Watching My Inner Helicopter Parent Fly Away - NOT

We carry into motherhood the baggage from our childhood. For those who have been blessed with a happy one, there is a wonderful connection running through past, present, and future that is a precious rarity much envied by those of us who are less fortunate. As for the rest of us, we strive to avoid the mistakes of our own mothers, mistakes that ironically helped mold us into the caring, sensitive, and vigilant beings that we are today.

The current generation of helicopter parents are a product of childhood cautionary tales combined with a veiled form of comparative parenting. We are the modern day Smiths striving to keep up with the elusive Joneses. A helicopter parent will very rarely say, "If it was good enough to do X while I was growing up then it is good enough for my child." We also very rarely think, My child doesn't need to do Y; I didn't and I turned out fine. We are motivated by a desire to create an environment BETTER than that which we grew up in, whether that means more toys, more vacations, more time with Mom, or just more attention. And our materialistic monetarily based society is more than happy to accommodate. For anyone with enough money, there are products and services out there that our mothers never even dreamed of, much less desired. For starters, there are vast libraries of books covering topics from sleep training to homemade baby food recipes to early toddler emotional development to early childhood discipline. For the generation before us, there was little more than Dr. Benjamin Spock and even that was viewed with skepticism. The notion of reading books on parenting was mostly considered preposterous. As my mother contemptuously told me when she saw my library of child rearing books, "Parenting is something you DO, not something you READ."

Consider also the bevy of classes available to entice even the most closeted helicopter parent: baby sign language, infant massage, music together, dance, gymnastics, infant swimming, toddler skiing, immersion Spanish or Chinese, and many more. Like the a la carte menu of a five star restaurant, they all sound so good. So we sample and survey and exchange notes with the other helicopter parents. We flock to the "right" classes with the "best" teachers. Maybe it's all hype or maybe we will stumble upon the one who will recognize and nurture the secret latent talent in our child that we do not yet see. If my mother was contemptuous of my books, she was beyond disgusted with the multitude of classes in which we enrolled.

Of course there is the piece de resistance, the Holy Grail if you will, for the helicopter parent: the RIGHT school. Forget the minor expenses of books and classes; this is where the REALLY BIG bucks are spent. For the price of a small kingdom, the average helicopter parent can buy the reassurance that if her child does not get into an Ivy League school it will not be her fault. Just before my twins turned three years old, we enrolled them in no fewer than 3 preschools. One was a drop off with extended care for the days that both of us worked. It was play-based and came recommended both by other mothers in my network and by online reviews, criteria that are crucial in the decision-making process of any helicopter parent. The second was an expensive academic preschool which I had toured TWICE the year before. This was also a drop-off program and was in session only a few hours twice a week even though it was more expensive than the first school which offered extended childcare hours. The third school was a parent participation preschool which met for a few hours on Saturday mornings, markedly less expensive although much more heavily laden with after school responsibilities - for the parent. In a bout of indecision, I maintained this ridiculously busy and somewhat confusing schedule for a semester before withdrawing my children from one of them. For the first four months of the school year, they would ask me every morning, "Where are we going today?" A very good question indeed.

We are now at the age of kindergarten planning. While the very notion is beyond ridiculous to my mother, we the helicopter parents spent many hours agonizing over the age old question for the parent of a child born in the fall - send them ahead or hold them back? For my mother's generation, this question is a no-brainer: Get the child out of the house into the public school system as soon as possible. From my mother's perspective, why on earth would anyone in their right mind elect to keep their child underfoot in the household, the mother's domain, for a second longer than is absolutely necessary? After all, we want to FINALLY see our tax dollars put to good use and regain the solitude and privacy of our household for at least some small portion of the day. I suspect that were it in my mother's capacity she would have thrown a ticker tape parade on the day her last child (me) went to kindergarten for the first time.

But here's the thing: I am not my mother. While my children drive me absolutely crazy from time to time and I have moments when I desperately want to run and hide from motherhood if only for a few hours, I actually really like my kids. Unlike my own mother, I am not chomping at the bit tempted to yell, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out!" I want to savor every moment and memory with them, from the smell of their downy baby hair to the unexpected gentle touch of a soft palm on my bare arm. The good and the bad both have space in my heart for them. I would rather have the pain of a thousand heartaches and be fully engaged with my kids than be spared a second of pain and lose a fragment of an inkling of who they are becoming. I don't want to miss it, not any of it. Because as they are growing up, so am I. The beauty of my children is that I get to live a new life with them and experience the world around me with them.

Why would anyone want to rush through that?

So hover away. Study them. Plan for them. Obsess over them. And enjoy.

This is an original post to Year of 4s.

Are my children enough?

I am not typically an adventurous person, especially with four year old twins in tow. But at my husband's request, we recently spent four weeks in Mexico where my mother-in-law has lived for the last twenty years. This wasn't Club Med Ixtapa or Puerto Vallarta or Cabo San Lucas. We stayed in historic places on the Yucatan peninsula where it is not unusual to wake up with a tarantula, a scorpion, or a boa constrictor on the back porch. There was a beautiful lagoon, awe-inspiring Mayan ruins, expansive colonial mansions over 400 years old, and festivals in the evenings in the town square where men and women danced and sang about love and the glory of their city. There were also plenty of days and nights when the heavy humid heat in the air was oppressive leaving me scratching my MANY mosquito bites in frustration, wondering if I would ever feel really clean again. 

Both my MIL and dh were often attuned to my more frustrated moments (a wallflower I am not) and it was during these times as well as late into the evening after my defiant and mischievous children reluctantly fell asleep that I would peruse David James Smith's most recent book "Young Mandela". I had recently read Mandela's autobiography from 1994 "Long Walk to Freedom" which turned me into an instant fan. I was impressed by his steadfast and enduring devotion to a cause which required so much personal sacrifice, in particular over 27 years in prison away from his wife and his young children. To never see my children grow up is a sacrifice I could not imagine making under any circumstance.

So I hid in my sadly un-air conditioned room from time to time under the lazy whirl of the ceiling fan and read about the world in which Nelson Mandela grew up, a South African apartheid society where mosquito bites and humidity were the least of a black man's troubles. In "Long Walk to Freedom" Mandela's regrets over his personal sacrifices are quite muted. However, in "Young Mandela" the voices of his family's regrets can be heard loud and clear. While the book covered many other contrasting elements in perspective between Mandela and several other freedom fighters, it is the familial component that strikes me to the core the most, for obvious reasons. 

Take our extended trip to Mexico, for instance. I had kept a running journal of our experiences, the trips to the beaches and ruins and marvelous dinners both homemade and at various eating establishments. But I heavily edited out the emotional outbursts, by both children and grown ups alike, which were a product of over exhaustion, stifling heat, and a multitude of insects with vociferous appetites. Did I re-write history the same way David James Smith implies in his book that Nelson Mandela did? Will my children, on some level, resent my subtle propaganda in the way I have chosen to remember their childhood versus the way it really was? Nelson Mandela's children clearly do. And based on Smith's account of the acrimony between the Nelson Mandela Foundation and his first family, resentment unfortunately pervades his familial relationships.

My newest part time work assignment obligates monthly visits to Sacramento for weeklong periods, just myself, no kids. Granted, it is a far cry from 27+ years in prison. Still, will my young children feel some vague sense of abandonment at the far end of the spectrum of what Mandela's daughters, Zenani and Zindzi, clearly feel? More importantly, I wonder what aspects of their childhood I will be missing during my absences. New games? New playmates? The gradual and insidious evolution of their personalities? Will there be an indefinable distance between us that, over time, will become more and more difficult to bridge as my children grow older without me? I often wonder how much Mandela really regrets not getting to know his oldest son, Thembi, before his untimely death. The time we spend away from our children is unfortunately lost forever. One of Mandela's comrades was asked if all his personal sacrifice was worth the struggle against apartheid. His response was less than satisfying.

But the most uncomfortable and unsettling issue that arises for me after reading "Young Mandela" juxtaposed against "Long Walk to Freedom" is this: 

Unlike Nelson Mandela, I have no noble cause which would compel me to sacrifice my family life in the ways he did. Reading both accounts of the relatively peaceful revolution against apartheid in South Africa, I am still unable to irrevocably resolve in my mind and my heart either position - neither his, which can be described as "freedom at any cost", nor his children's, which is a tragic lamentation of the family life they never got to have. Both perspectives are valid and virtuous - and sadly incongruous. I don't believe I could have made the choices he had, even knowing the inevitable outcome. So I ask myself with hope and some degree of trepidation, when I am 92 years old like Nelson Mandela, will I reflect on my life with satisfaction or with regret? Will I be fulfilled by my devotion to my family or feel a personal void for not contributing a greater good to our society? Will I have secured a good enough future for my offspring by concentrating my efforts on the home life before me, or am I being short-sighted by not investing my efforts into the future of the generations beyond? Mankind is rife with causes and struggles, many of them right before us in our own small corner of the world. But these causes are not where I choose to invest the vast majority of my energy and effort. No, that bottomless repository resides firmly with my family and I can't see that changing for any reason. I consciously make this decision every day. But I still ask myself: Will my children be enough for me? I sincerely hope so.

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of "Young Mandela" to review. All the opinions expressed in this post are completely my own.


This is a "From Left to Write" book club post.