When You're No Longer The Most Important Person In Your Kids' Lives

Do you even exist anymore?

Years ago, my kids’ dad--we’ll call him Zack--thought building a pool in the backyard would be a great idea. After all, we lived in Houston, Texas, which is classified as “humid subtropical” and hotter than cow piss on a flat rock. Our son was six, our daughter not even two, and Zack was very crafty at recruiting not just our own children, but all the kids on the block, to overturn my one dissenting opinion.

There was only so much adorable pleading I could take before caving in, but with one important caveat: my daughter, Kate, had to first learn how to swim. So, twice a week, I put her in a swim diaper and swimsuit (a Hawaiian print with a fuchsia-colored lei and a grass “skirt”--cuter than a speckled pup) and drove her forty miles to the only natatorium that accepted children under the age of two.

Kate was a born water bug. She paddled away on her little boogieboard, chortling with glee. Within a few months, I felt confident enough to green light the pool, and from that point forward, the sound of splashing and screaming became a constant at our house. I’d keep vigil under the palapa, fanning myself. The pool was full of children, day and night, and there was Kate, small but mighty in her little grass skirt and pink inflatable doughnut. “You go there,” she’d tell her brother, pointing with a pudgy digit toward the shallow end. Then splash, she’d fearlessly hurtle herself off the rocks into the clear turquoise water.

It’s true that motherhood will cause you to lose your mind, but your soul is another thing entirely, and my soul had fitfully discovered the secret to life. It was having children to love. It was exactly this moment, a balmy summer night with the pool lights making glittery diamonds on the water, the smell of hotdogs roasting on the grill, watching my kids frolic happily in the pool with their friends. It was my daughter’s independence, her sassy swimsuit, her little legs splashing in the water. It was watching my son struggle to reconcile his natural gregariousness with his need to be alone.

I cried. As I think of it now, I’m crying again.

“Oh, my heavens, what’s wrong?” one of the neighborhood mommies asked me.

I smiled at her through my tears, a smile meant to reassure her I could still be trusted and hadn’t completely lost my mind. “I don’t want this summer to end,” I told her. “I want these years to last forever, but they won’t. Even if I’m awake for all of it, every moment, my kids will still grow up. They won’t need me anymore. And I don’t know how I will survive that pain.”

To my surprise, she understood. I could see it in her eyes, this kind woman who was so different from me. She and her husband had four kids and a Christian summer camp. Her kitchen was spotless. She made parenting look easy. I felt downright disreputable around her squeaky clean, up-with-people, you-can-do-it positivity.

She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “You forget they’re going to be teenagers.”

***

My son (far right) with his high school graduation buddies.

I grew up with a horror of suburbia.

Suburbia felt menacing to me, drowsy yet full of secrets. In Houston during those years, our neighborhood was almost exclusively white. Men whose testicles were kept in a jar under the sink wore black socks and sandals while mowing the lawn. They looked sweaty, a little desperate, and when an attractive woman walked by, hungry. Their wives would sometimes appear in doorways, and a mutual indifference seemed to fall over them both, a subtle resignation to where they were in life. Maybe kids, bills, a mortgage steamrollered the enjoyment of each other’s company right out of you.

Always, I was conscious of Jack Kevorkian’s dictum: children make you a slave to society.

When I moved to the Houston suburbs in 1998, my two-year-old son planted firmly on my hip, I hadn’t forgotten that horror. I just didn’t care anymore. The need to feather a nest was too strong, and the suburbs were what we could afford, even if I didn’t belong there. It was all about making nice with the neighborhood mommies so they’d let their kids play with my kids. I sold myself down the river and was happy to do it, so long as it got my kids invited to birthday parties.

That included ignoring the fact that my kids’ dad couldn’t keep his pants zipped. That he’d gotten fired from his EMS job for sexual harassment. That his new business partner whose wife had been a runway model roofied waitresses and then had sex with them on his desk.

To be fair, I didn’t know these things at the time, but I sure didn’t care enough to dig. I had what I wanted: my kids.

Inevitably, the train ran off the rails. By 2005, I asked for a divorce, and I became that other thing I once lived in horror of, a single mother. And yet, I thrived. Away from the secrets, sickness, and shame of my marriage, I flexed muscles I didn’t even know I had. Six months later, I’d gained full custody of my kids. We lived in a crappy apartment that fed into a good school district and adopted two kitties. We watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and ate popcorn. We had a little garden on the back patio. We laughed.

Then, just as my former neighbor had predicted, came the teen years.

I’m convinced the old ways are the best ways. Kids should be married off at thirteen so you don’t have to deal with them anymore. Every day, I came home to a soccer riot. There were tantrums about undone homework, whinging about what I made for dinner, sibling blowouts, bedtime recalcitrance, shady friends, and multiple cell phone violations. My daughter’s grades plummeted. My son’s girlfriend took a picture of them “doing things” and sent it to ten of her closest friends. By the next day, they were both expelled from their private school, even though nothing had transpired on school grounds. Nowhere near as bad, but still alarming, was my daughter’s new therapist who tried to convince me I was ADD/ADHD because I taught fitness classes at the gym.

“So, if I’m understanding you correctly, I’m ADHD because I exercise?” I asked her in goggle-eyed confusion.

“Yes.”

“But I also write novels, which takes immense focus,” I told her.

“That’s just the flip side of the disorder,” she tartly informed me. “Hyperfocus and lack of focus. You should see your doctor about getting a prescription.”

My daughter at fifteen.

But I wasn’t ADD/ADHD. Neither was my daughter, who also happened to be a target of her therapist’s “good” intentions. Before my son’s expulsion from private school, I’d had to sign a waiver every month stating that I refused to put him on medication, despite their repeated attempts to persuade me. Mind you, I’d gone to their doctor, the best in the city, who said my son had no attention deficit or hyperactivity issues. Yet, every single day, I was fighting an uphill battle, and most of the time, I was fighting it alone.

Then their dad got in serious legal trouble and was arrested in front of our kids. I wanted nothing more than to let him rot. But here’s the thing they don’t tell you when you have kids with somebody. Love him or hate him, you’re stuck with that guy for the rest of your life. You’ll see him at school functions and graduations. You’ll see him waving to the kids from his car after he drops them off. Later, you’ll see him at your kid’s wedding, a much younger woman hanging off his arm, still leering at anything in a skirt.

I worked seven days a week and hated that I had to be gone so much.

I gave parenting everything I had--100% --and still came up short. That’s the other thing they don’t tell you about having kids. You vow not to make the same mistakes with them that your parents made with you. Instead, you make other mistakes, without even meaning to.

No matter how hard you try, how clever/attentive/present/patient/loving you are, you will fail at parenting. One parent, two parents, it doesn’t matter. Somewhere down the line, you will drop the ball and never even notice it rolling away.

Against all odds, I survived my kids’ adolescence, and they survived my ineptitude. Naively, I thought the worst was beyond me. I was wrong. Because there’s that other other thing you don’t tell you about having kids, which is that they will grow up and have their own lives, where you are no longer a prominent feature. In fact, the whole time you’re raising them, you’ll be working against your own best interests. When they go, you’re left with that most miserable and disappointing of creatures: yourself, only a far older, shabbier version of yourself that has no idea who she is anymore and must now come to grips with the fact that she is no longer needed. By anyone.

It’s why empty nesters buy yappy little dogs. We are desperate--desperate, I tell you--to infantilize something or someone, to be needed, wanted, seen. What are we even good for at this point? By Nature’s parameters, we have already achieved our purpose here on earth. We procreated, we raised healthy young, and must now dwindle into obsolescence.

But the pain is just as bad as I knew it would be. It sits on my heart every moment of the day, exacerbated by the sheer physical distance between us (they’re in Houston; I’m in Europe). You raise your kids to leave you and live their own lives. It’s horrible. You hold back tears and smile until your face cracks off, a waving figure in their rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller as they drive away.

And oh, baby, does it hurt.

And that’s because there’s no love without pain. Sooner or later, pain will come for you. All relationships are impermanent, either through death or departure. It takes two people to create a relationship, and one person to leave it. These are the rules we play by, like them or not.

My daughter and I on the Italian Riviera.

The heart is a territory of struggle.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger at the broken places,” Hemingway writes in Farewell to Arms.

We must grow strong enough to accept the world as it is, love it as it is, yet Zen enough to sit at the same table with its heartbreak and its horrors.

We may not have signed on for this, but it’s all we’ve got.

Do you have kids--grown, half-grown, or growing? If so, I’d love to hear your stories. Feel free to leave your comments below.