My husband was reminding me the other day that when we were dating and he talked about wanting to have kids (we were pretty serious, pretty quickly), my response was something like, "I can't have children. I have no idea what to do with them, how to raise them." Clearly, we passed that hurdle, and have a trio of young adults who share our DNA as evidence.
I never read a parenting book, never subscribed to following the advice of complete strangers hawking their so-called "expertise" about how to raise kids. So I did what turned out to come naturally: I followed my compass. That meant letting my values guide my parenting. And in that, I had a partner with whom I was radically, beautifully in synch.
We raised our kids in a community full of what I would call hysterical strivers, people who thought the most important thing in life was having your child ace his or her AP classes and matriculate at Harvard. I knew that sort of striving was a special kind of bullshit, and I always chuckled over how the parents chasing that outcome were not parents who themselves had ever been to an Ivy League school. And I knew that Harvard graduates as many jackasses as any other place, because having a high IQ, or being able to play the ukulele with your toes while scoring in a lacrosse game and installing fresh water in an African village doesn't make you better than anyone else. It says nothing about your values and everything about what you were willing to do to impress the admissions committee.
So avoiding that nonsense in the community in which we lived was easy. Why? Because our kids drank our family kool-aid, not the communal poison. So my eldest, one of those honors classes, talented athlete, great musician kids, just didn't care about that poison. In fact, when we talked with him once about how competitive high school was and asked how he thought about his GPA in light of that, he calmly told us that he wasn't willing to kill himself for another point on his GPA. We told him that that might, because of how crazy college competition was, somewhat limit his choices. He didn't care. And we didn't either. He applied to six schools--far fewer than most kids--and even with his stellar stats, got rejected by three. Didn't rattle him at all. Went to a perfectly fine school. And when I asked him about his experience there, he pointed out that he could take the classes he'd taken anywhere; it was the friendships he'd made that mattered most. Bingo. Lesson learned. And boy did he learn it. Having just finished his studies at law school, he's the only one in his class who chose the military. Schools like this one tout their bona fides with respect to public service, but 95+% of grads go into corporate settings. Same is actually true of Harvard. Kids kill themselves to get in, then chase money on their way out.
With my autistic son, there was no path to college. He just got to stay in high school longer. That gave some kids a chance to use him as resume fodder, as when they signed up to be his buddy in an after school club but routinely failed to show up because they had cheerleading practice or some other activity they actually wanted to do. When the speech therapist who ran the club told me about these absences, I told her that it was obscene that they were using my son as a pawn in their college applications, and that she should under no circumstances endorse their behavior with any kind of recommendation. It pained me to have to tell her that, but it was one of many occasions in the years of my dealing with a school system deluded by its own "excellence" that I had to remind faculty and administrators of the right thing to do. Frankly, it was exhausting.
Then there was my daughter, an outspoken, fiercely passionate child who collided with a school system and a community of conformists. Cliques were a thing not only among students, but among their parents. Mean girls learn what they learn from somewhere, after all.
I couldn't wait to leave that community, and my autistic son's exit from high school was my chance. He would have no life to speak of in the suburbs, given its car-based culture, parochialism, and social isolation. Sure, I could drive him to and from the one vocational program he was in that had any value, but that would be it. And that just wasn't good enough. All credit to my husband, who went along with me even though he's not a fan of change, and loved the home in which we'd raised our kids.
Fast forward 2.5 years, and we're living in what seems to be the global epicenter of a pandemic. While I remain strangely calm in spite of that, I do find myself worrying greatly about my children's futures--and frankly all young people's futures--in light of what I think is going to be a long-term catastrophe, both economically and in terms of the kind of undemocratic, fascistic country we are now living in. I raised my children to cherish knowledge, ideas, curiosity, kindness, seeing, listening, and questioning. Maybe above all, questioning. Not for the sake of playing "gotcha" but because it's only by posing questions that matter that we can arrive at answers that matter. It's an effort, in fact, to vaccinate my kids against ignorance and against the moral blindness and cognitive deafness that shake an accusing finger at facts and truth, and at the thinkers and do-ers trying to find a better way forward.
My greatest joy is when my kids are out in the world and I get feedback about how they've behaved. The mother who thanked my daughter profusely for getting her selectively mute child to speak. The judge who noted that my eldest was uniformly liked and respected by all the courthouse staff, and that that was not commonplace among interns, given class and other tensions between college-level interns and those staff members. The elementary school aide who told me that my autistic son was the reason she was so happy to come to work each day. And so on and so on and so on.
For these reasons and more, it is both heartbreaking and infuriating to see so many dark clouds on the horizon of my children's futures. What does it mean to pursue something meaningful through school and work, and find that both the floor and the ceiling are likely to collapse under you? What parental guidance matters in a country undone by lies, by corruption, by cruelty, by incompetence? I can applaud the goodness in people--and strive to be one of those people--but the larger forces of a virus that doesn't care and a President and his allies who care even less--is beyond catastrophic.
Prognosticators--who multiply in times of crisis, it seems--have made all kinds of predictions. We'll be past the worst of it in months. No, it'll be a year or eighteen months until we get a vaccine. Might take three years for the economy to right itself. We might never get a vaccine. My prediction, for what it's worth, is decades of struggle, of chaos, of suffering. There's not just the public health wreckage; there's the deep, corrosive economic destruction. And surrounding, undergirding, and suffusing all of that is the political destruction wrought by a lawless, corrupt, incompetent administration whose viciousness and self-serving lies rot the soul of this country in ways that might never be repairable.
So on the heels of what was a lovely, love-filled Mother's Day, I am heartbroken over what I cannot offer my children, of what I cannot promise them, and of what they--and millions and millions of other young people--have been robbed of. The only thing I can promise them is that I will love them, hold them, console them, laugh with them, cry with them, and remind them that however out of control the world spins, I will try my damnedest to be their ballast, to be the mother they can cling to however vast and furious the storm. I have no idea if that will be enough, but it's all I have to give. And who more worthy to give it to than the beings I was once afraid to bring into the world, the ones who convinced me that love can conquer fear, that hope can conquer pessimism, and that fighting for what you care about, what you treasure, what you value, is always worth it.
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