Six Feet Tall and On Her Way

One of the things I sometimes miss about having a baby is that moment you arrive at every once in a while, when you're sitting in a comfy chair with the baby in your arms. The baby is clean and warm and dry. The baby is fed -- or maybe you're feeding the baby. She might be drifting off to sleep, or maybe he is wide awake, looking up at you with huge eyes, soaking up the love you are beaming down at him. But either way, you are absolutely secure in the knowledge that you have met -- for this half hour, or five minutes, or however long it lasts -- every single need this baby of yours could possibly have. In those early weeks you are essentially the entire universe for one tiny person, and you have managed to make that universe a warm, loving, safe, happy place.

Then the baby develops permanence of the object, and unnerving methods of locomotion, and woefully inadequate communication skills. The baby acquires ambitions and desires and hopes and dreams -- and suffers the accompanying frustrations and failures and heartbreaks and skinned knees. Those moments when you've met your child's every need grow few and far between... and eventually fade away entirely.

For one thing, the needs keep multiplying and convoluting way beyond that early triumvirate of eat, poop, sleep. Babies eventually have all kinds of needs -- emotional, gastronomical, educational, sartorial -- that you have no clue how to fulfill. Some of these needs are contradictory, or easily overdone; others may not really be needs at all, depending on which expert you consult. Often they conflict directly with your own needs, or those of other members of the family.

At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear that you are no longer the entire universe, nor are you remotely in control of it.

As the child grows up, both factors loom larger and larger: their complicated, convoluted needs, and your own confounded impotence.

Fortunately, it's a significant part of your job description as a parent to make yourself obsolete -- to encourage these small creatures to stretch and explore, to gain new skills, to leave you behind. Mostly this is welcome news: who wants to change diapers forever? And mostly it's inspiring (if bittersweet) to watch them flower. Now they can tie their own shoes. Now they're reading to themselves. And how about that first bike ride without training wheels?



Then they start learning stuff you never mastered. When Josie began taking piano lessons, she passed me up after about six months... A year or two later she started playing the cello, and I realized that after a single lesson she knew about a hundred times more than I did about getting music out of this instrument: where to put her fingers on the strings, how to hold the bow, what the resin was for, the importance of the rock stop. It was clear I was going to be completely useless as a guide on this particular journey -- but I was happy to be along for the ride.

Another inspiring (and occasionally bittersweet) aspect of parenting: all the new people kids bring into your life -- piano teachers, babysitters, coaches, camp counselors, friends, parents of friends, etc. These are the people who can teach them all the things you can't. The people they can talk to about stuff they don't want to talk about with you. The people who can take them places you have never been.

At a certain point they start borrowing your high heels (and looming over you even when they're barefoot)... And suddenly all this stretching and exploring and flowering is not just inspiring or bittersweet: it's downright scary. Good Lord -- they want to go places you've never been, and do stuff you haven't heard of, with people you've never met! And -- this is the killer -- sometimes you have to let them.

The stakes feel so much higher now -- the failures and heartbreaks cut deeper, last longer -- and can directly shape their adult lives in ways they don't really comprehend. And yet, just as it was once your job to send them wobbling off down the street on two wheels, hoping they really would stop when they got to the green car (and -- sorry, but it's all coming back to me now -- trying in vain not to call out one last reminder, to really let them do it on their own),  it is now your job to smile and wave while they head off to Folklife with $25 and a cell phone that turns out to be almost out of juice.

Oh, the high stakes don't arrive overnight; mostly it's a gradual process with lots of anticipation built in. (Surely this is why every parent seems to start a mock-horrified Countdown to Learner's Permit when their child hits puberty: if we joke about our children driving for three or four years, maybe we can get ourselves used to saying the words out loud, so that by the time the child is actually sitting behind the wheel of the family car with that ecstatic, clueless grin on her face, we can hand over the keys without actually fainting.) The bumpy road to independence is slowly paved through years of experimentation, negotiation, confrontation, backpeddling, screw-ups, and limit-testing on all sides. It's exhausting. And humbling. And exasperating -- the other day, in the middle of an endless, circular conversation Josie and I were having in the car about whether she could go to a Sublime concert with a friend, Simon exploded. "Will you please stop talking about this! It's like a ping pong game in my head!"

However the journey proceeds, at some point it is clear that your baby is going to be out there on her own sometimes, and you won't always know exactly what she's up to. A review of those early bike videos may help you here, as you struggle to balance out your natural (and entirely appropriate) moments of panic with your (equally appropriate) faith in your amazing, capable child.

You've laid the groundwork already, you hope. Now you have to trust her. Which means not indulging that sneaky sliver of doubt, that whispering, irrational fear that one day you'll get a call from jail... that instead of studying at the library on Friday after school, she is on a naval base doing tequila shots.

Yes, you have to trust her to make good decisions -- and to handle the hairy situations that are bound to come up, whether she makes good decisions or not. Downtown at dusk, spent the last of her money on hair dye, nothing left for the light rail ticket home. Or maybe: Guy approaches at bus stop, thinks she's older than she is, wants to talk. You want her to know she can rely on herself to handle a situation like that. You also want her to know when she's in over her head, and how to get help if she needs it. And, paradoxically (parenting is nothing if not paradoxical) you also want her to know that if it comes down to it, you will absolutely jump in the car and come pick her up anytime, anywhere -- yes, even on a naval base.

You also have to lay out clear limits and expectations, of course -- even if it makes you the Meanest Mom on the Planet, a colossal fuddy duddy who ruins her child's life on a daily basis. And your kid needs to establish a track record of respecting those limits and meeting those expectations -- so that when she says she'll call you at 11 after the Sublime concert (if she goes to the Sublime concert, that is -- and no honey, that decision that has not been made yet), you know whether or not to panic when 11:05 rolls around with no call. (Any panicking you may be doing up until 10:59 is your own cross to bear.)

Now, unlike a five-year-old with no training wheels, your fourteen-year-old won't always come running back to you, bursting with pride, to tell you all about her latest adventures. (And really, you're probably better off not knowing about some of them -- not until some boisterous, confessional Thanksgiving dinner when she's thirty.) Most of the time you'll be lucky if she remembers to thank you for the $25, and to warn you that she told three other people you'd give them all a ride to the station in, like, ten minutes -- please, Mom?

But even if you're not the center of her universe anymore, you still get to share this marvelous young lady's daily life for a few more years. You still get to walk to the PCC with her after dinner, and hear how the Drama Club auditions went and who's going out with who this week. You get to giggle while you sing that silly Rebecca Black song in the car, and dance with her to Deee Lite in the living room. You get to help with her math homework, and watch Jon Stewart together, and tuck her into bed -- two or three times if necessary. You get to celebrate her new haircut:

And the fabulous lamp she got on Half-Price Day at the Salvation Army.

When her birthday rolls around, you get to bake a heart-shaped cheesecake and put 14 candles on it, and silently blanch at the realization that she'll be eligible for a learner's permit in -- gulp -- 364 days.

You will never again delude yourself that you've met her every need. But she's still your baby. And she's on her way.