Friday, March 29, 2013

The Plight Of A Helicopter Mom

   Yesterday I took my daughter to the show, Shen Yun, which is a performance of classical Chinese dance. We have been to the show once before, and plan to go again, because we really enjoy the dances and the costumes are gorgeous. We go to see them at McCaw Hall, and we always get box seats, which are  up high. Heights are something that make me nervous, but they don't seem to bother my daughter at all.
   Since heights obviously don't bother her,  she is leaning over the rail of the box, which is three stories up, and I am grabbing hold of her and hissing, "Don't do that!" After about 50 times of this, both my mother and my daughter are sick of me and my mom is making cracks about how she's glad I didn't see what they were doing the previous weekend, when she took my daughter to a ballet performance without me.
   And I'm rolling my eyes and exclaiming, "Oh my God, don't tell me!" Because I just really don't want to know. You see, I have a very, very vivid imagination. Sometimes this is a true blessing, but when my daughter is leaning over a rickety-ass railing three stories up, this is nothing but a curse. Because I can see her, clearly, crumpled on the floor with her arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles and blood and brain leaking out of a cracked skull. This flashes into my mind every single time she leans over that damned railing. So I can't help grabbing hold of her, because I panic.
   We make it through the performance and intermission without me causing to much of a ruckus, mainly because my daughter is nicer than I am and stops messing with me and we are in the car going home, complaining about how we were too warm. Now, for whatever reason, McCaw Hall is really warm. This is a great venue, but they do like to be toasty. But my mom is exclaiming that she's too warm even though outside the temperature isn't even 60 degrees, and she mentions that she never acclimated to the south, when we lived in good old MS, because she was always roasting.
   I have to argue with this because in Mississippi in the summer you could literally fry and egg on a car hood. I know this for a fact, because my bestie and I got in a shit load of trouble for frying eggs on her mom's car hood. And that intolerable heat kept us in a constant search for any body of water to jump in so that we could cool off. My bestie has even lost part of her toe to a snapping turtle lurking in the water of one of our creeks, and that didn't even stop us, although it did cause our collective moms to forbid us from jumping in random-ass creeks. We never stopped, so we spent a lot of time grounded. As I'm reminding my mom of this old habit of ours, she turns to my daughter, reminds her of the whole rail business, and tells her, "This is not your mom. This is the alien that took over your mom, and she came from a really wussy planet."
   And you know that your are a true helicopter mom when your parental freak-outs has your own mom calling you a wussy alien body-snatcher. Gotta love Grandmas. 

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