All My Parenting Wins May Just Have Been Good Luck
My kids were never picky eaters. They ate EVERYTHING. At 18 months, Archer hurled herself across the table to get at the salmon sushi. (Still her favorite.) At age seven, Grey would, in every single restaurant we visited, look around with bright anticipation and ask, “Do you think they have squid here?”
With the exception of raw tomatoes (Archer) they would eat anything you put in front of them, and usually come back for seconds. Their dad and I shrugged and replied to people’s shock and envy with, “Our secret? We just feed them exactly what we eat.”
I had a lot of other theories: we never introduced them to “kid food”, so they never asked for it. We always, ALWAYS sat down to dinner en famille, all of us eating the exact same thing. Okay, I sometimes had to remind them about salad.
Were we smug? You bet we were. It was obvious to us that all those picky eaters were the result of lazy parenting.
But I do not live in a vacuum. It appeared that other parents were also taking the culinary high road, with less than stellar results. Eventually I accepted that we couldn’t actually take credit for this stroke of luck. Yeah, we provided them with balanced, nutritious meals, but the rest was purely windfall.
This came as kind of a heavy blow, since I knew I was half-assing other parts of childrearing and wanted to capitalize on the things that were going well. Because like it or not, there’s a scorecard hovering over the head of every parent, like a drone guided by the spirit of Dr. Spock. (The baby guy, not the Vulcan guy.)
Other things I took a whole lot of credit for:
My four-year-old could already read! Obviously that was down to me reading to her for hours every day and enrolling her in Montessori at age three. What can I say? I rarely let them watch tv and I’m from a very literary family.
My kids ate like they were preparing for the apocalypse, and had slim, muscular little bodies. Well, I got them to eat all the right things (see above), barely let them near a screen (this was the early 2000’s), and ran them around like border collies. Hooray for me! What an excellent mother.
Mind you, I would never dream of saying any of this OUT LOUD. I’m nice like that. And really, all this pride was a species of defense. Because I yelled too much. And I never knew when homework was due. And I was kind of lax about baths. And hearing them fight sent me into a sort of paralyzed anguish in which I could take no constructive action.
What can parents take credit for? I mean, feeding and clothing and housing them isn’t exactly going to win you a Nobel, or even a cheap everyone-who-plays-gets-one gold-painted trophy.
Nature or nurture? Genetics? Temperament? Birth order? To my mind, kids are who they are, and all we can do is try to catch on as early as possible. Obviously the way we treat them matters, and what we expose them to matters, but at some point free will or chemistry or astrology takes over and all bets are off.
My kids are more or less adults now, and I can’t say I never worry about the myriad ways in which I’ve messed them up. But I no longer feel the need to defend my choices. Because for the most part the Mommy Wars are being waged by people in the very thick of battle. Looking through a microscope at the bark of a single tree while refusing to recognize that they live in a forest.
It’s an ugly struggle in which no one wins, and everyone feels concurrently self-congratulatory and defeated. It’s not until we’ve aged out of it that we look at that next group of moms (and other parents, don’t want to generalize here, but it does seem to be the moms who hit the hardest) acting crazed that we realize the game is rigged and it’s bringing out the worst in us all. And it’s hella hard to escape it, even though we all hate it.
I was once in a discussion on Facebook, of all places; something I rarely engage in, because talk about beating your head against a wall. The conversation was about schooling choices. This family swore by unschooling and that one homeschooled and the other used a fabulous charter school. And you could sense the overwhelm on the part of the person, a single parent, looking for advice.
Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and said something trite like, “We’re all doing our best with the resources at our disposal.” And honestly, everyone calmed the hell down and seemed grateful, because they got to get off their soap boxes without having to win the point.
(This may be why I refuse to engage in political discussions of any stripe these days; because for some reason we’ve moved into the Era of Winning, and let me tell you, Taylor Swift is the only one who has that one sewn up.)
In the name of all that is holy, mainly our children’s happiness and our own, can we (parents) be happy about the things that are going well and bummed about the things that aren’t and offer our friends and frenemies and even people we do not know from Adam a little kind support?
Moms are better than this. Let those a-holes in Congress belittle one another for holding different opinions; let’s not be like that. I promise to feed your kid only beige food if you come for dinner, because they will be just fine and may even end up being the genius who solves climate change.
Even if they end up becoming a geriatric reader at the ancient age of eight.