I was in no way ready to have kids. I didn't plan on it. Never planned on being married, never planned on being a mom, never planned on raising a family in my hometown. My only plan, in my twenties, was to flee.
Somehow I ended up back on the shore of Lake Superior where I grew up. I fell in love bought property with my boyfriend, lived in a tent, then built a tiny house that we lived in with our two dogs and without running water. I went back to college. I got pregnant. I had two kids that were born 16 months apart. I studied all the time and traveled back and forth to my school, five hours south of home, every other weekend.
The travel and school plus two new kids was a strain on us financially, to put it mildly. I taught dance in the evenings to supplement my husband's modest income. We boiled water to do dishes and carried our son up a ladder to bed with us at night.
I was a fearful new parent. I read everything that I could about parenting and scoured the internet for advice. My college courses offered an opportunity to do scholarly research about child rearing using many different lenses: biology, history, womens studies and literature. It was pretty thrilling to discover concrete research to back up my more casual reading about parenting - you know the guys, Kim John Payne, Dr. Sears and Alfie Kohn. The one that I liked the most was probably Naomi Aldort's, Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves.
I graduated when I was 31 years old, with honors and with two toddlers in tow. I will never forget how proud I felt. I'll never understand how my husband coped so lovingly with all of the chaos that my education brought to our young family.
I got to be a pretty confident parent. I've even dared to think that parenting is what I was meant to do - if there is such a thing. I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to raise kids. I'm so glad that we're doing it.
While teaching preschool children to dance, I could never understand why a parent would drop a screaming child off at class and leave them. I judged. I felt so sorry for the little, misunderstood people. The early childhood parenting techniques that I favored included: holding your children when they cried, nursing them (if applicable), sleeping with them - protecting them from harm above all else.
My son started preschool this past September. I wept when I dropped him off the first day. I pledged never to leave him there if he was crying or distressed, like the children in my dance classes had occassionally been. To me, that would have been an expression of neglect - of disrespect.
He's always been happy to go. He's quiet and cautious but loves his friends and the teacher. Then we were ill for almost three weeks and he remained home with his sister and I during that time. When he was well and I brought him back, something had changed. He clung to me and screamed. He was exhibiting behavior that I was not at all familiar with. He rarely crys and I really can't remember a tantrum. He's easy going and skilled at articulating his feelings. This was uncharted territory for me.
I asked his teacher, a friend and studied early childhood educator, what I should do. She gently recommended that I allow him to lean on her for help - that I would leave and that he would remain for his regular afternoon class.
I trust her fiercely. Eero has known her since he was a wee babe. She is kind and respectful. Her classroom is well ordered and provides predictable rhythyms for the students that include songs during transition times and independent work opportunities followed by reflection time. So, I left. It was awful. And I expected him to have stopped trusting me by the time he got home.
But I realized that it's not my job to teach my son how to avoid discomfort and suffering. It's quite the opposite, isn't it? The most difficult part of being a parent, for me, has been teaching my children how to experience sadness, anger and frustration fully and in such a way that they are able to move past it, once it has run its necessary course.
So I was wrong. I was wrong to say that I would never leave him somewhere while he was crying. And I was most certainly wrong to think badly of those parents who left their distressed children with me. I wish that I had been as compassionate with them as my son's teachers have been with me. Sheesh.
It was very difficult to leave him when he was so sad. And I wish that it hadn't happened. Still, I am confident that my role in this case was to reassure him that he is safe, that he can rely on people outside of our family to help him through difficult times and that although suffering is a part of life, it is fluid. He will move past it.
I haven't talked about parenting much here. I don't know if I will again but this lesson was significant for me and I hope that it might be a comfort to someone else out there. I'm interested in your thoughts.
P.S. I'm almost through with the Lila and I'm totally in love. I simply cannot wait to get it off of the needles and onto my shoulders.
Nursing my emotional scrapes todayby joining the Frontier Dreams readers "Keep Calm and CraftOn..." and yarning along with the Small Things readers too.
Also, hats like his can be found in the shop. And I talked more about his galaxy sweatshirt here.
