Sloane turned one last week. One year old. One very short, very fast year in which she went from a pink, wrinkly, flailing poop factory with no sense of the world around her to a walking, babbling, little girl who no longer lets mom and dad feed her and can retrieve an item from another room simply by asking her to go find it (I'm still working on "Find dad's beer?" We'll get there. We must). In many ways parenthood--especially stay-at-home fatherhood--has met all my worst fears and greatest expectations. On a good day, Sloane wakes up at 6:30AM, takes three naps, laughs and smiles and plays (sometimes with me, sometimes perfectly happy on her own), entertains herself in the car, plays with other kids on our outings, and makes me feel like the most competent person on the planet. On a bad day, she wakes at 5AM (ready for the day!), skips naps, becomes overly tired, refuses to eat, clings to me demanding attention, wails in the car as we try to drive somewhere to have fun (and then falls asleep before we get there, forcing me to turn around and go home), and makes me question why I possibly thought having a kid was a good idea. Some nights I sleep eight hours straight. Other nights we all wake up every few hours. Some days, after she's in bed at 7PM, I look at our battle-zone of a house--bedazzled by talking toys, brought to you by Fisher Price--and have to decompress for half-an-hour before I can even consider picking up. Other evenings I feel so jazzed from a fun day on the town and a pre-bedtime, slap-happy laughfest rough-housing around the living room that I blow through cleaning and dishes and kick back with a nightcap to appreciate my good fortune.
And this is my life now. I don't pack up a backpack full of life's necessities and lead teenagers on multi-week trips through the mountains. I don't drive cross-country on a whim just to have an adventure. I don't stay up all night studying, or stressing-out about a deadline. I go to parks and the zoo and baby storytimes and swim lessons. I haul a child to the grocery, entertaining her while dodging other shoppers and looking for healthy food in a sea of processed crap. I cook dinner while playing peek-a-boo and placing finger foods on my daughter's highchair only to watch them be immediately flung to the floor. I drink more, exercise less, try to ignore the upcoming, never-ending expenses of supporting an incapable human, and avoid sounding like a total drag to my childless friends who use me as their walking, talking birth-control--a clear image of why they chose a dog over a kid.
I am dad. Hear me grumble.
That said, I am realizing more and more the responsibility that comes with this mundane, rewarding, challenging, joyous job. I'm not managing an account, or writing a set of instructions, or climbing the corporate ladder. The repercussions of my actions don't result in company money lost, or a demotion, or customer dissatisfaction. I'm raising a human being. FDR was a human being. So was Hitler. So is Bill Gates. So was Jeffrey Dahmer. And so are the billions of people existing in between these extremes. The way I talk to my daughter, the way I carry myself day-to-day, the things I teach her, the worldview I paint for her, the values I instill in her, the discipline I push, the experiences I offer will all culminate in an adult who succeeds or flounders, who is harsh or kind, who is ignorant or informed, or is compassionate or cold, who is trustworthy or deceiving, who is greedy or generous. Moment to moment the interactions shaping my daughter seem so commonplace that it's easy to forget they're significant. But they are. And I have to stay mindful of this.
As an adolescent I had the good fortune of going to an all-boys Catholic high school where the faculty had a motto: "Teach to the man the boy is to become." I think about this often now. I see the obsession our culture has with what to feed our kids and how to stimulate them properly at each phase of life, and how much to coddle, how much to back-off, do we cry it out or keep her in our bed for five years? Do we breastfeed for life or start her on a bottle straight out of the womb? Do we dress her like a princess or a rugby player? Spoon feeding or baby-led weaning? Was that piece of fruit organic? And are we screwing her up when she sees a TV?! Will she become a sociopath if we don't give her a sibling?!! Holy shit, I think she just ate refined sugar!!!! Oh, the horror!
It's all a bit much, no?
Don't get me wrong, development is important, as is nutrition, as is education, as is fostering a safe, secure, stimulating environment. Let's face it, in America, the alternative to obsessing over new parenting strategies and human development data and the like is not giving a shit at all. The default child of American culture is an obese, uninformed, superstitious, aggressive, bigoted, entitled scumbag (and boy, are there plenty of them). Many of today's parents (if they're doing anything at all) are just repeating the patterns of their parents who repeated the patterns of their parents and their kids will be the same awful, unhappy people their grandparents were but on an exponentially worse scale in an exponentially less healthy culture (C'est la vie. Ain't that America. Let's move on). I believe there's a middle-ground. What I know for a fact is that I've met women who were dressed in pink as kids who grew up to be hardcore academic powerhouses in ripped jeans and flannels (apparently in 1995) and people raised on hotdog casserole and Mountain Dew who grew up to be triathletes and health nuts. Conversely, I know kids who grew up with a stay-at-home parent, went to private school, received every resource in the world to become a stable, successful person and became a drug addicted spouse abuser who can't hold down a steady job. So, there's no formula to this thing; parenting is a game of odds.
What I have realized and think about daily when considering how to raise my daughter, is that poorly-raised kids work right alongside well-raised kids. Well-raised kids sometimes work for poorly-raised kids; they have to compromise with these people; they have to fight these people ideologically in the political arena; they have to stand up to them in the PTA meetings when they want to implement their grandparents' ideas and patterns into the educational system; they have to confront them on the playground when their kids are stealing the toys of the polite kids who have been taught to share, and in the business world when they're stealing your money, because you were taught to share. In fact, well-raised kids seem to be in the minority in the adult world. I'm baffled by the number of people around me falling to pieces under the pressure of being a grown up. People I thought of as care-free and capable are suddenly tingling with stress and losing their composure. People who preached integrity are giving in to temptations of money and sex and power. Emotionally deep individuals are as shallow as they come. Commitments mean nothing. Friendships are fleeting. Communities are groups of enablers instead of people empowering each other. It's all a guy can do to hold tight to a set of values in this environment. It's even harder to imagine filling a young child with hope for a bright future when the world around her is telling her the opposite.
So, I beseech you parents: What kind of men and women do we want to raise? What kind of values will serve them? And, perhaps most importantly of all, is GMO food rotting our children's bodies?!!
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