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Meeting Mary at the airport 1968. Social worker who brought her from Arizona on left.
Christmas 1970
Motherhood
(Less than Ideal)
People who don’t know me are prone to ask how I did it all—preacher’s wife, four children, three dozen or so books, uncounted talks—how did I keep a proper balance? Balance? What balance? I feel as though I’ve teeter-tottered through the last fifty years, threatening to tip over at any time. I would never have made it without a supportive husband, forgiving children, understanding friends, and the grace of God. (And, as my grandmother used to say, “I speak reverently.”) A few less than shining examples follow.
We had four small children and not much money, so buying new clothes was out of the question. I bought one new dress for Lin before she arrived. It was pale gray with beautiful smocking. Other than shoes and underwear I think that dress was the only brand-new item of that quality that I bought any of our children before the 1978 Newbery. What new clothes they had prior to that my mother insisted on buying. After the Newbery, royalty statement arrival day meant that each child could buy something brand-new for him- or herself that hadn’t been previously worn by someone else.
From such humble sartorial beginnings, legends seem to arise. For example, my sons as young adults would insist to their friends that in elementary school we were too poor to buy them winter boots, so they wore plastic bread wrappers on snowy days. This is not true. There were bread bags involved, but they went on over street shoes, so that the winter boots that needed to last for more than one season could be slid on more easily. I promise you there were always boots covering the plastic bags, and if a boot had sprung a leak, the plastic helped keep the small foot dry.
This legend will never die because one summer day at our Lake George house my husband put plastic bags over his shoes and trousers so that he could protect them from flying grass while he wielded the weed-whacker. When one of our sons’ college-aged friends happened to drive up to ask about the boys he caught John in this protective outfit. “You know,” he later told the boys, “I never used to believe that story about the bread bags, but now . . .”
The faint line going up my sons’ foreheads is another story. They will tell you that it is a Paterson genetic defect carried on the Y chromosome. “See,” they’ll say, “neither of our sisters has this line.” The truth is much uglier. We had inherited from some now forgotten source a one-piece snowsuit that was fine in every respect but one. It had a very balky zipper and I had two very wiggly sons. Getting each leg into the proper legging pant was hard enough, but zipping from crotch to chin was nearly impossible. So it was that one horrible day I zipped eighteen-month-old John’s forehead. I was devastated. My beautiful child would be scarred both physically and psychically for the rest of his life. We both got over the trauma, but exactly two years later—you guessed it—wrestling the same suit onto my second equally wiggly son, it happened again. As I said, I have forgiving children.
There were times, of course, when I had to forgive them—like the Christmas when David was an infant and Lin and John got up long before dawn and tore the wrappings off all the packages under the tree. I spent most of Christmas Day trying to put scraps of holiday paper together and figure out what scrap might have been around which relative’s present. In the end I gave up and sent thank-you notes that read something like: Thank you for the (a) mittens (b) toy car (c) book (d) puzzle [choose one] that you gave to (1) Lin (2) John Jr. (3) David [check one].
Or there was the late afternoon when I thought the four of them were in the den watching Mr. Rogers on TV while I made supper, only to find that the older three had given their new baby sister war paint in varied colors with Magic Markers. I was appalled, but trying to follow the latest advice on child discipline, I didn’t yell. I just said firmly: “Babies are not for coloring!” “Oh, yes,” said four-year-old John, “I forgot. Jesus already colored her.”
Actually, the three older children adored their new baby sister. The first Christmas after she came they asked for Indian costumes “so she’ll feel at home.”
I felt a bit stupid buying those cheesy outfits, but hardly anything they got in those years pleased them more. Mary was not, at the time, available for comment.
When, however, Mary could comment, she was very quotable. When she was three and the older children were all in school, her six cousins from Connecticut came for a visit. We were a popular visiting site for friends and relatives in those days, living, as we did, one block from the District of Columbia. The cousins took after their father. He was a dairy farmer, well over six feet and of Swedish ancestry, and all the cousins were tall young Swedes of boundless energy. The family wanted to spend one whole day exploring the zoo and kindly took Mary along.
When they returned rosy-cheeked and full of excitement, they brought with them a wilted little three-year-old.
“Are you tired, Mary?” I asked.
She raised her weary gaze to me. “My socks are tired,” she said. “And my shoes won’t even walk.” To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we employ Mary’s eloquent description of her socks.
And speaking of shoes, there remains a mystery concerning them. Our very scrupulous pediatrician said that David should have orthopedic shoes to correct what she diagnosed as bow-leggedness. Trying to be at least as conscientious as the pediatrician, I took David (with, of course, three other children in tow) to the shoe store quite some distance away that sold such objects. The shoes were brown leather tie-ons, very ugly and very pricey. I swallowed and paid the bill so my little boy would not go through life afflicted, not dreaming that within a few weeks he would have managed to lose one of the hated shoes. Since he had no other shoes to wear to kindergarten, this meant another several hours taking four children to the distant shop to purchase another equally ugly and expensive pair, as the store was not in the business of selling single shoes. This scenario was repeated several times. Each time only one shoe was missing, but both shoes had to be replaced. The last time it happened was exactly one day after the new shoes had been purchased. When the five of us dragged ourselves into the store, the manager was amazed. “How in the world did you lose your shoe this time?” he asked David.
“I lost it dancing at a gerbil party,” said David.
I didn’t explain to the manager that Lin at nine was top sergeant of her little army of siblings whom she would order to perform various maneuvers. The gerbils needed entertaining, so Lin put a record on the phonograph and told the younger three to dance for the little caged creatures.
It was the end of buying special shoes for David, as just about that
time I happened on an article that stated that most professional athletes were bow-legged. I had no such ambition for David but I figured bowed legs could not be a significant handicap. I did think when we cleared out the house on Albany Avenue to move to Norfolk, we would surely find the hidden trove of lost shoes, but we never did.
David was a preschool dropout, and I didn’t even try to make him stick it out. The problem was his imaginary life, and I could never discourage another person’s imaginary life, now could I? At three he would wake up every morning with a new persona. The one I remember best was “the forest ranger who stands in the tower watching out for forest fires.” It was not sufficient to say “Good morning, Mr. Forest Ranger.” If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: “Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires!” If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him simply as “David,” you would get no response. This was complicated by the fact that the persona with the lengthy appellation attached changed daily. Mothers who are suckers for imaginative three-year-olds would play along, but harried nursery school teachers would send the offender to the time-out space. It seemed wiser to just skip the rest of preschool and let him play out all his fantasies with his adoring baby sister than to spend two years in time-out. I decided there would be plenty of years ahead when school attendance would be mandatory, why not delay what I accurately guessed might be a struggle to keep him in school?
The children’s loving father was, to be honest, home for meals, but otherwise mostly keeping a pastor’s long hours seven days a week. This didn’t relieve him of anxiety about what was actually happening on the home front with his darling four while he was busy comforting the sick and dying elsewhere. He would walk into the house at suppertime, take one look, and ask what I had been doing all day. I would manage to declare weakly that I had kept his beloved children alive and well even if the house generally looked as though it had been invaded by a barbarian horde. Yes, I was trying to be a writer even back then, but I only wrote in those snatches of time when every child was safely in bed, or later, at school. Knowing my own powers of concentration, I knew that if I tried to write when I should be on duty as a parent, the house might well burn down while I was rearranging an awkward sentence. (Just one example: In a high school classroom my friend Barbara Thompson planned aloud a surprise party for me when I was sitting a few feet away reading. She knew I wouldn’t hear a word. I didn’t and was totally surprised.)
The summer after David was born was about the hottest summer I can ever remember. We had no air-conditioning, so I put Lin and John in bathing suits in the yard. The wading pool had an inch of water in it and I figured they could cool off a bit while I fed David. Within a few moments the phone was ringing. It was our next-door neighbor, a church member, as it happened.
“Katherine,” she said in an obvious state of shock, “do you realize that your children are running around naked in the backyard?” My mental response, which, you’ll be glad to know, I did not utter out loud was: In this heat anybody with any sense would be running around naked. I simply thanked her, sighed, put the baby down, and went out and wrestled the suits back on the children.
There was another morning that summer that I set up the two-sided easel in the yard with beautiful pots of primary colors and big brushes, figuring that art work would keep them busy while I gave poor David a little attention. I thought I was keeping an eye out the window, but the next thing I was aware of was an ungodly shriek and my husband’s anguished cry of “Katherine!” I hurried out to see what disaster had occurred to find John holding his beloved children tightly. It seems that Lin and little John had had a wonderful time decorating not the newsprint on the easel, but each other with the crimson paint. As their father got out of the car, he saw his beloved toddlers racing toward him covered in blood.
When they got to school age, the children were often out playing in the small park a few steps up the street when he got home for supper. His invariable question when he walked into the house would be: “Where are the children?” And my invariable answer would be: “They’re fine. They’re up at the park playing. Children need some freedom. If I watched them every second we’d all be neurotic in no time.”
It was many years later that I heard exactly what those boys were doing when I was assuring their father they were just fine. We had moved to Norfolk and I with two writer friends was going back to Washington for a meeting. Teenaged David wanted to go along to visit some of his Takoma Park friends, and he was riding in the backseat with Stephanie Tolan. I abruptly aborted the front-seat conversation when I realized that David and Stephanie were talking about things they had done when they were young that they wouldn’t want their mothers to know about.
It seemed that on more than one occasion when I was sure the boys and their neighborhood gang of friends were playing at the park just above our house, they were actually exploring the sewers beneath the city of Takoma Park. Now I can laugh. I can even imagine another answer to my husband’s daily query about his children’s whereabouts. “Down in the sewer, where else?”
