All up in my grill = Someone who is “in your face”. Being excessively annoying or bothersome.

I think that defines parent (from a teenager’s perspective, anyway), don’t you?

My son Nathaniel is visiting me this week. He’s the one who went to high school in France last year. And he is going back again this year. It’s all part of the Grand Master Plan I hatched for him two years ago. The Plan involves him getting out of his house and the country, to a country where he would feel more at home and like himself. From there, he could choose a university (preferably one near me) and go on with his awesome life. And he’s doing it. He’s doing the Plan. Better still, he is choosing it.

Which brings me to all up in his grill.

Here’s the thing. The second-year-in-France would not have happened if I hadn’t amped up my grill-all-up-inning. Nathaniel was going to let inertia choose his destiny for him. Do I stay? Do I go? Not doing what it takes to go is the same as choosing to stay. And I didn’t like how it felt to watch him choose his life that way. Plenty of people choose through inertia. I know I have. I didn’t want that for him. So every few days I kept at it. Asking. Reminding. Nagging, probably. I hated doing it but at the same time, he had already made it clear that going back to France was his choice. He just needed help navigating all the hurdles to get there — visa, insurance, letters of commitment. All up in his grill.

But I can’t escape the niggling sensation that tells me I was way over-parenting this one. Let them work it out, that voice whispers. But you know what? I think it’s part of what it takes to be a good parent to be all up in their grill when it’s needed. I don’t regret it.

Where do you draw the line between all up in their grill and over-parenting/helicopter parenting?

To Jessica, 28, via text: I was admitted to hospital last night from ER. I have a mass in abdomen that looks like enlarged lymph node. Having biopsy and further CT scans in the next couple days. Should know more soon.

To Nathaniel, 16, who emailed me about flying out to visit me this week: I am in the hospital having tests and then later, The cancer has metastacized, I’ll be in treatment, I don’t know what’s next.

To Serena, 12, on Skype: The cancer I had is back. It’s Stage 4. That’s really, really bad. The medical community doesn’t give much hope and doesn’t know how to treat this very well. I will be doing all I can.

To Eric, 8, who has Down syndrome: I love you, sweet boy!

I believe our children should face the tough stuff with us. Families go through hard times together. I wished I had known as a teenager that my parents were rapidly losing money in their multi-level marketing endeavor and had three mortgages before the pressure caused them to divorce and suddenly I had to request financial aid for college. I could have made different choices. I could have supported them. At the very least, I would have known. Knowing makes a difference.

Do you tell your kids the tough stuff?

I got angry. I IM’d her:

I set aside time this morning to talk to you, to devote just to you, and you weren’t there.  Let’s set another time a different day, and make a commitment to be available at that time.

Living 3000 miles away from your kids is tough. You have to schedule talk time and connecting time. No matter how much to schedule, there is never enough time. It’s not like I can pop my head in her door and ask her to take a walk with me or see if she wants to go to the store so we can have a heart-to-heart. You know the sage parenting advice “pick your battles”? When you live 3000 miles away it means even more.

I felt bad. Disrespected. Angry and sad that I was going to miss talking to her. I had so many questions. Should I make this a teaching moment? Am I making too much of this? How much can a 12 year old take? What standards do I hold my kid to? Is making a big deal of this worth risking alienating her? When is it okay to be the bad-guy parent?

If we lived in the same house, would I be asking myself these questions?

Integrity.

We had a commitment. To me, it was a commitment. I want to teach my kids to honor their promises and to be accountable to them.

Respect.

Everyone’s time is valuable, even the 3 year old who thinks he has all the time in the world for everything. If I don’t teach Serena to respect people’s time — including her own — then who will?

Alienation.

If we lived in the same house, being the hardass once in a while would have a whole different effect than when you are the once-a-week long distance parent. Is teaching my kid something that I believe is an important life skill worth possibly pushing her away? How hard do I push? Will she believe me when I tell her that teaching her this way is one of the few ways I have left of loving her? I can’t make her sandwiches, but I can help make her a better person. Isn’t that my job?

Sacrifice.

Serena has told me that she thinks a mother should just be available and should sacrifice her wants to cook and clean and generally be there for her kids. Why shouldn’t she believe that? I WAS that for a good part of her life. A lot of people believe that mothers should sacrifice. I still caught in it…I caught myself wondering whether I should just suck it up and make myself available to Serena whenever.

Missing.

I miss the hell out of my kids. Every day. Every moment of every day. I am teaching Serena about integrity but there is a cost to me as well. We both missed out today.

I know that my example is extreme — most of you live with your kids at least some or most of the time — but finding balance in Teaching Moment vs. Possible Risks is something every parent faces. When do you decide to be okay being the bad guy?

Wait, what? Family meeting? Isn’t that like when the Brady Bunch came together to diffuse the tension created by deciding how to spend the trading stamps they saved? (spoiler: after a tense house-of-cards build-off, the boys and girls decided to give up their opposing ideas — rowboat! sewing machine! — and instead buy something the whole family could enjoy — a 13-inch color TV, w00t!)

Yeah, well, no. Family meetings are like the rainbow sprinkles of the donut world. They make everything sparklier. Tastier. More fun. Okay, maybe a food analogy doesn’t work here. But these are things you can have from holding effective family meetings:

• Unity
• Communication
• Togetherness
• Getting things done
• More love

Hey. Can you spare me a tiny detour segue thing? Because I really wanted to share this with you. And by this, I mean the awesome Jamie and Jeff’s Birth Plan over at McSweeney’s. Go on. I’ll wait. Because 1) in my world it relates to this post and 2) how can you NOT weep from pure happiness at birth plan talking points that refer to Zoey Deschanel, Oregon Tilth, Gisele Bundchen, texting, and placenta donation?

Back to the whining. So, in my world, if you take Jamie and Jeff’s Birth Plan (and all its social implications, because, this stuff has to come from somewhere) and add to it Yes, All New Parents Are Lame and Selfish But C’mon, Man, over at Jezebel, and you get a picture of the future.

Defensive, crankypants twentysomething: sorry, Jezebel writer Tracy Moore, but I judge you. Your life-as-you-knew-it is over now, and your beautifully crafted, clever essay is not going to make me believe that you are not now trying to tell your former friends (Ghosts of the Past You) that they Just Don’t Get You, because, well, you MADE A PERSON and they did not? And that making a person (read: wearing baby poop, being eye-blindingly tired, and alienating your former friends because they can’t relate to your incessant talk about baby poop) is way more meaningful, then, say, inventing the thing that brings clean water to Africa?

Dear parents who might spawn again, and dear everyone who might one day have a baby, let’s be clear on one thing: you will probably never get just how hard it is to have a kid.

It’s biology.

If we really knew how hard it is to have kids, more of us wouldn’t.

But we forget. We turn a blind eye. We smell babies’ heads and necks. We start nesting. And we just know that we can do it. We will be awesome parents! We won’t make the mistakes our parents did, or we will and it will all turn out anyway. We forget how hard, because if we didn’t? If we remembered and really thought about this giant step we make when we put Tab A into Slot B and make a person? Then maybe we wouldn’t even be here. None of us would be here.

But we do. We do the Tab A/Slot B thing. We make people. And it is really hard. Because we care and we want to do it right.

So dear New Parents, you people who are trying to figure it out and have it make sense and have your life while you do this Make a Person thing, stop trying so hard. Stop whining about it. Don’t just suck it up and stuff it down, but start thinking about trust. Capital-T Trust, the kind that comes when you tap into eons of person-making experience of our collective ancestors and you remember that the little person in the crib over there is going to make it — maybe even despite your best efforts. That little person in the crib over there has a drive to survive. That’s why his neck smells like bottled awesome. That’s why she learns to smile right about the time you’re ready to throw her out the window from the crying, but you don’t because your heart is melted into a puddle on the floor and you are more in love with her than you ever thought you could love another person, because this person is part of you and that never stops.

Stop whining. Start Trusting.

I miss Nora Ephron already. You’ve probably heard the news that she died yesterday —  the pseudofeminist screenwriter and playwright responsible for the phrase, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The 90’s are over. Meg Ryan’s lips now have their own orbits.

Nora’s most memorable characters mostly weren’t mothers. In fact, it’s safe to say that any of her characters played by Meg Ryan would have made awful mothers. Sally Albright from When Harry Met Sally…? Terrible mother, if she had been a mother. Julie from Julie & Julia? A trainwreck of a mother. If she had been one.

Still, Nora Ephron totally got what motherhood was. Or more specifically, what motherhood had become — not a state of being as much as a thing that you did:

Parenting was not simply about raising a child, it was about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a foie gras goose, altering, modifying, modulating, manipulating, smoothing out, improving.

–”I Feel Bad About My Neck”

And now, motherhood is reduced to what we do:

Here’s what a parent is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what involved in being a parent: You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. – “I Feel Bad About My Neck”‘

The 90’s changed the face of parenting. Mothering. Baby Mozart. Prenatal preschool applications.

Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse. –”Heartburn”

Maybe Nora Ephron didn’t write mothers into her screenplays because she was telling women to be something different, to do something else with this idea of motherhood.

I like to think about what might have happened to mothering had more women heard the message Nora Ephron delivered in her commencement address to the Wellesley’s 1996 graduating class. Here’s how she ended it (but read the whole thing):

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives.

So what makes a good parent?

According to the study, the parents that raised kids who grew up to have traits of persistence, hope, independence, and self-esteem used a child-centered approach combining structure with a strong heart connection. These parents used techniques of day-to-day involvement, listening, nurturing, and encouraged autonomy and decision-making. They set appropriate boundaries and applied consistent and fair discipline, but often used their kids’ failures as a teaching tool rather than as a punishment opp.

I know, right?  Tell us something we don’t already know?

The parenting style the study points to is called Authoritative. Not to be confused with Authoritarian (hi, Dad). And it…rocks. Here’s a list of traits:

• high expectations of maturity
• understand how child is feeling
• helps child regulate emotions
• independence is enouraged
• (within appropriate limits)
• lots of listening
• kids make many decisions
• and are allowed to fail, sometimes
• fosters child’s natural talents + strengths

Listen, the very thought of one of my children being molested or sexually abused by an adult makes me want to throw up. But the thought of punching someone in the head until they die? That makes me want to throw up more.

I don’t think this is a case of which is more important, a child’s life — sure to suck mightily for years and years after sexual abuse and probably require therapy, anger management classes, and emotional work to have a hope of healing — or the life of the kind of person who would attempt to sexually abuse a four-year-old, for gosh sakes (what kind of terrible person does this?), but it does. It does beg the question. So I will ask: whose life is worth more? And who gets to decide?

You could argue that the abuser opted out of being treated on par with other human beings when he stepped over the line — way over the line — and attempted to abuse a little girl.

You could argue that, and you’d be right.

But what about the dad?

Shouldn’t the dad have had, I don’t know, more self control? He KILLED a guy. As in, dead. The guy does not get to live his life.

I would do almost anything to protect my children. I suspect most of you would do the same. But kill a man? Unless the man seemed bent on killing ME or my family? Like I said, the thought makes me want to throw up. I can’t quite wrap my head over going from hey-get-that-guy-away-from-my-daughter-NOW to bashing in his head, repeatedly.

Can you? How far would you go to protect your kids?

Sigh.

Maybe I should have cloned myself a Mini-Me.

Because I TRIED to make my kids like everything I like, really I did. I bought Tinker Toys and trotted out my old childhood Breyer horses. I spent hours trolling websites that help people like me recall the names of their favorite childhood books so I could read “Shadow Castle” and “Mystery of the Green Cat” to my spawn. I found copies of every Rankin-Bass Christmas-themed animated film.

But you know what?

Some of those things my kids liked. Some they did not. And they liked a ton of things that they discovered all on their own (hi, Star Wars, I’m talking to you).

Hah, you’re probably laughing now. I know this stuff isn’t rocket science. Kids like what they like. We influence them, sure, but they are still quirky little autonomous beings with their own quirky tastes.

Last night a mom-friend was talking about her daughter’s TV tastes. We talked about the fine line we parents walk letting our kids have “their” thing. Like, how much do you join in and take an interest without co-opting the whole thing? Or the flip side, not being involved enough and then finding out after the fact that your kid’s interest in animal husbandry has suddenly translated into adopting a goat for a year?

I think kids should have their thing. Many things, if possible.

I also believe that part of our job as parents is to show them what our things are — what we are passionate about.

After that is the tricky part. When you dreamed of having a daughter who shares your love of horses, of bonding over long rambling dusty trail rides but she wants to spend her weekends sitting on the floor in the bathroom painting watercolors and writing Twilight fan fic, there’s a wee pang in your heart, as much as you love your kid for the quirky autonomous little person that she is.

And then what if your kid’s passionate thing is something you just don’t think is awesome? For whatever reason? Like in the movie “Billy Elliot” about the kid whose passion was ballet dancing, much to the chagrin of his burly macho dad. Movies are full of this stuff — plucky, determined kids following their hearts despite the wishes of their parents, yet winning the parent’s love in the end. I think reality is less golden, less happy-ending. We parents really do have a hard time letting go of our dreams for our kids.

How do you handle the [weird, random, outrageous] tastes of your kids? Live and let live? Keeping a finger in the pie? I’ve noticed that at about age 12, kids seem to really need to assert their differences from us parents, so I encourage it while trying to keep communication. Not always easy, is it?

My mom can’t remember what she did that day, or what she ate for lunch. She doesn’t know her roommate’s name. She remembers that a bus takes them into town from time to time and she can buy things. I imagine her standing at a glass counter, holding a little coin purse stuffed with a few folded bills, sliding coins across the counter to buy a weekly candy bar. In my imagination I can see the five-year-old Janey doing the same thing, only back then it was a nickel she slid across the counter instead of — how much do candy bars cost these days, anyway?

Some people would say I have lost my mother. I think I finally see who she is.

Women of a certain age — in our 30’s and 40’s and older — are having similar experiences as mine. I call it mothering our mothers. I wonder how you feel about that.

Not every woman’s mother develops Alzheimer’s like my mom has, but most of us go through an interesting journey with our mothers. When we are young, we are the child and they are the grownup. That part of our lives and the roles we play then are pretty clear. Then as adults we cross into peer territory, if we are lucky: two women comparing lives and supporting one another. And then, later still, the weird part: as they age, our mothers relax and even regress a bit while we grow wiser and stronger. That’s when it feels like mothering our mothers.

I didn’t recognize this switch in my relationship with my mother until it was painfully clear that she needed help (her house was ankle deep in piled-up mail and cat poop, a reality she had shamefacedly hidden in our phone calls but could no longer hide when I went to visit). But looking back I can see now that she needed mothering long before I knew it. But at 77 she needs mothering now. Lots of it. And I suspect that she is not alone in that need, that many of our mothers need our mothering, even if they are eyebright and chipper and playing tennis into their 80’s.

Many women naturally sink into the role of mothering their mothers. Why wouldn’t we? We are already mothering our children. Calling your mom to remind her of a doctor’s appointment or ask her how her new shoes are feeling isn’t a big stretch beyond wiping up a spilled bowl of Cheerios or listening to your preschooler tell a long story about the imaginary rabbit he saw on the playground.

I still wonder how this mother-your-mother thing works out for other women. I know that for me, it’s been poignant. I saw that my mother would never be the mother I had always hoped she would be. Instead, I see a woman who tells jokes to the nursing home staff and who talks to strangers and treats them as friends. This is a huge jump from the mother I remember who used to be a recluse and nervous around people. Now I think I see the real Janey, and I am so glad.