The Unexpected Life

Parenting is so weird. I remember a few weeks after having my son, I told Kent that I felt like Michael Scott:

There’s this strange idea that once you become a parent, particularly a mother, there’s some sort of instinct that kicks in and you’ll just know what to do. I guess that sort of did happen. Like, I could figure it out. I managed to keep my kid alive. But I also mostly felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

I assumed that feeling would go away as I became a more experienced parent. I thought, somewhat naively as it turns out, that I would magically become this confident mother who always knows what to do.

Welp. I am four years into this parenting gig and I still resonate deeply with Michael Scott. To be fair, the problem is that kids keep growing and entering new stages of life. Just when you think you’ve figured out parenting, the kid enters a fun new stage with whole new challenges. 

And you might be thinking “well at least you can use that knowledge for future kids!” And in some ways you’d be right. But you would also be incredibly wrong. Because kids are all different. What worked with one may colossally fail with the next.

Having kids is like taking a math class. Bear with me, I think this actually makes sense. 

You listen to the teacher give a lesson (advice from friends, books you’ve read, social media accounts you follow) and it totally makes sense. You think you’ve fully understood how to solve the problem. And then you get home and it’s time to do the homework (you are actually parenting your own real life kid) and you can definitely see how the lesson is related to the problems you’re looking at. But it’s a bit tricky to figure out how to actually apply what you learned in this particular case. Eventually you get to a solution, maybe checking the back of the textbook a few times for the right answer (asking some trusted friends or family members for advice, hitting up Google with some weirdly specific question). 

Then it’s time for the final exam (you have another kid or kids). It’s time to apply everything you’ve learned. And you’re sitting in a room, looking at a word problem that’s like “if Train A is going 5 km/h in a westward direction, and speedboats are all purple, how long will it take Sammy to fill the balloon with air?” (your kid bursts into tears because you said they couldn’t bring the stick they found outside to bed with them, or starts getting teary before bedtime telling you they just really, really need to know what God looks like before they can sleep). And all of a sudden nothing makes sense anymore. 

The only real point I have here is that I just want you to know if you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing most of the time…me too. 

But I tell you what, I see my kid out there being his incredible little self, and I think that just doing my best day after day is probably going to work out okay.