With Kids, You Never Know What You’ll Get

Until eight years ago, I was the best mother who ever lived.

My child was sweet, obedient, well-mannered and kind. She held my hand crossing the street, preferred apple slices to lollipops, shared her toys with the neighbor kids.

Then her sister was born.

And suddenly, I became a mother who could do nothing right. I couldn’t stop my new baby from crying, couldn’t get her to nurse or eat, couldn’t get her to sleep through the night.

She grew from what parenting books call a “fussy baby” into an intolerable toddler, running wild in grocery stores, climbing out of her car safety seat, throwing tantrums in crowded malls.

Now that she’s older, she’s settled for being a difficult child.

And I’ve settled for being an OK mother.

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How easy it was to think I had all the answers when I was a new mother of one easygoing child. How simple to attribute my child’s sunny disposition to my superior parenting skills.

And how naive.

Now I understand that having kids is a bit of a crapshoot; you roll the dice and you never know what you’ll get. And, like it or not, a lot of how they will turn out in life is out of your control.

Some days I appreciate the freedom that notion gives me. I can make mistakes, just let my kids be, and forgive myself for the times I fall short.

Other times it scares me to realize that I could do everything right--be consistent and kind, loving yet firm--and still watch them veer horribly off course, simply because kids are complicated and imperfect, just like us.

I look at my family and see three children so different in temperament and personality they might just as well have come from three different planets. Who knows how they get that way, raised in the same house, under the same set of rules, inheriting their genes from the same set of parents.

Sometimes it feels like I’m living in one of those carnival fun houses, the kind with funny mirrors that reflect back your image in a distorted way. My children are the mirrors, and I appear short and squat with an angry face, or tall and skinny with contorted features, depending in which direction I look.

It’s exhausting day to day trying to keep up with who I am, who I’m supposed to be, in response to who they are. And somehow I never seem to get it quite right.

I must remember that this one cries when I raise my voice, while that one won’t respond until I’m yelling. This one complies at just a glance, but her sister must be wrestled to her room at bedtime.

I realize now there’s no blueprint for raising kids . . . and each would require a different plan anyway. Parenting is no easy equation of A plus B always equals C.

There are too many variables and complications, and there’s that irrevocable reality that our children come to us with their own distinct personalities intact.

So all you can do is play the hand you’re dealt the best you can, and hope that luck is on your side. And accept that in some cases the payoff will be children who grow into happy, satisfied, productive adults . . . and in others, you’ll wind up looking at your grown child through iron bars.

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That’s what happened to friends of mine, who are among the best parents I know. They’ve lived all their lives in a small town in Ohio, surrounded by family and friends. He worked 25 years on an automobile assembly line; his wife stayed home to tend to the kids.

Their son and daughter were given plenty of love, security and guidance, taken to church, encouraged to do well in school, taught to be patient and humble and kind.

Their daughter graduated from high school with honors at age 16 and is now working on her master’s degree in counseling. She is engaged to marry a wonderful fellow. She wants to work with underprivileged kids.

Her older brother blew his chance at a basketball scholarship when he was arrested the summer after his senior year for selling drugs. He spent two years in prison, and after one month out on parole, was sent back for robbing a liquor store.

On their long rides back from prison visits, his parents torture themselves, wondering what they did wrong. I have to say, “Nothing.” You just don’t always get back what you put in.

So I’ve resigned myself to the possibility that one day my daughters will each wind up on a therapist’s couch, attributing their failures to some offhand comment I made when they were in second grade.

I just hope they’re old enough to pay for their own therapy by then.

In the meantime, I’m trying to lighten up. So it doesn’t hurt me now when the 8-year-old yells that I’m a horrible mother; that she’s never going to be like me and make her daughter eat all her peas or wear ugly shoes.

Fine, I tell her. And I smile at this thought: I hope your daughter’s just like you.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.