Pep talking
The first year of parenting can be full of insecurity. So many millions and billions of people have done this thing, this raising children thing, that it’s easy to feel like everyone else knows something you don’t, some secret code for doing the right thing. Like when your baby trucks along on a given schedule, for example, and then up and changes it on you. Or when the baby next door is doing one thing, but the baby in your lap can’t do that thing, has never remotely come close to doing it. Or vice versa. I’m sure the same goes for teenaged babies, too. Probably all ages.
So when you come across other parents who feel the same way you do, the same kind of insecurity, or even if they’re not insecure, are just facing the same sorts of things you are, there’s a kind of peace in that, a kind of grounding, where you realize this club in which you thought you were only faking membership? You aren’t faking it. Nobody really knows what they’re doing. And even if they feel like they do, their baby is not yours, so what works perfectly for theirs probably isn’t fair to impose on your kid, in your situation.
I was driving home from the library today, feeling bummed about not getting more accomplished on my book, when the thought occured to me that as much diversity as exists among infants, like, say, at what month they grow teeth, or when they learn to speak or crawl–all that diversity that pediatricians are constantly telling new parents is normal, only grows exponentially with time. The nurture side of the nature-nurture equation gets more and more diverse, and with it our genetic responses to it.
So it only makes sense to relax a little more into being who each of us is, parenting our own selves like we ideally would offspring: accepting that we are who we are, not the kid next door, not that other writer or teacher or parent or pastor, not that person we’ve always assumed we would or wouldn’t be. We are us. And that’s entirely normal. Normal for what it means to be human. Our stage of development, regardless of anyone else’s, is the only place we can be.
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Yes, there are marker times when certain things happen, but every baby/child/adult does things at their own pace. It’s the adults who are the most unpredictable.
When I was in WA with my new grandson, his mom, a pediatrician, told me that though she feels totally confident in the examing room, having Zach has raised all kinds of questions–just like you pose in this entry.
My three and 1 1/2 year old grandsons are preemies–30 and 32 weeks, and I have noted that they are slower with some of the motor skills things, but it all works out in the wash, I guess. Was it as gorgeous up there as it was in So Cal today?
June 5th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Fran–That’s so interesting that the other side of the “doctor’s desk” is different for your daughter-in-law. I guess it does makes sense.
Weather Saturday was uncomfortably warm up here. I lived most of my life in a desert where 80s are considered cool for summertime, but everyone there had AC. Our little place here roasts when it gets that warm.