Helicopter Dads: Getting more and more irrelevant

(Editor's note: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're tackling parenthood in the 21st century -- or being tackled by it. This is the latest in a series of reflections by UPI writers.)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 (UPI) --Children are excellent teachers, no matter what the lesson. And the lesson, apart from life and death, is usually about separation.

For 28 years I have tried to stay close to my daughter, not always with success.

My daughter began life as part of a bargain. I'd lived with her mother for several years in my mid-20s. I agreed to marry her, and leave what I thought was a promising career in daily newspapers to work, for her family's summer resort a couple of hours' drive from Washington in exchange for a child.

By that time I had fallen out of love, but I was still stupid enough to believe a married life could be built on a quid pro quo.

My daughter came into the world after almost 24 hours of labor while her mother tried to deliver her naturally. They had to cut her out with a C-section.

So I got to hold her before her mother.

She was a very small premature package. Her eyes were open -- and accusing. She wasn't happy about all the rough treatment.

I held her for an hour, staring at her and waiting for a rush of affection to overwhelm me. It never came. I was just tired.

Finally, I handed her back to the nurses, who seemed puzzled that I wasn't adoring this little miracle, and went to see my wife.

On the second day of my daughter's life, we learned she had an incompletely formed hip socket, caused by the way she had lain in the womb, and would spend her first few months in a body sling, then a cast from the waist down for four months, to hold her legs in position while the joint formed.

I spent the next six months changing her diapers and cleaning under her cast with Q-tips. The cast rubbed the top of one foot raw, and I became frantic, dragooning a doctor-guest into cutting part of the cast away to give her relief.

Through all this, she refused to whimper.

When the cast and sling came off she didn't walk. I wasn't worried. Away from the resort, at a reunion for my family in West Virginia, we set up a playpen. One afternoon I heard the other kids screaming. My child, beaming with delight, had pulled herself up and was running from corner to corner of her playpen while her cousins cheered. She was 14 months old.

As she grew, of course she was perfect.

I quit the family business and found work in the Washington area when my daughter was 4, becoming a weekend dad.

When my daughter was 8 her mother and I divorced. I had my ex's assurance that she would make it easy for me to see my daughter. Within a year I was persona non grata at the resort, and was jumping through hoops just to catch just a few minutes with my child.

But I got to take her on vacations, usually Thanksgiving and Christmases with my family, which my daughter loved.

She grew, and when my sisters finally bought her a training bra and showed her how to use it, she let me know one Christmas by needlessly fiddling with the bra strap and making sure I saw her do it. When she was 14, my mother, her grandmother and namesake, was dying slowly and painfully of cancer, and my daughter let me know in no uncertain terms that I would be taking her to the hospital -- six hours drive away from her home -- or she would find a way to get there by herself.

Eventually, she went to college, then grad school, and in her early 20s finally started dating the boy she would marry.

I "gave her away" in marriage at the resort, even though she was no longer mine to give away.

That feeling of irrelevancy only increased with the birth of her first child. As the father of the woman giving birth, I had no status at the hospital. I was peripheral, at best.

While my daughter delivered her child in the birthing room, I was exiled to the hall with my current wife. As the hours ground down, the staff wouldn't even tell me how she was doing. I hid my concern behind humor.

My granddaughter, now 2 1/2, turned out to be such a pistol I was afraid any subsequent child would be steamrollered. I was wrong. My chunky 14-month-old grandson is more than a match for his slender older sister.

I can't pretend to be the most important person in my daughter's life any more. I'm probably sixth or seventh at best, behind her husband, her kids, a couple of close friends and her mother.

But I intend to put these kids on my shoulders.

And they should stand on my shoulders, my grandkids, getting a head start on all the juice they can get out of life.

If you have grandchildren, I hope they give you the same sense of purpose, and the same joy.