Thoughts on Parenting

Becoming a parent: The moment the two lines appear on the little pee stick, the excitement and joy or fear and trepidation are soon met by the feeling that comes and never leaves...guilt.

In our society where everyone strives for "perfection" or at least the illusion of "perfection" it is virtually impossible to escape the nagging thoughts that compare us with them and size up our acheivements with their acheivements. If you have kids you know what I'm talking about- if you don't simply imagine the "competitive" feelings you have about your paycheck, your intelligence, your house, your car, your body...whatever it is that you strive to be the best at...then amplify it 100 times. Do you remember that NO FEAR shirt that said, "When you are not out there practicing, someone, somewhere is. And when you meet, they will win."? Well parenting is like the ultimate sport. We have these young impressionable people, and if we can shape their environment just so, and give them the perfect tools they can become....duh...duh...duh...duh...THE PERFECT CHILD. (all the things that we wanted to be, but didn't quite make it.)

I read an article this morning that helped to quiet the voices that can get loud. The ones that tell you, "so and so gave their child a better birthday party" or "so and so's child walked at 8 months old and speaks fluent greek" or "so and so stays at home and bakes homemade bread and breastfed her child till they were eight so they never had a stuffy nose slept through the night at 1 month old and...."

Anyway I could go on and on...but I won't. A couple exerpts from the article really sum up my feelings on the subject:

We live in a perfection society now, in which it is possible to make our bodies last longer, to manipulate our faces so the lines of laughter and distress are wiped out. We believe in the illusion of control, and nowhere has that become more powerful—and more pernicious—than in the phenomenon of manic motherhood. What the child-care guru D. W. Winnicott once called "the ordinary devoted mother" is no longer good enough. Instead there is an über-mom who bounces from soccer field to school fair to play date until she falls into bed at the end of the day, exhausted, her life somewhere between the Stations of the Cross and a decathlon.

If your mother has been micromanaging your homework since you were 6, it's hard to feel any pride of ownership when you do well. You can't learn from mistakes and disappointments if your childhood is engineered so there aren't any.

There's the problem with turning motherhood into martyrdom. There's no way to do it and have a good time. If we create a never-ending spin cycle of have-tos because we're trying to expiate senseless guilt about working or not working, trying to keep up with the woman at school whose kid gets A's because she writes the papers herself, the message we send our children is terrible. By our actions we tell them that being a mom—being their mom—is a drag, powered by fear, self-doubt and conformity, all the things we are supposed to teach them to overcome. It just becomes a gloss on that old joke: Enough about me. What about you? How do you make me feel about myself? The most incandescent memories of my childhood are of making my mother laugh. My kids did the same for me. A good time is what they remember long after toddler programs and art projects are over. The rest is just scheduling.