Adventures In Parentsitting (Or: We're Overthinking It, Guys)

The old adage is right-- parenting doesn't come with a handbook.  We all know this, duh, because somewhere between when our babies come home for the first time and about a week later we all get punched in the gut by the realization that we have *no clue* what we're doing.  That we're flying blind, playing it by ear, any and all other sensory cliches. 

 Admit it: even if you aren't high, you have no idea what's going on.

Most of us watch our children go from squishy, squawking newborns to toddlers that are essentially like dogs with less fur, to preschool age, to elementary school age, etc etc, and if it's our first kid we tend to watch this whole process with a sense of fascinated horror.  (The exception here to watching the entire process from birth would be parents bringing home adopted children, which I imagine being even more terrifying because the kid{s} just suddenly APPEAR as though by magic.) And with every single phase comes a new form of obsessive parenting anxiety.  

It starts with--Am I ruining little Jimmy by not bed sharing?!  Is letting Kayla sleep with me every night screwing her up for life?  Should I stop breast feeding so Mikey doesn't have a boob obsession?  Am I a terrible person for putting my breasts away when Hannah was six months old?  

And then we have-- is this juice box organic?  No? Am I poisoning my child?  Am I being too strict?  Saying 'no' too much and not letting Maddy be herself? Letting too much slide, screwing with Brady's boundaries so he doesn't have any self-control as an adult?  Am I not arranging enough play dates?  Am I spending too much time worrying about play dates?  Should I be worrying about music classes, instead?  

And it just goes on and on and on.  

But here's the thing-- in general, our kids give not a single shit about any of this stuff.  Honestly.  They give ZERO shits about whether their juice box is organic.  There's no possible way they could care any less about when we stop breast feeding them or sharing beds with them.  In short, they torture us with the enormous task of making sure we do everything right, but in their eyes ANYTHING is right.  As long as we love them, feed them, and let them play, they don't care what else is happening.

But learning this and living it are very different things.  Reasonably, I KNOW that worrying about Noa's social development is useless because she's going to figure it all out on her own anyway, but I also CAN'T STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT.  My therapist (of course I have a therapist, dummies; therapy is the new black) pointed out to me how important it is to let kids figure shit out on their own.  So Noa is too pushy with kids, and overwhelms them?  They won't play with her and after a while she'll learn to back off a little.  She's being too bossy and her BFF is pissy with her?  She'll either learn to stop wearing Bossypants or her BFF is going to tell her to eff off.  These are things we all went through at some point, and most of us came out of it pretty well-adjusted.  Or partly well-adjusted.  Whatever.  

Letting go of this and not trying to "talk it out" every single time some tiny snag in Noa's life comes up is difficult.  I want her to know that she CAN talk to me about anything, but I don't want her to HAVE to listen to me womp womp womp about everything in her life.  When she told me this summer that she was planning to perform a solo ballet to a song from her favorite movie (The Secret World Of Arrietty) at her camp's talent show I had a gnawing fear in my belly that she would get teased, laughed at.  Or that she wouldn't have the balls to walk out on stage once it was go time.  She's six, and she has NO actual knowledge of ballet; she can FAKE ballet but that's pretty different from really dancing ballet. 

Ultimately it didn't matter because the counselors nixed solo performances and everyone did a group act.  Noa and a couple friends made up a dance to Thift Shop (AWESOME) and Noa spun the wrong way and forgot part of the dance but she had SO MUCH FUN up there that it mattered NONE.  Had she done her solo ballet it likely would have been the same; she would have been imperfect but had too much fun for the technicalities to matter. Much like when she gave ZERO FUCKS when I forgot my ID picking her up from camp and a giant shitshow ensued, most of the traumas that she'll suffer in her childhood will actually be MY traumas.  They'll be my anxieties, my obsessions.  She'll tell me when she needs help, and if she doesn't tell me I'll likely be able to SEE when she needs help.

And it's my job to stand back until she needs me, so that she doesn't spend her childhood parentsitting.

                       "It's Thor!  Don't listen to him, he says you're a homo!"