Mama Says

I wrote this essay at the request of my son, Vincent, who wondered why I have this website but haven’t posted anything about him yet. He read it over and thought it was pretty confusing, but that I should post it anyway. I guess that was a fairly positive response, as reviews from my kids go.

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John and I agree on this fact: there was never a point when our answer was going to be no.

We have compiled all of the email messages that were exchanged during an almost unbearably long three weeks this past July — from July 5th, when we got the first really substantial information from the social worker for a 12-year-old boy named Vincent, to July 26th, when we met him and welcomed him into our home as our son.

Among all those thousands upon thousands of words, you can read worry, hope, confusion, even an emerging, impossible affection for a child we had never even met face to face. But nowhere will you find the words, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Let’s not.”

It’s possible we were just naïve. It’s possible that Vincent will never really learn to trust us or love us as his real, true parents. It’s possible things will go painfully wrong sooner or later. Anything’s possible.

Anything except this: it is not possible that we would say “No, we will not be your parents” — not then, and not ever.

Knowing this and convincing Vincent that it’s true, however, are two quite different matters.

Adoption of an older child is confusing under any circumstances. Adoption of a child who has already been adopted and displaced once before is utterly mind-boggling for parent and child alike.

On our side of the equation, we operate with the knowledge that every promise we make to this child of ours has already been made — and broken — before. What can we possibly say or do to convince him that this time things will be different, that things already are?

That part, we don’t know. We do know that the proving of our commitment to our son will ultimately involve a great deal more doing than saying. Most of the words we’ve used so far — the explanations, reassurances, promises and declarations — have sounded pathetically inadequate, even to our own ears.

To Vincent’s ears, I think it’s possible that “I love you” and “I’m glad I’m your mom” and “You will always be our son” might sound like the wordless, mechanical voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the old holiday specials. We say it; he responds automatically. It happens so quickly that it seems unlikely that our words ever made it all the way to his heart before getting pumped back to us. For him, maybe these are just sounds strung together. Just something to say.

Even so, words are what we have immediately at hand, so we need to use them as well as we can.

Last night, in response to a question from him, I tried to explain why, even though I have always written about my kids, I felt reluctant to write about him. He didn’t get what I was trying to say, and neither did I. I was using too many words, and it was getting very mixed up.

So now I will try to make it simple, Vincent, and tell you that for your Pop and me, there was only ever one word for you. It was, “Yes.”

I’ve been hearing a lot about helicopter parents these days. Truth be told, most of what I’ve been hearing has been coming from the nagging little voice inside my own head that whispers all those nasty, self-critical remarks. It’s admonishing me for being one of these loathsome creatures you hear about in the newspaper commentaries.

All right, I admit it: I hover. Even worse: I love to hover.

The pejorative term “helicopter parent” seems to have originated among school teachers, who used it to identify parents who were overly involved in their children’s lives. These were the parents who fussed with their child’s costume for 30 minutes before the school play, then shouldered their way to the front row of the auditorium where they could get the best angle for their camcorder. Helicopter parents were an object of dread.

Now that the school play — along with recess — has been eliminated in favor of standardized testing, the term seems to have expanded somewhat in meaning. It now covers everyone from the dad that calls the kid’s college professor to demand his own copy of the syllabus to the mom who not only enrolls her children for music lessons, but even drives them there. Right now, I only fit this latter category, but I’m clearly on the slippery slope.

It’s shameful, I know, but I actually like taking my kids to music lessons. What other line of work allows you to sit reading Newsweek or doing the Sudoku while convincing yourself that you’re fulfilling your job description? Yeah, I dig this helicopter parent gig.

I also like parent-teacher conferences, and volunteering in their classes. Don’t let it get around, but I actually get a secret voyeuristic pleasure observing my kids at work. This is almost certainly a sign that I lack a life, I suspect.

Yes, I know that a really good parent knows when to let go. According to tradition, that’s supposed to happen on the first day of kindergarten, when you slow the car down, toss the kid and the backpack onto the curb, and speed off to work or at least to Starbucks.

Really good parents — the non-hovering kind, I mean — reflect on their own childhood exploits and misadventures and conclude that they lived to tell, and so will their kids.

I suspect this is the root of my own problem: I didn’t have enough childhood exploits. And now I’m passing on that shameful legacy to my offspring. It’s so humiliating. I never ran away from home, set the house on fire, or smoked in the girls’ john, and now my hovering is preventing my children from experiencing fully their own crazy youth.

It’s no excuse to point out that the broader culture actually demands a pretty intense degree of hovering. Kids must be accompanied by parents at all times, whether they are at the library, the corner store, or the buffet restaurant. Get caught violating that rule and someone will call 696-KIDS. Every story of juvenile delinquency is accompanied by the braying of “Where were the parents?” Every newspaper editorial about the negative economic impact of dumb school children jabs the bony finger of blame right into the xiphoid processes of lazy parents who couldn’t be bothered to read to their tots or even just flick through a few lousy flash cards.

Neither can I avoid blame by mentioning that we are surrounded by thousands of examples of children who actually do experience the sort of childhood that helicopter-haters seem to value. It’s not the least bit difficult to find children who have unsupervised adventures for hours every day and night; whose pushy parents aren’t forcing them to practice their violins — or even to brush their teeth; whose school life is so independent that their parents won’t even sign their field trip permission slips much less annoy the teachers with questions about the homework. I think we can all agree that those children are doing just fine without all this relentless hovering.

Nevertheless, I still need to answer for the harm my self-indulgent hovering is doing. The happiness our kids seem to get from knowing that they are safe at the center of their parents’ world is really just a mask for the horrible, nagging insecurity that’s the result of never having rafted down the river like Huck Finn. We owe them that raft! Not only that, we owe our nation the strong, superior citizens that result when kids are compelled to fight their own battles and find their own fun.

I’ve got to go cold turkey; it’s the only way. No more setting aside the bill-paying to play Monopoly with them. My parents never played no stinking Monopoly with me, and I turned out, well, sort of a poor sport. But still! Let these kids amuse themselves by watching endless reruns of Gilligan’s Island, like we did back in my day. No more signing them up for all these lessons, either. If they want to learn to swim, let them fall into Lake Erie; they’ll learn quick enough. And especially, no more interfering at school.

It’s been a guilty pleasure hovering. But now I understand that it’s wrong to cut the crusts off the whole-grain bread of their cage-free turkey breast sandwiches, especially if I then write “I Love You” on them in mustard. A really good parent would make them write their own damn mustard love notes, or go without.

Turns out, there is a tremendous lot of waiting in this adoption business, even if you are waiting for an older child, a sibling group, any race. Waiting and waiting and waiting.

Besides meeting the child or children themselves, many other things are held up, so that the flow of one’s life can be like the water behind the beaver dam.

For example, we realized a while back that we had forgotten to update our will after the birth of our daughter almost nine years ago. We don’t think this would cause serious problems in the event of our untimely demise, but still. One wants to have all of one’s children named as heirs.

It’s already been almost nine years that this has needed doing. Do we go ahead and update the will now, when we may need to add one or two more chilldren any time now?

Our cars are both getting old, and we need to replace them. Now that the kids no longer require hoisting in and out of bulky car seats, I could get a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle. But if we have three or four kids, we’ll still need a minivan. Guess we’ll hold on to the van a while longer, until we find out how our lives go.

It’s been too long since we had our family picture taken, or even a portrait of the kids together. I suppose a portrait of how our family looked just before the big change would be good, but I can’t seem to schedule the sitting. It feels like an acknowledgement that we’ve given up on ever getting a placement. It’s only been six months since we got the thumbs up to adopt. Our looks won’t change too much if we wait six months more.

If you clear space in your garden and then don’t plant, nature will cause something to take root there anyway. All those drawers we emptied, the beds we set up, the room we made in our hearts, the time set aside, the mental space cleared — noxious weeds are starting to sprout in those open spaces. Doubts and worries flourish on the ground where children were supposed to grow. And like the black locust seeds now popping up everywhere we look in our back yard, those weeds seem to grow tall and leggy over night.

In the first few months after our family was approved, we were able to fill time with work. Looking through photolistings, checking leads, researching medical and mental health conditions, taking parenting classes. We exhausted ourselves, without moving things forward much. Sysephian indeed, this undertaking. To mix a metaphor even further.

It could still happen any day. The water could flow free, the seed could sprout and grow, the rock could find a resting place at the top of the hill. Maybe it will.

They can smell it on me.

These little kids in the Writers Circle I recently formed at the elementary school, they can tell I am not practicing what I preach. I am not writing every day. I am not brainstorming ideas in my journal. I am not outlining before I write. And that’s why they aren’t doing it either. They’ve got my number.

Writers Circle was never supposed to be about me, of course. It was supposed to be about nurturing their emerging interest and skills, supporting their efforts, encouraging them to practice. It’s not about whether I pre-write, write and revise a blog entry. They don’t need to know that I wait until the day before the deadline almost every month before making a desperate grab at the very first idea for a Plain Press column that enters my head. They are supposed to do as I say.

They do not, these recalcitrant youth.

Actually, to be fair and more accurate, a few of them do. There are one or two good, good children, who listen attentively, then promptly and sincerely apply themselves to following my spoken directions. A cynical artiste might conclude that these are the very children who are the least likely to demonstrate any real flair for writing. How could anyone so organized also be creative? Well, they are. Much of what has been written by these serious-minded students has been silly and fun and graceful and complete. And when you get right down to it, the element of completeness is the part that really matters.

In contrast, let us consider the child who was eager to share her writing as soon as possible, but who — instead of reading from a draft — spoke a sort of summary of her ideas that eventually trailed off into an inconclusive sort of, “Well, you get the picture..” non-ending. This child is a person with good ideas, who knows how to draw upon sensory details to create rich prose poems. But she is having a dickens of a time performing the alchemy that transforms ideas into written words on paper. This is the literary equivalent of the air guitar.

Which makes her a kindred spirit, I guess. I am always a little humiliated when a friend remarks in passing about my being “a writer,” when I produce so little actual writing. It is the same humiliation I felt when my dear friend and mentor Hale Chatfield — who preferred actual writing to creating clever ways to avoid writing — finally got fed up with listening to my sniffling about the difficulties involved in becoming a writer and bellowed impatiently, “Oh, for God’s sake, would you just get on with it? If you want to be a writer, write something! Even a grocery list!”

See, that’s what made Hale a good mentor. Had he wished to, he could have responded to my dillydallying by thrusting a sheaf of coffee-stained ledger paper under my nose and bellowing (he did bellow, and he was also stout and grizzled), “Quit your lollygagging! I’ve drafted this entire chapbook of poems in the time you spent debating whether it was better to write in pencil or pen!”

How can I mentor these little scribes if I’m ordering them to go home and draft an essay about their dream house while I go home, boot up the laptop, and then try to see if I can beat my high score on Tetris?

I cannot — not effectively, at least. I am emitting the effluvium of fruitlessness, and with their keen little noses, they’ve caught that rank scent. Masking that odor over with references to past accomplishments or vague comments on projects I may start someday won’t disguise the fact that right now, this minute, I am staring out the window, petting the cat, or re-reading an email I sent last week because it contained a clever and original turn of phrase.

Many writers of some merit and accomplishment have paused in mid-career to comment on this issue and to offer people like me guidance. I own many books addressing this problem. My patient and encouraging spouse has recently ordered yet another such title from the library, in another unsubtle effort to prod me into productivity.

So much, in fact, has been written and sold on the topic of writer’s block that one wonders whether it is possible to simply create a niche for oneself, specializing in this genre of non-writing. Why should established authors like Eudora Welty and John Gardner get to have the last word on writer’s block? I have been writing about not writing for more than thirty years! I am an expert on the topic!

It could be the answer for me. Daily, disciplined non-writing might at least allow me to dispel this redolence of failure. I could establish a goal of 1000 words of non-writing daily. For all appearances, I would be productive. I could walk into Writers Circle like the confident, confident, dry and secure women in the deodorant commercial. I could call out, “Who has written something today?” and thrust my own hand high in the air above their unknowing little noggins.

Quite often, I feel that I should take an antidepressant as a preventative measure before reading an editorial by the Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien. Let’s just say that I’ve crossed him off my list of suspects as the perpetrator of the cheery “I Love You Cleveland” graffiti that you see on the side of the old Metro Joe’s and at other spots around my neighborhood. His writing is often >99% problem and <1% solution. That kind of talk I can get for free at my block club meeting.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to argue with a lot of his views on Cleveland’s education woes. In today’s piece, predictably titled “Schools Won’t Get What They Need,” O’Brien once again lambastes both the broken educational system and the dysfunctional community that engendered it. In a Barlett’s-quality aphorism, he quips sardonically: “Success may breed success, but it can’t match failure’s fertility.” Ain’t that the sorry truth?

So here I was this afternoon, making my way with weary resignation through his editorial, when, with only fifty words or so to go O’Brien finally offered something against which I could indignantly rail.

“Cleveland needs a radical, new idea — probably something involving long school days, short summer vacations, dormitories and work-study jobs.”

Of course. What Cleveland needs is a return to that style of quasi-prison schools depicted in Dickens novels. We don’t need no stinking Bill Denihan. We need Wackford Squeers!

Even if O’Brien’s train of thought had not been pulling into the station at that point, I would have jumped anyway. Because one thing my public school children definitely do not need is more public school.

I say this with the most sincere respect to all of the public school teachers and administrators who have gone out of their way to accommodate my children’s needs. And I even grudgingly concur with O’Brien’s implied assessment that there are children whose parents are so disinclined or ill-prepared to parent competently that their children would be safer and more enriched if they were in someone else’s care for a large part of their days and years.

But even O’Brien acknowledges that there are also children in the schools who are motivated and supported. They may not represent a majority in most schools, but they are present in some number everywhere. For the moment. If there is one sure way to extinguish the spark of genius that they represent, it would be to sentence them to even more protracted institutionalization. Even if some factory standard could be achieved by controlling most of the variables in children’s lives, it would mean that we’d need to be satisfied with merely flattening the curve — eliminating the highs as well as the lows.

We do need “a radical new idea.” But if that idea further separates children who are eager to learn from the families that are eager to teach, then it may be radical and new, but still really, really wrong.