Scattered, Smothered, or Covered?

Can we have a little more honesty about parenting, please? Yes, children are amazing and our love for them can be unbearable at times. But, so can our frustration.

Are we adequately prepared? Where’s our village?  Anna Quindlen wonders the same:

So why is raising kids the most important job we ignore from a preparation point of view? Oh, there are more parenting classes and books than in the days when tutelage was mainly your mother saying, “You’ll spoil that child if you pick him up every time he cries.” A few high schools give their students a baby doll to carry around and tend, but that seems largely an attempt at libido suppression.

“Parenting is a much more separate, solitary activity than it used to be,” says Harold S. Koplewicz, the director of the NYU Child Study Center, where Brotman also works. It used to take a village to raise a child, but there isn’t a village anymore. Instead of extended family, there’s a playground where everyone pretends everything’s fine, and a computer screen behind which women can say, under cover of mommy blogs, “How come this is so hard for me?”

The prevailing ethos about being a parent is that it’s mostly intuitive and uniformly joyful, even though the news, and our own lives, are full of those who found it so conspicuously otherwise that they made an utter mess of actual human beings.

Read more here: Quindlen: Why Do We Pretend Parenting Is Easy? | Newsweek Voices – Anna Quindlen | Newsweek.com.

Do you relate to this? Do you put a different face on parenting in public? Do you feel isolated in your situation?

I think I’m pretty honest about my experience staying home with my kids.  I am grateful to have the opportunity and love the depth of it all, but also feel like the famed Waffle House order: scattered, smothered, covered. It’s as if I’m wading through cement sometimes, being clawed at most of the time, and having my ear talked off all of the time.

I tend more toward feeling smothered than isolated, thanks to my strong support network (ra-ra to you all!).  And, I assume most people are feeling a similar mix of emotions throughout a day or week or month, which is unifying rather than isolating for me.

So, about this pretending things are fine when they are not and then ranting behind a computer screen — I’m working on a theory here that involves a combination of our busy lifestyles and growing up during the self help movement . . .