Same Kind of Different as Me

My boys were over for pizza night on Sunday, along with their aunt Lynn. Like all mothers of adult children, I sometimes look back on their childhood days and wonder what I’d do differently if I could do it over again. (Thank you, God, that I don’t have to do it over again). My work brings me into contact with many different parents and parenting styles, and it’s easy to play the comparison game.

I see a lot of “chore charts,” oversized hard copy versions of spreadsheets, with each child’s name, day of the week, and designated chores, along with a place for checkmarks when said chores are completed.  Sometimes I’ll see a daily bible verse on the refrigerator, or a behavior chart tracking the laudable and the unacceptable.

I’m not ridiculing any of these things.  Good grief, I admire these parents’ organizational skills and adherence to order and structure. But wishing I had replicated this kind of parenting is like wishing I had brown eyes. 

Divorced when my kids were pretty young, I sometimes worked three jobs (I was fortunate that, other than my main job, my second and third jobs were always work-from-home opportunities). Not blessed with an inordinate amount of patience or discipline, I often felt I was flying by the seat of my pants.  Chores would be assigned and fall by the wayside.  I would make a solemn vow to take the boys to something “educational” once a week, and realize a month later that we’d failed to visit a single museum or attend a concert. Dinner was usually take-out (but healthy take-out), sometimes on TV trays as we watched “Seinfeld” together. Shouldn’t we have had dinner table meals, complete with a “topic of the day”? (I look back on my brooding, bespectacled teenage self and imagine my parents instructing the four of us to “Go around the table and tell us what’s the best thing that happened to you today!” GO AWAY.)

I couldn’t have been that kind of mother, because I wasn’t – I’m not – that kind of woman. And my kids probably didn’t respond to my failed attempt at textbook parenting, because they share my DNA.  I look at them now, and they’re just fine.  Better than fine, they’re wonderful.  And if they’d turned out to be ultra-conventional and non-quirky, I probably wouldn’t have been able to identify with them anyway.

Jackson and Sam.  Same kind of different as me.

A perfect day, a perfect walk.  Once again, I just couldn’t get going in the morning, so brought my walking gear to work and went to the trail over the lunch hour.  Seventy-five degrees, slightly breezy and clear.  This time I took the trail from the south side, to the 2.5 mile marker, and backtracked to make sure it was exactly five.