This is also a practical matter. To compile an itemized inventory of wished-for things and divvy it up among grandparents and aunts and uncles would require time, of which I have no surplus. Tonight, for example, I have four events to attend—two optional-but-encouraged work functions, a fundraiser for my children’s school, and an already rescheduled social gathering. I don’t know if our son’s soccer game will finish in time for the first event or at what point in the evening my husband’s meeting will let out so that he can come home to watch our daughter.
I don’t know what anyone’s going to eat for dinner or when, much less what everyone’s getting for Christmas.
Maybe I’m having a misplaced and cranky response to the rise of entitlement culture. There’s a transactional aspect to giving now, a way of forcing a script onto what used to be spontaneous. This has trickled down from wedding and baby gift registries to birthdays and holidays, not only for adults but for children, too. Online personal registry services have evolved to serve the demand. Apps let you tag items you want, right down to preferred color and size. God forbid someone show you generosity you didn’t explicitly request.
Where’s the line between writing a letter to the North Pole and forking over an itemized file of material desires? The former seems sweet; the latter feels like handing someone a grocery list. Plus, if you ask only for things you know exist, how will you ever be delighted by something you couldn’t have anticipated?
The emphasis on the things themselves suggests that the holiday’s success or failure—as if a holiday could be a success or a failure—hinges on the rightness of the gifts. In fact, that’s what retailers would have us believe. Before the last gingerbread crumbs have been swallowed, the post-holiday sales pipe up, “Didn’t get what you really wanted? Let’s fix that.”
Still, it’s my job as a parent to orchestrate all the steps that make Christmas look like magic, and that means I have to make the decisions. We’re lucky to have family who love our kids, who want to do something nice for them, and I know it’s unkind not to return their calls. I may be an ungrateful bitch sometimes, but I know better than to blow off a grandmother who loves her grandchildren. So I dig the phone out of my purse.
“Anything is fine, really,” I try to tell my mother-in-law. I tell my own mom, “They like everything. Maybe clothes?”
“That doesn’t help me,” my mom says.
That’s when I realize she and I are experiencing variations of the same feeling: Help me. Make this easier, please. Tell me what to do.
* * *
At the end of the school day, my daughter climbs into the car. Thanks to her brother’s sports schedule, she has done her homework on bleachers and in backseats for three of the past four nights. “What’s for dinner?” she asks.
“I’m not sure yet,” I say. “What are you in the mood for?”
“Whatever,” she says. “You pick.”
She wants me to decide. I want someone else to decide. My mother wants me to decide. We don’t grow out of this either, apparently. It’s funny how the same conversation happens every year, with the same undertones: You make all the decisions. No, you make all the decisions. I guess this means there is no age when we stop wishing to be taken care of. Good to know.
I make a decision: No events tonight. Not one, not two, not three, not four. I make the calls and beg off. “I’m sorry. I wish I could come.” And it’s true; I wish I could be many places at once. But I can’t.
We go to the soccer game. We come home. I make spaghetti. John and our son hang out after homework and talk about whether the deer in our yard have enough to eat when it turns cold. My daughter and I share a blanket on the sofa. She’s braiding the fringe when I ask, “If Mimi”—her grandmother, my mother—“wanted to give you something you really liked for Christmas, do you have any ideas for her?” She looks up and ponders for a moment, then says, “Maybe a few yards of fabric? I want to make a cape.” I reach for paper and pen, start making a list. That wasn’t so hard. “What else?” I ask.
So I make the list this year. I will do it every year, after I resist for a little while and then give up resisting, after I remember that I have been that daughter, I will be that grandmother.
The Unaccountable Weight of Accountability
I stood in the middle of a forest and silent-screamed every profane word I know, which is a lot of bad words.
For the second time in one morning, I was on a wooded park trail. The first time, I’d decided to cram in a mini-hike before doing an hour of writing and then heading to a meeting for work. Then I got home, checked my pockets, and found that my driver’s license had gone missing. So back I went, hiking the same route a second time, eyes scanning the ground for my lost card. An hour later, there I was under the trees, still no license, my precious hour of writing time gone. This is what I get for trying to exercise, I thought. Later, I ate a packet of gummy fruit snacks in my car on the way to my meeting.
I reported this episode to my various accountability groups—sets of friends who’d decided to check in on a daily or weekly basis to hold each other’s feet to the fire of various goals. There’s the fitness group; I’m supposed to check in with them weekly about how many days I’ve worked out. There’s the healthy-eating group, in which we keep a text thread circulating to log accomplishments such as, “Drank green juice instead of Diet Coke.” Then there’s the writing group, five nonfiction writers who also have day jobs. We meet weekly before work and use a private Facebook page to hold each other to our pledge not to let our creative endeavors get pushed aside by workaday tasks.
In Dani Shapiro’s memoir Hourglass, she quotes something the writer Grace Paley once said: The years between ages fifty and eighty go by so fast they feel less like minutes, more like seconds. I suspect Paley and Shapiro are right, although I’m not there yet, so I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that my early forties are ticking by at an alarming rate. The idea of making my days count makes me feel like I’m not wasting them.
Accountability is all the rage, and not just in our own lives. Whenever something bad happens, people insist on finding someone to hold accountable—as if that will undo anything. It’s a buzzword in the business and political worlds, code for “responsibility” and “the buck stops here.” Being accountable means you reply promptly to emails at work, you finish what you start, and you spend money wisely. It means every move you make counts toward something. The higher up the ranks you go, the greater accountability you have on your shoulders.
Personally, I’m glad I’m not an elected official or a CEO, because I can’t take any more accountability. The more people and forces I have to answer to, the more “held accountable” starts to feel like “held underwater.” Some days, I want to spend an afternoon online looking at pictures of dogs with eyebrows, and I don’t want to have to report it to anyone. Some nights, I want to spend $9.99 to buy a movie on-demand even though I could wait a week and rent it for $2.99, and I want to revel in that foolish splurge by myself.
As it is, I find I can only clear the bar for one accountability group at a time. As an approval-seeking person, I always want a gold star. But to achieve one thing generally means letting go of another. I can write, but only—as they say—by putting my butt in the chair. If my butt is in the chair, my butt is not outside walking. I skip checking in with my hiking buddies on those days, but not because I want to hide from them. It’s just that I’m already a little downtrodden from having to report to my healthy-eating group: “Unwrapped seven slices of American cheese for lunch.”
So I play a shell game of approval. Today my writing group won’t be proud of me, but my healthy-living group will. Tomorrow I will admit to eating a bowl of my kids’ cereal for breakfast but I will also gloat over having pushed the bowl aside when I finished and stayed in that seat, building and demolishing and rebuilding paragraphs for three hours.
You can’t have everything.
Speaking of my kids, I am not in any accountability
groups for parenting. Children hold you accountable on their own. They keep a tally, and they remind you. Hey Mom, this is the third day we’ve had sandwiches for dinner. Hey Mom, we were late for carpool yesterday and the day before. And this one, always leveled half accusingly, half compassionately: Hey Mom, your eyes are red. Did you cry? There’s no dodging these little accountability officers. They report for duty—and report on my duties—every day.
As if kids and accountability groups weren’t oversight enough, there’s always Facebook and Instagram to help you feel the pressure to measure up. People say social media is making us miserable, and I don’t always agree—I think there’s a lot of joy and connection to be had online—but there is a downside, too. Everything online is quantified, tallied up in hearts and upturned thumbs. If a woman posts a picture of the sparkling sunrise over her morning yoga session, she’s publicly delivering on her commitment to meditative stretching. When a pair of doting dads post a photo of their twins on their shoulders at the farmers’ market, they’re proving they’ve achieved optimum levels of family fun. Meanwhile, over at my house, the kids sat on the sofa with headphones on for over an hour this afternoon, because I was on the phone trying to finish an interview and I needed quiet. I will not post that. I don’t want it to count.
Sometimes I feel ill-equipped to do all this accounting. (I did not take any accounting in college. Of course, in college I didn’t need any help staying accountable. I had so few things to be accountable for. Show up to class, do your work, that’s it.) There are days, even weeks, that I don’t check in with my groups. I pull back when I feel the tail is wagging the dog, that I’m putting more energy into my anxiety over reporting what I’ve done than I would have put into simply doing it.
Ultimately, accountability is optional. I could leave my groups and cut myself loose from the commitment to show proof of how I use my time, but I’m self-aware enough to realize I need that sense of obligation. Knowing someone’s going to ask whether I met my goals has often made me get up and do what I might otherwise have blown off, and I have better health, more pages written, and—yes—greater happiness to show for it. The encouragement helps, too. When I lost my writing time that morning in the park and started freaking out that I’d have to waste additional hours at the DMV replacing my license, my friends commiserated. They, too, have more to do than time to do it all. They urged me not to worry, it would turn up. (It did. A park ranger found my license and called the next day. I didn’t lose that much time after all.)
But that’s the main reason I’ll always have some sort of accountability mechanism: time. I feel too keenly the need to use my minutes wisely. They will turn to seconds soon enough, and those go by too fast to count.
Blind-Spot Detection
The boy who was three when we left for Ireland is now approaching sixteen.
A dozen years ago, I feared what I thought parents of three-year-olds should fear: Should he be learning another language? Am I feeding him enough protein? Is it the right protein? What if he falls in the driveway and cracks his head? What if I forget to teach him something important about how to make friends?
As fear so often does, it refused to look itself in the eyes, instead drawing my attention to problems I could solve with things I could buy—namely, the perfect double-stroller. In Dublin, we’d have no car, and our ability to go anywhere would depend on taking both children on lengthy walks to the train station. My baby daughter would need a stroller, and, though he was really too big for one, my son might sometimes need a break from walking, too. I scrolled through page after page of online reviews before settling on an ideal model. Its extra big-kid seat affixed with a secure click to its metal arms. It offered ample foot room for both passengers, a smooth ride thanks to bicycle-style wheels, and a narrow body, perfect for maneuvering down crowded city streets and onto trains. Press a lever with your foot, and the whole thing collapsed into a neatly folded rectangle. It was sturdy, efficient, sleek—and safe.
Safe is everything. I bought it.
* * *
Now my son is taller than me, and I fear different things. Is he happy and does he know what to do when he’s not? Will he suffer or cause some terrible pain because he thoughtlessly takes one of the many stupid risks teenagers take? Or what if he takes the risk all Americans take—simply going to school or the movies, walking around in public—and he gets shot? I can’t mitigate all those risks. So I obsess over cars instead.
Before my son even had his learner’s permit, I was comparing the safety features of our two decade-old family automobiles, imagining which set of airbags and antilock brake system could best get him from home to school and wherever else he needs to go. Which one would handle wet roads better? Which provided optimal visibility at night?
Sometimes I think it would be ridiculous to buy a new car for a teenager. Then again, I’ve seen the ads: “I’m sorry. I’m okay. I’m fine,” the tearful boy in the commercial says, his bumper crumpled but his body not even bruised, the impact of the crash absorbed completely by steel. New cars these days are made with features like “blind-spot detection sensors.” Blind-spot detection? If only we all had it.
No wonder there’s such a market for diaper bags with a dozen compartments and gizmos. They’re talismans against harm for new parents just wrapping their minds around the idea that the child who has existed in their dreams for months or years will now exist in the outside world, where anything and anyone might touch him. He might at any moment need a bottle or a sweater or a developmentally appropriate toy. (He might need a stroller that deflects rain, wind, and his mother’s nervousness about caring for him abroad, so far from family and friends.)
I’ve made so much fun of other parents when I’ve seen children outfitted in ridiculously high-end gear. No kid needs $20 socks. No sock delivers $20 worth of amazing.
But I know how some of those kids end up in those socks. When it comes time to send our little ones to the bus stop, we want to believe that by wrapping them in quilted goose-down jackets, packing their lunch in a temperature-controlled tote, and buttressing their growing spines with ergonomically designed backpack straps, we’re as good as holding them in our arms wherever they go. We don’t really believe these things will act as force fields . . . but what if?
This is how those of us with the best intentions—those who surely know better—end up overprotecting and overindulging our children. We’re not being idiots. Or we are, but only because we are human, and humans are animals, and animals instinctively protect their young. We humans just happen to have a lot of false protection available to us. We’re all on a slippery slope from rational to insane, and the companies who make this stuff know it.
* * *
The frantic parental need to do every little thing right starts even before a baby is born. Have you signed up for the right prenatal classes? Washed the baby clothes in the right hypo-allergenic detergent? Did you buy the right pacifier? May the Lord have mercy on your soul if you let your baby suck on a rubber nipple that causes him orthodontic misfortune later in life. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.
If you believe there’s one right answer to every child-rearing question—and I may not so much anymore, but I sure did for at least the first decade of parenting—then you’re prone to extrapolating every choice you make. What if Junior doesn’t get into the “best” baby music class, the one where they put all the maracas and ukuleles and xylophones out on the floor and let the tots gravitate to the instrument that calls to them? Then what? He’ll never learn to play music, which means he won’t develop language and spatial skills, which means he’ll surely fail both English and math and never get into college. His hand-eye coordination will stall out, and he’ll be unable to hold a fork. All the other kids will be conducting orchestras and building robots with their amazing fine and gross motor skills, but Junior? No, Junior will eat with his hands, miss his own mouth, and stumble through the world in Velcro shoes with peanut butter on his face. All because he didn’t get on
the waiting list for that music class fast enough.
* * *
We want the best for our children, even if we don’t agree on what “the best” is or how to help them get it. For my mom, that meant drilling me on words so I could win a spelling bee. For me, it means studying the crash statistics of midsize vehicles. Most parents want a good future for their kids, but the details of what and how along the way aren’t nearly as important as we think they are. Montessori or regular kindergarten? Cereal or hot breakfast? Summer camp or summer job? Some of it doesn’t matter very much. Almost none of it matters a lot.
That’s hard to see in the moment, though. I can look back now and think, I know better than to think what brand of bib they wore made a difference. But you couldn’t have told me that then.
* * *
My son has been asking about colleges lately, and we’ve done some googling, inadvertently planting algorithmic seeds for the ads that now sprout in my browser. When I turned on my laptop the other day, a promotion popped up in my sidebar for “college student insurance.” I read the ad—“We offer replacement cost coverage, including accidental damage, theft, fire, and natural disaster . . .”—and just about spat my coffee across the kitchen. Replacement cost? How do you replace a college student? Then I saw the next line, which read, “. . . for your personal electronics and other belongings.” Ah.
Maybe when I fixate on strollers and cars, I’m thinking of them like insurance, an investment in my children’s future. But I think it’s more and crazier than that. Insurance means you get a payout if something—or someone—comes to harm, and I don’t want my children to come to harm at all. I believe in resilience and learning from our pain, yes, but at the same time, counterintuitively and deep, deep down, I wonder if maybe, just this once, these kids could grow into adults unscathed, their bodies uninjured, my heart unbroken. I know it’s impossible. I think about it anyway.
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