Parenthood

Parenthood is an amazing thing. You start off with this squalling ball of poop and crankiness, forced from a place of peace and comfort in to a world that is noisy and bright and smelly and foreign. And, if you are very, very lucky, you will take part in helping another person engage with the world and hopefully be happier and better prepared than you were when you did the same. It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing I will probably ever do.

I was thinking about parenting recently when I heard that a friend of a friend has someone in their family who is pregnant at 19 and my reaction initially was “Oh, I hope that goes well. Nineteen is so young…” And, of course, in many ways, it is.

But, as with all things, context matters. My own parents were young when they decided to have kids. My mom was 17 when she had me and my dad was 19. They both came from divorced homes and I think they looked to each other with an eye to creating the kind of family and home that they didn’t have themselves. Having said that, they were not particularly prepared to have kids. I suspect their only prior experience was their own recent stint as children, just a few short years before.

I love my children dearly, but thinking of them and imagining them having children at 17 or 19 is terrifying. They were still trying to figure out themselves, who they would be, hell, still who they will be.

I was 23 when my son was born and I recall thinking how much better prepared I thought I was than my own father had been. I had a college education, I was four years older. But, the reality is, I also barely knew who I was or who I wanted to become.

That didn’t stop me from starting down that path to have kids. I felt I was ready to provide from them, felt I was ready to parent them.

My kids will do what they choose to do, certainly. While I still have the ability to influence, I’ve lost the ability to affect them directly.

But, when I did, I know they heard me over and over again stress the importance of learning how to take care of themselves before they started to think about taking care of someone else. And I’m not and wasn’t talking about kids. I was simply talking about being in a serious relationship. I believe that an individual needs to know how to meet their own needs, take care of themselves, be self-sufficient and know they can stand on their own two feet before they should start thinking seriously about entering in to a relationship where, suddenly, another person’s needs and wants are at least of equal importance to your own. And that’s with someone you can talk to and negotiate with!

Kids, on the other hand, kids don’t get to choose to enter in to this new relationship. They simply get put in the middle of this family by virtue of birth, not choice. You can’t communicate with them, at least initially, then arguably again through the teenaged years. So, I’ve always believed, you have to have your own house in order before you are ready to start a long term relationship with someone.

And, in a perfect world, you’d have a few years with that person to figure out if this is someone you think you can live with, negotiate with, be happy with before you ever think about bringing another person in to that mix.

All of us who are parents understand this: Once you bring that child in to the world and in to the family, your priorities shift. No more can you be the selfish single person you were before you partnered with someone. No more can you just be the couple who loves to spend time together and can simply be happy when around the other. No, now your world revolves around that squalling ball of poop and crankiness because it’s your responsibility that that person is now in the world. It is your responsibility to provide everything for that child, both materially and emotionally. And, if you’re doing it right, there is no job you have or will have that is more important than raising that child.

So, you better have your own personal house in order because it may be 10-15 years before you get time to just think about yourself.

You better have a strong and resilient relationship with your partner, because it may be, depending on how much family you have and how close they are, six months to two years or more before you get a chance to get away as a couple for more than an hour or two. And, one way you’ll know you’re doing that right is that you’ll worry about that child you left with someone else the entire time you’re gone the first time or seven.

That job you used to put in sixty hours a week when things demanded may look a lot less critical, though it still remains important because it helps provide for your family and your child.

That relationship that you reveled in may take a backseat while you try to civilize the little feral child that you helped cause to come in to this world. Be sure to take that time to make sure that relationship can weather that kind of benign neglect because you will make that child the priority.

Now you get to balance all four of those worlds: The Children, the Job, The Relationship, yourself.

I don’t know if my parents were ready to have kids, aside from being biologically prepared and having the desire. Certainly I don’t believe they took any classes and they didn’t have great role models.

What other job can you take on with no prior experience and simply say, “Yeah, I think I’d like to do that!” There’s no test, there’s no entry exam, no pre-requisites. Hell, if you want to get a job in fast food, they’re going to want to know that you have some basic job skills. It’s terrifying to recognize that you can become a parent with even less.

That doesn’t mean that my parents were bad parents any more than I think I was a bad parent. I think we do the best we can with what we have.

I know I leaned on some books, especially during the teen years. (theirs, not mine). I know parents who refer to the Internet as “the Third Parent”. Hey, at least they’re not working in a vacuum. Though filtering the signal from the noise when it comes to asking the Internet can be its own challenge. But, at least it’s a form of community, which can make a huge difference because that means there are others out there to tell you that you’re over-reacting. Or you’re under-reacting or maybe you’re reacting just right. I don’t know where my parents went for that kind of advice or that kind of affirmation.

Frankly, there’s no guarantee that any of these things that I’m talking about are going to result in a better parent. Or, for that matter, a better child. Certainly there’s some sort of mix of nature and nurture, though I couldn’t begin to tell you how much of one versus the other.

But, I do believe in being prepared. I do believe in the value of being educated when it comes to solving a problem. And, to be clear, entering in to parenthood is a problem to be solved. There will be challenges the likes of which you may never have dealt with before. You will play a critical role in the development of a human being. That human being will go through a number of years where it can’t even tell you what’s wrong, though for that first year, it’s likely to be related to pooping or eating with some desire to be held tossed in with roughly equal measure. There will probably be unnecessary trips to the emergency room or to the doctor. There will probably be both over and under-reactions. My own mother thought I was constipated right up to the point where she finally took me in to the doctor, who then rushed me across the street to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and the appendix burst as they were removing it. Pretty sure she felt guilty about that one for a while.

But, I lived. I had some bumps and bruises, but I made it. I got to grow up and look at my parents and choose things that I wanted to do just like they did and things I wanted to do differently. And that, I think, is one of the best legacies we give to our children. We try very hard. We mean very well. And, at the end of the day, they get to choose what they want to emulate and what they want to do completely differently and the carousel goes around and around once again.