Detachment parenting

Now, 11 years later, I still feel that way: distracted, detached, fierce and loving, yet somehow never enough of what I am supposed to be. I have three daughters, and I am divorced. I know what past-babyhood attachment means: spending every waking moment with your children, being a stay-at-home mom, driving them to sports and social events, making crafts, just being there for them 24 hours a day. That's how I've heard some mothers describe parenthood in the pre-school or elementary school parking lot, glancing at other mothers with disapproval. Family bed, family vacations, family fun nights, family sports, family 5K runs.

Not that I don't spend most of my time with my kids. I help with homework, sitting at the same table with my daughters while grading my own papers. I watch "Sabrina" and "The Parent Trap," companionably. But I also like to read, sitting on the porch within yelling distance while the kids are on the swing set, or in the mulberry tree, or jumping on their beds.

Most of my attachment seems accidental. My baby, Rosette, just turned 5 and she still sleeps with me. It's not a family-bed, conscious thing -- hey, mine is a two-bedroom house, and a third bed wouldn't fit in the girls' room. So when my friends and family say, "That big girl's still sleeping with you?" I shrug and think, "I should kick her out and let the clean-laundry pile warming our feet take over that side of the bed?"

But I am often detached, though I feel guilty. Sometimes, on the weekend, I want to be alone! Not for romance; I want to clean the kitchen in peace. I say, "Go play outside."

I should say, first, that when my mother said this to us, she meant it. We went outside and climbed the foothills in summer heat and smog, avoiding rattlesnakes, excavating huge tunnels with hammers and chisels in decomposed granite. After hours, when we came back and complained that we were thirsty, she would lift the hose from her flowers in a detached manner, and we'd drink.

What did they do, those moms? So coolly detached that we could walk to the store a mile away, lingering to play in the flood-control ditch. So impervious when we rolled like Lincoln Logs on the huge bench seat of the station wagon as she stopped quickly at the light.

And yet, her arm, their arms, always shot out like a railway crossing gate to keep us from hitting the dashboard.

That morning, I watched my daughters through the kitchen window while I scoured the sink. They began investigating the huge dirt clods caused by our new construction. My neighbor, a contractor, is adding two bedrooms and a bathroom. In a few months, Rosette will detach from my side at night. She will not clutch my pajama top in a damp fist, mistaking it for her blankie.

"Rosette is so tall now, at 5," I was thinking. But she's still my baby.

They threw dirt clods at the large hump of sculptured dry mud near the foundation, and I went outside to yell, "Throw clods from the same side, so you won't hit each other!"

They did. I lingered at the counter, watching them chip the dirt with a garden trowel. I unearthed bread heels and chip-dusted baggies and Oreo shards from that corner of the counter that acts like a magnet whose steel filings are lunch castoffs. I thought, "Maybe Delphine will find a treasure today."

She loved excavating around our 1910 former orange-grove farmhouse. She'd found half a bisque doll's head, a mother-of-pearl button and a license plate from the '40s.

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