At dinner tonight I sat patiently while my oldest son, Jasper, popped edamame out of their casings. After he’d emptied all the pods on his plate he announced, “there are twenty, and now I’m going to eat them one-by-one.” He proceeded to count, placing a bean in his mouth and gently chewing before moving on to the next number. He was very serious. Somewhere around number ten I just had to giggle out loud. He looked up very surprised and didn’t seem to understand at all why I thought what he was doing was so funny.
Motherhood doesn’t come with an instruction manual and each kid is really different. Every now and then I talk about parenting with a friend. Sometimes parenting styles come up as in “child-centered” or “ferber method” or “attachment parenting” etc. I wish I could confidently state exactly my approach to parenting but I think “stumble-in-the-dark” is the most apt description. As in, “Oooops! I never expected that, what do I do now?” I still remember trimming a baby’s fingernails for the first time. The baby wailed, and my immediate reaction was that it was just a little uncomfortable and strange. Then, horror slowly crept in and I wondered if maybe my child was the first ever to have nerve endings in his fingernails. I mean, he was crying and there was no way to know. The fear and panic rushed through me.
It’s just kind of like that. The responsibility that comes with parenting is just so BIG. One must care for and guide the child. One must make split-second decisions when confronted with a new situation, and new situations are frequent: Baffling behavior associated with age; unexpected negative reactions from children to seemingly pleasant things like birthday parties, noodles and warm hats; sudden falls and injuries, tantrums, and the list goes on and on. And that’s just a sampling of immediate stuff. How about the long-term concerns? Such as whether or not we are saving enough to educate them and how will I even know if my child has an incredible hidden talent for fencing that I will absolutely never uncover because I don’t know a thing about fencing? And, what if my child WOULD HAVE loved or been great at something but because I pushed too hard or didn’t push enough or exposed him to it at the wrong time I RUINED that particular thing for him FOREVER?
I can just feel the gray hairs pushing their way through my follicles at such big worries. And then there are the even bigger worries. Such as when my husband is on a business trip and I pop awake at 3am and wonder if I popped awake because his plane just crashed or his car just exploded or he was run over by a bus or he choked on a fish bone? Then I think how tragic that would be, and just so terrible that there he was on a business trip having a meal and he choked on a fish bone. How would I ever tell the boys and how would I fulfill the role of mother AND father? And how would I support them? After all, my career is “on hold” while I care for them when they’re little. The feeling of vulnerability adds a few more gray hairs and maybe a wrinkle and darn it if it didn’t make something sag a little somewhere too.
The good part is that the worry about how I would support my children makes me stop worrying about my husband dying unexpectedly. I worry instead about my atrophying skill set. You know, as a youth and person in my twenties I was gaining skills. I tried new things. I continued doing things I enjoyed and was good at. I joined organizations and furthered my formal education. It was exiting. I had a list of things I was excited to try next. I still have that list and I do feel absolutely certain that I will once again one day be trying these new things. But, I really don’t have time to get to them now. And, the things that I have learned to do, that I enjoy, that earned me money, those skills I gained are not getting used. I think about them the same way I think of my wedding dress: a pretty thing that had a prominent focus in my life for a while but that is now hanging in a closet, collecting dust and possibly getting a little moth-eaten.
I was reminded of this recently when I went to a cocktail party with my husband. We dressed up which is very unusual. Most of the people there were older, with grown kids, so the subject of little kids didn’t really come up. They were more interested in talking about careers, travel, and other grow-up topics. I found myself conversing all evening and answering questions about myself, and feeling like a total imposter the whole time. I felt like I was lying, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t. I had to run it by my husband later. As in, “I said that I blah blah and then I blah blah but then I blah blah and I just love blah blah.” My husband assured me I hadn’t been lying. But it was weird, the distance I felt from the person I was pre-kids to post-kids, and how long ago my pre-kid life seems. It’s that sense of distance and time that adds to feeling a bit old too. If I’ve been around long enough to see these long, distinct periods in my life, then I must be kind of old. Then, I find myself worrying about something again, like maybe my two-year old’s pee smells kind of odd and what if it’s something serious? Then I notice that my back feels a little creaky, and feel another gray hair pushing its way through.
