A Short List of Things I Did Right As a Parent
and Things I Learned Too Late.
My kid turned 21 this year, which means I also reached the milestone of, congratulations, you managed to be responsible for another human from zygote to adulthood (and nobody died). This is an important milestone that in no way obviates the anxiety: When your kid is an adult, you no longer have the responsibility, but also you no longer have any control. Well, you never did, of course, but the point is that the parental feeling of vulnerability and preciousness and prayer — please, universe, protect my baby, please — is not one that diminishes with age.
Still, we seem to have done OK in the parenting department so far, knock wood, so, without additional preamble, for the benefit of those of you behind me on the generational treadmill, here's a short list of things I think we did right as parents, and things we were too slow to learn.
Things We Did Right
We had a kid. This one is not self-evident. We live in a culture where you cannot make a free choice to have or not have a child. If you have factory-installed baby-making equipment, your choice to use it or not is coercive. Without Roe v. Wade, without access to reproductive medicine, from birth control to mifepristone, people with uteruses don't have a free choice not to have a child. But they also don't have a free choice to have a child, which would require robust support for their parenting, including free medical and obstetrical care, free child care, paid parental leave, full support for the lifelong needs of any child born with or acquiring a disability, full support for parents and children in need from birth to death. We're a long way from that, so many people who have children do so out of coercion: cultural narratives about motherhood, actual reproductive coercion from abusive partners, lack of access to abortion, cultural narratives about immorality and responsibility for sex. And many people don't have children out of coercion: fears of being inadequate or faulty mothers, and being demonized for that, lack of money, lack of support, fears of doing damage to a career or being abandoned by a partner. In this atmosphere of coercion, the real joy that parenting can offer gets submerged in a sea of propaganda and realistic fear. I was an impulsively pregnant person with a deep ambivalence about parenting; it took actually having a child (in an environment of relative privilege and good support) to convince me that parenting was a wonderful thing that enriched and added magic and wonder to my own life. Having a child is a deeply creative act, a chance to shape the next generation directly, a chance to learn from a brand-new, super creative person with no preconceived notions or prejudices whatsoever. Children grow up in what feels like an instant, and then, if you're lucky, you get the rest of your life to have a relationship with this magnificent young adult you made. You get to see what they create with the bones you gave them. It's exciting in ways I could never have predicted from the propaganda around mothering I was taught. I wish I'd had about ten more, tbh.
We were selfish. One of the most pernicious narratives there is about parenting, about mothering, is the idea that parenting is a job. This idea suggests and encourages a culture of judgment and shame and guilt where you can be evaluated as having done a bad or unacceptable job by bosses ranging from your child to your parents to the moms at playgroup to the whole entire Internet. Yeah, well, nobody's paying you to be somebody's mom. It's not a job, it's a relationship, a love affair, with another human being. It's the only relationship that goes one way — your kid did not ask to or promise to love you, but you made a lifelong unconditional commitment to love them. But it's still a relationship. Once you realize that, it becomes clear that parenting means being consistently loving and emotionally available. And to do that, you have to be happy, content, and well in your own life and in your relationships. Unhappy people make bad parents. What this means in practice is you have to prioritize yourself and your well-being. If you're raising your kid in the context of a romantic partnership, that partnership needs to be solid and to receive as much or more attention as you give the kid. And -- romantic partner or single parent — you need to be nourished, to have the social life, the creative and meaningful life, a steady diet of joys and pleasures for you such that you have enough left over to effortlessly share with them.
We were good listeners who took our kid and his dreams seriously. Someday I'll tell y’all about the time Santa Claus brought my kid a literal pony. (A pony whose shit he shoveled daily for the rest of its life. Learning that magic has consequences is also a good lesson.) We tried to raise our kid in the general context that his dreams and wishes, even the big ones, would be seen and heard, honored and supported, were worthy and attainable with hard work. That didn't mean we sacrificed our own needs or gave in to every wish or whim — we had very limited financial resources and I probably was better about providing ponies than clean socks — but when he had a dream, we took that seriously and tried to support him to make it happen. At age 8, that took the form of a pony. At age 18, it meant reaching out to the far reaches of my network to find him a dream internship. Now it means haranguing him into submitting his video art work to galleries and sending him cool opportunities. It means having and communicating the attitude, “there must be a way,” and “I believe in you,” and “we're always here to help.” It doesn't mean being rich, although money always helps and unearned privilege has definitely supported him. When we didn't have financial resources, and usually we didn’t, it meant being creative and resourceful and resolutely hopeful about his future. The world may force him to be “realistic” someday. But that's not my job. My job is to conjure what magic I can for him. The world is hard enough.
We didn’t let him have much tech. We didn't have a TV in our house when he was growing up. The one computer was for work; he didn't get to play video games. He got a tracfone when he was 12, which was adequate for communication but not super cool and addictive as a tech device. There's nothing inherently wrong with tech, and he certainly has all that stuff now that he gets to make his own choices, but the good part about this set of decisions when he was small was that he learned to read and to value reading, learned to love and spend time in nature, and learned social skills and how to talk to people in ways (even though he was an introverted kid) that I know he felt put him ahead of his peers. We kind of embraced boredom for him, and I feel like it enhanced his peace and creativity.
The context matters. If your kid hates school, find them a different school. I always hear “bloom where you are planted,” and wonder if the idiot who coined that thought he could cultivate oranges in a Minnesota winter. Find a context that lets your kid thrive. Remove your kid from a context where they are wilting. The same goes for you, too, actually.
Teenagers and young adults need unconditional love as much as babies and kindergartners. When your teenager shows up in your bedroom at 2 a.m. to read you Sappho, move over in your bed and wake up for Sappho. (Wake up for Sappho is probably good advice for more than just parenting, actually.) Grownish kids might be prickly and self-involved, but they need your love so much more than you know. Make sure they know you're a safe place to be vulnerable, to be lonely and human and raw.
Send them to a really good daycare for a year when they are two. This one might have changed with COVID times, honestly, but for the future, if we ever live in a world that is safe from devastating viruses again: Trust me, you do want a professional to potty train your kid.
Things I Learned Too Late
Freeze your eggs. Are you in your 20s with some ovaries? Freeze some of those little gems you're dropping like it's nothing once a month. You never know, you might want ‘em later. Bodies don't so much age out of reproduction as they just run out of the key ingredient. Save some in case.
Don’t let them get COVID. COVID came too late for me to have much control over this one, but COVID damages your kids’ nervous system. It’s not just a cold. It’s not just the flu. You should vaccinate them. They should be masking. I’m sorry we’re all living through the plot of Rhinoceros now, but you should care about this so much more than you do.
Relax. Relax. Relax. This is a high pressure world for parenting. Taking your kids’ dreams seriously means serious worries about their bad, immature choices, and since they're kids, mostly they make plenty of those. I wish I'd worried less, hollered less, listened even more. I wish I'd treated my kid's self-esteem a lot more gently than I did. As a parent, your words program their self talk for the rest of their lives. I wish I'd been so much gentler, so much more patient. I wish I'd had fewer power struggles, fewer arguments. I wish I'd cared less about how others perceived him. I wish I had trusted more that he would find his path, eventually. I wish I had relaxed. They don't need to learn to read in kindergarten. They don't need top grades in high school. They will lie some, because they want your approval. They don't need to be good at anything. They don't need to excel or even try the thing you loved and excelled at. They can move beyond whatever bad mistake they just made and still be superstars.
I think that's all the wisdom I've got. Please distract the evil eye from this prideful post by sharing all your best parenting lessons, whether delivered on time or too late, in the comments! And of course share and subscribe to keep this content going.
He was and is definitely cute, and I think you've done a good job raising him.