High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [39]
I’m amazed by the memory of counting to one million in a station wagon, not because I resent having done it myself, but because I can’t imagine asking my daughter to do that, or, more to the point, needing for her to do it. When she and I head out on a car trip, we fall right into a fierce contest of White Horse Zit or license-plate alphabet. Childish enterprises, since they aren’t my job, are in a sense my time off, my vacation. In spite of the well-publicized difficulties of balancing career and family, when I compare my life to my mother’s I sometimes feel like Princess Grace. Each day I spend hours in luxurious silence, doing the work I most love; I have friends and colleagues who talk to me about interesting things, and never carry concealed reptiles. At the end of the day, when Camille and I are reunited after our daily cares, I’m ready for joyful mayhem.
For this reason I was also prepared to search through the pockets of my own soul on the day she and I arrived at our orange-juice impasse. I kept up a good authoritarian front at the time, but understood my daughter’s implicit request. What was called for here was some Cow Time, stress free, no holds barred. I decided that after work we would go somewhere, out of the house, away from the call of things that require or provoke an orderly process. Together my two-year-old and I would waste the long last hours of an afternoon.
We went to the zoo. Not very far into the zoo, actually; we made it through the front gate and about twenty steps past, to the giant anteater den. There Camille became enraptured with a sturdy metal railing that was meant, I gather, to hold the public back from intimate contact with the giant anteaters. There was no danger, so I let her play on the metal bar.
And play.
After ten minutes I longed to pull her on toward the elephants, because frankly there’s only so much looking a right-minded person can do at a giant anteater. But our agenda here was to have no agenda. I did my part. Looked again at those long anteating noses and those skinky anteating tongues.
Other children materialized on the bar. They clung and they dropped, they skinned the cat and impersonated tree sloths, until their parents eventually pulled them off toward the elephants. My eyes trailed wistfully after those departing families, but I knew I was being tested, and this time I knew I could win. I could refrain from asking my toddler to hurry up even longer than she could persist in sloth. After something less than an hour, she got down from the bar and asked to go home.
Five years have passed since then. Now it sometimes happens that Camille gets up, dresses herself in entirely color-coordinated clothes, and feeds the dog, all before the first peep of the alarm clock. I never cease to be amazed at this miracle, developmental biology. For any parent who needs to hear it today, I offer this: whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.
Plenty of psychologists have studied the effects of parents’ behavior on the mental health of their children, but few have done the reverse. So Laurence Steinberg’s study of 204 families with adolescents broke some new ground. All the families lived in Wisconsin but were otherwise diverse: rural, urban, white, black, brown, single-parented, remarried, nuclear. Steinberg uncovered a truth that crosses all lines: teenagers can make you crazy. Forty percent of the study parents showed a decline in psychological well-being during their children’s adolescence. Steinberg even suggests that the so-called “midlife crisis” may be a response to living with teenagers, rather than to the onset of wrinkles and gray hair per se. The forty-four-year-old parent with a thirteen-year-old, it turns out, is far more disposed to crisis than the forty-four-year-old parent with an eight-year-old. Marital happiness tends to decline in households with teens, and single parents are more likely to experience