Pinning our success on our children's

It takes a few years to get there, but with some repeated effort over time, jealousy toward other people's children can disappear.

When I was a young mother, my friends and I were quite competitive, without ever admitting to be so. If one child in our circle was reading at age five, there was an anxiety that one of us might have a little genius on her hands. Would my child be a reader soon? By middle school there were those children who were becoming well-rounded: playing in Little League, acting in the school play and winning at least third place in the junior high science fair. And if that kid was good looking, without acne, temperatures rose again. How would my child keep up? When the college acceptances came along, there were those who went to the Ivies and those who went to state schools and even a few who didn't go to college at all.

And then they left home and did the remainder of their growing up on their own. Our anxiety settled down. Our job was done and whatever configuration of young adult was before us, there was nothing left to do. What's different now is that each of our children has succeeded in his or her own way. Everyone caught up to reading and none of the Little Leaguer's (boys and girls) ever became a star athlete. The happiness for each child's success resembles the happiness we have for our own success: our children did not increase our own self-esteem as we had hoped they would. Their successes and failures belong to them, as those same aspects of normal life belong to us.