Princess and the Pea

Blessings

What happens when you are asked to recall Christmases of past and can’t find too many happy ones? That’s what happened when my youngest daughter asked me to tell a story of when I was a little girl. Of course, I came up with the one stellar story I do recall because it stands in stark contract to the others; a story that pleased since it was about the arrival of a puppy. Other grown ups were around and later over a cup of tea we remarked on the tragedies or sorrows of the past that colored our various childhoods – tough stuff like farm accidents, a drunk parent, divorce, kidnapping, near deaths – and sat in wonder at our emotional survival of it all. It seemed to me grist for the mill that the happy times are always juxtaposed to the sad ones. And it is that which gives life color. Yet my children, as far as I can tell, have had happy, seemingly uneventful childhoods thus far I wonder if they’d ever be prepared for hardship. We all need stress to toughen us up a bit. My past formed me into a highly independent, I’ll–make–my–way-one-way–or–another attitude.

Yet every day this week the newspaper had some horrible story in it, siblings who died in a house fire from a portable heater, a boy side swiped to a premature death by a young man driving while text messaging on a cell phone, the assassination of Bhutto. No Tsunamis this year, but my God, my girls are cruising through life giggling and it makes me wonder when something horrible will happen.

Many years ago, after the birth of my first child, a therapy patient – a mother of two boys – said rather violently: “Why is it that once you become a mother nightmares abound – and of the most horrible images one can imagine?! Blood, limbs, screams.” She was right. And her boys are cruising through life, too, and are young men now.

I suppose given that it is the end of one year and the dawn of another it is indeed a good time to be grateful for the joys and privileges of the times in this small corner of the world. It is after all, part of my remaking, and Christmases are indeed happy.

Cautionary Tale

My mother has two daughters. I have two daughters. No one can predict how the lineage of females will unfold. Yet, it’s interesting when it repeats.

When I look at pictures that are close to 40 years old, I see my mother in a different way than I experience her now (which is complicated). I feel an overwhelming nostalgia and sadness. At the same time I feel what I can only describe as a primal feeling of the power of motherhood.

My mother, born and raised in Germany, in one of the worst eras of that country’s history, came to the USA in 1960 to seek a new life. She got a job and hung out with other Europeans while having the time of her life in a new country that was busting many social barriers. It must have been liberating. She met and married a dashing American man, who’d prove eventually to be irresponsible. She had her first child (me) in 1965.

I was about 10 years old when I discovered that they were married perhaps 6 months before I was born. It was a shocking revelation at the time. In an instant my broken family life started to make sense. My mother married my father because she was pregnant with me. She has never told me this, but I’m sure of it. My sister was born a year later in what I imagine to be an honest try at building a family that could grow a marriage. It didn’t work. Forty years later it doesn’t matter that much to me. I think it’s a rather common story.

As my husband and I are cobbling a photo collection of my mother for her 70th birthday, I look at these photos and see a woman in love with her girls, who committed her life to making things work, and it wasn’t easy – and it’s still not easy.

It’s both humbling to review an archive of photos and cautionary. I wish to have a relationship with my girls that is warm, open and mutual. But sometimes lives take turns no one can anticipate. What heartaches might ensue? Maybe my girls will look at their childhood photos in some computer archive and wonder the same.

Enchanted, or not

We saw Enchanted this weekend. Two families, four girls. I had no real expectations and apparently the movie is getting decent reviews. Now I’m always up for a spoof on fairy tales, as you may guess. The girls sat in their own row, of course, as the three 10 year olds are outgrowing their parents – and the 7 year old wants to be one of the big girls, so she sucks it up at the scary scenes. She ends up climbing into our bed in the middle of the night, processing the wicked stepmother, poisoned apples, and being thrown down bottomless pits into Times Square, in a fitful REM slumber. Well, that would scare me, too.

In any event, I have to say while there were some laugh out loud scenes and parodies with lots of dancing and singing, in the end the message was pretty much the same. Princesses are rescued by princes and live happily ever after. I suppose Hollywood wouldn’t get the big bucks if the directors ended such a movie on a sour note, but the movie doesn’t score any points for me in debunking the myths of saccharine (and heterosexual) romance. (As an aside, there was a research study that showed that if you educate people about both truths and myths about a topic, that many people will remember the myths as “truth” later.)

As the credits rolled on screen I looked at my girls and said: Kids, don’t believe any of it.

Now maybe I’ve become a pessimist, or maybe I’ve seen one too many forlorn 30 year old women in my therapy practice lamenting that they will be alone forever, that there must be something inherently wrong with them that they haven’t found the right guy, and instead launch into unrewarding relationships just to prove they can be in one.

I think I worry about my youngest daughter the most. I wonder how her innocent mind is being molded by the fact that she’s little, always in catch-up mode, but strives to be cool and all-knowing like her sister (who is hardly all-knowing, yet). Maybe it is the birth order issue… the younger child gets more breaks, coddled, resorts to joking and humor for attention, sees more precocious shows than her sister ever did at the same age, and so on. But my little Adele also is just temperamentally unique. She constantly moves, spins or twirls. She was never able to self-sooth, or find a blankie or teddy she couldn’t part with, or even suck her thumb. No, she has a circadian rhythm all her own, needs little sleep compared to the rest of us, and inevitably climbs down off her top bunk to end up in someone’s bed. She used to sleep with her sister all the time, until Rosie got too long and needed full covers all to herself. Now Adele wanders into our bed with some – in her mind – legitimate and true reason:

“I hear mice in the wall.”
“I’m afraid there is someone outside.”
“I had a bad dream and can’t get it out of my mind even when I try. And I’m TRYING!”
“My nose is stuffy.”

And so on.

She falls immediately asleep next to a warm body but even in her sleep she moves and kicks and tosses. Which keeps me up. And I’m not one of these “family bed” type of people. So I walk her back to her bunk ladder, or lay down on the guest bed with her for the 5 minutes it takes her to drop into a secure sleep, or throw a sleeping bag on the floor.

What might this bode for her future? I guess my fear is she’ll be one of those women who will always need someone for the physical security, which is basically what all these fairly tales brainwash into little girls.

I’m not predicting the future and I don’t want to weave a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I do wonder. I even have thought of asking the 30-something women I see whether they had a blankie. It’s a theory anyway.