Paper Moon

Parenting is a controlled illusion and an illusion of control.  We struggle so much with teenagers because we feel as though we're losing control, but in reality, I realize already, we've never had control.  Never, not for one moment of a child's existence.  We snap inwardly at parents with unruly children, muttering, "Control your child!" or "He's completely out of control!"  Yet actual control is not what we ended up wresting for, but rather a sort of cotton candy control, all puffed and spun and empty.

I'm not sure why we're so surprised, so baffled and wounded, when our elaborately constructed, self-proclaimed authority comes crashing down around our ears.  Perhaps it's because we have spent years and years carrying this sense of control around like a talisman against all the uncertainty of the world, comforted by the steady weight of it, only to discover when called upon to use it that it's merely like Dumbo's magic feather.  We mistake control for influence because influence is not enough.  In reality, I've never had control of you, even when you were in the womb.  You've been thwarting my meager attempts at authority, the authority of my body and my mind, since you were two tiny cells.  I couldn't dictate when you wriggled, when you pressed outward against my ribs as though you were attempting to blow out a wall and enlarge your inadequate accommodations, when you hiccuped.

Although pregnancy is the large black underscore for loss of control, it's really when the illusion takes root.  All things become about shaping the production process, selling the idea of indirect control by molding fixations on the raw materials delivered.  Lunch meats with nitrates should be avoided, eat lots of fish to assist with brain development but only certain types and not too often lest the excessive levels of mercury you're bound to ingest lodge in a developing brain, avoid varnishes and stains and aerosols...the lists and concerns go on and on and on.  The physical weight of your body was nothing compared to the weighty sense of responsibility I felt at every moment, with every decision.  We sell ourselves on the idea of our control over you so that we can then sell you on it as well.  Converts, it is well known, make the best evangelists....

You proclaimed your independence immediately, peeing gallons and gallons the moment you were handed to me, the umbilical cord, the last vestige of control still pulsing feebly, and any sense I had of true influence was wiped away.  I couldn't make you do anything, even when all you did were three or four things.  If I tried to make you eat, you'd gnaw and pull and malinger until my breasts were raw.  If I tried to make you sleep, one of us would end up enraged with a sense of frustration so completely debilitating that it was clearly about more than just sleep.  (Perhaps this is why sleep-training is the parenting minefield that it is, because it's our first attempt to control.  The stakes are high and we're still trying to convince ourselves that it's not a fool's errand.)  Even your limited mobility was beyond my control.  I could smother you with kisses, running my fingertips over your forehead and eyelids and ears, all your perfectly small, perfectly working parts, but the moment I tried to remove snot from your nose or the salt rime of a tear from your cheek, your tiny neck suddenly developed the range of motion of a snapping turtle's, writhing and extending with a sense of life-threatening urgency toward any avenue of escape.  I soon realized that containment, not control, was all I had to offer, restricting your little body in a protective nest of pillows, bouncing and patting to delay the onset of a ferocious bout of needs, bearing you on my shoulder even as your stick-thin arms and legs moved inexorably against me.

Containing you is all I'll ever be able to do, channeling as effectively as possible the flow of your energy.  I no more control you than riverbanks control a river.  The river can be compliant for a time, gliding smoothly along firmly established banks (although it's often undercutting them at a steady, deliberate pace), but periodically, it will overflow, spilling out in unanticipated directions.  Right now, I see you in my mind as the smooth-as-glass Androscoggin, lake-like with a broad, placid, friendly flatness, moving along with a steady pace, reflecting all the sunlight spilled across it.  With time, you'll reach the shores of civilization, gaining in intent and purpose and speed, but there'll come a time when you'll rip through our lives like the roiling mountain rivers I knew growing up, where the rivers have their own lives, independent of the whims of those on the riverbanks, wending through rock and forging their own channels, drifting along peaceable for stretches of time, only to rise up suddenly, violently.  Eventually, the containment of the hillsides only makes the water deeper, faster, and sometimes more destructive.  All I can ever do as a parent is to try to prevent the damage of extended, unrestricted flooding, to shepherd you along the way, mitigating any potential property damage and delivering you as intact as possible.