If They Learn, Is It Because We Teach?

It is the latest in an endless ser- ies of skirmishes that seem to mark our Sunday nights at home.

My fifth-grader is rummaging through her backpack, looking for a missing assignment ... the homework I’ve been asking about all weekend, the homework she insisted she didn’t have. It is already 9 p.m. “How does this happen?” I ask, irritated. “You’re old enough to keep up with your work.”

She slams her notebook on the table and glares back. “Stop bothering me about it,” she says, her voice defensive and sharp, as if I am somehow to blame. “I just forgot, OK? Don’t make such a big deal of it, OK?”

I glance around the kitchen at dirty dinner dishes, unread newspapers, two hungry dogs waiting to be fed. Upstairs, her sisters are fighting over the shower, complaining that there’s only one clean towel left.

“No,” I yell, in a voice loud enough for all three to hear. “It is not OK! None of this is OK!” And I launch into a tirade about undone homework and unfolded laundry and an inconsiderate trio of daughters who know nothing about responsibility. I stomp off and up the stairs and hear their muffled complaints through my bedroom door. “So mean

Why indeed, I wonder. I lie in bed and flip through a magazine, nursing feelings of anger, failure and betrayal. I push, I prod, I set examples, I lecture them about responsibility. If they’re not learning it, am I not teaching? I feel disappointed in them, and in me.

Later that night she slinks into my bedroom to kiss me and to say good night. “Did you find your homework?” I ask her. She shakes her head, and I see tear stains on her face. “Well, it’s time for bed. You’ll just have to live with the consequences. Maybe a few zeros will teach you about responsibility.” I wave her off and turn away.

But I can’t sleep, and hours later I slip downstairs and leaf through her notebook, searching for the assignment she needs. I’m weary of the effort of training children, tired of trying to calculate the long-term costs of every gesture. I simply want to rescue my child; that feels like my motherly duty too.

I fail to find the missing homework, but deep inside my daughter’s English folder I come across an assignment I am drawn to read: “Things My Parents Taught Me,” it is titled. Below, in her unsteady cursive, are a list of lessons I never even tried to teach:

How to share

That I can’t have everything I want

To have manners and to use them

To forgive people

To try my hardest

To be strong

That not all people are nice

To respect your elders

To be loving

To love and respect God

There are certain times when I can’t talk

To pray every night before I go to bed.

Almost every successful man or woman seems to have some story to tell about the lessons Mom or Dad conveyed, and how those messages helped shape their lives. I imagined I’d guide my daughters, as well, through earnest talks and morality tales reflecting the values I held. But it turns out that the most important lessons I’ve taught them may not have come in lectures or “When I was your age ...” bromides.

I think of that later, when my best friend calls from Atlanta, disconsolate and blubbering. Her son has decided to drop out of college. It’s his junior year, his grades have fallen, he’s been reassigned to second-string on the football team. And he’s just realized that the average salary in his chosen field--journalism--is about $30,000 a year. So he’s quitting school to become a rap star. He’s already recorded his first CD; before long, he says, he’ll be touring the country.

“He won’t listen to reason,” she says through tears. “All I’ve taught him doesn’t seem to matter.”

I know the struggles she has faced. A single mother raising two sons, she’s moved back and forth across the country, pursuing better jobs and more opportunity. She earned her college degree at 40, juggling work and classes, PTA meetings and football practice. At 45, with both sons in college, she launched her own computer training business.

Now she’s crying because “I spent all their lives talking to my boys about perseverance and discipline, so they’d be prepared, so they wouldn’t have to struggle like me.”

That may be what her sons heard, but what, I wonder, did they see? Perhaps a fearless woman unbowed by defeat, always willing to take a risk, unable to resist following her dreams. Sometimes what we live is what we teach.

And I pull out my daughter’s list and read it again, understanding now that what she says she’s learned is what raising children has taught me:

To forgive people. That I can’t have everything I want. To be strong. There are certain times when I can’t talk. And to pray every night before I go to bed.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com