Parenting in Perspective
My wife and I are dealing with the terrible twos.
Our son is a rambunctious kid. He’s energetic, creative, intelligent, imaginative. Sometimes he doesn’t want to eat what we serve him, or seemingly, anything at all. Sometimes he kicks. Sometimes he hits. He doesn’t seem to do this to anyone besides us, thank gods, but we obviously do whatever we can to curb this behavior when it happens.
Some nights, after he’s gone to sleep (after much squealing and gnashing of baby teeth) I start to despair a little. Am I failing as a father? Is parenting supposed to be this hard? What else can I try tomorrow?
Now, when my head clears and my wife and I talk about the day, we realize we have a good kid, an adorable and funny kid, who is just going through a phase. That basically all kids do at some point, perhaps to differing extent, but there’s a reason “terrible twos” is a such a universally-understood concept.
But I still think it’s hard.
I’ve been following Eric Meyer on social media and through his blog for many years. When I was first really finding my way in web/front-end development, his was one of the voices I listened most closely to, along with people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Mark Pilgrim, and Nicholas Zakas. I remember following the story of his daughter Rebecca. I remember rebeccapurple.
But reading his repost of that original article from 2014 here on Medium the other day, and the footnote that follows, all those feelings came flooding back to me, as I consider my situation, a father of a raucous, curious, beautiful, healthy two-year-old boy.
My heart broke all over again for Eric and his family, but it helped me. It helped me put things in perspective. While my son might kick and he might yell for no apparent reason, while he might refuse to eat, and while he might refuse to take his medicine — which is, importantly in contrast, usually Tylenol — he’s healthy. My wife and I are lucky. Very, very, very, spectacularly lucky.
I don’t usually go in for “because other people have it rougher, your problems don’t matter” stuff, and that’s not what’s meant here. But perspective is important, and revisiting the unthinkably horrible experience of the Meyer family came at just the time I needed that perspective reset.
My kid is cool. He’s bright and active and he loves planes, trains, and automobiles (the things, not the classic film. A bit too young for that, still). He’s also trying, and difficult, and headstrong and stubborn (a trait, I should admit, he shares with his old man). But he’s healthy. And that makes all the difference in the world.
The rest is sound and fury.
I’m the luckiest dad in the world.
