When Babies Grow Up

Happy Mothers Day!  Mother's Day is a perfect time for your favorite pursuits, but the bigger our Belevation fan club has grown, the less time I have to do fun things like working on this Belevation Mom Blog.

In 2013 I wrote a Mother's Day post called Being a Mom: Doing It Your Way.  It explored varied mom-styles such as Helicopter vs. Free Range parenting.  I confessed that I have Helicopter tendencies.

You see back in the 1980's, I was a college student just old enough to consider becoming a mom and spent a lot of time in New York's up-and-coming Soho area. The Etan Patz disappearance, (in the news again recently) haunted me, as it did many others: Wary Children Who Became Watchful Parents,  May 8th 2015.

But the joke's on us moms, since babies do grow up. In my case as the mother of an only child, I tried to hold on as long as possible, but these things backfire. It jumped from my not letting my son around the corner by himself, to his going on multi-day treks in the Appalachians with friends, to later moving to Europe and traveling just about everywhere.

So take a deep breath, moms. It's gonna happen, no matter what we do. Just smile and ask, "so how did you like Istanbul?"