Dean Hughes - All Moms Go to Heaven

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Dean, 1943

All moms go to heaven / Dean Hughes.
p. cm.

ISBN 1-59038-424-5 (pbk.)

1. Motherhood. 2. Fatherhood. 3. Child rearing. I. Title.

HQ759.H844 2005

306.874'3dc22

2004025650

Printed in the United States of America 54459
Malloy Lithographing, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my mother,
Lorraine Pierce Hughes

I Was a Mother

Some might wonder whether a man really knows much about motherhood. But I can talk with a certain degree of authority. After all, I was once a mother myself.

Okay, so I didn't actually give birth to a babyalthough I would have been willing had the opportunity come upbut I was a stay-at-home "person" for an entire summer when my kids were five, three, and three months old, and at the same time I tended two other children, ages nine and seven. I've been there!

This all happened in 1973, just after I had finished my first year of teaching. I was an assistant professor of English, bringing in the princely sum of $12,100 a year. The trouble was, I was paid only for the nine months I taught, and Kathy and I found it impossible (for some reason) to save enough money to get us through the summer. When Kathy was offered a fellowship to work on her master's degree in a new field in special education called "Learning Disabilities"and even granted a stipend for living coststhe opportunity was just too good to pass up. We did a lot of thinking and praying about the situation and decided that Kathy was not only receiving a wonderful blessing but that I, too, would have a rich and rewarding experience. I would be able to grow closer to my childrenand truly bond with them. I would also (this was my thought, not Kathy's, as I recall) be able to have a laid-back summer with time to read and prepare for my fall classes. After years of pressure in graduate school, followed by a tension-filled year of teaching and research, I thought it sounded fun to have time to play with my wonderful little kids and, for once in my life, experience some downtime.

If this sounds a little too much like the plot to The Perfect Storm, you haven't heard anything yet. We realized, for one thing, that the small stipend Kathy would receive would never be enough to keep us going for the entire summer, and yet it was virtually impossible for a professor to find summer work in the small Missouri town where we lived. But Kathy was able to find an evening job at the local TG & Y variety store. This was another blessing, we told ourselves. True, she would be gone pretty much all day on weekdays and all evening four nights of the week, but we would be able to put food on our table. Then serendipity struck again. I found a source for a little more income myself. A woman who taught in the English Department, a friend of mine, was teaching that summer but didn't want to leave her nine and seven-year-old daughters alone. I offered to look after them, and she said she would pay me!

Hey, I'm no fool. I saw the opportunity. Young girls love babies. I would "tend" the two girls, but in truth, they would play with my kids, feed my baby, change his diapers, and generally add to the level of fun around the house. Meanwhile, I would be able to get all the more study and research done. It's amazing how things fall together sometimes. I was a happy man.

Okay. I know what you're thinking. I was nave. I was living in a fool's paradise. But actually, things worked out exactly as I planned. The girls, guided by their mother, came with little books and paper dolls so they could have fun with my kids. They read stories to them, played games, and clearly enjoyed the experience. That lasted, as I recall, the better part of the first morning. I don't think the initial battle was engaged until afternoon. But after that, it was open war!

As it turned out, these girls were nice, but they liked to read and watch TV, and they were accustomed to a quiet life together. It was one thing to read a story or play paper dolls for an hour or two, but after that they wanted their own time and their own TV shows, and two little kids (not to mention a crying baby) soon became bothers to them. Before the week was out, my children were the enemy.

No one got seriously hurt. Mostly I heard threats, warnings, screams of rage, and doors slamming (as the girls tried to find places to hide away). There was also only one TV in the house, and the big kids never stopped fighting with the little kids about what they wanted to watch. I'll even admit that before the summer was over I got into that argument myself at times (after all, moms have needs, too).

Well, okay, here's the point. I had my eyes opened that summer. Opened wide. I can now honestly say that I've been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it. And I'll tell you this: men just don't understand what we mothers go through.

I didn't read that summer. Not anything. I didn't even get to the newspaper. If you're a mom you understand that, of course, but as the realization set in on me, I'll admit right now, I began to suffer symptoms of depression. I got so I didn't care much what I looked like. Who would see me anyway? And I snacked way too much. It was almost the only thing I had to look forward toa little chocolate to comfort me when the stress got too great. And stress was a way of life. I'm the kind of person who likes to focus on a task, follow it through, get it finished, and move on. I get a great deal done, and it's because I get after a job and conclude it. But there's no finishing anything in the child-care, home-care business. When I think of that summer, I still get a mental picture of confusion and chaos, as though a hurricane had blown the whole time. I hear noise, see toys scattered everywhere, smell sour milk, and feel Robert, our baby boy, squirm in my grasp as I try to pin him into his diapers.

Yes, that's right. You young mothers don't know what we used to go through. I was using cloth diapers that summer, the kind you fold yourself. Robert was six months old by the end of the summer, and the older he got, the harder he fought against being held down long enough for a diaper change. And there were no sticky little plastic strips to slap down quickly on those old diapers. There were big, dangerous pinsdangerous to the baby, of course, but much more likely to end up sticking me in the thumb. (The potential for tetanus was always on my mind.)

Now let me make one thing perfectly clear (as President Nixon liked to say): I had started changing our kids' diapers right from the beginning. I had a very good attitude about that sort of thing. I wanted to be involved with my kids. I wanted to be a nurturer. The women's movement of the late sixties had raised my consciousness, and I wanted to be one of the new, sensitive fathers who wasn't afraid to show love to his kids. I had male friends who refused to change diapers, and I gave them a bad time about that. My favorite line was, "You go out and work on your car and get grease all over your hands, and you don't mind that at all. Well, there's nothing in a baby's diaper that won't wash off a lot more easily than that grease."