Are you sure that was a good idea?

Parenting is hard. wickedly hard. Magical too, sure, full of wonder and delight and yadda yadda, but hard. Throw away the notion that every woman has a secret manual on how to be a mom and cope with the stress. There aren’t as many expectations for dads. People expect that dad will go to work, play with the kids at night and on the weekends, and generally take an assisting role in the child-raising. Women, on the other hand, are expected to know how to raise this tiny little person, care and feed them, and nurture their development while still maintaining a grip on their sanity. On top of that, the media mom culture expects that you also go back to work. One person can only handle so much.

And like any overwhelming situation, being a parent forces you to suddenly deal with any and all unresolved mental issues you had kicking around in the closet. This is where being stubborn can become a terrible fault. It’s great to have your pride, and to believe that you can overcome all adversity with the strength of your will, but trying to bullrush your way through parenting is a perfect way to get in way too deep. And if you’re in way too deep, for the love of god acknowledge it and STOP GUNNING THE ENGINE. You’re only getting stuck deeper into the mud.

A friend of ours is stuck pretty deep in the mud right now. She’s finding staying at home with a 3-year-old and a 8 month old a hard road to travel. She is the type of person who expects to fill her day with activity and she wants to have the kids follow along with her schedule. Slowly she’s realizing that you cede a lot of control and ambition when you choose to raise your kids. It’s not a bad thing, but it does mean you have to set nice, small goals for yourself. Unrealistic expectations only put you in a no-win position.

What boggles my mind and  breaks my heart is that she’s just decided to run out and buy a puppy. Another creature who will demand her time and effort, another mouth to feed and pooper to clean up after. I’m saddened to see that she’s still so far away from the clarity it takes to see this is a bad idea. She said that the dog will give her more incentive to stay home with the kids instead of obsessively getting out of the house with two kids in tow every day of the week, but that’s such skewed logic. Nothing external will make staying at home with the kids easier: it’s entirely a matter of expectations and perceptions. Also, you have to make peace with the fact that during the day, the kids are the stars of the show, and your role is to interact, entertain, and support their learning process. Daytime is not about you, and that is a difficult pill for your ego to swallow.

But let’s hope for the best and do what we can to help. I’ve set up a weekly playdate for her oldest son to come here and hang with the little dude and me. It will give his mom a break, and I’ll get experience in watching the two guys. I want our house to be a welcoming place for Max’s friends, and I want to be a positive influence on them. Hopefully they don’t stage a coup and leave me tied up in the basement.

I was going somewhere with this,but I lost it

I had a topic picked out, one that had been sitting around for a few days and should have made a good, full post. But, it fizzled during the execution and so instead, I’m going to ramble. Ha!

We’re experiencing an upswing in independent behaviour from the little dude, and it’s hinting at an exciting future of chores and unaccompanied bedtime! He has one official chore right now, and so far he’s having a great time feeding the cat at 4:30 every day. Watching him do the job from start to to finish, carefully bringing the food container to the ground, pulling the scoop out and putting its contents cautiously into the cat’s bowl makes me so  proud. He even asks the cat politely to get out of his way if she’s impeding his way to the dish. Those little signs of increasing maturity are thrilling, even though they come along with the traditional rambunctiousness and rule-testing.

 

I’m an Imaginary Explorer!

I have invented a new term: The Kanye Meridian. This is the boundary line between exuberant self-confidence and outright hubris. There is a place for bold self-confidence, a Kanye West-like swagger as you approach your metaphorical microphone. When you choose to create anything you should undertake that endeavor like it’s your destiny to do it and do  it well. Don’t hum and haw and make pre-emptive excuses for not succeeding. Instead, assume you are about to rock the house, and then step up and do so.

But, and this is a big exception, try to keep your bravado restrained to an internal monologue. When you broadcast your awesomeness to everyone who can hear you, you start to wander into jerk territory and you encourage people to daydream about your possible failure. I wonder if Kevin Smith is crossing the meridian now. He’s just shown a movie at Sundance film festival, and in the lead-up to it he has been promoting it enthusiastically on Twitter and on his own website. On the one hand, a man has a right to be excited about his art. And he also writes about the perspective he’s gained from his years making movies, giving motivational advice, which is fine and dandy. But at some point, being loudly proud of your work and badmouthing the ‘industry’ that won’t do business the way you want them to creates a situation ripe for comeuppance. Hopefully,  his movie doesn’t suck. The real pitfall awaiting the over-confident is the loss of your own internal critic. You need to be able to turn your critic off at the beginning of a project, but that sour little fella is invaluable when you go to edit the work. You have to be able to notice that, after the first blush of new creative love fades, your new work of art kind of stinks. And jeez louise, do that before you show it to anyone.