Originally published in February 2008 as Expectations on A Wild Ride:
Expect nothing and parenting gets that much easier. Before I had that piece of knowledge in a sweaty new parent hand, I had expectations. Expectations of pristine report cards and unblemished popularity. Of supreme athleticism and fearless philanthropy. A beautiful mind without troubled thoughts, actions, words. Perfection in an imperfect world would be my children and I expected nothing different or else.
Until a 9-1-1 dispatcher asked me if my baby was still breathing and I had no logical way of answering his question. She was stiff and unmoving, unresponsive to my touch, unable to withdraw even from the hand of the man who’d hours before given her irrevocable brain damage.
Brain injury. Brain damage. Traumatic brain injury from shaking the baby. Wiped clean, someone in the children’s hospital offered as though there was hope in a brain wiped clean. It’s better to try to re-teach her three months’ of stuff than thirty years’ of stuff was the theory.
Oh.
Except that no one really had the proper way of telling me, a brand new mother who’d never tried to teach a child anything at all, that teaching the damaged brain is harder than scraping off dried shit. What you want to stick sticks not. What you want to wash away stays for an incredibly long long time. Get used to staring at the stains left behind, the ones that will not go away, no matter the reputation of the private school and cost of the tutors.
In a release of all expectations, two lives were born: that of my daughter as a funny, routine-driven friend to the underdog and of mine, more of a rules-are-for-suckers deist, abandoned by God, embraced by daily minutiae. Whatever works became our motto. She compensated for her physical weaknesses and mental deficiencies through adaptation and charm. I mourned our losses with a change in worldview, an ennui nearly unchallenged even when jarred by horrific events elsewhere. What is the violent deaths of thousands of people when my 12-year-old has no concept of long division?
My son was born and I found out this: picking up your child from the babysitter and discovering one unconscious infant is not a normal piece of living. Babies can learn without the additional necessity of hospital outpatient staff. Indeed, popsicles are for eating, dripping, making messes, not for stimulating the lower lip to encourage spontaneous babbling. Most babies babble without the assistance of occupational therapists, you know. Silly Mommy.
Six-year-olds enter first grade without having repeated kindergarten twice.
Some kids join sports teams with no extra explanation or accommodations needed.
On the flip, some kids are also well aware that commerce trafficked through the television is available to the annoying asker, the more annoying the better, is the misguided opinion. The one who knows television only as the messenger of the Bel-Air fresh prince is the one to take to the mall on a quickly needed errand, not her two-side-brained brother looking for Floam.
One of each I have. Girl and boy. Girl with the right side of her brain swimming in fluid being the one who keeps the family both on schedule and from too much whimsy. Boy with both sides firing light sabers and the capitals of all 50 United States. The disciplinarian versus the one who needs disciplinarians. The big sister with absolutely no concept of time who is never late walking the two of them to the little brother’s early morning school bus. The six-inch medical file and the simple “NKA”.
Mommy is somewhere in the middle. Coveting nothing from the universe, receiving everything it can offer. This is much better than I’d expected.
