mamapundit » Parenting

Never say never

kagranju — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:46:09 +0000

As I sit here rocking my 3 week old daughter (with my two year old daughter away for the day with her father and grandmother), i was organizing some files and found this essay from 2002, originally published in Metro Pulse. I never could have imagined when I wrote this how radically my life would change in the next decade.

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Friday, November 15, 2002

Emergence

by Katie Allison Granju

Today is my middle child’s seventh birthday, the age at which Swiss child development guru Jean Piaget theorized that children truly leave infancy behind. Last night I sat watching her sleep in her bed, a new kitten snuggled against her cheek. In looking at her, I realized that very little was left physically of the round, soft baby she once was. Now she is long and becoming angular. She has real cheekbones and she sprawls across spaces with fast-growing, strong, tanned limbs all akimbo.

My daughter’s changing shape is yet one more reminder of how different my own life seems lately. This summer I am able to wear whatever I want because for the first time in a decade, I am not pregnant or nursing a baby or little child. At ages 10, 6, and 4, my three children can now stay for several days with a grandparent if I want to go away. They rarely wake at night and I no longer wash a load of diapers each night before I go to bed. I will be 35 years old this fall and it’s clear to me that a certain season of my life is ending and a new one is beginning. I have passed through the intense crucible of mothering infants and very young children and have suddenly emerged on the other side, blinking at the sun and sometimes wondering what to do with myself.

During all those years that I was busy creating and sustaining my babies, I never had time to think much about the fact that my body wasn’t my own. Tiny hands and mouths and voices constantly asked more of me, and most of the time, I enjoyed giving it. Something that no one ever tells you before you have a baby is what a sensuous, tactile experience it is. I once heard a new mother describe her own embarrassing desire to literally lick her newborn all over because the baby smelled and tasted so wonderful. I laughed and nodded in recognition because I had more than once found myself furtively sniffing my own baby’s deliciously naked little body all over like some kind of junkie.

My emergence from the intense gauntlet of early motherhood has been gradual. I didn’t wake up one morning and realize that things had changed. Instead it has been a slow dawning of consciousness; what actually happened is that I woke up one morning and realized that there was no child in the bed with me and that I had slept eight hours straight. Then there was a day recently when all three of my children had been invited to friends’ houses to spend the night. As evening fell, I found myself at a loss. Should I wash my hair and go out to see a band like I would have 10 years ago? Should I try to get some needed grocery shopping done while I had the chance? Should I take a hot bath and read uninterrupted for as long as I liked? Instead I simply draped myself across my bed and without any plan at all, fell into a deep, much needed sleep. When I awoke in the middle of the night, I was momentarily disoriented and alarmed. The room was dark but I could sense that my children were not in the room or even the house. As I gathered my thoughts and remembered that I was alone for the night, I felt a forgotten rush of freedom and pleasure. I took off the clothes in which I had fallen asleep and climbed under the sheets to finish my night’s rest. The cotton felt cool and smooth. When was the last time I had been aware of how good fresh sheets feel against my body? A long time, I realized as I smiled to myself and fell back asleep to dream of things having nothing to do with motherhood.

mamapundit

When bad people do bad things

kagranju — Sun, 30 May 2010 00:20:49 +0000

Hell hath no fury like the mother of a child who has been critically injured by evil people who need to be locked up.

The more I find out (because I am doing investigating myself) about exactly how H came to end up in the condition he is in, the more determined I become to make sure that the law enforcement and legal systems do their jobs properly in this case.

mamapundit

Cruel and unfair

kagranju — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:32:41 +0000

I got the results of H’s neuropsych eval back yesterday. The report notes that when H was tested during his inpatient addiction treatment in 2009 – when he was 17 – he tested at the 99th percentile for verbal ability and comprehension for kids his age.

Now my child can’t speak or read.

Stupid drugs. Stupid drug dealers.

Talk to your kids about drugs and alcohol. Talk some more. Do it today. Dig deeper. Look more closely. Trust your gut no matter what your teenager is telling you. Err on the side of doing too much rather than not doing enough. Please. I don’t want H’s injuries to be for nothing. I want other people to learn from our family’s experience.

mamapundit

Parenting in the rearview mirror

kagranju — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:03:52 +0000

As I try to make sense of the fact that I am sitting next to my half-conscious teenage son on this, the 31st day of his hospitalization after a drug overdose and assault, I find myself flipping through my memories of how we came to this point. That’s what I blogged about over at Babble tonight.

mamapundit

Other mothers, other guilt

kagranju — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:40:05 +0000

A commenter pointed this blog post out to me, from another mother-who-writes – someone like me – about the guilt she feels that her teenage daughter now requires inpatient psychiatric care. She wonders where she went wrong and how she screwed up. Just like me.

mamapundit

The Teenage Boy – Five Years Later

kagranju — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:14:57 +0000

Five years ago I wrote an essay that was published in my friend Andrea Buchanan’s anthology, “It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons.” The essay was titled “The Teenage Boy,” and it was about how scary it was for me that H – my oldest – had turned 13, and how I knew that as he grew into adolescence, I would be unable to protect him in the way I had before.

As it turns out, I had no idea how right I was. No idea at all. But reading this essay now makes me wish I could turn back time and get a do-over with him. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. I would work even harder to protect him. I would do a better job. I wouldn’t let this happen…

But I don’t get a do-over, and neither does he. H and I instead have to live with what is, what was and what will be, whatever that may be.

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The Teenage Boy

by Katie Allison Granju

2005

My eldest child is officially an adolescent. He has put away his action figures and his Legos. He now loves his electric guitar, the band Green Day, and his vintage Ramones t-shirt. He and his middle school friends are starting a band, they say, but thus far, no one can play their instruments very well. Still, he perseveres, diligently plucking out the same chords from Nirvana songs again and again in his bedroom until he’s almost got it right. He reminds me that Sid Vicious and Courtney Love couldn’t play their guitars when they were first in bands either.

“Do you know who those people are, Mom?” he asks, eager to explain if I were to tell him that I didn’t. Sometimes I do encourage him to tell me things I already know because I enjoy his explanations so much.

He suddenly worries about the way he looks more than he did even six months ago, and he takes a loooooong time to get ready for school in the morning. I can’t quite figure this one out, since he wears a uniform, but he insists that it takes time to rumple his khakis and blue oxford button down into the perfect state of insouciance without crossing a line that will cause the dean of students to admonish him to “use an iron next time.”

He has a glorious head of thick, lustrous brown hair—the best in our familial gene pool, as I’ve been telling him for years—and he has let it grow to the very limit of scholastic allowability. It’s collar-grazingly long and perfectly wavy, and it looks like former teen idol Robby Benson’s hair on his best day,circa 1977. It’s so beautiful that I sometimes give it an involuntary run-through with my fingers, the way I couldn’t stop myself from kissing the top of his head over and over when he was a baby. Now, though, he
grimaces when I do this, and then heads back into the bathroom to shake it back into his preferred state of studied disarray.

Unlike all the friends and acquaintances who have warned me that adolescence is the worst part of parenting, I’ve looked forward to this. My son is interesting and self-sufficient and very, very funny, and I like hearing his take on politics and world events. His talents and deepest passions are blossoming, and he surprises me on a regular basis with things he knows or wants to know.

Raising a child is a bit like painstakingly unearthing a precious object over many years. As you carefully chip and brush away,
the object slowly reveals its nuances and contours—some of it comfortingly familiar, but much of it a completely unexpected surprise. The surprises have come more frequently lately.

Along with the delightful parts of early adolescence come its horrors. I remember all too well the acute, existential pain of being thirteen years old. Often, lately, when I see my son’s clear angst at the end of a long, tiring day of navigating the social minefields of junior high, or as he hangs up after a long, mumbled conversation with someone who sounded female when I answered the phone, I long to do something . . . anything to make him feel better.

“She’ll call you back,” I want to tell him. “Really, and someday you won’t even remember her name.”

But when I do say things like this, he doesn’t believe me, and mostly he doesn’t even hear me. It was so much easier when I could gather him up in my arms and rock him and sing to him, and then see him palpably relax and melt into a needed nap as a result of my efforts. We both knew that when he woke up, he would feel all better. The sense of omniscient power that comes with mothering babies and young children was heady for me. I loved having the ability to make the world of someone I loved safe, warm, and intellectually stimulating. Back then, all it took was patience, crayons, and plenty of baby-proofing supplies—like electrical outlet covers. It was easy enough to create our own self-contained happy, happy universe, where he knew that all was right with the world and my worries were minimal.

Now his world is becoming increasingly beyond my control. I can’t prevent cruel kids from saying what they will say or chronically unhappy teachers and coaches from venting their adult pain onto my son. I know that his heart will be broken, sooner rather than later, by some girl who has no idea what she’s doing. I know that far too soon he will see the first of his friends make choices that threaten to ruin their lives and that he too will be faced with these choices.

These are things that I know with a great deal of certainty will happen to my son, and for the most part, they are completely beyond my ability to prevent. But I’ll continue to try. I hope that the years we spent together in the warm cocoon of his early childhood offered him some immunization against the slings and arrows of adolescence. I hope that the slips of the hand that I’ve made in unearthing the man he is becoming haven’t banged him up or scarred him too terribly. Mostly, I hope he will continue to talk to me and tell me or show me what I can do—or not do—to support and guide him in finding his own way. Really, I think that’s increasingly all that’s left for a mother of a teenage boy to do.

Copyright Katie Allison Granju 2005-2010

mamapundit

A hard day

kagranju — Mon, 24 May 2010 01:22:39 +0000

H has had a really hard day. He had a seizure episode this morning and has barely opened his eyes all day. He couldn’t keep the little bit of lunch down that we got him to eat, and he’s having some tremors on one side – a new development.

I wish I could swaddle him and rock him to sleep for the night.

mamapundit

More conversation about parenting and addiction

kagranju — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:00:27 +0000

Thanks to Mir Kamin for her very compassionate, post over at BlogHer today about our family’s struggle and H’s current medical crisis. (Only quibble: I am no “guru” of any kind. No way, no how )

mamapundit

Dreaming of wolves at the door

kagranju — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:04:37 +0000

My dreams are getting weirder and more obvious, which is what I am blogging about at Babble this morning.

mamapundit

The online oconversation around my decision to come clean

kagranju — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:27:10 +0000

This blog post over at BabyCenter is my favorite among the ones that have been written since H was hospitalized. I like the blogger’s honesty and willingness to admit her biases. I appreciate her awareness – something I admit that I used to lack myself – that this “sort of thing” can happen to any parent, even someone who tries her very best. It happens every day to working moms and stay at home moms. To married parents and unmarried parents. To those who read Mothering Magazine and those who instead prefer the “Babywise” books

It happens. And now it’s happened – is happening - to our family.

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