A Surprising Discovery

I've made a surprising discovery. Over the last four months, I've read six parenting books, adjusted my parenting strategies six times, fought with my three-year-old, on average, six times a day, and gained at least six pounds from stress eating. I thought I was a great mom, but when Lucas turned three and started preschool, I had many reasons to question this assumption.

One book said his behavior was by-the-book normal for a slightly older three-year-old, and that my best bet would be to farm him out to others as much as I could so I didn't go crazy. I liked that idea, (of course I did!) so I started leaving him in after-care for three extra hours at preschool twice a week. The next book said I would cause my son to fall prey to peer pressure later on if he spent too much time with other kids and not enough with us. It also said that I was creating an attachment gap that peers would fill if I didn't help him when he was clearly capable of handling a task by himself. Here I was expecting him to put on his own shoes, with no idea that I was setting him up for full-body tattoos and drug addiction. I limited my use of after-care, and decided to help him whenever he asked for help, which shortly became all the time. I was exhausted.

Another book made me feel terribly guilty that I didn't hold him 24 hours a day when he was a baby. Apparently, this lack of full body contact caused him to miss out on time-sensitive neural connections, and this is clearly the reason he is now not cooperating with me. I decided to make it up to him by "spending time" at bedtime, which meant staying next to him until he fell asleep, and letting him come into bed with us when he asked. I was losing sleep and a bit more of my mind every night.

I tried time-outs and time-ins. I tried saying yes to most everything and keeping our schedule open and loose, and I tried limiting choices and instituting routines. Nothing seemed to improve our dynamic.

Let me just say that I do realize I've broken the cardinal rule of effective parenting: be consistent. Consistency is a problem when one is consumed with self-doubt and quick to implement new ideas. It would be silly of me to stick with the first thing I tried if it wasn't working, wouldn't it? Questioning and experimentation has its place in any thinking person's life, and although my son may have suffered from my lack of consistency, I think whatever I learn from these trials – and there will be many more – benefits us all in the long run.

Something shifted last week – and yes, it was due to another parenting book. But this book reminded me of something deep within myself. It gave me a larger perspective on all that I'd been reading and brought me back to what was true for me. I let go of the guilt, I let go of the strategies, I let go of the fear … and I returned to parenting in the way my intuition had been trying to pull me all along. The entire exercise was a lesson in trust.

It was also a lesson in humility, which leads me back to my surprising discovery. Did you think I'd forgotten? In the midst of all this self-doubt, I found it very difficult to work on my book. The pressure of writing a book that claimed to offer advice to parents while feeling stymied by my own son had pretty much stopped me in my tracks. I began to worry that I'd have to scrap the entire project. A little thought kept floating through my head that said, "memoir … memoir." I ignored it until a dear friend said it aloud. "What if you wrote it as a memoir?" Suddenly, everything made sense. Yes, this book would flow much more easily as a memoir than as a parenting book. It would also take me out of that strange position of pretending to be some kind of an expert when I'm clearly not.  This way, I could keep writing books even if Lucas turns out to be a menace to society, and no one can come after me to discredit me or tell me I gave bad advice.  It's still my story, right?

As soon as I settled on this decision, my relationship with Lucas magically reached equilibrium once again. In some ways, I think this whole thing was simply the humbling catalyst for moving my book in the right direction. Thanks, Lucas. Once again, you have amazed me.