Sunday I had a childhood dream fulfilled, but better than I ever expected.
I do not like yard work. However my parents forced me to mow the lawn when I was a kid (they used the method of paying me to do it). As I walked slowly, slowly pushing the giant fume spewing machine, full of thoughts about whatever fantastic great sci-fi novel I was reading during my long breaks, I swore that I'd force my kids to mow as soon as they were tall enough.
I am the admin for a listserv for parents in the area, and we've had a lot of pregnant people or people with tiny babies join. I always want to say, "You won't need anything from the listserv for a good few months (which will seem like a long time from now to you)." For the adults, the first while of parenting is nothing but a giant shock as you are sliced into smaller and smaller pieces, realizing the full import of twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, without end. And having the final say over an utterly helpless life for whom you would happily cut off your arm but with whom you cannot communicate. Fortunately at some point the infallible method to solve your apparent riddle becomes obvious.
I just went to the first summer playgroup at my son's upcoming pre-school. To compare it to two things I have absolutely no experience with, it seemed sort of like a combination between speed dating, "Hi, I'm Chris, that giant laughing boy is mine, where do you live? Whoops, gotta go chase him..." and an arranged marriage, "So, I guess I'll be seeing a lot of you."
The excitement of meeting these parents and children that we'll know so well in a year (this school is a cooperative school, one paid teacher and three parents in each class room, so the cooping parent really knows all the kids and the other cooping parents) was diluted by the presence of an active back-hoe operation in the park we were at, and the presence of a number of neighborhood friends that my son played with in lieu of the new people for the first 40 minutes or so. Despite the back-hoe and the old friends, my son played with a few of the new people, and said a big jolly good-bye to almost everyone when they were leaving. All the other parents seemed like they will be good people to co-op with.
My son did of course hit one child, and then burst into shrieks when told not to do that by the other parent, but they then seemed to reconcile as well as can be expected. The other child did not fearfully avoid my son after the incident, much to my relief. My son fell asleep in about 12 minutes of the nap drive (since the beginning of first grade, he only falls asleep for a nap by driving around, sigh). All in all an auspicious beginning to our three year journey of pre-school.
There's a card I saw recently that said: "There's just two words to remember about Zen: Not always so." I think it's pointing to the fact that no a priori words or rules are always going to capture the correct thing to do in a given situation. But that also applies to parenting.
There's a lot of press about mommy wars and the divisions among parents, but the press always seems to miss the essential issues.
It sounds so innocuous: "When we travel, we always have two weeks of disrupted schedules afterwards." A bit of dinner eaten before or after the regular time; a little trouble waking people up for school perhaps. But there is a dark side to disrupted schedules, especially for those two year olds. And their adult companions.
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