parents anonymous
"Hi, My Name is Joel, and I'm Tired"
Our son is no longer sleeping. Not just skipping day naps, but wrestling and yelping through the night as well. He continues to smile in the midst of these rebellions. When either my wife or I return from work and take him from the exhausted at-homer, he grabs the face of the returned with both hands and draws us to him. He is a little bear, a koala, a grabber and hugger, but if he doesn't sleep soon I'm going to slip him into my oldest brother's train of progeny, which numbers five (5!), and see how long it takes for them to notice. I think we'd get at least a weekend of respite.
Whether people enjoy parenting—and not just their children—was the topic of a somewhat recent Twitter-chat I accidentally started. A friend sent me a thread of parents bemoaning the horrors of raising children ("my son pooped in my hands while potty-training!" etc.) and asked what I thought, and then I tweeted about the curiosity of how little people seem to "enjoy parenting." Refinements and amendments and better thoughts than I initially entertained were offered. But what I first ranted to my friend in private was:
i think most people find parenting so hard because (JUDGMENTAL JOEL ALERT) we're all so selfish. a toddler pooping in one's hands? who gives a shit? besides the toddler? it's just poop. it's a human who needs you so unsentimentally they actually defecate on you while you're trying to help them. that's amazing! that's trust! we're currently in a rough stretch with Samuel's sleeping and Annabelle is a pretty classic two-year-old, but i guess i don't understand the level of surprise that all the bellyaching includes. like, life is work and hard and kids aren't pets. i don't want to squash the recent trend in being HONEST about parenting, but maybe having a single mom helped me. i never viewed the job as anything other than backbreaking. but also, they're kids. they're fun! so. i dunno. what i always want is to be gracious, and parenting is a lot for everyone i know.
I know! I'm the worst! Let me explain: what I find odd is that parenting confessions, much like marriage confessions, efface the assumption that spurs the very need to share: namely, children are obviously good! People are disappointed in the good things (in the parenting, if not the children) they have wanted or been told they want, and need affirmation they're not the problem. This is probably very healthy! If I'm digging a ditch my whole life it benefits no one, and is delusional and destabilizing, to tell people the ditch is basically digging itself. "Really, it is! It even puts itself to bed without a pacifier! "
What continues to strike me, though, is that when parents share their frustrations en masse and as a default they perform a sort of inverted AA or group-therapy meeting. No one is the problem with their own parenting—kids are the problem. Where a regular AA attendee might go through the steps of their mistakes and attempt to practice and engender humility ("I need HP. I know I can't beat this alone," etc.), parents kvetching in chorus often reassure each other that, well:
Disappointment during the young-kid stage quickly becomes the only way parenting is discussed. Its difficulty must be acknowledged whether you're joking with friends, giving banal answers to co-workers ("How are the kids?" "Oh, you know."), and so on. The antidote isn't more self-help paradigms or whatever, but to direct these conversations to their rightful end: kids are funny. My daughter not sleeping at 2:30am and, when told to go to sleep, insisting "Annabelle doing quiet time. Annabelle needs books"? Funny. We were up for two more hours, but you have to admit that's a bold stance! Barring true tragedies, most parent confessions I hear or share are absurd and ridiculous and humorous in a dark comedy sense, if not (more often!) a slapstick sense.
My mother knows this secret, and I suspect many other grandparents do as well. Your own grandparents or someone else's. Doesn't matter. Almost every time my daughter tries to pick a fight with my mom (one of her adjunct caretakers), my mother's response is to laugh or make light or deflect. She does not take the two-year-old as seriously as the two-year-old takes herself, because that would be childish.
In conclusion, parenting is very hard, and no one wants to fail. I will hopefully never tweet again.
Reading: Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander (finished recently & they rock); Murther and Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies (not as good as my first Davies); The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, & Fairies by Robert Kirk; Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (with my wife—it's like we're watching Big Little Lies again!)
Podcast: My friend Bill and I did a podcast on War and Peace and—surprise—the most famous novel in the world is good!
I love you all. I'm sorry I compared kids to addiction. Addiction is usually defeated in a much shorter span of years.