(Reality)
My father said something the other day that has stayed with me. He said “you act like you are a stay at home mother when really you are a working mother”. He was being kind. He was trying to figure out why I clutch at so many layers of guilt.
I can’t get that line out of my head. Because it is true.
I am walking a very fine line.
In this age of more information than we can ever absorb, and an abundance of choice, we have to form our identities as parents. I'm pretty sure that previous generations didn't do this. They just WERE parents. They were too busy. But now, we live with options. Choices. Sides. Possibilities. And so I find myself drawn into the “this is me” or “this is not me” game. And because there are so many places to gather role models and ideas from, I am often pulling together a jumbled group of things that don't always fit comfortably together in one place.
The Ideal
Here are the things I have absorbed about my own childhood, and my Mother’s parenting:
She made bread. Almost every day.
She cooked all our food from scratch.
There were lots of vegetables. We grew most of our vegetables. We had a HUGE vegetable garden.
We ate REAL food. Not snacks. Not boxed stuff.
We didn’t watch TV
We spent a lot of time outside
My mother made beautiful clothes for us.
We were all in cloth diapers
The clothes were dried on the line outside or inside
She stayed home with three children and didn’t go crazy.
Now add to that the blogs. And the books. And the articles. And the photographs that you find online. All this has helped me form – in my head – the kind of childhood I want my children to have. And the kind of parent I want to be.
Trust me – it is all VERY idyllic. I am striving for a very beautiful world. One that involves all the things I grew up with….and then some. This is where things start to get a little crazy.
Because…there is also the glossy extra layer of Important Scientific Information that is added to everything. “Children who watch more than two hrs of TV a day have high blood pressure”; “Your child is ALREADY a chemical waste dump”. You know how it goes. It adds (at least for me) an extra special lick of guilt or worry. Usually both. Because NOT parenting perfectly is almost certainly detrimental to my children's health and wellbeing. Right?
Reality
Oh, how I want my children to grow up in the world inside my head.
And instead they are growing up in reality.
We live in the city. If you want to go to the grocery store, it’s in a strip mall
My kids spend a lot of time in the car.
It’s too damned cold to spend a lot of time outside in the winter when you really little. And sometimes it’s too hot to be out in the summer.
I’m not great at getting vegetables on the table at every meal
We eat boxed macaroni and cheese. I can make it…but my kids won’t eat it.
Their meatballs and fish sticks aren’t homemade either.
And there are too many snacks. They think “snack” is a meal type.
I know how to make bread. I’m usually too tired. And the timing sucks if you work.
We have a TV. We watch it. My kids watch it. Usually for about 30 minutes every day. More on weekends. They mostly watch pretty good stuff…but still.
I don’t make clothes for my kids. I DO make things for them. But not clothes. I don’t have that kind of patience.
We have a dryer. We use it. A lot.
We have a vegetable garden. It’s great. But I’m not a very good gardener. I forget to water stuff. That’s a problem.
Cloth diapers. Yeah. That lasted one month.
And I work. Because I need to. And because I really like what I do.
And looking back over this list makes me sad. Because so much of it is in contradiction to what I want for my kids and how I envision our life. Their life.
Reality Check
But here is the thing. In between all those snippets of reality about my own childhood are other truths.
My mother made our food and bread…because that is what you did. There weren’t a lot of other options. And with a limited budget that was the BEST option.
Prepackaged...anything...was rare.
We did grow a huge number of vegetables. She also had the help of Mr. Beatty, a gardener.
We didn’t watch TV because we didn’t have a TV. And if we had, there would have been nothing to watch. It was the 70’s. In the UK.
We spent a lot of time outside because that is where a lot of the fun was. And we lived in a small town in the “countryside” so outside was where it was at. Museums? Libraries? Not so much.
And she did make clothes. It was the “thing” she made. It was her creative outlet. She is a good, patient seamstress.
Clothes were dried outside because we didn’t own a dryer. No one did.
And she stayed home with us because there were no options for her to work. She also had my father in an out of the house. A lot. He worked but not in an office. And after the birth of my youngest sister, we also had Sue. Who “helped”.
And…I always forget this…when I was only EIGHT we moved. To the city. And a LOT of this life disappeared. And life was different – but it was just as good.
Here is the thing:
Memories are dangerous. They are selective.
Photographs are dangerous. They are posed. Framed. Cropped. Colored. Carefully chosen.
Blogs are dangerous. They are self edited. And they are someone else’s reality.
Don’t even get me started on the books and opinions and articles.
There is no answer. There never is. There is just a direction to go in. A muddy, wobbly path to follow.
And it starts with the realization that I am NOT my mother. I don’t have her patience, her organizational skills or her deep and abiding love of vegetables.
But I have other things to offer my children. And maybe our life is different from how I want it to be. But that doesn’t make it bad.
In the end I suppose it’s a question of priorities. And also it’s just about working with what you’ve got. And the realities of life.
I wish I could I could be done with the guilt. And the “should”s. It isn’t that easy. But maybe reminding myself that our life is OUR life, and that my kids are happy and loved and (as far as I can tell) not suffering from too much from eating boxed macaroni and cheese (it’s organic after all!) is a good place to start.
In my clear moments, I know that time spent wishing for a different reality is, without action, time probably wasted.
And then I look at my reality...and realize how good it actually is.
