Parenthood 3

Parenthood 3

Along with the many joys you receive being a parent, inevitably you have to face disappointment too. This can be difficult to deal with, as I am finding out. There are times when our kids choices don’t make sense to us and the fact that there is no going back from some of them makes acceptance all the more difficult. You cannot help but wonder if you ever really knew who they were. And I guess this is the toughest lesson of all, as much as we’d like to think we do, we don’t know them. We only know the little bit they are willing to share with us, the rest is just a clever mask they wear to conceal what they don’t want us to see.

Parenthood 2

I have been a parent for eighteen years and I have just realised an important fact. Slow of me I know but often when a thing is always there you fail to notice it after a while. However it has come to my conscious attention that parenthood is a series of anxieties and it is only the intensity that varies. We have our joys and our sorrows but in between these high and low points we worry. Worry they are getting a fair go, worry they are giving others a fair go, worry they are safe, worry they are well, worry they aren’t hurt, worry about countless things. These concerns come and go constantly with seldom a break and no matter how old your children become, they continue. The only difference is the details. 

As parents we take on our children’s problems and suffer along with them when they meet life’s obstacles, and the more children you have the more anxieties you have to deal with, or this is how it seem to me. You can only pray that they do not all peak at the same time but by the same token hope that their ebbs coincide. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that it is at times when these anxieties are low that are the days to be truly celebrated. Not birthdays or milestones or graduations, weddings etc, it is the days when our kids are as happy as they can be with their lot and the level of anxiety is at a point where we are able to sleep at night that we as parents should take the time to toast ourselves. Because we can be sure in the knowledge, that at any given moment, it will all turn to crap.  

Letting Go - A mother's letter to her daughter

With a control freak like me, letting go was always going to be a painful business. But what I didn’t foresee was that I wouldn’t recognise the need to when it came down to it. I’m not sure when it was we started to appear as opposing forces, but that seems to be the way it is between us with everything now. And as much as it hurts to relinquish control, what hanging on is doing to us both, hurts even more. So go. I release you, to grow and be joyous and evolve to be everything you can be. Never fear, you will never be alone, I will always be behind you but from here on out, the decisions will be yours. I just hope one day you will look back and think of  the old control freak who ruled your life with kindness and know that nothing was ever done out of malice or a wish to hold you back. But rather my actions were born out a love so big and so powerful I lost control of it and it ended up controlling me.  Be happy.

Parenthood

I’ve often heard the question asked; why isn’t there an instruction manual when you take on the job of parent? After spending my Sunday afternoon in the emergency department of the local hospital, due to a football injury, waiting to see the triage nurse, waiting to see the admin officer, waiting to see the doctor, waiting to go to x-ray, waiting to come back from x-ray, and then waiting to be discharged, I have to wonder if it is in part due to the fact that no one would ever do it if they knew what they were in for.

As a parent you seem to spend your life bouncing from one problem to another, putting out one fire, only to see another one start up somewhere else and that’s when things are good. More often, you have to fight two or three simultaneously, not an easy feat when you only have one pair of hands. Not to mention you are flying blind into the bargain. You never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, until it is too late to undo them and by then other decisions that wouldn’t wait, have further complicated matters. I ask you, who in their right mind would agree to that, if they knew about it ahead of time? 

But like anything there is a flip side to this position, another way to look at it. Maybe there is no instruction manual because it would diminish the joy by revealing the adventure. Who needs extreme sports to provide, danger and excitement when you have kids?  Parenthood is there greatest thrill ride there is, with more ups and downs than a rollercoaster and a surprise around every corner.

 So maybe, after all we are better off without guidance, not only because for some it would stop the journey before it started, but also because it may reduce the exhilaration and diminish the experience leading to the worst of all possible situations, boredom.