How Second Kids Humble Their Parents

My first kid was sleeping through the night at two months old. Other new moms weren’t exactly thrilled for me. I tried to be humble, but I confess I was pretty sure I was doing an awesome job.

Until she stopped sleeping through the night five months later. Then I felt like I was doing a shitty job. When she got back on track after a month or two, so did my good-mom-identity. I was good at teaching a baby how to sleep. I was good at being a mom.

Then I had a second child. At eight months, he was still waking up six times a night. Because it turns out that I am not in fact a sleep expert or a perfect parent. I just got lucky the first time around.

My first was so easy (being a mom was hard, but she was easy). I could take her anywhere. She napped in the car. She crawled early. She walked when we expected. She talked up a storm, with actual little sentences by her first birthday.

So, I confess: I was pretty proud. She was a great kid, so obviously I was an all-star mom. 

When other parents—whose babies weren’t doing what they were supposedly supposed to do (sleep or walk or talk or whatever it was) when they were supposedly supposed to be doing it—would ask me how I did it, I actually answered them. It’s cringeworthy looking back at it now. “Well, I talk to her all the time” or “We do a lot of tummy time” or “You just have to put them down in the crib really slowly.” I actually thought I had answers.

Second kids are really, really good at one thing: humbling their parents.

Apparently, I wasn’t a sleep guru, didn’t have anything to do with my daughter crawling and was not at all responsible for her early talking. My son did everything on his own timetable, because kids are not blank slates we get to draw and they are not even tiny copies of ourselves. They are each their own little individual selves, with brains and bodies that have their own ideas. It has nothing to do with us.

My second kid was really great in helping me figure this out. With my first, I had a lot of “I’ll never…” One of which was: I’ll never give my kid a pacifier. Well, baby number two got one on day two. He needed it. That I never gave one to my first may have been more a product of her temperament than my principles.

The other side of this lesson is that the second kid also teaches you that the first one isn’t perfect either. When my son came along, I looked at him and realized he was good at and easy about different things. Which had a way of shining a light on the more challenging things about my daughter. She, like me, can talk incessantly. My son is quieter. Which is nice. He also hardly ever falls—he seems to have a more intuitive sense of where his body is in the world. My daughter sort of floats around and—no exaggeration—can fall down when she’s just standing still or off a chair she’s sitting in.

With two kids, I think we learn that we don’t know what we’d do if we had a different kids. We don’t know what we’d do if we had someone else’s kid. It’s a lot harder to judge someone else’s parenting when you realize how much it’s a combustible mixture of who your kid is and who you are and how you were raised and a million other things.

I don’t know how I would parent anyone else’s kids but my own. Even that’s an ever-evolving experiment. 

Knowing how much I’ve learned from having a second kid, I can only imagine how much parents of three or four kids learn. Though I think I’ll stick to asking them for their wisdom over first-hand, hands-on learning on that one!

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What If I’m Happy With My Small Mom Life?

Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond?

As long as I can remember, I’ve had this question in the back of my head, as if every decision—where to live, where to work, when to have kids—could somehow be made with this in mind.

Maybe it’s because of the American way we grow up thinking we could be President, if only we wanted to. So, if you don’t want to be President, it must be because you have some other fabulous plan. In part, it’s generational. Our parents were more likely to think about jobs as stable things that provide pensions, not identities.

But those of us coming up on midlife these days expected something different—a job that would say something about who we are as a person. We focused on meaning, not benefits (which is really another way of saying the parts of the job that allow for a life outside of work, like getting sick or taking a vacation or having a family).

It’s as much idealism as it is egoism—we want to do something that matters because we want to matter.

I don’t remember ever thinking I could “have it all.” For as long as I can remember, it seemed like a choice—being a mother or being something else. What is your legacy? How will you leave your mark on this world? Will you leave behind children or will you leave behind some kind of accomplishment?

I was either walking in the direction of something—being a writer, traveling the world, having an impressive job—or walking way from that, retreating to some idea of family life. Publish a book or have a kid. Both do something to extend your presence in the world, the impact of your existence. Something that will be here when you’re gone.

This bilateral thinking solidified when I got pregnant in the middle of college. I would either have kids or graduate college. If I wanted to be a writer, the right choice was an abortion. Once I had kids, it would all be done, choice made, only the living of the life remaining.

So I went about my way, trying to be a writer. Not being a mother. And then, somewhere along the way, between working long hours and going out for drinks, I got older and I had kids.

I think a lot of women have a bit of a post-kid identity crisis. (I don’t know if it’s the same for men.) Who are we now that we’re mothers? What happened to our old self? How can we hold onto that old self? Or how can we break that identity apart to make enough room for this mom thing to fit in, too? It takes a long time to let go of who you were before you had kids and it’s not an easy, fluid thing. It’s lumpy, bumpy, fits and starts and maybe never ends.

Lately—something about turning 40, I think—I’ve been in some kind of mid-life crisis thinking mode, which can best be described like this: Big fish? Small fish? Too bad: you’re not a fish! You’re a drop of water in the ocean. A drop of water in a vast ocean on a tiny planet. Stardust in infinite space.

It’s not easy to feel that small and temporary. If you sit with the idea of your death for long enough, it’s hard to get going again. But holding that fact in one hand and the life you’re living in the other, the acknowledgement that we are going to be gone one day can actually make you feel more alive.

How you live your days is how you live your life, right?

Somewhere I can’t remember, I picked up this little bit of writing attributed to Kurt Vonnegut—“Notice when you're happy.” And another little bit of unattributed wisdom that has also been caught in my fish net brain—Find a happy place and continue walking in that direction.

I just keep thinking, “It's so small. I am so small.” My writing, my days, my kids, my family. I spent so much time thinking about being a big fish or a small fish, trying to be some kind of fish, but mostly just flopping around in some pond not being able to feel how big or little it was, how big or little I was.

Maybe it’s what happens after forty years of flopping around, but lately I’ve been wondering something…What if I am happy? Fish or drop of water or stardust… What if it is enough? Not big or little, just enough. My kids, my family, my writing, my community. It’s a life. It’s not always happy or easy, but it’s mine. It’s right where I belong.

When I was younger, I think I thought I would get to a place like this and feel like life was over. Turns out, it’s actually a pretty amazing place to be—only the living of the life remaining. Not drudgery—although there is plenty of that. It’s not like the laundry is going anywhere. It’s more like belonging, or settling in, or arriving somewhere I didn’t even know I was going.

If this is it, I’m good with that. This is my life and I am living it. I’m sure there are plenty of days ahead of feeling like I’m not enough. The feeling that you do enough, have enough, are enough is a slippery little tricky thing. Hard to hold onto.

But still somehow, it’s like an existential crisis has ended. Or at least come to a resting place. And my kids are four and seven, so I could really use some rest about now. 

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The Stacked Deck of Motherhood

I have long believed that the whole game of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting holds at least one bad card for all women. For some, getting pregnant is the hard part. Other women have traumatic childbirth experiences that require years of recovery. And there are those for who pregnancy is a breeze, birth is nothing complicated, but parenting doesn’t come so easily. I have yet to meet even one woman who hasn’t struggled somewhere along the way.

When you struggle in the early stages—with getting pregnant, with staying pregnant, with a difficult pregnancy or a difficult childbirth or with breastfeeding or a difficult newborn—it’s hard not to see it as a sign of something. That you shouldn’t be a mom. That you’re a bad mom. That motherhood doesn’t come easy to you.

I’ve held my fair share of bad cards.

I have two kids, but have been pregnant four times. My first was at 19 and ended with an abortion. Even as an ardent pro-choice woman, that decision still colored me, felt like a failing.  I had thought of abortion as something fine for other people, but not something for me. Until I was there.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I wanted to be pregnant, that I realized how much meaning I had assigned my earlier experience. All of a sudden, it was a punishment well-deserved (so I harshly thought to myself) that I didn’t get pregnant the moment the intention popped into my head. In retrospect, it didn’t take long. But for those few months of “trying” (a euphemism if ever there was one), I was worried. Worried that I missed my chance, that I wouldn’t get a second one.

When my second conception ended in a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, that feeling deepened. I was being punished. I wasn’t meant to be a mother. There was something wrong with my body. That experience, complete with the loss of a third of my body’s blood, surgery and a complicated healing process, left me scarred. The scar on my body was deep and made it look like I’ve had a c-section.

The internal scars were more painful, and that awful feeling was deepened by the mystery about when or whether I would ever get pregnant again. The months between my second and third conceptions were sad. It was hard to be around anyone that reminded me of pregnancy or babies or moms.

The third time around, I was much luckier.

That pregnancy brought me my daughter. While pregnancy was fraught with things that felt worth complaining about at the time, it turned out that all of it was a “normal” part of the process. A happy pregnancy in retrospect, even if it felt awkward to live through.

My labor, though, wasn’t normal. It was a 4-day prodromal affair, a possibility I’d hardly paid attention to in my childbirth class. Kind of like the possibility of the ectopic pregnancy before it.

Again, I saw myself as someone who drew hard cards.

Motherhood had a way of easing me out of the feeling that I was being followed by a dark cloud, even as it had plenty of storms of its own.

But I finally felt lucky. I’d made it to motherhood. From early days, my daughter was easy—smart, beautiful, healthy, happier than I could even understand, a pure blessing. Being a mom was hard, but she was easy. Luck of the draw.

Then we gambled again. My second full-term pregnancy wasn’t nearly as cute as the first one. All those “normal” symptoms were even less fun that time around. But I made it through and wound up with a second birth that made me feel strong and capable and blessed. Another lucky card.

And then came nursing. With my second baby, I got mastitis five times before I gave up nursing. I also suffered some pretty terrible postpartum depression and anxiety. Quitting breastfeeding to return to the antidepressants I needed was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

When I was agonizing over the choice to stop nursing, I felt so judged. I’d nursed my first baby a few months beyond the one-year ideal. And I made it to nine months the second time around—farther than a lot of women can manage. I should have been happy, but it wasn’t my timetable. I was failing in my own mind, and again, my body was failing me. Failing to be able to do this womanly thing it was meant to do. I wasn’t strong enough to give my second child what I gave my first.

With all of that weighing down, I sent an email to our local parenting list-serv about my struggle to stop nursing. I live in a crunchy, hippy kind of town, where midwives and La Leche League rule the roost. I thought I would be attacked from all sides and encouraged to nurse through anything, no matter the cost to me. I secretly wanted to be told to keep nursing, so my contrarian self could somehow feel vindicated in quitting.

Instead, I got nothing but support. Dozens of emails encouraged me to do what was best for me, congratulated me for what I’d already done, sympathized with my struggle with mastitis, empathized with the guilt and the feelings of failure. Not one person told me to keep nursing through the pain—both physical and emotional. Not one woman said the slightest thing to make me feel bad about my body or what it was capable of doing. Not one.

I can’t explain how meaningful their camaraderie was to me.

Those early years of failed pregnancy, pregnancy and mothering of infants felt so fragile. I was so quick to think: Is there something wrong with me as a woman that I can’t do this pregnancy thing easily? Does the fact that I can’t keep nursing mean that I am less of a woman? Some kind of weaker mother?

Looking back now, I think: Those were my cards. That was the hand I was dealt.

Everyone holds different cards and no one has a perfect hand. Just because we can’t see that someone else has struggled—with fertility, with pregnancy, with depression, with nursing… with motherhood—doesn’t mean they’re winning some game we are losing. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s just not easy. At least, all of it isn’t easy. Not for anyone.

Motherhood is a stacked deck. We’re dealt the hand we’re dealt. I think it helps to think that every woman around has had at least one bad card, something she would discard is she could. And we all have our best card, too. Something to hold on to, to build a hand around.

The best part is—we get to discard what doesn’t serve us well. And we get new cards all the time.

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Ten Apologies for Stupid Things I Thought About Being a Mom Before I Was One

1.

I’m sorry… for being annoyed when your kids wouldn’t leave you alone so we could talk on the phone about what it’s like to be a mom.

Now I… wonder if I’m being punished for thinking my kids wouldn’t do the same, but know it’s just a thing kids do, even mine. And realize that it was really nice that you even tried to talk on the phone, knowing your kid would yell at you half the time and quietly spill water in an undisclosed location the rest of the time.

2.

I’m sorry… for saying that my husband would still rub my feet every night as we sat on the couch leisurely watching tv, even if yours didn’t.

Now I… have had one foot rub post-kids—when I mentioned to my husband how funny it was that I had actually said that my husband would still rub my feet every night. I think I felt sorry for you when you tried to explain how taking care of yourself tends to come last for moms. Sigh.

3.

I’m sorry… for the time I was snobby about you microwaving food for your kids.

Now I… know what you meant about how saving just a little time can mean the difference between sanity and screaming, and I know how time can move at the pace of molasses that yells and will take advantage of any shortcut I can imagine.

4.

I’m sorry… for judging moms who hired babysitters to watch their kids during the day while they’re home.

Now I… have hired babysitters for so many reasons (including no reason) that it’s hard to believe I ever even once had that thought. I’ve had babysitters watch my kids so I could organize a closet, so I could go to the gym, so I could so I could go to the doctor and hear a word she said, so I could go grocery shopping, so I could take a nap (or try to), so I could have a conversation with my spouse… None of which I ever thought I’d need a sitter to be able to do. In fact, none of which it even occurred to me to think about how I would manage to do after kids.

5.

I’m sorry… for thinking that nursing would be natural and easy and that taking a whole class about it was totally unnecessary.

Now I… am grateful that I took the breastfeeding class, that I was able to nurse both of my kids, and that lactation consultants exist. And I realize that thinking that nursing should be “natural” and easy is insulting and insensitive to women who struggle with nursing for any reason—from physical impediments to trying to even fit it into their lives.

6.

I’m sorry… for believing that moms who stay home had a ton of time to exercise.

Now I… do my best, as I think about the body I thought I’d have when I exercised in all the spare time I would have while the baby napped for hours, and how perfect I would look while I still had a baby to carry on my slim hip, and how anyone who didn’t exercise their way to postpartum perfection was lazy or didn’t care about the way they look.

7.

I’m sorry… for the time I looked in your car while you apologized for how disgustingly dirty it was, and actually said out loud that I wasn’t going to let my kids eat in the car.

Now I… draw the line at chocolate ice cream, and have a new understanding of what disgustingly dirty really means. And would put cotton candy in my kids’ mouths if they would just close them for five whole minutes so I could focus. I realize now that it’s really a safe driving issue, a public service that moms provide to the world—giving up a clean car in exchange for not crashing into you.

8.

I’m sorry… for thinking that it was lame to come into and leave work early to be with your son when he got home from school.

Now I… wish I could find a job with hours that would work well with my kids’ school schedule and an understanding boss who would be flexible about the inevitable and endless changes to that schedule.

9.

I’m sorry… for my conviction that women who did more parenting than their spouses, whose lives changed more than their husbands, must not have a spouse as evolved as mine or a marriage as equal as mine.

Now I… know how much motherhood changes a woman’s ideas about feminism and equality. How I would sometimes actually be a crazed supermom who won’t let my husband do more, and sometimes wish he could even see how deep the inequality runs.

10.

I’m sorry… for thinking that I knew anything about being a mom because my family had lots of little kids and I used to babysit.

Now I… am annoyed when people think they know anything about being a parent because they have been a babysitter or a camp counselor or talked to a kid younger than five for more than five minutes or held a baby and felt something.

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A Mothers Day Manifesto: Seven (Totally Flexible)* Commandments

1.      There Shalt no longer be an apostrophe in the title of the Mothers Day holiday. If it belonged to one single mother alone, royal treatment would be expected, thus leading to utter disappointment. However, since few mothers are without mothers of their own, or grandmothers or village elders or sisters with kids or mom friends, let it be a collective celebration. What we share in mutual recognition of each other’s greatness will be better than any spoils we may gather and enjoy alone.

2.      Thou Shalt Not do anything obligatory and unappealing. Unless it’s for your own mother, in which case: You now know how much you totally owe that lady. Do her bidding.

3.      Should no one choose to or remember to buy you flowers or ask the kids to pick some from the grassy area next to the supermarket, buy or pick or plant your own. Buy two, or three, bouquets of tulips or peonies or an azalea for your garden. Or don’t. Whatever, they’re just flowers, even on this day.

My own flowers, for my garden.

4.      Thou Shalt Not covet the basics. For this day, if only this day alone, there is to be no guilt, doubt or regret about indulging yourself in a silent shower or a seated meal. In fact, one should brazenly expect a moment to pee alone.

5.      Thou Shalt honor thy mother-in-law, the woman who put up with all your husband’s crap long before you. Without her son, you would not be a mother. Consider also thanks to the man who made you a mother. Gratitude is best expressed by blessing him with the constant presence of his children for a prolonged period of time.

6.      Thou Shalt honor thy grandmother for her strength in enduring days when women were expected to be fulfilled completely by motherhood and forgive her the ways in which she screwed up her kids, raising imperfect people who would imperfectly raise their imperfect children. Who would grow to be imperfect mothers, too.

7.      On the Saturday prior to the Sunday Mothers Day celebration, Thou Shalt honor thyself with a full day separated from those who made you a mother. When you return, your sainthood status will be fully recognized and your beloved offspring will be beloved once again. There can be no honest celebration of a constant, reassuring, supportive presence without a reminder not to take that for granted. Disappear first, return to accolades. Or at least return to the same mess with an inner calm that only retreat from family can replenish.

Beautiful chaos.

* Seriously: If you're not flexible in motherhood, you're in real trouble. So, enjoy the day. Or don't. As you know, this too shall pass, good or bad.

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Moms Just Want to Have Fun, Too

"Grownups don't know what to do with rocks."

I honestly can’t remember if I read that somewhere or one of my kids said it, but it’s stuck in my head for a couple reasons.

First, rocks are fun for kids. Sometimes we forget that all they need is rocks. And maybe a few sticks. Fun is something they make. Simple stuff. How much time and how many tears are lost over cleaning up toys they don’t even really need?

And second, it’s true that we don’t know. Whatever it is that makes rocks fun is totally lost on almost all grown-ups almost all the time. 

My niece recently shared this with my mom: Kids are fun. Grandparents are fun. “Middle people” are not fun.

It made me feel snippy—Middle people have to get you ready for bed! And tell you no! And take you to school! And fix what’s broken! Fun, on top of all of that, is a lot to ask.

And if grown-ups are no fun, let me tell you, moms are the worst. Moms are not any fun at all. Just think of all of the un-fun things we do. All day, every day.

“What do you like to play with your friends?” my daughter asked me once as I was driving us to a play date.

She listed everything she liked to play with her friends. But what about grownups? Do they like to play? She weighed the evidence—her dad liked to build things with her, and liked to go on adventures, and liked her artwork, so dads must like to play. And then, her final conclusion: “Moms don’t really like to play.”

Gut-punch translation: You’re no fun. Daddy is fun. You’re mean. And boring. All you do is feed me and yell.

Never mind that I was driving her to a PLAY date. That, in those days, I structured my whole stay-at-home week around making fun for her. That I researched upcoming festivals, found the cool play spaces, went to the kids’ museums, spent countless hours on the playground.

When balanced against the fifteen minutes of daddy-bliss when he came home at the end of the day (and frankly, I needed kid-free time, so preferred doing the whatever-else needed to be done while he entertained the kids), it didn’t matter. When compared with the two-hour trip to the playground on the weekend, where he didn’t also have to stop for groceries on the way home, I was no fun. Evil Queen of No-Fun-Land. I made fun end—told her we had to go or that we couldn’t play now or that it was time for dinner. When she looked at how I spent my time, wasn’t that a fair conclusion?

 One thing people love to say to stay-at-home parent is, “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.” Setting aside the whole “all the invisible stuff we do” issue, there’s something to that. When you spend your time in a frantic work-kids-sleep mode, it can be easy to lose sight of what you’d do if you did have any time. Most people wouldn’t know what to do all day—good thing we have all that laundry and whatnot.

 What's really seems out of balance with the way we live our middle-class, suburban parenting lives today is that we don’t leave any room for fun. We lose the belief that we deserve to stop the clock (or stop looking at it) and do something we really want to do—something that brings pleasure or something that brings meaning to all the rest.   

The absence of doing what gives life meaning is a greater problem than how many hours we spend at a desk or on carpool duty.

After managing our paid work and our hard caregiving work, we are too exhausted to even know something else is missing. We rush our kids off to activities we'd secretly love to do ourselves. If my daughter takes ballet classes, don’t I get to add "ballerina" as a tiny part of my own identity? If my son runs around at soccer on Saturdays, it's almost like I have an active life, “We are an active family,” I can think as I stand on the sidelines.

 Not only is this bad for us, it’s bad for our kids. It tells them that their fun matters to us. That we don’t like to play. No wonder they tell me they don’t like to clean up, as if I do. This imbalance means that we are raising self-centered children, because we don't know how to live our own lives after they come along. Because we think that “extracurriculars” are good for our kids, but we forget that they are good for us, too.

I think we’re afraid of being bad at fun. If someone has an outside-of-work-and-family “passion,” as we say, they'd better be serious about it. And good at it. Like to run? Better sign up for a 5K! Taking a frivolous photography or cooking class is a luxury more mock-able than Jimmy Choos. An indulgence. A waste of time we don’t have. A hobby—gasp!. Those few who manage to give themselves this permission are making very conscious choices that are not out there as cultural norms.

 I’ve just finished reading Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Pay When No One Has the Time, and the section on “play” was the most eye-opening for me.

In the book, Schulte describes an exercise where busy parents are given a blank weekly schedule and asked to write down everything they did last week. No one has any trouble filling up the page to bursting. But when they’re given a blank schedule and asked write down what their ideal week would look like, they are totally stumped. They don’t know where to start.

We’re not talking about taking a dream vacation here, but what would your week look like if you lived it according to your truest priorities? Imagine making time for those and then fitting in work and other responsibilities around what you really want to be doing. What would that look like? What if we fit work around the rest, instead of leaving what matters to the margins.

When I had a brand new infant, I realized that when they’re asleep, you have to do the most important thing first. The thing that’s on fire. The baby could wake at any time. Shower? Pee? What is the thing you'll wish you'd done if the baby woke up now?

What if the thing on fire is you? You might not get to do your second thing. What would you wish you had done today if you died tomorrow? Our days are truly are numbered and we don’t know how high we’ll get to count. To steal a quote from Schulte that she stole from someone else: "How you spend your days is how you spend your life."

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How to Make Your Kid Feel Guilty

Yesterday, my not-yet-7-year-old daughter did one of those publicly embarrassing kid things.

I’d picked the kids up from school and was trying to pass time on silly errands until we could get their dad from the train. Given that they barely eat breakfast and hardly touch their lunches, they’re quite the hungry little monsters after school. I had already handed over graham crackers and peanuts, but the whining continued.

As we exited the hardware store, she was whining, “I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry.” I had refused to buy her any of the “food” they sell at the hardware store. Evil mommy.

Seeing that we were about to walk past a woman asking for money, I tried to shush her with a firm, “I heard you. I told you we’ll eat when we get home. I don’t want to hear you say that again.”

“I’m hungry…” I heard again, just above the voice of the woman asking for help so that she could get a meal to eat.

More than superficial embarrassment, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I’m totally failing my kids, failing as a mother to raise children who might someday contribute to a better world.

It’s unfair, of course, to measure her in this way. She didn’t hear the woman, or even see her. But isn’t that the problem? Don’t we need to teach our children how to see the world outside themselves?

As we walked away, I struggled with whether or not I should say anything at all. I landed on “yes.” I couldn’t let it go.

My first instinct was to want her feel guilty for what she said. To want her to shut up about being hungry and to feel like she’s not entitled to claim that feeling ever again. But I tried to be simple about it, tried not to drown her with my grown-up guilt.

“Sweetheart,” I said to her, in the softest, I’m-not-upset voice I could manage, “Did you notice that woman back there was asking people to help her to get food? Because she’s hungry? Because she might not have a meal to eat tonight? I know that you really do feel hungry, but you know that you’re going to eat dinner when we get home. Your hunger is not the same as hers. How do you think she might have felt to hear you say you're hungry?”

“Oh,” she said, in the tiniest voice. Immediately, I begin to worry that this is how anxiety is built.

Was it too much? Maybe. I honestly don’t know. I had to try, to think about correcting course later if the words fell too hard. Or too soft.

(Warning: ugly, abrupt transition ahead…)

When we were shopping around for private schools for our soon-to-be kindergartener, there was a lot of talk about what the schools did to ready their students to be good citizens, caring about those who have less and ready to tackle the great injustices of this world.

There was also a lot of talk about anxiety. At the tawniest school we considered, the director told gathered parents that he’d noticed a definite increase in the level of anxiety kids have in the last twenty years. At a more progressive, more down-to-earth school, the director put it another way—he told me he’d also seen a remarkable increase in the level of anxiety in the last twenty years—but not in kids, in parents.

Then he shared a really helpful rule of thumb about how much is too much to share with kids—tell them about the hard things when they are old enough to do something about it. Because knowing, before you can do anything about it, that there are scary, awful things, and feeling like you are helpless against them, is a great way to instill anxiety.

I’ve found his words to be a helpful guidepost ever since the day my daughter asked me this heartbreaking question: “Everyone is good in the world, right, mommy?”

Think about the kinds of questions kids ask, those how-do-I-answer-that questions… What do you say and when do you say it? Following this wisdom, you tell them about kidnapping when they are old enough to run the other way. You tell them about sexual abuse when they are old enough to speak up for themselves. You tell them about homelessness and hunger—and then teach them what they can do to help.

That way, any worry about these newfound realities doesn’t feel like helplessness, like their only choice is to live with constant fear or guilt. So they are not resigned to believe that they have no power to influence a bad situation. To make change.

One way of measuring adulthood is when we realize that there are things that happen in the world that are absolutely terrible, about which we personally can do nothing. For me, it’s hard not to get stuck there, not to feel helpless and scared and sad all the time.

The only way I’ve found out of the sadness of that is to know that there are amazing, wonderful, really happy, even magical, transcendentally beautiful things in life that are just as true, just as real, as the evil realities we face.

It can feel disrespectful to continue on with our lucky lives, surrounded as we are by injustice. But it shows disrespect to the beauty, the love and the magical moments that come our way to shut them out or feel like we shouldn’t be able to have that while others suffer. They are no less true.

This world is both stunningly amazing and crushingly awful. Both. 

And if you don’t drown in sorrow, then maybe you have the strength to make change and to live in joy. It is hard for me to figure out the right balance. To tell my daughter, “This woman is truly hungry,” without worrying that she’ll feel like she should shut up about the hunger she is feeling, as if her happiness doesn't matter. She can want dinner, even if there is also a need to feed hungry people.

But how do I give her the perspective that her hunger is a smaller problem without making her feel like she should swallow her own feelings? Not to feel guilty about going home and eating dinner, but also to know that there is a world outside her, with other people who are hungry in a way that she should notice? How do I teach her to want a world where no one is truly hungry?  And do something about it?

Small ways. Every day. That's the best answer I have right now.

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