Three Simple Rules

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

This week Son #4 initiated a question on our family text string about Son #2. I don’t know his motivation for the request, but I was pretty shocked when one of my children brought up a time when Son #2 won a puppy in a poker game. All my children chimed in about what a cute puppy it was, and how Son #2 called it “Opi”, short for Opium. Really? I have absolutely no memory of that event at all. None. In fact, while my kids were growing up, every time they asked for a dog, I said, “I’m already potty training eight kids. I don’t intend to potty train a dog, too!”

And it’s not the first time one or the other of my children have challenged my version of their memories. “No,” said Son #3, “I did that, not Son #2.” “Mom, it was a Nintendo, not an Atari,” said Son #6, etc. I read somewhere that memory is most clear when it’s based on our strong emotional responses to events. I can’t imagine not having a strong emotional response to acquiring a dog, yet the truth is, that, in this instance, my memory bank is blank. (Apparently, the dog found a happy home sometime after—which I don’t remember either.)

At my age looking back, I think of myself as a “clueless” mother. Details about lots of things escaped me. Daughter #1 used to serve (patiently) as my Human Calendar. I’d say, “Don’t’ let me forget to buy eggs,” and she never did. Now days, she has thousands of details stored in her head for supporting Utah’s public-school children, so my “memory aide” is less available.

I’m definitely a “big picture” kind of person, which caused me some serious difficulties when I was raising children. I read numerous books of child development and family organization. My husband and I took at least ½ dozen Community Ed classes on how to help our children become healthy, happy, productive people. But when Son #4 and his buddy, both aged five, proudly presented my neighbor with the “weed” they had gleefully eliminated from her garden–which turned out to be a four year old peach tree (with peaches one it)–, all my resolutions and knowledge about better parenting fled out the window. I screamed at the both of them. I was immediately sorry, but the damage had been done.

Same two boys and a couple of each of their brothers a few months later dumped out four five-gallon containers of flour, sugar, honey, and oatmeal which my friend kept in her pantry. When we discovered them, five boys were building roads for their Matchbox cars in a gosh-awful mess spread under the table, chairs, and every corner of the room. They seemed genuinely thrilled that the honey mixed with oatmeal allowed them to create slopped embankments like NASCAR tracks. Once again, rage took over, and there was no room for behavior modification or redemption.

Truth was, when confronted with the “tough” stuff every parent faces, I never seemed to be able to dredge up a single piece of the good advice careful study should have afforded me. In the back of my mind, my combination of guilt and worry stewed around trying to land on a system of parenting which worked for me. Obviously, my head didn’t fit the neatly prescribed suggestions of the self-help books I had read. When I was under duress, the yelling, angry mom took over. (I was somewhat comforted that my dad, by then Dr. Leavitt, counselor and therapist, had once told my mom that mothers who don’t’ get angry at their kids tended not to express their love either. I hoped that if I was an angry mess, at least I also told my kids how much I cared about them.) Nonetheless, my behavior was a serious obstacle to helping my kids modify their behavior, and I was a disaster at modeling what a “healthy, happy, productive adult” should look like.

At some point I realized I needed a couple of simple rules which I could both Remember and Rely On especially at times, for example, when Sons #s 1-6 decided to try leaping from our split-entry roof to a stack of couch cushions and pillows stacked in the yard below. Son #2 broke his leg experimenting with how far to jump, missing the cushions all together. Not a single son breathed word about it until several years later when an Xray showed a long-healed break. Son #2 said his brothers had threatened him with bodily harm—beyond a broken bone?—if he complained. So, he kept his mouth shut.

In the end, I came up with what I call my Three Simple Rules:

1. Teach my children the skills they need to build a happy life. (Under this umbrella came religious training, emotional health skills, compassion, resilience, grit, empathy, etc.)
2. Teach my children to love learning. (Children who know how to learn and embrace it can figure out a way to handle a majority of practical life problems like unemployment, home and auto maintenance, finances, even marital conflict, etc. In addition, they have the capacity to expand their lives with the richness of history, art, literature, the sciences, and the human condition.)
3. Don’t damage them while working through Rules #1 and #2. (This one was for me alone. Whenever I lost my temper, or was so worn out I couldn’t think, or was at the end of a long string of crappy days, I could at least remember Rules #1 and #2, mostly because there were only two of them. Life-hacking at its best!)

Did it help my children? Probably, but the real winner was me. Now I had a parenting plan simple enough that when I discovered Son #5 peeing in the corner of his sister’s closet because it was easier than walking down the hall to the bathroom, I could remember strangling him was not on my list of rules. And figure out a better way to deal with the carpet and the boy.

But the most important thing my rules taught me? Balance. On the scale of life, my crazy, non-compliant, sometimes infuriating children mattered far more to me than the foolishness, the upheaval, and calamity they caused. That reminder has made all the difference.