No Better, No Worse

Sometimes, when I hear the stories my friends tell about their kids, I feel a little envious. From the outside, there is something that appears more fun about having multiple children. When I step into their homes, there is always activity, lively conversations, and laughter. Of course, minutes later there is fighting, crying, and a plea for mom to intervene.

You can’t have it all.

My house is quiet. One night, our neighbor (with four children) came over to find Kevin and I nestled on the couch, working on a crossword together. It was a little after 7:30, and we had just put Sophia to sleep. The floor lamps cast a warm, orange glow in the room. “You two look so cozy!” she said. “It’s so quiet in here,” she noticed. And we all absorbed the silence for a moment. “You could join us,” I offered, “hide out here for a bit?” “No,” she declined, “I have to get back to my piles of laundry.” She dropped off a flier for a local 5K and headed back across the street, where her house was humming with the energy of three boys and a toddler.

There are tradeoffs for this evening calm. By day, I am the entertainer and adversary. Sophia plays and fights with me, instead of a brother or sister. I organize countless playdates and chauffer her all over New Jersey to ensure she is not socially deprived, missing out on peer interaction, and adopting my adult mannerisms, speech, and seriousness.

Sophia has filled the sibling void with an imaginary sister, also named Sophia, who is two years older than she and lives in California with her mother, Melissa and her father, Kevin. I note that even her imaginary sister is absent…living in a parallel universe, only to be thought and talked about, but not actually played with or talked to. This is how Sophie has come to terms with her only status. I admire her resourcefulness.

I am resigned to eternal ambivalence. Certainly, it was a wise decision to not have a second child. We don’t have the resources…financially, emotionally, temporally to embrace another infant at this point in our family life. It is easy to rationalize away the feelings that accompany this decision. But when I stop thinking about how much sense it makes, I do feel a little sorrow, a mourning of an experience I will never have. If one of my earlier pregnancies had survived, Sophia might have had that older sibling she longs for…I might not be so fearful of getting pregnant again, even at the advanced age of 40, and giving birth again.

But this is the way things happened, and this is the way things are. I could spend my time longing for what we lack or I could focus on my gratitude for what I have.

And so, I live vicariously through other families. I delight in their anecdotes. I offer unsolicited advice to help manage sibling rivalry, once again in the comfortable position of being able to offer ideas that I don’t have to execute. The other night I went out to dinner with Nan and our mutual friend, Pam, who we have known all of our adult lives. In a few transcendent moments, I pulled back and thought about how our conversations have changed over the years…from work (we were all teachers together), to marriage, and now to our children. Pam was telling a story about her two boys, E.J. and Ryan.

“Ryan ran into my room and said, ‘E.J. is slapping his butt at me!’”

“What does that mean?” I asked, trying to envision the situation.

“Apparently, he lay down on the couch, flipped his legs over his head, and was slapping his butt. At Ryan.”

“And this was a personal affront to Ryan?” I was confused.

Pam shrugged, “I guess.”

I thought about it for a minute. “It seems to me that in order for Ryan to have thought E.J. was being provocative, E.J. must have said something provocative. Like, ‘I’m going to slap my butt at you!’ After all, there is nothing inherently annoying about someone slapping his own ass. It’s weird. Maybe a little distracting. But Ryan felt bothered by it, because E.J. told him he should be bothered by it.”

Pam agreed.

“So, just as Ryan chose to feel bothered by it, he could make a different choice. He could choose to leave. Or he could choose to think it’s funny. You could walk him through his options.” We brainstormed a list of things that Ryan could do when E.J. antagonized him in this way. It was fun. The same as it ever was.

There is something about the difference between our situations, the distance I have from being a mother of multiple kids that made it so much easier (and enjoyable) than to generate ideas for how to deal with my own day-to-day tribulations. There is no better. There is no worse. There is only different.

Had I not been able to have any children, I think I would have forever felt this absence, just as I imagine, if I had a house full of children, I would long for the quiet life I enjoy now.

The Case for Siblings (continued)

I read The Kids Are All Right, by Diana, Liz, Amanda and Dan Welch as a participant in the online bookclub, From Left to Write. The following blog is not a review of the book, but a blog inspired by this absorbing memoir.

Siblings are the only true witnesses of our childhood. They experience what we experience. They see what we see. They hear what we hear. They know what it was like. Whenever I have questioned a memory of my childhood, I can check it out with my sister, Jennifer. Whenever I feel like I’m exaggerating or minimizing something in my mind, I can rely on her to validate my perception.

This is something that Sophia may never have.

That thought was present for me, as I read The Kids Are All Right, a memoir of a difficult childhood (sudden, mysterious death of their father and the subsequent slow, painful loss of their mother to cancer) told in four, alternating sibling perspectives. It was an engrossing conceit; I took in these tragic events from four different angles: sibling position, age, and individual resources each playing a role in how The Kids experienced and coped with the death of their parents. Most of the time, their memories matched up…but occasionally, they contradicted one another or were completely different in content and feeling. It got me thinking, what would it be like to write about my childhood memories alongside my sister? What insights might come of it?

So, I turned to Jennifer and asked if she would participate in a little writing experiment with me. This week, my sister guest blogs as we recall a slice of our childhood.

Jennifer

Almost every weekend after brunch, a spread of bagels and lox and the occasional six layer chocolate cake (my father had a sweet tooth), we would venture into NYC to spend the day.
Both my parents enjoyed exposing us to the arts, culture and rich experience no other place like the city had to offer. I loved strolling the Lower East side and the Village with my family. Melissa gossiping and in step with mom, and me skipping next to dad, my father's warm hand reaching for mine. I had a feeling of great security and contentment. We would window shop, visit a museum or park and then usually have Chinese. I liked the warmth and steaminess of the restaurant inside as I people watched. After dinner I would have pistachio ice cream and Melissa, chocolate. Jazz would play on the car radio lulling me to sleep. Home would come too soon.

Melissa

Though my parents disagreed on nearly everything, from how much one should spend on a grapefruit to whether or not my mother should work…they were united in their love of the arts. My mother was an artist in her own right. She had studied fine art in school, and took a job in commercial art after college, drawing pillows for Comfy. By the time I was in school, her portfolio was moldering in our unfinished basement, though she still incorporated art in her nursery school teachings. My grandmother displayed my mother’s self-portrait (in oil) prominently on the far living room wall. I would study the painting--my mother’s face, forever young, her ponytail pinned in a “plotch” on top of her head--for traits that resembled my own. But I was the spitting image of my father. Dad was less a practitioner of the arts than an aficionado. He loved jazz, antiques, modern art, flea market finds. There was nothing pretentious about his tastes. He liked what he liked. So our forays into the City were wild and varied. I remember, one time, Mom and Dad took us to the Guggenheim. There was a transgender exhibit going on. Paper dolls had swinging sex parts affixed with paper fasteners. Jenny and I gawked, less intrigued by the fact that there were male dolls with female sex parts and vica versa than that there were sex parts on display at all. Dad suggested releasing a bag of marbles at the top and letting them roll down the spiral museum promenade. We either giggled or were appalled, the way we either giggled or were appalled at most of my father’s behavior. Whereas other dads might joke about this, our Dad might actually do it.

My mother was usually appalled. We always drove into the City. Dad had a Dodge Daytona that he drove like it was a Ferrari. He would weave in an out of the traffic, while my mother clutched at the sides of her bucket seat, arms tense, body lifted several inches into the air. “Lenny! Slow down!” she’d beg/nag as, Dad would cut off three lanes of traffic, making a beeline for the shoulder, which he’d speed down until his intuition would tell him we were getting too close to a cop. Jenny and I were wedged into the backseats and mercifully couldn’t see much of what was going on. We had to divine from the increasingly tense exchange when we had narrowly avoided disaster. “You almost went into him!” “Will you relax and let me drive?’ Once, the arguing got so bad that Dad jumped out at the light, just as we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel. I was stricken. Where would he go? How would he get home? My mother, seething, was determined to carry on with the day. We went to the Museum of Natural History and communed with animals long dead. When we got home, Dad was there. I never found out how he made his way back.

When we managed to make it through the day without someone bailing, we went to Chinatown to get dinner at Hong Fat’s. (No longer there, and what has been described on Chow Hound as “one of NYC’s legendary bad restaurants,” though, to it’s credit, many came out in defense of this comment). Afterwards, Dad would prefer to drive through the city streets than to take the West Side Highway back to the tunnel. Jazz on the radio, neon lights bleeding in rivulets of rain on the windows, it was soothing. Invariably, though, I would get sick in the tunnel on the ride home. When I got old enough, I blamed it on the MSG. More likely it was a combination of family drama agita, too much grease, motion sickness, and fear of returning to school the next day. I think Jenny doesn’t remember this because, mercifully, she had fallen asleep.

It’s probably hard to believe, but I do share her nostalgia for these trips. I think it’s because they were formative. Like Mom, Jennifer became an artist, coaxing graceful sculptures out of clay. Like Dad, I developed an appreciation for beauty in odd corners. If I dug far back enough, to the time when I was as old as Jennifer during these trips, I might have had sweeter, more harmonious memories of the four of us together. But that period is blank. Empty for me. And so I rely on Jenny to fill it.

As a member of the online book club From Left to Write, I received The Kids Are All Right from the publisher free of charge. I was not paid to write this essay. See how other moms were inspired by this book here.

The Case For...

Kevin, my nephew (not to be confused with Kevin, my husband), and Jennifer, my sister, came to visit us for a nice long weekend. Seeing Jennifer again—and watching Sophia, shrieking with delight, scamper up the stairs after her cousin--has tipped me in the direction of maybe, possibly having another child.

Sure, she used to sneak into my room and rifle through my things (once eating all of the Hershey’s Kisses off of a felt wall hanging I had purchased for her as a Hanukkah gift—ahhhhh, the satisfaction in watching her open that ravaged piece of felt with empty foil wrappers attached to it.) Yes, she used to grab the remote, lean back on the bed and kick me in the stomach so I couldn’t get near it (or her, for that matter). Of course she pestered me, asking the same questions over and over again, “Can I have a turn?” “How does this look?” “Will you play with me now?” Isn’t that what little sisters do?

But there were good times too—putting cold wash cloths on each others’ red tushies after dad spanked us for getting red paint on the rug, holding hands as we made our way down the staircase towards our goyisha four-foot fake fir on Christmas morning, pretending that we lived in rooms 4444 and 4443 of a grand hotel (NOT in a house with our parents), calling each other by our made-up pet names “Joanurn and Junurn” and chatting away in a mysterious language we invented as we went along.

My sister: the thorn in my side, encroacher on my only childhood, thief of parental attention, insanely cute, golden, curly-haired, wide eyed, skinny screaming child who can make me laugh until my stomach hurts, who IS my memory and the witness to my childhood, who loves me for no reason other than I am her older sister.

She left this morning, and the house feels so empty without her.

And then there is Kevin—halfway between a little boy and a teenager, still unabashedly affectionate, his mouth constantly moving, his brain constantly whirring. Kevin, who still calls my sister “momma,” who would eat the contents of my sugar bowl if he thought the deed would go unpunished, who stood in the family bathroom of the Franklin Institute and said incredulously, “25 cents for a napkin? What a rip off! I could get one for free!” Kevin who spontaneously tells me he loves me when he feels it, who patiently reads to Sophia with a fluency unmatched by most adults, and who wanted to know if there were any secret passageways in my house.

I hadn’t really thought anyone was missing from the table, until I had more at the table and, suddenly, they were gone.