Why Parenting Books Suck

There is this moment, during every labour, when I find myself on my knees with my head pressed into my husband’s chest, tears running down my face, weeping, “I can’t do this… I just can’t… make it stop.”

It’s not loud, angry railing at the gods weeping, it’s that completely wrung out, utterly spent, at the frayed ends of whatever rope I thought I had to hold on to, broken to my core weeping. At the precise moment when the one, and only, thing I know is that I have absolutely nothing left to give, I’m being called upon to give what feels like might cost me my life.

At this moment my husband, who has had plenty of practice in this space, does the only thing he can. He cradles my head to his chest with one hand, rubs my back with his other, balances the puke bowl against the side of the bed with his thigh and whispers to me, “You can do this… you are… keep breathing… it will pass… this is normal… you’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

What he doesn’t do, graciously, is ask me if I could please release the handful of his hair that I’ve got a death grip on, along with his belt buckle, as the pain is making his eyes water. Smart man.

This moment, taken in freeze frame, is the still life of motherhood.

Not the smiling angelic mother and cherub-faced child that is marketed on every baby product. Not the cheering parents in the background of some childhood conquest. Not happy, messy, cookie baking as a family. Not beach vacations, or Disneyland mouse ears all lined up in a stair step row.

Nope.

This one: On my knees. Completely spent. Nothing more to give, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. At the mercy of external forces. Just doing my best to survive.

Three things go through my head in that moment. And this is consistent, across four births:

1. WHAT have I gotten myself into?
2. This BETTER be worth it!
3. That’s it. I think I really am going to die. This really is going to kill me this time.

Twenty years into this parenting thing I’m beginning to have a little perspective on what I’ve gotten myself into.

As to whether it’s worth it… to be completely honest, I’m not sure yet. I can see that it’s worth it for the children, for humanity in general, for the grand, universal scheme of things. But for me? I don’t know. Of course that question is water under the bridge, isn’t it? This motherhood thing is a one way trip. We make it worth it.

For the record, it hasn’t killed me yet. Although I hear it does sometimes, so that’s a valid fear.

I’ve been lucky

I sat in a hammock yesterday in a picture postcard of Antigua, waiting for my man-child to bring me a rum drink with a candied cherry on top, watching a mama coo at her fat little boy, arms and legs wriggling, grinning back at her with no teeth.

“You used to be just like that,” I pointed to my son, “Only fatter.”

He chuckled, in his 6’3” (and still growing) frame, six pack abs a testimony to months spent raising sails, salted black hair wild around his shoulders, scars shining against his tanned skin, and nodded. It’s a favourite family joke that he was the fattest baby, so fat that he neither wanted to sit up, nor crawl. He just laid about and ate. When his following brother was diagnosed failure to thrive and couldn’t nurse enough to save his life (almost literally) we joked that it was because this one had nursed so much that there was nothing left for the next brother.

By every single account I have been “lucky” in motherhood.

Four for four we have healthy young people. Strong in body, heart, mind & spirit. No one’s committed a felony (… that I know of… that they’ve been caught at… yet…. perhaps I should knock on wood). We have no addictions. No one has broken more than a finger sized bone. No one has (as of 2:00 a.m. December 15, 2015… it could totally happen tomorrow) descended into that black pit that I hear swallows some teenagers. My kids like each other. They like us most days. To a man, woman and child, they are smart enough to get by, resourceful enough figure it out, privileged enough to have a real chance in this world, and well traveled enough to have a two handed grip on why they’d better not waste any of that.

That’s lucky.

I over think it

By every single account I’ve also been calculated in motherhood.

I read every book of my parenting generation. All of them.

I actually interviewed older mothers. I took notes.

I’ve studied other families, the ones with kids about 2–5 years on from my own, to figure out what they had gotten so very right, or what they’d dropped the ball on, so royally, as the case may be.

I have a set of questions I ask twenty somethings about what their parents did well, what they really messed up, and what they’d change about their childhoods and teenage years.

I made lists, dozens of pages long, when my children were small, of everything I wanted them to learn before we emancipated them. A sampling:

• Wipe your own butt
• The uses of each piece at a proper table setting
• To mix a perfect drink (preferably the ones I like)
• To operate a chainsaw
• To embroider

Nope. Not kidding.

Based on the encouragement of a really cool set of books, straight out of the seventies, I was the mom with two and three year olds who would pull pacifiers out of their mouths and correctly identify the planets on the wall at the planetarium, and who could point out which president was Hoover from a choice of ten cards laid out on the living room floor. They could recognize quantities, picking out a card with 72 (or 38, or 97) randomly placed sticky dots from all of the others when asked, and read a hundred sight words (based on their shapes) before they could pronounce half of them.

Nope. Not kidding. I was sure I was increasing their genius factor. Trust me when I say, I was not. If you’ve met my kids, you’re now weeping with laughter.

That was silly.

Shut Up

This book reading thing. This was my biggest problem. Thank god mommy-blogs didn’t exist yet. I’d never have found my way out of THAT black hole.

I have only one thing to say to the parenting books: Shut up.

• Shut up because you don’t live in my house.
• Shut up because you don’t have my kids.
• Shut up because I can’t bear to be told one more time where I’m going wrong.
• Shut up because you have no idea what right is, anyway.
• Shut up because there is no right way.
• Shut up because you’ve only half raised two kids and I’m trying to keep from killing four.
• Shut up because your two, sweet, traditionally tempered girls are no measuring stick for my wildlings.
• Shut up because your assumption that what I’m aiming for with my kids is what’s “normal” offends me.
• Shut up because none of what you have to say has any bearing on what’s really, actually, hard in parenting.

What the parents of the world do not need is one more sleep system, one more action plan for “controlling” children (is this possible? And if it WAS, thinking about the long term implications of that, would we really want to?) one more snappy chore chart, one more “readiness” checklist for pick-your-poison, or one more manifesto on what the perfect happy home looks like.

Barf.

No. None of the parenting books are any good at all when the rubber meets the road. What we need, what we really need, there are no manuals for. The solutions to the big issues are not listed on page 73, paragraph four.

The Parenting Books We Really Need

Looking to write a truly useful parenting book? Here are my topic ideas; it’s an incomplete list:

Melatonin or Murder: How to not kill a child who doesn’t sleep, ever, for years. Not how to get them to sleep, that’s not ever going to happen. How to not kill them. That’s salient information.

Plumbing for Parents: How to get matchbox cars out of the S bend in the toilet plumbing. More than once. (I’m sure it could be Googled now… fifteen years ago, not so much.)

Sweethearts & Smartphones: A three step protocol for how to have the, “Your kid asked my kid to text nude photos,” conversation with a best friend.

Cutting and Quiet Kids: What to do when you find a knife under a bed and when, exactly, that becomes a serious psychological condition and not just experimentation.

“I’m DONE with you people!” What to do with a child who utters this as his first complete sentence and then goes on to explore the nuances of tone, conduct, and meaning, for more than a decade.

Your Kid Might Die: A field manual to risk management and frontal lobotomy for tweens. The preface needs to be about getting your head around realities as you watch monitors bleep in the hospital all night when death really is on the line.

Is That Vodka in His Sippy Cup? A get real guide to when it’s okay to drug a kid, for your sanity, for his, for the whole plane load of people you’re trapped with.

Expletives R Us: On the proper timing and nuanced delivery, for every possible scenario. So far I’ve discovered at least ten unique ways to deliver, “Are you effing kidding me??” Each one communicating something very different, and crystal clear, to a child who is about to step over the imaginary line of insanity. My favourite story is of a friend’s kid who really thought her middle name was “dammit” and introduced herself as “Sally Dammit!” to her Dad’s boss. Awesome. Pure gold. Let’s write that book.

Raising Designated Drivers: Drinking your way through teaching a teenager to drive.

Mantras for Mothers: I’m a bit of a yogi, so indulge me. This should be arranged by age group and begin with things like, “Choose cheerful!” for toddlers, progress to, “Brothers and sisters are best friends,” for those middle years (when they SO are not). Please culminate with a section for teens and kidults with things like, “Condoms are your friend!” and “Touch the car to NOTHING.”

Oh, and there should be a special section with the real gems that transcend age group and contain some of my husband’s personal favourites, such as: “There’s …(room cleaning, dish washing, floor sweeping, homework)… and then there’s bullshit! Guess which you’re doing!” (gleaned from Shit My Dad Says which he takes as his personal parenting inspiration) “Don’t be a dick!” and “Just breathe. You can do this.”

Just Breathe. You Can Do This.

I quit reading parenting books at about about year five. Thank goodness for everyone. The last one I read remains my favourite. It’s called The Three Martini Playdate. Now there’s my kind of title. It includes all sorts of useful information, including your child’s first martini recipe. My youngest has, on more than one occasion, been complimented on his mixology skills.

This afternoon, my giant man child whisked me across English Harbour in a bathtub sized sail boat and out onto the sea. We could see Guadaloupe in the distance, and he surfed the boat, expertly, over perilous rocks and up onto a secluded beach so that I could collect shells and sea glass.

He explained to me how we were going to relaunch the boat from a perilous place, (there was no good place) admonished me to watch the sea urchins around my feet, and my head from the boom as I stepped aboard. He instructed me on the use of the dagger board and encouraged me not to do a “Mom overboard” when he jibed hard, to wait for his Dad.

I gave him a particularly kind version of my, “Are you effing kidding me?” face and said, “You realize I was the one who used to remind you to watch your head?”

“Yeah, but not on a boat,” he answered.

“YES. ON A BOAT. When we sailed when you were very tiny.”

He shrugged. He does not remember a time when he did not sail, or when he did not know to watch his head. So, he assumes he was born with this information.

Sailing. It was on the list. Turns out, it’s also his passion.

I guess that’s the thing that’s drawn me out of bed to write at one in the morning, sitting in the darkness of a tropical night with frogs singing and rain falling intermittently.

The two truest things about motherhood:

1. We don’t know who they are when they come into the world.
2. The truth of that first moment of agony, mirrored in thousands more like it: “I can’t do this, make it stop.”

I did not see today coming when slippery mess of a fat little baby slid into my world. I did it that day, and I did it today too.

I swear, three times a week, sometimes three times a day, that I can’t do this.

Motherhood. It’s too damned hard. I’m too damned weak. The odds feel massively stacked against me. I’m out numbered by 400%. I’ve read every damned book but I still have no idea what I’m doing. This can’t possibly be normal. I’m going to die from this, for sure.

And yet, when I look at my grown kids, I see exactly who they are now reflected the toddlers I once knew:

Hannah’s activist, independent, trail blazer self in the seven year old who was totally offended to be admonished to go inside and play “nicely” with the girls instead of sword fight in her prairie dress and bonnet with the boys. (That mom and I had a little chat.)

Fitz’s trans-Atlantic crossing, create-my-own-wind-to-fill-my-own-sails approach to hacking his education going forward in the little boy who learned every single basic fact while bouncing on a trampoline because if he wasn’t moving, he truly wasn’t learning.

When I really look, with the intent to see them, I realize that I still have no idea who they are. I’m aware that tomorrow could change the whole game. That 28 year olds sometimes come home and confess a drug addiction that they’ve had since high school. And other times, it’s smooth sailing until a Tuesday afternoon in your thirties, or forties, or fifties.

That’s Why Parenting Books Suck.

Because we can’t do this.

And there is no “right” way, even if we could.

And yet we do, generation after generation. We pull it together, every single morning, and we do it. Miracle of miracles, most of us do it right.

But not because of the books. Because we get to know our kids, and we become open to the idea that we may never fully know them. We accept the fact that the person we meet at breakfast today may not be the person we had dinner with last night, and that’s okay, because the reverse is true. We’re growing and changing and moving forward too.

We do our best. Our best varies, day by day, but it is always our best. And often, it is enough.

We find our tribe, our partners in every sort of chaos. The people who will hold us, hold our kids, and hold our hair and the puke bowl when it gets very, very bad. The people who will suffer with us and remind us of the only true things:

“You can do this… you are doing it… keep breathing… it will pass… this is normal… you’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Photo Credit: Michal Parzuchowski