Just the Way You Are

When you are a parent, you confront an endless battle. No, not the battles you fight with your kids - the battles to make them do homework, to make them eat vegetables, to make them clean their rooms, or to make them say please and thank you.  The endless battle is within yourself and the need to strike a perfect balance between knowing when to push your kids to make them strive harder and when to step back and let them learn for themselves.

We all know the parenting types: the soccer mom who schedules her whole day around her kids' needs, the helicopter parent who hovers and tries to solve every problem, the tiger mom who demands perfection from her children, the "cool" mom who lets kids set their own rules and dictates little.  Most of us don't fit neatly into any of those boxes, and we spend more time than most people imagine hoping that we're not messing our kids up with our own insanity.

Two books I finished since the last blog have me thinking about my own parenting choices and feeling hopeful about how I'm doing.  I picked East of Eden by John Steinbeck because every year I try to conquer a few "classics," and this novel came up as a book club choice on a blog I follow.  I've always loved Steinbeck's other books, and Mr. Stroud raved about this one, so I decided to plunge in. Little did I know it would be such a powerful story of the immense responsibility that goes along with raising children.  In the midst of heavy duty grading season, I did not need a book that would make me regret the time I take from my children, but thankfully, about halfway through I realized that there's no way I'm doing WORSE than the people in the book.  After East of Eden, I needed a quick read, so I chose If I Was Your Girl, a realistic young adult novel about a transgender teen that I picked up at a teacher conference in November. With the "bathroom debate" raging again, and with a close high school friend who is sharing her efforts to help her transgender son adjust, I decided getting more information about trans teens would make me more understanding of the debate we can't seem to escape. Fortunately, the mother and father in If Was Your Girl present a model of accepting, loving parenting and created a nice counterpoint for Steinbeck's struggling characters.

At 600 pages, Steinbeck's novel took me some time and defies quick summary, but in a nutshell, the author revisits the story of Cain and Abel as a parable for all of humankind's fear of rejection from their parents.  The Trask brothers, Charles and Adam, are half brothers who share a father, and Adam is clearly the favored son, the Abel.  But because their father Cyrus favors Adam, Charles targets his half brother and nearly kills him, which causes Cyrus to send Adam away to become a soldier.  Adam endures but is left broken and aimless after his time fighting Native Americans and Mexican soldiers in late 19th century America.  Later, he realizes that "The techniques and training [of the army] were not designed for the boys at all but only to make Cyrus a great man" (20). Disgusted by this realization and recognizing his father as someone who only seeks to better himself through producing valiant sons, Adam vows to be different from his father and rejects a life of order and discipline, a decision that leads him to a life of vagrancy until his father dies. With his father gone, Adam decides to return home and make amends with his brother, who has wallowed in his own guilt for decades.  Adam eventually gets tangled up with a deeply disturbed woman with whom he has two sons of his own, twins.  As if Charles and Adam weren't enough of a pair to recreate the Cain and Abel tension, Steinbeck throws in twin boys, Aron and Cal.  The boys' mother is not part of their lives (too much spoiler potential to explain why), so they vie for their father's affections.

Adam wants to love his sons, but he fears they have evil traits from their mother's genes, and his wise servant Lee tells him, "...not their blood but your suspicions might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them" (260). Steinbeck sharply criticizes the tendency parents have to try to shape and mold their children. While Cyrus's nurture approach, which pushed Adam to be a "man's man" and to deny his kind disposition, failed miserably, Adam takes the view of "nature" and sees only evil in his sons when they are still infants.  Lee's philosophical view nudges Adam to see his sons for who they might be and to give them time to find their own paths.

The path for each boy is not a smooth one. Much of the novel follows both Aron's and Cal's struggles to find internal peace, as well as acceptance and love.  Lee, again playing the role of philosopher, says, "The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears" (268). Those words made me feel better as a parent.  I won't sing my own praises too boldly.  I have a short temper sometimes.  I project my stress onto my children.  Sometimes I'm just distracted and forget to listen to them well.  But I think I've done a pretty good job of making my children feel valued. They are different in glorious ways, and those differences make my life fuller.

So perhaps the best thing parents can do for their children is to love them just the way they are. The book If I Was Your Girl offers two parent characters who do exactly that for their transgender daughter. Again, I don't want to spoil too much plot, but you can guess that the shift from male to female presents many difficulties. Nonetheless, Amanda's parents support her throughout her transition, moving her from Atlanta where she lived with her mom as a boy to a small town to start a new life as her father's daughter.  Looking at her daughter as she leaves, Amanda's mother cries at how much her child has changed, and Amanda fears that her mother regrets approving the transition, but Amanda's mother is crying the tears any mother cries, the tears that come from watching your child grow up.  She explains her tears to Amanda:

"When you were a year old I looked at your baby picture and cried. When you were three I looked at the pictures from when you were one and cried. When you went to kindergarten I looked back and cried. Kids constantly grow and change, and every time you blink they turn into something different and the kid you thought you had is just a memory" (187-188).

That segment captures the experience of parenting when you let your kids become who they are meant to be.  It made me cry. Because no matter what category of mom someone might place me in, I'm a mom who loves watching my kids grow up, yet at the same time, laments each quickly passing day as they grow up to become independent. So I cry over the loss and I cry over the triumph. How many of your parents will cry when you walk the stage at UNT Coliseum next year? Most of those tears will be happy ones, celebrating what a fantastic journey it is to be a parent.  My greatest hope is that my children and my students will know that I admire and respect them no matter who they decide to be. I want to say to them, "you're amazing, just the way you are" (Mars).

Mars, Bruno. "Just the Way You Are - Official Video." YouTube, uploaded by Bruno Mars, 8 Sept.
        2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhCEhWiKXk

Russo, Meredith. If I Was Your Girl. Flatiron Books, 2016.

Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. Penguin Books, 1952.