Surviving Parenthood

One of the great joys (and horrors) we have as children of Mrs Neu is that our lives were often part of her curriculum. 

We are also fortunate that many of our early childhood experiences that we’d otherwise have long forgotten were captured, only somewhat fictionalized, in a column my mother wrote for the Daily Democrat, “Surviving Parenthood,” under the pen name Lucy Robertson, when we were kids.  

Here is one of those columns:

Mrs Neu wrote these columns weekly in the Daily Democrat from 1973-1974 under the pen name Lucy Robertson. This one shows the importance of teachers in a young child's life and why you should say thank you when your child experiences a good one. 

In a note my mother wrote in gifting me a collection of her columns, she said their purpose was "to entertain and to educate."

"I used information that I had researched on Early Childhood and made my point in a personal way."

My mother liked the fact that no one knew she wrote these columns. Margaret Neu, according to my mother, once sent her a note with a cut out of the column "not knowing that I wrote it."

"Surviving Parenthood" also implies that raising children should not take everything away from your sense of self nor your other important relationships, most especially your relationship with the other parent. 

If my mother had not been a teacher, she might have been an expert advisor and author on early childhood development or she might have been a columnist.