If You're Old Enough to Reach the Spoon Drawer...

I was on the East Coast for business from Tuesday through yesterday, hanging with some colleagues I don't usually see.  Good times and productive meetings were had by all. 

Yesterday we were at lunch, and we got to talking about this blog.  Some wanted to know what I wrote about.  When you say, "I write about parenting," I think it conjures up a bunch of images of poop stories and birthday party photos.  I felt the need to clarify that while I do that all the time, I'm also interested in parenting as an art and science. 

One of the women I work with has five children and is a single mom.  Her kids are all above the age of 10, but her hands-off approach is still fascinating to me.  Her mantra is, "when you're old enough to reach the spoon drawer, you're old enough to feed yourself."  This extends to a lot of other areas, and she said you could plop her 17-year-old down in the wilderness and he could fend quite well for himself.

While I'll never be quite that hands-off, I do hope I won't be like the mom on Supernanny the other day still brushing her six-year-old's teeth for him.  It is hard to know when to help and when to step back and let your child sort of struggle through on her own.  I imagine if I had five kids and was doing it on my own, I'd probably just rock beneath the stairs in the fetal position most of the time, but I did think a lot about what my colleague said this morning when the little angel announced she was going to wear her Cinderella underwear to school today for the first time ever.

We've made it through our share of Target trips and dinners out wearing the underwear, but any time the little angel puts them on and then, oh, sits on the couch, I have to take deep breaths.  This is not because I have fabulous furniture - I don't - or because I'm afraid she's going to poop - she almost never poops anywhere but the potty, even when she is wearing her diapers.  I'm not that frightened by a little urine.  It's mostly this idea I have in my head that somehow I can control whether or not she has an accident by asking her incessantly if she has to go, or seeing the change that comes across her face when she's about to let it fly all over the hardwood floor.  I need to get over that, and the spoon drawer conversation was useful in that way. 

We talked a lot about how your children are their own little people, and not necessarily the reflection on ourselves we tend to think they are.  My new boss told a story about how his now MIT-attending son went through a phase during which he had to wear five t-shirts at all times.  They just went with it, and eventually he wore less clothing than a homeless person.  It does make you think.  Some things, like using drugs or alcohol or beating up other children at The Emerald City because they won't share the coveted pink ball, are bad and something we don't want reflecting on our parenting skills.  While our children may still do those things, those behaviors may be symptoms of a larger problem we could help with.  Other things, though, like the little angel's need to wear her clear Cinderella heels (gah) to a restaurant on Saturday night or having to take her out to eat with friends when she's covered from head to toe in tempura paint are not necessarily a reflection of me, my personal hygiene or my fashion sense.  They are simply her being her, and I can't force her to wear matching clothes of my choosing forever. Eventually she's going to go Goth or shave her head or insist on piercing her nose, and those things may not be worth the battle.  They may be her needing to express herself in her own way.  While I don't intend her to leave the house looking like a streetwalker while she's under my roof, I will need to work on my need to have other people think she looks cute.

I'm sure most mothers want their kids to look or behave in a manner consistent with their own style of dress or speech.  It's not evil or wrong to feel compelled to spit-shine your toddler's face.  But there is a fine line between wanting your child to look presentable and clean and dressed appropriately for the weather and needing to exert control over their appearance.  I probably won't be the mother who refuses to drive her children to school on a cold day because they have hats, dammit, but I don't want to be the mother who insists her daughter wear a dress on Christmas because THAT'S WHAT YOU DO.

So anyway, I didn't have time to shop for the little angel, so I brought her one of the plastic seafood table decorations from a big group meeting.  She promptly named the crab Sebastian and took him to The Emerald City with her today.   He can't reach the spoon drawer yet, so she shared her banana.  I think it was big of her.