Watching Her Kids Grow Up and Away

I walked in from work and caught the tail end of the conversation between my teenage daughter and our baby-sitter. Something about somebody’s husband cheating on his wife and shouldn’t the other woman know better and how could they do that to their kids?

It was the kind of after-school, at-the-kitchen-table conversation that I imagine they have every afternoon--a casual chat that could turn serious, could provide a chance to share visions and values. The kind I wish my daughter and I could have more often.

And it dissolved the minute I walked in the room.

Suddenly, the talk turned to homework and dinner plans and “What time do you need me tomorrow?” Then the baby-sitter was gone and my daughter had her head in her math book. And I was left to ponder the silence and wonder, again, what I had missed.

Maybe, if I’d been there, the subject would never have come up. Maybe it was something they’d watched on Oprah or gossip from some of her teenage friends. Maybe sex and marriage and cheating spouses aren’t things you discuss with your mom.

Still, it haunts me . . . these missed opportunities to teach and be taught that unfold each day in the absence of Mommy--and bond my children to the young women I pay to take my place.

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We make such a fuss over baby’s first years, caught up in our need to count every burp and chronicle every diaper change. “I’m staying home,” new mothers proudly announce, “until the baby is in school.”

As if heading off to school eliminates their need for us, diminishes our desire for them.

Yes, it’s nice to be there when they’re babies, to catch first steps and teach ABCs. But as I’ve watched my babies grow into little girls, and then big girls, I’ve realized that their need for me may have changed, but it has not disappeared.

If anything, the stakes are higher.

Because if school signifies freedom, independence, a loosening of the apron strings, it also represents a whole new set of challenges and choices, a daily obstacle course our children must navigate. And how can we guide them, if we are not around?

Forget first steps, what about the first time a boy tries to kiss them or a classmate tries to cheat off them on a test? The day they try out for the basketball team? Don’t we need to know; shouldn’t we be there for them then?

There are a host of books and studies aimed at relieving working parents’ guilt, of quantifying that children are not harmed by good day care. I read them greedily, to ease my fear that my need to work dooms me to the fringes of my children’s lives.

I even try to draw comfort from the controversial premise of the recent book “The Nurture Assumption,” whose author says parents need not worry about how much time they spend with their children, because their influence is limited. “The love of their parents can get [children] only so far,” author Judith Harris contends. “Their power ends at the door of the home.”

And Harris tells this story from her own childhood: “For four years . . . I was an outcast. None of my classmates would play with me, or talk to me. It was terribly painful, but I didn’t want my parents to know. There was always the fear they might butt in and make things even worse.”

I shudder at the thought of being shut out of my children’s lives like that; at the notion that they might not trust me enough to share their secrets, their failures, their fears.

Or that they might want to tell, but I might not be there to hear.

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Much as we’d like to believe it, you can’t always schedule “quality time,” can’t program your children to bare their souls only when you’re around, can’t limit their curiosity to the times you’re available to take their calls.

Perhaps it matters more to me than to them. A recent survey by the New York-based Families and Work Institute of 1,000 teenagers found that only 10% wished they’d spend more time with their mothers.

Children don’t miss having their parents around, the researchers conclude, as long as someone’s around to meet their needs--to make them a snack, help with homework, cart them off to soccer practice: “I think kids like to have a grown-up around,” a boy named Kevin of Anaheim said in a recent Times article. “Someone that cares about them, someone to talk to and someone to help when you don’t know how.”

But it doesn’t have to be a parent, the kids say, just a caring, responsible adult.

I suppose that should ease my mind. But all it does is make me ache to be that person, make me understand that my absence is my loss.

And take me back to that afternoon at the kitchen table . . . a moment gone, a door slammed shut. A vision of a child growing up beyond my reach.

Sandy Banks can be reached by e-mail at sandy.banks@latimes.com.