On being a parent

**Blogger's note: I wrote this earlier this week before a plague took up residence on my home. I haven't been back on the computer--aside from work--since. Even now I type one handed with little man on my lap. But didn't want to shelve this and write about ear infections...again.**

“I was a wonderful parent before I had children.”

I love that line. It is the opening sentence of the book my parenting bookclub/playdate is reading and it is so true.

Being thirty-three before your first child is born has its advantages. I definitely do not feel like I am missing out on anything. I definitely am happier to stay home any given evening with my family than to do anything else. And I definitely know I have seen enough bad parenting to figure out how to be better at it.

Now, if I could just DO it.

This is a news flash only to those who have no children: parenting is very hard. Even to grandparents and those far removed from the days of temper tantrums and meltdowns, people forget that parenting a toddler is stressful, exhausting, and frequently seemingly impossible. You try to do everything “right” and are never sure exactly what “right” is. Today I dressed little man using wrestling techniques I once saw on a WWF Smackdown episode. He acted like he was taking a bullet with each new layer I added. I thought the “right” thing to do was have him clothed. Now I am not sure if naked wouldn’t have been less traumatic for us both and possibly more “right”.

I am nothing like the parent I anticipated I would be. It is inexplicable too how that happened since I was so sure of how I would be as a mother. (Ha) This reality is that I think I am calmer and more sedate than I thought I would be. Right now I have sidewalk chalk art all over the siding of my house. That’s cool. Hudson went down for a nap wearing only pants. That’s cool. I am pretty sure he ate a discarded pretzel out of the flowerbed this morning. That’s cool (if it was, please God, just a pretzel).

Just because I am more relaxed than I thought I would be does not mean I think I have it all together because I SO. DO. NOT. I lose my cool too often. I get frustrated hourly. I find myself counting to ten (okay, fifty) and walking away from him thrashing on the floor daily. But I don’t get worked up nearly as often as I thought I would.

Even the books that are written for parents of toddlers typically present better one-liners than actual concrete suggestions on how to do things with greater success. So, I am stopping the books for awhile. Maybe I will pick up a potty training guide one day, but until then, I will just continue to relax. After all, when Hudson is thirty-five, I will be able to proudly proclaim, “I was a wonderful parent” and then under my breath add, “before I had children.”

But he looks pretty well taken care of, huh?