I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(58)

No wonder there’s such a market for diaper bags with a dozen compartments and gizmos. They’re talismans against harm for new parents just wrapping their minds around the idea that the child who has existed in their dreams for months or years will now exist in the outside world, where anything and anyone might touch him. He might at any moment need a bottle or a sweater or a developmentally appropriate toy. (He might need a stroller that deflects rain, wind, and his mother’s nervousness about caring for him abroad, so far from family and friends.)

I’ve made so much fun of other parents when I’ve seen children outfitted in ridiculously high-end gear. No kid needs $20 socks. No sock delivers $20 worth of amazing.

But I know how some of those kids end up in those socks. When it comes time to send our little ones to the bus stop, we want to believe that by wrapping them in quilted goose-down jackets, packing their lunch in a temperature-controlled tote, and buttressing their growing spines with ergonomically designed backpack straps, we’re as good as holding them in our arms wherever they go. We don’t really believe these things will act as force fields . . . but what if?

This is how those of us with the best intentions—those who surely know better—end up overprotecting and overindulging our children. We’re not being idiots. Or we are, but only because we are human, and humans are animals, and animals instinctively protect their young. We humans just happen to have a lot of false protection available to us. We’re all on a slippery slope from rational to insane, and the companies who make this stuff know it.



* * *



The frantic parental need to do every little thing right starts even before a baby is born. Have you signed up for the right prenatal classes? Washed the baby clothes in the right hypo-allergenic detergent? Did you buy the right pacifier? May the Lord have mercy on your soul if you let your baby suck on a rubber nipple that causes him orthodontic misfortune later in life. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING.

If you believe there’s one right answer to every child-rearing question—and I may not so much anymore, but I sure did for at least the first decade of parenting—then you’re prone to extrapolating every choice you make. What if Junior doesn’t get into the “best” baby music class, the one where they put all the maracas and ukuleles and xylophones out on the floor and let the tots gravitate to the instrument that calls to them? Then what? He’ll never learn to play music, which means he won’t develop language and spatial skills, which means he’ll surely fail both English and math and never get into college. His hand-eye coordination will stall out, and he’ll be unable to hold a fork. All the other kids will be conducting orchestras and building robots with their amazing fine and gross motor skills, but Junior? No, Junior will eat with his hands, miss his own mouth, and stumble through the world in Velcro shoes with peanut butter on his face. All because he didn’t get on the waiting list for that music class fast enough.



* * *



We want the best for our children, even if we don’t agree on what “the best” is or how to help them get it. For my mom, that meant drilling me on words so I could win a spelling bee. For me, it means studying the crash statistics of midsize vehicles. Most parents want a good future for their kids, but the details of what and how along the way aren’t nearly as important as we think they are. Montessori or regular kindergarten? Cereal or hot breakfast? Summer camp or summer job? Some of it doesn’t matter very much. Almost none of it matters a lot.

That’s hard to see in the moment, though. I can look back now and think, I know better than to think what brand of bib they wore made a difference. But you couldn’t have told me that then.



* * *



My son has been asking about colleges lately, and we’ve done some googling, inadvertently planting algorithmic seeds for the ads that now sprout in my browser. When I turned on my laptop the other day, a promotion popped up in my sidebar for “college student insurance.” I read the ad—“We offer replacement cost coverage, including accidental damage, theft, fire, and natural disaster . . .”—and just about spat my coffee across the kitchen. Replacement cost? How do you replace a college student? Then I saw the next line, which read, “. . . for your personal electronics and other belongings.” Ah.

Maybe when I fixate on strollers and cars, I’m thinking of them like insurance, an investment in my children’s future. But I think it’s more and crazier than that. Insurance means you get a payout if something—or someone—comes to harm, and I don’t want my children to come to harm at all. I believe in resilience and learning from our pain, yes, but at the same time, counterintuitively and deep, deep down, I wonder if maybe, just this once, these kids could grow into adults unscathed, their bodies uninjured, my heart unbroken. I know it’s impossible. I think about it anyway.

I don’t know yet what we’ll do about the car, if there is to be a car at all. The sensible side of my brain reminds me that the best way to ensure my son stays safe on the roads is to give him plenty of practice and patience. But in another part of my brain—the part that talked me into the fleece seat covers for the stroller—I wonder if there might be some essential new invention on the market. I wonder if I can trade away something so small as money in exchange for something so big as his life.