Firmament

Most of life goes on as we plan. We make our to do lists and write events on our calendars, and for the most part we keep with the program. Occasionally I find myself deleting something from a to do list that I realize I am never actually going to do. And relatively often, usually late in the day, I beg off on something I’d wanted to do but is just one too many events for that day.

But then there are those hiccups in life that push everything else aside. Ours came in the middle of the night last week, when our phone rang with the caller ID displaying my husband’s mother’s name.

I was the one who picked up. I knew, as soon as I heard the tone of her home care provider, Pamela, what the news was going to be. My mother-in-law had died in her sleep, simply stopped breathing after complaining of flu-like symptoms at bedtime. The paramedics were unable to revive her.

Her death was not completely unexpected – she was 89 and suffered from a variety of smallish health concerns. But what is smallish in a younger person can be life-threatening in the elderly, and we knew that just as she could conceivably live for years more, she could also go anytime.

Gram
She was an ardent admirer of both her child and her grandchildren!

Her death was a shock, and we are all saddened and miss her a lot. But given the circumstances, it was about as good a death as one could hope for. She surpassed her life expectancy, nurtured strong family bonds in her very large extended family, and maintained active friendships with people throughout her life—from those she’d known since she was a child to those she had met recently in her years in Florida.

My husband and I went to Florida to pick up the pieces, and found that she’d left us one of the best gifts we could remember: Her papers were in order, with very few questions and oversights. I can only imagine the chaos that we would have stepped into if she hadn’t been so thoughtful and organized.

Life goes on and we continue to make plans and put things on the calendar. But as my husband said on the plane, it was as if a piece of the firmament that our family’s life was built on had dropped out, leaving us all off-balance. We’ll miss her dry wit, her unswerving faith in her child and grandchildren, and especially that quality in her that led nearly everyone she met to consider her a friend worth having. Everyone from neighbors who had recently moved in to the woman at the medical device company reacted to her easygoing Brooklyn charm. And once they got to know her, they were never let down. We hear the same story from everyone: she was a great friend, mother, grandma, and mother-in-law.

We’ll miss her.


Addendum:

My husband writes:

I just realized that I misspoke: the firmament is the sky, thus we could not build our lives on it. 🙁 I meant to say fundament… although that has the unfortunate alternative meanings of buttocks or anus. My mom would have loved that. 🙂

I guess you could alter that sentence to say something about living under that firmament.

I have to say that living “under” one’s mother-in-law doesn’t quite work for me! But I agree that she would have thought the pun with “fundament” quite funny, so please feel free to replace firmament with fundament in all of the above!

Parenting tip #324: Don’t be indispensable

When we had our first child, there were naturally things that I did better or things that my husband did better. And quickly, as new exhausted parents, we fell into a trap: We let ourselves become indispensable.

It took me years to understand how dangerous this trap is. A few successes in packing snacks for my kids going on an outing with their dad, and suddenly my packing snacks became a necessary part of each outing. My husband puts a child to bed successfully with no bedtime call-backs and no nighttime wake-ups, and it becomes his de facto job.

Both of our kids were pretty inflexible about a change in plans when they were little. In preschool jargon, this is called “difficulty with transitions.” My husband and I joked that our kids could set up a non-negotiable new tradition in our household just by experiencing something once. So if I once put chocolate milk powder into a child’s milk, suddenly, they had always wanted chocolate milk powder, they will always want chocolate milk powder, and the world will end if we’re out of it and they want milk.

When you have kids higher on the intensity scale, you know how easy it is to fall into this trap: One time things go better getting a kid out the door if you get his jacket and shoes and help him put them on, and suddenly you are a slave to the jacket and shoes routine. You know that every child-rearing book on the planet is reminding you that it’s best to let kids muddle through doing things on their own, yet you also know that the doctor’s appointment is in 15 minutes, you have a ten-minute drive, and somehow it always takes at least 5 minutes to exit the door and sit down in the car with a seatbelt on.

So you let yourself become indispensable one more time.

(‘Just this once won’t hurt’ is, of course, the addict’s refrain.)

Both of my kids are double-digits now, and you’d think it would become easier to keep from being indispensable. But even with older kids, it’s easy to fall into the trap.  I still find myself working hard against my mothering need to “make it all better” for my kids. I see them struggling through something and know that I could do it better, faster, easier. Or I find myself doing something that I really should have them do, just because it’s more expedient. Or I give in to a demand that we both know is unreasonable, and once I give in, suddenly it’s my responsibility to take on the task—even when you have teens, a repetition of one can set a new routine that’s hard to break.

Recent research has shown what parents have known (and ignored) for eons: when you let kids muddle through, not only do they become more self-sufficient, but they actually learn better and more deeply. Part of parenting is knowing when to step back: when to let the other parent put a child to bed even if it results in a tantrum, when to shrug and say “that’s life” when kids make ridiculous demands, when not to help even if you know things will go better.

For my part, I had to do it again this morning. Having been presented with a demand that I simply could not fulfill, I just had to answer, “Hm, I wonder how you will solve that dilemma.” My mothering instinct was screaming at me to make it all better, but at least I knew I had science on my side!

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