Parenting 101

It was scary at first, thinking about becoming a parent. I mean, sometimes I still feel like I’m fourteen, a latchkey kid who sometimes falls off the broken stool in the kitchen and can’t talk to girls unless he’s had some egg nog first. So, yes, it was quite scary to process that some day, if I made that huge decision, I would be on the other side of that scenario, the one who bandages up the banged knees when my kids fall off the broken stool in the kitchen (or I could just fix the stool).

But then I got married, and my wife is the single most amazing, grounding person in the world. And I realized why people keep having children (besides the pull-out method not always working), because they really do want to see a little life in the world that is just as much a part of them as it is a part of their significant other. I wanted that too, and I also wanted to do some things differently with my children than my parents did with me. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate my mom (who did most of the heavy lifting) and everything she did for me, but there are some things that I remember in grey, when I’m sure they were really black and white at the time. I wanted to make everything for my children appear in brilliant, different colors, so nothing was ever the same. While that is lofty thinking, I knew I could do it, that we could do it, if we tried hard enough, and if we kept the goals in mind.

Children are difficult. Don’t get me wrong. Being a parent is the single toughest job you will ever have, but it is also the most rewarding if you keep those ideas you had prior to their births in mind. That’s the problem with so many parents. They spend so much of their time just adjusting to the kid that they forget the end goal, to make the experience memorable. They don’t take all those pictures they said they were going to take, and their children grow up so quickly that they miss both the experiences and the ability to recall them via photographs. Luckily, in our day and age, having cameras on our phones makes for much easier cataloging of memories, but they’re not perfect substitutes for the experiences themselves.

So, today we’re taking the kids to Disney on Ice, an amazing experience that I never had the opportunity to explore myself, so I’m going to enjoy it just as much as the kids. But it’s not just about the show itself. It’s also about the trip, which will take us a little over an hour, and how we fill that time in the car both ways. It’s also about the build up to the event. We’ve been talking about it for weeks, and imagining what’s going to happen. Afterwards, we will compare and contrast how it really was with how we imagined it would be (“Maybe we’ll even use a Venn diagram,” Lexi tells me). And we will take a million pictures that will someday make their way into scrapbooks that Lexi will show her children before they make a similar trip, before they make their own memories.

And that’s why I became a parent. Not so scary anymore.

Sam

On Parenting and Parenthood