Boy, Unfiltered
You don't know how you'll parent until you actually do it. I know I had lots of ideas. Some of them realistic. Some of them unrealistic. Some have become entirely unimportant. Something that has surprised me as a parent is how devoted I am to Finn being, well, Finn. I always thought I'd work hard to have polite, well-mannered children, and that work starts early. I'm not sure it does anymore.
I have a colleague who has a 2.5 year old daughter and she was telling me all about how her little girl has really great table manners and won't touch her food unless it's cut up, and all I could think was that I love that Finn will dig into his food with his hands and smear it all the way from his chin to hairline. Is that bad? Am I breeding an ingrate?
The world is going to dictate to Finn how he should be. It will tell him how to be a male in this society. It will tell him how to have good manners. I'm by no means saying M. and I have no intention of teaching him all these things, but I now realize that he will have just a small window to truly be himself without outside pressure. Next year we're going to send him to preschool and he'll start feeling the boiler pot of peer pressure, and it's something that will never stop.
We have our children for such short periods of time. I just don't want to be part of all the outside forces that will push and push, yet another filter he will have to define himself through. I want to be the person who gently keep my child, who holds him as the precious thing on this earth, and who creates a world where he can be himself every second of the day. This is why M. and I work hard to just "be" with our son: be present, be engaged, be his anchor and let him show US who he is.
posted by Sacha @ 9:42 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I am so glad you posted this. I just got into it with my mother this morning about very similar issues.
My mother is OBSESSED with my daughter's sleeping. Or well, more to the point, she thinks it is SO abnormal that my daughter does not sleep 10-12 hours through the night solid, and that I sleep with her for the second half of the night, and that I rock her to sleep. Obsessed. For about two months she would ask about the sleeping all the time and say things like, "I have NEVER heard of a baby who sleeps like that." (Uhh, what?)
Well she was here this weekend and she was on the sleep thing AGAIN except she kept asking, "Are you SURE that if you just laid her down in the crib and left she wouldn't just talk herself to sleep?" as if somehow I am FORCING her to need help falling asleep. She must have asked me six times in 3 days.
Finally today I really laid into her about it, how I realized that she didn't approve of my parenting and that was okay, and in all of her ranting I told her that right now it was NOT about me (because she always says she is obsessed with this stuff because of "my best interests" or some crap) and she lost it and told me I was raising my daughter in a bubble. BECAUSE I ROCK HER TO SLEEP AND SNUGGLE WITH HER AT NIGHT.
Nevermind that my kid is one of the most headstrong and independent and feisty 10-month-olds I have ever seen, and that she is in freaking child care while I go to work, but she lives in a bubble because she is not a self-soother. Yet.
There are no amount of times I can tell my mother that Punk has her entire life to conform to someone else's whims, and her entire life to have to do what the world wants, and right now, if it's all about her for a little while, that is okay. She is a freaking BABY for crying out loud. An INFANT. Until 10 months ago, she wasn't even BREATHING.
This long diatribe that is All About Me is just my verbose way of saying thank God that someone out there gets it.
This is one of the few times I disagree with you. I feel that it is my job to prepare my daughter for the world. To teach her how to take care of herself and get along. I want her to be true to herself, but I also want her not to suffer the cruelty of other children and the idiocy of adults as they don't comprehend why she does something her way and not what society says is normal. I'm not talking about forcing her into a sorority type thing or having her wear Ann Taylor, but just teaching her how to make her way through society with as little pain as possible.
I still don't feel prepared for the world by my mom. It haunts me that there are certain things that she did in the name of love and possession that taught me to be too dependent on her. I feel like the best thing I can do is teach my daughter how to live well without me so she'll be okay when I'm not there to catch her - no matter how much I want to be there.
That said, I cover her with kisses and snuggle with her as much as I can - but, for example, she sleeps through the night so far, and doesn't seem to need the attention that some children do. I'd give it to her in a heartbeat if she did, though. My mom also thinks I'm crazy for hanging out with her so much and constantly cuddling.
Delurking to comment; I read your blog all the time. My wife and I just adopted a 5-year-old girl, and we're struggling with something similar. How do we bond with her, encourage her to express her emotions (including all the anger and sadness she has piled up inside as a result of her life thus far), and still socialize her to treat others with respect? Other people start this work in infancy, as you are doing. We're trying to put this stuff in place at 5, including her having enough trust in us to do all the other stuff.
And everybody keeps telling us that she's 'just a normal child', and we're overthinking everything. But they don't see her at home, at night. They don't deal with a 2 hour tantrum because she doesn't know how to cope with happiness. And although we, like you, are doing it differently than we pictured it, in the end I figure we're the experts in her. Therapists and mothers be damned, in the end we have to trust our instints. We're going to screw them up in some way. That's a given. Every child feels hard done by in some way by their parents; that's why they move out and develop separate lives. But all we can do is what seems right at the time.
How can you tell I've been repeating that to myself a lot lately?
Dana - I don't actually disagree with you, I just think that I always expected I would be teaching my child as early as possible proper behavior and I have been surprised to find out how devoted I am to Finn not having those expectations placed on him until he's ready for them. I think he'll tell us when he's ready and he's really not right now. But I do agree that it's my job to teach him how to function in this world and I will do that when the time is right.
Shereen - oh, you just broke my heart. I'm glad you are being gentle and kind to your daughter. It's hard for people who haven't known kindness to accept it and often they don't feel worthy. It's an important thing to teach and model and it takes a lifetime. And I agree that our instincts are right. Personally I don't read parenting books because they tend to make it harder for me to listen to my gut.
Post a Comment
<< Home