Through Mom's Eyes: Simple Wisdom From Mothers Who Raised Extraordinary Humans by Sheinelle Jones - 6

One of the Cardinal Rules in Our House Is, Our Children Don’t Leave Until They Know How to Dance

Luz Towns-Miranda, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s mom

When Lin-Manuel Miranda was thirteen years old, he and his mother, Luz, stayed up late to watch the Academy Awards. When it was over, he promised her he would take her to the Oscars one day—and it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

Twenty-plus years later, when his ballad “How Far I’ll Go,” from Disney’s Moana , was nominated for 2017’s Best Original Song, the composer and actor hit the red carpet with his mom. She was stunning in a black Escada gown and long black evening gloves, one arm resting proudly in the crook of her famous devoted son’s. When they paused to smile for the flashing cameras, they looked beautiful—and happy. His song didn’t win that night but Lin-Manuel had already won Grammy, Emmy, Tony, and Pulitzer prizes. Besides, this night was about more than the outcome. It was about a son delivering on a childhood promise to his mom—and a mom sharing an evening like no other with her child.

Most of us won’t have a global glamorous mother/child moment, but there are countless magical milestones along the way that children can’t wait to share with their moms: they tied their own shoe, made the team, won the game, got the acceptance letter, the degree, the job offer, the love of their dreams, etc. In every life there are plenty of “Look, Mom, I made it” moments—and if we’re lucky, we are there to witness them firsthand.

If my family had an official soundtrack, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music would fill a huge part of it. From car rides with my kids belting out favorite tunes from Moana and Hamilton to early mornings in my dressing room listening to ballads from In the Heights before the show, this man’s musical genius has helped my family and so many others turn ordinary, everyday moments in our lives into precious memories.

That musical gift was evident early on, and so was his passion. By the time Lin-Manuel started preschool, he already knew all the words to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and his mom believed he had a very special…something.

He came of age in New York City, in a close-knit Puerto Rican family deeply rooted in their largely Latinx community where his child psychologist mom, Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda, was at the heart of it all. Meeting her, it’s easy to see where this beloved creator of hit Broadway musicals and big-screen blockbusters got his tenderness and spark.

“He was a very gentle soul, from the time he was little,” Luz recalls. “My husband wanted to get him to be tough, so he’d get a puppet and start punching him.” She starts to laugh. “Lin-Manuel, as a little guy, would say, ‘No, no fighting. No fighting!’…This was the little kid who would hear songs in the car and start to cry. Have you heard a song like ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’? He would ask us to change it because it was too sad.”

Luz can’t remember a time when her son wasn’t drawn to music and artistic expression, but there was a particular elementary school performance in a church that she’s never forgotten. “From the time he started singing, I swore there was this aura about him, because he embodied every single song,” Luz says. “And I remember leaving that church thinking to myself, Did anybody else just see the show I saw? Oh my God. To me that was it. That was the moment where I knew he was amazing.”

Lin-Manuel wrote an entire musical in the seventh grade. During his last year of high school, he directed West Side Story , and got his dad to do dialect training with the kids who were playing the Puerto Rican parts in the classic musical. As impressed as she was with her son’s talent and work ethic, in artistic careers there are no easy roads and no guarantees. So, while his success may not have been a surprise to his parents, it was still a relief.

“For me, it felt like a dream come true…reaffirming my belief that something like this would happen,” Luz says. “My husband worried that it could take a long time, and we’d have to support him. But I thought he would do fine.”

There was plenty of reason to be confident. Lin-Manuel wrote the first version of his debut Broadway musical, In the Heights , as a sophomore at Wesleyan University. When Luz was in college, she wasn’t free to simply pursue her dreams because she was confronting an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. She beat it, but the experience left her with a stark clarity about her future and a fierce resolve that she never lost.

“I wanted to be a mother and a psychologist,” she recalls. “These were long-term goals, so it was kinda tough. I wasn’t out chasing bucket lists at nineteen.”

She stayed in school, fighting her cancer with radiation treatments and studying at the same time. “I was determined,” she says. “I needed the bachelor’s [degree] in order to be able to go to graduate school. [I] paused, had my daughter, had three years in between, and then went back to school, and that’s where I met my husband. We had a son. The rest is history.” She laughs.

It’s a sweet story but, as every mother knows, life is never actually that simple.

A native New Yorker of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, Luz met her political consultant husband, Luis, at NYU, where she received a doctorate in clinical psychology. They’ve been married for more than forty-five years but, when they met, she was a single mother to her daughter and namesake, Luzacita. “So [Luis] inherited a family right away,” Luz says.

By the time Lin-Manuel was born, his parents were both ankles-deep in busy careers and Luzacita was, let’s just say, not amused by the family’s new addition. Living in an age when Instagram will make you feel like older siblings everywhere immediately take to their newborn siblings at first sight, the pressure on parents to “get this right” and cement a lasting bond between young children is real. But in spite of all the sweet photos of the newly crowned “big brother” or “big sister” cradling and cooing at the family’s new baby, that is not always the way it plays out. Luz agrees that we can’t be too hard on ourselves when it doesn’t. Now a grandmother, she says parents have to aim high and try hard but also give themselves grace when things don’t go quite the way you expected—or hoped.

“Luzacita took a while to adjust,” she says, so much so that a full month after Lin-Manuel was born, Luis took her to school, and the principal asked if the baby had been born yet. Luz was stunned that their daughter “hadn’t said a word about him!” If she was upset at the time, you wouldn’t know it. Luz cracks herself up telling this story. That’s the beauty of talking to a mother who’s “been there.” She can usually reassure you that any doubt or drama that’s giving you stressful days and sleepless nights will get better eventually.

Luz and her husband were very intentional about juggling their careers’ demands with being “present” for their kids. “I think we kept our fingers on the pulse of everything that was going on,” she says. “We never missed a parent-teacher meeting. We never missed a play or activity that they were in, a graduation, or a show. That was first and foremost on our schedules.”

They created a foundation built on love and the celebration of their family and culture, filling their home with authentic art, language, culinary, and holiday traditions such as Three Kings Day. Their children also spent at least one month each summer in Puerto Rico with their paternal grandparents. The entire family loved big musicals, and the soundtrack of their household featured plenty of classic salsa and merengue as well. “One of the cardinal rules in our house is, our children don’t leave until they know how to dance,” Luz says, laughing. “So, Luis taught them to dance.”

Luz says that they couldn’t have managed successfully without the help of their nanny, Mundi, who arrived shortly before Lin-Manuel made his debut in life. “I had a really hard last week [of] the pregnancy,” Luz remembers. “I had a slipped disc and couldn’t get out of bed. So [Mundi] came to stay with us and never left.”

Mundi spoke only Spanish and was more like family than an employee. “It would have been impossible to do quite everything we needed in terms of what we pursued without Mundi, who inspired the loving, maternal character of Abuela Claudia in In the Heights. (I couldn’t wait to share this fun fact about one of our favorite characters with my kids! There are big perks to my job, and access to cool info that gets me bonus mom-points is one of them. I’ll take those wherever I can.)

The bar—academic, artistic, and intellectual—for Lin and his sister was always set high. His accomplished parents expected nothing less than a full effort, and both of them had powerful, high-achieving careers in their own rights. In his early years, Lin’s father was a special advisor for Hispanic Affairs for the mayor’s office of New York City, and he was later its director. His mom, in addition to being a licensed psychologist, went on to specialize in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, focusing primarily on the needs of foster children and those in underserved communities. She ran a therapeutic nursery at one point and conducted evaluations for the family court system in NYC after spending years studying the attachment between infants and mothers. More recently, she has shined a spotlight on the importance of grandmothers—or abuelas , as she calls them in Spanish—in fostering the emotional well-being of their evolving families.

So impressive, right? Luz isn’t just a seasoned mom, she has devoted her entire career to the mental and emotional health of young children. So, I sit at full attention, listening to her every word as if I am in a master class. And then somehow, without my even raising my working-mom worries, she speaks reassurance right into them.

“Since we were busy often, [Lin-Manuel] was basically free to create what he wanted,” she says. “He was constantly using a video machine or a tape recorder—one of the earliest recordings we have is [from] a little Fisher-Price recorder…He made up a song to it. I forget the lyrics, but he basically started composing off the head from the time he was very tiny.”

I’m instantly reminded of the moment when I realized I didn’t need to facilitate my children’s play. There is so much power in children’s imagination. I came home one day and found Uche and Clara having a full-on makeshift rock concert with an old beat-up toy guitar whose batteries were long gone, and Clara was playing guitar on a broom. They were in heaven! Not zoned out in front of the TV or their tablets or needing me to facilitate their joy. Sometimes when you leave them alone, that’s when their imaginations take flight.

It was clear very early that I would not always be able to be there. I had to make peace with that—and so did my whole family. The truth is, I’ve never missed a big moment; I always somehow make those happen. It’s the smaller moments in between that make me feel as if I have to be like the movie— everything, everywhere all at once —and that’s just impossible. So, hearing Luz affirm that children can thrive in our absence and that that’s okay (maybe even necessary) for them and for us, eases my mind.

Luz also confirms what I know deep down to be true: that there is value in your network and the community of caring you build around your kids.

“Lin-Manuel grew up in a household that wasn’t a nuclear household,” Luz explains. “At various times, this house is filled with at least one other person, if not two. At one point it was four. We always had a lot of different individuals staying with us. So, he had a huge extended network that includes family, as well as friends that are like family.”

I think back to one of my favorite children’s programs, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . Sure, Mister Rogers was the central character, but it was the neighborhood that created the full picture of the show. The mailman, the handyman, the neighbor, Lady Aberlin, who I always thought was so lovely. Each of these characters helped enrich me as an avid little viewer.

I like to think of my kids’ lives in a similar way. I may be a central character, but they also need “the neighborhood.” I certainly had that as a child—a circle of loving adults who poured into me along the way. There was Ms. Dunklin, one of my favorite Sunday school teachers; Michelle, my favorite babysitter; our older neighbor, Ms. Ruby, who lived around the corner. She would let us kids come inside her house when we were out playing to give us water, or even some sugary drink we didn’t have at home, or a piece of hard candy from a tiny golden bowl on her table that was magically never empty. I know I’m better because of those people.

For better or worse, sibling relationships help shape us too—and they do tend to sort themselves out, but parents can’t force that. Even Luzacita eventually came around. “Their connection grew in large measure because Lin-Manuel was very engaging and very funny,” Luz says. It also helped that Luzacita started sharing her love for rap music with her little brother. “He’s very grateful to her for having introduced him to that genre.” (I’m guessing, so is every person who ever attended a performance of Hamilton !)

“Hip-hop and musicals,” I say, “it was almost like it was his destiny.” Luz agrees and when she opens the family’s home video vault, there’s no doubt. There her son is as a kid, jumping around his room to Footloose , unselfconsciously performing and loving it. Watching him, you can’t help but smile. He is the joyful embodiment of the Mark Twain quote, “Sing like no one is listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth.” I can’t help but wonder, What if nobody had been watching? Would Lin-Manuel still have become the superstar we’ve come to love? There’s so much that we just can’t be there to see or hear or know. As a mom, this eats at me: What if something important happens and I miss it?

Luz insists that what you do when you’re with your children is more important than being with them for everything they do. “I think there needs to be an awareness of their sensitivities, as well as their strengths and weaknesses,” she says, in a thoughtful answer to my question. Knowing her son had a tender heart, she always made sure to check in. “Every night I would tuck him into bed, and I would ask him, ‘What was the best thing that happened in school? What was the worst thing that happened at school?’ And, depending on how he was feeling and if he was having any difficulty falling asleep, I will talk him through some relaxation exercises and breathing exercises to get him to sleep.”

But, in spite of this practice, Lin-Manuel was being bullied as a preschooler for months before she realized it. “As the year progressed, whenever he would see mail from the school, he would burst out crying and say he didn’t want to go back,” she recalls. “And I told my husband, ‘He’s not going back. My kid needs to be happy and feel good about where he’s going. I don’t care if it’s a good school.’ ” So they changed schools, and it made a world of difference.

Luz believes that no matter what your child is like—and they’re all different—the power of parental support can’t be overstated. “It always worries me when I see children being torn down by their parents,” she says. “You see them in the streets, people getting out of control with their kids, or not being able to say very nice things about their kids. And my thought is always, if your own parents can’t really build you up and support you and acknowledge what an amazing individual you are, who’s gonna do it? It breaks my heart actually.”

I feel the same way. There are enough things in this world that can break our spirits; home just should not be that place. “You have to support them, because the goal is to get them to be able to be independent, fulfilled adults,” Luz says. “Provide all of the nurturance you can.” That includes when it’s hard and complicated and they’re doing all they can to push you away.

“A lot of families feel that when kids become teenagers…you don’t have to hover,” she says. “You do. You have to hover in a very supportive way—and not lose sight of the fact that they could be struggling with a whole complex series of emotions. You gotta do the best you can now, because if you don’t, they won’t grow up and leave you.” Luz laughs. Yet, she is quick to point out that no matter how attentive we try to be as parents, we can’t catch every issue or protect our kids around the clock. And they wouldn’t become confident or self-sufficient if we did. We have to live out the advice many of us give our kids: Do the best we can, on repeat, accepting that it won’t be perfect—sometimes we will even fall horribly short—but it will add up to enough in the end.

I think that my own mom had a similar philosophy about raising me. I’m starting to believe that this kind of support does more than satisfy an immediate need for affirmation and acceptance. It fueled the power for me to believe in myself . It’s as if she filled me up so much, that once she was no longer in my presence, I had enough confidence in the tank to figure out the rest on my own.

My journey in television news is not something she could’ve done for me. That’s the thing, right? As a mom, you can only do so much; your child has to be a self-starter in many ways to keep his or her dream alive. But a mother’s early support is like a child’s training wheels; it keeps them moving forward until, before you know it, they’re pedaling on their own. Moving farther and farther from you. As they reach new milestones, they’ll have those “Look, Mom, I made it” moments. And, if we are lucky, we are there to share in their joy.

One thing I learned from my mother is selflessness. My father died when I was sixteen, which was one of the reasons I lived at home all through college. When it came time for me to move away, out of state, for my first job, I was terrified—and also worried to leave her all alone in that house we had grown up in. She said, “Savannah, if you can’t leave me, then I haven’t done my job right.” It would have been so easy for her to hold on to me. But she knew I had big dreams, and she gave me permission to chase them.

—Savannah Guthrie, cohost, The Today Show