School For Mothers

The year I turned sixteen I could be found after school washing diapers, scrubbing bottles, and mixing formula. I wasn't a teenage mother. My parents, after sixteen years of vain attempts, had miraculously produced a second child.

Nine years later I could again be found after (graduate) school washing diapers, but with my own infant on my hip.

In comparison with my friends who were also new mothers, I was remarkably relaxed. I knew how to hold a baby. I knew about burping. I knew about the fontanel. I knew to put my fingers between skin and diaper when fastening a diaper pin. I wasn't haunted by fears that the baby would sicken and die because I had neglected to do something. And even though in the South in the 70s breastfeeding was still considered exotic, after sterilizing and warming all those bottles for my sister, I fought the establishment and breastfed.

Partly due to blind luck, but partly, I suspect, because of my confidence, my daughters were easy-going babies. They slept through the night at four weeks*. They didn't have colic. They didn't catch colds. There was the occasional unexplained crying jag, but on the whole they were responsive and I would even say responsible infants.

Looking back, I now see that in caring for my sister had gone through a training for parenthood that is common in many mammals. Adolescent wolves stay home and watch the new litter when the parents go hunting. Teenage marmosets carry their little brothers and sisters around and take them back to the mother for feeding. That is how they learn the art of parenting. Deprived of that opportunity, they neglect their own offspring.

In the large families of earlier times it was usual for girls to help care for infant siblings. But people have far fewer children now (and a good thing, too) and closely spaced, and the daily opportunity for teenagers to practice parenting is gone.

This is not to say that the experience was all roses for me. Although I enjoyed my sister, I resented the changes that her presence brought into my life, such as having to live at home while attending college so I could help take care of her. None of my friends had to wash diapers or sterilize bottles. I wanted to stay up nights discussing Sartre in the dorm, not home taking care of a baby.

In the end, it all paid off. I'm glad my life was enriched by something that, in their wisdom, many animals practice, and I was lucky to launch into parenthood with more than good intentions and a copy of Dr. Spock.

I'm wondering how many of you had the “mammalian” experience of taking care of much younger siblings, and how you felt about it.

*Part of that willingness to sleep through the night was due to the spoonful of cereal that, in those barbarous times, pediatricians advised giving babies starting at age one month.

My Vow Of Celibacy

When I lived in Ecuador, the difference between the Spanish and the Ecuadorean school systems caused me to be advanced three grades, so that when I was twelve, my classmates were fifteen-year-old girls. I didn't much like them. I thought they were ridiculous, with their whisperings and their hairbrushes and their bizarre obsession with boys.

I didn't know any teenage boys, (mine was a girls' school, run by nuns) but I was sure I wouldn't like them if I did. I did get to see boys on a daily basis, however, when they followed the school bus on its rounds.

The pupils of the boys' schools had invented the sport of following our school bus on its comings and goings through the cobbled streets of Quito. They didn't follow us in cars, but in motorcycles, which was much more exciting. Motorcycles allowed a clear view of the riders, and offered them the opportunity for daring maneuvers.

I watched the boys revving up their engines and the giggling girls on the bus with a kind of clinical detachment. My only concern was with Sister Imelda, only recently out of the novitiate, who had been given the task of maintaining decorum in the bus as a test of her vocation. She was young and pretty, graceful in her cream habit and black veil, with a small face and enormous green eyes. When the first Vespa came bouncing on the cobblestones, I could see Sister Imelda stiffen up. Soon the Vespa was joined by the roar of a Harley, with two riders at that, and then it seemed that from every corner little scooters and big black motorcycles would swing out and join the cortege, until there were seven or eight or a dozen behind us. As the motorcycles increased in number, Sister Imelda's face would grow red, then redder, then purple. Her green eyes would flash. I would watch in horror and embarrassment as at the next stop she leaned out the window and shrieked “Imbeciles! Asesinos! Vayanse!”

The boys would laugh and gun their engines. The girls would titter and speculate about who was following whom. And Sister Imelda would subside in humiliation, to do it all over the next day. I hated the whole thing: the pimply, yelling boys, the preening girls, the clueless nun. I kept wishing they would put another nun on bus-duty, and give little Sister Imelda a break.

At about that time, I was invited to a party given by friends of my parents'. There, among a crowd of children my age, I found myself noticing a blond, blue-eyed boy who, in turn, seemed to be noticing me. We ran and shrieked and played games until dark. I remember wondering, after the party, why I had had such a terrific time.

Several weeks later, there was another party, and the same group was invited. By then I had figured out the reason for my good time at the first party. In hopes of more delirious fun, I allowed my mother to shampoo my hair and put newly-ironed ribbons on my braids.

Unfortunately, this time HE wasn't there. I was miserable. My former playmates seemed pathetically young. The party went on and on and I felt unhappy, uncomfortable, and unattractive. I couldn't wait to go home.

That night, in my bedroom, I had a revelation. The reason the party had been so awful was that HE hadn't been there. Therefore, if HE, or others like HIM, had such power over my state of mind, my future was not nearly as much under my control as I had assumed. I thought with a shudder of the girls in my class, reduced to their idiotic state by pimply males. Did I want to be like them? No! Did I want to enjoy myself at parties regardless of who was or wasn't there? Yes!

It was a no-brainer: I would simply give up men. I remember quite clearly saying “men,” not “boys.” But, no problem. I could do it. I would do it. I would never let a single day of my life be spoiled by a man. I would be free. I would be me. I made my vow of celibacy, felt much better, and went to sleep.

My lovely descendants are evidence that I did not keep my vow. So is the diary that I kept from ages fifteen to nineteen. By that time I was living in the U.S., going to a co-ed Catholic school, trying to learn a language and a culture and how to be at ease in a body that seemed to mutate from week to week.

It is a wonder to me, reading that diary now, how I ever managed to learn English, or anything else, in those high school years, so besotted was I by the various HE's who hove into my horizons. The hormonal tides into which I had merely dipped my toes in Ecuador had rushed in and engulfed me so that not just my body, but my very brain was soaked through and submerged. I had turned into one of those idiots I had ridiculed just a couple of years earlier.

Thinking back, though my teenage self embarrasses me, I have a great affection for the pig-tailed, tree-climbing me, who managed to feel shame and sympathy for an adult, and who felt victorious and unassailable in her own innocence--a kind of baby Artemis hunting alone in the woods, blissfully unaware of the coming storm.

December 3, 2008, "Sister Dorothy Does A Makeover"

Newly arrived in the US, I spent my high school freshman year drowning in a soup of cultural and linguistic confusion. I was the only foreign student in the school, and was left pretty much to fend for myself. Able to speak only a little English, understanding even less, I lived in a perpetual panic that I would miss some crucial piece of information, commit a major gaffe, or otherwise disgrace myself.

I was especially scared in Home Ec class. Sister Dorothy, who suffered no fools, was teaching us to use the sewing machine. Not knowing what the words “spool,” “bobbin,” or “zipper foot” meant, I was making slow progress. When Sister would come over to explain for the umpteenth time how to pull up the bobbin thread, I would break into a sweat, and my ears would start ringing.

Not only did I not understand English, but I looked hopelessly different from my fellow students. I showed up for the first day of school in a knee-length dress with a gathered skirt and a top that, having no darts and no give, crushed my womanly attributes against my rib cage. And the dress, to my eternal embarrassment, featured a bow tied at the back.. This was a time when girls wore wine-dark lipstick, little scarves tied around their necks, cashmere sweaters over pointy bras, and long narrow skirts. To me they looked like movie stars.

One afternoon at dismissal time I was told to report to Sister Dorothy. My head swam. Had I broken the sewing machine? Had she sat on a pin I had dropped? In the Home Ec room SisterDorothy, robed in the full Benedictine habit, was waiting for me. “I want you to try these clothes on,” she said, handing me some things. “You can dress in my office.”

I was, as usual, disconcerted. Since when did nuns make people try on clothes after school? I'd been going to nuns' schools all my life in a couple of different countries, and not once had I been asked to try on clothes. But I untied my bow and took off my dress and put on a long straight wool skirt with a slit in the back and a green cashmere V-necked sweater with elbow-length sleeves. I walked back into the classroom and Sister Dorothy nodded. “They fit you fine,” she said. “You can take them if you want.”

“I can take them?” Since when did nuns in medieval habits give people tight skirts and clinging sweaters?

“Yes, yes, take them!” said Sister Dorothy impatiently. “And now go home and do your homework.”

I sneaked into my room and changed into the new clothes, and went to show my mother. “Most Holy Queen of Heaven!” she said, “what's happened to you?”

“One of the nuns gave me these.”

“But you can't wear these clothes! They make you look twenty-five, at least! They're inappropriate for a girl your age.”

There it was again, my mother's idea of what was appropriate for a girl my age: no lipstick, no fingernail polish, no stockings, no form-fitting anythings, and dresses with bows in the back. It was my own personal calvary, from which I prayed for deliverance every night.

But now Sister Dorothy, of all people, had handed me a weapon against my mother. “You can't say they're inappropriate, if a nun gave them to me,” I said.

“I don't know. I guess it would be impolite not to wear them.... But I never knew you had such slender hips.”

And the next day I showed up at school looking, except for the absence of lipstick (that particular battle with my mother would rage for another two years), like a regular American teenager.

Me Before And After Sister Dorothy's Intervention

Sister Dorothy's act of mercy wasn't as drastic as clothing the naked. But is was equivalent in terms of the difference it made in my life. Whereas my parents thought I should be proud of being different, Sister Dorothy understood the longing to fit in that consumed my fourteen-year-old soul, and decided to help me out.