You’d think that, at a certain point, when you’ve been a parent for a certain number of years or you’re the parent of a certain number of kids, there would come a time when you actually knew what you were doing. But we had our sixth baby a little more than a year ago, and while some things are easier this time around, I can still say, with certain certainty, that even on the sixth kid, I have no idea what I’m doing.
See, the thing about parenting is that a whole lot of it comes down to the children. There’s not one single thing that’s going to work for every parent and every child, because there’s no one archetype of “child” to point the way. I know. Our home is like a controlled experiment, a laboratory for testing out parenting practices. There’s the strong-willed nine-year-old, who will challenge every single thing out of each parent’s mouth, because he always sees things differently; there is the seven-year-old, who can’t possibly stay out of candy if it’s anywhere in the house, even if he’s been told not to touch it; there is the six-year-old, who shuts down whenever anyone tells him he did something wrong and needs to make reparations, clamps so tight we can’t see his hurt or his fear or his anger; there are the four-year-olds who care nothing at all for consequences, only care for their curious impulses that lead them to discover what a yard might look like if they emptied the entire recycling container while their mama was doing her workout inside and probably, arguably, should have checked on them but really thought they’d learned their lesson the last time when they had to sit in their seats at the table without playing for an hour because they’d emptied the trash receptacle in the same exact way; and there is the fifteen-month-old who is perfect—at least until he turns three.
All of these children are different. We teach them all the same things, but we do it differently. We have no idea what we’re doing. We do what our gut tells us to do. When the nine-year-old comes up with some different point of view about how we should handle bedtime, because he doesn’t think he’s allowed to stay up late enough, because all his friends get to stay up this late and why can’t he, we don’t ever know what to do or say the first time (besides the old, maddening, “If your friends were jumping off a cliff…”). We find our way into it.
Sometimes we can put too much pressure on ourselves as parents to know the exact right thing to do in every challenging moment, even though we’ve never had a moment where we opened a door and the eighteen-month-old is sitting in a room of painted poop—which happened for an excruciating forty days when my twins were eighteen months old.
We can let our not knowing what to do make us feel like maybe we shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. We feel incompetent, broken, not enough—not intelligent enough, patient enough, strategic enough, energetic enough, kind enough, brave enough—for this task before us.
But let me just tell you something: even on the sixth kid, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Sure, I know why the baby’s crying right now, because I’ve had a lot of practice in reading cues and being attuned to an infant. I know that right now he’s hungry but a few minutes ago he was uncomfortable because he had a wet diaper. And, yes, I know that if I tell the nine-year-old that it’s time for bed and he didn’t have any kind of advanced warning, he’s going to flip out. I know that if I try to forbid the four-year-olds from the LEGO station and the LEGOs are left out, they’re not going to have enough impulse control to keep from putting their hands all over their brothers’ creations every other minute.
I know that if I tell my seven-year-old he doesn’t need another snack, because it’s almost time for dinner, he will still find himself wandering over to the refrigerator to see what’s inside—not because he’s defying the rules but because it’s habit; he’s always, always hungry. I know that if the six-year-old is asked to find anything, even if it’s right in front of his face, it’s going to be gone forever and ever and ever and he will need my help to find what’s almost touching his head as he lies on the floor and pontificates in a whiny voice about how everything he loves always disappears and why can’t he have anything that is just his?
I know all of these things. I know my children. I know myself. But there are some things that can completely blindside me as a parent. I know that when my sons’ school called last year and the nine-year-old (who was then eight) was making threats about hurting himself, I didn’t know how to possibly handle it. I know that when the six-year-old told me there was a boy in his class who made fun of him on the playground and liked to knock him down, I didn’t know what to do about it. I know that when the seven-year-old said he wanted to play soccer and Husband and I are musicians, writers, and artists, I didn’t even have a clue about the first thing I could do.
My kids, after all these years of being a parent, still surprise me. Like the day Twin 1, who was three at the time, took out a bunch of Halloween tattoos someone had given us and decided to put them all over his face so his skin looked like a patterned sheet of ghosts and werewolves and “Happy Halloween” in orange and black. Like the day Twin 2, also three at the time, put on two different shoes, one green and one white, and announced that he was ready to go and then argued for ten minutes about whether or not these shoes belonged together.
Like the afternoon the oldest, eight years old then, stormed up the stairs because he had finished his technology time and he wanted a few more minutes, but, because we’re very rigid on how much time our kids spend with technology, the answer was no, and he said in this low, growling voice, “Yooouuuu meeeaaaannnn Daddddddyyyyyy” and then disappeared from our view, thankfully. Like the morning our third son was only three and announced that duck rhymed with “f*ck” and a bunch of other words we didn’t hear because we only heard the one he’d never encountered in his life because no one in our house ever says it. Like the day the second son ate an entire two pounds of grapes while we weren’t looking (we didn’t even know that was possible. Apparently, his body didn’t either, and he was glued to the toilet the rest of the day. Natural consequences.).
Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
There are still times when I feel way in over my head, unsure if I’m the person for this job. Like when the nine-year-old decided to express his anxiety by wrapping a scarf I’d knitted him around his neck and pulling, like he was going to choke himself. Like when the six-year-old scribbled that he hated his brother because he wouldn’t let him play. Like when the seven-year-old, who is normally a very encouraging and easy child, said he wished he was in a different family.
Just because I have six children doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing all the time, every day. That’s okay.
These are the things we learn as we go. We don’t have to know everything about parenting when we take our first wobbling steps as a parent. The point of parenting is not to know everything there is to know when we first begin. I read so many parenting books before becoming a parent—I still do!—so I could equip myself with all the knowledge I could possibly gather. Still, I have to find my own way.
We grow, just like our children grow. We make our mistakes, we make our reparations, we make our transformation.
How do we grow? We spend time getting to know our kids—all their hilarious inconsistencies, their maddening behavioral issues (that make for humorous tales), their dreams and disappointments and hurts and joys. We embrace their fragile, lovely hearts. We love.
And that’s always enough.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth 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.
(Photo by This is Now Photography.)
