I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Last week, I wrote a piece about many ways parents constantly second-guess themselves. I surely missed a lot of examples, which was inevitable; every parent has different anxieties, and every parent questions themselves in different ways.
But no matter the specific details of your insecurities, it all boils down to asking yourself the same thing: Am I a good parent?
I’m not.
In a recent post for Lifetime Moms, I mentioned that the issue of my son having “bad influences” – i.e., influences that aren’t his parents – wasn’t one I was expecting to encounter for a while. I expected him to be primarily under the influence of me for the next few years.
And then he met Xander.
And Xander ruined my son’s childhood.
Being a parent is hard.
You start from scratch every day and run until you’re empty, hoping that you’ve made a dent, that you did something right, that one of your lessons actually sticks. One of the intentional ones.
But you won’t know for a while. Not for years, not truly. And the lack of feedback, direct or otherwise, makes the job even harder. It’s impossible to know how well you’re doing and thus it’s very easy to succumb to self-doubt.
This is why judgment from other parents is so obnoxious; it’s redundant. Every decent parent already constantly questions their own parenting.
Last year around this time, I wrote a fairly irrational post about Valentine’s Day, in which I questioned its prominence and the things it teaches children.
I must have woken up on the wrong side of my heart-shaped bed, because I don’t really care all that much about the holiday and its harmless traditions, and I don’t usually get carried away about things like that.
This year I’m making amends by embracing both Valentine’s Day and my son’s involvement in it.
Read more about Fun Ways to Involve Your Kids in Valentine’s Day …