Mom Level: Expert

Some moms are great with infants, toddlers and preschoolers. They know when to help, and when to step back; when to offer sympathy and when to stand firm. They intuit the best time for their son or daughter to begin eating with utensils, potty-training, learning to read. They understand what behavior should be rewarded, and what should not—navigating grocery-store tantrums with patience and courage, or heading them off altogether with carefully-managed meal and naptime schedules.

My mom was one of those moms. I don’t remember my own infancy, of course, but I remember being openly, deservedly called out in a clothing store when I was very young, for playing tag with my younger brother in and out of the racks of hanging clothes. “If you embarrass me in public,” my mother told us levelly, “I will embarrass you. In public.” The lesson stuck; our days of endangering clothing and shoppers were over. The lesson held in all public spaces; while other children played tag through the church building after worship, my brother and I stood at our mother’s side as we were expected to. When my mother went to offices and schools to conduct interviews and take photographs—she actively worked as a freelance photojournalist through my childhood—we went along, and sat quietly in waiting areas and hallways while she did her job.

I was on the cusp of eight years old when my sister was born, so I was around for that. I was there for my mom’s high-risk pregnancy (it’s been written up in medical journals), when she defied the advice of multiple doctors to give birth to my sister. I watched her be a great mom to infant/toddler Heather right alongside myself and my brother, both of us school-age—which is its own challenge.

Some moms are fantastic with school-age children, shepherding them skillfully and patiently through the development of their emerging social skills, teaching them how to get along with others, how to make and keep friends, how to be disciplined about school work and sports and relationships.

My mom was one of those moms. My school-age years were difficult ones. I was good at school work and bad at social interaction, and as a result I hated school. The work itself was not challenging; I finished most assignments in just a few minutes, and then was required to sit quietly, bored absolutely to tears, convinced that school was little more than a system of punishment that levied against those who did their work well and behaved—after which, I was forced to bring schoolwork home, turning home into an extension of the thing I already despised. “It’s busywork!” I would shout, flinging my books across the living room. “It’s busywork, and I won’t do it!” My mother finally told me: “The ones who play the game get the goods.” Under her tutelage, I finally grasped that elementary school was not (as I had expected initially) a place to read wonderful books or learn interesting things, but rather a maze of largely pointless expectations to be navigated, and people who navigated those things successfully got to sing the solo at the school concert; go on the field trip to the Mayor’s office that only five students were chosen for; and stay after school to feed and play with the class’s pet hamster.

At the same time, I could not get along with my schoolmates. I was painfully shy, socially awkward, and desperately unhappy to be trapped at school all day. I did not want to be there and I did not want to know those people; I wanted to go sit in a corner of the library with a stack of books as high as my waist. My mother patiently taught me the social skills that I had no interest in learning, again by giving me coded clues—aphorisms—that I had to work to figure out: “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” “You’ll never find a friend sitting on your shoelaces.” By the end of elementary school, I was making friends at school and in the neighborhood.

She always knew what she was about. When the parents of one of my stricter friends insisted on meeting my mother before I was allowed to spend time at their home, they pointedly challenged her over coffee, “We are raising scholars. What kind of children are you raising?” My mother told them, “I am raising Christians.” My friend’s parents were Jewish; nevertheless, we were permitted to be friends. My mother was never unclear about who she was, and who she expected us to be.

And then we became teenagers.

Some moms are fantastic with adolescents and teenagers. Turned out, my mom was one of those, also. One of my schoolteachers, his sons on the cusp of adolescence, asked my mother what her parenting philosophy was. She told him, “I always say ‘yes,’ whenever it is possible to say yes.” And she did: saying “yes” to rock concerts on school nights, trips out-of-state with friends, extracurricular activities like horseback riding and competitive forensics. At the same time, both of my parents gave us the freedom to say “no” to anything by turning them into the meanest parents ever. Don’t want to go out with the troublemakers? “My mom won’t let me.” Don’t want to talk on the phone? Make big eyes at Mom and she’d shout, “Get off the phone!” loud enough to be heard on the other end. Peer pressure, meet my Mom. Good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

She gave us the freedom to take risks—and when we risked and failed, we could always come home.

Not all of my friends could do that. Once, on the weekend after the mall had closed, my friends and I wanted to rent a movie and watch it. No one would have us. No other parent would allow half a dozen teens to come over on a Saturday night to watch a movie. I watched all of my friends call from the pay phone outside the 7-11, and listened while their parents turned us away. At the end, I said “We can go to my house.” My friends urged me to call and ask permission. I argued with them. “It’s my house. I live there. I can go home, and I can bring friends.” We went to my house, and watched our movie. My friends were in awe. I was perplexed: who makes their children feel unwelcome in their own home? But parenting teenagers is hard—if you don’t want them roaming around getting into trouble because there’s nothing else to do, you have to be willing to let a gaggle of teens into your home on a Saturday night when you’re already in your pajamas fighting off a migraine, and even to sit at your kitchen table with the random one who wanders through and wants to talk. Yeah. That was my mom, in her fuzzy pink housecoat at the kitchen table, her head throbbing, having a heart-to-heart with one of my friends whose own mom was so far gone that he had asked the court to live with his dad just to get away from the drugs and the booze.

My mom was always there for my friends when their own parents couldn’t get it together. The same mom who bandaged my knees as a toddler bandaged adolescent scrapes in ways that still amaze me. There was, for example, the time one of my friends won a school fundraising contest—and then her mother failed her. She took $200 in cash that my friend had collected, and spent it on alcohol. Unless she could replace the cash, my friend was going to be in real trouble. My mother sat down and wrote a $200 check for me to give to her. I said, “Mom. You realize you may never see this money again.” My mom said, “I know that.”

The award for winning the fundraising contest was a cash prize. My mother got every penny back, in a matter of days.

Some risks don’t work out. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take them. “Life is risk,” my mother taught us. “Getting out of bed in the morning is risky. Get out of bed anyway.”

That one, I use every single day as an adult. “Get out of bed anyway.” Take the day’s risk.

As we became adults, my mother let us grow into it. She included us in adult life to the extent possible. When she, as the president of a professional writer’s association, hosted a Christmas party, I created a posterboard-sized, writing-themed crossword puzzle to hang on the wall. My brother met people at the door, took their coats, and engaged them in conversation. One of the writers asked how she had bribed us to participate. The question was confusing. We wanted to become adults; it was natural to her and to us that we should interact with them, especially in our own home. How else could we learn to be adults, except to walk among them and feel welcomed?

That lesson took, too. My brother, my sister, and I are adults, now. Christians. Risk-takers. Parents. We are what our mom and dad raised us to be.

In large measure that is because of what our mother achieved.

Mom level: Expert.