I'm tired of reading articles about parenting. I avoided it during pregnancy, mostly because when I get really scared, my go-to defense mechanism is avoidance. I read stuff here and there about what was going on during the seemingly endless stages of pregnancy, mostly because I was often freaked out at what was going on with my body. When it came to how to prepare for this child, I procrastinated.
About five days into her life when she wasn't nursing, was losing weight, and not sleeping more than an hour at a time, my over-stressed, malnourished, and sleep-deprived self got desperate. I started reading everything I could get my hands on. Babywise: Program your kid. Eat. Play. Sleep. It will change your life.Happiest Baby on the Block: The five S's. It will change your life. Dr. Sears: Breast feed or your baby will grow up miserable and severely detached. Breastfeeding will change your life. I drank in these three books in the first two weeks of her life, trying to find some happy ending to the miserable state of affairs both of us were in.
What I learned in those first few weeks of her life was that the world is not short on opinions on how to help babies adjust to their new lives outside the womb. Most of them are written by men, who don't have the slightest idea how it feels when a life is totally and utterly dependent on you to survive only minutes after going though something (i.e. giving birth) that is the physical equivalent to getting hit by a dump truck. None of the books seemed to address, honestly, what was really ailing me.
As she moved through life, this problem only grew. The blogs, god the blogs (ironic, I know). If you pile the blogs on top of the books, you've got even more information to sift through, all of it contradicting the other.
I was confused and frustrated, so:
I stopped reading, and was honest with myself about how bored I was with the topic. Oh, god, no! How could I?! How irresponsible! I've never done this before, how would I ever know how to do it right?! Don't I love my baby? Aren't I concerned that she will turn out wrong, grow up scarred and set up for failure.
I finally realized: Let go.
No matter how many books I read, blogs I devoured, or advice I sought, my kid's going to grow up messed up some way or another. My child is imperfect (gasp!), and the longer she is on this earth, each moment, each step she takes, will make her more and more imperfect.
How did I come to this conclusion? I looked around. I looked at myself and everyone around me and realized how imperfect we all are. Parents are the most influential figures in our children's lives, and consequentially, we have to take credit for however screwed up they turn out.
But this isn't a blame game, or a shame slam. It's merely a simple equation:
I am imperfect + I am shaping her more than anyone else into the person she will be = she will grow up to be imperfect.
She will grow to have some of the worst parts of me, and she will blame it on me, which I honestly can't blame her for doing.
But she will also have the best parts of me.
What I want her to understand more than anything is to be willingly vulnerable enough to be ok with the imperfection.
As for me, I know I suck as a parent, but I have my moments when I rock as well. I'm going to start embracing the up side and the down side of the "schwartz" of parenting (if you can name that reference, I'll buy you dinner).
And if all else fails, I'll just blame it on my mother.
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