Within a couple weeks of hip surgery, my mother was doing physical therapy at a skilled nursing facility. c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Barbara Falconer Newhall

Ten reasons why I’m finding it impossible to write about my 92-year-old mother, even though she’s all I can think about right now:   

1. I love my mother, and I don’t know how to write about that.
2. My mother is difficult, and I don’t know how to write about that.
3. My brothers can read, and they know about this blog.
4. My mother can read. So can all six grandchildren.
5. My mother has osteoporosis, dementia and a messed-up stomach. She is losing herself, piece by piece, like dandelion feathers floating off in the wind, and I don’t want to think about that.
6. My father is dead. My in-laws, Scott and Ruth, are dead. If my mother dies, there will be no more grown-ups left in my life.
7. I don’t want to be the grown-up. 
8. If my mother can die, anybody can die, me included.
9. If I write about my mother I might find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.
10. I’d rather grab a Clausthaler, curl up with the afghan that once belonged to my mother-in-law, and watch “House” re-runs. Except I’ve already watched every last one of  them in the three months since my mother broke her hip.

Note: My mother died on December 18, 2010. I still don’t know how to write about her. One of these days I’ll figure it out.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Grandma Falconer makes sand castles with Peter and his sister on Lake Michigan. c 1987 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, September 27, 1987

“Move,” said Peter. “I want to get by.”

My mother looked up from her book and gave my 6 1/2-year-old a hard look.

She was sitting on her sofa, in her house, feet up on her coffee table.

Reluctantly, she moved her feet to let Peter by. He squeezed wordlessly past.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with that exchange, said my gut.

But what? The chilly glare my mother threw at my son? The pleases and thank yous he left unsaid?

It isn’t easy to think clearly after a few days under the same roof with one’s mother and father. When I was a young career woman living in New York City, I discovered the three-nights-and-four-days-at-home rule.

That was all I could take of living eyeball to eyeball with my mother. I could be her kid again for four days, max. After that, it was flight – or fight.

I broke my own rule last summer and inflicted myself and my children upon my parents for an unprecedented stay of eight nights and nine days.

It was not until I was safely home under my own roof in the Eastbay, my feet tucked up on my own coffee table, that I could see what had gone wrong during that exchange between my mother and her grandson.

Peter had no respect.

It was more than a mere forgetting of his pleases and thank yous. It was downright presumptuous of him to think his grandmother should interrupt her reading to accommodate him at all. He should have walked quietly, respectfully, around the table the other way.

Had it been another child, a peer, in Peter’s path, squeezing past with a quick “excuse me” would be okay.

But around grandparents, children should show some respect.

Respect. The very word sticks in my craw. Question authority was the motto of my young adulthood. Challenge it.

There was no place for blind respect for one’s elders during the ’60s. We were equals under God and the U.S. Constitution. Every creature – adult, child, rhinoceros or whooping crane – was to be treated with respect.

Children, the clean slates of the future, were held in especially high regard in those days. As innocents, they possessed a unique wisdom lost to their time-sullied elders.

And today, the young child, the person of the future – not his parents and grandparents, the person of the past – continues to command unusual respect, even awe.

This small bundle of nerve endings is a miracle of creation, the child-rearing books coo. It has needs and feelings that deserve our utmost attention.

Little Samantha, but a fetus, can hear in utero. We should play her Beethoven.

She has feelings in utero. We should think nice thoughts about her as we experience morning sickness.

Unless, of course, we are planning to abort this particular fetus, in which case it is better not to think.

Through all of this, a stubborn something deep inside me has persisted, insisting that it is the grandparents, if anyone, who deserve the extra measure of unconditional respect.

Not because our elders have earned it. And not because our elders are in any way better, smarter or kinder than their descendents.

But because they are the elders.

Peter dotes on his grandmother these days -- and she on him. This is Christmas 2007, twenty years later, and I'm pretty sure he excused himself as he squeezed between the coffee table and my mother's knees. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

My mother deserves Peter’s esteem because of the life she has led as a mother and wife. Because of the potatoes peeled, the casseroles baked, the dustballs chased and the corporate VIPs entertained.

Because she holds the office of grandmother. Because she has done her do.

Peter won’t even clean up his room and he thinks he is on a par with my mother, who has cleaned up his bottom?

My friend Claudia sends her two small children to Chinese school every Saturday morning. “I want them to learn about their culture. I want them to learn that respect,” she explained.

“Your parents live in Michigan,” she went on. “So far away. I would never want to be that far away from my mother.”

The Chinese culture, thousands of years old, venerates the people of the past. It is not unique in this.

The elderly are held in high esteem in her native Belize, according to my friend Miriam.

“Old people are the root,” she explains. “If grandparents come to your house, they don’t sleep on the floor. You give them your bed or your hammock.”

Today’s Western culture, with its silicon chips, videocameras and interplanetary probes, venerates what it still to come.

It stands in awe of the future and its citizens – our children – as though our children possessed a hot line to the truth or, as the Chinese ancestors of yore, to Heaven.

The fact is, we and our forebears created the world into which our children are being launched.

We have done our best, sorry as it may be. We have done our do. And for that we deserve some respect.

By gosh.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

The Oakland Tribune, Sunday, April 16, 1989

Christina went off to kindergarten, got chicken pox and broke her arm. c 1989 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I was on the phone with my mentor. “Tell me it gets easier,” I sighed.’

“Well, actually it gets harder,” said Nancy.

Nancy has a daughter three years older than Peter. She keeps me briefed on the parenting realities ahead.

The kids were still pre-schoolers then, and it had been another night of sleep deprivation for me. The dream monster had been nibbling on Christina’s finger again. And, once again, I had been up at 2 a.m. sharp to escort Peter and his developing bladder to the bathroom.

“Kindergarten,” I promised myself as I felt my way back to bed in the dark. “Kindergarten,” I sighed as I bumped into Jon’s side of the bed again. “Rrngh,” grumbled Jon – again. Jon was looking forward to kindergarten, too. If we could just survive preschool, things would get better.

Mothering school-age kids would be a piece of cake after this. Having two of those dear, middle-aged children with the bony knees and the freckled noses would be fun.

No more nightmares. No more Play Dough on the kitchen floor. No more jam in the hair.

Once they reached kindergarten, Peter and Christina would be old enough to talk, but not old enough to talk back. They would be post-Oedipal, but pre-pubescent.

We could go camping together. We could travel. Our children would hang on our words as Jon and I introduced them to baseball, politics, art, books – all the things we loved.

Right Nancy?

But my mentor is not one to pull punches.

“No. It gets harder,” she insisted. “It’s a different set of worries, and it’s harder. They have problems at school or with their friends. They’re too fat. They’re too thin. They’re not chosen for the school play. They don’t want to do the things you want them to do.”

“But I will be sleeping through the night, won’t I?” If I could just get enough sleep, I reasoned, things would at least seem better.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “And you don’t have to watch them every minute. But you do worry more.”

And so it is.

Our children are ages 5 and 8 now. They’re grownup kids. They can take themselves to the potty. They know the difference between the knife and the fork, though they still prefer the finger and the thumb. When they squirt the mustard these days, most of it lands on the hot dog.

When reminded, they do their homework, feed the cats and empty the garbage. Without reminding, they collect their allowance and find the way to the kitchen at the sound of popcorn popping.

She can button her own shirt, if the buttons are in front. When they are not, she problem solves. She wears the shirt backward.

He can tie his own shoelaces. On special occasions, he does.

He knows where his laundry hamper is located. And now that he is 8, he can place things in it from across the room with grace and accuracy – the soccer ball, the homework pencil, the wet bathing suit.

Now that she is 5, she can put her Cinderella tape into the VCR. She can turn on the TV, though she still can’t turn it off.

As Nancy forewarned, Peter now has opinions. The six plaid, flannel lumberjack shirts bought on sale last fall are not cool. The King Tut T-shirt with the stain and the rip is.

Peter the middle-aged kid: Not quite an angel. c 1989 B.F. Newhall.

Peter does not want to go to the art day camp, the one with the beautiful, woodsy setting and the hours so convenient to mom’s work schedule. He is looking for a football camp that takes 8-year-olds.

Unlike his parents and grandparents before him, Peter is not drawn to a career in journalism. He does not look forward to the examined life, a life in service to humanity. He wants to go to law school and make money.

As infants and toddlers, Christina and Peter were angels. They were God’s carefully wrought gifts to Jon, Barbara and human history. They glowed with newness and perfection. Their eyes were wide with infinite potential.

But now the teeth are coming in crooked. The skin is marred by chicken pox scars. She bumps into things when she runs. He is still afraid to draw. We worry that he is too gregarious, that she is too shy.

My darlings are not perfection after all. They are not angels. It grieves me to have to report that my children apparently will be bumbling through life as mere humans, just like mom and dad.

But I can take it. I’m tough. I got a good night’s sleep last night.

© 1989 The Oakland Tribune

Peter Newhall and his father, Jon Newhall. c 1981 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, July 12, 1987

Have things changed since I wrote this piece for the Oakland Tribune? Are men taking on real child-rearing responsibilities? Or are they still just helping? Are women willing to cede some of their mom turf — are they letting the guys choose the pediatrician? The car seats? The hair bows?

Carol calls them “the little inequities.”

She is talking about the small, countless ways that men fail to notice what needs to be done for their children.

At breakfast, 2-year-old Max drops a spoon to the floor. John is reading the newspaper – he has to read it for his job.

Carol has to read the paper for her job, too. But it is she who notices that the spoon has fallen. She picks it up.

John and Carol have visitors. Max is about to walk into the living room eating a bagel slathered with cream cheese and jam.

Carol is talking to a guest. She would like to keep on talking – but jam is dripping off Max’s bagel.

John, engrossed in conversation with another guest, is unaware that a jammy bagel is headed for the living room.

Carol interrupts her conversation to steer Max back to the kitchen. John keeps talking.

“It’s their coping strategy,” says Carol of today’s fathers. “They fail to notice.”

Make no mistake. “John is a saint among fathers,” she is quick to add. He does the laundry. He dresses his children. He keeps them entertained while Carol sleeps in.

Indeed, John does a good 40 percent of the child care at their house, says Carol. For that 40 percent, however he gets tremendous sympathy and help.

“When I went out of town to a union conference,” says Carol, “John got dinner invitations for a week. When he is out of town, no one thinks to invite me for dinner.”

That’s because child-rearing in our job. We are in charge.

John washes his children’s clothes, but – and this is a big but – he does not buy them.

He does not haunt the flea markets for 25-cent sweatpants. He does not sort through the hand-me-downs. He does not rearrange the drawers to make room for the new clothes.

John dresses the baby, but often lets Carol choose the outfit.

He gets the overalls on, but can’t figure out how the hooks work.

He puts on the baby’s bathing suit. The straps criss-cross her chest.

He slips her into her nightshirt. The hood covers her face.

He gets it right the second time.

Is he playing dumb?

I can play dumb. In our house, Jon is in charge of the cooking. He asks me to help by breaking up the lettuce for a salad. I tear it into unmanageably large pieces.

Next time, Jon breaks up the lettuce.

The same way with kids.

We mothers read the parenting books, take the child development courses and spend long evenings on the telephone discussing separation anxiety, cradle cap and pre-reading skills with the other moms.

Baby is only days old but already we have her on the waiting list for that great nursery school over at Cal.

Summer is three months away, but it is not too soon to apply for gymnastics camp in Alameda or horse camp in Lafayette.

We relish our responsibilities.

Dads help – and they are getting more helpful all the time.

When we have an evening meeting, they agree to “babysit.” But when, at the last minute, their employers want them to work late, it is we who must come up with the child-care arrangement – spending 30 minutes of our employer’s time making phone calls.

Mothers are in charge. Fathers help. Perhaps that is why John was so annoyed when Carol complained to him about the bagel incident.

Who wants to help and then be criticized for not helping enough, or for not helping correctly? It’s much more fun to be in charge.

They would be good at it. They would enjoy – and resent – it as much as we.

Trouble is, I’m not willing to let go of motherhood as I have known and enjoyed it. I have ceded enough of my turf as it is.

I’m willing to let Jon have the cooking all to himself.

I’m even willing – though just barely – to let Jon decide whether granola bars are appropriate school lunch box fare.

But that’s it.

Maybe Christina will be different. Maybe – in 2017 – she will let her husband decide between cloth diapers and paper, between the Montessori and the traditional nursery school, between bangs and no bangs for her daughter.

As for me, I’m about as liberated as I can get – for the time being.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune