Now I See You (21 page)

Rosa would run and not come back. Sometimes, if David was with me, we’d let her go, just as an experiment. I’d watch her recede farther and farther, willing her to stop, even to pause and look back. But I always lost the game of chicken, screaming, “STOP!” and then, “David! Get her! HURRY!”

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, like the day I scoured the playground with Bobby in tow, 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 my local 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, describing them as “morons who should never have gone off birth control.” According to my mother, you don’t just hand over freedom to kids; you keep a viselike grip on their freedom until they wrest it 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, 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 eighty-seven-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. 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.

It didn’t take much experimentation to figure out that if I even dabbled in free-range parenting, my kids would end up in the ER and I’d end up institutionalized—and that was best-case scenario. Case in point: the Harvest Festival Fiasco.

It was early October and our go-to Park Slope playground was hosting a Harvest Festival, filled with the old-school country-fair fare we urbanites don’t get much exposure to and thus go crazy for: pony rides, a petting zoo, pumpkin painting. By the time David and I rolled in with our double stroller, containing four-year-old Lorenzo and two-year-old Rosa, the place was mobbed like a subway platform at rush hour. To make matters worse, the kids immediately headed in opposite directions.

“Owsah,” demanded Rosa, her pink bejeweled binky lodged in her mouth. In the sunlight, her eyes were the color of a Tiffany’s box, and like the gemstones you’d find inside, they glinted, cut with sharp edges.

“Mommy doesn’t understand when you talk with the paci in your mouth,” I explained for the five millionth time that day. Eventually we’d have to pull the plug on the paci but it was the only thing that made Rosa remotely sedate and I couldn’t face a world without it quite yet.

Rosa pulled the paci out of her mouth and enunciated clearly, “Orsey. Orrrr-seeeey.” Then she threw in for good measure, “Neigh, neigh, neigh.” I always got the feeling with her that I was the child and she was the beleaguered adult trying to be patient with my limited abilities but finding it very difficult. Having clarified her demand, she popped the paci back in her mouth and resumed sucking.

“No, no, no! I don’t wanna go on the horsey!” shrieked Lorenzo. “Yucky yuck yuck! I wanna make a punkin.”

Unlike any kid I’d ever met, Lorenzo actively disliked animals; he found them loud, smelly, dull, and coarse—in all respects revolting.

“I’ll take him to the pumpkins and you do the pony ride,” David strategized. Divide and conquer was always a good plan and I knew David had opted for the pumpkins because, like Lorenzo, he had no love lost for creatures that stomped in their own feces.

I left the double stroller in the Stroller Parking Area and securely took my toddler by the hand.

“We’re going to the horseys,” I explained. “But you have to hold Mommy’s hand. No running away. Got it?”

She nodded persuasively. And she did hold my hand, the whole ten steps to the ticket table. But as soon as she realized that we would not be immediately hopping on the pony’s back and would instead have to wait on a long, serpentine line, she let go and started climbing on the wooden fence that encircled the pony corral.

“Hey there!” came a voice behind me. I turned and saw Heather, the mother of a boy in Lorenzo’s preschool class. Heather had three children: one Lorenzo’s age, one Rosa’s age, and a baby she was currently carrying in an indigo sling. All three of her offspring looked like they’d been bred to appear in Gap ads, with gray-blue eyes and chestnut hair, and all three of them were quiet and agreeable. They were interested in the right things—the son was crazy for soccer and the daughter, ballet—and they could entertain themselves for the better part of an hour by flipping through picture books. I’d had Heather’s son over for a playdate one day and had been depressed for hours afterward by how competently he’d been raised. He’d asked to wash his hands upon entering the apartment, cleaned up his blocks when he was done playing, chose milk over juice, and made sure to place his cup at what he called “twelve o’clock,” directly in front of his bowlful of Goldfish. My own son had somehow spilled the lidded cup all over his front, saturating the coat of cracker crumbs that had been deposited there. When Heather, ever mindful of reciprocity, had invited us over for a playdate, she’d offered the kids kale chips and smoothies. To this day, when I see smoothies, I feel shitty and subpar.

Heather was the superest of Supermoms, and her seemingly effortless excellence at everything made me toxic with jealousy.

“I was waving at you for like five minutes,” Heather laughed. “Then I thought I’d just come over.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry. It’s such a madhouse here.”

I had made it a habit of blaming crowds and glare and distraction when I didn’t see people wave at me, and this time it was almost believable.

“I know, huh. How great is all this?” she gushed, gesturing at the cornucopia of activities.

“Yeah, it’s
amazing,
” I agreed, kicking myself for having taken a negative approach and trying now to meet her positivity or, ideally, outdo it. “Especially the pony rides. Rosa
loves
ponies.”

I gestured over at Rosa who had one leg over the top of the fence.

“No no no honey, we can’t ride the horsey yet,” I explained, hoping to mask my frustration with a singsong voice.

Rosa glared at me as I pried her freakishly strong fingers off the fence. It wasn’t just the color of Rosa’s eyes that were intense. Like hands, they gesticulated. Her lids were limber, narrowing in anger, snapping open like window shades to express surprise or fear. The rhythm of her lashes told stories—fluttering from nerves, beating out a bass to concentrate, unblinking in defiance. And her blond brows, so energetic, danced in their places like back-up singers. Her eyes were like a stage where a spectacular was always in progress. Which was captivating, to be sure, but also, exhausting.

As soon as I put Rosa back on the ground, she started climbing up the fencepost again. I felt like Sisyphus.

“Where’s the rest of your brood?” I asked Heather.

“Oh they’re around here somewhere,” she replied breezily. “Dmitri’s working today so I figured we’d spend the afternoon here.”

If their dad isn’t watching them,
I thought,
who the hell is?
How could she be so blithe and unconcerned about their lack of supervision? And, more importantly, how uncool and uptight did I seem by comparison?

“But I should get them soon because I have to throw a dinner party tonight for Dmitri’s family and I still need to find a few more place settings. There’s going to be twenty of us.”

The last remark almost sounded like a complaint but just before it veered into negativity, she hastened to add: “But it’ll be great and give the kids a chance to practice their Greek.”

She’s making a homemade meal for twenty people?
I marveled.
I can’t get it together enough to make a bowl of pasta for two kids. And even if I could, our table wouldn’t fit six people, not even very thin guests who are used to confined spaces
.

My silent spiral into self-loathing was interrupted by Heather adding, “But you must know how it is. Your kids speak Italian, right?”

“Ummm, not really,” I confessed. “I tried with Lorenzo a little but my husband doesn’t speak and I’m not so fluent anymore and it just got too hard.”

“Yeah,” she nodded sympathetically. “It
is
hard.”

Not so hard she couldn’t pull it off,
I thought.

“Oh, looks like you’re moving on up,” Heather observed, gesturing at the gap in the line in front of me, which I hadn’t noticed. Like people waving to me from down the block, gaps in the line were something I almost never noticed without having them pointed out.

“Okay Rosa, let’s go,” I called out, turning to where my daughter had been a minute ago. But when my gaze reached the fencepost, I saw Rosa was not there. I looked down the fence to the right and down the fence to the left but she wasn’t there either. I felt the sick, sinking foreboding that had become so familiar since Rosa had started walking. And at that moment, I wanted to lay hands on Heather’s unwrinkled neck and strangle her, right there in front of a hundred kids waiting for a pony ride. Because, unjustified though it might be, I blamed Heather 100% for this particular instance of losing my daughter.

She might be able to carry on a conversation looking me in the eye while her impeccably self-regulated kids roamed around; whenever she wanted to locate them, she’d just glance around with her superhuman, X-ray vision and bingo! they’d be found. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk and parent at the same time, not in crowded public spaces at least. If I wanted to keep my kid alive and in my possession, I had to train my eyes on her and not take them off, not to nod agreeably about dinner parties, not to smile in appreciation for pony rides, not for any fucking reason. I wasn’t like Heather. I never would be. And in pretending I was, I’d lost my toddler in a goddamned mob scene.

“Sorry, I gotta find Rosa,” I excused myself, turning in the direction of the swing set.

“Oh, she’s right there!” Heather pointed to the front of the pony ride line, where Rosa was trying—and failing—to gain early entry. A bored-looking teenager was holding her at bay.

I ran over, hearing the teenager ask in no particular direction, “Does this kid belong to anybody?” but a few steps shy of the pony ride entrance, my knees encountered an obstacle and I heard a
thump,
followed by a high-pitched wail.

I looked down. At my feet was another toddler, sitting on his bum, holding his hands in the air and screaming for his dada. Toddlers, being so low to the ground, almost always fell into the big blank area in my peripheral vision; unless I was looking directly at the ground, I wouldn’t see them. Rosa was used to getting knocked on her butt by Mommy. This kid was not. Thankfully, his butt was heavily padded and he appeared more startled than hurt.

Searing with embarrassment, I lifted the boy to his feet.

“I’m really sorry,” I stammered. “You okay?”

He stopped crying and looked up at me curiously, probably trying to decipher my mixed messages—one minute I was knocking him down, the next I was picking him up. What was I: friend or foe?

I patted the boy on the head awkwardly in a “good-as-new” gesture and was about to take the last few steps to retrieve my own toddler when the boy’s dad swooped in to the scene, lifting him into his arms and asking me: “What the hell is the matter with you?”

I assumed it was a rhetorical question.

“I’m really sorry,” I repeated. “Is he okay?”

“I don’t know, I guess so,” he replied. “But what the hell, man?”

“I’m sorry, I just—I didn’t see him there,” I stammered, flushed with embarrassment and guilt and a rising anger.

“Well,” he huffed, patting his son on the back even though the boy had stopped crying. “You’re in a playground for God’s sake. Watch where the hell you’re going.”

Satisfied with his rebuke, he turned his back on me and carried the boy away in the direction of the petting zoo.

With great effort, I suppressed the impulse to yell after him, “Hey! Daddy Dipshit! You wanna know what’s wrong with me? I couldn’t see your kid underfoot because I’m going blind. And I’m sorry if it inconvenienced you but I have begged your forgiveness and your lousy little kid is totally fine which is more than I can say for my own, who I can’t even get to because I’m too busy getting reamed out by you, you pompous, uncharitable asshole.”