We thought we were parenting experts, but we just had an easy baby
One of the most consistent lessons that I’ve had to learn and relearn through 29 years of parenting is the fact that my children are my teachers rather than my students. This certainty hit me like a lightning bolt when my middle child was still in diapers.
My husband and I felt very confident (you might say cocky) about our abilities to be parents when she was born. After all, we’d just navigated all of this a year ago and it had gone really well. Our son slept through the night at 6 weeks. He was happily chewing solid food right on schedule and stood up to take his first steps at his first birthday party.
It never dawned on us that our baby’s smooth road to toddlerhood had less to do with us and more to do with his own easygoing nature (which would continue to be his way almost the whole way through high school). “We,” we thought, “have got this parenting thing down.” And then our daughter was born almost two months early.
Our tiny tyrant shows us that there is much that we still have to learn
Because she was so small, she could not latch on. Yet, because she was so early, the doctors wanted her to have only breast milk for the first few months. This meant she would need tiny test-tube sized bottles of pumped breastmilk. Every two hours. That’s right. We had to wake her up (defying our uncontested primary rule of parenting – NEVER WAKE A SLEEPING BABY). We had to wake up to wake her up all night long. Right off the bat, this was not the same ball game.
At almost precisely the time that she finally started sleeping through the night, our daughter’s opinions started showing up. These were not gentle preferences. If we had a different vision of how things were going to go than she did, we found ourselves thrown into a cataclysmic emotional cyclone that makes the word tantrum seem too small. Let’s just say that we found ourselves carefully choosing our battles.
Through her toddler years, she became famous amongst our friends and her babysitters for her one-liners in the face of discipline. One that has become lore happened as we were putting her in a time out on the bottom step. She looked up at us with steel in her eyes and said levelly, “I was going to sit here anyway.” I think she was two years old at the time.
Different children need different parents (or parenting)
Just the threat of discipline was enough to pop her brother from “his way” back to “our way.” With our daughter discipline only made her clamp down harder on “her way.” The only way to get through to her was to quietly, softly attempt to understand where she was coming from. Suffice it to say that this did not come naturally to me. The moment I figured this out (in the middle of yet another raging battle with our tiny tyrant) was the moment I first realized that she was here to teach me a different way of being a parent.
Wait. It was actually more than that. She was going to teach me a different way of being – hard stop. She was going to teach me to hold my plans and ideas lightly. She was going to teach me to at least try to understand viewpoints different than my own. If she could be my teacher, it stood to reason that her older brother and younger sister would be my teachers, too. And so began the greatest education of my life.
Twenty-five years later, my kids are still helping me to learn and grow
Flash forward a quarter of century and my three children, now adults, continue to be my teachers. When you get a front row seat to three unfolding lives, your ideas of what should happen get challenged almost daily. My husband and I have learned (many times the hard way) that what we think should happen no longer carries the weight it did when our kids were kids. When we cling to our “shoulds,” life gets pretty uncomfortable – for us and for them. When we instead open ourselves up to wonder about the ways life could go things get pretty exciting.
The best part of all is that the lessons I’ve learned as a student of my children have impacted more than the just the way I parent. They have changed the way I approach my own life. In large part because of raising them, it is easier for me to accept that there is more than one right way to do anything. I am a little better at imagining that the thing that needs to change in any sticky situation might just be me. And, though there are few motivators as compelling as my once-tiny tyrant was, thanks to her and her siblings, I find that I can (eventually) welcome challenges as invitations to stretch and grow.
Thanks, guys.
For a long time I thought that the promise Patanjali makes in yoga sutra 2.39, that when we are firmly established in aparigraha (nonattachment) we will understand the nature and purpose of existence, was a bit overblown. But there is nothing like parenting to school you in nonattachment. Even now, when they’re all grown up, my kids continue to teach me about letting go and staying open to the wonders and surprises of life. Which, now that I think about it, might just be the “nature and purpose” of the way we’re meant to live these lives of ours.