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It's no more than I deserve. I've been writing about my children since there were children to write about. And I'll say about it the same thing I said to the guy who called in to a Chicago radio station and complained that I was opinionated: That's what I'm paid for. During one period of my life my job was to write a column in which the kids provided most of my material, mainly because I had two under the age of two and I didn't get out of the house enough to have anything else to write about. What saved me was the fact that a lot of that material was universal, at least among women of a certain age. So universal, in fact, that the paper once heard from a real nutbar who insisted that I was plagiarizing my column from the contents of her journals. She, too, had little boys who played with Legos and sometimes misfired when they stood in front of the toilet.
There are various criticisms of writing about your own kids: It's too cute, or it's not illuminating, or it's downright exploitative. I ran all of them through what was left of my mind in those years, while I was watching Christmas pageants with toddler sheep and attending parties at which at least half the guests had a major emotional breakdown somewhere between the cake and the presents. And if really pushed I would have had an unsatisfactory answer for why I did it: For the moment, it was my beat.
But in retrospect I think I was being a little too apologetic about the entire business. The world of children and child-rearing is social history writ small but indelible, whether it's the minutiae of Barbie dolls and Power Ranger action figures or the phenomenon of books like Harry Potter or The Cat in the Hat. It's a shared experience, not just for the children but for their parents, and a snapshot of where we were then.
And it inevitably leads you to write about other people's kids as well, the ones who get in trouble, who die too young, who live hopeless lives in places your lucky semiautobiographical types will never live and maybe never visit. If the job of a good reporter is, as H. L. Mencken once said, "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," then you can easily do both at once by writing about how tough society can be on its youngest members. And to the extent that you can make two people who care more than anything in the world about one small child thereby generalize their concerns to other small children, that feels like a very good thing.
At a certain point I traded writing about my own kids for writing about the troubles of kids in general. Plumbing the lives of the ones you live with every day has a fairly short shelf life if you know what you're doing as a parent. You have to be more careful as they become more conscious and more literate. But there comes a time when even taking care is not enough, and an absolute ban on the territory is clearly in order. No teenager I have ever known wants to read in a newspaper or magazine about that little sex talk you decided to have one night after he came home with a hickey. ("The only sexual behavior that doesn't survive high school," says my friend Gail, who is my mother role model and stays calm about everything.) Actually, no teenager really wants to have the little sex talk, so having it memorialized in print, for everyone else's parents to see—"Oh, I see Maria and her mom had a very serious discussion the other day"—only adds insult to injury. And puberty.
On the other hand, putting it all down in sentence form makes it easier to go back and look with a gimlet eye at the early years in a way most of us are unwilling to do when the children are small, especially when bystanders keep insisting we must be engaged in an enterprise of unwavering joy even though a fair amount of that enterprise consists of disposing of waste products. There is only one column I have ever written under duress; it came after a woman in Texas had drowned all five of her young children while in the grip of postpartum depression. My editor insisted, and he was right. After many years of hearing nightmare tales of children who did not sleep through the night until they approached adolescence (when of course they began sleeping through the afternoon), I became aware that the universe had arranged for me to have a pretty easy run as a mother. But even an easy time can be hard, and so there's probably no other issue that demands real honesty as much as motherhood does. (It may also be the only emotional role in which it is possible to be honest and balanced at the same time. Writers are wont to rip the lid off the institution of marriage once divorced, but they wind up telling only part of the story. Usually the bad part.) I tried to be honest, perhaps painfully so, in the wake of that shocking act of multiple infanticide, and you could tell how seldom that happened by the reader reaction to the resulting column about the demands of child-rearing. "Thank God" was the prevailing sentiment from women who felt as though they'd checked their selves at the labor room door. I was once one of them, but I got lucky in a big way. I got to write about it.
Excerpted from Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen. Copyright© 2004 by Anna Quindlen. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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