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From my book, THE 7 STAGES OF MOTHERHOOD
One of the mistakes I made with Maddie was to confuse a calendar choked with classes, concerts, and culture with “quality time.” Standing on line during my lunch hour to buy tickets to a children’s concert may have allayed my guilt about working late that day, but by the time the event rolled around, we probably would have had just as much fun hanging around in our PJ’s and going out for breakfast at McDonald’s.By the time Nick hit the preschool years, I was better able to reconcile my need to fill his day with activities and his need to hang out with no agenda.
Having learned the value of routines and the uselessness of trying to hurry along a dawdler when Maddie was a preschooler, I was wise enough to build plenty of markers into Nick’s days. If we had to get out the door by 8 a.m., I actually set a timer and put him in charge of telling me when it went off. And when something unexpected squeezed our time together even more, I tried to abbreviate certain rituals rather than eliminate them altogether.
One of the realities of this stage of motherhood is that we can’t fulfill our children’s every need. Nor should we want to. As difficult and painful as it is to make our preschoolers unhappy, it’s far worse to indulge their every request. A child who is told no may rant and rave, but when she calms down, she’s been given an invaluable gift—the experience of knowing she can handle frustration, weather an emotional storm, and wander back into her mother’s loving arms.
Starting Preschool
For any mom with a child just starting in school there’s the hope that he will be a successful ambassador, a bright tribute to our success as parents. When a teacher calls to say our child has bitten a playmate or kicked a teacher or failed to participate in circle time, the pulse quickens, the stomach drops, and the mind lurches toward an explanation that usually starts with “I.”
When Maddie came home one day with a note from her teacher that read, “Please make sure Madeleine wears underpants under her skirt tomorrow,” and I realized that she had gone bare-assed to preschool, I was inordinately embarrassed. (Maddie didn’t care at all.) By the time Nick was going to the same wonderful school, I had learned to let go of the need to see my kids as billboards—at least when it came to what they wore. But, of course, appearance is easy. Bad behavior, back talk, even a particularly impish imaginary friend can turn the preschool years into a time when we’re forced to question not only our own parenting skills but also those of our spouses.
The difficult patches during Maddie’s preschool years had rarely, if ever, made Steve and me feel like a team. More often, her obstinacy or whining or begging or all of the above drove Steve out of the room and me up the wall. I felt he was copping out; he thought I was trying too hard. Then there were times when Steve would cave (“What’s the big deal?”), casting me as the proverbial “bad cop,” or I would criticize how loud and “retro” he sounded when he disciplined Maddie.
Among the many wise advisors I turned for help in this regard was Ron Taffel, psychologist, teacher, and author of many excellent books on child rearing. Unfortunately, Ron had not yet written the book I needed then – Why Parents Disagree and What You Can Do About It, but I recall a conversation during which he asked me how often I left Maddie and Steve alone together. The pause that followed said it all. I stammered some embarrassingly low number as I realized how much control I managed to exert over their limited one-on-one time.
I think a big part of my unwillingness to let go of Maddie’s care related directly to the guilt I experienced when I worried that she was getting too little too late during a hectic week. If Steve was unable to pick up the emotional slack, to be home more, or to intuit my anxiety, I turned up the volume on my expert dial, overcompensating for my absence. Feeling frustrated or conflicted went hand in hand with feeling unsupported; I sent Steve decidedly mixed messages because I was so mixed up myself. Yes, I wanted him to help more with Maddie, but no, I want to be Übermom, jumping into her life with both feet and pushing Steve to the sidelines.
I wish I could say that I saw this clearly and initiated a heartfelt conversation about our parenting roles, our fears and hopes regarding Maddie’s care, but the truth is, we kind of muddled through her first three years, falling easily into the paradigm of Mom-as-primary-caregiver, Dad-as-primary-helper—until Nick came along. Then we were forced to adopt the one-on-one defense that got us through family time.
Having Another Baby
Many of the mothers of preschoolers I spoke to about their decision to have another baby expressed a longing for the baby years. “I miss the baby smell,” one mom said. Several others said they craved a baby “to snuggle.”
For Hope, who had experienced the first few months of her daughter’s life as “totally traumatic,” longing for a baby was not front and center. “A lot of friends talked about sadness when their kids went to a big-girl bed,” she said. “Or when they started to walk. I never felt that way. I didn’t long for a baby to cuddle. If anything, I enjoy Juliette much more now. She’s so companionable, so much fun. I’m really happy to hang out with her.” I wondered if the thought of sacrificing some of that time made her feel guilty. Without any defensiveness, Hope replied, “I don’t feel guilty, because I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with Juliette; I’ve given her a lot. I’m really not concerned about having enough time or love for her. Maybe I will once the baby comes; maybe it will be different. But right now, I’m more excited. And so is she. She’s ‘given birth’ to a number of dolls this summer!”
I admired Hope’s attitude, recalling the guilt that gnawed at me (maybe that’s why I had heartburn the second time around!) throughout my pregnancy with Nick. Countless nights I lay awake, playing the same unconstructive tape in my head: “I hardly have enough time with Maddie now. How will I be able to divide my hours between them? How can we expect her to just move over and welcome some little stranger into the family? We’re about to change her life forever—and she didn’t even have a chance to vote on the decision...”
To make matters worse, when I was about eight months pregnant with Nick I took Maddie to visit my best friend, who had given birth to my beautiful goddaughter, Isabel. The plan was to let Maddie spend some time with a one-month-old, to hold her and learn a little about what newborns are like.
Our visit could not have gone better. Madeleine held Izzie tenderly, cooing and singing to her like a little angel. I had tears in my eyes when I crooned, “Oh, honey, you’re going to be such a wonderful big sister!” Flashing a beatific smile, Maddie promptly replied, “You are, too, Mama.” Then I made the mistake of saying, “Oh, but, Maddie, sweetheart, I’m going to be the baby’s mama.” An excruciating pause followed, during which I could sense the tiny wheels of her mind spinning around before she said softly, “But you’re my mama.”
Ice pick to the heart! My desperate attempt to explain that I would be mom to Maddie and to her baby brother just rewound the guilt tape; in fact, by that point in my pregnancy, I had added a few choice tracks: “We aren’t ready.” “Our already hectic lives will spiral out of control.” “Maddie’s going to metamorphose from the sweet, loving center of our universe to a cold and distant planet.” “Our devoted baby-sitter will experience overload and quit.” And, worst of all, “Nick is doomed to get short shrift, the leftovers of our attention and love.”
The truth was that Nicholas’s slice of the quality-time pie was often served fast-food style, and with a few Maddie-sized bites taken out of it. This was less of a problem when he was a baby, because I was able to focus as much, if not more, on Maddie’s demands for attention and one-on-one time as I was on Nick’s basic baby needs.
I did learn—as you will when that second bundle of joy arrives—that whatever you give the first won’t be enough. Your eldest is hard-wired to complain that you spend too much time with the baby or that you “never did that with me!” I used to get into ridiculous arguments with Maddie about how much I rocked her to sleep when she was a newborn compared with the time I spent rocking Nick in the same chair, until my wise friend and colleague Nancy Samalin (I highly recommend her book about siblings entitled Loving Each One Best) suggested I try a different tack. “Why don’t you just say, ‘I bet you wish I still rocked you in this chair,’ and see how she responds.”
As Nancy had predicted, Maddie sadly and shyly concurred that she wanted to be rocked, too. So of course I obliged, and as she curled onto my lap, I encouraged her to indulge in another rivalry buster. This one I call “Throw the baby off the train and other demonic fantasies.”
“I bet you wish we could lock Nick in a closet and throw away the key,” I said.
Maddie hesitated, not certain how to respond. Then a glimmer of a smile gathered around the edges of her face. “Yeah. Or we could put him in the washing machine,” she suggested.
“Or throw him way, way up into the sky?”
“Or all the way to the moon! Or flush him down the toilet!” she shrieked, dissolving into giggles that definitely flushed much of the tension from her small shoulders. I felt a little guilty devising increasingly ghoulish ends for my sweetly sleeping newborn son, but I knew our words would never hurt him as much as his sister’s envy and potential rage. I also knew that assuring Maddie she would grow to love Nick was about as likely to change her present feelings as trying to persuade Rush Limbaugh to vote Democratic.
Child development experts will tell you that it’s normal and healthy for your preschooler to direct his rage toward Mom, but it’s not much fun to have your characteristically compliant firstborn scream “I hate you!” and refuse to do as he’s told. As guilt-ridden as you may feel, it’s critical to understand how important respecting routines and enforcing limits can be at this time of upheaval and transition.
What your preschooler needs more than ever is to know that you still have the energy and love necessary to keep his world as predictable and safe as it was before his little brother or sister came along.
Weathering Emotional Storms
Even if you’re raising just one—or if you have not yet expanded your family—the preschool years are sure to promise passionate shifts in your family’s emotional climate.
Some moms told me that their toddler’s meltdowns barely registered on the Richter scale of annoyance, while the whining or “whying” of their four-year-old shattered their patience within minutes.
During the kids’ preschool years, I understood more than ever why parents often resort to the “because I told you so” school of discipline or to spanking. There were days when a short time-out worked so well, I was ready to nominate myself to the T. Berry Brazelton Hall of Fame. If the planets were aligned just right, natural consequences made sense even to the child with arms crossed angrily across his chest. But much more often, nothing kept the kids from fighting or got them to clean up their toys. I felt like I was constantly forced to rewrite the Murphy Family Rule Book (don’t think for a second that such a document actually existed), knowing full well that they key chapter, “When ‘No’ Means ‘No,’” was missing.
What I learned is that setting up a framework in the context of your family and, most important, with your child’s unique personality in mind is key. If your preschooler reacts to being alone like Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense, then banishing him to his room for a time-out isn’t going to work. Gathering him onto your lap and holding him close until he calms down may be a lot more effective. I found that taking away Maddie’s Barbies or some coveted toy until she had calmed down worked better than time-outs.
It takes time, extraordinary patience, physical strength, and emotional fortitude to discipline effectively. No one has all those skills at her disposal at one time; and a few of us can call upon the skills we do have while waiting on line at the supermarket or under the righteous eyes of judgmental relatives.
Mothers spank their kids for countless reasons, including cultural differences. If you grew up in a family where a swat on the rear end was the way your mother got you to behave and it didn’t seem to do you any harm, then it’s natural and certainly easy to justify doing the same with your children. (Of course, you should ask yourself if you “turned out okay” because of the spanking or despite it.) Study after study confirms that corporal punishment is one of the least effective modes of controlling a young child’s behavior.
At the same time, when your child has reached an age when questioning Mom’s authority is a big part of his moving away, it’s tempting to use one’s physical “bigness” to assert that authority. Cathy, whose five-year-old had recently started kindergarten when I spoke to her from her home in Alabama, marveled at how often Ford would come home and question what she or her husband told him. “All day long he’ll say, ‘How do you know?’ Or ask us why, why, why. It’s not only annoying at times, but it’s clear that I’m not the all-knowing person I once was in his eyes. Now he’s learning things from other people. He’s learning that there are other authorities—his teacher, Miss Lucy, for example. And it just irritates me when he says, ‘How do you know?’”
Oedipal Wreck
Most child-development experts agree that while Freud may have been wrong about many aspects of our psychosexual development, he was definitely onto something when he first described the Oedipal complex. The preschool years are unquestionably colored by the deeply purple passions children express toward one or the other parent but rarely to both in equal measure. Although there are exceptions, most boys fall in love with their moms; girls with their dads.
I, somewhat guiltily, loved Nick’s Oedipal stage. What wasn’t to love? He laughed at all my knock-knock jokes, claimed my tuneless rendition of “Over the Rainbow” surpassed Judy Garland’s, paused in the middle of a game to place his pudgy palms on my cheeks, lock his dark brown eyes with mine, and coo, “Ooooh, you’re my lovey, dovey, honey Mama.” One night, after I had invented a bedtime story about a royal chef who created for his beloved princess a necklace of edible jewels, Nick’s eyes widened with excitement. “You know what, Mama?” he whispered. “When I’m growed up, I’m gonna make you a special, special cake. And it’s gonna be tall and really, really big, and it’s gonna have raspberries on it. And you know what?”
“What, honey?”
“When you cut it open, it’s gonna glow in the dark.”
But the gift that took the cake, so to speak, was unwrapped the Christmas of his fifth year. It consisted of a cardboard toilet-paper roll stuck in a blob of clay and topped by a rounded canopy of more clay that hung down just enough to make its phallic shape unmistakable. Below the cardboard shaft, stuck in the clay, were two large gold buttons, while from the top (or tip) of the canopy shot several colorful feathers. “Wow! Nick! This is beautiful,” I gasped, trying not to make eye contact with Steve. “What is it?”
“It’s a tree, Mama.”
“A very happy tree,” Steve added as he unwrapped his gift. “And what’s this, big guy?” Steve held in his hands what looked like a clay turd skewered by four Popsicle sticks.
“Oh, that’s a horse, Dad,” Nick explained. Then, pointing to a tiny Lego man glued to one side, “And that’s you falling off the horse.”
Of course, just as my mother was predicting that Nick’s Oedipal passions would cost him years of psychoanalysis, he entered first grade, took one look at the adorable assistant teacher, and decided she could do no wrong. The year was punctuated with “Guess what Miss Thompson did today” accounts of golden afternoons, special games, even an excited announcement that he had invited her to dinner. “I think I’ll make my black-pepper fettuccine,” he said with a sigh as I tucked him in one night. And he did!
Countless moms have told me similar “Oedipus wreck” stories of being displaced by a teacher or “best, best, best friend” or by Dad, who suddenly rules Olympus.
Happy and sad describes the universal ambivalence moms experience when the child who wouldn’t go near “the big swings” a year ago dares his pal to “race to the moon,” or when a child whose voice rarely exceeded a whisper performs in the preschool show, or when all the kindergartners line up for graduation.
By the time Nick turned five, the way he thought about me had developed along with his ability to communicate how he was feeling. Just a few years before, he would throw a fit because I couldn’t read his mind; now he could express what he wanted using the hundreds of words in his ballooning vocabulary. But letting Nick do that, not trying to read his mind, was a challenge because it ran smack up against my desire to be needed, to maintain my place as the center of his universe. When he insisted on making his own snack, teaching me a card game, calling from a pal’s house to ask if he could spend the night, it was more difficult than ever to celebrate these strides, not experience them as marginalizing my importance in his life.
The key for me—and for many mothers of preschoolers—was to stay connected to or to develop other roles that were meaningful and gratifying. For some that meant a return to work at the time their children entered kindergarten. For others, their children’s increased separateness signaled a chance to connect with their husbands more often. But for all of us, the preschool years should include plenty of time to step back and take note of the fact that had it not been for our constant, caring presence in our children’s lives up until now, they would not be ready and able to move ahead with confidence, to take risks, to develop friendships, and to learn."
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