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Kathy Gibbons: Northern Living

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February 27, 2010

Kathy Gibbons: Weaning going the wrong way

By KATHY GIBBONS

By KATHY GIBBONS

Local Columnist

I think I am being weaned.

I'm the mother, 54. She's the daughter, 22.

Shouldn't I be the one doing the weaning, and not the other way around?

We're in year five -- the final -- of college. She's doing her student teaching and after May is eligible to be launched as a choral music teacher who receives a salary and benefits -- if she can find such a thing in this economy.

My standing advice: Don't let yourself go, because all the audience can see of you when you're directing their children during a performance is your back side. You want them to remember the music, and not that they couldn't see their kid around your posterior.

My other standing advice: Don't do it yet. I'm pushing for devil-may-care strike-out-on-your-own and go to New York and take a shot at performing. Give it a year. Get a waitress job. Go to auditions. You can't do something like that once you have kids. Sheryl Crow was trained as a teacher, and look how she turned out.

"Mom, I need a job," she'll say flatly, being the responsible one here. Fortunately, one of her professors, independent of my influence, has taken up this cause. He may succeed where I haven't.

But I digress.

Why do I think I'm being weaned? Because after four-and-a-half years of her calling me pretty much every morning, just to check in, she's stopped. So then, self-righteous I -- who, me? -- call her because she has conditioned me to expect a call (translation: it's her fault) so if she doesn't, I know she must be injured or dead or worse.

And unless there is something she needs at the moment, she doesn't necessarily answer. Or call back right away, if at all. We have gone an entire day without talking. A whole day!

I call that extreme weaning.

Now, her older brother and I could go several days without contact when he was her age. But he never called every day to begin with. And being she's a female, I worry about her being more vulnerable.

She doesn't think I realize I'm being weaned, I bet. But I do. My feelings get hurt. Or I get huffy and decide to just stop calling her, period. If something happens to her, someone will contact me or I'll read about it in the paper, right? That lasts about 30 seconds.

No doubt this is just one more part of the parenting evolution. Then again, maybe underneath it all is a subconscious need on her part for revenge for the weaning I engineered back when getting her to part with her bottles and diapers took all the might I had.

In fact, I thought of a way to maybe bring this whole weaning thing to an end. I'll just give her back her blankie.

Kathy Gibbons can be reached at gibbonskath@yahoo.com.

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