Four Troubling Thoughts on the Eve of the New School Year
Parenting is easy, as long as you’re perfect.
This only works if you understand “perfect” to mean “perfectly human.” Full of mistakes and the ability and willingness to accept them and move forward despite all of them. Unfortunately, the older I get, the harder moving forward becomes.Beyond that, I don’t know what made me think I’d be good at being a parent.
I have no natural talent for it whatsoever. I love my kids and I’m always happy to be with them, but I’m not particularly good at any of this. I don’t like making other people follow rules, let alone make up said rules for them. I hate trying to cook healthy food for people who’d much rather have hotdogs, candy, and hot candied dogs. And I have too much of a laissez-faire attitude toward life.And that makes it wild I thought I’d be any good at homeschooling my girls. That’s what I did for the previous school year, and I don’t regret it, but I also don’t feel great about how it all went down. It was like double-parenting without the break of letting someone else take a turn playing the role of taskmaster for a few hours a day. I can spend all day with my girls, and the long months of the pandemic didn’t change that. And I think I could be a good teacher. But trying to do both was too much for me.
All of which has led to me hearing an old voice I haven’t heard in a while. I’ve decided to call her Lady Meanswell. She likes to tell me nice stories about how everything probably worked out the best way it possibly could have. She says I didn’t actually do anything wrong or make any bad choices and explains all my doubts away. The problem is that while it all sounds nice, I can’t help but see the holes in the narrative. I want to believe her, but I just can’t quite get there. So we become stuck in a dialogue about the past. It’s annoying but it’s a nice distraction from the discomfort of accepting the truth. At the same time, while Lady Meanswell means well, her pollyanna nature and refusal to let me admit that I made a bunch of mistakes saps my ability to move forward. Her silly insistence that I’m inhumanly perfect prevents me from being humanly perfect. And that makes parenting, well, not so easy.
