What’s it all about?

This parenting stuff is complicated shit. “Difficult” is not exactly it, nor can you gush about how rewarding it is without feeling like you’re pushing cheese without the macaroni. Complicated is my word of choice. Here’s why.

Every time you think that you’ve finally mastered some elusive parenting skill (i.e. getting your kid to sleep on it’s own or not scream in the Safeway checkout line) things  change. I don’t mean every month – we’re talking every day, almost. There is never “getting the hang of it” because “it” refuses to stay the same for more than 48 hours. And really, who can keep up?

I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person, quick to catch on to the subtleties and delicate nuances of human interactions. But these small people are just relentless in their mind-numbing rate of change. As soon as you figure out how to fix something today, the sun sets and rises and you find yourself in tomorrow – and back to square one. The magnificent solution that fixed your problem yesterday will not necessarily fix that same problem today.

What it all boils down to is this: babies are completely hand-crafted and custom-wired. And the factory does not offer troubleshooting assistance. I checked. You pretty much just have to guess what to do about 99% of the time.

So what does this mean for you? Well, I guess what you’re supposed to do is just try to keep up and hope like hell you don’t make any tragic miscalculations. Hopefully you won’t do any permanent damage and your child will turn out OK. This sounds like terrible parenting logic, I realize as I look at the sentence on the page. Did I write that? Like most people I guess I kind of thought that parents are these incredible orchestrators, molding tiny babies into thoughtful and responsible adults. I guess I believed that if I just studied hard enough (and being the nerd that I am, I read everything I could on the subject) that I would quickly master “being a parent.” But it’s not like that. There’s no logic to it, no formula. You can’t just apply an equation and get an answer. It’s complicated. Most of the time I feel like the kid is raising herself and I’m just a groupie along for the ride.