except from NOW I SEE YOU
(St. Martin’s, June 24, 2014)
When Rosa took her first steps, my instinct was to push her back down.
I didn’t do it of course.
Still, the fear that filled me was powerful and persuasive.
“You are screwed!” Fear cackled. “Good luck with that.”
Immediately, Guilt popped up, sounding eerily like my mother.
“What kind of a mother lets Fear in, at a moment like this?” she chastised, clucking her teeth, “Some people should never have kids.”
Then, just in the nick of time, Joy rushed in, doing back handsprings and waving her pompoms madly, and soon I was shrieking and applauding, oohing and ahhing, and repeating incessantly “What a BIG GIRL!” which is precisely the protocol detailed in the Milestones section of the Mother of the Year Handbook.
This will be fine, I thought to myself, I can handle this.
I was, of course, dead wrong. I couldn’t even begin to handle it.
The problem wasn’t just that Rosa was learning to walk, it was that in doing so, she was coming into her own, blossoming into the girl she was destined to be.
People have different names for the category of child my daughter fit into as a toddler. Laissez-faire folks called her “a free spirit,” artistic types considered her a “firecracker”, the practical-minded thought she was “high-maintenance” and old-school disciplinarians deemed her a “hellion.” But the phrase just about everyone agreed on is “a handful.” When Rosa was between the ages of one and three, you could count on someone observing, “Wow, that one is really a handful, huh?” every single time we stepped outside.
I was spared having to think of a reply because I’d be too busy grabbing her by her collar before she stepped into oncoming traffic, or yanking her back from petting a dead rat, or knocking a shard of glass out of her hand before she swallowed it.
Don’t get me wrong. From the start, I loved my daughter’s exuberance. I was awe-struck and inspired by her spirit. Which is why it was really too bad that I had to spend every waking second trying to crush it.
What else could I do? I wanted to keep the kid around, after all. Shielding that whirling dervish from harm would have been an uphill battle for a parent with all their primary senses intact, much less a mom who was losing her vision. The deterioration of my eyesight had been slow but steady since my diagnosis at nineteen with a degenerative retinal disease; by the time Rosa was mobile, I’d lost all my peripheral vision, so that I was like a horse wearing blinders—except not just on the sides, but on top of my eyes and below too. If I wasn’t looking directly at Rosa—nice and close, too—I wouldn’t catch whatever new trouble she was in up to her elbows. Take the tunnel vision, thrown in a kid with zero impulse control, factor an older sibling into the equation, and what you get is one big problem.
It’s not a problem unique to visually-impaired people. In fact, everyone that has more than one child but still only one set of eyes encounters the same challenge. Every parent has, at one point or another, lost track of their child in some crowded, public space, whether it’s a playground or a zoo or a supermarket—not in a serious way, not long enough to call the authorities or anything, but long enough to make you scared, sick-to-your-stomach, bargaining-with-God scared. It happens to everyone. It’s just that it happened to me on a regular basis.
I hadn’t run into too much trouble keeping up with Lorenzo, even with my tunnel vision, but he was a clingy kid with a strong Back-to-Mommy boomerang.
Rosa was another story entirely. Before she could walk, she cleaved to me, but only because I was her ride. Once she got mobile, she was off like a bottle rocket, and I swear I could hear her hissing, “See you suckas!” as she whizzed past, shimmering golden hair flowing behind her like melted metal.
So if Rosa vanished from my field of vision it was reasonable to assume that she was making tracks for the playground gate, and after that, who knew where?
Sometimes though, Rosa vanished from my field of vision by just sitting down or taking a few steps away from me. Then she’d fall into one of my blind spots, which kept growing larger and less manageable like a run in a stocking. She’d be gone, even though she was just an arm’s length away. The only way to prevent this from happening was to never, ever take my eyes off her, not even to look at my watch, not even to retrieve a dropped sippy cup.
Unfortunately, this made me what I’d learned from the Park Slope parenting listserv was called a helicopter parent. A “Helicopter Mom“ is one who hovers, like a helicopter, over her child, providing constant supervision and surveillance. The opposite is a “Free Range Mom,” who gives her children the freedom to explore, manage themselves, and make mistakes.
My mother has a different word for the latter, and like much of her lexicon, it’s not fit for print. According to my mother, you don’t just hand over freedom to kids; you keep a vise-like grip on their freedom until they wrest if from your cold, dead hands. And even then, you haunt them until their dying day, hovering over them from the afterlife.
When I hear fellow parents hearken back to the good old days when they were kids—how things were different then and they could walk to school alone, could play stickball in the street, could run to the corner for mom’s cigarettes—I am dumbfounded. I didn’t even get to take candy from strangers on Halloween. My mother not only chaperoned our trick-or-treating in Bensonhurst, she chauffeured us to it, driving us from one family friend’s house to the next. And even then, she checked our candy before we ate it, because while one could be fairly certain Nonny’s 87-year-old neighbor didn’t put razor blades in the Twix, one could never be positive.
“Don’t you trust me?” I’d protest, desperate to escape her force field.
“Of course I trust you!” she’d exclaim. “It’s everyone else I don’t trust!”
One of the biggest perks of becoming a mother is that you get to show your own mother how much better you can do the job. When I was pregnant, I thought that one of the ways I was going to do this was by affording my children the freedoms I hadn’t been given. Let them learn from their own mistakes. Give them space to grow.
And I might have, too, if it hadn’t been for my eyes. I might have shaped up to be one cool, confident, relaxed mom, standing on the sidelines at the playground, sipping my latte while chatting about gluten-free snacks or whatever the hell SuperMoms talk about, looking up every so often to locate the kids, but generally doing my own thing and letting them do theirs. Sounds dreamy. I bet my hair would have been fuller and my skin clearer and my ass tighter, too.
Instead, I ended up a greasy-haired, baggy-eyed, wilted-ass ,helicopter mom.
I suppose there are worse things.
Except that hovering is too gentle a word for what I did. “Pursuing” is more like it. As soon as I set those kids free, my goal was to catch them back up again, which entailed endless Keystone Cop chase scenes on the playground.
I don’t get to select a parenting style, I realized, I don’t have that luxury.
As I gradually lost vision, I gradually lost choices, too. It was always little, trivial things, none of them important except when you put them all together. I didn’t get to choose whether to wear heels or flats anymore; it was hard enough handling stairs and curbs in sneakers, much less teetering on four-inch stilts. I’d stopped wearing eye shadow after the third time a friend pointed out it was a bit, um, uneven; now I was forced to go bare because it was better than wearing a clown face. If it was a rainy day I couldn’t opt to take the kids to their doctor’s appointment with the car; it was always the bus.
One little concession that didn’t feel little at all was not being able to choose what kind of watch to wear. The Swiss Army watch my grandmother had given to me at college graduation had been getting hard for me to decipher and when I’d gone to Target to replace it, I’d found there was exactly one watch with numbers large enough for me to read and it was about the biggest eyesore in manufacturing history: An oversized round watch face studded with rhinestones, with a pink pleather band. The only choice I had was whether I’d hide it under my sleeve or wear it with pride, as if it was a fully intentional fashion choice.
I chose the latter—with the watch, at least. As far as my parenting was concerned, I was still trying frantically to keep the ugly truth of my blindness hidden under my sleeve. Little hints of it kept peeking out though, like when I knocked the toddler down, and I knew I couldn’t keep it under wraps for much longer. The trouble was, after so many years, the hiding gesture had become instinct.
Pull the sleeve down. Cover up.
Nicole C. Kear’s memoir, Now I See You, comes out June 24th by St. Martin’s Press. You can order the book and find more info at nicolekear.com.
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