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When I was asked to write an article for Mother’s Day I thought, Sure. I thought, How hard can that be? I thought, I have three kids under 10, which absolutely makes me a mother. Even if all of my kids have informed me at various points that I’m the worst mother in the world because I wouldn’t let one of them eat a piece of old chewing gum he found on the bus; or I declined the 5-year-old’s request to have her own smartphone; or I forgot to buy an emperor costume for Roman Day at school, which all good mothers know is the most important holiday of the year.
Well, at the risk of pulling the curtain back on the magic-making here, I have been trying to write this article for three hours and failing, and here is an incomplete list of reasons why:
An email arrived informing me that two of my children will go on a field trip tomorrow and therefore need a packed lunch, necessitating a run out to Pret A Manger to spend about $37.19 on sandwiches and dried mango that the children will definitely not eat;
An argument erupted in the school parents’ WhatsApp about children and screen time, and let me tell you, those parents could teach Sun Tzu a thing or two about the art of war;
Another email arrived reminding me I had to buy a costume for Viking Day at the 5-year-old’s school, which even bad mothers know is the second most important holiday of the year.
Like a fish can’t describe water, parents can’t really describe parenting, mainly because they don’t have the time. And it’s very difficult for mothers who have got through the brunt of the experience to describe it in retrospect, because—like childbirth—they’ll have blocked a lot of it from their memory. Which is why I love the essay “Parenting in Three Stages,” by the late, great Nora Ephron, from her 2006 collection, I Feel Bad About My Neck.
Ephron wrote about parenting exactly the way she wrote about heartbreak, aging, friendship, and food: hilariously, wisely, originally, and honestly. Ephron’s sons were adults by the time this was published, but she remembers in teeth-clenching detail what it’s like to deal with, first, small children, who you’re constantly terrified of breaking, physically or emotionally, and then large adolescents who suddenly hate you for no obvious reason.
“Adolescence comes as a gigantic shock to the modern parent, in large part because it seems so much like the adolescence you yourself went through,” she writes:
Your adolescent is embarrassed by you and walks 10 steps ahead of you so that no one thinks you are remotely acquainted with each other. Your adolescent is ungrateful. You have a vague memory of having been accused by your parents of being ungrateful, but what did you have to be grateful for? Almost nothing. . .You’ve devoted years to making your children feel that you care about every single emotion they’ve ever felt. You’ve filled every waking second of their lives with cultural activities. The words “I’m bored” have never crossed their lips, because they haven’t had time to be bored. Your children have everything you could give—everything and more, if you count the sneakers. You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you. And yet they seem to have turned out exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse. How did this happen? What did you do wrong?
Just as Ephron knew that no amount of expensive face cream can head off the aging process (not that it stopped her from buying lots of expensive face creams, a paradox she wrote about often), no amount of parenting can prevent your child from becoming a teenager.
This essay captures two more truths that I think have been forgotten in a lot of more recent writing about parenting: First, kids are changing all the time. And second, parenting is worth it.
When did people stop understanding that kids are not adults, and therefore subject to change on a daily basis? I noticed it during the rise of the gender debate, when parents were suddenly writing articles saying—and I swear I’m not even making this example up—that they always knew their daughter should have been a boy, because she told them she was a boy when she was “almost 2.” Let’s not get distracted with that craziness. The point is, whatever lunacy your child comes out with, whether they’re 2 or 12, don’t sweat it too much, because they’re programmed to try on things for size and then mutate, just as kids have always done. It’s hard not to catastrophize when your kid is wildly unhappy at age 14, as I was. But the worst thing you can do is affirm your child’s belief that they are uniquely, hopelessly doomed. Instead, reassure them—and yourself—that pretty much everything in childhood is a phase. Or just give them Ephron’s essay, which at least might make them laugh.
Secondly, parenting is worth it. I appreciate that a lot of parents fear coming across as smug, or making the child-free feel left out, but I think we’ve had enough of this tedious trend in which every article about parenting focuses on how stressful and horrible it is. Is it any wonder young women increasingly say they don’t want kids? By all means, don’t have kids when you’re young—I waited until pretty much the last chimes before midnight—but parenting is not miserable. Yes, it can be stressful, but the stress is often hilarious. Not even Larry David could write the kind of absurdist comedy scenes that parenting brings, such as when you’re debating with a 4-year-old about what color of plate is acceptable for his dinner.
Then one day, according to Ephron, you realize your children are delightful adults. It’s a miracle, all of it, in the truest sense of the word. Happy Roman or Viking or Mother’s Day.
White House press secretary and chief prevaricator Karoline Leavitt
