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Parenting without maps

Last week my mother came from out of province to help take care of my two girls while I worked. My daughters had the week off school while their teachers had professional development time.
Andrews
Columnist Kirsten Andrews

Last week my mother came from out of province to help take care of my two girls while I worked. My daughters had the week off school while their teachers had professional development time.

My mother and I haven’t spent this much time together in years, and it was a delicate balance of give and take, patience (primarily on her part), and a growing understanding of what it takes to be both parent and child (on my part).

In particular, it was a lot of letting go for me. Letting go of old judgments around how I was raised and thoughts about how my parents could have done better.

I’ve been a mom for close to a decade. In some ways it seems like forever, and in others I’ve only just scratched the surface. I haven’t had the opportunity yet to tackle some of the bigger issues head-on like Internet safety (they aren’t online yet), drinking, drugs and sex, but those are coming faster than I can comprehend. I already know that if I could go back in time I would do a lot of things differently. I can only assume that will hold true of future decisions that I make as well. I’m going to want to undo some of them and make different choices. But we can’t, we simply need to move forward.

We all come at parenting without a guidebook.

No one tells us the hardest parts, and the impossible-to-wrap-your-head-around parts. The way your heart will break like it never has before when you see another child cruelly taunt or exclude yours in the schoolyard, or how you would give anything to trade places with your sick baby.

Almost everyone, myself included, has had an opinion on the way another person has parented. We’ve all experienced the eye roll one gets at the grocery store when a toddler is throwing a tantrum in the aisle or eating cheesy pasta off the restaurant floor. We don’t have the perspective it takes in every moment to be compassionate and remember this simple fact: We have no idea what another person is dealing with. We don’t know that this mom hasn’t been out of the house for four days because she’s been caring for her ailing grandparents and this is the first “break” she’s had. We can’t see into the world of the bleary-eyed father who is just trying to get a few morsels of food into his preschooler before he returns to the hospital to check on his wife and newborn twins. 

We forget that we are all doing this for the very first time.

I was an incredible parent too, before I ever had children. Now I know differently. I’ve spent a lot of time softening those sharp edges in my mind, letting go of expectations of others and how they “should” be raising their children.

Finally, I can add my own parents to that group as well. They did the best they could at the time, just like all of us. It’s a humbling experience to be able to see one’s own parents as peers – allies, even – in the obstacle course that is child-rearing.

The amount of patience my mom must have required waiting for that to happen is incalculable.

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