Why You MUST Have a Life Outside Family

For almost two decades, we've been going deeper and deeper into a style of parenting that not only fosters dependency in young people but also does strange things to many of the moms who practice it religiously. For lack of a better word ( "official" terms like Helicopter and Supermom don't encompass the whole role), I call it the Fertilizer Mom trend. The unspoken assumptions of Fertilizer Mom culture are:

• Being a "good" parent is not the most important goal in your life; it should be the only goal. Wanting to do other things occasionally is selfish.
  
• A good mom exists to help her kids get to the top of the heap. Back in the day, it also meant making your kids the best-fed, housed and clothed ones on the block, via homemaking. Now it mostly means facilitating their educational careers by driving them to any team practices, lessons and other stuff you can cram into the schedule, and by volunteering 40 hours a week at the school so you can be eligible for favors from school staff (like recommendations) when needed.
• Work done in the home simply because the kid is a member of the family (popularly called "chores") robs him of time he could spend studying, practicing or working on yet another activity to pad his college apps; therefore, a good mom doesn't require that her kids do chores. Requiring them to do any "adult" work makes you a slacker mom.
  
• You can judge a mom's character and worthiness entirely by how her kids are doing. If they're on top of the world, she's a good mom. If not...
  
• It's okay to have casual buddies (all parents from your kids' various groups) but since your job is to pave the way for your kids, you may have to step on said friends' toes in order to do this if their kids are standing in the way of your kids.

Back when I was working a job, raising two kids with my husband and trying to write, I envied friends who had the luxury of being at-home moms for long stretches. Now in retrospect I notice that some of those women fell prey to Fertilizer Mom syndrome, and in all cases I think it was because they had no emotional investment in anything but their kids - no job to force them to diversify.

A few such friends underwent some unhappy personality changes. These included becoming a one-upper or "comparison" parent, with an attendant cattiness towards other women; exhibiting a growing level of desperation when things went wrong with a child (and "wrong" could mean going from a 4.0 to 3.8!), or developing a competitive streak suitable for a Fortune 500 CEO but not a parent. The first and last two changes I could ignore when I saw them in other women. After all, no one was forcing me to remain part of such conversations.

The middle change, desperation, was terrible to see. And in each instance it could have been avoided by the mom, not by changing her kid but by investing in other loves as well as in her kids.

Of course your kids will remain the most important part of your lives, and if anything bad happens to any of them, it could be devastating. But having separate interests, pursuits and friends will keep molehills from becoming mountains; you'll hurt or worry if your child falls seriously ill, for example, but not if she fails to make the A-level team and has to settle for B instead. It will prevent the sort of emotional over-investment that makes moms do crazy things like kill a daughter's competitor for a spot on the cheerleading squad or devise a fake Facebook user who convinces another child to commit suicide.

I believe it's best to even have a friend or two who have never met any members of your family. They are possibly the only people who will take you for who you are, without the strings of a dependent's reputation lifting you up or dragging you down. During one especially dark time in my family's history last year, the people who really pulled me through were the members of my writers' group. We've had very limited contact with each others' families, and several members haven't met any of mine. Yet because of their detachment, they were able to help me put things in perspective.

And you know what? They were right.