A Student Again: Grownups, It's Your Turn in the Sandbox

Today upon entering and leaving the reception room at Beacock's, I noticed the usual Saturday morning activity - kids tuning guitars, kids humming, kids leafing through sheet music and kids bouncing around, eagerly anticipating either the upcoming class or lesson, or the day in general. Even the kids who seemed shy wore little smiles. They all looked joyful.

I also noticed the parents. No, the moms. All the waiting parents in the little room upstairs today were moms. I noticed them because they provided such a contrast to the bouncing kids. One woman was listlessly paging through a magazine. Another was frowning while she fiddled with her phone. The third woman was merely pressing fingers to forehead as if to ward off a headache. No joy here.

Maybe the adults looked soggy because they all had weighty problems on their minds or were worried about something. Maybe. However, I think it's more likely that each mom, in the deep recesses of whatever part of the mind harbors secrets, was thinking I'm always waiting around while my kids have all the fun.

Back in the early '90s when I started raising kids, the parenting style I call Fertilizer Mom was becoming the cultural norm. If you had kids, you were expected to give up everything that until then had made you a complete (and interesting) person, and make a career out of being A Mom. Your job was to be the fertilizer that helped everyone else grow. The "lucky" women were married to men who could support an at-home wife, who then dedicated herself to her children's success. However, even the women who needed to stay in the workplace arranged all their non-work waking hours around kids. This was the era when SUVs started to display vanity plates that read "Mom-mobile" and school gave awards to parents who spent 40 hours per week camped out in the volunteer center.

My mom was "at home" full time during the 1960s but even she would never have dreamed of doing some of the things that came to be routinely expected of mothers in the '90s. One of those expectations was that you'd drop any activity that wasn't directly related to your kids, their schools, sports teams and other activities.

I had one friend during this time, an aspiring writer, who wouldn't even give herself permission to attend the monthly writers' group To which I belonged. The meeting was only three hours a month, yet she felt she'd be "cheating" (her word) the husband and kids if she went. Not surprisingly she plunged into a major depression two years later.

Thankfully things are changing - it seems like the pendulum always has to swing between extremes before it arrives in the middle - and now it's OK to be a mom and a real person simultaneously. Many of today's new moms seem to be happily doing their own thing as well as cheering their kids on. But maybe some of them still need reassurance: your own growth isn't going to take anything away from your kids. In fact, the stronger you are as a whole person, the stronger your kids are likely to become.

Maybe some of the wilted women I saw today would like to have music lessons themselves. Or art classes or band or a soccer team of their own. Maybe then they'd be just as joyful on Saturday mornings as their offspring.

There's an idea: classes for parents held during the times that they're waiting for kids. That way, no one has to feel left out.