Hi all,

Per our discussion below, I started wondering the ages of our children and how that affects our coverage. I am going to take our Rachel's suggestion and put up a poll. If you don't mind telling us the age of your children and whether you feel we cover moms from all walks of life that would be helpful. Clearly, there is a hunger for information related to older children!

Also, in case you missed it, our Rachel D -- the other Rachel! -- is thinking of launching a print publication targeting the parents of teenagers. What a fabulous idea. Let's give her our support.  

I would like to highlight one more article from this issue’s Brain, Child magazine. Of course, it is an article I am interested in, which means it is not available online.

Nonetheless, it wigged me out in that it brought back memories of the battles I had with my own parents when I was a teenager. At one point my father, fed up that we would hole ourselves up in our bedroom, unscrewed the door from its hinges and laid it against the wall for us to see when we returned home from school. I am sure having three teenaged girls drove him to do many things he now regrets. :-)

Anyways,  Brain, Child contributor Kristin Kovacic reversed past positions -- isn’t flexibility the very definition of motherhood? -- such as you should never argue with your spouse in front of your children and you should not be your child’s best friend -- now that she has two teenagers. Despite what we young smug mothers think, parenting a teenager is “a whole new ball game, played in the dark, and no one really knows the rules,” she wrote.

And just as suddenly, things get really quiet. The kids become secretive, closing the doors to their rooms as thoughtlessly as they once climbed into your lap. The parenting magazines you peruse in the pediatrician’s office (who, by the way, has kicked you out of the examining room) no longer apply to you. Their colorful taglines -- The Truth About Fructose! -- and clever craft ideas seem like pamphlets from another planet, like the Easy Readers your kids can’t believe they ever actually read. Most noticeably, other parents stop their happy babble. Your old playgroup coffee klatch seems to you, in memory, like a teddy bear tea party. Because real secrets, real fear, real shame and the specter of real failure have now entered the space where you once traded stories.

I will keep this in mind next time I complain at being woken up by my babbling and hungry cherub.

But instead of writing a four-page screed on the hell of parenting teenagers, she reviews three books, which I thought I would pass on:

The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy’s Adolescence by Deborah Digges

Once an imaginative and spirited child, Stephen morphed into a teenager with a shocking propensity for bad behavior. In well-crafted, diary-like essays, Digges dispassionately records Stephen’s exploits: He runs with gangs, gets high, steals cars, brings home guns, and once, pre-Columbine, packs an unloaded pistol to impress a girl at school, an event that shows up in the newspapers and gets him kicked out of school yet again.

Mothers of such children need to be heard, Digges eloquently insists, because they can be a lot like us: earnest, well-read parents who want their children to grow up imaginative and unfettered, creative and cool – resilient, not compliant. Stephen is certainly all of these things, as well as a truant and a criminal.

I was moved by an essay in Brain, Child magazine, “Not One of Those Mothers.” Unfortunately, the link is not online, but it was a firsthand account by artist Kate Trump O’Connor on raising a son with Down Syndrome.

Trump O’Connor, who chose not to partake in any genetic prescreening and was blind-sided by her son's diagnosis, aptly described what every mother feels at least on a subconscious level: that only special mothers are chosen by God to mother special children; that surely a selfish, afraid or unenergetic woman would not bear a child with a disability.

I know all of this makes you uncomfortable: my child, the future you can’t or couldn’t have imagined for yourself. For your child. Two years ago if I had been told that at two days old, instead of being discharged home with me, my baby would be put on a lung bypass machine that circulated the blood out of and back into his body; that at two and a half months he would have open heart surgery; that at 14 weeks old he would come home from the hospital, alive but fragile, with a feeding tube and an oxygen tank; that instead of holding him warm to my breast, the tiny infant I’d felt kick and roll inside of me would be nourished by the milk I pumped five times a day for months -- if you had told me all of this, I would have said, Nope, can’t do it, (God,) find someone else please.

And if I had been told that my newborn son would be disabled? And if we’d known the first gift we would receive after his birth would come from the chief geneticist at the big-shot hospital, a book titled Babies with Down Syndrome? Certainly I would have paled and looked around. Me? I can’t be the mother you intend for this child. Surely you mean someone else -- someone who hears all this and doesn’t turn away in fear. A woman who instead hauls out her breast pump, grabs a medical dictionary, calls the local early intervention program, and gets down to the business of mothering her special child…

Now, after all I’ve told you, I must concede: I am a different kind of mother…

But the truth is, whoever or whatever force is in charge of baby placement didn’t see anything in me that is not in every one of us -- the capacity to love our children beyond measure and reason, beyond diagnosis and fear, beyond uncertainty and self. I wasn’t picked to be Thomas’s mom because I am special; I was made special because I am his mom. When I took him in my arms for the first time and gazed into his eyes, I saw only my beautiful, perfect son.

So I settle back in my chair here on this side of the café table. It may be hard and unyielding some days, it may wobble a bit when I lean, but is my seat at the table. I don’t want to trade places. Because what you can’t see from your seat on the other side is the breathtaking view I have gazing out over your shoulder.

Trump O’Connor beautifully describes the transformation a woman undertakes when she becomes a mother. I thought I would share with you the most accurate account I have read in a long time of what it is like to view the world through the lens of motherhood. Bravo, Kate!