident and described the white-hot rage she had felt when she ran after her son. (Rage? But I thought you were just being silly and theatrical!) As she confessed her anger, I couldn’t believe that she had been brought to such a point with her son. How could one’s own child be that infuriating? Rage was chaotic and uncontrolled; it made me nervous. Committed as I was to keeping my fantasy alive, I quickly dismissed the idea that she could have experienced such a strong emotion.
Anomaly, I thought with a shrug, and then I complimented her on the lilies in her garden.
I’m sure she could have used a kind word at that moment and would have liked to be seen and accepted as the real-life person she was. But I had shaped her into something else. I had slapped a big label on her that read “Perfect Mom” and the letters were so shiny and appealing, I couldn’t see past them to the real person standing in front of me.
Now, years later, after being broken in by time and exasperation and days when I want to run after my own kids with a wooden spoon, I no longer look to others or to myself to be ideal mothers. Now, like the Velveteen Rabbit, I’ve become, well, more Real. My fur’s been rubbed off. My heart has stretched and expanded. The shine is gone. Now I can say with confidence that much as we may long to do so, we cannot create perfect homes and families. No matter how spiritually deep, deliberate, or disciplined we aspire to be, we can’t completely escape the unpleasant parts of ourselves. We can’t gather up all of our childhood memories, injuries, and longings like a heap of dirty laundry and load them into the washing machine to make every wrinkle and stain disappear. Whatever you call it—original sin, human nature, or just life—a vein of brokenness runs through every one of us. We must acknowledge the darker parts of ourselves, confess our mistakes and bad choices, accept forgiveness, and give ourselves the chance to start again. Over and over and over again.
These days, instead of focusing on creating a conflict-free home, raising picture-perfect kids, and being an ideal mother—comprised of equal parts June Cleaver, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Angelina Jolie—I have embraced a more realistic view of what I can and cannot do as a parent. This reality-based “Velveteen parenting” includes, but is not limited to, the following general guidelines:
• I choose my battles. Although I don’t like it when my kids draw on their hands, chew the erasers off of their pencils, or overuse the word like, I try to overlook these misdemeanors.
• I know it’s not even worth trying to puzzle out what is “the right kind of busy.”
• I keep my eyes open and look with a critical—and often delighted—eye at what my culture is dishing up to my children and me. I try to teach my kids to do the same and to appreciate that which is true and good.
• I remind myself that children are not little adults but are uniquely suited to grow, learn, and enjoy life in ways that many of us adults don’t remember how to do anymore.
• I ask questions such as, What do I want our family to be like? What are our individual gifts and perspectives? What connects us as a family and brings us joy?
• I make certain things priorities in our family life—that we treat each other with respect as much as possible, that we eat together whenever possible, and that we attend church together as much as we can.
And I’m not ashamed that everyone from my kids’ teachers to my friends to the children themselves knows how smitten I am with them. That I’m besotted and madly head-over-heels in love with my children underlies all of the precepts above, and I hope as they grow up and go out into the world, that big love will be a protection to them. I also pray that the way they have experienced love from my husband and me in their childhoods will affect the way they experience the reality of God’s love throughout their lives.
If you picked up this book in hopes of reading a parenting manual with a definitive solution to the very best way to raise children, I’m afraid you’ll be let down. In these pages, I don’t advocate that you become a Tiger Mother, BFF Mom, Helicopter Mom, or Earth Mama to your kids. I don’t know the best way to potty-train a toddler, to get children to prefer broccoli over caramel corn, or to ensure that teenagers don’t engage in risky behavior such as driving too fast or sassing their parents. I don’t know how to make the middle school years or algebra homework as rewarding to children as an afternoon at the beach. What I do know is that family matters and it is a constant source of joy, grace, and, yes, moments of real exasperation in my life.
This book, then, is just stories about family life and how I’ve come to appreciate the mess of it. I am grateful for my own happy, idiosyncratic, and imperfect family and the culture we are creating together.
I’m doing my best to raise strong children, not broken adults.
I wish all of this for you too.