You’ve Got This…Mostly
Dear me…eighteen years ago
So I see you got through the fifty-two hour marathon of childbirth, not to mention the nausea and exhaustion of pregnancy, and have now arrived safely home with your new perfectly healthy baby.
I hate to mention it, but that all was the easy part.
I know you’re tired and moderately terrified, and have realized that you should have spent far more time babysitting infants or even toddlers, building your upper body strength, and learning how to meditate, or at least breathe deeply. I know that your husband is about to go back to work, leaving you alone with very little support.
I know that you are starting to sense that this almost entirely alien creature is going to be unusually sensitive and needy. He will cry more than average. He will be content with only three people other than you until he’s about five. He will wear you down because for the next several years you will not be able to leave him. Getting your teeth cleaned or hair cut will require the precision timing and coordination of a CIA operation. A day to yourself will be out of the question.
I know that you didn’t plan to have babies. I also know that the second they placed that little creature in your arms that your heart ceased to exist inside your body and forever moved into orbit around that baby. I know that you have no idea what you are doing.
I know all of this.
But I also want you to know: you’ve got this. Mostly. It will not be easy. It will be the ride of your life. You will be pushed to the edge of everything you ever knew — your capacity for love and joy, rage and despair. The next eighteen years will truly be the best of times and the worst of times.
You will make what will seem like a million mistakes. Often, you will not even be certain what constitutes a mistake. You will helicopter at times, snowplow at other times. You will probably also plane, scooter and streetsweep. You will overparent, underparent, hover, and maybe occasionally show benign neglect. You will say things you regret, lose your temper, and overindulge. You will view his first broken bone and cavity as catastrophic failings on your part (they aren’t).
The mistakes will never stop, but you will learn eventually not to give the mistakes too much power. The memory of the mistakes will fade. You will learn not to take responsibility for every little thing. You will get up and carry on.
You will worry about everything. Arcane diseases that you happened to notice on the internet (just a tip — do not even approach the internet during the first five years of your child’s life). Your precious little boy standing alone on the playground in grade one (yes, you will drive by multiple times just to torture yourself). The radiation from the CT scan you allowed the doctor to do because it seemed like it was a serious concussion. The fact that you did not insist on braces and now it looks like he has a weak chin, and what does that mean for his long term employment prospects and dating life.
As far as I can tell, permanent worry just part of the deal. You will learn to manage the worry (better), move on from specific worries (sometimes by substituting in new worries), and adopt a slightly more sanguine way of being. Life is inherently risky and there is a balance point between too much risk and not living at all. You will have to carve a haphazard path to that balance point, and recognize that it is your child’s life to live and their right to make choices matters.
Do not ever apologize for your worry, no matter who finds you annoying or makes fun of you. Worry and love go hand in hand. You’ve earned the right to worry about whatever you want. Exercise and meditation help. So does wine.
You will (and should) be so grateful that you are doing this under close to the best of circumstances. You have a husband who has a good job. You are reasonably financially secure, enough to afford many of the extras, sports, trips and a decent house. You have always had a job where you could simply drop everything and go to your child as needed. Your children will not have any special needs. Your husband is not going to leave you. You are healthy enough.
Compared to the circumstances that some parents face, you will have a relative parenting cake walk.
Your girlfriends will get you through the first years of your child’s life. That baby class that you were not sure about going to two weeks after your son was born will be one of the best choices you ever made. You will arrive sweaty and agitated because your son screamed the entire way there. You will struggle to find parking and almost hit a car while wedging your SUV into a narrow spot. But you must persist. You will meet about eight other moms there who have babies the same age as yours. You will become friends, and spend the next five years going to parks, music, and kindergym together. You will do group dinner parties, camping trips and girls nights out (GNO). You will talk about all your worries and mistakes with them.
They will be your life line. Eventually you will drift apart, as members of the group move away, go back to work and the kids start going to different schools, but for many years they will be the most important friendships of your life.
You will ache with pride at some of his accomplishments and just his general being. There will be soccer gold medals, a second place in a National freeskiing competition when he is eleven, and a consistent streak of firsts and seconds at the district track meet. He will produce some remarkably attractive artwork in preschool and get into a decent university. You will like his friends, his work ethic, and his kindness to animals. He will make you laugh. There will be no highs like these highs.
You will wallow in shame at his mistakes. That time a commemorative plaque was broken at a campground and your son got part of the blame, even though you are certain it was his friend who did it. His propensity to end up in conflict one of your friend’s daughters, leading to screaming, tears and total meltdowns, even though admittedly you don’t really like her either. You will wonder why he can’t just suck it up and be a people pleaser like you are. You will spend time blaming yourself (or your husband) for every perceived foible he has, the fact that he doesn’t volunteer, or can be rude and selfish sometimes. The fact that he is not a “try hard” like you were. The lows will be low indeed.
Mostly though, he will be remarkably average, and you will have to learn to be okay with that. You will start to block people on Facebook who continually post about how great their kids are. You will do research on how average people are more successful and be disappointed at the lack of clarity in the results.
You will hate some of your friends at times. Nothing stings deeper than a direct rebuke about your own child, or worse veiled criticism and implied complicity in some nefarious activity, especially when you are certain they are mistaken. You will learn that all children lie to their parents, painting themselves as more wholesome, incorporating others into wrongdoing to spread the blame and making it seem like their peers behave worse than they do. You will loathe your friends for their blind spots about their own children and their judgy attitudes towards other children. You will be mystified by others’ perceptions of your child, and you will come to understand that they are an amalgam of the narrative they are told, their own deep-seated beliefs and experiences, and actual data heavily influenced by confirmation bias. You will learn, in time, to focus on the opinions of those who emphasize the positive.
You will hate playdates. They will almost invariably be a stress filled endeavor in which you try to keep other people’s kids alive, entertained, outside and off screens. These children of other people will push your buttons, be lippy, and completely disregard your authority, as they demand to watch TV, play video games, and eat candy. You will wonder about other people’s parenting, but more likely your struggles will be because you are perceived as, and in fact are, an easy mark. You want your kid to be liked by other kids. You want to be liked by other kids. You want to be liked by your own kid. You want to be liked by other parents.
Kids smell this from a mile away and will exploit it with no hesitation. You will bargain desperately in a way that you would never do with your own child — five more minutes of screen time if you go outside for half an hour. You will finally get annoyed as they go into their second hour of a movie and demand that they go outside. They will look at you like you are insane, and you will again wonder what goes on in other people’s households. Your dreams of being the cool parent where the kids all hang in their teen years will quickly evaporate.
You will not raise a reader. You will do everything right, from reading to him in the womb to afternoon and bedtime stories every single day. You will spend a fortune on books, and go to the local library so frequently that the cute guy behind the counter will think you have a thing for him. You will model reading, limit screen time, do enforced reading sessions and exhort on the value of reading. You will hate the holier than thou mothers who opine that raising a reader is just about reading to them when they are young. You will be convinced that he is doomed because he is not a reader.
You will worry about how the world has changed from when you grew up and the future he is inheriting. You will sense his worry about it even as he tells you to chill out. You will not know what to do. Is university the best course of action, or the trades? Should you teach him animal husbandry or computer coding? Is knowing how to shoot a gun an essential skill? Is being a ski instructor a safe aspiration? Will there even be snow? Is being an “influencer” going to be a real, sustainable thing? Should you just by lottery tickets and hope to bequeath your son with riches? You will never know the answer. You will take small solace in the fact that you at least taught him how to cook.
You know none of this and yet somehow all of this. This will be the most wonderful, and occasionally terrible, journey of your life. But it is shorter than you think. Embrace it with every fiber of your being. Appreciate him for who he is, but appreciate yourself for who you are too. You’ve got this… enough.
