love

On special occasions, like birthdays, my parents would let my sister and me share a can of soda with our dinner. I remember how we would put two identical glasses side-by-side on the table and take turns pouring a little soda into each of them, periodically checking, like surveyors measuring a million-dollar property, to make sure that both glasses contained exactly the same amount of liquid, down to the last milliliter.

We measured our parents’ love in the same way, always vigilant to make sure we got equal amounts of it: equal amounts of attention, affection, praise, and presents. If one of us ever felt she was not getting her fair share, our home would ring with that most aggrieved accusation in the siblings’ handbook: “You love her more than you love me!”

In less emotional moments, one of us might slyly pose the only question that makes mothers and fathers more uncomfortable than the one about where babies come from: “Who do you love more, her or me?”  Every parent knows there is no answer that will satisfy the child who asks this question. If you say you love both or all of your children the same, the kid won’t buy it. He’ll either think you’re humoring him and try to wheedle another answer out of you, or suspect you’re not telling him the truth because you love his brother or sister more (or less) than you love him but don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

The problem is that “Who do you love more”” isn’t the right question. It’s not a matter of the amount of love you have for each of your children; it’s about how and why you love each of them, how you express your love to each, and what you particularly love about one or the other. Try explaining that to a six-year-old!

The fact of the matter is that if I had to divide my heart between my son and daughter, I have no doubt the two parts would come out equal. But if I had to describe my love for each of them individually, it wouldn’t sound the same, for the simple reason that they are not the same people. I love my son’s gentleness, his protectiveness toward those he cares for, his instinctively sunny disposition. I love my daughter’s engagement with the world, her curiosity, the intensity of her feelings and beliefs. As mother and daughter, she and I share more of our emotional lives with each other, while with my son, I share a sweet, easygoing camaraderie. How can I even out the lump sum of such an assortment of sentiments and attachments in a way that they will understand?

Growing up, both kids had gripes about the unequal (i.e., unfair) treatment they felt they sometimes received from me. My son complained that I spoiled his sister, that I indulged her and got her anything she wanted. My daughter grumbled that I was more lenient with her brother, that I laughed at some of his misbehaviors, the same misbehaviors for which she got scolded.

I here and now freely admit that their grievances were absolutely legit! I did buy daughter more, because she seemed to need more—more clothing, more paraphernalia, more stuff —while my son seemed to need less. (We’re talking about a boy who could wear the same shirt for a month and not notice.)  I did scold him less, because he knew how to charm the anger out of me by explaining himself in a way that made my stern face crumple with amusement. But did these inequities mean that I loved her more than him or him more than her? Not for a minute.

So, where does that leave us? Maybe there’s a mother out there somewhere who knows how to satisfy her children’s incessant desire to extract the inexplicable, but my own best guess is that we’re back where we started, with “I love you the same amount,” amount being the operative word. Although that answer might not be complete, and it might not pass muster with our kids, it is truthful—at least for me it is. My heart is filled with love for my children, and the feelings I have for each are bound together inextricably. One of them may take up more space in there one day, the other loom larger the next. But there is always plenty of room for both. 

Soon after we brought our newborn daughter Caroline home from the hospital, her five-year-old brother Michael wanted us to take her back. I know that because that’s exactly what Michael told me and his mother.

My wife said, “OK.” And then she started to wheel Caroline in her stroller out of our apartment.

“Where are you going?” Michael asked.

“I’m taking your sister back to the hospital, just as you said you wanted,” she said. “But then I’ll have to stay there with her.”

Michael looked at his mother with a confused expression on his face. “You’ll have to stay with her?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” my wife said. “Of course I will. She’s too little to take care of herself.”

We could see Michael giving this whole idea some really deep thought.

“Oh, OK,” Michael declared. “She can stay.”

And that was that. And so Caroline stayed.

Since then, Michael has changed his tune. In fact, he’s always looked out for Caroline. Early on, he would stand alongside her crib, his hands on the railing. Look, he seemed to be thinking, I have a little sister. One time, at a nearby McDonald’s, Caroline, then about five, crawled into one of those long tube slides and disappeared from sight. We waited for her to come out, and then we waited some more, until we started to wonder if she had somehow gotten trapped. Finally, without being asked, Michael climbed into the tube, saw that she was just hanging out in there, and coaxed her out.

Another time, while Caroline was still little, she kicked Michael in the legs—for no apparent reason. Her brother could easily have kicked her back, and probably kicked her harder than she could kick him, but he refused to do that. Caroline got the message, and never kicked him again.

And so it went with our son and daughter. They would be in a restaurant with us, and Michael would curl his right arm around her shoulder to bring her close to him, as Caroline pressed her forehead against his cheek. And we have photos that show much the same. Michael and his one-year-old sister floating in a bathtub foamy with bubbles, happy just to be together. Michael during a summer vacation, holding her from behind, his left arm around her waist, as Caroline smiles broadly, looking as if she feels protected from the water in his embrace.

That’s how it is in photo after photo all through the years, because that’s how it goes with Michael and Caroline. Jump ahead five years, then 10 years, and the story stays the same. Michael’s always ready to watch over her and keep her safe. And Caroline would do no less for him.

I’ve done the math here. First Michael came along. Then Caroline joined us. And now they’ve created something else. I can see how much they mean to each other, how much they belong together. In the end, it’s really as if one plus one somehow equals three. 

I was having breakfast recently with the appealing young woman who used to be my little girl, when she suddenly looked across the table and, out of the blue, began reminiscing about a game we used to play when she was in the first grade. "Remember how you'd put the cereal boxes in a circle on the kitchen floor,” she asked, “and then spin me around until I stopped in front of one of the boxes, and that would be the one I had for breakfast?" I smiled, flashing back to the hurried mornings when that game had been the only way I could make sure she didn't spend a precious five minutes pondering her cereal choices and wind up missing the school bus.

So many conversations with my children today start out with the words: “Do you remember...?”  The question always delights me. It feels as if they are extracting some happy detail from their childhood and presenting it to me like a gift. After all, kids are the repositories of our parental pasts, and when their memories are good ones, we can feel gratified. 

Our children often remember the little things that we, their parents, may not. So, just as I will never forget sitting on my father’s lap raptly listening to his nightly stories about a made-up, Orphan Annie-like character he called “Garbage Can Mary,’’ my grown-up daughter remembers how I pretended my fingers were “tickle bugs” and used them to tickle her awake in the morning. And just as I can still picture my mother hand-delivering trays of tea and toast to me whenever I was sick in bed, my son fondly recalls how I sat on the floor of his room and read him a book—about a mighty steam shovel, or a courageous dog, or a legendary first baseman—every night of his young life. 

Of course, our kids are bound to remember the times when they felt we were mean or unfair. I have many such misdemeanors on my rap sheet, and have found that the best way to deal with them is to either express regret, if I think they have a good a case against me, or explain myself, if I think they don’t have all the facts. 

So, when my daughter, at the age of 18, accused me of refusing to get her the American Girl doll she claims she begged me for when she was 10, I speculated that I probably hadn’t taken her request seriously since, as I remember it, she never liked dolls and wouldn’t play with the little girl next door who did. While I ultimately did say I was sorry she’d been disappointed about the doll, I immediately went on to enumerate some of the half million other things she’d asked for that (often against my better judgment) I had bought her.

Despite my daughter’s complaint, I’m convinced that it’s not the American Girl dolls and the X-boxes that count most with our kids, but the daily time and attention, comfort and fun we give them as regularly as we give them dinner. At least these are the things that seem to spring into their minds most often— treasured memories that fit into their pockets and that they carry out into the world, where they become signposts for their own behavior as parents.

I wish I’d grasped this essential truth earlier on. I might not have fretted so much about not getting them every little thing their hearts desired.  Maybe I didn’t listen hard enough to my own childhood memories. If I had, I would have realized that I knew all I needed to know about which ones matter the most. I only hope I’ve passed that lesson along, intact, to my children.

My son was a sophomore in college when he brought his first serious girlfriend home for his birthday dinner. She was pretty and petite and well-spoken, and my instinctual wariness (What does this girl want from my precious son?) ebbed as the meal progressed. At the end of the evening, as they were getting ready to leave and I was carrying dishes from the table to the kitchen, I passed the two of them standing in front of the hall closet. She had just finished buttoning her coat, when my son—a 6’1” bruiser, with shoulders that barely made it through our front door—flipped up her collar and said, “It’s cold out there.” His hands lingered under the cloth, cupping it to her cheeks, and he gazed down at her with a look of tenderness that, until then, I’d only ever seen him bestow on our dog. The object of his gentleness, whose blond head stopped just short of his overworked biceps, turned her face up to his. Her expression, which I remember clearly to this day, was one of complete trust and adoration.

Their emotional transaction lasted for no more than ten seconds, but that was long enough to convince me I had raised a son who could do more than simply consume a houseful of food in one afternoon, or emerge from a rugby match with a black eye and a grin. What I saw was that I had brought up a young man who could both inspire, and return, love.

It’s memories like these, I find, that I treasure most about my kids, not their public triumphs, but the intimate moments in their lives when, without knowing it, they showed me they were becoming the kind of open-hearted people I always hoped they’d be.

My daughter was seven years old the day the soccer team she played on after school lost a close game at the last minute, when their goalie was unable to stop a ball kicked swiftly into the net by one of the players on the opposing team. The loss was a big letdown for our side, so I prepared a consoling speech as I watched my daughter walk dejectedly off the field. All at once, I saw her lengthen her stride so that she came up beside her team’s goalie, who looked dangerously close to tears. I watched as my little girl leaned in and said something to her fallen friend, who shrugged her shoulders and seemed to brighten up. They gave each other a quick hug, after which my daughter skipped over to where I was waiting.

“What did you say to Natalie?” I asked, as she put on the jacket I held out to her. She brushed away the bangs that were forever flopping into her eyes and began to zip up. “I just told her that I thought the last ball had been a really hard one to stop, and that probably no one else on the team could have done it.”

“That was nice of you,” I said. She shrugged. “Yeah, well...” She didn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. I guess a seven-year-old doesn’t have the dictionary definition of empathy at her fingertips. No matter. Her behavior was proof enough that she knew it by heart. 

Look, there are many things my children are not and never will be: Rhodes Scholars, Silicon Valley billionaires, Nobel Prize winners, or Olympic champions. But does this mean they are less than they should be? Of course not—not if I remember that their value isn’t based on what they achieve, but on who they are.

I think we parents often forget this. I know I did all those nights I lost sleep agonizing over my son’s listless test scores or my daughter’s lack of direction, his carelessness, her dreaminess. It took me far too long to see that the question isn’t whether a child makes valedictorian, but whether he makes other people happy. It isn’t whether he gets into the college of his choice, but whether he makes the right choices. It isn’t whether he keeps his room clean, but whether he keeps his word.

As I see it, we parents are in the manufacturing business. We’re on the assembly line every day, reminding our kids to say please and thank you, not to hurt other people’s feelings, to work for what they want, to be good sports. And after putting in countless hours of unpaid overtime to get the job done right, our rewards are found not in diplomas or trophies but in the everyday feats of kindness and courage by which our children show us that we’ve turned out a quality product.

We just have to keep our eyes and our ears wide open.