Summary
"I thought a kid's a kid, a blob of clay," she says. "You're going to take your expert, loving hands and mold them into the child you want. My friend, Erin, once gave me this great image. Our kids are like redwood trees. Maybe you thought you were going to get an oak, a palm tree. But you got a redwood tree, and you are trying to reconfigure that child with a nail file. You are filing away. It's still going to be a redwood tree. We can get them to shake people's hands, look in people's eyes, give them some values, brush their teeth every day. But they are who they are.
[Joan Ryan] spent her son's first 16 years trying to re-mold him into the boy she thought he should be. She took him to see the Nutcracker, tried to get him to read, expected him to engage in intellectual dinner conversations. "Ryan's not a kid who's going to sit in a classroom and think about the Ottoman Empire," she says. "But he's making this steel sculpture.""I just couldn't get that image out of my mind ofthat woman parking her car and jumping off of the bridge," Ryan says. "No one would ever, ever suspect. We drive through these beautiful streets, and we don't know what's going on behind those doors."See the full content of this document
Extract
The Good Mother
Joan Ryan figured mothering would be easy. How tough could it be for a woman who talked her way into a professional football team's locker room as a sportswriter in 1984 to raise a son?
Much harder than she ever imagined. The former San Francisco Examiner and then Chronicle columnist and reporter approached the task of mothering the same way she approached her stories. She sought expert opin...See the full content of this document
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