Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time

Earlier this week, I was at training for my new job. At lunch, I headed to the mall and stopped at a Panera where I waited in line for ten minutes behind a flock of moms with their toddler children. This was ironic since I was returning to the workforce after years of being a mom and then I was surrounded by stay-at-home moms getting kids' meals.

I watched one of the moms in particular. She had short dark hair like me, was wearing jeans, sneakers and a shirt that was not "Dry Clean Only." Her daughter was about three years old. She seemed like a regular mom, like the hundreds I've known since Claire Adele was born.

"You can pick out a cookie, but not the one with the candy," said the mom to her daughter. "What do you want to eat for lunch? Here are your choices....  You want to say hi to Hannah? You can go say hi but come right back." The girl tripped and fell, and the mom waited a second to see if her daughter was okay before jumping in for the rescue. The mom gave the girl her hand and helped her up.

The woman was constantly teaching her kid in the ten minutes I saw her even though it looked like a low-key interaction. The mother didn't seem to be pedantic, fussy or high-strung. She wasn't teaching her kid to read, to math, draw or play the piano. Instead, she was teaching her daughter to navigate the world.

It took me getting a day job and watching someone else do exactly what I did for so many years to realize how much work is involved in being a mother, how it is a constant flow of nurturing. At times, the flow of motherhood is a gentle trickle and other times it is catching the violent end of a firehose. I remember the crises and the tantrums where I was drinking from the firehose, but I forgot how much goes into the other 98.9% of managing the tiny everyday drops the come so slowly that we don't even notice what we are instilling in our kids.

I think about the Boy and Claire-Adele. When I was running for School Board two years ago, we had something new in our family: money for dinner. I would give each kid twenty bucks and tell them to walk to Kidd Valley and get something to eat. What did they have to learn in the course of their lives to be able to do this? They needed to know how to

-- Determine when they are hungry without throwing a tantrum,*
-- How to safely cross the street,

-- Read a menu to decide what they want to eat,

-- Stand in line at a fast food place,
-- Communicate so they can place their order,
-- Calculate how much the food will cost, pay and get change,
-- Say please and thank you to the people serving their food,
-- Wait patiently while their food was being prepared, and
-- Have decent table manners so as not to offend everyone in the establishment.

I never sat down with my kids and had a "How to Navigate a Restaurant" lesson, but along the way, they figured it out over through repetition and my guidance. That is pretty amazing, not only for the kids but for the moms of the world.

Now that my kids are older, they need me less in their grille. They are out and about on their own, as they should be. I have other friends with disabled kids who are as old as mine, but their kids still need help navigating the world. My kids still need help, just less than they did when they were toddlers.

Moms need better PR. Here is slogan with enough gravitas to be worthy of a bank ("We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.") or the armed services ("The few. The Proud. The Marines.") Here it is: "Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time." Imagine James Earl Jones or Catherine Zeta-Jones saying it. Moms would become the most respected job in the world,

I wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day!

* We are still working with the Boy on this one.