Parenting Reflections : Luann Tennant Coyne

Parenting Reflections

Reflections on being a parent, a mother, a grandparent and an older friend in our world.

On Motherhood: In Multiple Drafts

To be published . . .

Standing on the Bridge

Gardening: “A Family Project”

Introduction

On Motherhood is based on journal entries and letters that I wrote in the years I was most actively engaged in motherhood, from the births of my daughters Elizabeth and Shannon to their departures for college.

The entries you see here are pretty much the way they were written, helter-skelter, on mornings when I was at work but missed my kids too much to start work right away, or in stolen moments in random places like the waiting area of my company’s Personnel department… Or on the living room floor at home as my two preschoolers “did” my hair with twenty plastic barrettes and a spritzer bottle of water while I scribbled away with pen and paper.

I never was much good at taking pictures. The horizons in pictures I take tend to list from side to side as if the picture was taken from a boat drunkenly tossed by waves; I also seldom bother to check the backgrounds of portraits I take, so people often show vases or other random objects sprouting from their heads, in the pictures I take of them.

But I can write. Writing is my camera, and putting words on paper is my way of pasting photos into an album. Like my husband, who is never happy with his memories of an occasion until he has edited the photos and posted them online, I never feel that an event has been processed until I write about it.

Having had some additional time since those years to look back and ponder, I have also written a few brief reflections on some of the lessons I learned during those busy years.

So—here are my “snapshots” of a grand and hectic and intensive time of learning in my life. May they give you some laughter and bring back happy memories of your own about this extraordinary adventure we call motherhood.

Standing on the Bridge

I stood in the middle of a bridge over the DuPage River, watching the dark waters of early spring rush up to me and then disappear beneath my feet. It was a brisk sunny day in early April, and though for those around me it was a normal workday in the middle of the week, for me time was standing still.

I was nine months pregnant.

My husband and I had just finished our Lamaze training the night before.

My friend Patrice, busy mother of two toddlers, had told me emphatically, “Enjoy this moment. Take time for yourself now, because after your baby is born you won’t have time to yourself for a very long time.”

So, I had taken a few hours off work that morning, to rest after our late night at Lamaze class, and to go to a retreat house near where I worked. I often went there when I wanted peace and solitude. The retreat house had extensive grounds, separated from the outside world by the bridge. There were also two chapels, both of them still points in a changing world, but as I look back it is the river I remember.

I remember standing in the middle of the bridge and pondering Patrice’s words: “Being a mother will change your life forever.”

I was wondering… How could I prepare for something that I had never experienced, something that would permanently alter my life and change me, forever? And what would it change me into?

I didn’t have an answer to those questions. Eventually I walked back across the river, got into my car, and drove to work. I sat down at my desk and got busy, which, as I look back, was as good a preparation as any for what was to come.

I don’t think there is ultimately any way to prepare for being a mother.

I think motherhood is something that happens to you, like a giant tsunami, forcing you to struggle through tidal waves you have never before experienced. And afterwards, after much clumsiness, some tears, some panic, equal parts joy and terror and a lot of self-doubt (at least this was my experience) you find yourself in a new and larger place… a beautiful place, calmer than the storm you survived to get there… but a very different world from the world you used to live in.

Gardening: A Family Project

May 9, 1999

Last night we had “yard night,” which is my favorite night of the week, because I imagine my daughters and I happily working together in our family garden after a long day at work and school. Just perfect.

My daughters, Shannon 9 and Elizabeth 12, have other ideas about just perfect.

I was 15 minutes late, so I had told the sitter to go ahead and leave Elizabeth and Shannon home alone for 15 minutes–a risk we are taking, now, at least until I learn my lesson.

When I got home, with tomato and pepper plants in hand–we had planned to do the vegetable garden last night– I walked in the door and the kitchen was filled with very loud noise– one of the bounciest of songs from “Grease” and there were sacks of flour and sugar out and backpacks and stuff EVERYWHERE– and Liz was mixing some sugar and butter together in a bowl. Shannon was at a friend’s house, and Liz was dancing, enjoying the loud music and having the house to herself, and making a pound cake. (“I found the recipe in one of your books, Mom.”)

So– stuff everywhere– I grinned and put supper together. Vegetarian burgers, because they’re healthy and fast. We tried a new kind last night– the ones that are supposed to taste like hamburgers. Shannon announced “well, they’re a step up from the ones that are stuffed with vegetables, but they’re nothing to get excited over.” She smothered hers with ketchup and fastidiously (and VERY SLOWLY) worked her way through it.

Shannon also announced that her new glasses were loose. “Look Mom, they practically fall off!” So, I said we’d get them tightened over the weekend. I race through supper and put together a design for a vegetable garden while they finish eating.

I ask them if they are willing to commit to more than half an hour, since doing the vegetable garden was THEIR idea. Liz looks up from the comic strip (which she’s been reading while eating supper and listening to music from Grease, still blasting away in the background), and says, “It wasn’t MY idea.”

Shannon says, “If we PLANT for half an hour, just plant, we won’t have to pull weeds.” (They hate, loathe and detest weeding; but they have to do half an hour of yard work each week as part of their allowance … and it’s often weeding.)

I say “I just need to tell you it will take more than half an hour to do this. Are you willing to keep at it with me?”

Shannon says “maybe”, and Liz says, “Will you pay us?”

I say “No. This is a FAMILY project.”

And with this shaky amount of buy-in we proceed. Manage to get outside by 7:00. I’m dying to be in the yard–it’s one of those fairy-tale picture perfect early spring evenings with the sun shining, the sky blue– and the first time it hasn’t rained in a week,

And Shannon proceeds to bend her neck to look at the cement floor in the garage and her brand-new glasses fall off her nose all the way to the cement, and bounce, and fall again, on the cement.

I look at Shannon, and Shannon looks at me.

Miracle of miracles the glasses don’t break! Praise the Lord. And I’m there thinking “A real mother would have made her put them into the case the minute she heard they were loose.” (One more time I failed the “real mother” test.)

I look at her glasses, look at her, and my evening disintegrates, while all the time I’m thinking … this is like the time we had just started Yard Night and Liz threw the ball for the dog and it hit the dog in the eye, and I had to stop work and phone my nurse friend and decide whether to take the dog to the vet or not. (We didn’t, and she survived.)

***

So, we proceeded to have one of the funniest Yard Nights we’ve had in ages (in retrospect).

Liz’s pound cake was in the oven, so we couldn’t leave now anyway (to get Shannon’s glasses fixed). I called Lenscrafters and found out how late they were to be open (9:00 p.m.).

So, we went out into the yard for half an hour to plant the veggie garden.

We basically just threw 1.5 rows of seeds and plants into the ground and put patches of plants here and there.

I pulled out a new bag of topsoil and we used that to cover the seeds, instead of spading up the ground.

And here I am, reminding myself every moment, that the point of doing this is to Have Fun as a Family, not to Get the Job Done, while every moment I’m trying to Get the Job Done…

While Liz goes back into the house periodically to check on the cake (tracking mud all over the kitchen rug by the sink) and I restrain Shannon, who has been appointed to open the plastic bag of topsoil, from swinging her spade at it like an ax from way over her head…

Then I look up a few moments later to see why she doesn’t have the bag of topsoil open… and it’s because she is using the spade to carefully cut, in block letters, the word “HI” into the plastic.

I tell Shannon to plant the onions, while Liz and I plants beans and sunflowers… Shannon shying like a young colt away from her planting, “There’s a spider, Mommy!” and showing me the dance she just made up, where she hops from one stepping stone to another, all the way across the vegetable garden, and then all the way back, humming her own accompaniment.

Even at the time, in my frustration, I knew it was funny.

I know now that it was more than funny… that these young colts of children, hopping through my life and perpetually pulling me away from the joys of gardening, will become beautiful dancing ghosts of memories that come out of the May twilight for the rest of my life, whenever I plant my vegetable garden.

It may be all I can do to hold on to this during certain strained moments, but I know very clearly that it is my job to enjoy these entrancing moments, come when they may, because they will not come this way again.

I would know this, even if I did not already know it in my heart, because Shannon told me so. Last night.

Elizabeth kept asking me what was wrong. “I feel frustrated,” I said honestly. “I wasn’t planning for my evening to turn out this way.”

And Shannon said, “Mom, you can’t plan your life, because you don’t know how it will tum out. You have to just accept what happens and enjoy it.”

So– my stern young giggling kissing twirling 9-year-old future ghost of my future May twilights– I will.

I will enjoy every moment of this life we’ve been given together, because, whatever happens in the future, these moments will not come this way again.

****

P.S. We went to Lenscrafters, singing our favorite songs all the way up to the mall (“Oh Lord I Want (Two Wings)” and “You’re Never Fully Dressed without a Smile”) and then listening to B96 (“One Hour of Your Favorite Uninterrupted Rap Songs”) all the way home again… and got our glasses tightened with no more eventful happening than getting lost in Marshall Fields on the way out of the mall.

*****

Good times. Good kids. Good life.

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