Detachment parenting

My neighbor was putting in windows, and when Delphine picked up his sharp claw hammer, he studied her for a moment, then handed her a shiny pick hammer. He thought it would be safer, he said.

I went outside and said, "You be careful." Of course I did. Mike glanced at me and grinned. He has boys. And they're still so young.

I said "Be careful" about five more times while I took out the recycling and trash. Then I said, "That thing's very sharp. Do you know what you're doing?"

Then I went inside to clean the week's worth of hair ornaments from the bathroom counter. It was only half an hour before Rosette screamed, and I ran out to see her holding a finger, dripping blood.

The pain that I get when I see their wounds is like barbed wire pulled across the inside of my belly, low down, between the hips, where I carried them.

I screamed, too, at Delphine. "How could you?!" I slapped her on the shoulder, and her eyes went black and tear-shined as stones.

I couldn't tell what was gone from Rosette's left index finger until I got it under the tap. I thought she'd lose the end. A huge flap of skin, nearly the whole tip, but a shallow layer. It bled as fingers and lips and toes and chins do, on children. All those extremities. "All my responsibility," I kept thinking furiously.

We rushed her to urgent care, just to make sure it didn't need stitches. "I don't want to see," Rosette moaned, looking away from the proverbial dish towel. Delphine cried silently. I sat there remembering broken wrist, dresser-corner split forehead. Meningitis, scarlet fever, pneumonia. All Delphine. And this hurt her way worse.

Of course Rosette only cried for the first five minutes. My girls are stoic, like me. Delphine never cried when she broke her wrist. (The E.R. nurses all came to see her stony fierce gaze over the dangling limb. "Look at that one -- she's scary.")

Even in the car, I was saying, "When I was 5, just like you, someone slammed my finger in the kindergarten gate and it tore just like that."

"Did Grandma take you to urgent care?" they asked.

"Heck no," I laughed. "She probably said, 'Go get a Band-Aid.'"

But later, I tried to remember. Had my mother carted us off for every scrape, as we mothers do now? We had broken bones, pneumonia. Do I just not remember? And that led me to wonder if my own kids will remember these trips. Will they think, "My mother was so detached. She let us play outside with sharp tools because she wanted to clean the bathroom sink in peace."

Stitches and casts and butterfly bandages -- they are the attachments of our mothering lives. The doctor didn't even seal Rosette's wound with that new glue. He pressed the flap of skin down and bandaged it, then gave her a tiny splint like a flat, silver gingerbread man. She was dry-eyed, fascinated.

So why did I mope around for the next two days thinking, "But she could have lost her finger! I'm the worst mother in the world"?

Because that's what we do now. Attached like limpets to everything about our kids -- schoolwork and clothes and friends and food and games -- we see ourselves in every move they make, every facet of their days and nights. We take credit for soccer game victories, because we drove to practice or coached. We suffer with every spelling mistake, every birthday party snub, every childhood injury. Perfect mom is who we are supposed to be. Not like the moms of my childhood, who shooed us from gold-flecked Formica tables and said, "Go play outside." We drive our kids everywhere, rarely let them play in the yard unsupervised, never let them walk to the store. We can't. We won't.

I'm not wholesale romanticizing the old days. My mother was a foster parent, and I lived for 12 years with children whose parents were detached to the point of drunkenness, hunger and abandonment.

I'm only saying that all weekend, I wanted the misery and pity and guilt of Rosette's finger for myself. Our bad luck turned into my personal failure.

I pictured myself at the playground fence come Monday, seeing other mothers' frowns at Rosette's splint, hearing them say, "One of yours got hurt again?" I heard them already saying, "My God, she could have lost a finger! She'd have been scarred for life!"

I know. That's what I kept thinking, all weekend. I also realized I didn't even know Radio Disney existed until someone else's child rode in my van and showed me the station. (I had to take out the Van Halen tape Rosette loves just as her favorite song, "Running With the Devil," came on.) I have never played a Raffi tape. We never finger-paint. I never made baby food from scratch. The girls don't even have a real closet. Rosette doesn't even have a bed.

Delphine came bleary-eyed to show me the rough draft for her fourth-grade writing assessment, titled "The Most Valuable Lesson I Have Ever Learned." Her sentences were fine constructions full of references to "sharp tools" and "blood," wrapping up with, "I should have listened to my mom."

Then we went to church. I glanced behind us to see the older men rising to sing, their hair silvery and gone, their fingers gnarled and big-knuckled on the pews. I felt Rosette pressed against me, playing with her splint. Who am I to think I own her fingers, I own her safety forever, I own every drop of her blood, her life?

On Monday morning, she awoke crying, and I sat up with a start. Was she in pain?

She'd lost her splint and bandage in the sheets, and she had wanted to show them to everyone in kindergarten. "Does your finger hurt?" I asked, as perfect as I could be this early in the morning darkness.

"No," she said matter-of-factly, now that I was holding the splint. In the bathroom, while I slid the bandage back on, she raised her eyebrows critically and said, "Mommy, did your pajamas actually come with the wallpaper?"

My ancient, cheesy flannel pajamas have a stripe with a floral design inside. The wallpaper in the hallway, something I was so proud of getting done after my divorce (since during my marriage the raw drywall had been exposed for years), has exactly the same pattern. "I'm just asking 'cause, you know, it's kinda funny that you match the wall," Rosette went on, nonchalantly jamming the splint onto her finger. "Tighten that up for me, Mommy, OK?"

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