People sometimes ask her for parenting advice, and she has to wonder just how insane they are. Jean is famous now. They all are—the parents of the Animorphs, the children who had almost single-handedly saved earth. Somehow, this means they did the whole thing right. As if.
These days, the child-rearing police warn against helicopter parenting, and nine years ago, Jean would have very much agreed with them. She was the type of parent who let her sons chase after their crushes at meetings on the beach and go to the mall with friends, and look, they were just fine, weren't they? They resisted peer pressure; they didn't get into fights at school, got decent grades, and had friends. They were model children at best, typical kids at worst. They were intelligent and funny and their own people.
Of course, Jean and Steve were proud—of their children and of themselves, good, reasonable parents who had raised two upstanding sons. They had sometimes talked about it on the nights Tom was at the Sharing and Jake was "out with friends," remarking how lucky they were and congratulating themselves how they had raised Jake and Tom right.
The Yeerk had laughed at these memories, and as much as Jean hated to admit it, the parasite's reaction had been spot on. They had been fools, utter fools, and their children had paid the price.
Those good, safe, fine sons? Before they even got out of high school, one was enslaved, and the other was a guerrilla general, holding countless lives in his shape-shifting hands. Forget sibling rivalry—her sons were fighting a full-on war against each other, no holds barred and no referees. By the age of 16, Jake had more blood on his hands than even he could remember, and Tom had spent years captive in his own body, slave to a creature who had no second thoughts about murder, as long as it moved him to the top of the parasitic heap.
And where was their mother during all of this? Where else but in blissful ignornace?
How many times had Jake lay on that thin line between life and death, while she had slept or watched mediocre late night TV in her comfy bed? How many times had Tom screamed in horror and rage, locked in a cage, while she joked with her husband about the power of teenage puppy love? And how many times had her youngest stared at his brother across the dinner table, knowing he just might have to kill him if it came down to it, while she had asked for the salt or prodded them about a B- here or there?
How had she missed the darkness in Jake's eyes, the fear and guilt that had become so clearly etched in him as he moved silently and sadly through post-war life? How had she looked into her teenager's face every night and still missed the lines that shouldn't have been there, the battles that had aged him beyond his time?
Good parent? She wishes. In fact, when one of your children is dead and the other one is missing, all but presumed to be so, all you can do is wish. Wish that you had noticed. Wish that you had said yes. Wish that you had said no. Wish that you were a parent in more than past tense.
She cannot count the number of times she's heard news anchors or even passers-by gibbly remark on how they "can't even get [their] 13 year old son to pick up his laundry, much less lead a war against an evil alien invasion." She will smile and laugh, as though it is new and clever, not an unfunny joke she heard a million times before. She does not tell them that Jake did not pick up his laundry when fighting the war nor that she wishes she had never asked him to do such silly things, that in hindsight, all she would have done was to cradle her sons against her, watch over them, never let them go.
She does not say to them that being a helicopter parent is infinitely better than being none at all.