Just wanted to share this with you: One of my posts a while back was about cellulite being a dirty word, and I got the most insane email from a cellulite cream sales rep saying I was “making more of problem” for myself rather than looking at “why you have cellulite to begin with.” I was then urged to go study their cream as a solution to my emotional problems! Can you believe the desperation? Do they think we are all such dolts?

Just because I am a not a fan of helicopter parenting doesn’t mean it is particularly easy for me to quell the desire to hover. Especially when it comes to school. My kids haven’t always done well with the freedom I’ve given them –which is, I suppose, the whole point. Growth is based on a lot of trial and error, and beyond a few initial tips, I think every student has to figure out how to get their own work done. Many times this school year I have had the urge to step in help Dex with his work or pressure him to bring up his grades, but I have had to bite my lip and go back to my own work. I know my anxiety about his grades is exactly that: my performance anxiety. He is not me. I was a hurdle-jumper; I did whatever a teacher said. Dex is not like that. He’s calm and assured. He’s engaged, curious, enjoys his classes. He’s figuring it all out. Whereas I was all about cramming facts, he takes these tidbits from his studies and weaves connections and conversation about them. He has depth where I only had grades, and I admire that. I hope I can hang onto that admiration when report cards come in.

Another mom at his school told me I was doing the right thing. She has a son in tenth grade and in Dex’s grade. She said, “I learned my lesson. I’ve given James a wide berth. I wished I had backed off my eldest. He’s like Pavlov’s dog, and i made him that way. He’ll study if I sit there and tell him to, but if no one tells him, he won’t do anything.” 

“How are his grades?”

“Actually, that’s the tough thing. They’re really good. It’s seductive.” She sighed. “A’s make it seem like the whole family is doing well. And who doesn’t want that?”

Who, indeed?

An intriguing behavior has emerged from Dex and Neve over the past few months. I had noticed it in dribs and drabs before, but now it is in full-on bloom.

They have started parenting.

Before, sure, they would help and correct Colin as he went about his business, but I have been truly surprised by the fervor with which they have taken to disciplining him.

For example, yesterday evening I had to get some papers out of my car, and when I came back inside, Colin was sitting on the stairs (our traditional time-out spot), whining, “I sorry, Neve, I SORRY!” 

“No, you sit there until I come for you,” Neve commanded.

She was at the sink, wetting a paper towel. “What happened?” I asked.

She sighed in such a world-weary fashion. “He drew on the wall.”

I stood there, speechless, as she marched over and began cleaning the wall. This was like some wierd house of mirrors. My child was disciplining my child with methods she had been subjected to years earlier. And Colin wasn’t looking to me to help him, he was imploring Neve. “Please, Nevie, I sorry!”

She looked at him, then came over and squatted in front of him. “Do you know why you’re on the stairs?”

He nodded. “The pencil.”

“Yes. Where do we draw?”

“On paper!” he shouted.

“Right.”

“Good boy?”

She looked sternly at him, but she couldn’t hold it. She gave him a hug. “Yes, you are a good boy — for now.” She looked at me with an expression that could only be translated as, “Kids, they are such work.”

Colin drifted away and Neve went back to her work, and I was left wondering whether I liked this or not. Not 20 minutes later, I heard, “Sorry Dexie, SORRY!”

At a meeting, I was listening to a woman beginning to describe the game she and her husband play about goal-setting and life-planning.

She lost me at “me/husband/game.” I started imagining what a very different lives they must live as a couple. Romantic dinners. Sharing. Warm conversations. Detoxing. Herbal teas.

The last game I played with my husband was when he challenged me to basketball in the driveway about ten months ago, and he proceed to mow me down. Literally, I was in the bushes picking leaves out of my hair. Before that, we were on the same capture the flag team at a family picnic. I always see these blurbs on the covers of magazine articles in the store, you know, “Ten Ways to Get Your Hubby to Open Up” or whatever, and I can’t help but think, why doesn’t the cover of Esquire or Sports Illustrated ever read, “Five Romantic Games to Engage Your Wife’s Emotional Trust!”

That’s because most the husbands I know really just want to compete in a game they can win. Touch football.  Or maybe some pool. Or a board game that involves land or money or solving a crime. Nothing drives Tom crazier than a conversation or activity that goes nowhere. 

Years ago, a friend and I designed a board game about mothering. It was really just for out own amusement, but we did show it to a few people. The look of utter confusion on Tom’s face had me worried. Was he insulted by the snide reasons on “go back two spaces” cards? Was he thinking, geez, these two really hate mothering? 

No. He looked at the game carefully. “I don’t really see the point.” He pointed at the game board’s finish line. “I mean, what are you winning? So you finish first? So what? What’s the incentive?”

I tried to keep my face straight. “There is none, honey. Nothing beyond sharing experiences.”

He stared at the board. “I don’t get it. It’s a game, right?”

“Oh, nevermind.” I was packing it up when he called from the other room.

“What if your kid wins a college scholarship? That could determine the winner!”

Neve rides high and falls hard. She throws herself passionately into every project and occupation, and therefore is crushed when it doesn’t turn out as she envisioned. But she will not air her grief publicly. She wants privacy and she wants space when things don’t go her way. That’s fine, she knows what she needs, but her needs can be problematic when it is a group occupation.

So when her hockey team lost a key tournament game this weekend, Neve held it together through the locker room and the post-game meet-and-greet, and even in the car on the way to the restaurant where the team and their families were meeting to soothe ourselves with pizza and companionship. But when we got to our table, I felt her lurking off my shoulder as I spoke to other parents. I turned and the look of utter pain in her eyes was so profound, my heart nearly broke open. 

“Want to to come to the ladies’ room with me?” 

She nodded. As soon as we got in the bathroom, I wrapped her up in my arms as she broke apart, and I absorbed her sobs. She talked about the goal she thought was her fault, how tired she was, how come everyone wasn’t as upset as she was, how, everyone was sad in their own way, how embarrassed she was to need me like this. I didn’t try and make her feel better, I just listened. Neve is never ready to be rationalized out of her emotion. I have learned over time, that she just needs a soft place to land. Slowly, she calmed.

We cleaned her up and when we got outside the bathroom, Colin came running to her and gave her a big hug, and soon she was mobbed by girls wanting to hold the baby. I could see the pride in her face as Colin clung to her. “Nevie, my Nevie!”

Tom came over. “Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she just needed some love.”

One of my adventures this winter has been dealing with a mysterious back problem. With an old, slack back and 27 pound toddler, I wasn’t sure what was so mysterious, but as usual for me, I have to have the “unique” issue.

I always get the weird virus, the pregnancy disorder the doc has to look up in his textbook, you know the type. Tom teases me that even my illnesses are artistic.

So one day last month, out of the blue, I am flat on the kitchen floor, my back in total spasm. All you that have back problems, I have new respect, because it was hell. After I managed to crawl/slide to the phone and make all the necessary calls, I lay on the floor as my doc told me and waited for the spasms to subside. Tom brought me painkillers and a heating pad. I waited. By nightfall, everyone was getting really tired of my immobility. 

“You think you could make some dinner?” Tom asked. “Everyone’s hungry.”

“Do I look like I can make dinner?”

Tom sighed. 

“Hey, I’m sorry to be such an inconvenience!”

“Okay, okay, calm down,” he called. “Leftovers!”

Colin came in periodically and rolled around on the floor, moaning, “Oh, my back, my back.”

“Gee, thanks, bud. That really makes Mommy feel better.”

“GET UP MOMMY. GET UP!”

By the next morning –I hadn’t moved — Neve was all over me. Can you do my hair, can you take me to the bookstore, can we do an art project together?

“Honey, I can’t move my arms.”

“So?”

Dex came in and I thought, ah, my compassionate one. He patted me on the head and crooned, “Poor Mom.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“So, you think you’ll be up in time to take me to the tournament?”

I tugged a blanket over my face as best I could. “Oh my God.”

This went on for three days.

I was relating my woes to my mother, who was trying to figure out how to serve me hot tea as I lay in the fetal position. She tried to hide the amusement on her face.

“Mmm. Comes with the territory, dear. Try to see it as a compliment.”

“Mom, I’m not as noble as you are, and you know it.”

She sat down and smiled. “It’s true.” 

I think I get so caught up in the call-and-response of parenting that I block out the fact that becoming a parent meant a lot of intense, inauthentic adaptation. You begin to look at everything reactively. People need, you react. You get through days and you survive the lack of sleep and the toddler tantrums and bad dreams, and then you adapt to being involved in the schools and the activities. Then you begin to adapt to how the people around you do things, what’s “in” and what’s “out” and where you fall on that scale. Then you start dreaming for your kids instead of for yourself. On the rare weekend mornings when we don’t have a bunch of activities, my husband and I always feel a little lost. It becomes hard to envision that one day they’ll be off to designing their own days and we are left staring at each other, musing, Well, that was a wild ride. Now what?

I know people who cannot believe that because I have lost a child, I’m not a constant Johnson & Johnson commercial, all doey-eyed and soft-focus over the gift of parenting. I think it is because I was so profoundly wounded that I can recommend that it is not a great idea for mothering to become your entire identity. If you are reading this, chances are you know about food groups and monitoring media and that kids need fresh air and exercise and vaccinations. In my opinion, that’s all you really need to to know. I went through about a year of that data-slurping over a decade ago, and I realized it was making me neurotic, not empowered. Middle class culture in this country is obsessed with child nurturing in a way that makes mothers constantly doubt themselves. Just when you hit a groove, some new study reveals something to make you panic. And we transfer that panic to our kids, make no mistake.

We all want to be good at our jobs, of course. I understand that. But whenever you find yourself responding to a job in a less than authentic way, you need to step back. Whenever a new teaching fellow asks what they should be like in the classroom, I am always a little surprised. Be yourself, I say, the students will feel the hypocrisy if you’re not. It feels to me like a lot of parents are getting sucked in that direction, looking around at others and adjusting themselves to be more like everyone else. Keeping up on the trends and data, the best classes, toys, stimulation. If I had a dollar for the number of college students that have told me they loved their parents, but thought they were hypocrites. Ouch! After all we do for them, that’s what they’ll think?
Maybe it is unavoidable. Maybe they’ll think we’re hypocrites no matter what we do, as part of their need for independence. But I am going to hold tight to the hope that it won’t strike a chord of agreement within me when my teens accuse me of selling out.

Colin. Sweet, loving, chatty, inconvenient Colin.
It was just the timing, I guess.
I had just come back from a work trip, a trip I had been hatching for years, and I had a lot on my mind. But it was hard to sort it all out because Colin was off on one of his many soliloquies — this one was about carbon monoxide detectors, which he calls beep-beep-beeps.
He’s so charming, I thought, so very funny. And yet . . ..
I had gone on this trip to further my career. I won’t bore you with the tedious story, but I was offered an opportunity. An opportunity I had been hoping for, lots of interesting work. But there was one catch: I had to move.
And so I was in the kitchen, listening to Colin going beep-beep-beep while I was mentally pacing: I can’t move, I could move. No, I can’t. The kids. The community. Tom will never leave his job. If I had really wanted this I would have made very different choices, right? I did this to myself. I should have begun long ago to head down this path if I really wanted it.
So was this trip some exquisite sort of self-flaggellation? I must have known that it would come to this sort of stalemate.
I found myself looking at this beautiful boy and wondering if he was the reason or the excuse I wasn’t doing what I really wanted to be doing. I had regained momentum before he was born, I was surging ahead once again with things I wanted to do, but the past three years had punctured all of that ambition. It is hard to be ambitious when you all you really long for is sleep. I’m not proud of thinking this way, but maybe there is more truth to it than I want to admit.
Motherhood can be an opening, abundant experience — but it takes a lot from us too. Once you commit to parenting, are you ever really free again? The answer is as individual as our thumbprints. My goals for myself cannot be the goals I had as a 25 year old. Too much has changed emotionally and physically because of the children in my care, and like it or not, I am a team player. And so the vision of the team trumps my personal vision. At least for now.
Beep-beep-beep. I looked down at Colin, who had come over to give me a “wittle kiss” as he says. Irresistible.
“Well, bud, maybe I can go do it when you’re in college,” I said. “I’ll only be . . . 60.”

I’ve been thinking about power a lot recently, particularly power wielded as parent/coach/teacher/authority figure in a child’s life.
Maybe it is a by-product of watching Dex surging towards independence, and trying to assess his own competence in a variety of situations. Conversations between he and I have become more and more level lately, without that constant tinge of me advising or enlightening or telling him what to do. And I have to say, when I do hear adults barking out orders at him, it gives me pause. I find myself cringing.
Some part of it is tied up in what has been going on with the hockey teams I know. Many teams are coached by remarkable guys, with hearts of gold and the intention of seeing the kids have fun. But too many other teams are run by fear. If the coaches yell at the boys, well, the boys have learned that it is part of the package–the package of being male and being involved in the sports hierarchy. If coach throws stuff at you in the locker room, well, then, he probably had a good reason. Nice man lessons, huh? The girls are different, though. There’s been a lot of talk circulating recently about the male coaches telling girls they are morons or retards or idiots, never mind how angry they get when the girls don’t do what they want on the ice. While the boys keep the code of silence about abuses at practice, the girls tend to talk about it.
I have a niece who is an excellent high school player, and when I asked her where she wanted to play in college, she said,”Are you kidding me? Another four years of getting screamed at? No thanks.”
Where do we get the idea that yelling is motivating? Where do get off thinking keeping kids scared is the only way to get them to perform? And why are we so hung up on controlling them anyway?
What gets me is that all it takes is a whiff of injustice for parents to descend upon their child’s teacher at school –who is usually female. Mrs. Jones told you you couldn’t go get a drink of water? Well, I am going to give her a piece of my mind!
But I asked a few parents whose children play for a particularly abusive coach if they confronted him. Confront him? Oh, no, that would jeopardize so much!
And so the kids have learned an important lesson: keep your head down and your mouth shut and take whatever the male power mongers dish out.

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-Andi