However you arrive at it, parenting is a learning journey. There is so much no one tells you about how to do what is probably the most important job on earth. Really, shouldn’t there at least be a license? I mean you need a license to fish or own a dog. Isn’t raising a child just as important-- in terms of operator competence?
And to those who say “it’s natural”, isn’t that somewhat dependent on the model of your own parents? How do you know how to parent, unless you’ve been around a lot of parents, or studied it, or been around children a lot?
For me, I had only the model of my parents to look at. And, while forgiving them for being overprotective and authoritarian and yelling a lot, I didn’t want to repeat their mistakes.
Because I wanted to flex my freedom to make my own parenting mistakes.
I think a lot of parenting is actually trial and error. Which is a frightening thought, since the outcome of decisions you make all day every day as a parent, may not bear fruit for many years.
And I believe most of us are out here just trying our best and learning to be a parent as we go.
So, some years ago, on the first day of school, everyone was gathered the bus stop, Moms and schoolkids, little sisters and family dogs alike. And I was surprised to see one little sister with her inside-out pajamas pulled backwards up over her head, as if she forgot to fully remove them.
Trying to be polite, but with difficulty, I might have let an inquisitive arch escape from one of my eyebrows, aimed at the mom. It seemed to be met with a responding head nod signifying “I know, it’s OK” from her. All of this, of course, without a word spoken.
Yes, women, and especially moms, can communicate without uttering a word. This explains why men and women will forever, IMHO, have communication difficulties, as all of the men I’ve met this far in life are unable to either notice or fully interpret the nuances of non-spoken language (outside of silent and swift kick under the table, which is likely met with a loudly spoken “What was that for?” paired with a look of confusion), and so will be the topic of another post.
The pajama-head sister appeared at the bus stop almost daily with her headdress, so I (and others) became desensitized and learned to let it go. On her first day of kindergarten, she wore a cloth headband, and soon after, her mother explained that the headband was their conciliatory compromise.
In my unflagging ignorance, I steadfastly maintained that I would never have let my kids out the door with pajamas pulled backward over their head.
This is where the disturbing truth that a-large-part-of-parenting-is-experimenting comes in.
Fast forward: The little girl graduated from college and received a scholarship to Cambridge University. Her father, a PhD in optical engineering, professor, and author of college textbooks, confessed to me that he cannot understand the research she is doing: It's as if she is speaking another language when she tries to explain it to him.
That is enough for me to proclaim that she is, clearly, a genius.
A genius whose parents let her be what she naturally was going to be – pajama headdress and all.
And has me thinking: Jeez, left to my own uninformed parenting style of conformism, I probably would have smothered her genius by insisting she remove the pajamas from her head. And I hereby apologize to my kids for any genius they might have had that I inadvertently stole from them, by shooting low and only trying to make decent human beings.
It never even occurred to me that I could have been aiming for geniuses.
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