By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Forget pushing my boys in a baby carriage. I couldn’t wait for them to drive me in a car.

All too willingly, I thrust them headlong toward maturity, thinking what? That I needed more time to read mysteries? Do yoga? Drink coffee? Come on.

I wished myself into parenting obsolescence.

You’re too big for a bottle,” I told my 11-month-old, and I pushed the little green sippy cup on him like it would add 20 points to his IQ. “No baby talk,” I told my other son. “Say periphery,” I said. My legacy would be to pass on a word I’ve been obsessed with for 42 years — to a preschooler. That made sense.

And I was beyond thrilled to turn ratty baby blankets in and shop for college comforters. What was I thinking?

I remember exactly what I was thinking. Good riddance, Pokémon. Figuring out your powers was as confounding to me as differential calculus. But when Pikachu finally disappeared from my life, so did something else.

Ah, battles over homework. My sons saw the ubiqitous worksheets not as a valuable review of the wonderful things they’d learned during the day. Nope. All they were were impediments to Nintendo.

The arguments that I waged over doing the extra credit spelling words were ridiculous. Like a benighted Benjamin Franklin, I conducted many a battle on the virtues of doing more than expected. I don’t think the life lessons captured in Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac were intended to make sure third grade kids got more than 100 on spelling tests. Eventually, wouldn’t my sons have learned to spell the word accumulate anyway?

At one time, I wanted to turn my sons into the kind of kids who saw multi-step math problems as a challenge not a burden. Clearly I viewed the “A’s” on their report cards as a not-so-secret referendum on my parenting.

You don’t always get what you order. What stands out about my youngest son’s childhood was not his abiding commitment to Shakespeare. He used to leave little totems behind when he’d been in my room. Like Kilroy writing “I was here,” he’d throw an old sock on top of the non-spinning blade of the ceiling fan. I’d find a Beanie Baby on my bedpost. That is always more who he was than the millennial version of Doogie Howser.

Whenever I was trying to rush, these little tokens would make me pause, slow down. When he visits today, my son doesn’t leave anything but an open screen on my computer where’s he’s been doing something mysterious with data. Much as I was in a rush to put in my parenting time, and to see how it all turned out, I miss those socks.

Of course, I love my adult children. They grew up to be good people; they’re even fun. If I like Fleabag and Sex Education as much as they do, I assume I’m still relevant.

Of course, the conversation is different than it was 18 years ago. But if I close my eyes, I can still see them as they were. For me, it would be so easy to lapse into the old lingo. “Pick up your shoes. Put on your cleats and get ready for soccer. The Hebrew School carpool is here.”– sentences I said dozens of times. Too bad I have no one to use them on.