Mad with power

My kids have never listened to me. My warnings and wheedlings have fallen on deaf ears. I've never been good at carrying through on threats of punishment, so, really, they had little to fear in defying my wishes. I once (once!) spanked my daughter, and I was the one who ended up in tears.

But there is one arena in which I hold them hostage: my ability to embarrass them in front of their friends. I can invoke terror simply by withholding a promise to "be nice." I'm always nice. Really. But they're never sure I won't go rogue and utter the one sentence that will prove excruciating to them. Actually, there are lots of sentences that can make them writhe, and therein lies the problem. I have so many to choose from! And then there are my clothes: my frumpy shoes, my penchant for hippie splendor and, paradoxically, my mousey drabness.

Oh, and their father! He's less embarrassing to look at. But his sexplicit language makes us all squirm. What a perv!

Now this ability to inflict mortification is only occasional, since most of their friends are already known to us and familiar to our peculiar ways. So it's only when a new friend arrives on the scene that I come into my full power. There is an opportunity on the horizon. I am a genuinely well-meaning person, so I'd like to use this power for good. But how?

You like me, you really like me

Today's online edition of the New York Times has Lisa Belkin blogging under the question "Do You Have a Favorite Child?" And it reminded me of my conversation over dinner last night with my daughter, C, who is home from college for the weekend. She asked, "Who do you think you raised best—me or J [her brother, who is 10 years her senior]"? My immediate answer was that I was too strict with J and too lax with her.

Then she startled me by saying that regardless of how she turned out, she felt Other and I had been good parents for her since she really liked us, whereas most of her friends disliked their 'rents. I know that having your child like you is not the best gauge of parenting. Indeed, it might be the worst gauge—an indicator of wussiness. Maybe it was the food at Veselka's—she had a chicken-cutlet sandwich with latkes and I a spinach salad, and we shared a slice of chocolate and peanut-butter pie, all excellent—that put her in a good mood, but I was gratified to hear that despite all our wrangling over curfews, money, academics, tidiness and everything else, she has at least some fleeting positive feelings about us. I know that at her age I hated my 'rents.

But the question of which child I parented best continues to intrigue me—and did even before she raised it. I was very strict with my son early on—no war toys, no video games, no sugar, no TV, no grade lower than a B (I think the term "control freak" was used behind my back, though in defense, I have to say that J was a very accommodating child, so I didn't have to brutalize him into submission)—but more relaxed than perhaps I should have been when he entered his teens and I was preoccupied with C and allowed him to roam wild with no curfew and no academic oversight. Although he certainly would have resisted interference on our part, he may have felt abandoned, ousted from our hearts by the "fucking moron" (as he called C). There were a couple of incidents that prompted us to clip his wings in his senior year—like the binge vomiting of a friend of his that necessitated the replacement of J's rather expensive extra-long mattress and eventually alerted us that our house was being used as a boozing den while we were at work. Incredibly, we believed J when he said his friend had eaten a "bad burger" at the school picnic. The second time, a few weeks later, when the same friend again passed out while barfing on the brand-new mattress, we called the boy's father to alert him. Astoundingly, however, when J assured us that although the friend "might have had something to drink," he himself was stone sober. We were so gullible. And after a safe passage of time, J gleefully told us how naive we had been and recounted numerous other misadventures that had slipped beneath our radar—all those nights spent at the friend's house had been unchaperoned drugfests, the afternoons spent in extracurricular activities were misspent in decadence, the allowance and lunch money all went for beer. But the kid got A's. How was I to know?

As for C, I tried to impose the noes—no Barbies, no designer clothing, no video games, no sugar, no TV, no grade lower than a B—but was sabotaged by the family of her best friend, who allowed their daughter what seemed to us infinite freedom and unlimited funds. It was difficult to hold the line on curfews if insisting that C be home by midnight, say, when she was 13 meant she would have to abandon the buddy system and come home alone since her friend T had no curfew at all and didn't want to be pinned down by C's. Also difficult to hold the line on expensive taxi rides for the same reason—if we insisted that C take the subway rather than a taxi with T, she would have to come home alone. So in the end we brought up C up like a princess in some ways, according to the ethos of T's family rather than ours. She ended up with $150 hair cuts, $200 jeans, $400 jackets, $500 handbags—and we whined about it, but we paid for them. We're getting better at holding the line now that she's in college and we don't actually have to hold it in person (or see the breach if she disregards it).

So we've been pretty bad parents in many ways—we didn't stick to our guns—but we've ended up with a couple of reasonable kids. Maybe setting the bar unrealistically high meant that when our kids fell short, they were still within range of acceptable behavior. Maybe we failed miserably as parents but our kids had good genetic survival skills. Maybe their well-being has nothing to do with us at all but with the friends they hung out with (even J's drinking buddy and C's high-roller gal pal had redeeming qualities). Maybe the story's not over and our poor parenting will prove ruinous after all.

Still here

On September 4, Other and I took our daughter C out to dinner to celebrate her 18th birthday. But it was more than just her 18th birthday we were toasting. Over the past year, she has graduated from one of the toughest high schools in the country (in addition to C, its graduates include seven Nobel Prize-winning physicists, the most of any secondary school, and five Pulitzer Prize-winning authors), passed her road test on her first try (proudly outdoing her brilliant and accomplished brother, who has failed five times and still counting), was admitted to an excellent liberal arts college (actually several)—and now appears to be making the transition to same.

But it wasn't just my daughter's achievements that I was celebrating. It was also that I was there to celebrate them. Three years ago on September 4, I found a lump beneath my right breast that turned out to be a particularly lethal form of breast cancer. Back then, I didn't know whether I would live to see any of my daughter's successes (or her brother's—and he's no slouch either, despite the failed road tests). I resisted making long-term plans, in part because it felt like tempting fate. I'm still a little superstitious that way.

I know that three years is a significant milestone—most recurrences for an aggressive cancer like mine take place early on—but I know I'll never be carefree again. I also know that cancer is no more deadly than the afflictions borne by many of my friends—high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, which can result in a far faster death. They're all crapshoots.

But as I enter checkup season—oncologist on Thursday, radiation nurse and ovarian-cancer specialist (breast-cancer patients are believed to be at greater risk for ovarian cancer) a few days later, dermatologist (ditto for skin cancer) the following week, breast surgeon a few weeks later, a general physical that I still need to schedule—I taste the fear again, the adrenaline-soaked knowledge that an abnormal blood test, a suspicious ultrasound, a tiny pimple-size growth (and who isn't covered with wens at my age?) can put me back in the wrestling ring with death.

I'm scared, but it's a forced kind of fear, like probing a cavity with my tongue to flirt with the pain. It's also prophylactic: If I'm scared enough now, the crazy side of my brain thinks, I'll get to feel foolish instead of prescient. Or I'll have built up the emotional muscle to deal with any horror that awaits me.

No matter what happens in these or future checkups though, I've had three years, and bad as they sometimes seemed, they were a gift.

Buying retail

I have scrimped and saved, bought wholesale or on sale, sent my kids to public schools, encouraged them to wear hand-me-downs, bought them toys at Odd Job, got our books from the library, avoided buying what we couldn't afford, put off renovations, collected furniture off the street, lectured them on thrift. My daughter C has always hated the cheapskate in me. Buying bargains made me feel rich, but it made her feel poor. So finally, we have sent her to the Barneys of colleges—and we're paying full freight. She seems bewildered, and perhaps a whiff suspicious. What's the catch? There really is none. We just want her to accept the gift, not turn it down, feel rich at last.

The delivery

Just as it was in giving birth to my daughter, the transition was hard but the delivery was easy when Other and I dropped C off at Skidless yesterday. All day (all summer, truth be told) we had steeled ourselves for the traumatic parting, and then—nothing. We hugged goodbye, and she and her new friend EM walked off together to dinner, as Other and I headed for our car. Bewilderingly uneventful. But a little sad, because unlike childbirth, delivering your child to college means you go home with empty arms. Fortunately for us, we had our own dinner plans—at the country house of longtime friends who had just dropped their two daughters off at school. So we were in sympathetic company. We stayed up till midnight talking kid. Hope I got it out of my system. I'm looking forward to having space in my brain now for some new thoughts that have nothing to do with parenting.

This fancy liberal arts college C's going to is a little like a gated community. It's cut off from the town by sprawling lawns and grand landscaping and an invisible shield of security cards and codes. Like a fairy-tale princess raised by peasants, she alone has keys to the ivory tower she now inhabits. We low-born parents can enter only at her indulgence. Indeed, if we were found wandering the campus unattended, we would be evicted by one of the 70 guards installed to deal with riffraff like us. She is fed, fostered, mentored and given as her magic wand an i.d. card with which she can fulfill every whim (or at least every whim chargeable at the college store). We are left behind in the dust of the great juggernaut that is bearing her onward to the glory of her intellectual flowering. Goodbye, sweetheart. Think of us sometimes. Try not to look down on your rude beginnings ...

The animal years

Twenty-seven years ago my son was born, and I turned into an animal. Gradually I've returned to my human state, but I still remember the animal years, when my primal nature ruled.

He arrived two weeks early. I was in a theater lobby about to see March of the Falsettos, created by an old college friend, Bill Finn, when my water broke (10 years later, when I was pregnant with C, Bill's next extravaganza, Falsettoland, was making its debut, but I was afraid it would bring on premature labor, so I missed out on both plays). I didn't have enough money for a taxi, so I begged the guy at the ticket window to cash in my ticket. He stalled but eventually relented. The friend I was with asked me whether she should go with me or stay and see the show. I said, No, don't waste your ticket, go see the show. Incredibly, she did. Now if it were me, and there was a choice between seeing a baby being born and seeing a play ...

Since my water had broken, I knew I would be giving birth within the next 24 hours. Once the membrane is ruptured, bacteria can enter the womb, so if labor doesn't progress, the doctors take over. At the Maternity Center, my midwife, Gene Cranch, laughed when she saw that I had brought baby undershirts to embroider. "You won't be doing much of that," she said, the first clue that labor might not be a walk in the park. In my prenatal classes, the trope had been that it was "hard work—that's why they call it labor." In fact, labor was more like death throes. It felt as if my body were being blown apart in slow motion, with these weird trancelike moments between explosions. After 12 hours of excruciating contractions, I finally got the urge to push. I had been told it would feel a little like having a bowel movement. In fact, it felt exactly like having a bowel movement, and I tried to hold back, not wanting to "poughkeepsie" in public. Just as Gene started to cut an episiotomy, I was hit by an irresistible urge, and little J—feeling just like a huge turd!—blasted halfway across the birthing table. He was about the size of a large Cornish game hen, and his hair was crimped in tiny finger waves. At first I was stunned and maybe a little disappointed that he seemed to have my curls instead of Other's glossy black hair. Once the afterbirth came out (it was filled with multicolored tubes that looked like electrical wiring), my entire escutcheon had to be stitched back together. Other was asked if he'd like to cut the cord. He turned a little green but did the deed. And a few hours later, we were sent home to our seventh-floor walkup on Thompson Street with this tiny baby we didn't have a clue how to care for.

It didn't take long to learn. I couldn't bear to let anyone hold my beautiful golden boy (turned out the gilt was jaundice and he had to be hospitalized and placed under "bili" lights for a few days to help his immature liver metabolize bilirubin), and when my milk came in, the hunger to hold him intensified. When I nursed him, it felt as if the fluids in my body were rivers rushing to the sea. It was totally bizarre—in a good way—that he could find sustenance by sucking on my body.

Some people get postpartum depression. I got postpartum mania. I couldn't sleep. I stayed up at night cutting up my old T shirts to make baby wash cloths. I taught myself how to use an Afghan hook to crochet him a little rainbow jacket. I wept admiring the calligraphic whorl of his navel, the little rosebud of his penis. In short, I fell in love. And for 10 years, until the arrival of his little sister, we were passionately in love (somewhat to the alienation of Other).

It saddens me a little to look back. I know that at the age of 27, he has long forgotten those early ecstatic years. He doesn't remember the hours we spent lying together on the daybed reading Dianne Wynne Jones or the treks we took all over lower Manhattan looking for fans (he had an autistic obsession with gyres) or the car trips to amusement parks or the art projects or the card games or the ... He seems to remember mostly being sidelined by his (spoiled) little sister. It's as though the love affair never happened. I still love him, but it's no longer reciprocal. I know that's normal. He's not supposed to love me that way anymore. He's supposed to find adult love elsewhere. And he has—a couple of times. And I'm glad. I want him to be happy. But I also feel just a tiny bit jilted. (Was that how he felt when his sister was born?) He's a good, dutiful son. But I'll never be able to recapture the wonderful wildness of the early years. He's just not that into me. He's moved on.