Once freed from the yoke of parental rules, I quickly made my own. Most of them involved leisure. Huge swaths of free time. Time to contemplate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the merits of Guinness for breakfast. Time to sit on the rickety upstairs porch and listen to Liz Story. And after that, a nap.
In retrospect, it wasn't the most productive use of my tuition funds. And my stunning lack of direction did lead to spending the next five years wandering from one aimless job to another, even less interesting, aimless job. But it did teach me a valuable lesson that I've carried well into adulthood, and now parenthood.
In a world of multi-tasking and laptops and Blackberrys and soccer practice and dance lessons and in-your-face, up-to-the-millisecond updates on everything and everybody I know or might want to know, tuning out is the new turning on.
I could have gone to law school or grad school or started on the bottom rung of some corporate ladder after college, but the truth was I had no idea who I was and what I wanted out of life. And I needed those five years of downtime to figure it out. So I worked as a secretary and an office manager until the divining rod finally pointed in a direction.
When I realized that I wanted to be a reporter, I poured all my energy into making it happen. And within six months, I was working as editorial assistant at a national magazine, and 21/2 years after that, I was working as a reporter for a national wire service.
What caused me to choose journalism as a career? Damned if I know. It was something that gradually dawned on me during all of that free time working in jobs that I knew weren't going to be my life's work.
When my twins were born in 2000, I started gunning for the role of Supermom. I would tandem-nurse them, freeze my own strained peas in ice-cube trays, teach them to play soccer by the time they were 3, and get the old piano that came with the house tuned and ready for little fingers as soon as they turned 5. And work five days a week, too. Lesser women may not have been up to the task, but I knew in my soul that I was different.
What caused me to choose journalism as a career? Damned if I know. It was something that gradually dawned on me during all of that free time working in jobs that I knew weren't going to be my life's work.
When my twins were born in 2000, I started gunning for the role of Supermom. I would tandem-nurse them, freeze my own strained peas in ice-cube trays, teach them to play soccer by the time they were 3, and get the old piano that came with the house tuned and ready for little fingers as soon as they turned 5. And work five days a week, too. Lesser women may not have been up to the task, but I knew in my soul that I was different.
Short story: Didn't happen.
Instead, I quickly understood why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture, my babies were sick for 50 percent of the first two years of their lives (causing my then-boss to complain that he couldn't count on me anymore, causing me to start looking for a new career), and in my darkest moments, I felt that not only was I not Supermom, I was not-even-adequate-Mom.
When I wasn't working, I rarely left the house - and essentially spent the first three years of my daughters' lives barricading them in the living room with sofas and dog gates, and making sure they didn't kill themselves.
Once those years were behind me, and they started school, I toyed with the idea of signing them up for soccer or T-ball or dance. In Pre-K, I did sign them up for ballet, but their first recital (complete with pratfalls and giggles, poor tutu etiquette, and a complete lack of awareness of what they were supposed to be doing) made it clear that this was not their calling.
So we dropped that.
We tried a few more activities after that, but anything that started on a weekend morning was difficult for all of us, and after school activities required me to beg huge favors of moms who didn't work in NYC like me, and I just wasn't up to asking.
Not that my girls felt they were missing out - I was the one who felt that working mother twinge of guilt that I wasn't exposing them to enough extracurricular activities - possibly dooming them to teenage angst and excessive drug use.
Secretly, though, I loved our lazy weekends. We'd wake up whenever we woke up, make pancakes or eat cereal out of the box, read a book, play with the cats, or just sit by the front window and watch the neighbors walk their dogs. I live on a suburban corner, with sun streaming in from three sides, and it's a cozy, relaxing place to just be.
Magical things can happen when you're sitting still. One weekend day a few years back, I walked over to one of my daughters and sat beside her on the couch. She smiled, then looked at me quizzically. "Mom," she said, "why is it that just sitting next to you makes me feel so happy inside?"
Those kinds of moments are difficult to catch if you're running too fast from place to place. So over time we've made it a family tradition to have "lazy Saturdays." It's brought my family closer together, and I think my twins are getting a lot more out of it than it may be apparent on the surface.
Yes, they often use this downtime to play on the computer or their video games, but they also draw and paint and build blanket forts and read comic books and ask questions and talk to us about whatever happens to be on their mind. Free time gives them the space to explore and make choices, and create and figure things out and interact with the world in their own way.
And it gives me the opportunity to be a better mother. I try to always take the time to listen, really listen to what they're saying. And to not give them rushed answers, but to thoughtfully and fully respond.
One of my favorite adults when I was young gave me the greatest gift you can give to a child - the gift of attention. From my earliest memory, she treated me as an individual and spent time trying to understand who I was as a human being.
Coincidentally, the home my children are growing up in today is her home, which my husband and I bought from her when we got married. We were starting a new life, while she, an aging widow, moved to another state to live closer to her son.
Before she passed away, she came back to visit for her 90th birthday, to spend time in her old home and to meet my then-baby girls. She told me she was so glad I was raising my family in the home where she raised her son. And she wished me joy in the coming years.
As always, she looked deeply into my eyes when she spoke, as if she was confronting my very soul. She wanted me to know how much this meant to her, and was willing me to acknowledge the importance of this moment. And then she hugged me and laughed. A big, mirthful laugh that showed how much she was still enjoying life in her ninth decade.
I wish for my children and for myself that same kind of joy that comes with attentiveness and the rare, but oh so precious ability to truly know another human being.
Once those years were behind me, and they started school, I toyed with the idea of signing them up for soccer or T-ball or dance. In Pre-K, I did sign them up for ballet, but their first recital (complete with pratfalls and giggles, poor tutu etiquette, and a complete lack of awareness of what they were supposed to be doing) made it clear that this was not their calling.
So we dropped that.
We tried a few more activities after that, but anything that started on a weekend morning was difficult for all of us, and after school activities required me to beg huge favors of moms who didn't work in NYC like me, and I just wasn't up to asking.
Not that my girls felt they were missing out - I was the one who felt that working mother twinge of guilt that I wasn't exposing them to enough extracurricular activities - possibly dooming them to teenage angst and excessive drug use.
Secretly, though, I loved our lazy weekends. We'd wake up whenever we woke up, make pancakes or eat cereal out of the box, read a book, play with the cats, or just sit by the front window and watch the neighbors walk their dogs. I live on a suburban corner, with sun streaming in from three sides, and it's a cozy, relaxing place to just be.
Magical things can happen when you're sitting still. One weekend day a few years back, I walked over to one of my daughters and sat beside her on the couch. She smiled, then looked at me quizzically. "Mom," she said, "why is it that just sitting next to you makes me feel so happy inside?"
Those kinds of moments are difficult to catch if you're running too fast from place to place. So over time we've made it a family tradition to have "lazy Saturdays." It's brought my family closer together, and I think my twins are getting a lot more out of it than it may be apparent on the surface.
Yes, they often use this downtime to play on the computer or their video games, but they also draw and paint and build blanket forts and read comic books and ask questions and talk to us about whatever happens to be on their mind. Free time gives them the space to explore and make choices, and create and figure things out and interact with the world in their own way.
And it gives me the opportunity to be a better mother. I try to always take the time to listen, really listen to what they're saying. And to not give them rushed answers, but to thoughtfully and fully respond.
One of my favorite adults when I was young gave me the greatest gift you can give to a child - the gift of attention. From my earliest memory, she treated me as an individual and spent time trying to understand who I was as a human being.
Coincidentally, the home my children are growing up in today is her home, which my husband and I bought from her when we got married. We were starting a new life, while she, an aging widow, moved to another state to live closer to her son.
Before she passed away, she came back to visit for her 90th birthday, to spend time in her old home and to meet my then-baby girls. She told me she was so glad I was raising my family in the home where she raised her son. And she wished me joy in the coming years.
As always, she looked deeply into my eyes when she spoke, as if she was confronting my very soul. She wanted me to know how much this meant to her, and was willing me to acknowledge the importance of this moment. And then she hugged me and laughed. A big, mirthful laugh that showed how much she was still enjoying life in her ninth decade.
I wish for my children and for myself that same kind of joy that comes with attentiveness and the rare, but oh so precious ability to truly know another human being.
The world moves past us all at such a dizzying pace. And it's exciting and wonderful to get caught up in its whirl. But it's in those empty spaces in between that the important stuff happens. And I don't want to miss a thing.
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