Chapter One: Amy

“Sometimes you wonder why you can’t trade your parents for some better ones. No need to apologize; they sometimes wish they could trade you for someone easier to live with.”
-Boyd K. Packer

I suppose I always knew I’d have children eventually. I liked little kids. There weren’t a lot of them around my house growing up. I was 4 of 6, so I never experienced taking care of a baby brother or sister. But, we had cousins. I baby-sat and changed diapers. I talked about being a mom. I played house and named all my dolls. As a child, I did.

Things were different when I became a teenager. My mom always claimed that some horrible alien species inhabits the brains of all teenagers. She said the mischievous, invisible alien descended upon a 12-year-old brain and stayed there until it turned 18. In some cases, it stayed longer.

I disagree. I think teenagers suffer from a cousin of the middle-age crisis. Like balding forty-year-old men revert to their younger, wilder selves because of some perceived “ending of play-time,” teenagers have some psychological sense that childhood is at an end, and so revert to the behaviors we commonly associate with small children.

Those of you who are shaking your heads are surely doing so because you don’t know any teenagers who have lost their ability to use a toilet or eat solid foods. Skeptics, consider this, babies do not understand that they are not the center of the world. They demand their perceived needs the moment they become perceived and they simply do not have the mental capacity to understand that other people have needs too. They are also missing the tendency that older children have, and then loose when they become teens, to understand that parents and teachers know more then them and should be looked to for advice and help. It is also arguable that many teens completely loose their sense of fashion and taste.

I remember being at a restaurant with my young son and some friends who were not yet parents. The friend mused, “I wonder when they start not wanting to act out because they realize they look silly in front of other people.” I present that young children don’t mind acting like morons in public and neither do teenagers. But there seems to be a period between these two phases where most children have manners. This being the case, I think it is appropriate to refer to teenhood as the teen-aged crisis.

During my teen-aged crisis, I discovered the great world of being all-knowing and extremely selfish. That said, understand that I was also beyond amazing and deserved all of the airs I gave myself. I learned the taste of victory early and that may have aggravated my blooming case of teen-aged crisis.

I want to share a few of my accomplishments with you so that you can completely understand my current heart. I’m pretty sure it’s not to relive the days when my over-sized ego was being fed a healthy diet of success.

My mom worked really hard to take care of six kids in difficult circumstances. We were poor. But, I admit that I didn’t really know that as a child. Mom and Dad sacrificed to give their kids every opportunity we would have had if they had money. One of these sacrifices was when my sweet mother spent hours working as a bookkeeper for a dancing school in exchange for free lessons for my sisters and me. Her investment was well spent. My sisters now have their own dance studio where they can constantly showcase their hard-earned talent: a talent that, somehow, skipped over the middle child.

I tried hard to be a dancer. I really did. I went to class and wore the costumes. I felt pride when my grandparents lovingly encouraged me after recitals. But, alas, I wasn’t very good. I remember one time in particular when my mom came home from a discussion with the dance teacher and spent the entire afternoon trying to teach me one dance step. She told me that the teacher had promised that if I learned the step, I would be allowed to join a competitive team. The next time I went to class, I proudly displayed my new step for the teacher, who acted somewhat disinterested. Desperately, I told her my mom had said she promised me a spot on the team. She blinked and replied, “What I said was, if you can’t learn it, you shouldn’t be in dance at all.” Such was my dancing ability.

In eighth grade, though, I discovered a new talent. My brilliant history teacher staged a debate between students representing the American Colonists and the British to teach us about the Revolutionary War. I was amazing. And when the debate coach from the High School showed up to recruit new students to his program, I made sure he remembered me.

The summer before high school he gave me a scholarship to a three day debate camp. We learned several speaking events and were allowed to compete with the other students on the last day. I came home with ribbons in all three events I had competed in. None of the other students on our team had earned any. The coach gave me a ride home and asked to talk to my mom. He told her he wanted me to attend another camp, a two-week camp. He promised the debate budget would pay for it. He considered it an investment for the school.

I went to the try-out for the sophomore cheerleading team soon after. I walked into the gym, jumping with adolescent excitement. The girls clustered into groups and giggled about their dance clothes. My entire life had been leading up to that tryout. There were years worth of dance lessons to consider. I had always expected to move from there to the drill team and linger in the world of high school dancers, just like my big sister before me and my little sister after.

I stood in the gym for several moments before I grabbed my bag of dance clothes and walked down to the debate room to fill out the paper work for the next debate camp. That day changed my young life. No longer would I be a mediocre dancer. No longer would I feel the familiar pang that came with standing in the back row where your mistakes could best be hidden from the audience. I soon learned what it felt like to be really good at something, propelling me quite firmly into my own teen-aged crisis.

I won’t bore you with the details. Actually, I don’t know how many I can, in fact, remember. I won over a hundred trophies and was rewarded by several scholarship opportunities when college time came. As a high school sophomore, I pouted when I didn’t win. As a senior, I learned to take it in stride. After all, it didn’t happen very often!

I went to a fairly large high school, but was still well known. Our football team won one game during the entire three years I was there, but I debate team won state every single year. The team included homecoming queens and student body officers. We traveled the country and even had students from other schools transferring to be a part of our amazing program. And through it all, there was me. I was the only person to be on the state team every single year, each time in a different event. Over the years, I trophied in every event that went to competition. I was the president my senior year and even spoke at graduation. I was voted most likely to take over a third world country by my classmates. I was pretty high on myself. (Although, I ought to mention that the reason for all of this was my amazing coach.)

During this time, the idea of having children was very depressing to me. Motherhood was for people incapable of doing anything really important with their lives. Not that I thought it was an unimportant job, it simply occurred to me that the jobs that take the most talent are the ones that the least people do. Since becoming a mother required very little talent, creativity or intelligence, it, therefore, must be for the girls that were less impressive then me.
If you need any more evidence of my spectacular case of teen-aged crisis, I shared these thoughts with my mother. I told her I had big dreams and things I wanted to make out of my life and being a mother would prevent me from achieving those dreams. I figured my own mom would understand these feelings because she knew how absolutely exceptional I was. I was wrong.

It may have stemmed from the supreme insult of being told she had devoted her life to someone who thought she was common and untalented, or it might have been that she loved me dearly and wanted to clue me into the reality that the President of the United States wasn’t trying desperately to call our house for my opinion, but mom told me plainly that she hoped I wouldn’t give up my opportunity to be a mother. I know, now, that it was because she knew what would really make me happy, and, in answer to the prayers of all the poor parts of the world, it wasn’t conquering a third world country.

The things I learned as a mother changed who I am. I’m not sorry about that. I used to fear change, as if I was loosing something, in the process, that was unique and precious about me. Now I understand that who I was is a part of who I am, though the changes have only improved me. Growing up isn’t scary. There is no reason to fear that you’ll settle for something less than what you wanted. What really happens is that you realize how much better what you once considered to be “less” really is. I ache for my friends who hold so tightly to their youth that they never really enjoy adulthood. Youth is wonderful, but as I grew up, I learned that motherhood is much, much better. Your priorities are altered and your heart grows. You become closer to who you were truly meant to be.