As Tina Turner Might Say

What’s love got to do with it?

One day, as all four of her children were sitting around the kitchen table, my mother, smoking her cigarette, announced out of nowhere that she would always love our father more than she would love any of us.

Now there wasn’t much love going around in the household to begin with, but I remember being hurt because I thought, if she loves our father so much, there was very little love left for the rest of us.  And besides, who in her right mind would say something like that to her children?

I’m sure my mother, in her way, did love some of us.  After her marriage she waited four years to have Joe, the first born.  I can remember how she told us she had him in a Catholic hospital in Ann Arbor because my father wanted her to have the best care, when actually she said the care was rotten and she would have been treated better at the university hospital.  By then my father was just about to receive his Ph.D. and had landed a job at Lederle’s in Pearl River, New York.  They could finally afford a child.

Unfortunately, my mother accidentally got pregnant with me.  This put a crimp in their budget and their planning, as I was born fourteen months after my brother.  So from the beginning, unwanted. It didn’t help that I looked like my father’s side of the family, especially, as I grew older, the despised mother-in-law.

My sister came along three years later and she was “fragile.”  Not really, but this was the role assigned to her.  She turned out to be tall and slender and blond, all those things I wasn’t, and also pretty, while my mother couldn’t figure out why I looked so—  Well let’s leave it there.

My younger brother was born after my mother had four miscarriages.  Needless to say, he was the prince of the family and always treated as such—we thought.  He was named Michael James.  Someone had told my mother that Michael was an Irish name.  She was puzzled and put off, so she asked me if that were true.  I was nine at the time, already the font of all knowledge, as long as it was trivia.  I told her no, Michael was an archangel; the meaning of his name was “one who is like God.”  Appropriate for the prince, and she was satisfied.

Three of us, but not Joe, always wondered where our parents learned their parenting skills.  I would say Nazi Germany, but that might prove offensive.  Let’s just say that they assumed giving us food and shelter was more than enough.

As for me, I would never tell my children that my love for my husband came before all else because it wouldn’t be true. While I love my husband, my job and my joy in life has been to nourish my children.  For both my husband and myself, our children came before all else, although I’m sure, if you asked them, they would disagree.  But, let’s face it, children are disagreeable; and parents are never perfect in their eyes.

Was I a perfect parent?  Not at all.  But I shall leave it to my children to elucidate you.  In my defense, I always wanted to be a mother, and I was so thrilled to have a child.  But it turned out that my first child had colic.  Those who have a colicky baby will understand my pain.  There was nothing either my husband or I could do to comfort him.  He never slept, we never slept.  And I have to say he’s been a difficult child all his life.  At one point he was even a Republican.  Perhaps the angst of those early days is somehow remembered?

How blessed I was to have a daughter eighteen months later. She took to the breast right away and was so pretty and sweet, until she reached third grade.  Then it was a mean girls scenario wherever we traveled.  Such a tornado of emotions throughout her life, when she left for college, she said, “I’m never going to speak to you again.” You can’t imagine how grateful I was.  Relief was short lived.  She called that night.

Now here’s the rub.  I had a third child five years after my daughter.  If I could give advice to anyone planning parenthood, I would say space your children five years apart instead of eighteen months, as I did the first two. The timing of five years gives you a chance to devote yourself to each child in ways you can’t when you have two in diapers and are tired all the time.

My two older children constantly accuse me of loving the youngest best.  What they don’t realize is that the youngest never gave me any trouble.  I cannot say the same for those two!

I guess what I’m trying to point out is there are different dimensions to love, but no hierarchy, no way to quantify who you love more or less.  If you are capable of love, spread it like manure and watch what your garden gives back to you.