#Drive 4, Get Your Own Ketchup
Over-helping breeds insecurity in kids.
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” —Albert Einstein
“Mom!” Josh bellowed as he ran into the house. “Guess what?”
“What’s that?” I asked coolly, hoping to sound curious. Sometimes, I mirrored his bellow, the expressions, the gestures, and other times, not. It depended on my mood and his.
“Jimmy* needed ketchup for his fries at McDonald’s today and didn’t know how to get it!”
“Really?” I said and raised my eyebrows like, No kidding!
“Really!” Josh all but yelled. This kid had big energy. “So, I ran to the counter and got it for him. He couldn’t believe it! And neither could I.”
Neither could Jimmy’s mom, I’m sure. When he graduated from high school, Josh referenced that and all the other things he was “unfairly” expected to do long before his friends.
At some point, Josh had compared notes with enough other kids to recognize when he was being pushed out of the nest, yet again, on another practice flight.
Like the time he was eight, he commented, “But Mommy, you’re supposed to be nurturing and loving…” then collapsed in giggles on his bed, laughing at his joke.
Once I recovered my composure, I’m pretty sure I tickled him until neither of us could breathe for laughing. You don’t forget lines like that.
Part of him was serious and didn’t want to be pushed, I was sure. But then, I was serious, too. Life with a brain-injured and somewhat unsafe father was tricky at best, even if we had separated.
Maybe, especially if we were separated.
My kids needed to be able to take care of themselves when they visited their dad. He was barely a parent. One time he put Ally back in my car without any pants on. It was 35 degrees. She definitely had pants when he picked them up.
On another winter night, Josh came home without his coat.
The panic would catch in my throat when I saw them and I would numb myself to the fear and anger until I could get to my therapist’s office, rather than set him off with a confrontation about details he (still) couldn’t remember.
The problem was, as Judy explained, they were allowed to see their dad. I wasn’t aware of any scenes that happened when they were with him.
She advised me to watch the transitions. “If they can’t settle back in after time with their dad, are irritable or having meltdowns, then there is something to explore,” she said.
I couldn’t worry about what might happen when they weren’t with me. I had to focus on what I saw, heard, and witnessed in them. And track all of it.
“With any luck,” she said, “You are the only one who triggered his ‘interpersonal issues.’ It isn’t impossible.” However, that could change as they got older, especially for Josh.
Dr. Archibald Hart warns in Stress & Your Child that aside from the big ugly stressors like a move or divorce and separation, kids are stressed by overly structured, adult-like schedules with every moment programmed. “That childhood is stress-free is a myth,” he said in one interview. “That time is gone.”
Mothers & Sons offered two concepts that alongside Hart’s were pivotal for me:
Mothers do way (way, way) too much for sons that sons should be doing for themselves if they’re to be confident and productive men. Over-helping our small men breeds insecurity and dependence at best; resentment at worst. Many moms unwittingly encroach on their son’s confidence with helping when they should let them have at it and accept the results.
Over-helping hinders a man’s adult relationships by reducing their sense of responsibility, whether between employers and employees, coaches and players, spouses, or just friends.
I couldn’t have that. They both needed agency.
After I read the lists of chores for boys broken down by age, I decided to experiment. hadn’t I watched 6-month-old Josh enjoy a “game” of pushing laundry, piece-by-piece, into the dryer as I dropped it on the lid? He would roll his eyes today, but I’m telling you, he loved it. So, it was a no brainer to give him other small tasks to do around the house.
When I got pregnant with his sister, I upgraded his rewards to helping himself to juice pouches or other snacks placed where he could reach them. Adults are rewarded with money and incentives for their work, right?
And trust me, he was an energetic kid.
Combined with Dr. Hart’s and my therapist’s advice, kids needed downtime, playtime—and chores. Maybe our routines defied Amish productivity compared to some standards, but hey, I was part German. I’d keep life as full and fun as possible.
God knows the fun was for me as much as them.
“Resilient,” said a friend who had been an elementary teacher, “You want him to be resilient.”
“Mmm—yeah, that could be it,” I said. The image in my head was that of an athlete in a flexible, soft-knee position, ready to deflect a check to the hip, to dive for a line drive, or pivot around a defender. But always, always, always, watching for the shot that’s about to take you out.
For that reason, I thought it was negligent to shelter my kids from age-appropriate “stress” in the same way that preventing them from exercising would weaken their muscles. How would they handle big things, guaranteed to show up unannounced with their dad, without practicing on the little things?
The struggles that loomed weren’t theoretical—they were at-risk kids: 1-1/2 generation immigrant kids of a blue-collar man with emotional issues and a violent temper being raised by a single, uneducated mom with her own issues and blind sides.
Not that I intentionally exposed them to life-threatening danger.
But some lessons demanded that I did not jump in, that I let them have-at-it, and that I keep my mouth shut if I couldn’t affirm, affirm, affirm.
Life had dealt them unusual family circumstances and if possible, I wanted to give them the training, the practice, and the resources to deal before they needed them. This would allow them to choose whether their circumstances would be a hindrance or something they ate for breakfast.
I let them down more times than I care to admit, but I was going for “Breakfast of Champions.”
Why I was so determined, I can’t even say. According to some pretty hilarious Instagram reels, Gen Xers raised ourselves compared to the Leave It to Beaver Boomers or the helicopter-parented Millennials of today.
On a more practical side, my Baby Whisperer Mom, Dr. Hart and Judy all advocated for keeping regular bedtimes and routines, even for meals.
We didn’t have cable TV, so we didn’t stay up to watch it. Streaming wasn’t a thing yet. When they went to bed, I did, too. I’m sure that made it easier when they were little. Josh never needed more than 8 hours and Ally needed closer to 10 (still do). Between the two of them, I got just enough.
Most days, I think my kids took our routine and way of life in stride because they didn’t know any other way. As Ally put it recently, “Looking back, it was about survival.”
I would’ve said it was about their thriving, not just surviving.
And, ok, I definitely talked with them about my ideas and the whys more than most parents I knew. Burying the issues didn’t make sense to me. It was another form of “pretend.”
Not that I attempted to explain everything their dad or I were going through. A basic, “He just can’t come home right now. It’ll make sense someday” was usually enough. They just didn’t get a lot of “because I’m the mom.” I filled in the “whys” wherever I could, on their level.
It could be a tough balancing act if you had to get out the door. Especially since I tend to run back in for things I’ve forgotten two or three times.
The summer after we separated, I joined the part-time paid staff at the church, coordinating the Confident Kids program that had helped Josh and I. Helping other single moms helped me, too—even as it gave me real-time understanding of the challenges of working full-time as a single mom. And the effects on the kids.
A benefit of being on staff were the three- and four-day conferences on children, leadership, and families that I attended in Atlanta, Orlando, and Lancaster. Not only did I love the travel, the workshops on family dynamics with in-depth stats and outcomes for single parents, on Contrarian Leadership and Revolutionary Parenting inspired me to ask deeper questions about my choices for myself and for my family.
I kept coming back to how I would send Josh to school. As little confidence as I had in my ability to homeschool him for 12 years, I had even less in my ability to put him on a school bus. Especially when Stress & Your Child talked about school amping up the potential for stress for a kid from a happy, intact home, never mind ours.
Josh was an adventuresome, athletic little tyke, an early walker at 9 months, who had never met a stranger. I didn’t worry that he could make friends. But as Kindergarten registration loomed, the thought of forcing him to sit in a concrete block building made me ill.
But let’s face it, I was a college dropout in an extended family chock-full of educators on sides and all levels. I had quit college and went to work as a waitress when some family financial difficulties coincided with an (expensive) failed engagement that ate up my junior year deposits.
When eleven-year-old me had announced that I wanted to be an artist, Dad told me, “You’ll starve. Do something more practical—just not accounting.”
Although I was devastated, I believed him. I looked into both Interior Design and Creative Writing. In high school I won two awards in English. One was for an essay for the local Rotary Club and included a $500 check. But I didn’t connect it to writing professionally, not yet.
I majored in Business at the University of Richmond because they gave my first-in-family-to-college self a huge financial aid package. Business was boring, but tolerable until the second semester of Economics sent me running back to my first love, reading and the English department. There, I could analyze literature without even trying.
Not that I wanted to be an English teacher, although that was the assumed career path. I loved most of my teachers, can still name each one, and have reconnected with most since graduation. But the unyielding daily schedules and dusty enameled concrete halls were enough to make me shiver.
No, dropping out of college didn’t seem to be a loss, at the time.
And yet, long before the kids could speak, I read to them before bed, seven days a week. I certainly wasn’t trying to educate them. I had never heard of Sir Ken Robinson or dreamt that the ability to escape through a book is where a love of learning starts.
I wouldn’t even say that I loved learning at that point. I was just sharing what I loved with them. That, and writing for pleasure, for my sanity, almost every day.
Granny had given me my first diary the Christmas after Bobby died, 1976 and I had kept a journal off and on since. I wasn’t the most committed diarist because I couldn’t reconcile writing to a book any more than I could sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what I wanted.
Even then, something about writing longhand soothed me. Many of my entries were stream-of-consciousness poems, others were rants, and some were something like essays. For a while, I was obsessed with time and mysteries like, why can’t I know my own brain (or body) if I’m actually thinking and writing with that brain (and body)?
But I wasn’t looking for answers. I just enjoyed the scratch of the right pen on paper and wondering about it all. By middle school, my journals were all about my latest romance or mean girl drama.
Twenty years later, a method of journaling changed my life—four short months before meningitis, amnesia, and “confused states” visited my marriage.
My spirit was sore, my energy waned on the day in July 1996 that I attended a women’s conference. I was six months into a marriage that had not had any fights before I said, “I do,” (—Yes, ladies, no disagreements, ever, is a red flag that someone isn’t showing up). Since then, our arguments left my arm bruised in the pattern of his right hand or whatever I had been pushed into.
A lithe, tanned woman in a bright white pantsuit sprung onto stage (I swear) and talked about “making appointments to meet with God.” Becky Tirabassi called her journal her Prayer Partner and challenged us to do the same.
I didn’t expect much from the experience, but ever the office supply store nerd, I was lured by her simple notebook system. Put five dividers and loose-leaf notebook paper in a 3-ring binder. Read the Psalms each day. The poems and lyrics supposedly covered a full range of human emotion. When you get to one that expresses how you’re feeling that day, rewrite it in your own words as a prayer, directly to God behind the first tab.
Something happened as I wrote out my prayers through moments of confusion and shame, anger and doubt. The feelings in the Psalms modeled how to talk about my own. The frustration, desire for revenge, for fairness, for help that I had been unable to express—and definitely hadn’t understood—all came tumbling out.
That writing gave me peace. And I started to believe that I wasn’t alone, even if I rarely used the other four tabs.
Before long, I started feeling new energy for each day and hope for my kids because God was answering lots of little prayers. And I knew it, because I had them written down.
Maybe not everyone would give the credit to God, but I did.
So, of course, I wrote out my concerns about sending Josh to Kindergarten and wanting to homeschool since … forever. I wrote, Lord, how can I do this?
*Author note: Most names have been changed. Conversations have been recreated to the best of my memory.