The Toughest Job You'll Never be Prepared for

I’ve been up half the night and my mind is 22 miles northeast of my present physical location. I’m not sure I’m all here. This is a story of parents, which means it is an imperfect story about imperfect people whose purpose in life may at first appear to be to make as many mistakes as possible in 18 years. I’m writing this because I recently overheard a conversation between an estranged parent and adult child that was heartbreaking. The occasion was the revelation that said adult child is pregnant. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to discover what an imperfect person she is. The sad part is, by the time she discovers this, it might be too late for her to tell her father that perhaps, just maybe, she was a bit harsh in her judgment.

None of us should be allowed to be parents, and yet most of us are. There are no more harsher critics of our parenting than our own parents and our own children. I was surfing through some children’s health websites today and so many questions pertained to new parents having different opinions from the new grandparents: when to potty-train, when to wean, whether to allow a pacifier, the child’s too fat, too thin, to aggressive, doesn’t stand up for himself… right up until, about age 13 when suddenly the questions became “why won’t my mom let me get my tongue pierced, date, become a vegetarian..”

In some ways I suppose I was lucky in that my parents had both passed on before I had my child. I had enough doubts in my head. I certainly didn’t need my father’s second-guessing as well. It doesn’t change the fact that parenting is a losing proposition. Someone is always going to think you’ve done something wrong, even if you have a perfectly healthy child in every respect, there’ll be someone to tell you he should have started walking sooner, was weaned too soon, and heaven forbid if you didn’t breastfeed! I have this awful feeling that all those Mother Superiors (not the Catholic kind, the other kind) are planning to buy Gitmo from Bush and his friends once they are done with it. It will still be a gulag, but it will be there exclusively for women who don’t breastfeed their children. Trust me formula moms, they’ll be coming for you next.

So once your own parents have told you what a bad parent you are, and society has chimed in about what a bad parent you are -- and pity anyone whose child is less than perfect, because all of society knows, deep down, medical research, mapping of the human genome, heredity be damned, any flaw in your child from a strawberry birthmark on the cheek to an extra toe to anything in between is the fault of the parent, especially, the Mom – little junior or Suzy gets old enough to tell you what a bad job you are doing and how you are ruining the best years of his/her life.

But louder than any of those voices is that voice in your head that keeps you up at night…what did I do? What mistake did I make today and how bad was it? When did I do too much and when did I not do enough? That cup of coffee I had when I was six months pregnant, how damaging was that and when is it going to come back to haunt me? Am I helping my child build self-esteem or am I spoiling her? Should junior be playing with Rainbow Fairy Barbie or should I take that away and give him a pro-wrestling “action figure” instead?

And then, no matter how careful you are, no matter how many books you’ve read, no matter what expert advice you’ve listened to, something goes wrong. Maybe it’s choking on a coco puff or falling off a swing or tripping over a sprinkler. Maybe it’s a signal you missed that said, silently but clearly, “Mom, we need to talk” or “things aren’t going so well at school.” And you realize you’ve made a mistake. You weren’t watching. You weren’t attentive enough. You lost patience. You failed to anticipate. You got careless. You didn’t think. There’s no worse feeling in the world. Then you have to measure the magnitude of your blunder and figure out what damage control can be done. After you’ve patch things up as best you can, you do it all again until the next time you make a mistake, and there always seems to be a next time. That any of us make it to adulthood is a credit to the survivability of our species. That we then manage to raise another generation is nothing short of incredible. Some blunders you never fully recover from, some turn into opportunities in the most unexpected ways, the best ones are the ones you get to look back and laugh at a few years later.

I’ve stayed up half the night with contemporaries telling the tales of all the unmitigated errors our parents made in raising us. Now, some of my contemporaries are hearing from their own children how badly they botched the job. We all fail. The best of us attempt to inflict the least amount of damage possible. But how would the most perfect parent prepare a child for the knocks and bumps of the real world if they always did and said the right thing?

With all that in mind, I propose the following thought experiment. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, forgive your parents just one thing today. And while you are at, forgive yourself for one as well.