I Can Only Be Free Range If You Are Too

Remember the MOMifesto? You can read it here so go for it, but I might end up alienating you in the way I probably alienated a lot of other people I know and maybe even ones I don't. That happens when a girl gets all uppity and mouthy-like. Oh well.

I've been thinking about that bitch session essay a lot over the last few days. I've been thinking about it because maybe I've been breaking my own code lately; I mean, the girls are all entwined in jump rope class and soccer after all and I even signed them up for a week of soccer camp. (The Giant Four Year Old, alas, is still getting his extracurricular kicks at the grocery store and in the Mobile Discovery Unit which also serves as my car.)

I've been thinking about it mostly after reading this article and all the opinionated opinions surrounding it and even the author's own rebuttal. Lenore's essay inspired more of the Mom on Mom pissing matches we are notoriously famous for, more of the Woman on Woman brawls that bring us down time and time again. (Fret not: I've resigned myself now to these "I really respect you, but you're totally fucking wrong and crazy and stupid and you are doing damage to your children" fights and I even find them halfway humorous so I won't get all ranty about it.)

The real juicy meat of this Helicopter Mom vs. Free Range Kid debate is not so much the ire it arouses, it's more about the way it can get a girl thinking. Especially if you're one like me. You know the kind: the loudmouth who proclaimed her angst with the kind of mothering that is less about mothering but more about running the business that is Mother. I said it before, and I'll say it again: my kids will never be my "job" and I don't and won't feel guilty about having interests and desires and conversations and needs and plans that don't always include them. But would I let my nine year old ride the subway alone? Who knows? We barely have buses in this small town and my kids think a taxi is like the coolest ride ever. Her kid and mine? Completely different worlds, completely different experiences.

But I do know this: Helicopter Mom I am not. I do not negotiate friendships or fights. I have never requested a teacher. I do not linger at any practice unless I am required to be there. I love drop-off parties and drop-off play dates and drop-offs of any kind. Yet, I don't think my kids are totally Free Range either. Granted, they are wee ones in the scope of things and I'd probably be arrested if I "freed" them as much as I might like to at times, but this whole hoohah is making me feel a little uncool. Because..well, I'm not hovering per se... I'm sort of hot-air ballooning above them. I don't have (nor want) the navigational skills those Heli-moms have to land squarely in any spot they choose whenever they choose but I'm up there nonetheless. And it makes me feel a tad hypocritical, all half-in, half-out the way I appear to be: wanting to go where the wind takes me but white-knuckling the tether to Earth.

I have to remind myself that just as my kids can't learn how to handle a bossy, bitchy friend if I whip out the Mom card at each infraction, they can't learn how to cross the street by themselves if I insist on holding their hand every time. Right? So eight year old B has walked to school since second grade with a pal, all of four blocks and without a cell phone (like some her friends). The Giant Four Year Old roams the 'hood now, at least in the perimeter I allow (a square block, no crossing streets). And while I know they won't be pro soccer players, I am also pretty sure they won't be pro jump ropers either so clearly I am not "training" them for anything other than you know, growing up.

But there's a playground half way between here and school and I've only once allowed B and her friend to scooter there alone, and I did it under protest. Which irritates and sort of shames me.

When I was 8, almost 9, I rode my bike at least a mile each way to the beach club my parents belonged to. I snapped my towel in the rat-trap and zoomed off for the day, without sunscreen (or more importantly, anyone to apply it) and without - gasp - a helmet. I probably didn't even know my own phone number. But herein lies the rub: there were A LOT of us back then riding our bikes to some place or some event for the day. We were the numbers that added up to the safety that our own mothers relied on. If you wiped out on your bike, the fastest kid would book to the closest house to find the closest available mom to take care of it. And we did wipe out. And we did encounter creeps. But we never got seriously hurt, not ever, because we were a posse (that sometimes included kids we didn't even like) that our moms made us walk/ride/play with. It was safety in freakin' numbers.

I can send my kids into the backyard to play (because I do believe their own imaginations with grass and pebbles is better than about anything I can pay for), but it's a lot less fun if there aren't some other hoodlums to imagine with. I can let them go down the street to the park, but it's a lot less safe if they don't have a buddy to go with.

If it was safe enough for us then shouldn't it be safe enough for her now? Be safe enough for your kids? The only bigger threat in the world today (besides, you know, terrorism, global warming, George Bush) is probably the fact that there are more and bigger cars on the road (you gotta get those kids to their activities somehow). Stranger danger? Not so much; most kids abducted are taken by someone they know. So what, pray tell, am I, are we so afraid of?

I can only be Free Range if you are too.

The more kids that are pulled off the street from playing and riding bikes and starting ball games, the more dangerous the street is for the kids who are left there to play and ride bikes and start ball games.

Tomorrow if the sun is out, I'll let some more air into the balloon, because, if I am using this metaphor correctly, that might be the thing I need to bust through this irrational fear. But I'm also going to need you. I'm gonna need you to strap on your kids' helmets and let 'em ride. I'm gonna need you to just let 'em go even it's down the block. I'm gonna need you to let them traipse across your neighbors' yards to get to the house where the Sardines game is being played. And I'm gonna need you to shout with me from your own perch in the clouds (where maybe you hover too), I'm gonna to need you to shout really loud so that they can all hear us, "You go! You just go!"

They'll come back! And if we're lucky, they'll also grow up and move out and get to write snarky, bossy blogs like this.

Good Mother Club

Just to make absolutely sure that no "Good Mother Club" existed, I googled it and this was the first image on the list.

Which makes me feel ridiculously, entirely better.

Jump Rope

I am signing up my girls for a Jump Rope class.

My father, the atheist, who has just re-read the New Testament (for kicks), thinks this might be a sign of The End; this and the third graders plotting their teacher's murder. Since I don't remember anything of the New Testament and as I am the only one who hasn't heard the story of the murderous third grade gang, I guess I'll just go with him.

It IS pathetic that there a classes for jump rope. Didn't we all just learn those games in the school yard or in the driveway? Was I supposed to teach that...too? I can hold the rope for them, and they can hold it for each other, but there are rarely enough kids around in my kids' backyard to make these basic games happen for real. Too many of them are too busy with classes of other kinds. So, what's next? Will there be semesters to teach Pickle, Spud, or Statue?

My girlfriend says of the Jump Rope class, "Maybe they'll bring what they learn to the playground."

Maybe they will and that's what sold me on the idea entirely.

Not to mention, I can't teach jump rope. I demonstrated it to my girls about 6 months ago and thought I might have a heart attack. I thought I might lose one or both of my boobs and felt my brain ACTUALLY SMASH into my skull.

NEVAH AGAIN, I said, NEVAH. This is the sport of breast-less children.

I do however have some interest in renewing my love of Chinese Jump Rope: the extra big stretchy cord we wrapped around our ankles and a partner’s while a third “jumper” engaged in elaborate tangles, getting caught up and then escaping in one wickedly cool flow.

That's the cerebral kind of jump rope I'm game for now, with less threat of boob loss. My flat-chested (for now) beauties, those backyard girls: I'm giving them double-dutch.

MOMifesto

Before I leave for three weeks, I send this along: something to ruminate on and debate. I've been sitting on this group of sentences for a while, but it still makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Maybe it will to you. Forget the stay-at-home vs. the working mom fight -- this is where the good punches fly.

****

PROFESSIONAL MOTHERHOOD

This is what I have learned so far about the world from children: it is tiny and enormous. There are bugs more interesting than great books, and questions about bugs and eyelashes and sadness and electricity are never-ending. It’s all or nothing, and also all and nothing. It changes daily. You learn to go with it.

This is what I have learned about motherhood, stay-at-home motherhood: it’s a jungle in here.

As it was in the office, so it is behind the picket fence. The geography has changed but the scene is the same. The playground has become the office cooler, the PTO meeting has become the company picnic, and there is jockeying and one-upmanship all over the place. I never knew that when I left the career I built to stay at home with my kids that I would have to contend with another world of professionals. My greatest nemesis is no longer The Man, but The Mom: the Professional Mother.

The Professional Mother has a lot of company. She is one of the millions of women who benefited from every wave of Feminism. She picked a job she wanted, or thought she wanted, and she succeeded. When they told her as a little girl that she could be an astronaut, she believed them. She never got a free pass. She worked her ass off every step of the way and she became whatever her heart desired: a marketing director, a teacher, a filmmaker, a lawyer, a business owner, a nurse, a doctor, a banker, and even sometimes, an astronaut.

Maybe because she could do it all, or because she wanted so badly to do it, she became a mom.

Who knows what happened next? Either she couldn’t or didn’t want to keep doing what she was being paid to do, or maybe it was hormones or finances or love or who knows what, but she decided to quit. She gave it all up for the kid, the brood, the life.

As it turns out, the everyday life with kids is a sneaky life. It is mostly boring and rarely rewarding. For the most part, it’s spit up, crapped diapers, Legos all over the place and getting dinner not only made but also eaten. It is not like the magazine pictures or parenting books, or art: it is getting through one long endless day without going crazy.

The Professional Mother takes it all very seriously. Turning down a lucrative career, earned and fought for, is ridiculously hard for anyone. Why not make a career out of the life chosen at home? Why not up the ante on what you do, so that it’s easier to answer the question of old friends and colleagues: what do you do?

So, the Pro Mom engages her newborn in sign language, music classes (I did this once: it was mostly toddlers, always mine, running into padded gymnasium walls), and potty training before they can sit up. She considers co-sleeping, attachment parenting, and nursing on demand not an option but a requisite. She relishes an entire Baby Bjorn culture that literally glues the baby to the bod.

The Professional Mother of a pre-schooler or grade-schooler engages in activities so numerous that there are children less than six years old who have tried more hobbies in one week than I have tried in my whole life. There’s Spanish, team gymnastics, travel soccer, tennis, baseball, painting, ice hockey and lacrosse all weekend. And it’s not just one of these things – it’s all of them, at once. Her multi-tasking is without limit.

It wasn’t long after I became a full-time mom in the suburbs that I realized there was a pace out there that I couldn’t keep. As much as I desired, needed, craved to be busy, expressing that through my kids and with my kids was a disaster – for them and for me.

Don’t get me wrong, pre-school is a life saver and we’ve dabbled in soccer and ballet and the dreaded music class, but never more than one of those things a week. Truth be told, it was way too much work for me to drag a baby and a pre-schooler to stand outside a 45-minute “class” for a 1st grader. Instead, I just blare the IPod at home: dance, gymnastics, music class. There you go.

Did I nurse each child for fewer months than the one before? Yes. Do I consider crayons and construction paper and pretty much no guidance about what to do with those things (‘cause Mommy’s on the phone) a good, learning day? Yes. Do I make cereal and cereal bowls accessible to my tiny kids and expect them to make due some mornings? Yes, I do. Do I feel bad about all of that? No, I don’t.

I think.

My soapbox is wobbly I admit, and the doubts creep in. I doubt my exhaustion after a day of homework and housecleaning. I wonder since I didn’t drive to five activities is my tiredness, well, less than? Will Harvard reject my child because she didn’t speak French fluently by 9? And now that I don’t have a nursing baby to lean on (literally), is it my convictions that still make me pass on more than one activity per week? Or my laziness?

The Pro Mom exacerbates my undoing. Even on the days when I’ve whipped up homemade play dough or read the same book six times in a row – at dinnertime! -- she is out there. She is out there tapping endlessly into her Blackberry the schedules of her accelerated children to remind me that no matter what I do, or don’t do, I am not doing enough.

The Professional Mother doesn’t aim to be mean spirited. Maybe we brought this culture of competition onto ourselves. When I was in college, we good, smart feminist girls waged a minor rebellion – one of many that stood to pit us against old-school feminism. It was okay to be sexy, we said, to like men and wear mascara and short skirts. We were confident in our sexuality as a tool, not a limitation, and we took advantage. Marriage was okay and motherhood too. We would indeed have it all: respect and hot pants, babies and promotions. It would be different for us. And it is.

We forced ourselves over the line in a lot of ways. We supported each other, hired each other, built businesses, built networks, made changes and money together. But when we made the biggest decision of our lives, to trade the cash and achievement of our former selves for a colicky, bundle of ridiculously cute panic, we forgot in the process where we came from. Maybe it was the distance from the shackles of our past or the cool comfort of our modern success, but somewhere along the way we forgot what essentially gave us the idea that we could be superwomen in the first place: each other.

Our mothers before us? They shoved us outdoors, they handed out hot dogs like vitamins, and they never attended or arranged a single pre-school graduation. The lucky ones schemed a life for themselves in between the wife-being and the child-rearing so that when the chance came, unexpected or anticipated, they seized it. If there was a bad guy or a naysayer, he lived in the house or on the TV. For her, the girl next door was a partner and confidante. A lot times, she was the one whispering, “Go, girl, go.”

For me, the girl next door is confused a lot of the time. Her degree on the wall and a gaggle of kids in her hallway, a husband late to dinner, a house half done, a host of parties to attend, she is never quite sure if she lives in world of content or discontent. She is never quite sure that any of the rhetoric is true: that she is indeed doing the most important job in the world.

The Pro Mom implodes her doubt and confusion. She creates a coping mechanism that is a schedule so mercilessly rigorous, so chock full of child work that her billable hours far outnumber any corporate power player. She doesn’t so much swallow her resentment and isolation, she creates it—and passes it along like some grown-up girl game of Telephone. The Pro Mom creates a culture of perfection, a stratum of achievement, that is impossible to maintain. Mostly, it’s not a lot of fun.

Where did our girl network go? Why does it only seem to exist in dinners dropped at the door when a new baby arrives? Why does it evaporate when the real work begins? Why has the camaraderie of our earlier feminist experiences backfired in the moment of our most feminine experience?

Maybe feminism has failed. There are those among us who still don’t truly value the role of Mother, plain old just getting the job done Mother. And most of them are mothers.

If I “missed” the registration date for a camp I can’t afford anyway, then I apologize to my children in advance. If I avoided the countless other activities that might make my kids smarter or nicer or better, than I apologize for that as well. But if the proof is in the pudding -- my daughter does a perfect cartwheel, self-taught in the grass, the other not only marches to her own beat, but bangs the drum herself, and my son, he can make friends with anyone -- then the pudding is all right with me. I know I am qualified and educated: I have no need to prove that through my kids. They are not, never were, never will be, My Job.

There will never be a moment when I see the world as unwritten upon as I used to when I was a kidless kid. But when I find the calm in the middle of my amateur mom day, in between the heart attacks and heart aches and volunteer work and laundry and the guilt about never quite doing enough for any body at anytime that is so much a part of that day, I don’t use up the peace and quiet on my kids. I do the best that I can do – for me.

With Kidz Bop in the background and a plastic golf club in the gut, there are not a lot of thoughtful silences anymore. Most of the poetry I write is cheap haiku – but write, I do. I make business plans after midnight all the time. I try to have reasonable conversations about politics when I find something newsworthy on the ‘net. I gripe to my sisters and my friends about the drudgery of everyday doing and I hope against hope that I will find one open ear who will honestly gripe back to me.

I am grateful that I made my new girl network, all the ones who tell their truths, who cry sometimes, who whine even, who make plans like me, schemes like me, and the ones who have come to believe that this life, after all, is good enough. I am grateful for those who give me who they are and take me as I am.

But I regret that this loose knit web of secret holders, who for the most part don’t even know each other, is such a small part of my life. I regret that this is who we seem to be now, a disparate coffee klatch endlessly seeking a home.

Still, I have a great suspicion that secrets like mine are being shared all over the place, on streets like mine, in towns like mine, with friends like mine, even by Professional Moms.

In the end, the world remains tiny and enormous. Children ask a million questions because there are that many. There is more than one answer. You don’t need to be a Pro to know that.