Just one smile begins a friendship,
Just one hug can lift a soul.
Just one star can guide a ship at sea,
Just one friend should be the goal

Just one vote can change a nation,
Just one sunbeam lights a room
Just one candle lift the darkness,
Just one giggle infects gloom.

Just one step will start a journey.
Just one word can start a prayer.
Just one hope will raise our spirits,
Just one touch can show you care.

Just one intention makes the change,
Just one heart can know what’s true,

Just one life can make a difference,
Will it be you!

I take great satisfaction in what I have today: 3 young adults all taller than me.  Three people who read the same books as I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I double over and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel, and privacy and who eventually kept their doors closed more than I liked. Who, miraculously go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.  Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a little toy at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I poured over is finished for me now.  Penelope Leach, T. Brazelton and Dr Spock were my “go to” experts.  The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early child hood education, all grown obsolete.  Along with Good Night Moon and Green Eggs and Ham, they are battered, spoiled and well used.  But if you flipped the pages dust would rise up like memories.  What those books taught me, finally and what the woman on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations–what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple-choice, until finally, far along,  you realize its an endless essay.  No one knows anything.  One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a time-out.  One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would choke on his own spit-up.  By the time the last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome.  To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.  Eventually you must learn to trust yourself.  Eventually the research will follow.  I remember 25 years ago poring over Dr Spocks wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sort of infants:  average, quiet and active.  I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for a 12 month old that didn’t speak yet. Was there something wrong with his tiny mind?

Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged?  Was I insane?  He just arrived back in Germany from his second deployment in Iraq.  He can talk just fine.  He can walk too.

Every part of raising children is humbling, too.  Believe me, mistakes were made.  They have all been enshrined in the “Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame.”  The outbursts, temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs.  The times the baby walked out the back door and down the drive-way, the times I arrived late for pre-school pick up.  The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp.   The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 95 on his English test, and I responded “What did you get wrong?”.   I did not allow video games for many years; And I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for at least 4 seasons>  What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this.  I did not lie in the moment enough.  This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 10,6 and 4.  And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept at night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life.  when they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done.  Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.  The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top.  And look how it all turned out.  I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity.  That’s what the books never told me.  I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.  It just took me awhile to figure out who the experts were.

written  August 2007