by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
It was date night, the first one since having our new baby twelve days before. We’d just finished our dinner and decided to stop by the store to pick up a few baby necessities, since our son was sleeping soundly in his car seat (which we carried into the store, don’t worry. I’m not a completely incompetent parent.) and the other five were at home (hopefully) asleep with a sitter.
We were almost through the checkout line when a woman rolled into the space behind us. She had her grandbaby sitting in the basket, chattering in an unknown baby language. Her husband stood behind her.
And because I’d just pulled up the car seat cover to check on my little one, she noticed him and said, “Oh my goodness! You have a brand new baby!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said politely as Husband stood paying. I turned to put the bags in the cart.
That’s when her husband said, “Oh, looks like she’s got another one on the way!” all excited and proud of himself for noticing.
And I swear we heard that woman say, “Uh-oh,” while Husband and I tried to hold it together. We made it all the way to the exit doors before we burst out laughing. We laughed all the way home.
The next day, thirteen days postpartum, we stopped to get an oil change at this place Husband frequents, where you can just sit in the car while they do a quick change. No kids need to be unbuckled or entertained or chased away from the parking lot. It’s the best idea ever. There should be more places like this.
The attendant knew Husband, but I’d never met him before. Still, when we were leaving, he assumed familiarity, calling, “See you soon, man,” to Husband and then flippantly remarking, “Not you, I guess. I’ll see you after.”
Husband quickly rolled up the window, and I tried not to laugh while in clear view, until Husband said what I was thinking. “After what?”
Some men are just clueless.
But lest we go easy on females and chalk it up to men not knowing any better, I must tell you the story of a woman we met at a park one week after I gave birth to twins.
Our twins, who collectively weighed ten pounds at the time of delivery, were born six weeks early, so we had to leave them in neonatal intensive care for a while, but because our other boys weren’t allowed in the NICU unit and one of their birthdays was coming up, we decided one day to take them to the park and visit the twins later that evening.
They were playing like children do, making friends with another little boy, and his mother ambled over. We got to talking about how I only have boys, and it wasn’t long before she gestured toward my postpartum belly and said, “Is this one a girl?”
“Oh, no,” I said, laughing, because I knew this was about to get awkward. I really didn’t blame her. My uterus had a lot of shrinking to do after twins. So I kept it nice and gentle. “No, I just had twin boys six days ago. They’re in the NICU right now.”
She nodded and said, “Oh,” like she understood, but clearly she didn’t, because her next words were, “So when are they due?”
I had to explain it all over again, and she apologized profusely and then gathered up her son and hightailed it out of there.
I didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable. But such is life when we’re looking through the lens of assumptions.
Nine years ago, when my first baby was born and those eating disorders and body image issues still stood way too close, these experiences would have really bothered me, but today I know the truth of it. I know that something incredibly amazing happens to a woman’s body when she’s growing a human being. I know that in the days after, her stomach won’t just POOF! back into place.
You see, the uterus has fed and housed a new baby for nine whole months, and it can’t be rushed in its shrinking back to normal. Shrinking takes time. It’s not done in a day or a week or even three. For a time, we will still look just a little bit pregnant, with a bump that could go either way. (And it’s different for every woman, so comparisons aren’t constructive.)
So when is it okay to assume that a woman is pregnant?
Never.
But if you really want to try (God help you), and you’re feeling brave, here are some (mostly) foolproof giveaways:
1. She doesn’t have a newborn baby with her.
2. She tells you she’s expecting.
3. She doesn’t say she just had a baby.
4. She announced a pregnancy on social media but she hasn’t yet announced a birth.
If you’ve checked all the above and answered no, there’s one really important one left:
5. Her stomach looks like it’s housing an oversized basketball, she’s almost doing a standing backbend and she’s waddling significantly. And I mean significantly, because yesterday was her due date.
That’s it. Any other time? Just keep your mouth shut.
Better safe than sorry.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first book in the Crash Test Parents humor series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
The other night we were just settling down for dinner, and the 3-year-old sat in his chair, looking at us all, waiting for his turn to speak.
It’s not often that the 3-year-old twins are given a chance to speak in our house, because there are a lot of people talking all the time—about school and Minecraft and Pokémon cards—but this time we could clearly see that he had something important to say, so we let him. And what he had to say was as profound and wonderful as you’d expect from a 3-year-old:
“I’m going to toot on the table,” he said and then giggled.
Okay. So it wasn’t at all profound and wonderful. But it did shed some light on circulating smells that were more potent than the actual salmon sprinkled with lemon on the table before us. It’s not like this is something new, however. Boys bring with them many smells in a typical day.
I live in South Texas. That means that, for ten months out of the year, when boys go play outside, they will most definitely come back in smelling like a wet dog. They don’t notice the smell, of course, because they don’t really know what it means to smell bad. But I notice. I’m in the middle of cooking dinner, and it smells like a sheepdog that waded through a pool of sewage just stepped inside my kitchen. When I turn around, I see that it’s not a sheepdog at all, it’s the 5-year-old coming in for a drink of water before he races right back out into the sauna to sweat some more while flailing on the trampoline.
If we spend a day out on the town, where we walk around the historical streets of our city, visiting the Alamo and the Riverwalk and a local park and admiring all the horses pulling carriages, we will have to roll down the van windows on our way home, because the smell of our boys is much stronger than a horse pasture. The one who should be wearing deodorant doesn’t see much use in it, so add to that horse-pasture smell a distinct and mighty body odor.
“What’s that smell?” they’ll say, and Husband and I will just laugh, because if there’s anything that’s impossible in the world, it’s convincing boys that the smell that makes them wrinkle their noses is actually coming from them.
It’s not just the smells they bring back in from outside, either. It’s also the smells that happen throughout the course of a day. Ask any of them to take off their shoes, and you will pass out cold from the fumes that radiate from their socks. I know, because every laundry day I encounter those smelly socks and I have to wear a gas mask if I don’t want to pass out and leave the fort to my 3-year-old twins.
Take a walk in their room, and you will think you are walking in an animal graveyard that didn’t quite get the bodies buried before they started decomposing. This is likely because boys like to leave their dirty clothes—and especially their damp, dirty socks—under their beds.
Pass by their bathroom and you’d swear you were walking in a sewage dump. That’s because boys hardly ever remember to flush the toilet and just let the yellow mellow into a distinctive and disgusting brown.
And then there’s the massive amount of gas that’s balled up inside their little frames. The volume of it is quite remarkable. It’s not unusual for me to be reading a story and taking a deep and adequate breath so that I can properly mimic a man’s voice, but, instead of breathing in clean air, I get a great big whiff of fart, and my nose hairs burn and the back of my throat closes up and I’m coughing it all out, because the invisible fumes that leaked out someone’s cheeks are not air at all, they’re poison to my lungs. The boys, naturally, are very proud of owning up to the fart, so we always know exactly who it was who let loose that SBD (Silent But Deadly), but when I tell them they need to hold it for another time and place, preferably when I’m nowhere around, their daddy will interject a comment about how it’s really bad for you to hold farts and it could cause all sorts of problems later. To which I’ll respond, “That’s fine, but make your bathroom the gas chamber, not this library. I would like to live.” To which they then reply that it would be impossible to make it to the bathroom before the gas slipped out.
It’s hilariously funny for them to let loose an SBD when we’re in the car with all the windows up and the air conditioning turned on high and suddenly we’re all choking and waving our hands in front of our faces because something crawled up inside someone and died and then crawled back out their fart flappers. They bust out laughing every time one of these farts makes a noise other than what is typical—like “pat” or “pop” or the whine kind, and then they’ll keep trying to do it until they have to run off to the bathroom because they tried a little too hard.
The other night I was coming in to check on my 9-year-old in the bath tub, because it was about time for him to dry off and get out so we could start story time, and I knew he wouldn’t want to miss the chapter book we’re reading. I got to my room, which is where he bathes, since we only have two bathtubs and when you have six kids you have to stagger the bathing, and I could have sworn there was a motorboat in the water. When I poked my head in, he was laughing to himself, and the first thing he said, upon seeing me, was “Do you smell it?” I hightailed it out of there, because not only did I not want to smell it, but it was also my bathroom he was making his mark in. I came back a few minutes later to tell him it was time to get out, for real, and he was passed out in the tub.
Not really. But it probably could have happened if the bathroom door had been closed instead of wide open, because the smell, thankfully, dissipated into my room. I know, because when I pulled back the covers of my bed, there was a great rush of heat that smelled like someone had dissected a bunghole and put the pile of whatever was inside it beneath my covers, especially for me. The smell was trapped in the fibers, I think.
Husband says I’m wrong about that. He says it was actually me.
Well, I don’t like to argue about technicalities. I don’t find it necessary to always be right, like some people do.
The smells that boys bring to a home can be an inconvenience when you have guests coming over to visit, but they’re, right now, easily hidden by the spritz of essential oil and a little strategic positioning of the diffusers. I realize that when they get older, my house will probably smell like a locker room, but we’ve got a little time between now and then. I’m confident that I’ll figure out a solution.
Or maybe I’ll just have to get used to it, because this is life with boys.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
by Rachel Toalson | Crash Test Parents
Happy Holidays!
I know that you all are secretly wanting to hear from me about my truly exceptional kids, so I decided that this year, instead of a card, I would just send out a Christmas newsletter so I could humble-brag about these boys who really are the most amazing kids ever. I hope you stick around to see how much better I think my kids are than yours.
The family
First, I really have to commend our family. We have left the house three hundred thirty-four times this year, and we have only been late three hundred twenty-six of those. This is quite an accomplishment, believe me. We really are extraordinary. When you can leave the house on time EVEN THOUGH someone decides at the last minute that he needs to go to the potty and then he overflows the toilet, or another one decides he left something critically important in his room and now can’t find it under the massive mountains of clothes he didn’t put away last laundry day, or, God forbid, fifteen of the left shoes are missing, you have made it. You really have.
The 9-year-old
This boy has only had his behavior folder marked “transition trouble” seventy-nine of the eighty days he’s been in school, and he’s been late to school ONLY sixteen times. Something to be proud of, I know. Just this morning he threw his fourteenth LEGO creation in anger, because he couldn’t find the right “brown brick” piece, and “it would be totally ruined without the brown brick piece.” He has “accidentally” broken three pieces of furniture this year by turning flips on it even though he’s twice as big as he used to be back when it was okay.
He’s also learned all of three songs on the piano (taught himself!!!) and plays them incessantly so we’ve all started changing the lyrics for “Pass the Pumpkin All Around” to “God, I really hate this song. I don’t want to sing along, Oooooh, oooooh, let it stop at you.” We are thoroughly proud of this boy, who prefers reading a book to listening to instructions, which makes our house really fun and easy.
The 6-year-old
This boy created a special dance move called “The Hipster,” which is really just a hip thrust with a little bouncing thrown in. I’m pretty sure Elvis Presley might have invented it first, but, you know, we want him to believe he’s unique and special. And he is the admiration of the family when he busts this move. He also started washing the dishes with the dish wand and has only broken five plates this year. A great start to a great dishwashing career, if you ask me. (One of his Christmas presents is going to be a collection of new plates. Don’t tell him!!!)
He has also asked the “How did I get out of your uterus” question twelve times this year and always forgets the answer. Something about it makes it hard to remember. I don’t know. Maybe it’s some Freudian coping mechanism, like “Don’t think about that horrible, jarring, pitch-black passage into the world.” If you do happen to ask and he does happen to remember, he’ll most likely answer “A Fa China passage.” Because we believe in teaching kids biology and the proper names for body parts.
The 5-year-old
This little boy started kindergarten this year, and every single morning (never fails!), he manages to misplace his shoes. It is really quite a mystery. He has somehow mastered the art of not seeing what’s right in front of his face, which, as you can imagine, is a fantastic quality to have. It doesn’t make the morning get-to-school routine any harder to have to drop everything and “find” the shoes that are right beside his feet because he “already looked and can’t find them.” He has also, somehow, managed to lose every shoe of one foot and now walks around with only a left foot. You try it and see if you don’t trip. I’m telling you. Exceptional.
He has also phonetically learned how to spell words like his countrified Nonny says them—sol for saw, mayen for man, mayilk for milk.
3-year-old number 1
Twin 1 has had quite a year. He has ruined fifteen pairs of pants by expertly scooting around on his knees, no matter how many times he’s been told not to do exactly that (great initiative!). He has also ruined four pairs of shoes, because he forgot he left them in the backyard. They got baked in the sun, and now we have four pairs of tie-dyed Converse sneakers. I’m actually super impressed that he learned how to tie dye without even trying. I remember that being a really complicated thing back when I was in elementary school.
This one has also put his shoes on the wrong feet three hundred sixty-four times this year, which has added exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds to our morning routine (not counting the five minutes and twenty-three seconds of arguing about it—“This IS the right foot, Mama.” “No it’s not, buddy.” “YES IT IS!” “Trust me.” “IT IS THE RIGHT FOOT!” [four minutes of the same.] “Okay. Try to walk in them.”). Of the other accomplishments, this is probably the most notable: He learned how to open a gummy vitamin bottle and consumed the entire contents while I was otherwise occupied by a massive blowout diaper, courtesy of his baby brother. He’s never had so much diarrhea before. I know! Another accomplishment for the baby book!
3-year-old number 2
Twin 2 nearly contracted a bacterial infection three times from unauthorized play with the plunger. He can’t help but take this charming toy for a test drive, if it happens to be anywhere near a toilet. Left alone in the bathroom for five seconds? I think I’ll plunge the toilet. Mama’s watching? Brother will distract her while I plunge it. Mama’s upstairs dumping the laundry on the bed? I WILL PLUNGE IT! This typically happens when the toilet water is brown with the most delightful presents, and he proficiently sloshes said water all over the walls. It is quite lovely, as I’m sure you can imagine. Part of his Christmas present will pay for a cleaning service that will dare to touch those walls.
This little boy also figured out how to make gigantic spitballs out of toilet paper rolls and actually get them to stick to the walls and ceiling. He will soon be featured in the Guinness Book of World Records for “Most Annoying 3-year-old.”
The baby
This little guy. He has not thrown up all over himself today, which is quite a feat. This year he also put twenty-seven Happy Baby organic kale and spinach puffs in his right ear before finally, thankfully, mastering the art of feeding himself. He’s only had one major poop blowout, which is saying a whole lot for a Toalson baby.
He also has managed to eat some really impressive things that are ground into our carpet—three-day-old bread, wads of hair, possibly a toenail, old toilet paper that was stuck to someone’s shoe, and a dozen other unclassifiable objects. In a dramatic turn of irony, he’s the only one of us who bypassed the vomit-rocket virus this year, which means he’s likely the healthiest among us. It’s a great case for eating whatever you find on the floor. Or not.
Other random accomplishments
The older three boys are quite gifted in the art of armpit farts. I bet we could even fart “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” complete with two harmonies, but we’re saving that for our Christmas card next year.
I’m sure you can see why I’m so proud of my brilliant boys. But the real reason I’m telling you all this is to show you that Husband and I really rocked our parenting this year. We only yelled two hundred fifty-seven times, and we only said, “I tap out” every other day, and we only complained about the maddening things our kids do for about four hours of every day. That’s saying a whole lot, and I think we deserve a congratulations!
I hope you have a wonderful holiday with your not-as-exceptional-as-mine family. And may your new year be as noteworthy as my old year was.
This is an excerpt from Parenthood: Has Anyone Seen My Sanity?, the first in the Crash Test Parents humor series. For more essays on parenting humor and real life living with kids (including a couple of guides you can get for free), visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash)
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog, Stuff Crash Test Kids say
Husband: Give me the fly swatter.
4-year-old: But I want to die a fly.
Husband: You want to die a fly?
Me: Well, that is quite an aspiration.
9-year-old: Mama, I have DNA samples of myself on my desk.
Me: Oh, really?
9-year-old: Yeah. A fingernail, a toenail and hair. I was hoping to go to a science place and clone myself so one of me could go to school and one could stay home.
Me:
9-year-old:
Me:
9-year-old: What?
5-year-old [bouncing on Husband’s back]: You’re…really…squishy.
Husband: The reason we don’t do that is because [blah blah blah]
9-year-old: You’re overwhelming me. You’re using too many words.
5-year-old: Daddy, I have to go pee.
Husband: So go pee.
5-year-old: My brother is already peeing. I guess I’ll have to pee on his face.
Husband: That is definitely not an option. Nope.
4-year-old: I forgot.
Me: You forgot what?
4-year-old: I FORGOT!
Husband: You forgot to talk?
4-year-old: YYYEEEEESSSSSS.
Me: I don’t think you’ve ever had a problem with that, actually.
6-year-old: Sometimes when I’m running, I trip over my leg.
Me: Well, that sounds like a problem.
6-year-old: Yeah. It is.
Husband: What do you want to be when you grow up?
4-year-old: I want to be a caveman when I grow up.
Me: That shouldn’t be too hard.
9-year-old: Daddy, while I was getting dressed, I was thinking about all the different ways you can kill a chicken.
Husband:
9-year-old:
Husband: That’s sounds…normal.
7-year-old: Hey, Mama. Guess what?
Me: I hate guessing games.
7-year-old: But guess what.
Me: What.
7-year-old: Nothing.
Me:
7-year-old: I made that up.
9-year-old: We’re starting a mine in our back yard. Asa’s digging, and we’re picking up strange rocks and old wood.
Me: Oh! I’m so excited!
9-year-old: You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you.
9-year-old: You’re the only parents in the whole world who make their kids do chores!
Husband:
Me:
9yo:
Husband & Me: hahahahahahahaha
Husband: Where is your brain?
4-year-old: In my tummy.
Me: Sounds about right.
Me: Did you know I won a poetry award today?
4-year-old: Because you burp really loud?
7-year-old: Daddy it’s raining!
Husband: I know. It’s crazy. My weather app says it’s zero percent chance of rain.
7-year-old: How does the weatherman keep his job when he’s wrong so much?
Husband: In the future, when we come to church, you need to not wear flip flops. And pants with no holes in them.
8-year-old: Yeah, and I should also probably wear underwear.
Husband:
8-year-old: Regrettably, I had a little bit of diarrhea in my underwear this morning.
Husband:
8-year-old:
Husband: Well, then.
9-year-old: So we’re not going to the pool?
Husband: No. We told you guys to clean up, and you didn’t.
9-year-old: I was going to come downstairs, but my brothers were chasing me with a banana.
7-year-old: Did you hear my toot? It made me go really fast.
Me: Too bad the smell didn’t go really fast with you.
7-year-old: [laughing hysterically]
Me: [passing out on the floor]
9-year-old: If you touch a fly and put your finger in your mouth, will you die?
Me: Why would you want to?
9-year-old: Maybe accidentally?
Husband: No. Think about it. You live in a house with twins. They’ve done much worse, and they’re still alive.
9-year-old: I’ll probably be really popular now that I’m the son of an author.
Me: Just make sure you wear deodorant.
9yo: Why?
by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays
This picture is called “This is What Happens Five Minutes After the Kids Get Home from the Grandparents.”
I don’t even know how this happened. I just remember going out to the car to get the baby and their suitcases, and I walked back in to a paper/stuffed animal/book explosion all over the living room and boys chattering about all the stories they wrote and pictures they drew at Nonny’s house.
Husband and I sent the boys away for a week-long stay at my mom’s house (thanks, Mom! Sort of! I mean, thanks for keeping the boys! No thanks for sending home all the “artwork” they created while they were gone!). While the house sat silent, with only the infant to keep us company, Husband and I organized the house, donated half their toys, cleaned out our old clothes we’ll probably never wear again, reduced our books by about 200 (there are still about 1,800) and tidied the entire house. So you have to understand, the house was spotless before boys walked in.
“Wow!” they said, because they have never seen it so tidy. “How did you get the house so clean?”
Five minutes later, they had their answer.
WE SENT YOU AWAY.
Connections like that are lost on kids, though. They could not see the tidy house and, five minutes later, the tornado-went-through-here house and think, “Hmm. This must have happened because I decided to take off my clothes, pull out a few books, and show Mama and Daddy my five thousands pieces of artwork.”
I just got done reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I sort of thought it might be possible to keep our house tidy if we just had a place for everything and we reduced enough of our possessions so those possessions wouldn’t get dragged into a mess every ten seconds.
BUT KIDS.
They’ll always find a way to make a mess of things, I think. I’m done trying. So, welcome, papers. Thank you for coming. Please stay a while. Crawl between our couch cushions and get shoved under the armchair farther away than my arm can reach when I finally have the energy to tidy up again and make sure you come visit our bed right before we fall asleep. That’s my fave.
P.S. Nonny, we are now working on Project For Nonny wherein they draw five pictures every day until the next time you take them for a weekend (don’t make it too long or…). I’ll make sure to pack them up in a suitcase all nice and neat and pretty. So of course they’ll stay tidy.
by Rachel Toalson | General Blog
I’m a working mom. I’m really good at what I do. I studied for four years in college and ended my time with a degree in journalism and English. I used to work as a managing editor for a newspaper, and I rocked that job every single day. Before that, I was a reporter. Now I’m an author.
I know exactly what I’m doing when faced with a blank screen. I know how to create stories from thin air, how to pull from my experiences and craft an essay that someone would actually want to read, how to position words on a page so that I can communicate what it is I’m trying to communicate. I’ve been doing this every single day for more than a decade.
I’ve also been a mother every single day for almost a decade. You’d think that after this long, almost ten years spent in the School of Parenting, I would have a slight idea of what I’m doing.
But I don’t.
When I open the door to my twins’ room, where they were supposed to be taking naps, and I see that they’ve just colored themselves green with a marker they smuggled in their room while their daddy’s back was turned, I don’t know what to do. When the 9-year-old’s mood flips at the drop of a LEGO mini figure and suddenly the whole entire world is ending, I don’t know what I’m doing. When the normally complacent and obedient child becomes a back-talking fool and I have to address all that sass, I have no idea what I’m doing.
I study parenting books, pouring over them for all the wisdom they have to offer me. I’ll read examples about children in the middle of rebellion, and I’ll think, “Yes, I can totally do this,” and then the 6-year-old will sneak out the door with a piece of gum I just told him he couldn’t have and surreptitiously stick it in his mouth while his back is turned to me, and all of that wisdom goes right out the door with him.
My children have the ability to turn me into a completely bumbling idiot with one disrespectful look or one ridiculous prank or one irreverent question or simply their state of being.
When they sneak out of their beds on a Saturday morning before the sun has even deemed it time to wake, just so they can get into the frosted mini wheats and make sure they get their fair share, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they eat half their brother’s deodorant in the bathroom while everyone else is sleeping, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they fill up the bath water to a flooding point, even though they’ve been told a billion times not to, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When a boy comes home and tells me about a bully on his school playground, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the 4-year-olds take the canister of gasoline that sits behind a locked shed and pour it all over the yard, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they wake up in a horrible mood, even though they got plenty of sleep (because I’m psycho about their sleep), I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they refuse to love each other, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the angry one threatens to run away because we’re the worst parents ever, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When one wakes in the middle of the night just to tell me he’s feeling sick and then, before the words are even completely out of his mouth, something else comes rocketing out of his mouth, too, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When one of them suffers from anxiety and depression, even though I’ve lived with these myself, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they take off their seatbelt in the car while we’re driving 70 miles per hour down a busy highway, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I think of how impossible it is to give all of me to all of them, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they’re all talking to me at the same exact time, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they get in a slap-fight, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I tell them they can’t fly from the top of their daddy’s shed to the trampoline and they try it anyway, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When the 4-year-old cuts a huge hole in his brand new shirt, because someone left the scissors out, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I worry that I don’t know how to help the one who flies off the handle, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I worry about them, period, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When they mouth off one minute and then the next minute they act like I’m their best friend, I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I think about the next stage I’m coming into as a mother—the Puberty one—I don’t know what I’m doing.
That’s okay. Here’s a secret most parents won’t ever willingly tell you: We’ll never completely know what we’re doing. Our children are grand experiments—some days we get it right, some days we don’t.
Before my twins were released from their 20-day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit at our local hospital, Husband and I had to take an infant CPR class in order to take them home. We learned all sorts of things we’d done wrong with our three older boys. At the end of the class, we looked at each other and sort of laugh-cried and said, “It’s a miracle they all survived.”
It’s a miracle any kid survives, because we’re all pretty much clueless.
[Tweet “We can spend a lifetime parenting and never feel competent at it. We’re a community of scientists.”]
We can spend a lifetime in this job and never feel quite competent at it. We can read books and take classes and listen to what other parents do and try it with our own, but the truth is, we’re all basically on the same playing field—that is, amateurs. What works today probably won’t work tomorrow. So just when we think we have it figured out, our kids will promptly show us that we don’t actually have anything at all figured out.
Parenting is hard. We’re dealing with irrational humans on an everyday, every-hour basis. We’re never going to know everything. We’ll never anticipate everything they’ll do. We’ll never be able to predict who our children will be when they wake up tomorrow. They are daily growing and changing and coming into their own bodies and minds, and that means that the best we can do is sit back and let it happen and try to roll with the uppercuts, devising our next grand experiment for what might possibly work to turn them into a rational, kind, courageous, creative, joyful, gracious, enjoyable adult.
No parent really knows what he’s (or she’s) doing. That means we, the clueless, are all in good company.
[Tweet “No parent really knows what he’s (or she’s) doing. We, the clueless, are all in good company.”]
Now, please excuse me, because my kid just told me I owe him a million dollars for making him sit down and do his homework and for being the worst parent ever, so I have an experiment that’s calling my name.
