Maybe parenting is like a sling shot.

Maybe parenting is like a sling shot.

You wind it up, pull it back, pull it, pull it tight, and then BOING you let it go soaring through thin air. No longer in your control. All the while you were winding you thought that was the hard part, only to find out that no, the hard part is letting go, the hard part is watching.

My pregnancies were spent in the subways of New York City. I worked full time because I thought I had to, although in hindsight I'm not sure I did. Bob and I were in the rare position of having cheap housing and low expenses while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I suppose I worked because I wanted to. I wanted to be important, and to be important you worked. Or so I believed. Truth be told, I'd simply  never not worked, although these days I'd sure like to give that a try.

My OB-GYN clinic was located equidistant between our home in Brooklyn and my office in Manhattan. I arranged that on purpose so I could take the subway to appointments and then get back on and head on into work, no matter how big my belly was. I'll tell you that the thousands of other people who shared my R-train route were generally very kind, always embarrassing me by offering me their seats if I was standing, grabbing on to a pole for balance. Being from the Midwest, I would have preferred that me and my fleshy beach ball go unnoticed, but that doesn't happen in the city. Same thing when my belly weight threw me off balance and I toppled like a weeble on the corner of 26th and Park Avenue South, in my navy blue maternity office-wear. I was hoping to quietly wobble upright unnoticed as the zillions of people around me marched like ants to their workplaces. But for one thing, the laws of physics wouldn't allow me up, and for another thing, those nasty New Yorker's simply came to my rescue and pulled me up. I headed to my my 8th floor desk space  with one of those classic knee scrapes a 3-year-old kid would get on a playground.

When my babies were three months old, respectively, I went back to work. I felt lucky because I knew many other women who had less time. Still, I should have stayed home longer, even a couple months longer, but that's another blog post. Of course the question hit me: what's the point of having kids if you're going to hand them off to someone else? I mostly brushed off these questions and a wise colleague advised me that kids need you more when they are teenagers, so work now and save up the career capital until later.

Even as I had questions, the most amazing childcare provider emerged. A new friend in Brooklyn, who like me, was from Minnesota. She understood perfectly the whole Midwest-to-East Coast dynamic. Plus, get this, she was a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Yes, my daycare provider was a practicing mental health counselor. Her skills constantly came in handy for all of us. She became first in a long line of people we've enlisted to care for our children. For the most part, it's all worked out surprisingly well. (I really don't know how anyone can say they do anything independently. It's metaphysically impossible.)

I no longer believe in so called "career capital" but my colleague was right. I feel like for the past 15 years all Bob and I've been doing is winding up the sling shot. We thought we were doing the hard part, but we were just pulling tight the energy so we can soon let it go, sending it into eternity. Everyday is less control, and loss of control is -- well, I don't know, isn't that a basis for mental breakdown? Hello parents of young children, you're all headed for inevitable insanity. No, I'm not saying that, but maybe to some degree I am. No, really, this is just how it is with me.

It has taking me 15 years to come face to face with parental loss of control, as our kids prepare for 11th and 8th grade, as my daughter learns to drive, as my son becomes more mysterious, as we are a few short years away from college and the (inhale) empty nest. My friends tell me the loss of control continues as children find partners, lose partners, have their own babies. "My son, the father" is an essay by Anne Lamott that I'll be using next Monday, in the first night of teaching my composition class at Des Moines Area Community College. Even now, witnessing my own kids taking care of younger kids is something I'm not fully prepared for.

My young niece is experiencing parental loss of control far too early as today she is being induced because her baby was diagnosed in utero with a terminal condition, anencephaly. She and her partner will lose their baby, who they've named Charlie King Ball, at birth, which will be within the next 12 hours or so.

Maybe parenting has to be like a sling shot, creating a force so strong we cannot contain it. Because if we could contain it, we would. And children, apparently, sadly, cannot be contained.

With love, T