Parenthood

Father’s Day


As we were preparing Rob’s carb-laden breakfast in bed tray this morning, Katy diligently prepared the card she’d picked out for him, a Transformer theme with Optimus Prime on the front that said “Transformer, unite.”, or something like that.

I had written out what she wanted to say on another piece of paper and she copied it proudly.

I love you Daddy.

I had checked with her first on whether it was to be “Daddy” or “Rob”. She mainly calls him Rob but there are more and more instances of her addressing him as Dad or Daddy and she mostly refers to him that way.

She wanted to go with daddy.

“I need to practice saying daddy,” she told me.

Interesting. A few months ago she’d resolved to call him “Poppi” like Dora the Explorer does with her father. That really went nowhere. Now it is dad and with Jordan living at home again for a while, I don’t doubt that her calling Rob dad all the time will speed up Katy’s processing a bit more.

People who know our story – Katy’s and mine – like family and close friends – are thrilled that she has a father. They don’t seem to think that I have pushed Will, Katy’s biological father, out of the picture by allowing her to form a father/daughter relationship with my new husband. They see it as a win-win. I have found love and contentment and Katy has a father who loves her.

Given my own state of being as an adopted child, I don’t understand the whole “biology” thing. I have talked about this before. The people who love and care for you are family. The people who raise you are your parents. Biology is not a guarantee and its worship in our society leads to the devaluing of families who fall outside the “norm”, leading children who don’t have biological ties to their parents feeling “less than”.

I remind Katy still from time to time – and she me – how lucky we are to have had first Will and now Rob in our lives. We talked a bit about Will today at lunch. He liked to cook and she found this very interesting. She hasn’t forgotten him and is unlikely to do so. Both Rob and I keep Will very much alive for her through the wall of photos she has in her bedroom and our willingness to discuss him.

She isn’t the least bit confused and her early conflict has faded into an acceptance that this is just how our lives are. Children are much more capable of an expansive heart and an open mind than we adults are, I think.

Free Range Kids


My parents were free rangers. Their active non-involvement in much of my childhood and that of my younger siblings would earn them scorn and visits from the CPS today. Just how little my folks were aware of my activities is most evident today when I choose to freely reminisce about my escapades within their hearing. Dad just raises an eyebrow. Not because he is surprised but to let me know that although he never had proof at the time, he suspected I wasn’t any less adventuresome or reckless than the younger ones. I was just smarter. My mother professes shock and sometimes horror, but it is quickly forgotten. After all I didn’t die, wasn’t even maimed, and the police didn’t show up at the door.

Okay, the last part isn’t entirely true. The police actually showed up at my high school and requested that the girls’ dean get me from class so they could “ask a few questions”. Fortunately the dean was a woman not easily intimidated by a uniform. School policy required that she inform my parents first and my mother kept her cool enough to refuse permission. They could come to our house and question me there if they liked. That never happened however because as luck would have it I was still underage – by two whole months – and did not possess a fake ID (my two friends who did get hauled into the dean’s office both swore to that) and so I escaped being charged with underage alcohol possession and the older brother of the our friend who sold me the beer lost his job. Oh, and the little matter of transporting alcohol across state lines was dealt with by issuing a stern warning – to my two friends. I never did see a policemen over this matter nor did I receive a school punishment as was the practice of the day at my uber-conservative Catholic high school. My father told the dean that he would be handling the discipline of his daughter thank you very much and because he is a Virgo, they nodded and let the matter drop.

I was grounded for two weeks, could only go to work and school and spent the rest of my time doing what I always did – read, write and listen to music. It’s very hard to punish a Sagittarian. Even without TV (which I wasn’t banned from) I could retreat for hours into a book or my writing. How do you ground a child from her mind?

Free ranging is the new rage in parenting. A backlash against hyper-parenting and helicopter parents, free rangers let their children play unsupervised in their own yards and neighborhoods, walk to school and stay home alone once they reach a reasonable age. Free rangers are probably products of the same type of childhood that most of my peers had. The ones where we got ourselves to ball practice after school and babysat our younger siblings when our parents went out with friends on a Friday night.

I knew I was an overprotective parent but when my five year old informed me that she didn’t need me waiting for her at the bus stop after school because it was right in front of the next door neighbor’s house, I knew that it was time to let go and step away from the kid. I was only slightly older than she is when I trooped up the hill behind our house and disappeared into the next neighborhood over every morning to catch the bus to school for first and second grade. As a second grader, I was even in charge of my younger grade one sister. As a ten year old, I babysat my siblings ages 8, 7 and 5 when my folks went out for dinner. Nothing terrible ever happened and no, it wasn’t just luck.

Parents today have been indoctrinated into the hall of horrors where parenting is concerned. Death or dismemberment lurks with every unattended moment. Trailer parks and service industry jobs are all that can result from not overseeing homework diligently. All that has been really accomplished with this nonsense has been a few generations worth of kids who haven’t the coping skills or the social skills to move out and live on their own (the average age at which a child leaves home in Canada now is 32).

Children need freedom, within acceptable limits for their ages, in which to learn to think and do for themselves. Free range parenting? It’s about time we got back to it.

Non-moms and the UnAmerican Family


I miss on out all sorts of atrocities because I don’t watch television. One that I recently discovered via Girl with Pen was a recent NBC show that culminated on Mother’s Day called America’s Favorite Mom. It’s one of those American Idol-ish contest shows with a “theme” and “ordinary people” contestants and that perennial American favorite, audience participation via voting. Or something awful like that. The reality show as contest genre is about as simple-minded as entertainment gets these days. I would personally rather watch reruns of Happy Days after Fonzie jumped the shark than any of these 15 minutes of fame shows. Read Full Article