Oh these three!
Do you ever have one of those moments when the irony and paradoxes of parenthood hits you square in the face? Recently, I have been having those moments… a lot! So, my writer’s blocked mind (yes, I know, my blogging has slowed down a bit…lately I’ve been so busy being a mom that I’ve had a hard time processing enough to write about it!) thought this was the perfect opportunity to make a list. Here we go – a list of some of my current parenting paradoxical struggles, in no particular order.
- Eat your vegetables. Eat your vegetables. Eat your vegetables. No… you can’t eat any more carrots. Whaaaat? What parent tells their kid they CAN’T eat more vegetables? Apparently, this one. See, somewhere along the way of trying to get my kids to eat their vegetables (and much to their dismay, chicken nuggets are not vegetables), they fell in love with carrots. And now, the only vegetable they ever want to eat is carrots. Raw carrots. Carrot sticks. Baby carrots. Sure, that’s great and all. And I do let them eat A LOT of carrots. But I want them to be exposed to other vegetables too… namely green ones. So, no, tonight you cannot have more carrots.
- You can do it… you can walk! Oh wait, you’re walking! Oh no… stop walking! Walking becomes running. Running becomes bolting. Bolting becomes a nightmare. Especially when there are three kids with capable legs who can run in different directions. Maybe learning to walk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes I find myself longing for the days when the baby could only lay stationary on her play mat and her entire world consisted of the brightly colored animals dangling above her head. Simpler times, indeed.
- Say [insert any word here]. Use your words. Talk, talk, talk! But no, don’t say that… Yes, learning to talk is an amazing feat and communication plays a key role in interaction. Watching kids find their words and expand their vocabulary is truly incredible. And having them be able to communicate their wants and needs is much easier than trying to decipher their babble and their cries. But learning to talk also means learning to talk BACK, and that is a form of communication I could happily do without.
- Big girls (or boys) get to sleep in big girl (or boy) beds… Okay, sure, transitioning out of a crib and into a kid bed is a huge sign of growing older and exploring independence. But does exploration of independence have to happen every night between 8 and 10pm, mostly in the form of walking down the hall to tell us something that could have certainly waited until the morning. Tell me again why I transitioned you out of your cage… I mean crib.
- The law of opposites rings very true these days. And no, not of the “I say hot, you say cold” variety. I mean telling my kids to go to the bathroom before we leave the house and they swear up and down they don’t have to go, only for them to need to pee approximately 4 minutes after we drive away from wherever we are. Or, they tell me their belly is full of dinner, but minutes later tell me they’re hungry… for cookies (okay, yes, I have room for cookies too, but still…). Or, on weekend mornings they are bright eyed and bushy tailed at 6:30am, precisely the day I want to be lazy and move slowly. But during the week, when we are trying to adhere to an actual schedule, they stay in bed like a teenager. What is the deal?!
More than anything, I find that the paradox of parenting is rooted deeply in the dichotomy of wanting my kids to grow up, and simultaneously longing for a button to slow the growing process down. With each milestone that passes, I celebrate their accomplishments while also being reminded that they are growing out of the stages of being babies, toddlers, and little girls and quickly approaching being big girls, teenagers and young women. People tell me all the time that “it goes fast.” Yeah, no kidding! The days are long but the years are short and they really do go by so quickly. In five short years, I have already found “it goes fast” to be a huge understatement, and can only imagine what the next five, let alone fifteen, years will look like. How can I make time slow down?
A few weeks ago, I asked my three year old what she wanted to be when she grows up, thinking she’d tell me she wanted to be a firefighter, an astronaut, or any one of the other professions little kids seem to say when asked. Instead, she told me that when she grows up she wants to be “a mommy.” My first inclination was to cringe – was I not doing something right that my daughter wasn’t aspiring to be a doctor or superhero or any other world-changing type of profession? Then it made me sad that I cringed at this – what a wonderful aspiration to want to be a mom. It is the most selfless and rewarding (and exhausting) job I know. She wants to care for others, take care of others, and put their needs in front of her own.
Finding Mom(me) 