The woes of parenting....

As a kid I remember thinking I was never going to be like my parents.  If my kids didn’t want to clean their room, then I wasn’t going to make them.  It is their room after all.  If they don’t like fish, then they don’t have to eat it, and an 8:30 bed time is just unreasonable.  Then one day, I woke up and realized I had turned into my parents.  I am not sure if it was a slow progression or if it just happens one night while you are sleeping. You find yourself saying things like, “Because I said so that’s why” “If you just listened to your mother then things like this wouldn’t happen” “Well I am not (insert child’s name)’s mother now am I” Or my personal favorite, “If Johnny told you to jump off of a bridge would you do it?!”

I, like most other women, saw parenting like it is on TV.  The nurse would hand you a clean, great smelling, quiet little wide eyed baby after a brief drug and virtually pain free delivery and life would be perfect. You would ONLY use cloth diapers, you would breast feed of course, and when the time came, make ALL of your own baby food.  Your perfect bundle would only fuss when she needed something and quiet as soon as they saw you. They would sleep through the night practically from birth and it would all be so blissful. Then reality slapped you in the face. After 12-50 hours of intense EPIDURAL FILLED labor you are handed a gooey, slimy, slightly misshapen screaming baby. It is the best feeling in the world. Although things didn’t go as planned initially, from here on out it will be PERFECT! Then you leave the hospital. Your perfect baby wont latch well, your nipples feel like they have been put through the meat grinder, you have a HUGE pile of dirty cloth diapers and you are FAR to sleep deprived to wash them.  Welcome to parenthood.

I am here to tell you, that it is ok.  What makes a good parent is not breast milk, cloth diapers, or organic steamed beets.  Don’t get me wrong those moms exist, my sister in law Moira is one of them. She has 5 kids, she home schools, she gardens, her babies wear cloth diapers, she is still nursing her nearly 2 yr old, and she even has her own chickens. She is my hero.   Is she a better mother then me? I don’t think so.  I live in my car half the time, running to this child’s sporting event, or 4h meeting, or Girl scout project. We are never home. My idea of home cooked is frozen pizza warmed in MY oven in MY HOME, therefore home cooked! I KILL house plants just by looking at them. My sister says my house is where house plants go to die; it is like a plant hospice. If we had to eat only what I grew, we would all starve to death.  Moira had her 5^th child unassisted at home drug free; when my 4^th kiddo was born I walked into the hospital NOT EVEN IN LABOR YET and asked for my epidural. I had been here a few times before and I knew what was coming, might as well be prepared. My son was born a few hours later, a perfect gooey misshapen screaming baby. He was not harmed in any way because I chose not to suffer through the pain of child birth, to each its own.

I am here to say, IT IS OK! If you feed your kids boxed macaroni and cheese, they will survive. If you don’t pick them up and hold them the second they start crying, they will not turn into the children that shoot up play grounds. If you let them watch Yo Gaba Gaba on a 3 hr loop so you can have a few blissfully quiet moments, their brains will not turn to mush. IT IS OK!  In reality, society has now made it so that no matter what you do, you will feel like a failure.  If you exclusively breast feed you are causing the child to have an unnatural attachment to only you making it difficult for the child to bond with their father therefor insuring that they will have daddy issues in the future.  If you exclusively bottle feed then you are lazy and are choosing to poison your child.  If you home school you are isolating your children and insuring they will be out casts in society. If you put your children in public school you are just pushing off your responsibilities on others so you don’t have to deal with them.  If you let them watch TV you are letting the world poison their minds, if you don’t let them watch TV then you are sheltering them and they will be unprepared for the real world.  I could keep going forever, but really, you get my point.  Society seems to LOVE to make parents feel like failures.  

So when you wake up one day and realize your life of parenting resembles more “Children of the corn” then “Cheaper by the dozen”, don’t feel bad, you are not alone.  Millions of sleep deprived parents out there feel your pain.  I wish I could lie to you and say it gets better, it doesn’t.  People will tell you it is just a stage, they will outgrow it, and they do. They then start a new stage, their stages never get better.  I once asked a father of 4 grown children what age is the worst, he replied that it depended on the child, for one of them it was 35.  So fear not, it is only the first 50 years of parenting that are the most difficult; it’s all downhill from there.