Anyone who has had kids knows they change just about everything. Sure, we tell ourselves this and that won't change, we'll still be the same people, will still relate just fine to our friends without kids, but in my experience that isn't as true as we might like it to be. Maybe we just need to believe that it's true in order to take the leap. In my 3rd year of being a mom to N and O, I'm much happier about what that looks like than ever before. I've always loved my boys to pieces, but I'm now also more happy with the life that goes along with being their mom. The first year was exhausting and a bit lonely. I didn't have a lot of mom friends yet, and getting out of the house at all was hard, and I was SO tired, mostly due to the insomnia that lasted until the boys were about 20 months old. Our Early Childhood program, getting to know the women from church better, joining a writing group, and some online connections changed all that, and I have lots of friends with kids now, lots of women to see in real life who totally get what it's like. I'm rarely short of an option for a play date or outing. I've found my tribe, and it is such a relief and joy to have a peer group.
I wonder sometimes what my parents' generation makes of the way we do things, with all our classes, and books, and e-mail lists. I think that one of the best things about our very wired generation of parents is the knowledge that we are not alone if we find some things frustrating. We're informed, to be sure, but I will say that all that information can be overwhelming too. The other part of being a mom that's gotten easier for me over the last year of so is just getting it through my head that there's more than one legitimate way to do things, and that whatever answer I find to whatever issue I'm trying to deal with is just the one that happens to be right for me, my child, and my family. At some point, you just have to say, the heck with this or that "system", I need to parent the kid I have and listen to some of my own instincts and common sense. No one book has a perfect system for our particular family - but books can have some great nuggets that expand my toolbox a bit, and that's pretty much how I approach them. There's a lot of peer judgment among today's mother's though, perhaps because finding that "answer" can be such hard-won knowledge. It is sometimes a real blessing to be a mother of twins: the "answer" is rarely the same for both boys, and it's been pretty obvious from the beginning that we can take neither all the credit or all the blame for the wonderful or difficult things they do.
My generation doesn't really have the coffee klatches of previous generations, or the knowledge that many or even most of the moms on the block are home all day too. We are more mobile, and people often only live here for a few years. We are told that if we work, we're letting someone else raise our kids, but that if we don't we're letting our brains rot and setting a poor example for our kids. We are told from the moment we're pregnant that we're not only responsible for our children's basic needs, but also the intricacies of their social and brain development. We aren't just raising kids, we are, as a recent headlines stated "optimizing their development". Playpens and the like are frowned upon - we are expected to have pretty much constant meaningful interaction with our kids, and have lots of books at our disposal telling us exactly which games to play at which month to encourage a specific skill. Our Early Childhood teacher shared a study that showed that stay at home moms in the 70's and full-time working moms in the 90's spent almost the same amount of time daily actually directly interacting with their kids. We're informed, but we're also under a lot of pressure. I have a feeling that the generations before mine were a little better at just letting kids be part of life - being able to say "go play" and getting on with the needs of the household, or an adult conversation. I know that when I was a kid, I was also allowed to roam the neighborhood, something few of today's kids are allowed to do. Today's American kids grow up under an adult microscope, with a whole lot of structured activity or indoor screen time. I suspect that we're losing a lot by not letting kids have that unstructured outdoor time to explore the geography of both the neighborhood and of their own imaginations.
I'd be interested to see how all this works in Holland, or, if you're old enough to be my mother, how it worked for you. Were the early childhood years lonely? Did you obsess over the choices you made like this generation (at least this generation of middle-class mothers) does? Who did you go to when you had questions about discipline, or health, or sleep?
If you're interested in another take on what it's like to be a mom in early 21st century America, you can go here for an article I really enjoyed.
Christmas pictures coming soon.
