I was intrigued by a Yahoo Shine poll today asking parents if they discuss natural disasters with their kids. More than half said yes, we want them to know. I liked that. I’m on the same page as 52% of America! Yay!

In September 2001 I was spending my days breastfeeding one child in the parent lounge of my Waldorf school while another child attended kindergarten. On the morning of September 11 a friend received a text about an airplane and the World Trade Center. Soon all the parents awaiting kindergarten pickup and even some teachers were in the halls, whispering. Something had happened. An hour later we all knew. By noon the official school word was out: parents were not to tell the children what had happened. A huge thing had happened that would change all our lives forever, and we were not to talk about it with our children.

I hated that.
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Last week, Work It, Mom colleague Lylah Alphonse from The 36-Hour Day wrote a post over at Yahoo Shine about what turned out to be a highly controversial topic — moms leaving kids. The post has more than 16,000 comments so far. That’s sixteen. THOUSAND. Ahem.

[Disclosure: Lylah's article is in part about me and she wrote with compassion and curiosity. I heart her much. A more detailed account of my story is here, but the short version is: I left my three younger children in custody of their formerly absentee-ish father, not to pursue my dreams but because I believed that by removing myself from a horrendously conflict-ridden situation, all our lives would be better. My children would have one home. My ex could step up to his potential as a father. The constant conflict would be over and everyone would be happier. And yes, there could be a space where I could pursue my dreams and be awesome.]
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[From the Blogger Formerly Known as Karen Murphy. Next week: why I changed my name!][Also: it hasn't escaped my notice that my last three posts all deal with death. What's up with that??]

Last week I received a brief emailed note from my son’s high school. A student ended his life last night. OMG. My heart ached for the student’s family, whoever they were. No names or identifying information were given. The next day I talked to my son on the phone. He’s 15.

How was your day?

Terrible. It was a really, really bad day. A terrible day.

Then I knew. They had been friends. Turns out they ran cross country and track together. The boy was one of the nicest people my son knows. Knew. They were friends. A friend of his was no longer alive. Forever gone in one moment. Just like that. Suicide. Why?

I tell myself that even if I was 3000 miles closer, there would have been nothing I could have done differently than what I did. I listened. Told him how sorry I was. Told him that he is loved. Let my tears for this tragedy and his loss show. Yes, I could have hugged him. I would have liked that. I hated that my little boy, now so much a man, has learned how to grieve.

He posted a moving tribute to his friend on his Facebook wall, a remembrance of the boy’s character and little moments they had shared. I have never felt so proud as when I read it, especially the last sentence: I love you, man. No, he’s not a boy any longer, my son. Those words were from a man.

The next day my daughter, 11, asked me what she could do to help her brother feel better. She knew he was hurting, and she felt it too. She wanted to show him that she was touched, that she cared. I heart my kids so, so hard.

The whole community was struck by this event, from what I can tell. The school seems vigilant in providing support. There was a memorial. I am grateful for that.

Kids grieve truly, I think. Openly. With their hearts. I wonder what we can learn from this. It feels wrong to teach my children to grieve the way adults do, carefully. I am a hospice volunteer and was taught a little about grief, that it’s a highly individual process. I wonder how this will unfold for my son. Surely every time he meets for track practice he will feel the loss of his friend. There will be reminders. And unanswered questions. We can sort of wrap our heads around accidents — they happen, right? — but it’s less understandable why someone would not want to be. To be here. We wonder what we could have done differently. How the story might still be unfolding, if only. If only.

I have adult friends whose lives were touched by suicide, so I know a little from that place. And when I was 14 a classmate hanged himself. I was friends with his older brother later, and he always held a bit of sadness that I imagined was the unexpected loss of his little brother. I know, I know, we all experience loss in our lives, but somehow this kind of loss seems so much more poignant to me. Things were just getting started for this boy. People loved him. And his pain was, perhaps, more than he could bear.

Words of wisdom? I’m fresh out.

[WARNING: Bummer alert. Sorry.]  I think I have a knack for having the hard conversations with my kids. Moving, divorce, custody battles, cancer. Life stuff. Now my mother seems to have dementia — it looks like Alzheimer’s — and I’ve been spending the past couple of months helping my kids understand where she’s coming from and where it looks like she’s going.

How do you deal with the possibility that your grandmother may never really remember who you are? I am trying to look at this from my children’s perspective. My older kids remember their grandmother in the distance and not very clearly — she visited our home in Pennsylvania several times before the aforementioned moving and divorce changed everything radically, but the 3000 miles between us meant that they were never as close as many kids are with their grandparents. Now my mother is every day slowly slipping farther away. She remembers me, and she remembers that she has grandchildren, but she doesn’t remember much about them anymore. I am not sure how to make this easier for them.

The Sandwich Generation — legions of parents who are dealing with taking care of their aging parents as well as their kids — is fast growing larger. I know I’m not alone, yet this is something that I never thought I’d have to deal with when I became a parent.
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All day yesterday I saw and read reactions to the death of Elizabeth Edwards on Facebook, Twitter, and on blogs. Everybody was talking about it, and this only one day after the announcement came that she was stopping treatment and was “resting comfortably” at home. Waiting to die.

I stayed away from reading about the scandal that enveloped Elizabeth Edwards when news of her husband’s infidelity exploded all over the internet. I stayed away from reading about the controversy surrounding her decision to remain on the campaign trail instead if staying home with her two small children after receiving her cancer diagnosis. I stayed away from dark hints and blatant suggestions that the Edwards’ children were conceived to replace their older son Wade, who had died.

What did all this matter? Elizabeth Edwards was a woman and a mother. Like me. Like you. And she has died, and whatever our politics is we feel a cold ache in our hearts when we hear a mother has died, the visceral fear that our children will be left alone without us.
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My daughter, nearly 11, told me three years ago that she intended never to marry. I believe her. Not only is she a person who seems fairly well tapped into who she is and who she will be, but statistics bear her out. We’re not getting married the way we used to.

According to Time, only half of us are married now, compared to nearly 70% of us just 50 years ago.  What’s even more profound and perhaps more disturbing is that it seems that only the more well-off of us are marrying; less well-off folk are waiting longer to step up to the altar, and perhaps not stepping up at all. 40% of us think marriage is obsolete, according to a Pew survey (huh? really?), but it does seem like we are rewriting what marriage is.

Dreaming of your daughter’s wedding? Your son’s? You might have to wait a long time for it. Are you prepared for never?

What does all this mean?
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Until I read Babble’s piece that explores whether it’s bad parenting to raise unconventional kids, I never thought of it as a lifestyle choice. You raise the kids that your kids are, right? They pretty much insist on raising themselves. Oh, I don’t mean that toddlers are driving the family minivan to T-ball, but kids pretty much insist that we parents toe the line and accept their little, well, … eccentricities.

Take my son, for example. At three he decided that his older sister’s black knit skirt was perfect daytime attire to complement his collection of LL Bean polos. For his fourth birthday present he picked out a gorgeous panne velvet dress with rose appliques and a tulle skirt, along with pink plastic pumps. And eventually I let him wear whatever he wanted. In public. It took an internal struggle to let him do it but I did and then got used to the compliments about my “daughter.” When he started school he told me that he thought he’d better wear “boy clothes” and that was the end of that. I kind of missed my gender-ambiguous child when it was all over.
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My heart sank this past month every time there was news of yet another distraught, unhappy young man who felt he had no other option than ending his own life to make the pain he was feeling stop. I still tear up as I write this, not only for the horrible pain endured by Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas and Seth Walsh, but by what their parents are undoubtedly feeling. While I cannot pretend to compare my letting-go experience to that of those parents, I can say from experience that as a parent — from the time our children are born — we have  to override our every instinct that tells us differently and bit by bit trust that they can make their way in the world. Even if that leads to disaster. And that’s what makes being a parent so difficult. Every little step along the way, from weaning to big boy underwear to first sleepovers to puberty to ski trips, feels like a step away from the warm, loving embrace we instinctively know how to give.

And that’s what we struggle with.
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In my fourth and final pregnancy I was determined to have a home birth. Not only was I living a crunchy lifestyle, eschewing store-bought snacks for homemade organic muffins and crackers and ferrying my older kids to Waldorf school, but I also felt that the whole birth thing was No Big Deal. This was Number Four, after all. I’d just pop him out like O-Lan did in The Good Earth, resting for a moment in the shade of a tree after a morning working in the fields, then strapping him on my back to continue the plowing. Or better yet, in my antique terra cotta tiled kitchen immersed waist-high in a kiddie pool filled with warm water while my older children gazed adoringly on, enthralled with the miracle of life they were witness to….

SCREEEE.

Children? Witnessing the miracle of birth, which we all know involves naked vaginas and blood and lots of OW OW OW OW?
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“I look fat in this,” she said. My first reaction was to reassure her. You’re not fat. Look at you! So thin! You’ve always been thin. “I have?” she asked, shyly, smiling a secret inner smile, looking up at me with her big golden brown eyes. Yes, you have. Aren’t you the thinnest in your class?

Crisis averted, for the moment. She’s ten and she shouldn’t be thinking of being fat. She shouldn’t compare herself to others. She should rest in the knowledge of her own beauty, perfect as she is, because she is who she is.

And then it hit me. I had said the wrong thing. I was reacting to my own body image demons, the ones that have plagued me since the fourth grade and I caught a side view of myself in a window, belly out and breathing naturally, and I vowed to hold that belly in to avoid looking fat. I’ve done it ever since. Only in pregnancy did those muscles relax. And I had nothing to worry about — old photos reveal a stick-thin fourth grader.

What I wish I had said was: You’re beautiful. You’re perfect as you are. I love you because you are you.
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