who we are given
When I was in undergrad I used to think that when I became a parent my kids would be artistic sidekicks. I pictured listening to them, believing everything they said, and they would grow up naturally without too many rules.
But the first kid I was given positively thrives under structure. Maybe because she has a mother who can listen and cuddle, but with Rosie I have had to stay strict. Jack doesn’t need quite so much steering, but with Rosie, especially when I met her, if we didn’t keep a rigid schedule she’d crumble. Every transition every shift every minute past her bedtime caused exponential chaos.
I was not so good at this at first. I wanted to be a poet, not a cruise ship director. There was a period of six months where we couldn’t afford a vacuum cleaner and so I didn’t ever sweep or vacuum. We never knew what we were having for dinner or when — especially because I was in graduate school and there wasn’t money to buy food. We couldn’t afford diapers and so we’d wrap Jack in towels and plastic bags at night. We couldn’t afford heat so we’d pile blankets on top of Rosie at night. I was in graduate school and trying to be a poet and also trying to help Steve keep his family afloat: often that meant I graded papers instead of going on family walks, or I read books instead of cooking dinner. I just couldn’t balance a kid who needed so much order out of me when I was 23 and my whole life was a mess, I’d never learned to cook or do laundry and I had a whole lot of schoolwork to do. But if there wasn’t dinner on the table at 6, she’d get anxious, hover; I’d watch her eyes fill with worry, expectation and disappointment.
Right now the house is clean, I know where Rosie is, I know what’s for dinner, I know when dinner will be, I know that the pets are healthy and contained. There’s still so much chaos inside, and so much that needs to be done, oh Lord so much more I have to work on in myself, but this house is the kind of place where a kid can enter and there is enough under control that a kid is free to be a kid.
I wonder what it will be like this time. Once my sister and I were in a rest stop in Ohio; we saw a girl with a long braid, a red sweater, polka-dot skirt, and striped stockings. She was quietly leaned up against a wall, reading a book, waiting for her family to come back from the bathroom. That’s what your kid will be like, my sister told me. No, that will be Meghan’s kid — my sister Meghan was born inherently more organized than I am, and she was born with a compass inside while I was most definitely not. I’ll have the organized kid who tells me what to do. And maybe that was true then, maybe a kid would have had to counteract my chaos. There’s just no telling who we will be given, but I do believe that we are given the creatures who help us learn the most we can. To me that’s a little scary but mostly reassuring.
