A Good Childhood
By Anna Quinlan
@annisbadatig
I’ve spent hundreds (thousands?) of dollars on therapy sessions where I mostly just needed a professional to assure me that yes, parenting (especially single parenting) really is supposed to feel this hard. When I felt the tug to return to work after a two-year stint as a stay-at-home-mom when my boys were babies, I took that urge straight to a therapist, all so I could be reassured that not wanting to be a stay at home mom didn’t make me a bad mom. Years later, after their dad and I divorced and my boys approached their teens, I found myself back in therapy with a different twist on the same question: Is motherhood supposed to feel this challenging? Like I’m always swimming upstream?
Recently, one of my boys got in trouble at school in a manner that cocky, careless teen boys are wont to do. And while the offense falls within the normal range of Stupid Teenage Stuff, it was the first big offense for us, with potential consequences that could’ve been really bad, made more devastating by lying about it. I couldn’t believe it. Once the initial shock wore off, I mostly couldn’t believe that I was in this situation now, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘This is my first rodeo, actually.’ I don’t know what the right consequences are; how to walk the tightrope of offering warmth and grace while still teaching him that the rules are the rules. Ultimately, a consequence was delivered and it was received with a fit of rage, my red-faced son screaming at me that I am ruining his life. I bit my lip and excused myself to my bedroom where I sat on the edge of my bed and cried.
* * * * *
I am raising two boys who are nineteen months apart. The youngest just turned fourteen and the oldest will be legally allowed to drive an entire motor vehicle all by himself pretty soon. When people ask me if they get along, my answer is always the same: “They get along like brothers.”
Today is a good brother day. Today, the three of us are camping in Yosemite Valley, floating in inner tubes down the Merced River, stopping for every rope swing we pass along the way. We have cold drinks and Uncrustables and a waterproof Bluetooth speaker from which my older son is playing a playlist that is really nailing the vibe, actually. It’s our last hurrah of summer vacation before they go back to school next week, and the day is cooperating.
At one point, we take a break from floating and I walk up onto a bridge to get a better vantage point of my boys while they take turns doing flips and cannon balls from a rope swing. Somehow, we have the spot to ourselves. Time slows. The sun is dancing on the water, Half Dome is stoic and majestic in the background, all I can hear is the punctuation of their laughter, and their splashes into the river. I perch on the bridge watching them launch themselves into the water, and the world feels perfect. In that moment it dawns on me that I am doing exactly what my therapist told me to do.
My therapist had been unimpressed by my last round of seeking assurance, essentially offering some rendition of: “Yeah, parenting is hard. Next question.” Instead of trying to find some mysterious childhood source of my struggle, or offering a rubric by which to examine it, he had recommended I “focus on the wins” or some related bullshit that didn’t seem worth the copay. I only saw that therapist one or two more times after that; not because the advice was a fireable offense, but because our work was done. Therapy can’t make parenting easy, and I finally understood that. Do your best on the hard days. Celebrate the good days. Make the good count more than the bad. Repeat forever.
So from my perch on the bridge, I soak in this good day. As I watch without agenda, I realize that my boys look nearly like young men now, sinewy and capable and strong. The sound of their laughter feels the same to me as when they were toddlers sharing a room, and I would stand outside their bedroom door and listen to them giggle together. I would bottle it up and get drunk off it if I could. I marvel at how big they are now, stronger swimmers than me, probably, even though it feels like just a couple summers ago I still made them wear floaties. Now they make fun of me for being too chicken to fling my middle aged body off a rope swing.
‘This is a good childhood,’ I think to myself. Despite the hard brother days. Despite the divorce. Despite all my insecurities. ‘I am giving them a good childhood.’ The thought is its own therapy, its own medicine.
I am full of hopes and wishes for us as I watch them simply be brothers on a summer day. I hope they’re friends as adults. I hope the world is mostly kind to them, and that they’re able to recover well when it isn’t. I hope they like me. I hope one day the older one and I can have a good laugh about the time he saw my vibrator charging on my bathroom counter. I hope they’ll take care of me when I’m old, and I hope I won’t need them to.
I stop myself before the wishes pull me out of the moment. The older one swings out, away from the shore, glides right into a backflip and lands easily in the river, flipping his hair out of his eyes the second his head pops out of the water. He calls out to his brother, some assessment of the backflip, probably, and then he glances over his shoulder at me as he swims back to shore.
‘Yes, I see you,’ I say to him silently. The incessant, “Mom! Watch this!” hollers have died down a lot as they’ve gotten older, but mostly they’ve just evolved into these quieter moments, easily missed when I’m not paying attention.
Thank God I am paying attention. Thank God for their good childhood.
After debuting her first Coffee + Crumbs essay in August 2014 as part of the OG writer's team, and contributing to The Magic of Motherhood book in 2017, Anna Quinlan came out of writing retirement for this final love letter to the C+C community. Anna is a single mom with a full time sales career and a million ideas she hopes to get on paper some day.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.