Though I feel very fortunate that I can count on one hand the number of times parenting made me feel bad or sick, the terminal part is definitely true - “once a parent, always a parent.” I can affirm that truth with authority and a bit of chagrin since I’ve been 20 years retired and still have to remind myself to stay out of the office.
Prolonged exposure to your kids changes the way you think, the way you act, the way you are. As my dad told me: “It takes a child to make a boy a man.” In some cases, it takes two or three kids to create a successful parent, or set of parents, if they’re working on folks who are inattentive, immature or stubborn.
Because "kids come with lots of moving parts and no manual,” parenting is definitely “a continuing education course with no syllabus taught by your kids” (and maybe a pediatrician even though s/he's never there at 2:00am when the scary things happen). Kids often have to work long and hard to turn a normal, self-motivating, self-interested, self-serving human being into a caring, care-giving adult. The learning curve can be so steep at times that it rocks one’s ego to the core. Just the fact that we have to keep adjusting to these rapidly changing critters we’re trying to raise is a constant threat to our status quo and can corrode our self-confidence.
There is no “one size fits all” in parenting; if you want to be good at it you must tailor your work to each child as they show you who they are, and are becoming. If they weren’t so cute and helpless in the early stages it might not work from the git-go. Indeed, even cute is not infallible; some kids are tyrants not teachers and some parents flunk the course. But parental failures can provide good role modeling for kids of what not to do as parents. It certainly helped in my case.
The first born child has by far the major challenges in expanding a couple into a family headed by good parents. There may be added complications if s/he was the reason they married. But it’s the parents who never recover. What we learn about ourselves in the process of parenting can be enhancing or shocking and both. Our self image and our self esteem are both at risk from time to time - sometimes permanently, often for the better. Have you ever chewed out your kid for not being where you told him to be only to discover that you went to the wrong place?
When kids have to assimilate and train a non-biological parent - one conscripted by marriage - the challenges can be baffling to all parties because there’s no visceral emotional wiring; it must be created. Because they’re cute and helpless, infants are the most natural creators of emotional bonds. After age five, the process becomes more cognitive so there are many more factors to screw up.
Even those who do not raise their own children are affected for life, no matter how they may wish to deny it. Although there can be men unaware of being fathers, pregnancy and labor guarantee that there is no woman unaware of being, or having been, a mother. A parent enlisted by marriage or adoption into raising someone else’s children may be spared those many long months of bonding with the unborn and the new-born, but this is not an advantage. They do without that intense bio-emotional leg up. Being a step-anything has it’s own set of challenges.
Finally, as your kids move into adulthood, most of your previous struggles and changes, have to be re-struggled and re-changed or you’ll get summarily fired. The euphemism is “cutting the apron strings” but it can feel like repeated sucker punchs to the gut. After all that work, they leave and there you are - an "empty nester.".
Some people continue to use those parenting skills as they take care of their own aging parents; that can be tricky and usually requires more adjustments to their skill set. Many of the rest or us offer some of our parenting skills to the broader community in civic, professional or volunteer work. It’s a shame to waste those skills when there is so much of the world that needs caring.
For me, there has been no life work more important, or more rewarding than giving the world two loving, socially responsible and productive young people. We have weathered some challenges, both internal and external to our family and still love each other dearly. No therapist could be more deeply knowledgeable, invested, honest and persistent than my kids were in raising me into effective motherhood. And as I am now the mother of adults, there is still more to learn about how to retire gracefully from the assumptions and prerogatives I once took for granted (like being able to call the shots!). But I am grateful to them for my life-long learning in human relations. Be brave, be creative - raise or mentor a child.
In this category we can all share some of the “coursework” that made us who we are since we became biological, adoptive, surrogate, or step-parents.
Parenting by Abby Freedom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Comments may be addressed to randmxcentric@gmail.com