I opted for "Child care" because babies interested me and I didn't have to pay an extra fee to cover craft materials. All we had to do was bring a baby doll to school, pretend it was a live infant, and offer it the necessary care to keep it content throughout the day. We were led through the motions of nappy changing, baby CPR, babysitting essentials and the likes.
**Read anecdote below***
What "they" failed to touch on was 'Parenting', and I really think that this is a subject that all students need to be exposed to. Even if it is just a peep into the torrid world of parenting. Who knows, perhaps a dab of "Truths of Parenthood" would be a more effective contraception for teenagers than the threat of genital warts.
Sometimes I think that if I had had any idea of what lay in store for me as a mother, I might have insisted extracting my womb and putting it into cold storage for, say, forever. Look, I love my children to bits. I could just gobble them up sometimes. And sometimes I wish that I had. Seriously though, I wouldn't have it any other way, really. Having kids has been the single most enlightening experience of my life. I have learnt more about myself in the last 5 1/2 years of mothering than in the 25 years preceeding that. And that's the problem really - Learning about me.
I have learnt some incredible truths about myself as a mother. I've learnt how strong I am, really. How patient I can be. How caring and completely sacrificial I can be. These are things I never knew about my self. But the incredible truths don't end there. I have also learnt the very worst things about me. I've been shown the monsters and skeletons that have lurked deep inside me all my life and were only awoken under the disturbance of parenting. I learnt that I can be mean. I can be selfish. Self-centered. Short-tempered. Things I hate to admit. But they are parts of me that cannot be excised, but serve to make me who I am.
Being a mother is truly the hardest thing I have ever done. Trying to lead by example. Aiming to mould another human. Trying to prune and nurture and grow to adulthood real live people! What pressure! After all, we're not talking sea monkeys here. Being The woman who as to answer for the health, safety, social value, moral fiber, life education, and final outcome of two clean unblemished canvasses is a suffocating responsibility. I am the mother. I cannot delegate this responsibility. It is mine. And with this duty comes the agony of knowing that I have conceived these perfect little people into a world that is far from perfect. There is an excruciating pain understanding how vulnerable these bright little stars are and how polluted their space to shine in is.
How desperately I want to succeed in launching these starlets into the social stratosphere. To secure them onto the intangible concrete of adulthood, headlamps polished and positioned for optimal illumination.
But the road is oh so dark. The maps and advice books apply to another time, another place, someone else's children. As we travel we make our own light, but usually it shines behind us, lighting up the path we have already travelled. Seldom do we see the solutions to the problems that we face day by day.
The last two weeks were nightmarish. My daughter and I butted heads. We argued. We battled. We shouted. We sulked. We howled and sobbed. And all the time, what was happening was that she was discovering that she had outgrown the boundaries that we had put in place to provide her with stability and security. Stubbornly I was squishing her back into that space and she was bursting the seams, unable to explain why her life suddenly felt so awkward and uncomfortable. On a number of occasions she actually said, "Mom, you're ruining my life!" I took it personally, of course, but in the light of retrospection she was feeling the pinch of the little kid box. I was suffocating her! Now, a heads-up on her need to expand herself would have made it so much easier! Thanks Life Skills coach!
Sure it would have been a whole lot easier to just burn the box and call the whole parenting journey to an end, but we took another road. A harder one. It's steeper. But the view from the top is magnificent, I believe. We've given her a new box - with room to grow. And you know, she is completely fine with that. I have my little angel back. She's happy. I'm happy.
And so we go.
***A friend and I undertook the job of educating our peers about the real threat of The Big Bad World. The year after we had experienced the Child Care course, we targeted the next group and managed to kidnap a baby for 2 weeks. We held the infant for ransom and the entire school was involved in the negotiation and return of child to mother.
On second thoughts, that sounds like an awful thing to let people know about.
We really only did it to prove a point.
And the doll was returned in good condition.
Ok.
Nevermind.
No comments:
Post a Comment