Too Invested

I'm overly invested in the lives of my children. I don't want to be, to have my heart-rate soar with each athletic success or struggle, to lie awake at night after their competitions, my mind spinning with adjustments to their swim strokes or turns. I know too much about their school day, the fracas at the locker or the poor result on a math test, and it's difficult to let their emotional backwash spill over me and stay calm.   Given my personality, I thought this might be a problem when I first endeavored to get pregnant, but I hoped that diluting my passion with three children would prevent me from being too tied up with any one. Perhaps that has helped each kid individually, but what I feel is the emotional engagement in triplicate.

Recently I've discussed my dilemma with neighborhood moms, who confess to similar problems. Highly educated, trained for the workforce, and yet moved into SAHM space or part-time work space by various needs of the family, we may have ambition and drive and skills that aren't put to use outside the home. Or we work full-time, and somehow spread our energies across an eighteen-hour day, between work, home, spouse and children. If free time exists, we look for projects that fit within the school day, so we're free to drive endless carpools. In our conversations, it seems clear that we don't want to be this involved, know this much, or be so affected by the emotional roller-coaster of childhood.  Were our parents this caught up in the minutiae of our lives? In retrospect it appears they weren't, that this particular hyper-vigilance arouse out of our generation, but perhaps I'm wrong.

In the January 29 edition of The New Yorker, the Book Review covers books on parenting. This line, by Adam Gopnik, sums up my dilemma:

"The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us (Americans) escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise - in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. Until we get to that final destination, we'll never be apart." (65 - 66).

As our family moves toward college with our first, my wrists have faint bruising from those handcuffs. We signed Aden up for a college application boot camp at the high school, hoping to empower her to complete all of her applications, draft all of her essays, without our assistance. We try to stay laid-back as she reviews colleges and universities, offering up our budgetary constraints and our own experiences, mostly hoping to relieve her tension, persuade her that she could do well anywhere. I want to release her handcuffs now,  give my overly stressed heart time to breathe and prepare for the moment when she goes off on her own - and leave me with only have one handcuff on each hand.