BY SANDE SNEAD

After doing my duty as a “Good Mom” and duly trucking out to yet another soccer field to take pictures of my daughter as she received First Team, All-District honors in soccer, I jumped into my mid-life crisis mobile (red convertible Mini Coop) and took off. It was only as I heard paper flapping in the back seat and saw said award about to slip out onto I-288 that I could hear Jeff Foxworthy’s voice in my head saying, “If your daughter, who’s been playing soccer since she was 5 years old, finally wins an honor that she never dreamed of achieving in the sport, and you LOSE the award on the way home, you MIGHT be a bad mom.”

O.K., I’m not really a horrible mom. It’s just that I’m the opposite of the so-called helicopter parents who hover over their children making sure their homework is done and even that they’ve submitted their applications to college.

Honestly, I am a single parent who works full time at an advertising agency and freelances on the side. I serve on a few boards and even do volunteer work. I’m training for a half marathon and I have a very lively social life. So I ask you, who has time to check their child’s homework?

I’ll never forget that when my oldest, Brittany, was in the third or fourth grade, one of my neighbors called to ask me about what their homework was for the next day. I had no idea.

Dr. John Rosemond, a psychologist and nationally syndicated columnist, is one of my child-raising heroes. He said, “It’s human nature to pawn responsibility off on other people, so the more you do for a child that the child can do for himself, the greater chance you have that the child will act irresponsibly.”

While having lunch with my co-worker, Tamara Neale, I confessed that I had the wrong date on my calendar when Nicole received the “Student of the Year” award. She had “bad mom” stories of her own, like the time she missed her son’s play or didn’t even know he was being honored at an awards ceremony.

As working mothers, I feel like we are torn in several different directions at all times. Neale agreed saying, “More is expected out of women in general. Most women work but also manage the bulk of the household including taking care of the kids. You just can’t be there after school every day at 2:30. But I think your children become acclimated to it and become more responsible.”
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But even when I was a stay at home mom when the girls were little, I taught them to fend for themselves pretty much from the time they could read. When they told me about some new activity they wanted to try, I tossed the burden of responsibility right back to them. Brittany once told me she wanted to take belly dancing lessons. I told her to look it up in the phone book. This strategy was designed to discourage more work for me. But the next thing I knew, she and I were doing belly rolls and hip drops.

And so, in August, Nicole goes off to the University of California at Berkeley, more than 3,000 miles away. My little bird who learned to fly at such a young age is going about as far away from the nest as she can get. But I know that she is fully equipped with important life skills that will see her through.

And I’m here to tell you that this empty nest thing is overrated. Being a mother is the most rewarding and wonderful experience of my entire life. While I have not had the time to micromanage my children, I have had the time to get to know them and to fully appreciate the amazingly accomplished and successful young women they have already become.

One of things my father used to say about my sisters and me was, “I will not take credit for your successes, nor blame for your failures.”

I always thought this was a wise Mark Twainish-kind of thing to say. So you could have knocked me over when Nicole said in her graduation speech, “My last piece of advice must be credited to my mother who taught me absolutely everything I know…”

Doggone it all. I’m taking credit for these two.

This was published in the In My Shoes column of the Richmond Times-Dispatch four years ago.