I opened my garage door to find my neighbor Crystal pacing like an expectant parent, and in retrospect, my initial reaction was not inaccurate. She clutched her iPhone as she directed a squat van to a spot opposite our row of townhouses. I recognized it as that of the Westport Animal Control squad. I feared her young chocolate lab Halo might have escaped.
“What’s up? Is Halo ok?” But as I asked, I could hear said brown bundle of energy barking at us from behind her closed front door.
“Yes,” pointing at a duck who paced nearby as frantically as she, “her ducklings all fell into that storm drain. Officer Pete is here to try to rescue them.” Indeed, mama seemed distraught, quacking noisily as she simultaneously circled the drain cover and tried to keep her distance from us. We could all hear a chorus of high-pitched chirps from the raft of trapped babies.
I found myself mirroring her distress, so much so, that despite his assurances that he could remove the stubborn and heavy grate (with the help of our Department of Public Works), I felt I couldn’t watch. I asked that Crystal let me know the family’s fate, and thanked Officer Pete profusely. An hour later I texted her for an update, and she sent video and photographic proof of deliverance, including one of the very relieved mama waddling away with her team in tow, in a striking resemblance to the famous bronze statue in Boston Common (http://www.schon.com/public/ducklings-boston.php) representing the eponymous and beloved children’s book. I flashed back to visiting that statue with my boys twenty years prior.
“She flew back as soon as he released them; the ducklings were bouncing up and down looking for their mama.” I cried with relief and joy. What a wonderful bit of good news amidst the deluge of gloom and doom that has so dominated our landscape of late.
Crystal and I stood in awe of her perseverance, and of how much we share with the animal world. I thought about the agony and the ecstasy this family had experienced that morning, and how this parenting moment did not differ so much from many of our – my – own.
My mother was one of the most kindhearted, selfless women I knew. She prioritized my father’s, sister’s, and my needs over her own, which made us feel wonderful, but left her frustrated at times. This, combined with her own inadequate parenting role models made for a tremendously caring woman with a long fuse who resorted to shouting when frustration ignited the gunpowder. And this trait, combined with my father’s anxiety and controlling consumed myriad books and courses to ameliorate what I recognized as a less than optimal approach to parenting. Ironically, she, who never attended college, went back to school just shy of her fiftieth birthday and earned an associate degree in Early Childhood Education. In one of my favorite photos, she stands on a deck overlooking the Pacific clad in cap, gown, and Groucho Marx eyeglasses, nose, and moustache. “Be silly,” was her motto, and her preschool students there, and later in Manhattan, loved Ms. Barbara. If we ran into one of her students on the Peter Cooper Village playground outside of school hours, they’d look up at her with starstruck awe.
“I am learning about and regretting all the mistakes I made mothering you,” she would tell me and my sister as she delved diligently into her course load. We saw the flaws she had magnified as minor blips in an otherwise stellar mommy record. By then, she was the optimis optimus of grandmothers, and she offered up advice to us in the form of “what I learned at school today” gently and with respect for our own parenting skills and boundaries.
“Pick your battles,” “Criticize the behaviour, not the child,” “limit only D&D (dangerous and destructive) behaviour,” “Tell them to be aware, not to be careful,” and, of course, “Be silly.” When my boys stayed with her and my dad, she orchestrated “backward days,” where they’d wear pajamas in the morning and eat ice cream for breakfast. She helped them make Cheerio necklaces on colorful lanyards so they could snack at will all day. She visited their schools to show and tell their classmates one of her famous flannel board stories.
I thought of her as I peeked into the storm drain at those scared, peeping ducklings. They’d simply followed their mom, as they always would at this age, as she waddled by the grate. She didn’t warn them, as I would have in a voice a few decibels too loudly, to steer clear of the drain. Maybe she didn’t realize that their tiny, webbed feet couldn’t transverse it as easily as hers. Maybe she thought they’d figure it out. Either way, they all suffered through a scary experience and, I hoped, would learn from it.
I tended to intervene too early too often as many moms do to avert “disaster” (read, anything that could harm either of my children in any way). But in doing so I may have robbed them of the opportunity to figure things out for themselves; to learn to intuit danger, or just bullshit, either experience or avoid it, and make the decision for themselves about whether to make the same or different choices the next time. I still have this tendency, now in the guise of “I’m old and wise and know better so I’m just magnanimously sharing my insights with you.” I believe that, in toto,despite having inherited some of my own parents’ less enviable proclivities, I also adopted some of their most endearing traits, and was and still am, a damn good mother overall, just like my own, and just like this duck that ducked into our lives on this morning. Also, like both of them, I was and am far from perfect.
I strive to learn from my mistakes and improve every day, even if it is microscopically incrementally. I hope the same for that mama duck and her paddling of babes.