Raising children without losing yourself

Rudyard Kipling said it all in the poem "If." The words are emblazoned in my memory and I hearken back to them during any time of confoundment or stress. "If you can keep your head while all others are losing theirs" was a mantra that I chanted when my children were small.

The youngest was less difficult to raise in his formative years being satisfied with himself, a social butterfly and a 'low key' personality. His questions were related to "when can we go swimming, are we there yet, or can we get a kitten." These simplistic qualities set him up to be a high achiever. No stress could be as to his place in the world allowing him to devour information and retain it as if it were his birthright.

The eldest was a completely different story. He was a compilation of numerous complexities in the cerebral hierarchy. I thank my mother profusely for having attended college during my earliest years. She blazed a path that I might follow when motherhood appeared to me on an afternoon following an exhausting labor.

Mom was one of those unique women woven from the "Greatest Generation" that was set upon receiving her college education though she had three children and her peers had set themselves upon the duties of housewifery and motherhood exclusively. These women of the latter aforementioned joined together in coffee clatches as their children played in the yard or went around ringing doorbells for mischief. Mom would commiserate with them during the day, but come evening there would be a transformation. Make up would be applied as well as suits with skirts and a well placed brooch on a lapel. Large and heavy books with exotic titles such as "The History of Western Civilization" would be gathered, and I would watch the car backing from the driveway while keeping an eye on my father. I just wanted to make sure to make that he wasn't leaving also. She would remove herself from her domestic duties to join the collegial life of adults becoming a student rather than a mommy for the precious hours that she spent in a classroom. This was both a blessing and a curse.

My mother was generous in her sharing of information with her children that she'd gleaned during her mysterious, nocturnal outings as far as to bring a frog home that she'd dissected in her biology course enumerating each organ and its purpose. Unwittingly, she had fueled a fire that would necessitate taking herself and her three children to every museum and aquarium within a 50 mile radius to satisfy her broods thirst for knowledge and the ensuing questions that would occur after each outing. Those places of learning were the theme parks of today as far as we were concerned and gleefully would hop into the car for those joyous outings.

The Museum of Natural History was a favorite where we, ranging in age three up to eight, would rush to find the shrunken heads or even be as brash as to ask the curators where they had placed them since our last outing. To this day, I'm not sure if those employees were pleased with having to conform to the demands of a six year old or silently ruminating on the audacity of undisciplined children unaware of their station in life. If they thought the latter it was never vocalized due to the watchful eye of my mother standing as an obelisk to higher education.

At the aquarium we had memorized the placement of the cave fish since we were amazed that they had no discernible eyes or would rush to the watery home of the electric eel. That tank had a switch on the side that you could flip displaying a visual demonstration of the depolarization of this creature with an ensuing electrical current. My mother would merely use this demonstration to remind us not to push bobby pins into the outlets of our home. Seeing the watery demonstration and feeling the hairpins in my unruly hair I felt surely that I would die.

The art museum was a tougher one to sell us. At that time impressionist's and abstract artists were in abundance. The modern art of splashing colors upon a canvas and giving it a name flourished within the marble edifice. We were truly lost in a blaze of color that we couldn't comprehend. The statues were giants and we just couldn't wrap our childish minds around the true significance of these pieces. We were only in Erickson's "concrete operation's" stage and had no idea as to what symbolism was, try as we might for the immature attention span that we possessed.

Mom was nonplussed by our insufficient appreciation and continued to direct us through the canvases and sculptures with hopes that a glimmer of light as to aesthetics would imbed itself in our formative minds. It wasn't until we went outside at the reflecting pool that our fortune changed. A swan as large or larger than I, took an instant dislike to me and went on the attack dashing from the water to chase and nip (or surely to peck my eyes out). With that incident our days at the art museum were gratefully at an end and the ballet "Swan Lake" was stricken from our "Must See's."

It is no wonder that I followed in my mothers footsteps and determined her secret as to how one may raise precocious children without becoming a blithering idiot. The museums were nothing more than a field to run through, though they were arranged and categorized. Unless instructed, there would be no need to hold onto tiny hands or endure the constant pulling of one's skirt. She could be an adult in her own right merely ushering fresh minds through great halls of learning allowing those hallowed walls to do the teaching rather than herself. The only time that she would need to intercede was in relating what was seen to everyday life (we'd become electrocuted) or to save an unsuspecting and tiny personage from the grasp of a raging beast (I still remember that damned swan hissing).

Yes. I followed her path and took my goslings to museums, historical re-enactments, teaching farm parks and arboretums as I was attending college. We discovered the world mutually hand in hand and my eldest whose thirst for knowledge was so great that it seemed unquenchable, could be silenced as a butterfly would perch upon his hand.

We all have our ways and fashions of raising children with many of our concepts being borrowed from our parent's (like it or not). My mother showed me the way to be a mother and a teacher at the same time keeping my status as an adult and yet looking at the world through the eyes of a child. She was a pretty smart lady, my mom. I hope that she's enjoying this story as well as I am.