Growing Up

I've been feeling like a rather inadequate parent today. Rainy Mondays, you know. It got me thinking about my own parents, and about the kind of parent I WANT to be.

Growing up, my four siblings and I had it good. We didn't have a lot of "stuff," necessarily, although I think in the grand scheme, we did ok on that front. But we had so much love. There was never so much as a shadow of a question that we were the most important things in our parents' worlds. Our Mom all but literally turned herself inside out to make our lives everything hers growing up was not. (Hers, growing up, went back and forth between difficult and downright horrific.) Our Dad worked his fingers to the bone to make sure we had enough, and he did his best to create the aura of love and security his parents represented to us all (I think, in some ways, he may have even surpassed them, with his ability to truly accept us as we were). We were, and are, really, extraordinarily lucky.

Of course, some of this, I really only realized after becoming a parent myself. My early twenties were marked by an obsession not to have the same financial struggles they had. This is the number one reason I don't have five children myself, nor will I. Because having four siblings was really amazing in so many ways, but that shit was expensive for my parents and it's certainly not getting any cheaper these days. I had a fixation on not making their mistakes, financially. And I think some of that did me some good, for sure. But I've also come to realize that we all have financial stress. It's a fact of adult life. The best we can do is to live within our means and work as hard as we can to achieve success.

But I AM a parent now. And when I think about the mother I want to be, I think of combining the best qualities of each of my parents - my mother's passion for education, nutrition, and closeness, my father's warmth and support. Am I succeeding? I hope so. It doesn't always feel like it...

We all question our parenting from time to time. Again, a fact of life. But what I do know is that my son is happy and that he knows, without a shadow of a question, that he is loved. The rest may be a work in progress, but he's got the foundation.