Our self-determined charge across our Executive Momorandums? To intersperse well-selected nuggets of lesser-known information with some well-selected inspiration. To the latter, we were digging back into Momorandums past, and could not resist sharing this dose of lovely perspective excerpted from a piece the prolific author and columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a few years back, reflecting on her three children, now grown. Before we all return to the treadmill of another school year (in addition to the never ceasing treadmill of our own adult lives), give yourself one moment of quiet to read this one, and take it in. It’s one of our very favorites…
From "On Being Mom," by Anna Quindlen
"…What all those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations –what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.
"Every part of raising children is humbling too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame … But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked bout, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
"… Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were."
Share your own thoughts in the Executive Lounge