When I was pregnant with Avery, I was bombarded with information from other parents, wanna be parents, and non-parents who believed they were experts anyway.
About half of what I heard was horror stories of labor and delivery gone wrong. The other half was parenting advice and warnings that my life was going to change forever.
The horror stories and warnings always wrapped up with the final sentence, “But it’s the best thing that will ever happen to you.” No one really elaborated further on this point.
Most of the things I was told and warned about were and are very true.
Labor is not for the weak of heart… the unfortunate news is that if you are weak of heart (like me), once you are pregnant, the baby has to come out some way.
Sleep deprivation can cause your entire world to crash down; and, it’s something you don’t fully understand until you are hallucinating that you are holding your crying baby only to be shaken awake by your husband to find yourself rocking a pillow.
And yeah, you go from being a fun, youthful person who loves to stay up late at classy parties (or on bar roofs), who has a successful career, and a flourishing social life to a pathetic old person who gets excited about going to bed at 8pm, any sleep stretch longer than 2 hours, and a $20 dollar off coupon on diapers. DIAPERS. Your life boils down to sleep and excitement over diapers, the vessel you pay a lot of money for that contains your childs bodily fluids and is promptly tossed in the trash.
All of the warnings were true. And to be honest, despite the 24/7 advice and warnings I was receiving, they left out some important details.
For example, why didn’t anyone tell me about how you go from having a nice car to a car that literally contains probably 3 pounds of crushed up goldfish packing every crevice. Melted fruit snacks are scattered throughout your now junky form of transportation and act as a traveling lint roller… becoming covered in dirt, grime, and goldfish crumbs in their journey around your car.
Or that some babies go through a phase where literally no diaper known to man will contain their explosive poops. This phase lasts months. And you panic, thinking something is horribly wrong with your child’s GI tract. But in fact, this is normal.
Repeat after me: “Explosive poop is my new normal.”
I’m still disappointed that kids don’t have some sort of warning that goes off before they puke. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve caught kid puke. IN MY BARE HANDS. Actually, I can tell you because it was very traumatic and I have it burned in my memory. Three. Once on an airplane, once in a restaurant, and once in a car.
And no one thought to mention how weird kids are.
Examples from our household:
-Well first of all, kids hate sleep and have to be prodded to eat. If that isn’t weird, I don’t know what is.
-Alice informed us she will only eat cucumbers on Saturdays. (I take advantage of the fact that she never knows what day it is)
-This conversation was overheard at the dinner table:
Child: “You gotta kill pigs so we can eat bacon.”
Parent: “Don’t you feel bad about that?”
Child: “Yummy yummy in my tummy”
-One of our children, I won’t name names, conned the other child into wiping her butt after she pooped.
-Alice thinks the word “lit” means sick and uses it frequently to describe people who are ill.
-Every month or so, I find my children playing the game, “Our mom is dead”. It is rather morbid, but at least they seem happy without me.
-One child, after admiring her poop (in the toilet, thank goodness), announced “it’s my lucky day!” and walked away. I’m still wondering what exactly she was pleased about. The poop? Getting it in the toilet?
Of all the loads of advice I heard, no one was able to accurately capture and communicate the magic that kids bring to life. No one really elaborated on the, “But it’s the best thing that will ever happen to you”
Kids are an invitation to pause and consider why we don’t dance more or sing at the top of our lungs. They ask genuinely deep questions that make us rethink how we live.
They give us an opportunity to dig into our deepest places. To find out how patient we really are. How we act during sleep deprived, stressful situations.
My favorite part about kids though, is how brave and resilient they are.
It starts early. When they learn to walk, they literally face plant and get back up to keep walking. MULTIPLE TIMES.
Have you face planted recently? It hurts.
If I were to go back and give myself one piece of advice about parenthood, it would be: “You have very little control. Stop fighting that and embrace it.”
From day one, Avery persistently taught us that she would do things in her own time. The first time she taught us this is when she arrived NINE DAYS LATE. I’m still pissed.
Then we were concerned that she wasn’t crawling when most babies were. So we got her evaluated, only to be told, “There’s nothing wrong with her. Find what motivates her and she should start crawling soon.” The next day I set a bowl of puffs on the floor across the room from her. She crawled across the room as if she knew how to do it earlier and simply chose not to.
Out of the caution that only a firstborn child (of an actuary) can have, she walked around on her knees for a few months before she got on her feet and started walking like a normal kid.
Most recently, she went from refusing to put her head in the water to deciding to start swimming. Like, swimming across the pool on her back with very little coaching.
Here’s the thing. Kids do terrifying things on a daily basis. They trust us when we say that putting your head underwater won’t kill you. They pet dogs that are larger than them. They go off to school, leaving the people who have kept them alive and figure out how to navigate.
As I watched Avery swim across the pool on her back, with a big smile on her face that she maintained even when her head dipped under water, I thought to myself, “Dang, that’s pretty brave.”
I watched as she attempted to show off her swimming tricks and got endless nosefuls of water (the worst). And yet, she exuded such joy. She was so proud of getting over her fear of swimming… and she loved it.
Kids do things like this on a daily basis. Their days are full of opportunities to try new things. Sure, opportunities for failure, but also, brimming with opportunities for success.
Adults come no where near to the amount of new experiences that kids have per day. In part, this is because we are seasoned. We’ve lived a little longer. We know how to walk and talk.
But have you ever considered…
When did you stop trying new foods or foods that you thought you didn’t like? And why? Is it because now you just know everything about what you like and hate?
And when was the last time you tried a new activity? Or went out of your comfort zone and talked to someone new?
Just because we are adults, doesn’t mean we have to stop learning, trying, and being open to failure.
Yeah, kids are a lot of work. Life changing. Weird. Sometimes annoying.
But without a doubt, they are the best thing that has happened to me. They’ve infused my days with new ways of looking at life. They are funny. They remind me what it means to be human, and have taught me a heck of a lot more than I will ever teach them.
With that, I’ll leave you with a question that they left with me:
When’s the last time you did something scary?
Cheers,
Laura
